From what I’ve heard, until the late '60’s or so, single men lived in boarding houses, no questions asked. There were no “bachelor pads,” no guys who had their own house, no guys going halves on rent on a house/apartment, etc. If you were a single male, you found an old spinster who gave you, and presumably several other men, room and board for $x per week.
Nowadays the only boarding homes that I’m familiar with are geared toward people with, ah, special needs.
What caused this sea change in the way single men are housed? My guess is that it’s partially due to the Sexual Revolution. Once women got out of the kitchen, men realized that they couldn’t depend on women to feed them and so they learned to cook. Once they learned to cook, they no longer needed Old Bessie to handle the kitchen and they got places with their own kitchens.
Single guy here. Just me and my two dogs living in a 2,000 square foot house on a quarter acre.
Do I cook? Not much. I almost always eat lunch out, and about 1/3 of my dinners are in restaurants. There were restaurants back in the 1960s and earlier, so I don’t think men would have lived in boarding houses because they’d otherwise starve.
I’m told that single men currently face some discrimination in rental housing, because they’re assumed to be wilder and/or more irresponsible than single women or couples.
I wonder if it has something to do with people not feeling safe inviting strangers to live in their homes anymore? Especially the older spinster/widow types.
Housing supply is greater and life management is easier now. A single young man then would have a harder time getting by alone as everything was more complex and required more time. No precooked foods, fewer or no appliances etc. Reanting a room was convenient as the basics were taken care of. Also today people live in messy conditions which would not have been acceptable 60 years ago.
I’m gonna guess your time frame is incorrect. Boarding houses were a pre-WWII thing. The Depression made them necessary(or continued their existance) but the prosperity which came with the war probably doomed them. People finally made more money and could afford privacy.
I spent 30 minutes at the reference desk of my library trying to find a boarding house for a guy.
After he left, I realized that he was looking for a “board and care” facility and the man suffered from mental illness.
He insisted though that there were places where you could move in and someone would serve you three meals a day. He said they still had them in Europe.
The tipoff might have been that he said he was living in one now, but it wasn’t listed in the phone book.
Try looking under “Domiciliary Care.” We have a few patients that live in them. In their cases at least, it seems that these places tend to house single people who are unable to function effectively without assistance (chronic substance abusers, mentally ill, chronic illness, etc).
I should have mentioned something else that might have had something to do with the decline of boarding houses.
The automobile.
The automobile didn’t become ubquitous until the 1950s. However, it was still possible to live day-to-day life without a car in most North American cities until the 1960s, when many public transit systems reduced service, and the first employment centers in suburban areas were built.
What does this mean for a boarding house? If a man’s gonna’ work, he needs a car. A house hosting several men, each with their own car, is going to generate some complaints from nearby residents – traffic, parking, and so on. A typical single family house in the United States generates an average of 9.6 vehicle trips per day. I live alone, and I have four vehicle trips – to and from work, and to and from whatever errands I may have to run that night. Imagine 6 people under one roof … that’s 24 vehicle trips. Not many for an urban area, but a lot for a quiet cul-de-sac.
Most zoning codes I read prohibit boarding houses in residential neighborhoods, and permit group homes only under a lengthy review process. The word “family” is also very well defined, to avoid any confusion about whether a group of people living together functions as a family or not. As a planner, I get a lot of complaints about a commune in a residential neighborhood where several unrelated people live; it’s not so much the people, but the cars and activity that bother them. Other cities are dealing with issues related to immigrants from countries where having 10 or 12 people living in a single house or apartment is common. Communities are responding in ways that some Hispanic activists see as discriminatory; banning parking on front lawns, prohibiting paving over the front yard, and/or enforcing noise ordinances.
In the good 'ol days, if you had a boarding house next door, you probably wouldn’t notice. That isn’t the case today.
My mother lived in a boarding house from the mid-40s until the early 50s. The ground floor was for single men, the second floor for couples, and the top floor was for single women (this was to protect the ladies from men wandering around claiming they were looking for the bathroom or for another guy’s room). There were no meals served, though; some of the rooms had tiny kitchenettes and this was in Newark, where it was easy just to walk 'round to a diner or cafe.
WAG, but I think increasing government safety/health regulations, business licenses and taxes, plus the parking issue mentioned by elmwood just made it too much of a hassle for someone to run a boarding house. Damned shame, too.
Bob You may have them out there, but the Akron, Ohio yellow pages doesn’t have a listing for “Boarding Houses.” But, then, we don’t have a listing for “domicilliary care.”
I still contend that in post-WWII America the average American was better off economically and wanted privacy. I would bet that the stereotypical boarding house all but disappeared by 1960. Not that a few didn’t remain, but as an institution, they must have gone away by that time.
“Domiciliary Care” was a zero in the LA Yellow Pages, so I just tried other words.
The places listed under “Boarding Houses” were all board and care facilities for people with either physical or mental illness however. It wasn’t anything like “Ma Bailey’s Boarding House, 3 Squares for $10 a day!”
Good question. I think it must have had something to do with the idea that single men were going to be no good at feeding themselves and taking care of a house by themselves, or at least bad at it. I know my dad probably just didn’t have the slightest inclination to do either of them after he got out of college in '62. He moved into a boarding house kind of thing when he got his first job.
Even after being married for 10 years, when I was little, it’s a good thing Campbells made soup in ready-to-eat form, and that peanut butter didn’t require cooking. The nights my mom worked at her nursing job, these were pretty much staples.