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.
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.
It's hard (or at least, unattractive) to run a flophouse if you cannot easily + risklessly kick highly disruptive individuals out.
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.
[1] this was a real setup in a grandfathered SRO apartment in Hudson, New Hampshire in the early 2000's that I knew about
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.
Good article. Thanks for sharing.
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.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
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?
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[a] According to the company's own PR: https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...
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.
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.
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.
- 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 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.
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?
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.
This might be true of certain demographic groups but it isn't a valid statement without more specificity.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
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...
“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.
Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.