A flophouse (American English) or dosshouse (British English) is a place that offers very low-cost lodging, providing space to sleep and minimal amenities. Characteristics Historically, flophouses, or British "doss-houses", have been used for overnight lodging by those who needed the lowest cost alternative to staying with others, shelters, or sleeping outside. Generally rooms are small, bathrooms are shared, and bedding is minimal, sometimes with mattresses or mats on the floor, or canvas sheets stretched between two horizontal beams creating a series of hammock-like beds. People who make use of these places have often been called transients and have been between homes. Quarters are typically very small, and may resemble office cubicles more than a regular room in a hotel or apartment building. Some flophouses qualify as boarding houses, but only if they offer meals. American flophouses date at least to the 19th century, but the term flophouse itself is only attested from around the early 1900s, originating in hobo slang. In the past, flophouses were sometimes called lodging houses or workingmen's hotels and catered to hobos and transient workers such as seasonal railroad and agriculture workers, or migrant lumberjacks who would travel west during the summer to work and then return to an eastern or midwestern city which ran along the rail lines, such as Chicago, to stay in a flophouse during the winter. This is described in the 1930 novel The Rambling Kid by Charles Ashleigh and the 1976 book The Human Cougar by Lloyd Morain. Another theme in Morain's book is the gentrification which was then beginning and which has led cities to pressure flophouses to close. Some city districts with flophouses in abundance became well known in their own right, such as the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City. Since the middle 20th century, reforms there have gradually made flophouses scarcer. The resulting gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit. 21st-century revival In the 2010s, the high cost of housing in cities such as San Francisco saw an increase in the number of flophouses. The modern flophouses, sometimes branded as "pods", usually have partitions between beds for privacy, and are created from existing houses or apartments. They are often marketed toward commuters who stay in the city during the workweek. Cage homes in Hong Kong Cage homes were built in colonial Hong Kong in