By the 1950s, rooming houses were already a target for city planners looking to maintain high home prices and orderly neighborhoods. “If rooming houses are permitted to spread to the city’s one- and two-family neighborhoods, there is not much use in talking brave words about fighting blight,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1957. “Rooming houses are not compatible with one- and two-family districts. When the rooming houses come in, the families move out—and the whole area starts down hill.”50
