From Palace Hotels to ‘Parasitic’ Housing

Why apartments, hotels, and co-living were respectable for elites - and suspect for everyone else

One of the stranger ironies of American zoning law is that it was constitutionalized by people who (in many cases) would not have met its ideals.

When the Supreme Court decided Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926, it did something extraordinary. It didn’t merely uphold a municipal zoning ordinance; it blessed a theory of social order. Single-family homes, the Court’s ruling suggested, were the natural and most desirable unit of civic life. Apartments, by contrast, were suspect - so much so that the Court described them as “mere parasites,” feeding off (and polluting) the neighborhoods around them.

That language seems jarring today, but it was devastating in its policy impact. Euclid constitutionalized the idea that density was not just a physical condition, but a moral one - and that separating people by housing type was a legitimate exercise of the police power.

But interestingly, the justices who embraced this vision lived nothing like it.

The Court of the early twentieth century was an elite, urban institution. Its members worked in Washington, traveled constantly, and often lived in hotels, residential hotels or apartment buildings - forms of housing that were common, respectable, and convenient for professionals of their class.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who joined the Euclid majority opinion) lived for long stretches in boarding houses and apartments, both in Boston and Washington. And Chief Justice Taft lived at the Willard Hotel during political transitions and extended stays in Washington.

Later justices followed the same pattern. As Paul Groth documented in his book “Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States,” figures like Felix Frankfurter and Earl Warren spent significant portions of their lives in hotels or multifamily dwellings, finding nothing degrading or parasitic about them.

Indeed, from the “palace hotels” of the late 19th century through to political, celebrity and creative class hotel residents of the mid 20th century, it was often considered prestigious to live at a fashionable hotel address, or to move with one’s entourage from hotel to hotel along with the seasons. Groth writes:

The most famous hotel-dwelling politician was Calvin Coolidge. The thrifty Coolidge and his wife were very long term hotel tenants. They lived many years in a dollar-a- day room in the old Adams House of Boston (built in 1883). When Coolidge was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1918, on the advice of friends he moved into a $2-a-day room. In 1921, Vice President and Mrs. Coolidge moved into the same modest fourth-floor corner suite in the Willard Hotel that Vice President and Mrs. Thomas R. Marshall had occupied throughout Marshall’s second term in the Wilson administration.

The point isn’t personal hypocrisy in a gotcha sense - Justices Frankfurter and Warren weren’t yet on the Court when Euclid was decided in 1926. It’s something subtler and more revealing: Euclid was never really about housing types. It was about status, and the notion that apartments were fine for “us,” but not for “them.”

What worried local governments (and what the Court ratified) wasn’t the form of a building so much as the people associated with it: renters, immigrants, industrial workers, the young, the single, the poor. The residential hotel or apartment building was a proxy, a stand-in for social mixing that supposedly threatened property values and local hierarchies. The term “parasite” simply made exclusion sound scientific rather than political.

Seen that way, Euclid reads even less like a neutral land-use case and more like a moral justification for the entire system of exclusionary zoning as we now know it: minimum lot sizes, bans on boarding houses and single room occupancy, caps on unrelated occupants, and the slow legal erasure of America’s cheapest and most flexible housing options.

The justices themselves - educated, itinerant, professionally mobile - were exactly the kinds of people who benefited from apartments, boarding houses, and hotels. But their comfort rested on a crucial assumption: that such housing would remain exceptional, reserved for transient elites, not normalized or democratized.

That assumption still shapes our cities. We preserve single-family zoning not because it’s historically inevitable or constitutionally required, but because it protects a social ordering inherited from cases like Euclid. The apartment (and other forms of missing middle housing, from duplexes and townhomes to cottage courts and co-living) is no longer called a parasite out loud, but it is still treated as something to be contained, capped, or tolerated only at the margins.

From Euclid to the War on Shared Housing

The legacy of Euclid did not stop with apartments. Once the Supreme Court accepted the premise that certain living arrangements could be treated as socially dangerous rather than merely different, it handed local governments a tool that proved endlessly adaptable.

Single-room occupancy housing, boarding houses, and residential hotels were not fringe phenomena. For much of American history, they were how workers, students, widows, new arrivals, and people in transition lived in cities. They were lawful, common, and - in the eyes of elites who used them - perfectly respectable.

But as zoning codes thickened, these forms of housing were quietly legislated out of existence. Definitions narrowed. Occupancy caps multiplied. Kitchens were required where none were needed. Minimum unit sizes crept upward. Stays became “too long” to count as transient and “too short” to count as residential. What had once been ordinary urban housing was reclassified as a nuisance, a loophole, or a code violation.

Shared housing was no longer treated as normal, but as a problem to be managed. Density was assumed to bring disorder. Stability was equated with ownership. And residents who did not conform to the single-family ideal were viewed as temporary, suspect, or extractive.

What makes this especially striking is how selective the stigma remains. Extended-stay hotels are acceptable when they serve consultants, traveling professionals, legislators, or judges. Co-living is slowly starting to be seen as potentially chic when branded for young urban elites. Yet the same arrangements become unacceptable when they are affordable, unbranded, or accessible to people without status or political voice.

This is not an accident. It is the modern expression of the same hierarchy entrenched by Euclid nearly a century ago: housing forms that elites use are normalized; when those forms are democratized, they become regulated out of reach.

Seen in this light, today’s bans on SROs and co-living are not aberrations or overreactions to contemporary problems. They are the logical descendants of a constitutional framework that taught American cities to treat shared housing as something that must be contained, diluted, or eliminated, lest it disrupt the social order that zoning was designed to protect.

Which raises a simple question, nearly a century later: if non single-family housing models were good enough for the Supreme Court and America’s political and social elite, why are they still treated as a threat when ordinary people want the same option?

Postscript: Making Room Again

I should be clear about where I stand on this question.

In my day job, I work as a legislative lawyer at the Institute for Justice, where I focus on property rights and housing freedom. I’m also the drafter of the ROOM (Restoring Options in Occupancy Models) Act, a model state bill designed to unwind precisely the kinds of restrictions described above.

The ROOM Act does not mandate density, subsidize housing, or override private covenants. What it does is simpler and cleaner: it restores the right of property owners and residents to choose lawful co-living arrangements (SROs, rooming houses, and shared homes) without being second-guessed by zoning codes built on 20th-century fears about who lives with whom.

In other words, it is a direct response to the legacy of Euclid and the misguided notion that certain forms of shared living are inherently suspect, even when they are safe, voluntary, and historically normal. The same kinds of housing that were perfectly acceptable for judges, professionals, and urban elites should not be illegal simply because they are affordable or accessible to ordinary people.

If you’re a legislator, staffer, planner, advocate, or just someone trying to make sense of why so many cities ban their most affordable housing options, I’m always happy to talk. You can reach me through IJ, or my @LegeLawyer social media accounts, with questions about the ROOM Act, co-living law, or how these rules operate in practice.