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Chapter 1: What are boarding houses and why did they become popular in American cities?
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A few years ago, Amanda Cantrell was looking for a new house to live with her boyfriend and a friend. She wanted to rent a home with a large garage that would take pets.
I have a rescue dog. His name is Digby.
Amanda was searching in one suburb in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and she noticed a lot of the houses were owned or managed by big corporations.
It seems that those companies own all of those houses in that suburb, but I didn't see one private landlord when I was looking.
This made Amanda a little concerned for when she becomes a buyer.
We would like to buy a home in the future, and the fact that corporate investors can take all of them feels unfair.
This feeling of unfairness crosses the political spectrum. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act is a bill aimed at improving housing affordability. It was passed in a bipartisan sweep, and this bill restricts large institutional investors from owning too many single-family houses.
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Chapter 2: How did corporate landlords impact rental prices in the housing market?
It was amazing because there was a lot of people that was really friendly and the staff here is amazing.
Euclid Hall is run by a nonprofit called the Westside Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing. It operates 22 properties across New York and provides social support. Not all the buildings are dorm style. Most have studios, you know, self-contained units of kitchens and bathrooms.
But Euclid Hall is divided up into single rooms because New York still has these remnants from what used to be a common form of housing.
Rebecca Baird-Rembaugh reported on New York housing for more than a decade and has written about single-room occupancy housing, or SROs.
In the 1950s, the city had more than 200,000 SRO units, accounting for more than 10% of the city's rental housing stock.
Yeah, one in 10 people was staying in one. 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.
Landlords started to think, well, why don't I convert my warehouse, my commercial building, even an apartment building with larger apartments, into what were then called boarding houses.
SROs covered the spectrum from long-term stays in high-end hotels to basically a bed in a cubicle with chicken wire on top to stop neighbors from stealing your belongings. And these bare-bones boarding rooms were incredibly cheap.
Everything from five to 10 cents a night to, you know, maybe at the high end, $50 a night.
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