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.

I want them to come back, but isn't at least some of the problem with SRO's tenant's rights laws?

It's hard (or at least, unattractive) to run a flophouse if you cannot easily + risklessly kick highly disruptive individuals out.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure the Y in my city (Beverly, MA) actually still has SROs. It certainly needs more options like this...

Yeah. Urbanism death spiral.

Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.

SROs do not seem compatible with modern tenants rights.

It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.

> 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.”