Like a good old fashioned room and board types…Do they even exist?
Sort of. In the early 1970s I was at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and the student council set up a residence in an old house for quite a few students, and hired a cook for a meal or two a day. Unlike the ones you’re probably thinking of, there were shared rooms, and ISTR that residents were responsible for their own cleaning, laundry, etc.
Mind you, my impression of boarding houses comes from movies and pulp fiction from the '30s and '40s, not to mention the “residential hotels” that are still around.
Since the OP is asking for personal experiences, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I used to rent a room that was added on to the back of a typical suburban house and there was a guy who lived in the garage that had been converted into an apartment and another guy who lived in what was essentially a large garden shed that had been finished and furnished. So there was the guy and his wife that owned the house and three renters. I set up my own little kitchen area in my room and shared a bathroom with the guy in the shed. He had to walk across the yard to use the bathroom that was next to my back door.
Of course the defining characteristic of a “boarding” house is the meals thing and I don’t know of anyone doing that, but I suspect that shared homes are more common than most would think.
Yes, I lived in two of them, back when the Major Hoople type was still popular, in the 1950’s. One in Baton Rouge, when I first went to college and I was wait-listed for dorm space, and once in Salem, Oregon, for a couple weeks when I was looking for an apartment. The experience was pretty much as described in the literature of the time. You get a sleeping room witha bed in it, meals were served at set times with everyone at a big dining table helping themselves, and you wait in line for your turn in the bathroom.
There weren’t very many options in those days for respectable single gentlemen, some old guys lived in the same house for decades. There were very few small apartments, and the option was to live in a hotel with long-term rates and eat meals down the street in a lunch counter.
I never have personally but they definitely still exist. I see them advertised a lot in real estate listings in my city. It seems most come with a small kitchenette type setup in the room rather than sharing meals in a dining room with other tenants. However, in my opinion, if you are renting a single room and sharing a bathroom with complete strangers with no control over who they are, that’s a boarding house. As opposed to sharing a house or apartment with roommates because while they may be complete strangers, you met them beforehand (one would hope anyway!) and it was mutually agreed among everyone that you would move in and share with them. In a boarding house, you don’t get to choose, you just apply for the room and only the lessor gets to pick who will occupy the other rooms.
A boarding house also generally falls into the lower socioeconomic bracket as most occupants would not earn enough income to live in a proper apartment. I highly doubt anyone would actually choose to live in a boarding house if they could afford a place with a private bathroom (or at least one that is not shared with a bunch of strangers) unless they had a really good reason, such as it being a temporary setup while they are between homes or something like that. They are usually associated with the underemployed/unemployed, people with drug problems or mental illness issues, etc. Some of the ones being advertised in my city are designed specifically for students, though they are such a waste of money for the asking prices given that a student could move into a shared house or apartment with other people for much less and get to choose who they want to share it with. It’s pretty much only gullible international students who move into them. Most students here, if they don’t live in a dorm on campus, enter a shared arrangement with other students in a private rental.
There are a few boarding houses still around in my area. They’re unobtrusive and seldom advertise. Most of the bill themselves as “sober houses”. I once knew somebody who worked at our local detox center, and these were the houses people were sent to after completing treatment.
AFAIK they don’t accept families nor children. Most, if not all, are single sex. I have no idea how much the room/board is, but I’d presume it has to be much more reasonable than a monthly rent around here.
My experience was so long ago that it won’t make much difference, but the summer of 1960 I stayed at a boarding house in Birmingham while working a summer job there. Most of the other guys were also just “summer job” types although there were a few older guys who lived there year round.
The food was superb and there was a lot of it. That’s about all I remember well enough to report. That was a fun summer for me.
I did back in 1981 - I was fresh out of rehab for a back injury, and was killing time looking for a new apartment [my family had cleared out and stored all my stuff when I first went into hospital a year and a half previously and had terminated the lease] I didn’t want to go back to living with my parents, and while I was going to be restarting university, I also didn’t want to live in a dorm.
Classic boarding house - run almost like you would run a half-way house, no guests allowed in the bedrooms, no cooking in the bedrooms, eating breakfast and dinner ‘family style’, sharing bathrooms. All female, actually so no males allowed past the common living room. I seem to remember it was $25 per week, the food was basic but fairly decent [and seriously carb and casserole heavy] and we had to clean our own rooms, and provide our own linens and do our own laundry.
Sort of. When I returned to Thailand after finishing my master’s degree in Hawaii, I lived in Peachy Guesthouse in Bangkok in the months before we got married. (My future wife lived with her family; even though she was in her 30s, us living together before marriage would never have been tolerated by her family.) On Phra Athit Road, Just off the river and near Khao San Road. Technically a backpacker’s flophouse, there were quite a few long-term farang (Western) residents, and the place had monthly rates. Just a small room with the bathroom down the hall. There was a small open-air restaurant downstairs, but meals were not included in the deal.
I didn’t live in one, but one of my former employers ran one in a small college town. In the early eighties, IIRC, it was $20 a week, female only, breakfast and dinner provided. I do know that there were several bathrooms in the old Victorian, so at most, one would share a bath with two others. Miss Minnie was also a fine cook.
I think a lot of these responses aren’t truly answering the OP. A boarding house, by definition, is a place where you rent a bedroom and someone (usually the owner, who also lives in the house) cooks the meals for you, which you eat in the common kitchen.
A group home, where people with chronic mental illness live, is not a boarding house, because the people are there because of their condition, and there’s some kind of oversight. They aren’t able to live on their own–at least not safely.
A sober living isn’t a boarding house, either. It’s just a shared house, like those commonly found around colleges, only drinking and drug use are not allowed. No one cooks for you.
When we stayed at a bed and breakfast the owner said she sometimes has guests that stay long term - like up to 6 months.
In one case it was the hiring manager for Cerner when that came to town. She said he made his terms ahead of time - that he was to have his meals at certain times and where he would have them. And he was not to be disturbed. Rarely did he eat with the other guests. He was with people all day already and wanted privacy. However he did invite guests over and sometimes they would hold meetings there too.
It works out. The long term guest doesnt have to worry about his meals, housekeeping, or his laundry. Plus, rather than a hotel, its a quiet place.
Houses chopped up into rooms (no closet? Probably wasn’t designed as a bedroom) with keyed locks on the doors are/were common around college campuses. I spent time in one, and knew several who lived in similar houses - who got a key to which room was a decision of the landlord’s not the other tenants (all-female houses existed 40 years ago - landlords respected the tenants that much).
The only time I’ve heard of real meal-provided situations were either religious (sermon before the food, no “sins”) or a landlady who got the old men to sign over their SS checks, whereupon she’d kill them and bury them in the back yard.
After that, I’m not surprised that they are not popular locally.
No to the rooming house, yes to it’s modern equivalent, the camp bunkhouse. My last job was working in a remote mining camp up north where we worked 12 hour days for two weeks, lived in a bunkhouse (individual rooms), ate in a mess hall, then walked to work. After working two weeks, we flew out to civilization and were home for two weeks. The mess hall provided top-notch meals and the rooms were comfortable with toilets and showers down the hall in a central location. It was a comfortable existence with damn good pay and benefits.
For a time my mother lived in one (this was quite recently, say six years ago, and the boarding house is still there). Most of the people who lived there were older and single, though there were some disabled people as well. It was not “assisted living” and you were pretty much expected to take care of yourself. My mother liked it for the social interaction at meals, though she always complained about the food.
I suspect there are a great many of these boarding houses around and would not be surprised to see more as the boomers age.
Hereis a link to the one my mother lived in.
I haven’t heard of any existing boarding houses for anyone other than senior citizens - but rooming houses still exist (a few of them on my block). A rooming house is essentially a boarding house without meals. They are normally in houses that were built for a single family but are sometimes found in three or four unit buildings. In some respects, they are similar to a roommate situation (individual bedrooms with a shared kitchen, bathroom and possibly living room) but there are significant differences also. If I share a $1200/mo apartment with three roommates, each of us pays $300/mo. If one moves out, the remaining three pay $400/mo until a replacement suitable to us is found. Not so in a rooming house- if my rent is $300, it stays at $300 no matter how many vacancies there are. And I have no say in who the other tenants are- the landlord chooses who to rent the vacant rooms to. Which accounts for the locks (sometimes key in knob but often padlocks) on the bedroom doors.
Nope, but my grandmothers family owned a general store in Missouri, they also rented out rooms in their home. My grandpa was one of the boarders. Since my great grand parents had like a dozen kids I wonder if he had to room with grandma’s brothers. I never asked and of course now it is too late. Anyway he used to stay home from work on wash day to carry water for grandma, because she was the family work horse. She knew a good thing when she saw it so she married him.
I’ve lived in group homes run by a local mental health organization. The organization owns the homes and collect rent, some of those homes also provide residents with food and one resident - on a rotating basis - cooks dinner for the entire household. These homes have one staff member on site 24/7 while other homes, where residents are responsble for their own food, have staff visiting maybe twice a week.