Waylon Wong
speaker
548 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6d ago
Waylon Wong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And they were common in cities like Chicago and San Francisco, too.
Rebecca traces their boom to the end of the Civil War in the late 19th century as more rural Americans flocked to cities and immigration rose.
Okay.
And obviously we've had inflation since then.
So roughly how much, even once you account for inflation, you know, what are we talking?
$100 a month, even accounting for inflation?
Now, to be clear, paying $100 a month in today's dollars did not get you a cozy, clean place like Euclid Hall.
This is more a chicken wire cubicle situation.
Cities gave incentives to landlords to convert their buildings.
They wrote increasingly stringent housing regulations for sunlight, heating, fire safety and minimum unit sizes.
Some of this was motivated by charitable intentions.
Some was not in my backyard pressure.
Some, as critics of urban renewal have emphasized, was classism and racism.
This period was the height of boarding house destruction.
The 1970s saw a million rooms eliminated or converted to other uses.
But the evictions at the International Hotel led to a congressional report released months later.
The report talked about how SRO closures had contributed to a rise in homelessness.
Still, there were other forces brewing around the same time.
You had the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric facilities, the federal government delegating responsibility for mental health care to state and city level.
But Rebecca Baird-Rember thinks that the loss of SROs was a big driver of America's growing homelessness.
Showing 221–240 of 548 · page 12 of 28
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