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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think any of the problems you quote are related to shared living arrangements.
People have become selfish bastards and drug use is rampant. Of course those people are going to congregate in the only places they can pay for. Having them living on the street instead is definitely not the solution.
> “I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers…”
Hope you never have to, but people have a way of working together nevertheless. Each place is its own kingdom, but with similar ethos—mind your own business. Clean up your $#!t. People either get along, or they have problems. Some people stay a long time, and others take their cues from the long-time-people. Others are non-conforming trouble makers and will not be staying.
Yes. I lived in an SRO.
However, the “moral panic” comes from the outside—- rational or irrational judgment of outsiders who pass laws and zoning rules which impose their own moral codes and judgment. Well meaning, corrupt or just plain ignorant, the result is the same. (It’s like people who complain at the election polls about voter IDs. They’re privileged people who _already have_ driver licenses, because they own cars and drive everyday. They simply can’t imagine the difficulty of having, keeping or maintaining valid ID. As a result, they confuse voter enfranchisement with the privilege to drive.)
Add economic development and 100 years, shake and bake. Poof. Today SROs may not be available on the same scale as 100 years ago, but they’re here and there and a sight better than roach infested rooms above a dive bar.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
> 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
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
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
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.
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!)
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.
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.
There are a bunch of companies trying to make co-living mainstream again.
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?
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.
36 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
It's hard (or at least, unattractive) to run a flophouse if you cannot easily + risklessly kick highly disruptive individuals out.
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.
People have become selfish bastards and drug use is rampant. Of course those people are going to congregate in the only places they can pay for. Having them living on the street instead is definitely not the solution.
Hope you never have to, but people have a way of working together nevertheless. Each place is its own kingdom, but with similar ethos—mind your own business. Clean up your $#!t. People either get along, or they have problems. Some people stay a long time, and others take their cues from the long-time-people. Others are non-conforming trouble makers and will not be staying.
Yes. I lived in an SRO.
However, the “moral panic” comes from the outside—- rational or irrational judgment of outsiders who pass laws and zoning rules which impose their own moral codes and judgment. Well meaning, corrupt or just plain ignorant, the result is the same. (It’s like people who complain at the election polls about voter IDs. They’re privileged people who _already have_ driver licenses, because they own cars and drive everyday. They simply can’t imagine the difficulty of having, keeping or maintaining valid ID. As a result, they confuse voter enfranchisement with the privilege to drive.)
Add economic development and 100 years, shake and bake. Poof. Today SROs may not be available on the same scale as 100 years ago, but they’re here and there and a sight better than roach infested rooms above a dive bar.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
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.
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
- 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 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.
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!)
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.
“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.
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?
---
[a] According to the company's own PR: https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...
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.