Chicago’s Ewing Annex Hotel

The Ewing Annex Hotel is a 220-room SRO hotel for men only. It remains in operation despite being the target of multiple attempts to shut it down over the years.

I was able to find four articles about it. The first is a current piece (dated April 2, 2021) that I happened to trip across via Hacker News. It's title is The Last Men’s Hotel in Chicago

Excerpt:

The price ranges from $400 a month to $450, with the higher end providing air conditioners and, perhaps, a sink. It’s quieter in this wing, where only five men live on each floor and where all the rooms have ceilings.

On this side you find wood floors, not tile, and narrow hallways, not wide. Two men can’t pass each other without at least one turning sideways. Each floor holds 54 of the famous cubicles; each cubicle, for $19 a night, $120 a week, or $360 a month, provides a door that locks, an outlet that works, a twin-sized bed with a sheet, and a ceiling of chicken wire that lets your neighbor’s conversations, odors, and dust drift through—hence the "cage" nickname.


This next article from 2019 is really nice because it's about the entire block, not just the Ewing Annex Hotel: This Time Capsule Downtown Block, Once Called Chicago’s Worst, Is ‘Run Down And Real’ — And Home To A Community. (I got a pop up, refreshed and was able to access it.)

This article describes the gritty block that contains the Ewing Annex Hotel. It notes that Hollywood often comes here to film. The block has appeared in both TV shows (Chicago PD) and movies (The Dark Knight; The Fugitive).

One of the buildings on the block, The Yukon, is an architectural gem and the article has a photo. It was built in 1898 and described by author and architecture critic Lee Bey on Facebook as "one of the most overlooked cool buildings downtown...So glassy, so early. The 2nd floor ribbon of glass on Clark Street turns the corner and graces the Van Buren side too. Like a Victorian peek into midcentury Modernism."

Excerpt:

It remains a single-room-occupancy hotel for men, most at the bottom rung of the financial ladder who rent 5-foot-by-7-foot cubicles for $340 a month. The cubicles are tiny stalls with walls that don’t reach to the ceiling and chicken-wire over the top. For $440 a month, there are rooms with a drywall ceiling and a closet.

In 2013... the residents of the Ewing and the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless teamed up and succeeded in staying open and remain open today unlike many other SROs. The reason, according to Coalition Director of Organizing Wayne Richard, was that the city had no plan for where the residents would end up.

“You can’t make people homeless because of a development. The residents may be on the bottom rung of housing, but they are not homeless,” Richard said.

He also said because of its location, a lot of residents live close to where they work, unlike some of the SROs that were closed on the North Side.


Here is a 2013 article about that attempt to shut it down: Economic Cleansing: Aldermen Push to Close Down Ewing Annex Hotel. It notes a price of $300 per month for rooms there at that time.

This piece is dated July 5, 2016: Chicago SROs. It notes a monthly price starting at $315 per month and $15 per night. It also provides the following stats:

These hotels provide a very modest bulwark against homelessness, which afflicted more than 125,000 Chicagoans during the 2014-15 school year, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. The cubicle hotels are at the lowest rung among several dozen single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels which remain in the city. According to a November 2014 press release from the mayor’s office, 73 Chicago SRO hotels were licensed at the time, with an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 rooms. Contrast that with figures from a 1985 study, which noted 115 SRO hotels and 11,500 rooms, reportedly down from 28,500 rooms a decade earlier.

Since 2014, the number of rooms has declined further.


An earlier paragraph indicates current residents (include) an airline mechanic, an employee of the FBI, and young college students from nearby Robert Morris University. DePaul University, and Columbia College. One Columbia student, he said, had been living in a dorm but found himself repeatedly asking his parents for more money... In February, Mike Bush said the number of college students living at the hotel had grown to 12.

At least one of the other articles similarly indicated that residents were from all walks of life and some stayed during a time of crisis and were able to successfully rebuild their lives, becoming homeowners and business people. Having a cheap, humble place to go during a crisis makes it vastly easier to rebuild your life than if you actually end up on the street.


I've quoted prices for the Ewing Annex Hotel from four different articles published in four different years. You can see the prices creep up slightly, but they remain low -- below $500 per month for monthly residents.

Informal research by me -- first hand experience of my own, plus talking with various homeless people online over the years -- suggests that rent of $500 or less per month should be a target figure for anyone trying to make a dent in homelessness. There are homeless people with income, it's just not enough to cover the cost of a middle-class lifestyle.

Elderly people on social security or disabled individuals with some kind of disability payments are sometimes homeless largely because it is so hard to find any housing at all in the US below $500 per month. If such people can find a place cheap enough where they can make life work without a car, some of them are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and do not necessarily need any kind of intervention (such as addiction services).

SROs are potentially a means to try to meet the need for market-based housing at or below $500 per month. If they are in a walkable neighborhood and have access to public transit, this would help some Americans avoid ending up homeless to begin with or get back into housing if they already are on the street.