A flophouse (American English) or doss-house (British English) is a place that offers very low-cost lodging, providing space to sleep and minimal amenities. [1]
A flophouse (American English) or doss-house (British English) is a place that offers very low-cost lodging, providing space to sleep and minimal amenities. [1]
Historically, flophouses, or British "doss-houses", have been used for overnight lodging by those who needed the lowest-cost alternative to staying with others, shelters, or sleeping outside. Generally, rooms are small, bathrooms are shared, and bedding is minimal, sometimes with mattresses or mats on the floor, or canvas sheets stretched between two horizontal beams creating a series of hammock-like beds.
People who make use of these places have often been called transients and have been between homes. Quarters are typically very small, and may resemble office cubicles more than a regular room in a hotel or an apartment building. [2] Some flophouses qualify as boarding houses, but only if they offer meals.
American flophouses date at least to the 19th century, but the term flophouse itself is only attested from around the early 1900s, originating in hobo slang. In the past, flophouses were sometimes called lodging houses or workingmen's hotels and catered to hobos and transient workers such as seasonal railroad and agriculture workers, or migrant lumberjacks who would travel west during the summer to work and then return to an eastern or midwestern city which ran along the rail lines, such as Chicago, to stay in a flophouse during the winter. This is described in the 1930 novel The Rambling Kid by Charles Ashleigh and the 1976 book The Human Cougar by Lloyd Morain. Another theme in Morain's book is the gentrification which was then beginning and which has led cities to pressure flophouses to close.
Some city districts with flophouses in abundance became well known in their own right, such as the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City. Since the middle 20th century, reforms there have gradually made flophouses scarcer. [3] The resulting gentrification and higher real-estate value have further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit. [4]
In the 2010s, the high cost of housing in cities such as San Francisco saw an increase in the number of flophouses. The modern flophouses, sometimes marketed as "pods", usually have partitions between beds for privacy, and are created from existing houses or apartments. They are often marketed toward commuters who stay in the city during the workweek. [5]
Cage homes were built in colonial Hong Kong in the 1950s for single working men from Mainland China. Cage homes are described as "wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment." [6] As of 2012, the number of impoverished residents in Hong Kong was estimated at 1.19 million, and cage homes, along with substandard housing such as cubicle apartments, were still serving a portion of this sector's housing needs. [6] The combination of high rents and income inequality has been given as one reason that cage homes persist. [7] [8] [9]
Michael Adorjan, a University of Hong Kong criminology professor, has noted that "The United Nations has called cage and cubicle homes an 'insult to human dignity.'" [10]
Cage hotels, a form of single-room occupancy, were common in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century; an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people lived in them during the winter.
These were lofts or other large, open buildings that were subdivided into tiny cubicles using boards or sheets of corrugated iron. Since these walls were always one to three feet short of the floor or ceiling, the open space was sealed off with chicken wire, hence the name "cage hotels." [11]
A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security. [12]
A similar preference for cage hotels over shelters was reported in turn of the century New York City, where single working men ranked their housing preference in the following order:
They preferred lodging and boarding houses to cages, cages to dormitories, dormitories to flops, and flops to the city's shelters. Men could act on these preferences by moving as their incomes increased. [13]
"Regulatory efforts to combat low-cost 'cage hotels,' ... [has been] a driver of the expansion of the homeless population in US cities", according to Jencks. [14] By 2021, only one, the Ewing Annex Hotel, remained in Chicago, housing some 200 men, many of whom would otherwise be homeless. [15]
A capsule hotel, also known in the Western world as a pod hotel, is a type of hotel developed in Japan that features many small bed-sized rooms known as capsules. Capsule hotels provide cheap, basic overnight accommodation for guests who do not require or who cannot afford larger, more expensive rooms offered by more conventional hotels.
A boarding house is a house in which lodgers rent one or more rooms on a nightly basis, and sometimes for extended periods of weeks, months, and years. The common parts of the house are maintained, and some services, such as laundry and cleaning, may be supplied. They normally provide "room and board", that is, some meals as well as accommodation.
Single-room occupancy (SRO) is a form of housing that is typically aimed at residents with low or minimal incomes, or single adults who like a minimalist lifestyle, who rent small, furnished single rooms with a bed, chair, and sometimes a small desk. SRO units are rented out as permanent residence and/or primary residence to individuals, within a multi-tenant building where tenants share a kitchen, toilets or bathrooms. SRO units range from 7 to 13 square metres. In some instances, contemporary units may have a small refrigerator, microwave, or sink.
Shek Kip Mei Estate is the first public housing estate in Hong Kong. It is located in Sham Shui Po and is under the management of the Hong Kong Housing Authority. The estate was constructed as a result of a fire in Shek Kip Mei in 1953, to settle the families of inhabitants in the squats over the hill who lost their homes in one night.
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum – from emergency homeless shelters, to transitional housing, to non-market rental, to formal and informal rental, indigenous housing, and ending with affordable home ownership.
"Common lodging-house" is a Victorian era term for a form of cheap accommodation in which the inhabitants are all lodged together in the same room or rooms, whether for eating or sleeping. The slang terms dosshouse and flophouse designate roughly the equivalent of common lodging-houses. The nearest modern equivalent is a hostel.
An apartment hotel or aparthotel is a serviced apartment complex that uses a hotel-style booking system. It is similar to renting an apartment, but with no fixed contracts and occupants can "check out" whenever they wish, subject to the applicable minimum length of stay imposed by the company.
Housing First is a policy that offers unconditional, permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. It was first discussed in the 1990s, and in the following decades became government policy in certain locations within the Western world. There is a substantial base of evidence showing that Housing First is both an effective solution to homelessness and a form of cost savings, as it also reduces the use of public services like hospitals, jails, and emergency shelters. Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Housing, or more generally, living spaces, refers to the construction and assigned usage of houses or buildings individually or collectively, for the purpose of shelter. Housing is a basic human need, and it plays a critical role in shaping the quality of life for individuals, families, and communities.
Net café refugees, also known as cyber-homeless, are a class of homeless people in Japan who do not own or rent a residence and sleep in 24-hour Internet cafés or manga cafés. Although such cafés originally provided only Internet services, some have expanded their services to include food, drink, and showers. The term was coined in 2007 by a Nippon News Network documentary show NNN Document. The net café refugee trend has seen large numbers of people using them as their homes. The shifting definition of the industry partly reflects the dark side of Japanese economy, whose precarity has been noted since the downfall of the national economy that has lasted for decades.
McRefugee is a neologism and McWord referring to those who stay overnight in a 24-hour McDonald's fast food restaurant.
Homelessness or houselessness – also known as a state of being unhoused or unsheltered – is the condition of lacking stable, safe, and functional housing. The general category includes disparate situations, such as living on the streets, moving between temporary accommodation such as family or friends, living in boarding houses with no security of tenure, and people who leave their domiciles because of civil conflict and are refugees within their country.
The Bowery House is an historic hotel on the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City, that mimics its former incarnation as a flophouse.
A bedspace apartment, also called cage home (籠屋), coffin cubicle, or coffin home (棺材房), is a type of residence that is only large enough for one bunk bed surrounded by a metal cage. This type of residence originated in Hong Kong, and primarily exists in older urban districts such as Sham Shui Po, Mong Kok, To Kwa Wan, and Tai Kok Tsui. In 2007, there were approximately 53,200 people living in cage homes in Hong Kong.
Transitional housing is temporary housing for certain segments of the homeless population, including working homeless people who are earning too little money to afford long-term housing. Transitional housing is set up to transition residents into permanent, affordable housing. It is not in an emergency homeless shelter, but usually a room or apartment in a residence with support services.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
The Great Gildersleeves was a rock club and music venue at 331 Bowery in Manhattan. The club opened in August 1977 and closed in February 1984 after the building in which the club was located was taken by eminent domain by the New York City Board of Estimate. It was the first time that a private property was taken by eminent domain by the City of New York for use as a shelter for the homeless. The City's action followed a rent dispute between the owner of the building and the City, which leased three of the upper floors of the building that were operated as the Kenton Hotel to house approximately 200 homeless men. Following condemnation by the City, the building became a flophouse before being taken over by Project Renewal as the Kenton Hall Men's Shelter and used as a shelter for homeless men on methadone maintenance. It was named after a radio show, The Great Gildersleeve.
Columbus, the capital city of Ohio, has a history of social services to provide for low- and no-income residents. The city has many neighborhoods below the poverty line, and has experienced a rise in homelessness in recent decades. Social services include cash- and housing-related assistance, case management, treatment for mental health and substance abuse, and legal and budget/credit assistance.
Housing in the United States comes in a variety of forms and tenures. The rate of homeownership in the United States, as measured by the fraction of units that are owner-occupied, was 64% as of 2017. This rate is less than the rates in other large countries such as China (90%), Russia (89%) Mexico (80%), or Brazil (73%).
Housing in Washington, D.C., encompasses a variety of shelter types: apartments, single family homes, condominiums, co-ops, and apartments considered public housing. Washington, D.C., is considered one of the most expensive cities in which to live in the United States—in 2019, it was ranked in the top 10 of American cities with the most expensive homes.
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