Stretched thin? Take in boarders

By Bankrate.com

When single mother Connie Baschke's severe health problems prevented her from working outside the home, she did what countless people in difficult situations have done for centuries: She took in boarders.

In summer 1994, college students filled the three available bedrooms of Baschke's home in Fostoria, Iowa. The students were in town to work seasonal jobs in the Iowa Great Lakes area, a popular summertime vacation destination.

"Parents were really concerned about sending their children off to a strange place to work all summer with very little supervision," Baschke says.

Her summer boarding effort helped diminish those worries. In fact, the decision to take in borders was such a success that she made it permanent.

"It does seem safer to parents because I live here," she says. "They can come here and meet me and see what the room is like and be reassured."

• Talk back: Would you share a house to cut costs?

In 2001, Baschke remodeled the basement of her 1914 home into three more rooms and opened Connie's Bed & Breakfast and Boarding House.

Income from her six units -- including three to four full-time boarders at $550 a month and two to three seasonal bed-and-breakfast weekenders at $65 to $75 per night -- averages more than $30,000 a year.

In lean times, many homeowners may wonder whether they can open a boardinghouse and squeeze some rental income out of spare bedrooms or a converted garage.

But just how practical is it to open a boardinghouse today?

The evolution of the boardinghouse

Wendy Gamber, a professor of history at Indiana University and the author of "The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America," thinks a modern version of the boardinghouse makes perfect sense today.

"A single-family home sort of defines the American dream, but there is also this strong undercurrent of communal traditions of various sorts," she says. "At any moment in time, substantial portions of the U.S. population do not live in those single-family, idealized homes."

Gamber says traditional boardinghouses provided daily meals, mostly to single male boarders, as Americans moved from the farm to the cities during the 1800s.

The boardinghouse's seedy reputation, though sometimes deserved, was as much a reflection of the various turn-of-the-20th-century campaigns for decency as the living conditions themselves, she says.

As the boardinghouse mutated -- first to lodging houses (sans food) and later to apartment hotels and apartments -- each variation distanced itself from the negative baggage originally associated with the boardinghouse concept.

Contrary to popular perceptions, boardinghouses and similar group-living arrangements never really disappeared, Gamber says.

Instead, they morphed into places where people continued to live communally. Examples include co-op housing for college students near campuses, group living among elderly people who shun traditional nursing home environments and communes such as Black Bear Ranch in Forks of Salmon, Calif.

Today, traditional boardinghouses survive, though many no longer offer meals.

Several current conditions favor a resurgence in communal living, Gamber says. Though some people open boardinghouses purely for financial reasons, others see the boardinghouse as an extension of their values.

"I think there is some reaction against the McMansion," Gamber says. "There is certainly a lot of emphasis on being green and reducing one's carbon footprint, and maybe part of that is people trying to move back to cities, to places where they can walk or take public transportation to work.

What does it take for a boardinghouse to thrive in the 21st century?

According to Robert Sheehan, a longtime consulting economist for the National Apartment Association, the prospects for a boardinghouse all depend on that old real-estate rule: location, location, location.

Most residential areas prohibit people from taking in renters where they live.

"Single-room occupancy (SRO) is illegal in most jurisdictions," Sheehan says.

Exceptions occasionally are granted to organizations such as group homes for the disabled or elderly. "Exceptions are typically made for nonprofit organizations or for local government programs," Sheehan says.

Continued: Opening a boardinghouse

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