In this case, the article contains the reason:
"as SROs disappeared, ... homelessness exploded nationwide."
Looks like SROs weren't being used by scientists and scholors.
You're saying SROs were banned specifically to increase homelessness? Is this a discarded Bond movie plot?
People fleeing domestic abuse with reasonable means need to have options, because the domestic violence shelters can't be expected to accommodate everyone for the whole time a divorce takes (which in some situations can be multiple years).
https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple...
ish.., to the level of attention councils can afford to do so in an era of tight local government finances, and in the backdrop of limited housing stock making it difficult to refuse planning permission.
Getting a place to live in for $350/mo would be absolutely game changing for low income (and even middle income) people trying to build wealth. The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than the sunny smilely communal life ideals they are sold as.
If someone wants to waste his life away, sitting around doing drugs, that should be up to him.
Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?
If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
It is my understanding that anthropology has shown that the people of prehistoric times cared for their sick, elderly, and infirm.
> "From the very earliest times, we can see evidence that people who were unable to function were helped, looked after and given what care was available."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
[1] https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/kPn9cHW4RWKz94CjxDBw3ds/?forma...
I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
Based on how much people pay for even absolute shithole desert wasteland where I live, I can tell you there'd be a huge demand for homesteading federal BLM or other land if they'd reopen it. It would definitely help people who can't afford to get land on their own.
Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
I have family member suffering from extreme mental illness. He is likely on the streets somewhere, we don't know where because we had no choice but to abandon him to save ourselves. United States makes it extremely difficult to force treatment for someone who can't be making these decisions on their own ever. He ended up in this cycle. Mental Health Episode, Drugs, Law Enforcement interactions trying to get drugs (Robbing people), some minor help, slightly better, stops medications because side effects, repeat.
Funding it is always crazy expensive and in United States with crappy social safety net, it's really hard to find funding and politically, people don't want to fund it because "I'm barely affording rent and you want to raise my taxes to pay for them? Hell no."
Mark followed a bunch of homeless people in Skid Row as well as providing assistance to them and documenting it all through interviews.
The problem is so much (soooo much) deeper and worse than the surface level virtuous hand waving of "Just give them food and shelter and the problem is fixed".
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
I have to imagine that at 10% of the rental market there had to be tons of drugs being done within SROs. But also that a lot of drugs were being done in the other 90% of the rental market ...
I come from a "big" family, and I am used to movement where I live. And living alone or just with one person, makes my energy go down.
Now that I plan on moving to Paraguay, I am looking for co-living options or someone to rent place with. Different people have different preferred ways of living.
For me, it's cheaper, and I am happier, when I share place with other people. Also, you get to learn from others, have people to talk with, at the expense of a bit of privacy. But depending on the roommates you choose the privacy thing is usually not an issue.
Perspective: My mother owned a home in a wealthy area of Virginia, her mortgage was $1200/mo for 30 years. When she sold it (for double what she paid for it) she thought she was rich. Then came the assisted living rent bill of $8k/mo. She realized she only has a few years to live on her life savings. It's a generational rug pull and kicking the ladder out from those climbing. It's going to end very badly.
C'mon bro. Where the hell do these beliefs come from? Yes, negatives are inevitable, but that's hardly the expected outcome for an average person. Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
Just declare your roommate as a care giver. They provide cleaning services (for a fee substracted from rent) You need emotional support, and they provide it for negative salary. Or you provide course to educate people on current issues, accomodation included. You advertise this on booking and airbnb...
It works for dog, every shit bag now has papers as helper dog, and can enter grocery store!
City will immidiately drop all charges....!!!
And don't get me wrong SROs were not happy places, people living in them should just try not being to poor to have real housing (sarcasm). I think homeless issues would not be solved but at least partially mitigated if SROs with regulations could exist. I think we need to look serious at whether people living and shitting on the streets is more or less dignified than SROs
Yes, unironically, they should. And most would be trying to do exactly that.
I don’t know why some people treat economic status as some immutable property outside of your control. People move up and down in economic status all the time. And most people move up as they get older and get more work experience and higher paying jobs.
Having a stable place to live with a physical address instead of a tent, and possibly being around other people who are trying to improve their lives instead of a bunch of drug addicts would absolutely help people “not be poor”.
Some of the homeless could live in a roommate situation. Others are "so far gone" that no reasonable person would want to live with them, and they would destroy a room if allowed in one without supervision.
Homelessness is a hard problem. Anyone claiming they have a solution is wrong. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't try - just because you can't solve the problem doesn't mean you can't make things better for a subset.
My uncle once had a tenant smear feces on the wall before leaving it was nasty but that person was homeless and I don't think think that had mental illness beyond having a break down. I think they lost there job and it was a hard time for them. Still the wall was nasty.
Ultimately SROs do not solve homelessness hence the mitigating it factor if it solves 30% of the homeless problem that would be amazing
Entropy. The fact that change happens doesn't prove that we control it.
Your wealth and health are randomized when you're born. What you do later has miniscule influence.
Most people living with roommates don't want that situation (here I distiguish roomates from someone you have a romantic tie with), but it is the best compromise. Roommates save money which is important when you don't have enough (hint almost nobody has enough money - even billionairs sometimes have to not buy something they want because their budget can't afford it)
SRO would solve a lot of problems. There are some people that is the only living situation they could afford. There are some people who want to spend their money on other things and so the savings from SRO enables that other thing they want. Many of those latter will "settle down and get married" in a few years thus changing their life situation, that is okay, life is not static.
Regulations are why they don't exist. Once you pile on everyone's additions to the bike shed it's an economic non starter.
The only difference is dogs shit outside, they still get private bathrooms!
I know of single room rentals available in pretty much every major metro in the world. Shared common bathroom and kitchen.
I also know of one in plenty of subletting of multi-bedroom apartments.
I have never heard of enforcement against this. It also doesn’t bring rents down as much as claimed.
Because eventually individual rooms start being rented by families. Next you have four families living in a single-family occupancy location and there is a huge fire hazard. I've seen this happen in NYC growing up, and its super dangerous. I also empathize with the other side -- as a poor person you may have no other option.
It’s not at all clear to me that four families in a single family-intended house is worse than the alternatives. (Building more housing is the long-term solution, of course…)
Therefore regulating housing is quite possible to only make things less safe, as people end up giving up money for healthy food / education / healthcare / dentistry etc to fund the trumped up "enviromental study" "planning and zoning" "code" and other requirements that might not best fit their budget.
You aren't in the neighborhoods where this has been in place. But it doesn't mean its not happening.
I'm not sure if this an actual law but housing listings often imply its forbidden in the neighborhood, they're looking for couples and families with kids.
In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter, and in most jurisdictions the complaints are public record far enough ahead of time anyone with the slightest bit of foresight would get ahead of it.
In my county sometimes I monitor the local complaints, mostly initially when I was looking at properties because I did not want to live next to a neighbor who likes to be a busybody to the code enforcement. There are a number of properties that just lock their gates whenever a code complaints happen or tell code inspection to kick rocks, by the time they come back with a warrant the situation is faked well enough they can't do anything.
Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease - 4 roommates listed, 4 beds, all of us responsible for the full amount of the rent. But, we were absolutely allowed to reside in the same home. Same thing in college - single lease for four people in a four bedroom apartment.
Edit - post college was Northern VA (DC Metro). College was UVA, Charlottesville, VA.
Edit 2 - partially answering my own question... For Fairfax Co, VA... Can a home or dwelling unit have multiple renters? Generally, no more than one family, plus two renters, may live together as a single household. Or, no more than four unrelated people may live in one house as a single household. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultipl...
All my past rentals were 4 people, so within the limit. And given the size of most homes (4 bedroom is typical), doesn't seem totally unreasonable (ADUs and "granny flats" count as separate homes, so not covered by the 4 person rule).
Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!
Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.
1/ If one roommate is disruptive (noise complaints, property damage, safety issues), landlords and other tenants have limited legal tools short of eviction of everyone. That blunt instrument makes it unattractive for landlords to allow multi-tenant arrangements.
2/ From a legal discriminatory standpoint, the law doesn't have much protections for people blocking certain raises or genders from renting.
3/ Many local codes were written with “traditional families” in mind. Some municipalities cap unrelated adults per household (e.g., “no more than 3 unrelated people”), which makes normal roommate setups technically non-compliant even if the lease is joint.
4/ Standard renters or homeowners policies often don’t contemplate multiple unrelated parties. Landlords worry about claims, while tenants may find themselves uncovered in disputes or accidents.
I tried to get umbrella insurance for myself, but because I rent out other rooms and I didn't want to also cover my 2-3 roommates, I am forced to go uncovered or find another provider.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem? When you're living in such close quarters with people, you should have some freedom in choosing who you're living with. The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The race angle is more thorny, but I'd rather lean in the direction of allowing people to choose who they co-habitate with.
I should have a very high degree of freedom over who is allowed to share that space with me and I shouldn't have to justify not allowing another person (stranger or not) to co-habitate.
But, yes, if you have a typical shared home, where 4 people get together and rent a home at once, yes, you do have that control (and should have it).
Because it makes it relatively more difficult for minorities to obtain housing, see sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348212
> The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
I think it's because the only two options being presented are a group of people signing one lease with one landlord. Or a group of people individually signing leases with the landlord.
So basically, the problem is for people that can't find a group on their own. Or for a landlord who wants to act like every room is an apartment, when they're clearly not.
The purpose of the system is what it does. They don't want to make doing "bad" things easy so they let your only option be through the same absurd catch-all process.
"The Color of Law" is a good starter read here.
A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
* https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/mult...
There is a separate contract with each tenant (i.e., multiple contracts), and each tenant is only responsible for paying for their private area.
This differs from a roommate situation in that there is generally one contract with the entire group.
Similarly with subletting: there is one contract with the landlord and the 'main' tenant, and then that tenant then turns around creates separate contract between them and another tenant.
In any case, there is _some_ limit to the number of occupants allowed to coreside in a given residence. States tend to codify minimum square footage requirements on a per-person basis to determine occupancy limits for a particular building.
Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.
The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.
Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.
I did this in grad school BUT they were 100% separate leases (in NY state, not the city though). Not sure if the whole thing was just illegal or what TBH but that was the standard for apartments around the university.
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
When I was in high school a couple decades ago visiting liberal arts colleges across the Midwest, it was a common refrain that only fraternities had houses while sororities did not because they would be illegal (at least, historically).
With the rise of airbnb and the problems with those kinds of situations, I get why people don't want that.
I lived in a place where we had a lot of amateur hour landlords and they were terrible at it. Trash, noise, parking and even crime problems. We banned short term rentals and rentals in general (some exceptions allowed) because of problems with those situations.
I ended up renting an office at a coworking space (which was much more expensive) before I found somebody interested, but I wonder, is this kind of arrangement common?
Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
Right, you're just dragging in migration to the discussion, which is entirely a side issue, purely out of the goodness of your heart.
From your link:
> The UK has experienced broadly similar levels of migration compared to other high-income countries, on average, over the past few decades
That doesn't make it sound like the UK is an outlier, contrary to the implication of your statement.
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
This passage, in particular, is eye-opening:
> ... had SROs [single-room occupancies] grown since 1960 at about the same rate as the rest of the U.S. housing stock, the nation would have roughly 2.5 million more such units— enough to house every American experiencing homelessness in a recent federal count more than three times over.
bell-cot•1h ago
And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?
profsummergig•1h ago
One moment you allow multiple unrelated people to share a house.
Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard.
My peeve is about banning of growing food in your front yard in many states. So much available land going waste growing grass (that is not even fed to cows).
pavel_lishin•1h ago
Next moment, you've got a rat infestation living 5 to a burrow and 8 of them are moving into your house.
My pet peeve is yet some other thing that might have downsides.
plasticchris•1h ago
bluGill•51m ago
9rx•1h ago
Being from a community where the pro-nationalist movement has really taken hold, that sounds like a single, related family. Why do you give them special treatment?
wat10000•1h ago
JoshTriplett•1h ago
So? Not your yard, not your business.
deadbabe•1h ago
erfgerfgwertg•50m ago
bell-cot•56m ago
potato3732842•53m ago
>Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard.
Is it on their property? If so not my problem.
Having principals and sticking to them makes reasoning about the subjects so easy.
boringg•1h ago
Come on - zoning rules aren't some tool of repression. Sometimes they can be, but that isn't their raison d'etre.
vidarh•54m ago
boringg•33m ago
vidarh•4m ago
echelon•1h ago
Want to only allow single-family residences?
Fine, but pay the city taxes on that privilege. Then use those funds to offset the negative externality.
9rx•54m ago
Good luck.
echelon•34m ago
Major urban centers have enough renters to form a voting bloc, and this is where such a policy could be useful to increase housing supply.
9rx•21m ago
Maybe, but voting would only matter if there was a referendum, which is highly unlikely for something that isn't challenging fundamental rights. Taxes are easily repealed if the people realize they made a mistake. It not need that kind of level of agreement.
What does matter is having time to participate in democracy. It very well may be that in theory the renting crowd have a loud enough voice to be heard, but in practice do they really have the time/the feeling of having enough time to actually do it? Statistically, renters are lower income and tend to struggle to make ends meet. While making themselves heard would be beneficial, often they face other pressures, like needing to go to work, instead that diminish their ability to carry through with it.