ABSTRACT
Many low-income single adults are hampered by old age, the loss of a spouse, physical handicaps, chronic histories of institutionalization, and unemployment. During the nineteenth century the boarding house was the main source of housing for singles. World War II brought a new development in housing, the single-room occupancy unit. Designed to accommodate the influx of single, low-income workers into the city, it developed from the fusion of the two single-person housing types—lodging/boarding/rooming house and the apartment hotel. The single people traditionally have found shelter in boarding houses and other minimal accommodations that meet their needs for cheap, simple dwellings. The boarding house was gradually replaced in the twentieth century by the "rooming" house. The lodging house was charged with the task of the moral reform of the lowest of the working class: "the incorrigible, the drunkard, the criminal, the immoral, the lazy and shiftless".
