Home Sweet Flophouse
A single-room occupancy hotel in Vancouver
Today’s Guardian features an article on a new generation of Japanese — most of them young men — unable to afford homes. They spend their days either unemployed or working at menial jobs; at night, they float between 24-hour internet cafés and capsule hotels.
“According to a recent government survey of the people the media has dubbed ‘net café refugees’, 5,400 people spend at least half the week living in cafés such as Manga Square, though most have little or no interest in the internet,” the Guardian reports. “Instead, they are attracted by the low cost of a night’s accommodation, an expanding array of services and the sympathetic attitude of café owners.” A night at a net café costs about $8.70 per night — double if you include dinner.
In some ways, living in an internet café is really just a novel take on an old standby: the flophouse. These cheap “cubicle hotels,” along with their slightly more upscale cousins, the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO), have traditonally offered low daily rates for a modest amount of private space. They flourished in North American cities until the 1960s, when they slowly began to disappear, with no tears shed from municipal authorities who saw them as a blight.
New York’s Bowery was especially famous for its flophouses. In the 1930s and 40s, up to 25,000 “Bowery bums” spent their lives on the street, many of them residing in its 100 flophouses. Today, just a few of those hotels remain; the rest were long ago purged by housing reform, urban renewal and gentrification. In Vancouver, an abundance of SROs has been whittled down to a mere handful as they have been converted into hostels, hotels or condos.
Increasingly, though, housing activists have realized that these kinds of cheap, low-rent flophouses and hotels might have served an important role in keeping marginal young men off the street. Last year, Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told the New York Times that the decline of SROs and boarding houses “was probably a big contributor to the emergence of homelessness.” Indeed, as the number of SRO rooms in cities across the continent declined, the number of homeless swelled.
A similar story has unrolled in Vancouver. Unlike many other cities, it retained a high number of SRO units until recently, when development pressure began reducing their ranks. Even though it has long had substantial problems with poverty and substance abuse, Vancouver has only recently had a significant number of homeless; in the past, SROs kept people off the streets in spite of their troubles.
When surveyed, many homeless say they are uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in shelters; they would much prefer a private space to call their own. They crave anonymity and stability, two things that shelters cannot provide. Increasingly, then, housing advocates are looking to flophouses, boarding houses and SROs as one way to ease North America’s homeless crisis. Last year, the New York Times ran articles on “the humane flophouse” and the architects and designers who are looking for ways to make flophouses into cheap, compact and efficient living spaces.
In Vancouver, housing activists are working to save the city’s remaining SROs from being coverted into boutique hotels in advance of the 2010 Olympics. In the past year alone, more than 600 rooms have disappeared, even as the number of people considered to be on the verge of homelessness — just one paycheque away from going broke — increases.
So what about Japan? “Living in a net café can be hazardous,” reports the Guardian. “Many long-term residents suffer from back pain and haemorrhoids, and are susceptible to colds and other viruses. Depression is common, particularly among women, who, according to official figures, make up about 20% of the net cafe population.” When your only alternative to the street is an internet café, even flophouses start to sound inviting.
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