I'm not convinced at the narrative presented here, thought it seems compelling and worthy of further research.
My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
And rather than being refuges for same-sex couples and generally "[offering liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores", they were the opposite -- often being extremely stringent in "morality" clauses and forbidding mixed company after dark. They were frequently racially exclusionary in ways that became incompatible with civil rights laws.
The reality is that the situation was probably a mix of both attacks -- attacks through over-regulation and tenant rights, as well as direct attacks on SROs as hotbeds of crime and illicit or immoral behavior, but I'm curious as to the mechanics of how this came to be.
Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:
Anti-discrimination laws
• 1968 Fair Housing Act made SROs “dwellings” subject to full federal anti-bias rules
• 1974 McQueen v. City of Detroit: an SRO that refused welfare recipients was liable
• 1982 Sullivan v. SRO Management: an owner who turned away unmarried couples violated marital status discrimination
• 1988 FHA amendments added “familial status” making “no children after 8 pm" illegal
Also building code and tax incentives
• 1974 UFC required sprinkler retrofits
• 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
• 1986 low-income housing credit gave 130% write-ups for new construction but only 90% for rehab of existing SROs
Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).
The reason we see these simplistic narrative is because nobody wants to blame their pet favorite regulation for having any hand in it.
A great example is HOAs. Everyone wants to complain that they stand in the way of diversification of housing stock or use of land. Nobody wants to address the fact that they're infinitely more prevalent than they would otherwise be as a side effect of environmental regulation and often their absurd rules were a condition of approval of the development in question in the first place.
I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.
IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.
I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
Yes, typically the local government require a HOA-like structure for all new housing developments.
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
That doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. An HOA that only existed to maintain the stormwater plan and just collected small dues to maintain it would be almost completely unrecognizable compared to how actual HOAs function. Come to think of it, even my standard explanation of HOAs being prevalent because local government use them as a backdoor way to increase property taxes is inadequate, since an HOA that just maintains the roads and parks would also be pretty unrecognizable.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
> My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
Possible that tenant rights could have had some negative impacts as you say, what's the timeline on when that would have been happening? We do know that very early on that wealthy neighbourhoods were working hard to prevent SROs (prevent multi-unit buildings at all really) for class and racial exclusionary reasons. We have a great deal of direct evidence of this in contemporary reporting on these issues.
> By the early 1900s, cities and states were classifying lodging houses as public nuisances. Other laws increased building standards and mandated plumbing fixtures, raising costs and slowing new construction. Urban reformers next embraced exclusionary zoning to separate undesirable people and noxious uses from residential areas. SROs were deemed inappropriate in residential zones, and many codes banned the mixed-use districts that sustained them.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
It may be that there's no one answer because every city is different.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
Here in Chicago there are still some SROs. Chicago has middling tenants rights: not as strong as New York or SF but stronger than most of the country. If tenants rights ended SROs you'd expect them to not exist in a place like Chicago.
I moved to logan square before gentrification. There were two SRO buildings that I knew of. Both were redeveloped by the time I moved out.
SROs often serve as half-way houses for people getting out of prison so there's a lot of community opposition. All the SROs that are left in Chicago have been around a long time, there aren't new ones being built and the old ones slowly go away when the area gentrifies.
Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and complexity unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.
There are still a decent number of sros in uptown. We’ll see how long that lasts with the new towers and zoning probably making them prime redevelopment targets.
The high-end SRO market arguably still exists. There are plenty of young Americans rooming with strangers they found on the internet, not infrequently converting the living room into an additional bedroom, and nobody in power really seems to complain unless they throw too many parties, even if the zoning laws prohibit it. I also think it's unlikely they'd rent to a down-on-his-luck, 45-year-old (even if they could afford it).
You can also find medium-term, single-room rentals on sites like FurnishedFinder, often explicitly catering to traveling nurses and other medical professionals. Again, my strong suspicion is that many of these violate local zoning laws, and nobody really cares.
The article paints a very friendly picture of SROs but dismisses problems as unwarranted moral panic.
However, I don’t get the impression that this is a balanced look at the problems facing SROs in modern times. The article barely touches on important details like the relocation of low-wage jobs away from the SRO locations or the rising amount of mental illness collected within such arrangements:
> In the 1970s, states emptied mental hospitals without funding alternatives, pushing thousands of people with serious needs into cheap downtown hotels unequipped to support them. What was left of the SRO system became America’s accidental asylum network—the last rung of shelter for those the state had abandoned.
I think low cost communal living arrangements with shared kitchens and more are much easier in theory than in practice. Especially today as norms have changed. When I talk to college students the topic of roommate conflict or debates about keeping common areas clean are frequent topics, and this is among friends who chose to live with each other. I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers paying $231 inflation-adjusted dollars per month to be there.
Then there’s the problem of widespread drug use. The availability and also the strength of street drugs is an extreme problem right now. Combine this with seemingly absent enforcement in some cities and I have no idea how you’d expect communal living low-cost SROs to not become the primary destination for people with drug problems.
In the 1920's SRO occupants were much more likely to be immigrants, with different cultural values and living expectations. So norms may have declined over time, but norms are much more uniform today than they were 100 years ago.
And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
I think what made it more feasible in the 1920's was two things:
- much higher staffing levels. Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's. They had staff cleaning kithcens and bathrooms, and staff warning and kicking out tenants that consistently left a mess. I can't imagine that being feasible today on a $231/month room rent.
- a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
> And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
> a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
You probably brought up the biggest problem with making this model work today.
In the 1920s the threat of being evicted rapidly for violations was real and present. Either you follow the rules or you’re getting kicked to the street.
Modern tenant laws are unbelievably protective of tenants and require extremely long periods to evict people. I know someone who spent months and tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict squatters who broke into their house while they were doing some construction work on it. If it takes months to kick non-paying tenants who were never invited out of a place you own, it would be a nightmare to try to evict people from an SRO fast enough to keep any peace.
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.
Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time & eat more rapid price cuts while trying to sell it than try to be a single unit landlord in NYC.
Likewise small time landlords are going to be much pickier about who they let rent from them, in possibly discriminatory ways. It's a much lower risk than having a bad tenant occupy your unit, fail to pay rent, cost you legal fees and possibly damage unit on way out after 6 months.
A landlord is not going to take a chance on a drug addict in recovery or other higher risk tenant in this context.
In my jurisdiction I once had a roommate who stole from me. I was the homeowner, and he was renting from me. I was able to kick him out without notice. If he had his own separate bathroom & kitchen I wouldn't have been able to due to those tenant protection laws you mention. But because we were in a shared space those laws didn't apply.
The laws for SRO should be the same as shared living, but I imagine it varies greatly.
Do you mean have him forcibly removed by the police? Or just terminate his rental agreement?
Depending on the location, there’s a difference between being able to tell someone their contract is terminated and they have to leave versus actually having legal standing to have them removed.
The tenants who abuse the laws know that they can just refuse to leave and nothing can be done for so many days. In the last case I heard of, the tenant knew this and waited until a day or two before the clock ran out to actually leave, despite being declared unwelcome and asked to leave many weeks prior.
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.
> Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's.
IIUC, this is an inappropriate of use of Baumol's cost disease. That is intended to apply in cases where the fundamental issue is that technology and/or process changes cannot improve the productivity of those performing a task, such as a symphony orchestra. Janitorial work has been subject to productivity increases, and ultimately, it's a bit of a stretch to use Baumol's to talk about a case where you can't for some reason reduce the number of people doing the work from one to zero.
Supervisory roles might, possibly, be an appropriate Baumol's example.
What is your proposed alternative? If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
Drug use and mental health are also problems that need to be addressed, but you cannot cure someone of their issues while they're sleeping on the street. Unlike shared apartments, homeless shelters, or the street, SROs provide each resident with a private room and a locking door. If those were the four options I could afford, I would choose the SRO every time.
> If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
Arguing over who cleans the kitchens is the version of the problem for friends who know each other. If you try the same arrangement and add people with severe mental health problems or drug problems randomly into the communal kitchens you would get something far, far worse.
I only brought that up as an example of what happens in the best case of friends choosing to live together, not as a suggestion of what it would be like with public strangers mixing together.
Those 'far far worse' things are already happening to the unhoused, they're not unique to SROs and low-cost hotels, so all that keeping people unhoused does is make their lives even worse.
I don't follow, why would you let people with severe mental health or drug problems "randomly" into your communal kitchen?
In my 20s I lived in a series of 2-3 bedroom apartments with anywhere from 3 to 8 strangers I found on Craigslist. Decidedly not friends.
When a spot became available we would meet potential new roommates and decide if we felt safe sharing our space with them. The landlord would also meet them and do their own background check. We didn't let the first person off the street live with us, that doesn't make sense. AFAIK only homeless shelters work that way, and we're not talking about those.
This is the kind of disingenuous/unserious reframing of the problem that causes housing advocates to dismiss your opposition as "unwarranted moral panic"
> In the 1970s, states emptied mental hospitals without funding alternatives, pushing thousands of people with serious needs into cheap downtown hotels unequipped to support them.
In the runup to this, there were stories appearing regularly of people being committed to institutions against their will, and without valid cause. In other words, putting someone away for other people's convenience (or financial benefit).
I interpreted the outflow of mental patients as an unexpected side effect of efforts to halt the above-mentioned abuses. Of course it's also possible that reform of abuses was used as a cover for simple, unintelligent budget cutting.
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution.
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).
A person might be fine, like in a typical dorm, with a microwave, microfridge, and electric kettle.
Especially if there was a low-cost cafeteria in the lobby.
People live in the city because they want to eat out, right? We should start at the realistic assumption for typical city-dweller behavioral patterns, not, like, take a suburban house and try to randomly time-multiplex part of it…
>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?
No? Having a usable kitchen does not mean you cannot eat at restaurants, and surely a good portion of people who like to eat at restaurants also want to be able to cook at home sometimes, if only to save money. This is not even going into the fact that eating at restaurants is almost always unhealthy.
The kitchen is a cost, the availability of food outside lessens the need to pay that cost.
In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.
There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.
Eating out in the US being crazy expensive is somewhat of a self-causing problem.
When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.
And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.
Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.
Right, NYC ironically had the cheapest eating out options even though it's one of the most expensive metros. But now the dollar slice is dead, and bringing back a single SRO building isnt bringing it back. The transition period is too rough for anyone to invest enough to make it happen, so now we're stuck with everyone having a kitchen and eating out being expensive.
Not necessarily. I have a stew place by me that is $12 for a plate of veggies + meat that is easily two meals for me. There are plenty of food trucks around with good options in the $5-10 range. And that's before we're looking at stuff from a bodega.
WeLive/WeWork used to do this before the CEO fiasco. They operated a shared living space for working professionals. It wasn’t $231/mo but it was a great way for younger professionals to get their foot in the door living and working in the city.
The SROs discussed in the article were prominent long after that.
Modern synthetic fentanyl is a different situation than opium for many reasons, including the relative strength and difficult controlling dosages. The current opioid epidemic is really bad for drug users, even with historical perspective.
A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).
We need tiers of low cost housing. Some people could make a communal space work, they would need to be able to vote to kick people out. People who are difficult to deal with need their own place, maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
Interestingly, churches are one of the ways you still could, given that when zoning conflicts with practice of a religion zoning often has to give way. Get some folks with development experience and start a Hospitaller order.
In my opinion, your entire comment is suffering from the "out of sight, out of mind" bias that drives so much policy around housing and mental illness, mostly for the worse. The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement? There's no reason why publicly-funded SROs wouldn't have these things, probably at much lower cost than we currently end up paying for the revolving door of law enforcement, jail, mental hospital, regular hospital we have with the homeless right now. Again, I think this is "out of sight, out of mind" bias - you don't think the current spending is "real" because you can't see it, but this hypothetical new spending would be, even though the total cost to the taxpayer would be less.
> The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
What are you talking about? I brought them up because it’s a front and center problem that anyone who walks through a big city will have to encounter on a daily basis. It’s not out of sight out of mind at all.
> And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement?
At $231 inflation adjusted dollars per month, just how much do you expect to be left over for daily cleaning staff? If you expect nearly hotel level frequency of cleaning common spaces, you’re going to have to expect nearly hotel level monthly rents.
Law enforcement isn’t going to arrest someone for refusing to clean their plates. It’s the responsibility of the SRO operator to evict people. Do you know how hard it is to evict anyone these days? Even literal squatters or people who stop paying rent can take months to evict.
As always, I'm firmly of the mind that none of this has to do with balance sheets or what things cost. There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits, thanks to decades of propaganda saying as such. The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line. The fact that housing assistance and other such things would clean up the streets of the same people while giving them the help they need, and at a lower cost than rolling the cops on them to beat them with batons and shove them into coach busses to other cities doesn't matter, because the violence is what they want.
There's a substantial slice of this country that legitimately hates poor people, whether they want to admit it or not, and they will die on the hill of spending a thousand taxpayer dollars making their life a living hell, before they will willingly accede to giving them a hundred bucks to buy food.
This is not a reasonable position and as such, you cannot reason with it.
> There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits,
I wasn’t talking about people struggling. I was talking about the actual, visible drug users on the streets. The struggling people looking for temporary housing would be intermingled with these people and suffer the most.
The Y and religious shelters have a zero-tolerance policy. You get kicked out immediately for drugs or alcohol. So no, they're generally not intermingled.
> The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
> The people we now call “chronically homeless” were once simply low-income tenants, housed by the private market in cheap rooms rather than by public programs. Once that market was dismantled, the result was predictable: the homelessness wave of the late 1970s and 1980s followed directly from the destruction of SROs. Today’s crisis—nearly 800,000 unhoused people in 2024—is the long tail of that loss, compounded by decades of underbuilding in expensive cities and soaring rents. As one advocate put it, “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market. They aren’t anymore.”
Over a decade ago I grew weed in the East Bay, and regularly sold weight to many of the warehouse artist collectives. Often they'd be stealing utilities (either directly from the utility, or more commonly from neighbors), but they were well-tolerated parts of their surrounding communities. The HPS lamps they often bypassed (for electricity) resulted in lower power usage, net.
I cannot imagine these still existing, at least not in the capacities they were after the last great recession brought rentals down. I used to grow/rent an entire five bedroom house for $1400 month (split with 2.5 others), although it was a mom&pop landlord [good rate even then].
When my father came to this country he lived in an SRO while working in restaurants in New York City. That gave him the start he needed to eventually grow a family of 6 that had the opportunity to experience the American dream. The decline of SROs (and IMO mixed use residential like where the owner of a deli lives on top of it) has really pulled the out the bottom rungs of the ladder making it harder to get a footing.
Immigrants still do this. Except now they fill apartments and houses with bunkbeds. I know because my dad did this in the early 2000's and is still in contact with the local immigrant community.
I think many Americans have the impression that this violates the terms of their lease, and without other-country kinship connections and networks, they’re not aware of how to find people who would lease under high occupancy conditions. It may even be illegal. So we may need to explicitly make these legal again so Americans will rent in this way.
There is a ridiculous perception that privately run high occupancy housing is abusive. I don't understand that at all. They are running a business that is compassionate enough to offer, at the bare minimum, shelter from the elements. If there is competition in that market, as there used to be, then the bad actors go out of business.
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
But if we own real estate, we see the limitation and destruction of housing stock as value creation benefiting own personal assets. From that perspective, reducing this sort of low cost housing makes perfect sense.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.
HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
This is one that many arguing for more building also argue against. It is popular to talk about how we can make it so that people can afford a "starter home," not so that people have a cheap place to live.
If you set it up as a charity or something, then maybe you could. Otherwise, there's still likely $100+ in property tax per occupant per month even on a dorm sized space. That's before utilities, upkeep, paying off construction, admin costs, etc. Just look at what they charge for dorm rooms, and many of those aren't even in expensive areas.
I'm curious where you get that it is property tax driving costs? I know it isn't free, by any means. But compare dorms in a place like Atlanta to rent. Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month? That is rather substantial. Being colocated at the school helps save transportation costs, as well.
"Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month"
What does it cost? Otherwise, this is like saying I saved $100 buying a pair of shoes on sale. Property tax is a major component of most property expenses (maybe not for schools). Even dorm rooms tend to run over $500/mo. That's not cheap for most people, especially the homeless population. If we look at most mortgages, property taxes are 25%+ of a monthly payment in many cases. Even in apartments the tenants are paying this indirectly.
With the recent boom in tourism in Japan there's been heaps of people coming back after seeing no homeless people, pointing to Japan some utopia with all the answers, and grasping for vague socio and cultural reasons as the explanation.
The answer to why there is less visible homelessness in Japan than NA is a rather more boring one in that they simply didn't destroy their last resort low income housing as much as Canada and America did and so there remain many more options for someone in Japan to duck out of the cold at a very low cost.
All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.
There are countries in the world where homeless are pretty good hidden, by means of extreme expensive welfare, or are moved away from big cities, or at least touristic centers.
I have no idea in Japan. As I was there I saw extremely poor people (deduced from cloths and lack of hygiene) I doubt they had an own house. Even worst, I saw middle-class neighborhoods that I would associate with a favela in Brazil (albeit very clean and organized, each flat was smaller than a space in Rio.
Japan's also got plenty of dubiously legal operations for that kind of thing, like "24-hour cafes" with private booths obviously set up as illegal capsule hotels.
Tech workers are prime targets for SROs, and it is wild that zoning has kept them out. I have had plenty of coworkers who ate the vast majority of their meals at work anyway and only used their kitchen to store clothes.
This portrays them just as an option for poor people, but if they were legal we would have high-end SROs also, for people who want high-end amenities but don't need giant amounts of space. Removing them hurts the people without other options the most, but zoning has hurt everyone's options.
This is a really great article. The root causes of our problems have been the destruction of affordable housing.
Even back in 2007 when the housing crisis was only just starting to become noticible and we didn't yet have a full blown fentanyl crisis people that worked closely in low income communities were hitting the panic button about the implications of the destruction of existing SROs and other low income housing. Despite occasionally building new social housing buildings, the pace of destruction of existing affordable housing was so great that the city was net losing housing that low income people could afford.
> “The City of Vancouver has finally acknowledged that we are losing more low-income housing than we are building, and that vacancy rates are functionally zero,” said housing activist David Eby, of Pivot Legal Society.
(Irony here is that the activist quoted here, David Eby, is now Premier of the Province. Has he built a remarkable amount of low income housing? Nope!)
Thanks for bringing Vancouver into the discussion.
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
I remember in 2005ish or so I knew people that rented other's Garages. This was before AirBNB, I imagine the rent was 300 max in the Bay Area. I imagine now under the new world order, it's $3000 for someone's garage.
if people need to have the great intellectual renaissance of the past
- cheap housing for young people like the rooms mentioned in the article at around $250~$500/month range
- no communal kitchens - but communal cafeterias serving cheap food at $5/meal or even better go for the packed elsewhere - microwave option
- lots of rooms (cafes / study's) for people to interact & have people with diverse goals / interests meet
This is a very good history and I do think we need this level of the market (and boarding houses! People who don't want to cook for themselves shouldn't be stuck eating out - it's about twice as hard to cook for 5 as it is to cook for 1. And running a boarding house is a job.) But I do not think that SROs are compatible with post-2008 housing financialization. I think they will simply be pushed up by the huge companies that own thousands of units until they are $800 or $1000 a month, and 1bd units will rise to $2000 or more.
The problem is "desirability" i.e. employment in small towns being destroyed so people have to move to big cities to look for work. There are plenty of housing units, what's gone is the manufacturing and retail that used to support them.
If ownership is diverse (not "diverse," but just meaning lots of different owners rather than a few megagiant equity rollups), and incentives are lined up, I'd absolutely be happy about a return to being able to rent a room.
These kinds of housing are not compatible with current tenant laws. In order to cover this zone of the market you need the ability to boot bad actors. If you can’t do that, you get massive adverse selection as your decent but poor people leave and you are left with the bad poor. Eventually you get this Dead Sea Effect where your stuff is all busted.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
That is the sad thing, in the City I grew up in, we had a few large "one room" rental buildings were people shared a bathroom that were rather cheap. But those started disappearing in the late 90s. Now, none are left :(
I can still picture one building that had probably 100 rooms. I can see a few men leaning out their window smoking.
That is a shame they are gone, seems no one down on their luck has a way to rebuild their life these days.
These are in the UK as HMOs and widely used, and are known for a lot of abuse by landlords. They have stemmed part of the population problem but they still rise to massive costs. Even 20 years ago I knew the bottom of the bracket were not just sharing those one rooms, but even time-sharing beds - you'd have 4 people sharing a room with 3 beds in.
You have to be very privileged and delusional to write articles like this.
“The poor yearn for the HMO. They yearn to share houses with 20 other men.”
No. These places are horrible. They cause huge amounts of crime both inside the property and in the community around them. Putting a bunch of criminals and addicts into a building is not good for anyone.
Something that isn't well-known in the popular discourse is that single-occupancy homes are the main thing that we lack. If you go to a city meeting, you will hear endless talking about how we need more "family-sized" homes. This is mostly repeated by senior citizens who have no idea what they are talking about because the last time they participated in the housing market was when Gerald Ford was new and exciting. What we actually lack is studios or 1-bedroom apartments. We have way too many 3 and 4-bedroom homes given our current households, and we are lacking, nationally, tens of millions of small homes for singles and couples without children.
When I lived in Ireland it was full of people moaning about “family homes” but then they build nothing but 3bed 2 bath semi d’s only to watch them get filled by young roommates. Who would have preferred their own flat.
As I understand it, Helsinki made this mistake. They wanted to attract families to the city, so they mandated a minimum portion of larger apartments in new construction. Unfortunately these apartments ended up being too expensive for their intended market, real-world families.
Unfortunately amongst the few that genuinely are calling for family homes because they need one, there are plenty more disingenuously using "family homes" as a tool to keep "undesirables" of renters, single people, young people, new immigrants, homosexuals etc out of their established low density, wealthy communities.
Family homes and family apartments are not the same thing. You are referring to zoning restrictions only allowing detached single family homes to be built, which are more expensive per occupant, and hence keep poorer people away.
There are multiple reasons for why dense areas only have 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, while less dense areas only have detached single family homes. One is, as you say, to keep the poorer people away. But another big one is also the change in household size due to people's preferences. And yet another is people's preference for detached single family homes once they do have kids (by and large).
So, to repeat myself, no. There is an overabundance of 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers and we continue to build too many of these. There is a shortage of 0-1 bedroom apartment in dense urban centers.
I should've been clearer, I meant development of new abodes is bifurcated, it's either a low density region with homes with multiple bedrooms, or a high density region with homes with 1 or 2 bedrooms.
The 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers were probably built a while ago, but I have never seen new homes built in dense urban centers (I'm referring to NYC/SF/SEA/etc). The low density suburb regions that border the dense urban center usually try to keep their low density status.
You won't see an apartment building with units that have 3 and 4 bedrooms going up in Manhattan, and you won't see apartment buildings with 1-2 bedrooms going up in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
That's not really the case, though. We don't have detailed statistics for bedroom count in New York because a city of just 8 million people with the largest urban economy on the continent can't be expected to track building permits. However in my city, Berkeley, California, the densest city in California outside San Francisco, we get mostly larger apartments. For example I point to the nearly-completed 2587 Telegraph Avenue with 485 bedrooms across 4, 5, and 6-bedroom apartments but only 5 studios. This is a direct outcome of the zoning code that denominates "density" in terms of units, therefore incentivizing the construction of gigantic units with too many bedrooms and forcing people into roomate situations that they don't actually want.
I swear it's as if these people have never met a crackhead. Crackheads are a destructive creature with the sole animus of getting high. This is why they live on the street: they have specced themselves as crack-pures and stripped all nonessential attributes like a job, shelter, or biological needs. The invisible hand of poverty isn't keeping people on drugs- it's the drugs.
All that to say an SRO facility full of crackheads would be hell for anyone to live in. It won't solve the homelessness (aka crackhead) problem, but I can imagine it would enable the tiny minority of non-crackhead visible homeless to get a place to stay. Any SRO that sets rules to stop antisocial crackhead behavior will just put crackheads back on the street. They will always pick drugs over shelter.
Soft hand, empowerment type solutions aren't going to fix crackheads. Only forceful measures like institutionalization will. I've seen too many otherwise normal friends and neighbors end up as crackheads on the street. Unfortunately thanks to neoliberalism this sentiment will remain unpopular for my lifetime and we will be doomed to suffer.
Beats living on the streets if that’s the only thing you can afford.
Like the article said, there’s fine hotels for some and some truly terrible ones for others. Still beats being homeless. Also, just because something isn’t perfect and has its flaws, doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
And rather than being refuges for same-sex couples and generally "[offering liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores", they were the opposite -- often being extremely stringent in "morality" clauses and forbidding mixed company after dark. They were frequently racially exclusionary in ways that became incompatible with civil rights laws.
The reality is that the situation was probably a mix of both attacks -- attacks through over-regulation and tenant rights, as well as direct attacks on SROs as hotbeds of crime and illicit or immoral behavior, but I'm curious as to the mechanics of how this came to be.
Anti-discrimination laws
Also building code and tax incentivesThe reason we see these simplistic narrative is because nobody wants to blame their pet favorite regulation for having any hand in it.
A great example is HOAs. Everyone wants to complain that they stand in the way of diversification of housing stock or use of land. Nobody wants to address the fact that they're infinitely more prevalent than they would otherwise be as a side effect of environmental regulation and often their absurd rules were a condition of approval of the development in question in the first place.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
Possible that tenant rights could have had some negative impacts as you say, what's the timeline on when that would have been happening? We do know that very early on that wealthy neighbourhoods were working hard to prevent SROs (prevent multi-unit buildings at all really) for class and racial exclusionary reasons. We have a great deal of direct evidence of this in contemporary reporting on these issues.
> By the early 1900s, cities and states were classifying lodging houses as public nuisances. Other laws increased building standards and mandated plumbing fixtures, raising costs and slowing new construction. Urban reformers next embraced exclusionary zoning to separate undesirable people and noxious uses from residential areas. SROs were deemed inappropriate in residential zones, and many codes banned the mixed-use districts that sustained them.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
1: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/mayor/Press%2...
I moved to logan square before gentrification. There were two SRO buildings that I knew of. Both were redeveloped by the time I moved out.
SROs often serve as half-way houses for people getting out of prison so there's a lot of community opposition. All the SROs that are left in Chicago have been around a long time, there aren't new ones being built and the old ones slowly go away when the area gentrifies.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and complexity unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
You can also find medium-term, single-room rentals on sites like FurnishedFinder, often explicitly catering to traveling nurses and other medical professionals. Again, my strong suspicion is that many of these violate local zoning laws, and nobody really cares.
However, I don’t get the impression that this is a balanced look at the problems facing SROs in modern times. The article barely touches on important details like the relocation of low-wage jobs away from the SRO locations or the rising amount of mental illness collected within such arrangements:
> In the 1970s, states emptied mental hospitals without funding alternatives, pushing thousands of people with serious needs into cheap downtown hotels unequipped to support them. What was left of the SRO system became America’s accidental asylum network—the last rung of shelter for those the state had abandoned.
I think low cost communal living arrangements with shared kitchens and more are much easier in theory than in practice. Especially today as norms have changed. When I talk to college students the topic of roommate conflict or debates about keeping common areas clean are frequent topics, and this is among friends who chose to live with each other. I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers paying $231 inflation-adjusted dollars per month to be there.
Then there’s the problem of widespread drug use. The availability and also the strength of street drugs is an extreme problem right now. Combine this with seemingly absent enforcement in some cities and I have no idea how you’d expect communal living low-cost SROs to not become the primary destination for people with drug problems.
And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
I think what made it more feasible in the 1920's was two things:
- much higher staffing levels. Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's. They had staff cleaning kithcens and bathrooms, and staff warning and kicking out tenants that consistently left a mess. I can't imagine that being feasible today on a $231/month room rent.
- a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
You probably brought up the biggest problem with making this model work today.
In the 1920s the threat of being evicted rapidly for violations was real and present. Either you follow the rules or you’re getting kicked to the street.
Modern tenant laws are unbelievably protective of tenants and require extremely long periods to evict people. I know someone who spent months and tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict squatters who broke into their house while they were doing some construction work on it. If it takes months to kick non-paying tenants who were never invited out of a place you own, it would be a nightmare to try to evict people from an SRO fast enough to keep any peace.
Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time & eat more rapid price cuts while trying to sell it than try to be a single unit landlord in NYC.
Likewise small time landlords are going to be much pickier about who they let rent from them, in possibly discriminatory ways. It's a much lower risk than having a bad tenant occupy your unit, fail to pay rent, cost you legal fees and possibly damage unit on way out after 6 months.
A landlord is not going to take a chance on a drug addict in recovery or other higher risk tenant in this context.
The laws for SRO should be the same as shared living, but I imagine it varies greatly.
Do you mean have him forcibly removed by the police? Or just terminate his rental agreement?
Depending on the location, there’s a difference between being able to tell someone their contract is terminated and they have to leave versus actually having legal standing to have them removed.
The tenants who abuse the laws know that they can just refuse to leave and nothing can be done for so many days. In the last case I heard of, the tenant knew this and waited until a day or two before the clock ran out to actually leave, despite being declared unwelcome and asked to leave many weeks prior.
It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.
IIUC, this is an inappropriate of use of Baumol's cost disease. That is intended to apply in cases where the fundamental issue is that technology and/or process changes cannot improve the productivity of those performing a task, such as a symphony orchestra. Janitorial work has been subject to productivity increases, and ultimately, it's a bit of a stretch to use Baumol's to talk about a case where you can't for some reason reduce the number of people doing the work from one to zero.
Supervisory roles might, possibly, be an appropriate Baumol's example.
Drug use and mental health are also problems that need to be addressed, but you cannot cure someone of their issues while they're sleeping on the street. Unlike shared apartments, homeless shelters, or the street, SROs provide each resident with a private room and a locking door. If those were the four options I could afford, I would choose the SRO every time.
Arguing over who cleans the kitchens is the version of the problem for friends who know each other. If you try the same arrangement and add people with severe mental health problems or drug problems randomly into the communal kitchens you would get something far, far worse.
I only brought that up as an example of what happens in the best case of friends choosing to live together, not as a suggestion of what it would be like with public strangers mixing together.
If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business. Maybe don’t do it next time.
And that is a good thing. It forces people to actually abide by the social contract.
And there will be people who can’t deal with that, and can’t live anywhere, but here’s the thing.
You need a first step on the ladder for people who are ready to actually enter society. Otherwise they never will.
"social contract" is just "abide by the terms of the contract they signed" or "hold up their end of the deal" in this case.
Those 'far far worse' things are already happening to the unhoused, they're not unique to SROs and low-cost hotels, so all that keeping people unhoused does is make their lives even worse.
In my 20s I lived in a series of 2-3 bedroom apartments with anywhere from 3 to 8 strangers I found on Craigslist. Decidedly not friends.
When a spot became available we would meet potential new roommates and decide if we felt safe sharing our space with them. The landlord would also meet them and do their own background check. We didn't let the first person off the street live with us, that doesn't make sense. AFAIK only homeless shelters work that way, and we're not talking about those.
This is the kind of disingenuous/unserious reframing of the problem that causes housing advocates to dismiss your opposition as "unwarranted moral panic"
In the runup to this, there were stories appearing regularly of people being committed to institutions against their will, and without valid cause. In other words, putting someone away for other people's convenience (or financial benefit).
I interpreted the outflow of mental patients as an unexpected side effect of efforts to halt the above-mentioned abuses. Of course it's also possible that reform of abuses was used as a cover for simple, unintelligent budget cutting.
In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43280456
A person might be fine, like in a typical dorm, with a microwave, microfridge, and electric kettle.
Especially if there was a low-cost cafeteria in the lobby.
People live in the city because they want to eat out, right? We should start at the realistic assumption for typical city-dweller behavioral patterns, not, like, take a suburban house and try to randomly time-multiplex part of it…
No? Having a usable kitchen does not mean you cannot eat at restaurants, and surely a good portion of people who like to eat at restaurants also want to be able to cook at home sometimes, if only to save money. This is not even going into the fact that eating at restaurants is almost always unhealthy.
In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.
There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.
When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.
And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.
Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.
In 1875 San Francisco adopted an ordinance banning opium dens. A little history might provide some perspective.
Modern synthetic fentanyl is a different situation than opium for many reasons, including the relative strength and difficult controlling dosages. The current opioid epidemic is really bad for drug users, even with historical perspective.
That could be addressed by creating SRO housing near the locations where the low-wage jobs are now.
We need tiers of low cost housing. Some people could make a communal space work, they would need to be able to vote to kick people out. People who are difficult to deal with need their own place, maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
That already exists. It's underfunded.
And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement? There's no reason why publicly-funded SROs wouldn't have these things, probably at much lower cost than we currently end up paying for the revolving door of law enforcement, jail, mental hospital, regular hospital we have with the homeless right now. Again, I think this is "out of sight, out of mind" bias - you don't think the current spending is "real" because you can't see it, but this hypothetical new spending would be, even though the total cost to the taxpayer would be less.
What are you talking about? I brought them up because it’s a front and center problem that anyone who walks through a big city will have to encounter on a daily basis. It’s not out of sight out of mind at all.
> And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement?
At $231 inflation adjusted dollars per month, just how much do you expect to be left over for daily cleaning staff? If you expect nearly hotel level frequency of cleaning common spaces, you’re going to have to expect nearly hotel level monthly rents.
Law enforcement isn’t going to arrest someone for refusing to clean their plates. It’s the responsibility of the SRO operator to evict people. Do you know how hard it is to evict anyone these days? Even literal squatters or people who stop paying rent can take months to evict.
There's a substantial slice of this country that legitimately hates poor people, whether they want to admit it or not, and they will die on the hill of spending a thousand taxpayer dollars making their life a living hell, before they will willingly accede to giving them a hundred bucks to buy food.
This is not a reasonable position and as such, you cannot reason with it.
As they say, "The cruelty is the point."
I wasn’t talking about people struggling. I was talking about the actual, visible drug users on the streets. The struggling people looking for temporary housing would be intermingled with these people and suffer the most.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
I cannot imagine these still existing, at least not in the capacities they were after the last great recession brought rentals down. I used to grow/rent an entire five bedroom house for $1400 month (split with 2.5 others), although it was a mom&pop landlord [good rate even then].
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
It's hard (or at least, unattractive) to run a flophouse if you cannot easily + risklessly kick highly disruptive individuals out.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
The largest one appears to be PadSplit (https://padsplit.com), claiming 27,000+ rooms nationwide.[a]
But I don't know if any these new co-living solutions work as advertised, or whether the companies providing them are actually making any money.
Does anyone here know?
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[a] According to the company's own PR: https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...
What does it cost? Otherwise, this is like saying I saved $100 buying a pair of shoes on sale. Property tax is a major component of most property expenses (maybe not for schools). Even dorm rooms tend to run over $500/mo. That's not cheap for most people, especially the homeless population. If we look at most mortgages, property taxes are 25%+ of a monthly payment in many cases. Even in apartments the tenants are paying this indirectly.
The answer to why there is less visible homelessness in Japan than NA is a rather more boring one in that they simply didn't destroy their last resort low income housing as much as Canada and America did and so there remain many more options for someone in Japan to duck out of the cold at a very low cost.
All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.
I have no idea in Japan. As I was there I saw extremely poor people (deduced from cloths and lack of hygiene) I doubt they had an own house. Even worst, I saw middle-class neighborhoods that I would associate with a favela in Brazil (albeit very clean and organized, each flat was smaller than a space in Rio.
This portrays them just as an option for poor people, but if they were legal we would have high-end SROs also, for people who want high-end amenities but don't need giant amounts of space. Removing them hurts the people without other options the most, but zoning has hurt everyone's options.
https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...
Even back in 2007 when the housing crisis was only just starting to become noticible and we didn't yet have a full blown fentanyl crisis people that worked closely in low income communities were hitting the panic button about the implications of the destruction of existing SROs and other low income housing. Despite occasionally building new social housing buildings, the pace of destruction of existing affordable housing was so great that the city was net losing housing that low income people could afford.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/
> “The City of Vancouver has finally acknowledged that we are losing more low-income housing than we are building, and that vacancy rates are functionally zero,” said housing activist David Eby, of Pivot Legal Society.
(Irony here is that the activist quoted here, David Eby, is now Premier of the Province. Has he built a remarkable amount of low income housing? Nope!)
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-gr...
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
- cheap housing for young people like the rooms mentioned in the article at around $250~$500/month range - no communal kitchens - but communal cafeterias serving cheap food at $5/meal or even better go for the packed elsewhere - microwave option - lots of rooms (cafes / study's) for people to interact & have people with diverse goals / interests meet
The problem is "desirability" i.e. employment in small towns being destroyed so people have to move to big cities to look for work. There are plenty of housing units, what's gone is the manufacturing and retail that used to support them.
If ownership is diverse (not "diverse," but just meaning lots of different owners rather than a few megagiant equity rollups), and incentives are lined up, I'd absolutely be happy about a return to being able to rent a room.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
I can still picture one building that had probably 100 rooms. I can see a few men leaning out their window smoking.
That is a shame they are gone, seems no one down on their luck has a way to rebuild their life these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
“The poor yearn for the HMO. They yearn to share houses with 20 other men.”
No. These places are horrible. They cause huge amounts of crime both inside the property and in the community around them. Putting a bunch of criminals and addicts into a building is not good for anyone.
There are multiple reasons for why dense areas only have 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, while less dense areas only have detached single family homes. One is, as you say, to keep the poorer people away. But another big one is also the change in household size due to people's preferences. And yet another is people's preference for detached single family homes once they do have kids (by and large).
The 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers were probably built a while ago, but I have never seen new homes built in dense urban centers (I'm referring to NYC/SF/SEA/etc). The low density suburb regions that border the dense urban center usually try to keep their low density status.
You won't see an apartment building with units that have 3 and 4 bedrooms going up in Manhattan, and you won't see apartment buildings with 1-2 bedrooms going up in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
All that to say an SRO facility full of crackheads would be hell for anyone to live in. It won't solve the homelessness (aka crackhead) problem, but I can imagine it would enable the tiny minority of non-crackhead visible homeless to get a place to stay. Any SRO that sets rules to stop antisocial crackhead behavior will just put crackheads back on the street. They will always pick drugs over shelter.
Soft hand, empowerment type solutions aren't going to fix crackheads. Only forceful measures like institutionalization will. I've seen too many otherwise normal friends and neighbors end up as crackheads on the street. Unfortunately thanks to neoliberalism this sentiment will remain unpopular for my lifetime and we will be doomed to suffer.
Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.
Like the article said, there’s fine hotels for some and some truly terrible ones for others. Still beats being homeless. Also, just because something isn’t perfect and has its flaws, doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
There are no other options. Like smaller cities with a lower cost of living. The big cities just suck away life from everything.