Living in Cars and Municipal Shelters

I’m reading Paul Groth’s _Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States_. One chapter gives a real sense of the full range of hotel housing in cities (mostly SF, but others as well) from 1880-1930. Palace hotels offered suites to millionaires whose names we still remember. Mid priced hotels served recognizably middle class travelers, as well as longer-term residents who might be widowed, single executives, people living in a city for months or years for work, or even families with children. Boarding houses, rooming houses, served people with a lot less money, but were still more or less respectable: young people starting out in a city, among others. But further down the chain were hotels that housed migrant workers between jobs — during the winter when there were no harvests to pick, and when factories reduced labor. A resident might arrive after being paid for their last job in the fall, turn all their money over to the woman who ran the place, and thus avoid accidentally spending it all in one binge — or having it stolen from them. For the true down and outers, there were hammock flophouses, or a spot on a floor or in a hall. And if you couldn’t come up with even the nickel to spend the night in one of those, the police station and city hall ran municipal shelters where you could sleep in a wooden chair (maybe put your feet up in another), or on the floor. Those shelters would be empty, or close entirely during boom times, when people could come up with the money for one of the commercial operations.

Reading in the Seattle Times about ongoing struggles between people living in cars and RVs parked — often not legally — on city streets, the people who live or work on those streets in more regular buildings, and the judges who try to find some kind of rough justice (viz. you can’t just put liens on the RV or tow it or fine it astronomically if it is someone’s home) really makes it clear how the cities of 2018 — like the cities of 1880-1930 — are very _unlike_ the cities of the 1980s and 1990s, when I first loved cities. Those cities had been emptied out. Built for earlier generations that were far larger and packed in much more densely, squatters could generally find a place indoors to sleep (depending on the city in question, they might be offered more regular access to the space, if they were prepared to start paying property taxes on the space). While indoor space is pretty much filled in, the streets still have all that lovely open space devoted to “Free” parking.

I’ve read things about free parking, and how it isn’t really free at all. But this is the first time I’ve really considered what might put an end to “free” parking.

In the meantime, in the same spirit in which city hall and other municipal police shelters were opened for those too poor to afford even a nickel a night flophouse, cities are offering lots for people who live in their cars and RVs to park in. But it is odd — those shelters _used_ to be needed in busts, not booms.

ETA: Groth mentions Roger Miller singing “King of the Road”. I’d been hearing that song in the back of my head even before he mentioned it, altho inevitably, it was Dean Martin’s cover that sticks best in my brain.