Today, a young man down on his luck in a new city is more likely to land in jail or on the street than on his feet. Fifty years ago, he had another option. A place to wash up, get a hot meal, meet other young men—even start over. All he had to do was put his pride on the shelf and get himself to—well, you can spell it out: the YMCA.
The Village People’s 1978 disco hit celebrated one of the less-remembered services offered by the YMCA. From the 1860s, the YMCA began building single-room occupancy (SRO) units “to give young men moving from rural areas safe and affordable lodging in the city.” At its peak in 1940, the YMCA had more than 100,000 rooms—“more than any hotel chain at the time.” The Y wasn’t the only provider of such housing; indeed, there was a vibrant market for hotel living that existed well into the twentieth century.
Variously and derogatively known by many names—rooming houses, lodging houses, flophouses—SROs provided affordable, market-rate housing to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. SROs were the cheapest form of residential hotels, specializing in furnished single rooms for individuals, usually with shared kitchens and bathrooms. A typical SRO rent in 1924 was $230 per month—in today’s dollars.
As late as 1990, as many as two million people lived in residential hotels—more than lived “in all of America’s public housing”—according to Paul Groth, author of Living Downtown. Today, not so much. SROs like those offered by the YMCA were the safety net that kept many people off the streets—and their disappearance from the housing supply explains much of modern-day homelessness. What we destroyed wasn’t just a housing type but an entire urban ecosystem: one that provided flexibility, independence, and affordability at scale.
As with so much of our urban history, this destruction was by design.
From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, hotel living was a normal way of life for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. As hotelkeeper Simeon Ford colorfully put it in 1903, “We have fine hotels for fine people, good hotels for good people, plain hotels for plain people, and some bum hotels for bums.” SROs, the “bum hotels,” were the backbone of affordable housing, serving “a great army” of low-paid but skilled workers. Clustered in lively downtown districts with restaurants and services that acted as extensions of the home, SROs offered liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores. Rooming house districts let young people mix freely and even allowed same-sex couples to live discreetly—signs of a more secular, modern urban culture. Downtown hotel life, Groth notes, “had the promise to be not just urban but urbane.”
And therein lay the problem: the urbanity of SROs collided head-on with the moralism of the Progressive Era.
Reformers drew on a long tradition of anti-urban bias, seeing the emergent twentieth-century city as a problem, with cheap hotels at its heart. They pathologized hotel dwellers as “friendless, isolated, needy, and disabled” and cast SROs as “caldrons of social and cultural evil.” Some of the cheapest hotels were unsafe and exploitative, but reformers cared less about improving conditions than about what the hotels symbolized. They blamed rooming houses for loneliness, sexual licentiousness, civic apathy—even suicide. To them, the presence of “social misfits” proved that hotels caused moral disorder. In reality, people lived in SROs because they were cheap and offered greater independence—especially for career-oriented young women. Firm in their belief in the “One Best Way to live,” the reformers exalted the single-family home as the “bulwark of good citizenship” and succeeded in stigmatizing hotel life.
By the turn of the century, they set their sights on changing the law.
Beginning in the late 19th century, reformers used building and health codes to erase what they saw as “aberrant social lives.” San Francisco’s early building ordinances targeted Chinese lodging houses, while later codes outlawed cheap wooden hotels altogether. By the early 1900s, cities and states were classifying lodging houses as public nuisances. Other laws increased building standards and mandated plumbing fixtures, raising costs and slowing new construction. Urban reformers next embraced exclusionary zoning to separate undesirable people and noxious uses from residential areas. SROs were deemed inappropriate in residential zones, and many codes banned the mixed-use districts that sustained them. In cities like San Francisco, zoning was used to erect a “cordon sanitaire” around the prewar city “to keep old city ideas from contaminating the new.”
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