Hotel living has a long history--the Eloise books by Kay Thompson are probably the most famous example. I can talk a little bit about some of the earlier history, specifically, hotel living in Paris!

(This is adapted from several of my earlier answers with some new stuff thrown in).

Paris is the City of Lights...but it sure wasn't very lit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it had one of the lowest electrification rates of any major city. It also had one of the worst housing situations in the Euro-American world, especially given the doubling of the population between 1871-1920. As you can imagine, this burden fell mostly on immigrants and the lower classes.

Attempts at mitigating the horrific conditions, like establishing factories in the suburbs instead of the city (with extensive slum settlements building up around them), or even some government-sponsored housing projects, could never come even close to meeting demand.

As a result, Paris even more so than other cities developed a system of "hotels."

But these are not what we often talk about in the U.S. at the time--the de facto boarding houses for single men where housekeepers would take care of "women's work" for them, or for single working women where they could be watched and "stay respectable."

No, these were tenements with really lousy--metaphorically and often literally--living conditions.

The hotels garnis resembled very lousy--metaphorically and often literally--versions of our hotels today: single-room "apartments" with no kitchen. (Although, sometimes also no bathroom). They even often had a restaurant on the ground floor. So when you hear about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spending all their time in cafes...well, guess what.

Parisian hotels were filled with transient workers, new immigrants, basically the young and poor--single women and men, single women with children, young couples.

To give you an idea of the conditions of the worse of these: Helmut Gruber describes housing for the working women of Paris (in the slum tenements known as "insalubrious islands" and in the hotels garnis) as:

The majority lived in domiciles lacking indoor water, heat, electricity, daylight, and ventilation, and they shared slovenly sanitary facilities...It is difficult to imagine where and how they actually washed their clothes, and how often...The absence of hygiene is evident from reports by teachers of the lack of cleanliness of children and from the high death rate from tuberculosis and pulmonary disease.

But despite these conditions, hotel residents weren't all just sitting around cafes philosophizing. Gruber also notes that tenement and hotel residents were very active organizing in order to keep rents down to something they could afford on their salaries, protesting to the government to enforce protections for them against landlords/slumlords.

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We used to have a really great answer on the U.S. end of things I mentioned, but that user seems to have deleted it.