Buildings as Targets and Surrogates

To a downtown observer in 1945, the collective effects of all the attempts at hotel housing control—moral reforms, building codes, promotion of housing ideals, zoning, and deliberate ignorance—might have seemed ineffectual. Virtually all of the old rooming houses and cheap hotels were still standing. Where they had been torn down, it seemed that independent builders (such as the South of Market's Edward Rolkin) had simply replaced the old structures with larger and more threatening structures for the same resident groups.

Although the reformers seemed unsuccessful at first, their battles highlighted the active roles these ordinary buildings played in skirmishes over the cultural engineering of the city. Buildings were more

than passive strongholds of an old urban order and more than sullen threats to a new order. New buildings were also active tools for creating the king of urban culture that officials desired. Buildings, old and new, were also surrogate targets, substitutes for more radical or thorough solutions to human problems that were beyond the activists' power. Albert Wolfe, for instance, wrote in 1906 that the only real cure for the Boston rooming house problem would be job security and fair wages for the "mercantile employee as well as the skilled mechanic, the female stenographer as well as the man beside her." In private correspondence among themselves, the members of California's Commission on Immigration and Housing admitted that the most efficacious approach to slum conditions would be a land tax; simultaneously, they admitted that this solution was far too radical to overcome the opposition of private real estate interests.^[83] Because reformers could not feasibly put such far-ranging issues on the agenda, they settled on buildings and land uses as surrogate targets.

At each higher level of government, the cultural control of housing became increasingly abstract and isolated. This abstraction was an inherent weakness built into the urban housing agenda after 1900. As reformers, lobbyists, and their bureaucratic machinery catapulted ideas from city to state and finally to the federal level, antihotel policies not only gained power but lost knowledge of local cultural diversities. As the San Francisco and California cases show, the ever more consolidated building codes and zoning definitions (ending with the FHA guidelines) had thwarted creative variations in local housing survey practice and sensitivity to local needs. In the decades after World War II, more centralized, more professionalized, and increasingly isolated housing staffs gained greater power for using buildings as tools of reform and as surrogates for greater action. The consequences of two generations of biased regulatory reforms, doctrinaire idealism, and deliberate ignorance would become massively apparent to the people managing and living in hotels after 1945.