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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
That could be addressed by creating SRO housing near the locations where the low-wage jobs are now.
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.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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!)
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.
jmclnx•1h ago
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.
BoiledCabbage•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
manithree•1h ago
iso1631•48m ago