| The growing Single Room Occupancy crisis in American cities has catapulted into consciousness the practice of living permanently in hotels. More people live in hotels than in all of America's public housing. What were the forms, locations, and the historical roles of hotel housing, why did their numbers peak in about 1900 and begin decline in the 1920s, and why were they virtually unstudied from 1920 to 1970? Answers to these questions require examination of Progressive Era housing reform, which defined hotel homes not as public resources but as public nuisances.;Morphological samples based on the commercial lodgings listed in the 1880, 1910, and 1930 city directories show that entrepreneurs rapidly specialized four distinct ranks of hotel building types and clusters of neighborhood services for permanent as well as transient guests. In 1930, two-thirds of San Francisco's 60,000 hotel rooms were residential (occupied a month or more). Of the residential rooms, one-sixth were in palace or good hotels for social insiders (high-status families and professional people with mobile careers); one-third were in rooming houses for largely single and poorly-paid clerks, skilled workers, and "dejected families"; and one-half were in cheap lodging houses for unmarried social outsiders (casual and migrant laborers, the elderly poor, and social outcasts).;Hotels offered "kitchenless" household life--totally commercialized, cosmopolitan, convenient, highly individualized, and requiring few personal possessions. All of these qualities threatened the middle-class model of single-family houses in single-use districts. Social critics castigated all hotel living as biologically unhealthy, culturally abnormal, personally immoral, socially irresponsible, politically dangerous, and inimical to family life. Efficiency apartments and apartment hotels, like flats and larger apartments, offered high-density household life with kitchens yet caused nearly equal concern.;By 1930, housing reformers had transformed the social criticisms into ideological processes--most importantly, doctrinaire idealism favoring private houses and apartments, and deliberate ignorance which removed hotels from positive housing agendas. These processes fueled physical exclusion and eradication strategies such as building codes, zoning, shifting investment, non-building, and eventually, outright demolition. All were attempts at eliminating hotel life from urban morphogenesis. |
