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Living Downtown: A Great Book for Market Urbanists
One long-forgotten housing option is residential hotels; a century ago, most renters lived in hotels and shared space with short-term tenants. I just read a book, Living Downtown, about the rise and fall of residential hotels. Rather than discuss them in detail I refer you to my amazon.com review.
But here are two general thoughts:
- one reason Airbnb has been controversial is because it mixes long-term and short-term tenants. But in the first half of the 20th century this was a common mixture.
- Until the 1920s, residential hotels were so unregulated that they included a wide range of places, from luxury hotels to vile flophouses where there was not even a mattress to sleep on. But this mixture allowed even tramps to avoid sleeping on streets as they do now.
In NYC in the 20s the “apartment hotel” was a very contentious issue in real estate circles because they could be built to commercial building codes as opposed to the residential codes, which were more restrictive at the time. So owners were building new apartment hotels and running them as apartment buildings, and the owners and developers of existing apartments were not exactly thrilled with this development. Eventually this led to a merging and standardization of the building codes so that the same rules applied to both. But in some ways the legacy of the apartment hotel in NYC lives on, in the rise of buildings full of tiny apartments with extensive shared amenities.