boardinghouse at Fourteenth and Harvard Streets. Boardinghouses were a common place for adults to live through much of American history. They worked something like today’s college dorms: The rooms were small, the bathrooms and kitchenettes shared, and the cost was low. They weren’t as nice to live in as a single-family home with a detached garage, but they were far nicer than a tent in the middle of an encampment in the dark of winter. So where did they go? The answer is that they were made, in most jurisdictions, functionally illegal. By the 1950s, rooming houses were already a target for
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