In recent months there’s been a lot of focus on hotels for downtown L.A.’s most vulnerable residents. Through the statewide initiative Project Homekey, efforts have ramped up to convert underutilized hotels into homes, and nonprofit organizations have also purchased old residential hotels to create units for folks experiencing homelessness.
However, despite their vital work, controversies and problems have swirled around the many nonprofit SRO organizations. In April last year, all 29 properties operated by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust were placed in receivership after falling into disrepair and becoming drug hubs.
In fact this discussion has been ongoing for over 140 years. Rooming houses, small residential hotels, tenements and what we now know as “single residency occupancy” residences have all played a vital role in providing housing to hundreds of thousands of Angelenos as downtown has transformed again and again.
Bare bones rooms
Los Angeles was founded in 1781, a tiny, dusty outpost centered around what we now know as Olvera Street and the historic La Placita Church. As it grew, agricultural fields lining the Los Angeles River (roughly bordering what we now know as the Arts District and Little Tokyo) brought seasonal migrants to the area. In 1876, the transcontinental railway arrived, and the Southern Pacific Rail Yard (now the Los Angeles State Historic Park) opened. In 1888, the Arcade Depot opened at Alameda Street, between 5th and 6th Streets.
Small residential hotels and boarding houses began to spring up in the area to house the countless single men who came to work the rail yards, the fields — and help build the Los Angeles we know today. These residences often offered cheap rent, bare bones single or shared rooms, communal bathrooms, and storage facilities near sites of agriculture and industry.
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But as the Victorian era made way to the 20th century, these facilities would prove woefully inadequate in the face of Los Angeles’ unprecedented growth.
“Railway fare wars at the turn of the century brought the price of train tickets from the East Coast way down, making travel more affordable. The city was also heavily promoted as a place to recover and recuperate,” said planning historian Meredith Drake Reitan, associate sean at USC Graduate School. “Later, migrants were attracted by Hollywood, by jobs in the aerospace industry, and the port. The population of L.A. basically tripled between 1890 and 1900. The population doubled again between 1920 and 1930. I’ve always loved that Carey McWilliams’ quote about L.A.’s growth: it has been ‘one continuous boom punctuated at intervals by major explosions.’ All of those people needed somewhere to live.”
During the early 20th century, more and more residential hotels and subdivided boarding houses opened in areas including Skid Row, Little Tokyo, Boyle Heights, and what we now know as the Arts District.
“The people who lived closest to industry were those who were the lowest income and who had less healthful conditions for where they lived,” said Catherine Gudis, scholar-in-residence at the Los Angeles Poverty Department and director of the Public History Program at UC Riverside.
“The boarding houses were intended for those seasonal laborers and those working-class men who might have gone to different places following the work,” Gudis added. “There were also different scales of residential hotels to serve those people as well as families, because downtown was an urban enclave.”
While the nicer residential hotels had all the conveniences of a comfortable apartment, seasonal worker and transient accommodations were often shockingly substandard. Some were simply makeshift cubicles — larger rooms divided by plywood walls. Single rooms were not much better. According to Paul Groth’s masterful Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, these accommodations often offered “only a dilapidated bed (sometimes with a straw mattress), one rickety chair, and a hook for clothes.”
According to Groth, these residences had a (often unfair) poor reputation and were frequently targeted by the LAPD:
In the twentieth century, Los Angeles police routinely searched for law offenders in the cheap hotels and rooming houses near the railroad station. Raymond Chandler’s detective character, Philip Marlowe, repeatedly visited hotels ‘whose clerks were ‘half watchdog and half pander’ and where nobody except Smith or Jones signed the register.’
With its unprecedented growth, California did attempt to standardize living conditions at these hotels. “California’s 1917 hotel act showed the framers’ close familiarity with cheap hotel life,” Groth wrote. “They allowed existing cubicle rooms to remain, and they included guidelines for open dormitory rooms, however, they outlawed new cubicle hotels. Most important; the act set lasting bath-to-room ratios for the cheapest lodging houses: a separate water closet and shower on each floor for each sex, at the minimum ratio of 1 per 10 rooms of guests.”
Different classes of hotels
While more and more cheap hotels and boarding houses — often three- or four-story brick buildings — were opening in downtown LA, another type of “hotel” was being built to service middle- and upper-class visitors and residents. Some of these were “palace hotels” in western downtown like the Barclay Hotel (1896) Hotel Alexandria, The King Edward (both opened in 1906) and The Biltmore (1923), large edifices which provided luxury accommodations for visitors and well-heeled residents.
Then there were the mammoth middle-class hotels, which provided guest and living quarters to businesspeople and middle- class visitors like the Rosslyn (1914) and the Hotel Cecil (1924). “If the palace hotel was usually surrounded by some of the city’s most exclusive boutiques, the mid-priced hotel was usually close to the city’s best department stores and reasonably close to the financial district,” Groth wrote.
The need for affordable housing grew exponentially in the 1930s. “The depression increased the number of migrants to the city. We’ve all seen the Grapes of Wrath — the boosters got their way and California became a destination for millions who were pushed off family farms in the South and Mid-West,” Reitan said. “In the 1930s, downtown L.A. remained an important location for reasonably priced rent. And for those who bought the houses, having tenants was an important and steady source of income.”
Luckily, there were options. For working class singles and families there were ample accommodations on Bunker Hill, the once upper-class Victorian hillside neighborhood bordering the Western edge of downtown. Reitan explained:
Rent in 1939 in one of the houses on Bunker Hill was about $10 - $15 per month for a single room with a shared bathroom. In general things were probably pretty spartan. Typically, tenants would have had a very small room, maybe with a hotplate and sink in the corner. Most rooms were furnished with a bed and possibly a closet. There would have been a bathroom down the hall that was usually shared by the residents of a single floor and sometimes by the entire house. The rooming houses all seem to have had electricity, but it was rare to have heat. The number of residents varied considerably. A fact that I find staggering is that in 1939, there were 30 people living in 325 Bunker Hill, a Victorian known locally as the Castle.
Since square footage was at a premium, much of daily life was pushed outdoors.
“A lot of life happened out on the streets,” Reitan said. “If you had the money, you probably ate at least one meal in a café. On the top of Bunker Hill there was a collection of benches. We’ve seen a lot of photographs of these benches, it was obviously a place to meet friends and socialize. There were a lot of single people on the hill, especially widows.”
In nearby Little Tokyo, one iconic building also served as a home to countless Angelenos. According to Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times, a Chinese migrant named Look Mar Jung and his family opened the famed Far East Café (now Far Bar) at 374 1st Street. Above the café, the three-story building served as a 24-room residential hotel. “Over the years,” Rasmussen wrote, “the rooms housed Japanese immigrants: bachelors, dentists, workers in the bustling furniture and hardware industry, and even students of a chick-sexing school.”
But Los Angeles officials knew that these housing options could be better. In 1938, the Los Angeles Housing Authority, dedicated to providing affordable housing to Angelenos, formed. In 1949, the controversial Community Redevelopment Agency formed, dedicated to revitalizing, refurbishing, and renewing economically depressed areas of California (it was dissolved in 2012).
'Coded to death'
These organizations had their hands full — and a skewed perception of the lives of folks living in these spaces. According to Groth, in 1949 a sociologist described a rooming house in downtown Los Angeles as a “universe of anonymous transients.” In post-war downtown, middle class residents and businesses fled the area and headed west for the suburbs easily accessible by the shiny new freeways.
This meant the demographics living in residential hotels in DTLA dramatically shifted.
“Downtown residents in the 1930s and 1940s were well connected to jobs. They were clerks, plumbers, schoolteachers, actors, and beauticians. They also worked in the restaurants in and around downtown,” Reitan said. “As the 1940s became the 1950s, the number of elderly residents and retirees grew – I think living downtown gave them access to services and support that might not have been available elsewhere.”
L.A. businesspeople and city leaders interested in revitalizing downtown decided that the lower-income residents in the area need to go in the name of “progress.” During the 1950s and 1960s, affordable housing in downtown Los Angeles was decimated by “anti-blight” campaigns, and “slum clearance” plans.
“Policy makers began to send out crews of people to call out violations of zoning or code or other things, because they wanted the private property owners to abandon those properties because the cost was too great to repair them,” Gudis said. “So that's what starts to happen in the '50s and into the '60s. People are kind of coded to death.”
Civic leaders envisioned a downtown of shiny skyscrapers, leaving no room for the small hotels and rambling homes that served as a landing spot for working class and transient residents.
“[In Skid Row] there's a dramatic push to get rid of what looks like those horrible Victorians with multiple families living there and putting their laundry out on strings,” Gudis said. “That same kind of discussion takes place on Bunker Hill, and that removes the housing there.”
Clearing out
Reitan believes that the destruction of Bunker Hill in the 1950s and ‘60s forced displaced residents to move into the flats of downtown Los Angeles. “There's a lot of housing that's removed,” Gudis said. “And that puts additional pressure onto those residential hotels.”
Increasingly, it was the former “palace hotels” and business oriented mega hotels, long out of fashion, which picked up the slack. “More and more migrants from central America… start settling in the once grand hotels like Barclay and business-oriented hotels like Cecil,” she said.
According to Groth, this trend was occurring in downtowns across the country. “Building owners … made rooming houses out of run-down palace or mid-priced hotels,” he wrote. “They eliminated service, repairs, and amenities until the rents matched rooming house levels.”
But the thousands of residences removed as part of “slum clearance” was a catastrophe from which downtown has never recovered. According to Gudis, it got so bad that there were ads boasting that you could buy a seat in a theater at Fifth and Main where you could spend the night, albeit sitting up. Or you could pay a little more for bunked rooms with access to a shower.
'Containment'
To deal with the increasing number of unhoused community members, many suffering from mental illness and substance use disorder, the 1970s’ city leaders adopted the controversial policy of “containment.” According to Gudis’ highly informative “The Green Paper,” the problematic “containment” defined the boundaries of Skid Row and made it possible to preserve “housing, community, and services” in the area.
In 1984, the CRA formed the SRO Housing Corporation, which purchased over 1,700 SRO units close together to offer government subsidized housing while fostering a sense of community.
“In 1989, Skid Row Housing Trust was formed as well, to expedite the process and with the aim of securing the housing on the western edge of Skid Row, along Main and Los Angeles Streets, among others,” Gudis wrote.
But over the last four decades, the affordable housing crisis in downtown Los Angeles has only intensified. Many nonprofit community organizations, dedicated to providing emergency, transitional and permanent housing to downtown residents, were severely affected by the dissolution of the CRA, which had provided crucial funds for SRO housing throughout the state.
Nonprofit organizations have tried to fill the gaps with help from other sources of government assistance, with mixed results. The SRO Housing Corporation operates 32 properties which provide housing to over 2,500 formerly unhoused and low-income individuals, which includes refurbished historic small residential hotels, new construction apartments, and the larger former commercial Hotels like the Rosslyn, which offers 264 studio apartments.
AIDS HealthCare Foundation’s Healthy Housing Foundation has also become a major player on the scene, managing 13 SRO hotels and motels like the Madison Hotel on 7th street, which offers single rooms with shared showers for $400 a month. Other properties include the Baltimore Hotel, the iconic King Edward Hotel, and Barclay Hotels (rent $400-$700). According to their website, in March 2023, AHF purchased the historic 12-story Insurance Exchange Building at 318 West 9th St. They plan to turn it into an SRO with 251 affordable homes.
The economic revitalization and hipsterfication of DTLA in the past 15 years have also destroyed many remaining residential hotels and low-income housing options, as luxury condos and renovated market rate historic apartments have dramatically raised prices and brought middle and upper- class residents back to DTLA.
In an attempt to combat the housing shortage in DTLA and plan for an estimated around 150,000 more downtown residents by 2040, in spring of last year the controversial Downtown Community Plan, known as DTLA 2040, was approved by the city. Its passage may impact the future of thousands of residents in Skid Row and other parts of downtown.
While the DTLA 2040 plan attempts to preserve low-income housing in Skid Row, while also bringing more higher income residents and businesses to the area, community leaders and planners, including the grassroots coalition Skid Row Now, worry that without expanding the proposed IX1 Zone(Affordable Housing Only) throughout the boundaries of Skid Row, low-income housing opportunities will be lost.
“The battle is that if all of those odd parcels and other historic buildings get converted or adaptively reused at a market rate, it will put speculative pressure on everything else,” Gudis said. “If we can re-utilize the existing housing and ensure that when additional housing is built, it's also affordable as opposed to being luxury, then we have a chance of continuing a real sense of community and that's much more ethical.”
In the Green Paper, produced by the Los Angeles Poverty Department, Gudis wrote:
Given how little affordable housing has been built in Skid Row, or Downtown Los Angeles overall with current incentives, it is clear that the market alone cannot provide the housing that is needed. A new model is needed that includes the use of publicly owned land, long- vacant structures, and empty warehouses for low-income housing, rather than using zoning to make these more lucrative for luxury and market-rate housing.
And so, the struggle for every sowntown resident to have a clean, well-lighted place to call their home rages on, as the stakes get higher and the situation more dire.
