I Don’t Take in Boarders Anymore

There’s a line in The Blues Brothers that caught my attention recently. “I don’t take in boarders anymore.” My daughters don’t even have the concept it refers to. The idea that people once rented rooms in other people’s houses as a normal, unremarkable phase of life simply isn’t part of how they understand the world.

That absence matters.

For most of human history, housing existed as a wide and surprisingly functional spectrum. It flexed across income, geography, work patterns, and life stages. Dormitories. Boarding houses. Rooming houses. Hostels. Multigenerational homes. Shared flats. Family homes. Communal living for elders. Graduated care. Palliative care. People moved through these forms as their lives changed, without drama and without moral judgment.

This wasn’t marginal or shameful. It was mainstream enough to show up everywhere in culture.

The Fonz lived in a rented room over the Cunningham’s garage and was part of the family. In Places in the Heart, a widowed woman and her children form a functional household by taking in boarders who collectively fill the space of a traditional family. The Facts of Life revolved around a boarding school, not as a last resort, but as a place where young people learned how to live among others under light supervision. These weren’t stories about failure. They were stories about transition, proximity, and becoming.

We didn’t live this way because we were poorer or less sophisticated. We lived this way because it matched how humans actually develop.

Which is what makes the current moment both tragic and faintly absurd. Today’s kids are on a longer, slower path to maturity than at any point in recent history. Not because they are weaker, but because we made them better. Kinder. Safer. More emotionally aware. Less brutalized by necessity. We deliberately extended childhood, mostly for good reasons.

At the same time, we dismantled the housing forms that once absorbed long maturation arcs. We kept the expectation of instant adulthood while extending the time it takes to become one. The result isn’t failure so much as friction. Not fragility, but mismatch.

Today we have young adults in desperate need of something different, but our system has no category for the different. We didn’t just stop building these intermediate spaces; we often made them illegal, creating a bureaucracy of loneliness through zoning and occupancy laws that only recognize the nuclear family.

Somewhere along the way, we collapsed the housing spectrum into a binary. You either lived independently in a private household or you had failed. Housing stopped being developmental infrastructure and became a verdict. That shift didn’t just change where people lived; it changed how we evaluated one another.

On that altar, we placed our incomes and, more quietly, our humanity. We normalized the idea that an extraordinary share of lifetime earnings should be spent simply to secure isolation. Not comfort. Not beauty. Not community. Separation. Privacy became synonymous with dignity, even as loneliness and brittleness grew alongside it.

Every housing conversation today defaults to the same response. Build more. Increase supply. As if all housing serves the same function, and as if a studio apartment, a rented room with rules, and a single-family home are interchangeable objects. This is industrial thinking applied to what is, at its core, a developmental problem.

It’s also worth saying plainly that housing prices are not broken. They are, in many respects, finally priced correctly for a global market.

For most of history, property markets were local by necessity. Information traveled slowly. Being nearby conferred buyer power. Today, a property in Toronto is instantly visible to buyers in Frankfurt. Capital is mobile, comparison is frictionless, and price discovery is global. The old informational subsidy is gone.

But assets priced correctly for a global market make poor incubators for human development.

What we failed to do was redesign the places people live while they are becoming.

We now practice what might be called Insta-Pot parenting. Children are raised under sustained pressure, optimized and supervised, or low and slow, insulated from risk and consequence, often both at once. What disappeared was the simmer. The phase of partial independence, real rules, tolerable mistakes, and social correction without catastrophe.

Housing used to provide that simmer.

A rented room with rules. Limited access. No guests. A structure that wasn’t family but wasn’t abandonment either. You learned how to live among other people before being left alone with a lease, a credit score, and total autonomy.

A friend of mine runs exactly this kind of house today. She rents out four rooms. There are strict hours, limited kitchen access, and no guests. It works. Parents are actively looking for places like this for adult children who need time rather than exile. She could open ten more rooms tomorrow if the system allowed it.

Housing, at its best, tracks a life cycle.

You move from living with parents to living in a dorm. From a dorm to a rooming house. From a rooming house to shared apartments. From there to a family unit while you raise children. When the children leave, you move back toward peers. In your sixties, why wouldn’t you want to live near your friends rather than rattling around alone in a house built for four people. From there comes communal assisted living, increasing care, palliative care, and finally the return of that house to the market, as so many boomer homes soon will.

That isn’t regression. It’s flow.

And this is where the loss becomes visible.

When was the last time you heard of someone “living at the Y.” Not visiting. Not working out. Living there. When did rooming houses become unthinkable rather than unremarkable. When did boarding with rules turn into something we associate only with desperation or failure. It wasn’t that long ago the Village People made it sound like fun.

These weren’t marginal solutions. They were mainstream housing forms that absorbed youth, migration, ambition, failure, recovery, and transition. They allowed people to be unfinished without being cast out. They provided structure without ownership, community without permanence, and dignity without isolation.

We didn’t replace them because they stopped working. We replaced them because they stopped fitting a single elevated idea of what success was supposed to look like. And once that happened, everything else was reclassified as a problem to be solved rather than a phase to be lived.

And this is where the argument widens beyond housing.

AI is unlikely to bring us closer together. It is one more force pulling us further apart, the digital version of the private studio apartment. More work done alone. More life mediated through screens. More friction removed, including the friction that reminds us other people exist.

Isolation may be part of the price of the tools we’re building. We should be honest about that. But accepting the price doesn’t mean leaning into the damage. It means hedging deliberately, and in public, with more face time, more shared space, and more reasons to leave the house.

People are difficult. They are inconvenient. They are often exhausting. But they are also all we have. And the more abstract our lives become, the more unavoidable we need each other to be. We belong together.

That means more density, not less. More communal living arrangements. More third places that don’t require ownership or performance. The restaurant. The club. The tennis court. The shared kitchen. The common room.

In short, we need a lot of housing options we haven’t seen in years, and some we’ve barely tried at scale. Rooming houses with rules. Communal homes. Intergenerational living. Purpose-built transition housing. Models that already exist elsewhere, even if we’ve forgotten how to use them. Ashrams in India. Kibbutzim in Israel. Not as lifestyle branding, but as serious social infrastructure.

I don’t pretend to know which form is right for whom, or when. That’s the point. A healthy system doesn’t force everyone into the same shape.

I do know for many it won't be semi-detached.