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A flophouse (American English) or doss-house (British English) is a place that has very low-cost lodging, providing space to sleep and minimal amenities.
People who make use of these places have often been called Tramp and have been between homes. Quarters are typically very small, and may resemble Cubicle desk more than a regular room in a hotel or an apartment building. Some flophouses qualify as , but only if they offer meals.
American flophouses date at least to the 19th century, but the term itself is only attested from around the early 1900s, originating in hobo slang. In the past, flophouses were sometimes called lodging houses or workingmen's hotels and catered to and transient workers such as seasonal Rail transport and agriculture workers, or Migrant worker lumberjacks who would travel west during the summer to work and then return to an eastern or midwestern city which ran along the rail lines, such as Chicago, to stay in a flophouse during the winter. This is described in the 1930 novel The Rambling Kid by Charles Ashleigh and the 1976 book The Human Cougar by Lloyd Morain. Another theme in Morain's book is the gentrification which was then beginning and which has led cities to pressure flophouses to close.
Some city districts with flophouses in abundance became well known in their own right, such as the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City. Since the middle 20th century, reforms there have gradually made flophouses scarcer. The resulting gentrification and higher real-estate value have further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit. From flophouses to fancy on the Bowery from The Real Deal Magazine
Michael Adorjan, a University of Hong Kong criminology professor, has noted that "The United Nations has called cage and cubicle homes an 'insult to human dignity.'"
A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over Homeless shelter for reasons of privacy and security.
A similar preference for cage hotels over shelters was reported in turn of the century New York City, where single working men ranked their housing preference in the following order:
"Regulatory efforts to combat low-cost 'cage hotels,' ... has a driver of the expansion of the homeless population in US cities", according to Jencks. By 2021, only one, the Ewing Annex Hotel, remained in Chicago, housing some 200 men, many of whom would otherwise be homeless.
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