The Case for the Modern Boardinghouse

A Pragmatic Prescription for America's Homelessness Crisis

By Theodore Russell Jordan

For Cassingle Collective Dispatch

America is facing a severe and deeply visible homelessness crisis. While the causes of homelessness are multifaceted, ranging from mental health challenges to addiction, the fundamental driver is a profound lack of affordable housing. Policymakers often focus on two extremes when trying to solve this issue: expanding temporary emergency shelters or building heavily subsidized permanent apartments. Both are expensive, slow to develop, and insufficient to meet the overwhelming demand.

To find a scalable solution, we must look to the past and restore the lowest rung on the housing ladder. We need to bring back the boardinghouse.

The Blackstone Valley Precedent

We do not have to look far for proof that this model works at scale. Here in Rhode Island, the industrial history of the Blackstone Valley offers a perfect case study. Mill towns like Woonsocket and Central Falls were essentially built on boardinghouse logic. The massive influx of immigrant laborers who powered the textile mills did not arrive and immediately purchase single-family homes. They relied on a dense network of worker accommodations, triple-deckers, and dedicated boardinghouses.

This housing was cheap, accessible, and highly dense. It provided a vital foothold for generations of workers to establish themselves in a new country. Rhode Island's history demonstrates that shared, low-cost living arrangements successfully housed a massive workforce for decades. It was not a temporary emergency measure. It was the structural foundation of a booming industrial economy.

The Missing Rung and the Fall of the SRO

For over a century, the broader American housing market included this same vital safety valve for low-income individuals and young workers. Single Room Occupancies (SROs), lodging houses, and residential hotels offered a private bedroom with shared amenities like bathrooms and kitchens. They required no long-term leases and demanded no credit checks.

If someone fell on hard times, lost a job, or needed a cheap place to crash while getting back on their feet, a boardinghouse provided an immediate, market-rate solution. It was not luxurious housing, but it was safe, indoors, and profoundly better than sleeping on the street.

Today, this critical rung of the housing ladder has been legislated out of existence. A person earning minimum wage who cannot afford a modern studio apartment has almost no legal market alternatives.

Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1970s, urban planners and city councils began a systematic campaign against these buildings. Driven by the urban renewal movement and a desire to clean up downtowns, cities instituted strict exclusionary zoning laws. They banned the construction of new housing units without private kitchens and bathrooms. They implemented parking minimums that made dense, low-cost housing unprofitable to build. They enacted strict density limits and passed ordinances prohibiting a certain number of unrelated individuals from living under the same roof.

Furthermore, existing SROs were frequently condemned or regulated so heavily that owners were forced to convert them into high-end apartments. The intent was often framed as improving living standards. The reality was the mass displacement of the poorest urban residents. By effectively banning cheap housing, cities did not banish poverty. They simply pushed it onto the sidewalks.

The Modern Co-Living Hypocrisy

The irony of the ban on boardinghouses is that the concept has recently returned for the affluent. In cities like San Francisco and New York, developers are building "co-living" spaces. Young technology workers pay premium prices for a private bedroom and a shared kitchen, bathroom, and lounge area.

These high-end co-living spaces are structurally identical to the boardinghouses of the 1920s. Yet, because they are marketed to wealthy professionals and dressed up with modern interior design, cities occasionally grant them regulatory variances. If a shared-living model is acceptable for a software engineer making six figures, it must also be legalized for a service worker making minimum wage.

The Community Management Gap

Legalizing the physical structure is only half the battle. We must also resurrect the social infrastructure that made historical boardinghouses functional. Traditional lodging houses relied heavily on landladies and on-site managers who maintained social order. These figures acted as a hybrid between a hotel concierge and a resident advisor. They ensured basic rules were followed, mediated disputes, and kept an eye on vulnerable tenants.

Many modern SRO revivals that have failed did so not because of the physical shared-space model, but because of inadequate on-site management. Packing dozens of individuals into a building without dedicated staff to manage the inevitable friction of communal living is a recipe for disaster. A modern boardinghouse policy must treat the property manager as a cornerstone of the project, prioritizing funding and training for robust, compassionate on-site management to ensure these spaces remain safe and stable environments.

A Blueprint for Revival

Bringing back boardinghouses requires a concerted effort to dismantle decades of exclusionary zoning while creating realistic financial incentives. Local and state governments must take three critical steps.

First, cities must legalize SROs and boardinghouses in all residential and commercial zones. This means eliminating bans on unrelated individuals living together, abolishing minimum unit size requirements, and rationalizing building codes to allow for shared, commercial-grade kitchens and communal bathrooms. Cities must also eliminate parking minimums for SRO developments, as residents seeking the cheapest possible housing are the least likely to own vehicles.

Second, we must address the "who builds it" question. Deregulation alone will not motivate developers to build five-hundred-dollar-a-month rooms when they could build luxury studios on the same land. The math in high-cost markets requires a nudge. Municipalities must lean heavily into adaptive reuse. Empty office buildings, dying shopping malls, and abandoned commercial properties are prime candidates for boardinghouse conversion.

Third, governments must provide the right financial mechanisms. Cities should offer aggressive tax abatements for developers who commit to building and maintaining micro-units. Alternatively, municipalities can partner with community land trusts to remove the cost of land acquisition from the development equation entirely, making low-rent models financially viable for non-profit and private builders alike.

Conclusion

Critics will argue that boardinghouses are inherently substandard and that America should strive to provide a full apartment for every citizen. While providing a full apartment is a noble long-term goal, demanding perfection is currently preventing progress. The alternative to a small room in a boardinghouse is not a spacious one-bedroom apartment. The alternative is a tent on a concrete sidewalk.

By deregulating the bottom end of the housing market, incentivizing adaptive reuse, and prioritizing strong property management, we can allow builders to provide naturally affordable housing at scale. Bringing back the boardinghouse will not solve all the systemic issues related to deep poverty or mental illness, but it will immediately provide a cheap, safe, and private space for thousands of people who simply cannot afford the modern cost of living. It is time to legalize cheap housing.