Housing for life lived on the edge
I’ve spent the last couple weeks researching residential hotels for a client. You might know the housing type by its poverty-and-crack-rock-burn-stained other name, the SRO (Single Room Occupancy). If you don’t know either, go to Wikipedia.
For most of American history, the SRO, in one way shape or form, was a plentiful, affordable housing option in cities across the country. An SRO unit was typically a small room with a bed, a bathroom (usually down the hall) and maybe a kitchenette.
There were fancy SROs like Barbizon 63, an all women’s SRO in NYC whose past residents are a who’s who of 20th Century luminaries (Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, etc). The majestic Ansonia, home of Babe Ruth and others, started its life as a residential hotel.
But most (roughly 84% according to a 1930 US Census survey) were pretty basic and shitty — they housed a city’s lowest paid, largely single workers (NB: many 19th and 20th Century luminaries found themselves at one point living in an SRO). They provided bare bones, affordable housing in central locations.
Since their constituents had zero political clout, cities took a laissez faire approach to SRO governance. Over the years, they became increasingly overcrowded, dirty, dilapidated and crime-ridden, and starting in the mid-20th Century — concurrent with Urban Renewal efforts — cities started scrubbing themselves of SROs. By the eighties, the majority of SRO units were gone.
The removal of the SRO created a technical problem: i.e. the loss of as many as a million non-subsidized, affordable, high density housing units sent their residents looking for housing alternatives. Many went to the streets (A 1980 survey of homeless citizens in NYC found that 50% had previously lived in SROs). Those with means subdivided family-friendly apartments with roommates (I cannot find data for this, but I suspect the modern era of roommates also started around this time). Many dispersed to cheaper cities.
But it’s the cultural nature of the removal that most interests me. In his seminal text on the topic “Living Downtown,” Paul Groth writes:
Calling SRO people homeless reinvokes the cultural bias against hotel life. In the long run, the ecologically and culturally aberrant idea about housing may prove to be the huge single-family house on an open lot, not the more social way of living downtown in a hotel.
The elimination of the SRO was an act of cultural genocide. Cities tried to eliminate the parts of their society that didn’t mesh with an ideal of upward mobility, affluence and stability. Eliminate the housing, eliminate the people. If this weren’t the case, there would have been a more concerted effort to find alternatives. Instead, cities half-heartedly replaced SROs with public housing projects and Section 8 vouchers, both of which fell in line with more conventional, stable housing models — the volume of new units of either during this era was far less than the volume of SRO units lost.
The cultural genocide suggests the SRO and its resident was deviant to something. And that something, as Groth alludes to, is the nuclear family living in a suburban single family house.
In America, we fetishize stability, and the single family house has become the architectural and (sub)urban planning embodiment of stability. Unlike cities, suburbanites aren’t subject to the sounds, smells and vagaries of their neighbors. Suburbanites can’t be immobilized by transit strikes or locked in their houses by a riot — they have their own private transit system (assuming there’s fuel and roads) and they have their own private fortress in a peaceful hamlet.
Suffice to say, this personal stability has greatly undermined collective stability. Conventional suburban single family housing has eroded our culture and raped our planet (I won’t substantiate this latter statement here, but feel free to take me to task on it). But I don’t want to rag on car-dependent suburbs too long (because I could go on for a while). I do however want to seriously question our idealization of stability.
I get newsletters from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr and several weeks ago he wrote a beautiful treatise on what I would call “intentional instability.” He writes:
[The] liminal space (from the Latin limen for “threshold”) is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways. It is when we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We often enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed — perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, engagement, or at the birth of a child. During this graced time we are not certain or in control. This openness allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive — an erased tablet waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable.
Because we have avoided liminal space, we have created a very smug and middle class kind of Christianity that has little wisdom or compassion to offer the world today. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new. Many spiritual giants (like St. Francis, Dorothy Day, or Mohandas Gandhi) try to live their entire lives in permanent liminality, on the edge or the periphery of the dominant culture. This in-between place is free of illusions and false pay-offs; it invites us to discover and live from a broader perspective and with a much deeper seeing.
The SRO is the ideal form of urban housing for liminal living. It is the housing for people who are “betwixt and between,” for those who have “left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next.” Sure, many people settle into SROs indefinitely, but so what? Why is that any less valid than someone camping out in their carbon-spewing 5500 square foot McMansion in the burbs?
I am not glamorizing poverty. But I will say that living in poverty or living single or living a life without stability as an endgame are not bad or wrong — that these are valid ways of living that don’t need to justify their existences to suburban or wealthy overlords. And these people need affordable places to live in our cities. SROs once were, and I hope may one day again, be such places.
Moreover, once we recognize “hotel life” as a valid form of living, we can actually make some great ones, employing technological innovations and proper governance that will make them infinitely safer and cleaner than their forbears.
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