“Two Hours of Pushin’ Broom Buys an Eight by Twelve Four-Bit Room”

The times Roger Miller wrote about in his classic song, King of the Road, are long gone.

Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let…fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin’ broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.

Miller wrote King of the Road in 1965 at the age of 29. Using an online inflation calculator I found that $0.50 (aka four bits) in 1965 is equal to $3.14 in 2006 dollars. In 1965 you may not have been able to get a room for such a rate but the point is that today it is likely harder to find a cheap room for a couple hours of work. I checked St. Louis area room rates on some online sources and the best deal I could find is $45/night — if you are able to drive there. Ninety 360 bits plus tax. I’m sure cheaper places exist but you’ll likely need a credit card to check in.

Miller, born during the Great Depression, grew up in the next county over my father in very rural Western Oklahoma. My father was born seven years earlier in 1929. My dad rented a room briefly in the late 40s until he and my mom got married after she graduated from high school. These were the dust bowl days with families packing up and leaving for greener pastures further west. In these years and later you always had mostly single men that were drifters, vagabonds, and such — traveling from town to town working jobs here and there to get by.

Interestingly, one of the great names of St. Louis has just such a history: former St. Louis Mayor A.J. Cervantes. Cervantes, born on the city’s south side in 1920, became mayor in 1965 as Miller’s song was hitting the charts. Cervantes’ 1974 book “Mr. Mayor” talks about growing up in St. Louis, getting kicked out of St. Louis University High School and hitch hiking toward California “with a quarter and a few dimes in my pocket”. He continues:

Thumbing my way through the Dust Bowl offered few hardships. Motorists were usually friendly to a neatly dressed teen-age hitchhiker, and aside from suspicious farm wives in rural Arkansas, enough housewives who responded to my knock on the back door were ready to trade a meal for cutting the grass or some other odd job. I learned other tricks, too. A firehouse usually offered a place to sleep, and sometimes a meal as well. Firemen seemed always ready to interrupt a card game for a few words with a young wayfarer. And if all else failed I could always try the parish house next to the church.
Cervantes made it as far as Dallas but it was only a few months before he was back with his family on Juniata St. The next spring, however, he would venture out on his own again as he had had his “first taste of freedom.” Cervantes talks about hopping on freight cars and how they’d stop the train sometimes to toss off the free loaders — he describes learning to “ride the suspension rods underneath the cars – a dirty, precarious business. When I was sneaking rides over the Rockies in unheated boxcars, I used to wrap myself in newspapers to keep warm.”

Cervantes, a 2-term Mayor of our city, had lived for a brief time as a homeless drifter trying to find his way. Eventually he did find his way to a mansion on a private street and to Room 200 at City Hall. A future mayor may not be among our homeless today but you just never really know who is out there.

Rooms to let…fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets

In those days rooms were plentiful and available throughout every major and minor city. Ironically our efforts to provide better housing cleared many of these places located on skid row. The arch grounds, 40 city blocks cleared. East of Soulard, cleared. Blocks along Market near Union Station — all cleared. The free market naturally provided housing at many price ranges, including two bits. But by the time Miller’s song became popular many of the rooms were gone. But one type still existed, the rooming house.

Former mansions had been cut up into apartments of varying quality . Sometimes people would share a single bathroom and kitchen. Codes required fire escapes, many can still be seen today. Cities were naturally responding to market conditions, providing housing that people needed. Many a beautiful staircase, for example, were ripped out to be replaced with a wall to create separate units. The wealthier continued to move out of their once fashionable mansions to new digs on the edge — not really caring about what they left behind.

But in popular culture we could also see the old mansion divided up into apartments as something cool and modern. The perfect place for a single gal at age 30: Mary Richards. Mary Tyler Moore’s character lived in a former mansion turned apartments. Cloris Leachman played Moore’s landlady — at least the building was owner occupied, right? Some rooming houses still exist but they are very hard to find. Do you think any respectable associate producer for a local TV station would live in such an apartment? Getting permission to rehab an existing rooming house is not likely given today’s climate of people only wanting neighbors just like themselves.

Today few choices exist for those seeking the four-bit room. Downtown’s Mark Twain Hotel is one such choice, an old fashioned residential hotel (pictured at right). I called them earlier in the week to ask about rates, terms and availability. Rates start at $113/week for a room, $118/week for room with a bath (others have shared baths), a $50 deposit and $15 application fee for a background check — no felonies in the last 3 years and no drug convictions in the last 7 years. Doing the math you’ll see that someone could rent an apartment for what it takes to live at the Mark Twain but leasing an apartment usually requires a steady job, good credit, a 12-month lease and the ability to get utilities. For those on the edge of being homeless, the cheap residential hotel rented by the week is an excellent option to keep them out of the parks & shelters. When I called the Mark Twain all 238 rooms were full.

The new term for the residential hotel is the SRO — single room occupancy. The idea is to rent a room to someone at a very low rate. Hostels are similar although they usually serve a somewhat different clientele. Like the tiny cold water flat and rooms of the past, we’ve razed or otherwise done away with buildings that once served a useful need to a segment of the population. Other cities, working on real solutions to homelessness, are building new SROs. Having a place where someone working can put their few possessions and have a good night’s sleep is an important part of a city’s housing mix. St. Louis, like most cities, have unknowingly eliminated a housing option that would keep many homeless from being homeless.

We need to increase our housing options for the working poor. This doesn’t mean a hand out, just not forcing out viable choices via zoning or other methods. To me it is in our best interests to catch people with such housing on the way down — a far better way to solve the problem than pulling them up from park benches after several years on the streets. For more on this subject read a piece called A Place in the Sun written a few years ago by my friend Robert E. Lipscomb.