It’s Time to Concede the American Dream is a F#cking Nightmare
In 2016, I was hired by a San Francisco real estate developer to help promote an overseas-made modular housing development. The developer had identified an unloved Department of Public Works parking lot they could build over. If the city gave the developer the right to build over the lot for free, the developer could deliver a new building with small, but high quality homeless housing units with no upfront costs. The developer would recoup costs with a lease-back to the city, charging $1000 a month per unit for the building’s first ten years. Though the project was shot down by labor, it was a good deal for the city. San Francisco’s aging residential hotel units made up a large percent of its ersatz homeless housing stock. Nonprofits often took over hotel building ownership and/or management (or of units for vulnerable tenants). Between the cost of the nonprofit management and debt service fees, average residential hotel unit costs to the city were around $2,400 back in 2016 (most of these older units were tiny and in states of massive disrepair).
In addition to landing an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle in support of the project, I researched and wrote a paper arguing for a return of the residential hotel as a staple of American housing. Residential hotels were once a ubiquitous housing option for (usually) itinerant workers, but were found on all socioeconomic strata. From flophouses to the Waldorf-Astoria, folks from all walks saw a benefit in having small, manageable, and affordable homes in a central, social location. My piece focused on San Francisco and homeless housing, but hotels with short, medium, and long-term options are as useful tiny towns as large metropolises.
The residential hotel, like so many good things, was killed by cars and marriage. Mid-century urban renewal programs reoriented the U.S. to suburban living and gutted city centers, especially their older buildings with socioeconomically-disenfranchised tenants. It wasn’t until both coasts revolted — notably Jane Jacobs in NYC and protests around The International Hotel in SF — that the destruction began to subside. But the damage was done since so many hotels were destroyed and never replaced due to regulation forbidding the construction of new residential hotels.
The geographical shift to suburban, single family homes was complemented by cultural move to nuclear family formation, i.e. married couples living with their children. Living alone or with your partner, much less with children, in a residential hotel was aberrent to this ideal. Starting in the late thirties, residential hotels started being called SROs, or single room occupancy, a bureaucratic term that became shorthand for people who couldn’t make it in the mainstream. This stigma did not subside even when nuclear families became far less common; today, around 18 percent of U.S. households are nuclear families versus 43 percent in 1950, and single household populations make up nearly 30 percent of all households versus 9 percent in 1950.
I heavily relied on Paul Groth’s excellent Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States for my research. Groth wrote one line that keeps running through my mind:
The urban Americans living in hotels are not homeless. They are living in admittedly minimal and unusual dwelling units, often in hideous repair and under woefully inadequate management but dwelling units nonetheless. Calling SRO people homeless reinvokes the cultural bias against hotel life. In the long run, the ecologically and culturally aberrant idea about housing may prove to be the huge single-family house on an open lot, not the more social way of living downtown in a hotel [bolding mine.]
As noted in a recent interview, I’ve deliberately, and by necessity, lived in hotels for much of the last three years. Hotel life is a flexible, affordable, social, and low-impact lifestyle that allows me to live in the places I want to live. I have been married and lived in my own, purchased home. I know what it’s like to lease my own and share apartments. I prefer this. Despite my innumerable, researched reasons for living the way I do, I’m constantly asked why I live like this — often by people spewing emissions and spending large portions of their lives working to pay for rent and car payments. I won’t detail how this situation has been used against me in court as evidence of my lack of fitness as a parent. Being an upstanding American — culturally, politically, and economically — means fealty and subservience to the cult of home-ownership, driving, work, shopping, and money. Few of the upstanding Americans I meet — also upholding industrial and commercial market complexes — ask why.
Like so many Americans, my piece of the American success pie seems to contract with each passing day. And like many, I’m wising up to my real odds of achieving conventional success. No stranger to unconscious motivations, I’ve often maintained that if I work harder and learn to compromise and apologize more, success will be forthcoming — a myth that may be as pernicious as the homeownership one. I’ve worked as hard as I could, compromised, apologized, and pivoted to the point of disorientation — and I still get screwed, then ignored and left broke.
I write above, not to spew superfluous vitriol, but to provide an honest assessment of where I seek out success and where I actually achieve it. I have experienced countless successes in my lifetime, but counter to American success, mine have come about through emotional and spiritual release. Enduring success has usually come about after relinquishing desires, not fulfilling them.
During my research for the residential hotel piece, I wrote a separate personal essay about residential hotels called, Housing for Life Lived on the Edge. This piece was written about a month after separating from my then-wife. I was 40, two young children, my life and plans blown up, and I was living month-to-month with a roommate (with this guy, for what it’s worth). I was unsure where my life was heading and had little money or security. And yet, as I had in other dark spots, I felt free. In my piece I connected my liberation with an essay I read around that time by Franscican priest Richard Rohr about the “liminal state.” He wrote:
Many spiritual giants (like St. Francis, Dorothy Day, or Mohandas Gandhi) try to live their entire lives in permanent liminality, on the edge or the periphery of the dominant culture. This in-between place is free of illusions and false pay-offs; it invites us to discover and live from a broader perspective and with a much deeper seeing.
This liminal success through release and emptying was consistent with my experiences of success, but it was the exact opposite of American success. Unlike marriage and homeownership, liminal success requires relinquishing ideas of attaining enduring happiness. Unlike professional success, liminal success requires giving up personal glory and achievement. Unlike American success, liminal success shirks wealth, accumulation, and pride in achievement.
Unlike achieving success with a windfall of cash or accolades, liminal success does not require being born into special circumstances, going to a particular school, or maintaining certain political views. Anyone can live humbly and broke and in service to a greater purpose. And though this liminal path is opaque on the clearest days and lonely on the most crowded, it has, in my abundant experience, been the easier, more reliable path to experiencing real success and freedom.
