In this series
In this series
During the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, a Union commander mistakenly pulled a division out of its defensive line only minutes before Confederates assaulted that very spot. Southern forces poured through the gap unopposed, and the Northern army collapsed.
A little more than a century later, political and financial interests worked together to reduce the supply of SROs—single-room occupancy hotel rooms, sometimes colloquially called flophouses, boarding houses, or workingmen’s hotels—just as demand for cheap housing increased thanks to the closure of state mental hospitals.
My first introduction to this destruction of inexpensive housing came in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1970. City offices nicknamed “the Kremlin” received national attention when Mayor Richard Lee pushed for rapid home tear-downs said to make way for better housing. I interviewed one of the people being displaced: Harold Cornwall, who lived in the Strand, an SRO building. He described a “real family atmosphere here. People cared about each other. We had an established community.”
I didn’t then know about the importance of community in combatting homelessness. Now I do, both from interviewing people like Cornwall and from reading dozens of studies on the subject. Samuel Wallace’s 1965 Skid Row As A Way of Life described the typical SRO in Minneapolis and elsewhere: A four-by-six-foot room, cotton mattress on steel bed, 60 cents per night, $15 per month. A small wooden cabinet with a wash bowl, a beer opener, a hand towel, several religious pamphlets. Nails in the wall for hanging clothes.
It wasn’t much—except for that word Cornwall used: community. Urban planner Charles Hoch and historian Robert Slayton showed in New Homeless and Old that the SRO districts of large cities were “a place where men could interact, take care of their business needs, and find camaraderie and friendship.” They had “cheap and convenient shelter and services and proximity to the day-labor agencies that dotted the lodging-house districts, thus providing a means for making ends meet.”
Hoch and Slayton found that “88 percent of residents knew the managers or desk clerks personally. These staff people take phone messages, distribute mail, screen visitors, and perform other small but important services for residents.” A restaurant “took care of ‘regulars’ by saving favorite foods for them, receiving their mail and phone calls, and offering credit or even free meals.”
Social interaction was high, with few sitting or drinking in isolation: “The residents of Skid Row shared a social world with its own bonds of reciprocity in which the homeless found the social strength necessary to carry on an autonomous life—despite the daily imposition of uncertainty.” Residents also had privacy, since “every room [had] its own lock and key.” Those working even a little could afford an SRO room for $100 to $300 per month in 2025 dollars.
New York City in the middle of the 20th century had more than 200,000 SRO units, accounting for more than 10 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Other large cities had tens of thousands. But the positive view Hoch and Slayton reported was a view from the inside. From the outside, SRO residents were depicted as drunk and dangerous “bowery bums,” and their buildings were considered deathtraps.
It’s true that US cities from the 1870s through the 1950s averaged two notable hotel fires per decade. In 1955, at the Barton Hotel in Chicago, a 70-year-old man accidentally dropped a cigarette butt into a bucket containing alcohol. He was one of 29 out of 245 occupants who died in the resulting flames.
I’ve gone city by city and read about fires in Atlanta (1938 and 1946), Minneapolis (1940), Houston (1943), Boston (1966), Seattle (1970), and Portland (1975). They were bad, but the response to the much higher death tally from automobile accidents was: Make cars safer. With fires in SROs, the standard response was not Let’s make them safer but Get rid of them.
I’m not discounting the costs of retrofitting, but in city after city, the needs of those otherwise homeless gained little consideration amid a push from real estate interests and unrealistic social planners. New York City did not have an equivalent to the Barton Hotel disaster, but official animosity toward SROs was nevertheless strong. In 1955, the city banned the creation of SROs and enacted zoning changes and building codes requiring apartments to be larger than SROs. In 1965, the mayor’s office declared, “The SROshould not be accepted as lawful housing. … No community should equate such housing with the acceptable living standards of the 1960s.”
New York City lost 160,000 units from 1955 onward. Landlords and homeowners were offered tax breaks and other profitable incentives for upgrading from SROs to full-size apartments with their own kitchens and bathrooms—and they readily agreed, as historian Paul Groth has shown. As urban renewal accelerated in Manhattan and around the US, reformers and realtors rejoiced while bulldozers “reduced to rubble” buildings “not renowned for adding luster to their city’s good name.”
Groth details the destruction or conversion of 1 million residential hotel rooms nationwide from 1970 to 1980 alone, sometimes with dehumanizing results. Since many officials did not count hotel living as permanent housing (although, in practice, it was), the demolition of a hotel could be reported as having moved “no one” moved and destroyed “no homes.” In reality, demolition totals included 16,000 units in Seattle between 1960 and 1973; 32,000 in Chicago between 1973 and 1984; and 40,000 in San Francisco.
New Haven mayor Richard Lee’s daughter, Sally, said he later was filled with regrets about demolitions in New Haven. “I could have restored that building,” he said of one such project. “Instead, I knocked it down. … I was so excited about making the city a better place, that I didn’t look at the neighborhoods the way I should have.”
Lee had operated high on the ladder of abstraction, failing to examine the actual conditions of city and its people. So did others in the 1960s: Psychologist Thomas Plaut wrote in Alcohol Problems about the elimination of most Skid Rows, and urbanologist Donald Bogue argued in Skid Row in American Cities that it was time to “dispose of Skid Row. [Due to] the rising level of living in the general population … continued tolerance of the Skid Row situation appears increasingly callous.” Lower on the ladder of abstraction was a truth they missed: This man is 60, an alcoholic, earns $8 a week, and has nowhere else to go.
Was “tolerance” callous? What happened to SRO residents? George McDonald, founder of the Doe Fund, a New York nonprofit housing group, answered: “People sleep on grates outside.” Homeless advocate Mary Brosnahan saw it too: “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market. They aren’t anymore.”
