Is it time for America to bring back the boarding house?
America is in desperate need of more affordable housing. The burden of rent has been rising for decades, especially for low-income families, and data shows that homelessness soars as housing costs become unaffordable.
What’s a boarding house? A boarding house is like a cross between a single family home and a hotel. The bedrooms in the house are rentable — usually by the night, week, or month — while the kitchen, bathrooms, and common areas are shared by all the tenants.
A room in a boarding house typically costs far less to rent than a full-size apartment or house, and tenants don’t have to commit to long leases. The communal aspect also provides boarders with a built-in social network, which can be appealing to someone who just moved to a city.
The rise and fall (and rise?): For those reasons and more, boarding houses used to be incredibly popular in the United States — in the 1800s, between a third and half of the nation’s city-dwellers either lived in a boarding house or owned one at some point in their lives.
