Several years ago while browsing through the Rooms Wanted section of Philadelphia Craigslist, I found that many of the ads there sounded like the personal ads of old. Some people included photos of themselves and lists of their hobbies, likes and dislikes and whether or not they are drinkers, addicts or 420 users. A minority of people listed their sexual orientation and sex. 

One ad had a provocative Delilah’s Den feel to it. Labeled, “Desperate,” the sultry-looking lady in question (she included a suggestive photo) stated that she needed a room and she needed it now. 

A posting from a “mature employed guy” who needed a room got me to read further. “I’m drug and alcohol free, no partying. I do not have guests over. I work full time. Clean FBI and Sterling Background. I work in Delco, but mostly on the road. I do have one car.”

Okay, so this man never parties and he never has guests over and the FBI has never had him on its Most Wanted List. I cannot imagine a life in a room without guests. And what is life without an occasional party? The life that he describes sounds like a prison…but that’s another story. 

Another ad read: “I am a mid 20 year old girl with a pet cat and I am in need of a room in either Center City or University City by late July or August 1st. Range 400-600.” Okay, the cat part is really charming. The first thing I thought of was Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music doing her whirling dance on the mountain top. Sweet! It is also a rare thing indeed to read a post from a twenty something woman calling herself a girl. 

“I prefer a night in with a few drinks around friends over going out to clubs personally,” a man of indeterminate age stated. ”However do enjoy happy hour and getting drinks inPhilly.-420 friendly but not a heavy smoker and wouldn’t in the house if it’s off limits, just prefer a toke over a shot.” Here’s all of life boiled down to nothing but the pleasure principle where the big existential question is: will it be a shot or a toke? (But will you be so ‘shot’ you’ll forget the rent?)

“Looking for a clean & nice room no bad people inside the house,” another ad proclaims. “Call me if u got one. Can only do 400 $ month to month looking to stay only for couple months. No drama. No drug addict. No Dj inside. No weed man inside.
I’m straight and working, don’t have time for BS. so I’m waiting for your answer.” 

On Craigslist I also noticed a lot of temporary room requests, something that was common when I was a student in Baltimore and lived in a rooming house on the wrong side of town. 

Across the hall from me in that house was a man who lived in a closet with a glass door labeled, Fire Escape. He had a static AM radio that played day and night. The entire house smelled like stale cinnamon buns and old tobacco. My little room included a hot plate which smelled like burning rubber whenever I turned it on. Later I lived in a boardinghouse where the landlady would sort through my mail and read the letters and the papers on my desk and then gossip about what she read to a neighbor friend of hers. One day I came home from work to find her going through my underwear drawer. What was she looking for in there? 

Rooming houses in the old sense of the word don’t really exist today but there is a call for their return. In the 1970s, the Philadelphia Inquirer had daily listings of rooms for rent. Apartment buildings like the Adelphia at 13th and Chestnut had efficiency apartments — a small refrigerator, sink and stove — for $400 a month. People — students and others — coming into Center City for the first time could quickly rent a room here until they “seasoned” and were ready to upgrade. 

Philadelphia Citizen reported in 2016 that the median city rent was somewhere in the $1,200/month range, “thereby imposing an annual $14,400 cost on the median Philly household income of $41,233 — which means the average Philadelphian is spending nearly 35 percent of their annual income on rent, and rent alone. That’s less money for a lot of essential things.” Average rents in Center City in 2024 began at $1,099 (and these were humble apartments) but skyrocketed near and above the $2,000 range, depending on the neighborhood. For a furnished room in Chinatown (again, from Craigslist) you can expect to pay $750 per month. 

The lack of affordable housing in Philadelphia is daunting. Way back in 2017, Curbed Philadelphia reported that, “Philly needs to build more than 38,000 apartments by 2030 to meet its rising demand, and they need to be made available at all price points.” 

At all price points? Really? 

For the last ten years or so a typical 25-year old cannot afford a newly constructed apartment in Center City. If Center City prices are off the charts, then the solution is to move further away from the center of the city. 

This is what has been happening for several years. As a frequent user of the Market-Frankford El, it’s quite noticeable that more millennials are moving into remote sections of Kensington. It used to be that when the El stopped at Berks, Somerset, Huntingdon stations, the only people who got on or off the El at these stations were people who grew up in those neighborhoods. During the morning and evening rush hours the El is sometimes so crowded by the time it reaches Girard station there’s no room for anyone else to get on. One must now board the El at stations closer to the Frankford Transportation Center (Church, Erie-Torresdale or Tioga) to get a seat. It doesn’t help that many homeless use the El as a motel-on-wheels and sleep in their seats for hours. 

Given the crowded conditions on the El at rush hour, one is tempted to ask: Where are all these people coming from and where are they living? 

They are certainly not living in high-end places like Vue, Hanover North Broad, Franklin Towers, Park Towne Place or Alden Park Apartments, where the monthly rents range from $1,600 and can top out close to $10,000. These moneyed class residences have nothing to do with the “real” Philadelphia, as the Rooms Wanted section of Craigslist indicates. 

In the 1790s, travelers and people without homes stayed in taverns. After that came the boarding house craze. Robinson’s Philadelphia Register and City Directory from 1799 lists at least 100 boarding houses in the city. The boom accelerated in the late nineteenth century with the rise in immigration (legal, thank you very much!), so much so that one in four homes then had a boarder. It’s interesting to note that before the University of Pennsylvania built dormitories, students lived in a boardinghouse. 

In the book Rooming Houses and the margins of Respectability (University of California Press), it is noted that:

“As late as 1949, a sociologist described a Los Angeles rooming house district as a ‘universe of anonymous transients.’ Indeed, in their home life, rooming house residents belonged neither to the middle and upper class nor to the working class; the domestic rules of both classes were largely based on family life and group households. Critics felt that rooming house residents were potentially eligible for membership in polite society but constantly in danger of losing that eligibility. Rooming house residents, too, knew they were on a social edge, but to them it was often a leading edge, one moving toward more independence.”

More independence and more choices in affordable living: this is what is needed today. But everybody has been saying that — and will continue to say it — but no solution is ever offered aside from having groups of people living together in a collective-like arrangement. But collectives and multiple roommates is not for everyone. 

For a while there was a cry to bring back official rooming houses. In the 1930s there were 50,000 rooming houses in the city. 

Rooming houses, however, do not have to be like the ones described by Wendy Gamber in her article, Boarding and Lodging Houses. Nor do they have to resemble what I experienced in Baltimore.

Gamber writes, “An 1854 issue of the Philadelphia Mercury carried the surely apocryphal story of a boardinghouse keeper who saved money by serving soup made with kittens (yes, you read that right). Irish longshoremen who labored on Philadelphia’s docks in the early twentieth century recalled a landlady who smeared fat on the faces of sleeping inhabitants to deceive them into thinking they had been fed…or the less than desirable accouterments, including smelly mattresses and dingy sheets, at a boardinghouse that advertised “meels & login cheep.” 

“Login’ cheep” — minus the kitten soup and the fat smeared on sleeping faces — needs to become a reality again. 

We’ll end with another Rooms Wanted post from Craigslist: 

“I am a mother of an 11 year old boy we need a place to go now. My landlord wants us out due to death in his family and now I don’t know what to do. I am not working right now but I do have a job interview on Thursday.”

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.