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The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market

204 points by barry-cotter

by andrewla

8 subcomments

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.

by Aurornis

14 subcomments

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.

by astroflection

2 subcomments

> 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.”

by hrimfaxi

2 subcomments

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.

by helle253

1 subcomments

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.

by acyou

3 subcomments

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.

by jeffbee

3 subcomments

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.

by simonsarris

0 subcomment

Part of the problem is that SROs work if any only if you are able to evict an unruly tenant at a moment's notice. If you have 5 people paying by the week, sharing 1 kitchen and 1 bathroom[1], and one of them becomes a menace, you need to evict them immediately. Many states have tried to or do outlaw that. The more regulations you have of any kind, the harder it is to do anything even slightly unconventional. You accidentally rule out stuff you weren't even thinking about.
[1] this was a real setup in a grandfathered SRO apartment in Hudson, New Hampshire in the early 2000's that I knew about

by jmclnx

3 subcomments

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.

by jhancock

0 subcomment

China has in recent years built apartment blocks for the unhoused. From pics I've seen, the units are one room studio like apartments. I'm told they rent for around $15 per month. It seems to work for a large set of the unhoused. China's leadership has a mantra of "no welfarism". This is an example of how they achieve it...by enabling even the poorest to have a way to support themselves.
Good article. Thanks for sharing.

by Tiktaalik

3 subcomments

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.

by taeric

1 subcomments

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.

by renewiltord

0 subcomment

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.

by cs702

0 subcomment

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?
---
[a] According to the company's own PR: https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...

by cpfohl

1 subcomments

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

by esbranson

0 subcomment

Just like with mental health care (a noted contributing cause), the undeniable truth is that state and local governments are to blame for deteriorating quality of life, not the federal government. The states are piggybacking off Medicaid and SSI to house the insane in the community (pseudo-institutions pretending not to be) as a fraudulent and deadly workaround to the IMD exclusion, often backed by the imperial judiciary. SSI pays the rent, Medicaid pays the "community services", and Olmstead gives political cover. Everyone loses, not just those with SMI, but the addicted, the non-addicted poor, and everyone else using or depending on community and shared services.
Government-funded propaganda like NPR and PBS and their local affiliates have been instrumental in the obfuscation and half truths, so good riddance to them. Replacing them with blogs like this will be slow but ultimately better for everyone.

by BenFranklin100

0 subcomment

I left work late tonight and again saw in the parking lot a car with sheets inside the windows and the engine running. Someone who can’t afford Boston metro housing prices is sleeping in their car.
If I recall correctly, the strongest correlation with homelessness is housing prices. SROs used to be a way to keep people at the bottom of the market housed. Now it’s a Toyota Camry.
Progressive New Englanders hold their NIMBYism close to the heart and would rather someone sleep in a car (or worse) than allow sufficient amount of housing to keep prices down.

by Tiktaalik

1 subcomments

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.
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!)

by roguecoder

0 subcomment

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.

by dzonga

0 subcomment

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

by pessimizer

0 subcomment

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.

by eucyclos

0 subcomment

I read something about unaffordable housing being a function of English Common Law systems - couldn't find the original piece so I asked chatgpt to compile some data:
Legal System Average Price-to-Income Ratio
Common Law 8.9×
Civil Law 6.1×
Mixed / Hybrid 6.5×
Islamic Law 5.1×
I'm not sure of the accuracy but it sure seems like common law systems have quite the surcharge, do any scholars of comparative law have theories as to why?

by stego-tech

0 subcomment

Adding some personal context here:
I share an apartment with two other people. I've been in the housing market for years, but have had to repeatedly walk away from affordable units specifically because of the long tail of these sorts of regulations against tenements, flophouses, SROs, etc. Condos and neighborhoods with HOAs almost always have boilerplate covenants that arbitrarily restrict households based on blood relations and family lineage, such as barring permanent residents who aren't married or blood-related to the owner within a single generational branch (so Great Grandma can't live with her Great Grandson, for instance); if they don't, then cities often have ordinances barring cohabitation of more than two unrelated individuals outside of rented apartments.
The net result is that for the three of us to find a home, we have to look solely at the most expensive stock out there: single-family homes on lots outside of subdivisions, in a major metropolitan area.
These laws suck in the context of the current housing crisis, and we need to repeal such arbitrary bullshit. At the very least, prohibiting cohabitation based on blood relation can be incredibly queerphobic in effect, if not intent, and that's reason alone to repeal or reform it.

by almosthere

0 subcomment

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.

by kevin_thibedeau

0 subcomment

> Today, a young man down on his luck in a new city is more likely to land in jail or on the street than on his feet.
This might be true of certain demographic groups but it isn't a valid statement without more specificity.

by encoderer

1 subcomments

SROs do not seem compatible with modern tenants rights.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.

by watchakorn-18k

0 subcomment

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by breakingrules3

0 subcomment

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by catlover76

0 subcomment

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by bendbro

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by johnea

0 subcomment

As usual, HN comments go immediately off the rails into the right-wing nut weeds 8-/
Loss of the SRO model in residential real estate was a major setback to low income residents, and is undoubtedly a significant contributor to modern homelessness.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
Instead of facing this, the comments are full of the typical "gubment regulation" bullshit.
This is related to the other typical bullshit regarding homelessness, namely that the problem, again, is the gubment getting in the way of free enterprise and preventing it from saving the world, in the form of building more housing.
Here in San Diego, almost 9000 new units were permitted in 2024. Thousands of rental units came online in the last year. However, the average rental price of one of these new apartments is about $4000/month, for 1 bedroom.
What ended the prevalence of SROs was real estate being redeveloped for more profitable buildings, including high end housing and office space. To the extent that regulations affected closing SROs, it was for the purpose of facilitating this upscaling.
Even if the accusations leveled against SROs are all true, would you prefer psycho drug-addled homeless peoplle live in flop houses, or on the freeway overpasses?
If it's offensive to you to have to step over some crack heads encampment to walk to the opera, maybe it's worth spending some of the ballooning wealth of the nation to put them into cheap housing...

by MagicMoonlight

1 subcomments

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.

by cyberax

1 subcomments

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