So are/were cage hotels; further in that page,
> A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security
and more at http://historyapolis.com/blog/tag/cage-hotel/ ).
> Cage hotels emerged in Minneapolis in the late 19th century, as a way to house the migrant laborers who came to the city to find work and then to stay while they spent their earnings from the railroads, the farms and the logging camps. By 1895, there were 50 cage hotels in Minneapolis. While these hotels provided a cheap place to stay, the rest of Minneapolis found them increasingly distasteful. The city outlawed new cage hotels in 1918, but they were such an established institution that some of them lasted for four more decades.
The flophouse WP entry points out: "gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit"
However, that skips over how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago.