Boarding House at the End of the World

Pore over local histories, and you’ll find quaint anecdotes that place boarding houses firmly in the past. As far as I know, we no longer host bridge parties to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, as did Cincinnati’s Edgemont Inn, a refuge listed in the Green Book during the Jim Crow era. Nor do we, like one New York City boarder, expect to hear a seance through a thin partition separating sleeping strangers.

Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of the population. But living with strangers, or at least non-kin, could be the answer to our loneliness epidemic.

Though it doesn’t take an expert to notice that people are achingly lonely, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says that living alone can be lethal. Writing for the Institute for Family Studies, the sociologist Rosemary L. Hopcroft expands on living alone as a risk factor. She warns, “Unless living with extended kin or non-kin becomes a more common living arrangement in American society than it is at present, more people will likely experience living alone and for longer periods of time. If that happens, our epidemic of loneliness, with all its attendant problems, will increase.”

Hopcroft’s research shows that, from 1970 to 2022, the percentage of people living alone increased from 17.1 to 28.9. Declining marriage rates, plus greater life expectancy, have also led to the average person living more years alone, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced for women. A woman born in 1850 had practically no time living alone, but for a woman born in 2000, the expected number of years is closer to ten.

I’m a married yet childless cat lady by circumstance, so I occasionally worry about what my later years will look like. What if, God forbid, I’m widowed, and my niece and nephew are too busy with their own nuclear families to accommodate an extra person? This scenario of lonely widowhood—a common one amidst rising childlessness—makes me wary of solutions from pronatalists of all stripes, be they Silicon Valley transhumanists or my fellow religious conservatives. I hope that pronatalists succeed in encouraging ethical ways to grow families, but we need ways to keep older adults company when they cannot rely on their own children. We need the boarding house.

By “boarding house,” I’m not referring to the larger dormitory-style facilities. (However, I dream of cities and towns zoned for mixed use where the boarding house is the center of civic and social life.) Instead, I’m focusing on boarding in a family home because this arrangement is less regulated and easier to reintroduce to a culture that’s forgotten boarding’s merits.

Boarding was prevalent before Americans were banished to suburban archipelagos in the mid-twentieth century. Estimates vary, but Paul Groth, the late professor of geography at U.C. Berkeley, wrote, “[T]hroughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century … one-third to one-half of all urban Americans either boarded or took boarders at some time in their lives.” Typically, young singles or newlyweds rented rooms from widows, and their rent bought them cooking, laundry, and other domestic services. A landlady was an alloparent. She offered “a transition between being at home with Mama and being fully out on your own,” according to Jaclyn Tripp, who reported on the history of a 1920s boarding house in Minden, Louisiana.

Like any good parent-child relationship, boarders cared for their landladies, too. In an essay at Fairer Disputations, I identify boarding as an example of our forebears’ sense of responsibility towards and reverence for their elders:

As the late family historian Tamara Hareven observed in the Annual Review of Sociology, “In the regime of economic insecurity characteristic of the nineteenth century and the first part of [the twentieth] century, kin assistance was the only constant source of support.” … What’s more, people also cared for senior citizens outside of their families. Hareven wrote that the boarding system was common for young couples seeking affordable rent, and the elderly rented out space “in exchange for money or assistance” and to “avert loneliness.”

Sadly, renting became impersonal and transactional, and that was by design. The urban renewal movement was the primary culprit, and zoning laws and building codes were the tools of advocates who did have some well-meaning goals, including mandating more space per person as a public health measure.

But the urban renewal movement betrayed elitism and left families with the impression that boarding was unfit for the well-to-do. A 1957 report from the professional organization that eventually became the American Planning Association opens with a quote from the St. Louis Post Dispatch describing the “blight” that would come to “fine family neighborhoods” should the rooming house (a term frequently used interchangeably with “boarding house”) “spread to the city’s one- and two-family neighborhoods.” The authors of the report continue with their own choice words: “Rooming houses have become notorious as both symptoms and causes of neighborhood decay in many cities.”

Most of the report is dedicated to larger boarding houses, but it seems to take issue with any living arrangement that includes non-kin. One section bemoans the fact that broad legal definitions of “family” present “loopholes that permit group living arrangements.” Officials in an incorporated area of Wisconsin, according to the report, tried to deny housing to “several members of a religious order.” Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled in the favor of the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, opining that “family” in the zoning law didn’t explicitly exclude non-kin. The report concludes by noting, “For years, nothing dispels the illusion that one- and two-family zones are completely protected.” Communities can protect themselves from hordes of boarders, it’s implied, “by eliminating the loopholes” to “insure effective zoning.”

The stigma stuck to group living arrangements, whether they’re boarding houses or family homes that host boarders. Zoning laws are unlikely to ban homeowners from taking in boarders (my county has no such restrictions), but today’s homeowners often value their privacy and might even consider it declasse to rent out a room or rooms.

Renters appear equally hesitant to seek a boarding arrangement. With competing claims about Airbnb’s financial situation, the short-term rental company has taken a public image hit. The “Airbnb collapse” might never materialize, but as travel writer Scott Hartbeck has observed, “What started as a website full of beds in quirky spare rooms, fixed-up basements and Mothers-in-law quarters hosted by humans morphed into a monstrous marketplace filled with far too many empty apartments.” If there ever was a communal aspect to renting from Airbnb, that has shifted in favor of more private experiences.

When it comes to long-term rentals, the media shares plenty of horror stories on the serious safety issues presented by renting from and living with strangers. Fast Company profiled PadSplit, a rental service that functions similarly to Airbnb, and generalized renters’ experiences to other group living arrangements in its headline “The dark reality of the modern-day rooming house.” The profile’s author, Ann Larson, writes,

[Tammy] Olomina feared something had gone horribly wrong when she opened the door to her new home and found a man on the bed “just lying there, staring at me,” she said. The stranger seemed reluctant to budge. When he finally left, Olomina inspected the room and found that it was “filthy” with a “dirty and sticky” bed. When she opened the closet door, she found a 44-ounce cup full of urine sitting on the floor.

Larson goes on to give an accurate account of the housing crisis but focuses her criticism on solutions that are over-technologized or state-run. Of course PadSplit is a failure. The company oversees 6,500 rental units and owns very few of them, so there’s no accountability to the tenants whose complaints about cleaning, maintenance, and safety reportedly go unanswered.

To establish accountability, the ideal modern boarding arrangement will happen through local, in-person networks with a close relationship between landlord and renter. Savannah Shipes, a family friend, is one such example. She rents a barndominium on a ranch in Central Florida from a landlady she met through her stepdad. The landlady’s husband and 23-year-old daughter live on the ranch, too, and Savannah’s interaction with them differs from the typical distant, contractual relationship that characterizes most rentals. (If I ever spoke to my landlords, it was about rent or maintenance, and it often happened through an online portal.)

Savannah takes care of the family’s animals when they’re gone, and in exchange, she pays affordable rent that her landlady allows her to split into bimonthly payments. But the benefits of boarding on this family’s ranch go beyond the financial. The husband suffered from a traumatic brain injury, so Savannah’s help on the ranch is welcomed. And she occasionally visits with the family, providing a hopeful look at how we can maintain bonds with non-kin even though boarding, and the ensuing tight-knit communities, were largely relegated to the past.

Now that we realize the costs of our affluence and preference for privacy, we first need to eliminate the legal barriers to boarding. If local zoning laws don’t outlaw it, then one’s homeowner’s association (HOA) might. HOAs—private organizations known for their overreach that have come to control the majority of newly-built homes—are being reformed by state law. My home state of Florida enacted legislation to prohibit HOAs from issuing frivolous fines. (Thankfully, homeowners now have a whole 24 hours to get their garbage cans off the curb.) More importantly for boarding advocates, Florida introduced limits to HOA rental restrictions, but homeowners still aren’t completely free in that regard. Elected officials are encouraged to draft legislation ensuring that HOAs don’t effectively dictate whether people can take in boarders.

There’s also a learning curve along which we’ll have to overcome the feeling that living with non-kin is, frankly, weird. Because Savannah lives in a barndominium, her arrangement is admittedly more private than renting a room in a house. Inviting boarders into our homes will certainly be a harder sell. When the living room replaced the parlor, and when industrialization created the concepts of the “public” and “private” spheres, the activities of a household were suddenly intimate. To live with strangers is to expose ourselves—our tastes, our disappointments, our personalities stripped of performative niceness. The most countercultural among us will have to normalize boarding to show others that this arrangement is not only possible but preferable to our current epidemic of loneliness.

My husband and I are moving into a house soon, and we plan on having a friend live with us. If and when he moves out, I’m proposing that we take in a senior citizen, a slight twist on the model of a widow renting to a young couple. I anticipate plenty of challenges, but I hope for a culture where the option to board or take in boarders is there when we’re the ones who need the company.

Who will join us?

Image via Picryl