Modern Living

Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking about affordable housing. Everyone seems obsessed with it. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it. One of the problems is that the places needing it most urgently are the places where the market, and many times other forces, resist it most fervently. Some of those cities that I call “Modern Boom Towns,” try to encourage construction of housing for the working class. They find though, that, upon construction, the market pushes rents or selling prices far out of the reach of those most in need. They must find transportation from places where affordable housing exists. The distances they must travel grow greater with each year of local regional prosperity.

One type of housing upon which the poor depended in years gone by exists largely in photographs of yesteryear, for example: 

These once dotted the rural landscape of the agricultural South. They provided homes for farm laborers and sharecroppers. I’m told that my parents lived in one of these after their marriage while sharecropping near the Ladd community south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

 The homes consisted of three rooms in a row with a straight shot from the front door to the rear door, hence the name “shotgun houses,” as a weapon fired through the front door would go straight through the rear door.

 In certain areas, such homes consisted of an addition story or half-story. In cities they were lined side by side. As neighbors began to escape the bitterest of poverty, two of the homes might be connected to make one. This earned them the local moniker of “double-barreled shotgun houses.”

Photographer/writer Rian Dundon wrote in an essay in Timeline of the location of such home in urban areas: "The precise origins of the shotgun house are up for debate. Some scholars trace the style back to West Africa, where an early 19th century boom in New Orleans’ Afro-Haitian population introduced the distinctive structures. But the ubiquity of shotgun houses throughout the urban south can also be viewed as a variation on the typical one-room farm house—rotated 90 degrees for a better fit in the city’s narrow lots."

 In one of those cases of irony that tend to confuse us, the archetypal “shotgun house” has been adopted by a new and different breed of owner. The one below represents a head-turning case. The owner obtained it for free just before demolition, moved it, and “fixed it up” for $140,000 as a part time lodging place and part-time short-term rental ($350 per night). He then listed it for sale for just under a million dollars. No sharecroppers or service workers need apply.

Most examples in our state  have disappeared. One of the last stood for years just outside the Delta city of Marvell, Arkansas, a fixer-upper for certain had it been saved.

I