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.
Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).
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 (they do). 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.
I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.
IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.
>O an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality
Don't forget snow plowing and sidewalk maintenance and the cluster of mailboxes down by the gate where the driveway meets the main road and the pool and and and and and and....
It's like the touchscreen in a goddamn car. Once you have it you get lazy and use it for everything because it lets you cheaply add "premium" features.
I agree that a lot of these HOAs should be dissolved, but like everything else involving real-estate it's less painful in the moment to keep on bending over and taking the status quo and hoping you can pass the buck to the next sucker.
If you really want your blood to boil, a some of the larger stormwater features (for example those drainage ponds commonly found in certain regions beside the highway or on the outskirts of strip malls and other large commercial development) wind up getting regulated as wetlands, they are constantly wet after all, and the legally implied setback and permitting requirements can push over the property line depending on the details. And that's assuming they build them right, that water being returned to the ground affects the height of the water table, with potentially huge negative affects on nearby properties.
For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.
But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.
right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)
Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.
That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.
there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.
Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.
Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.
The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.
It should be, except that a lot of people demand taxes too low for that municipality to function if it actually did everything, so legally required HOAs get used as a shitty stopgap because the work still has to be done.
That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.
I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
I looked at the rules for dissolving an HOA in lived in. There were a couple of procedural barriers, but the biggest one was that it required 75% of homeowners to sign a petition within a 3 month period. That’s a pretty high bar and lets a minority perpetuate the HOA.
My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
But are the rules actually the same as those imposed 20 years ago for regulatory reasons, or are they now stricter without good reason? Are there really good regulatory reasons for restricting exterior paint color and other things that HOAs do?
American HOAs simply have too much power. In Canada HOAs exist, but their ability to levy fines or put liens on property is much more limited[1] and usually requires actual damage. This effectively eliminates a lot of the ridiculous rules about the size of someone's shed or the species or grass because there's no real way to enforce them.
Yes, typically the local government require a HOA-like structure for all new housing developments.
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
That doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. An HOA that only existed to maintain the stormwater plan and just collected small dues to maintain it would be almost completely unrecognizable compared to how actual HOAs function. Come to think of it, even my standard explanation of HOAs being prevalent because local government use them as a backdoor way to increase property taxes is inadequate, since an HOA that just maintains the roads and parks would also be pretty unrecognizable.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
I think the thousand cuts analogy applies in general to the housing crisis, specifically affordability.
You announce or plan some "affordable" housing in an area, or actually these days ANY housing that would increase housing units and decrease demand for existing homeowner homes, and it's like a telepathic demon takes over every homeowner regardless of Trump or Biden signs on the lawn.
The knives come out, and it gets killed.
People would rather have homeless outside their houses than any sort of project that will dilute their unsustainable growth in housing values.
Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:
Anti-discrimination laws
• 1968 Fair Housing Act made SROs “dwellings” subject to full federal anti-bias rules
• 1974 McQueen v. City of Detroit: an SRO that refused welfare recipients was liable
• 1982 Sullivan v. SRO Management: an owner who turned away unmarried couples violated marital status discrimination
• 1988 FHA amendments added “familial status” making “no children after 8 pm" illegal
Also building code and tax incentives
• 1974 UFC required sprinkler retrofits
• 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
• 1986 low-income housing credit gave 130% write-ups for new construction but only 90% for rehab of existing SROs
I mean SROs that aren't subject to full federal anti-bias rules, are allowed to refuse welfare recipients, that turn away unmarried couples, or reject children after 8 pm probably wouldn't really fix the problems that people want SROs to fix.
I'm not sure if
> 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
means that SROs are required to have private bathrooms, which would absolutely damage the model and doesn't strike me as strictly necessary.
> 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
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
Here in Chicago there are still some SROs. Chicago has middling tenants rights: not as strong as New York or SF but stronger than most of the country. If tenants rights ended SROs you'd expect them to not exist in a place like Chicago.
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.
Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
> That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.
There are still a decent number of sros in uptown. We’ll see how long that lasts with the new towers and zoning probably making them prime redevelopment targets.
> 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.
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.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
It may be that there's no one answer because every city is different.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
> As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs.
For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
I'm skeptical that there are landlords who want to run SROs, having interacted with landlords, they see SROs as being more work (maintaining lots of public space like shared kitchens) for undesirable tenants. Further, in the unlikely event that a landlord would want to run an SRO, they will have to deal with nimby opposition. I just find it difficult to believe that laws designed to keep existing SROs open would be the threshold for preventing new ones. Additionally, we don't have to speculate because there were no new SROs being created before the law passed.
> For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.
Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.
>For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Another way of seeing this is "Sure, I'll give it a shot, but if it turns out to be a bad business I want the option to bail, rather than getting trapped slowly going bankrupt with a 90% empty building because I'm not allowed to evict 4 tenants and do something else with it."
It's possible to concoct a theoretical landlord who has that thought, although in your example it would cost $8000 to evict those people under the law ($2000 per).
The bigger problem is that no SROs were created in recent history before the law was passed. To say that there's some demand by landlords to create SROs but for the law you would have to show SROs getting created before the law, and that stopping after the law. The law was written to preserve the existing SROs with the understanding that the era in which SROs were an attractive investment was already past.
Secondly the OP claims without evidence that the law didn't slow the rate that SROs are being redeveloped. But gentrification in Chicago has accelerated so even if that's true the law is doing its job if the rate of SRO destruction didn't likewise accelerate.
SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.
But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?
I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.
I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.
That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."
So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.
One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.
The high-end SRO market arguably still exists. There are plenty of young Americans rooming with strangers they found on the internet, not infrequently converting the living room into an additional bedroom, and nobody in power really seems to complain unless they throw too many parties, even if the zoning laws prohibit it. I also think it's unlikely they'd rent to a down-on-his-luck, 45-year-old (even if they could afford it).
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.
> 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.
You could also just as easily argue it was naive reliance on the market that led to this failure. It doesn't take much thought to come to the conclusion that this approach will never fully alleviate basic housing concerns.
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.
In the 1920's SRO occupants were much more likely to be immigrants, with different cultural values and living expectations. So norms may have declined over time, but norms are much more uniform today than they were 100 years ago.
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.
> 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.
In my jurisdiction I once had a roommate who stole from me. I was the homeowner, and he was renting from me. I was able to kick him out without notice. If he had his own separate bathroom & kitchen I wouldn't have been able to due to those tenant protection laws you mention. But because we were in a shared space those laws didn't apply.
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.
It sounds like I had the option. I had called the cops and talked to them, and she told me that the only option she had at that point was to arrest him and we didn't really have grounds for that at the time. But when she learned we had a shared kitchen she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
> she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
Right, so you didn't have to follow the eviction process. This is a key distinction. If you tell someone they're no longer welcome and they have to move out immediately, you're not technically following the eviction process. If the person had refused to leave, you'd have to follow the eviction process which can require some evidentiary collection, such as being able to prove that the person was notified that they were being evicted on a certain date.
In extreme cases (not like your ex-roommate) squatters will go so far to game the system that they only come and go in the middle of the night to avoid being officially served the eviction notice.
I was told that becase of the shared living situation, it became a safety issue. That my right to safety trumped the roommate's right to live in my house. Of course, the cop may well not had a complete understanding of the law either.
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.
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.
> Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time
Sadly, this is how most squatting situations start. Having an empty housing unit is very risky.
When my friend had squatters break into his house while it was being renovated, the police said their hands were tied. They had become squatters first, and the breaking and entering couldn't be definitively proven. They got to stay in the house for months while he paid lawyers to do the eviction proceedings.
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
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.
>>in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble
The words "can" and "minimal" are doing a lot of work there. An angry tenant who knows they are getting evicted can do an incredible amount of damage in a few weeks, even without deliberate vandalism.
And landlords can be insanely abusive.
Perhaps a system wherein not only the tenant must pay a deposit, but the landlord must also put three month's rent in escrow. They can evict a tenant nearly immediately for certain issues (violence, drugs, etc.) but the tenant can sue in small claims court (for low time and overhead) and recover the extra three months escrow funds if landlord found to be abusing it. (Obviously just he rough outline of an idea, but maybe it'd work?)
> And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
> Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's.
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.
By that criteria, Baumol's doesn't even apply to symphony orchestras. Technology has made symphony orchestras marginally more productive. Instruments are better and more consistent, recording technology improves practices, et cetera.
Baumol's applies to anything where technology has improved the field significantly less than average. That includes both symphony orchestras and janitorial services.
If the function of a symphony orchestra is to perform symphonies, there has been essentially zero change in their productivity for several hundred years. Contemporary instruments are no better than they were in the mid-1800s. Their rehearsals are rarely recorded, and even if they were, it is much less common for this to contribute to future rehearsals.
Wikipedia says that Baumol's is:
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
while it's not the canonical source for the definition, it is notably more specific than your version.
What is your proposed alternative? If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
> If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
> If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business.
Not any business, it's a landlord-tenant relationship.
You can't simply kick out a tenant. You have to do a formal eviction process. In many cities this requires collecting evidence of contractual breach, proving that the tenant was notified they were being evicted (such as through a paid service to officially serve and record delivery of the notice), and then following the appropriate waiting period and other laws. It could be months and tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees before you can kick someone out of a house.
Contrast that with the $213 inflation-adjusted monthly rent that the article touts. How many months of rent would they have to collect just to cover the legal fees of a single eviction?
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
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.
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).
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…
Add an 'instant pot' or similar (or replace the microwave with one if you're really short on space) and you actually have a huge variety of available meals with a regular outlet + countertop. Home kitchens are designed around old fashioned stoves that required a lot of space to produce heat, and they've stayed around because everyone likes to have lots of counter space. These days the actual cooking process can be done quite well even in a very small area.
>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?
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.
The kitchen is a cost, the availability of food outside lessens the need to pay that cost.
In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.
There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.
Eating out in the US being crazy expensive is somewhat of a self-causing problem.
When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.
And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.
Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.
Go back in time 2000+ years to Rome and most apartments didn't have kitchens. Eating out was far cheaper than eating in. The primary cost was fuel, and restaurants use far less fuel per diner than a home kitchen.
Right, NYC ironically had the cheapest eating out options even though it's one of the most expensive metros. But now the dollar slice is dead, and bringing back a single SRO building isnt bringing it back. The transition period is too rough for anyone to invest enough to make it happen, so now we're stuck with everyone having a kitchen and eating out being expensive.
It's because commercial real estate is eating businesses alive, but the government can't do anything about it because a good chunk of the economy depends on propped up commercial real estate valuations
Not necessarily. I have a stew place by me that is $12 for a plate of veggies + meat that is easily two meals for me. There are plenty of food trucks around with good options in the $5-10 range. And that's before we're looking at stuff from a bodega.
And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.
$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?
Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?
Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.
And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
WeLive/WeWork used to do this before the CEO fiasco. They operated a shared living space for working professionals. It wasn’t $231/mo but it was a great way for younger professionals to get their foot in the door living and working in the city.
The SROs discussed in the article were prominent long after that.
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.
> 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.
Who in the world are you talking to?
For $230 a month the college students I know would sleep on a shared dirt floor of a cabin.
I don’t think any of the problems you quote are related to shared living arrangements.
People have become selfish bastards and drug use is rampant. Of course those people are going to congregate in the only places they can pay for. Having them living on the street instead is definitely not the solution.
A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).
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.
> they would need to be able to vote to kick people out.
Not possible. Tenant laws are highly protective of the tenants. There is zero chance you could allow people to vote to kick another person out and not get immediately crushed by discrimination lawsuits.
Evictions also take a lot of time and legal fees. If you rent a room to someone and they break the contract you can't just kick them out. You have to follow the eviction process. Even if someone stops paying rent and tells you they're done paying, it could take months before you can actually evict them.
Interestingly, churches are one of the ways you still could, given that when zoning conflicts with practice of a religion zoning often has to give way. Get some folks with development experience and start a Hospitaller order.
Wouldn't want to endanger the homeless by letting them sleep under a church roof without the the state's approval, much safer to keep them sleeping on the side of the highway and arrest the pastor /s.
In my opinion, your entire comment is suffering from the "out of sight, out of mind" bias that drives so much policy around housing and mental illness, mostly for the worse. The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
> The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
As always, I'm firmly of the mind that none of this has to do with balance sheets or what things cost. There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits, thanks to decades of propaganda saying as such. The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line. The fact that housing assistance and other such things would clean up the streets of the same people while giving them the help they need, and at a lower cost than rolling the cops on them to beat them with batons and shove them into coach busses to other cities doesn't matter, because the violence is what they want.
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.
> There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits,
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.
The Y and religious shelters have a zero-tolerance policy. You get kicked out immediately for drugs or alcohol. So no, they're generally not intermingled.
> The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
> If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people,
It's impressive you managed to be this wrong right out of the gate. Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income. So if we set UBI to be $35k a year, and you make $30k a year, you get $5k a year in UBI payments. The vast majority of employed adults wouldn't get anything, because they don't need it, so saying we're paying out $3 trillion in benefits is flatly ridiculous.
> and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever
And there shouldn't be. It's a Universal Basic Income. You can spend it on food, housing, a car, a model train set, hard Nicaraguan cocaine, prostitutes, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Poor people do not need to be shepherded: study[0] after study[1] after study[2] has proven that when you give people who are broke money that actually has the ability to change their circumstances, shock of shocks, they use it to change their circumstances. If somebody wants to take their UBI and then live on the street, weird choice, but that's also completely their choice and it is not your or anyone else's place to judge them for it.
And under the current system: You ARE paying for their ER visits. You're paying for their ER visits, you're paying to house them in prisons, you're paying for men with guns to beat the shit out of them and then drive them around, you're paying a justice system to move them about place to place and have hearings with judges, stenographers and guards, public defenders, and then when they do get out of jail, you're paying for the bus stop they're living in to boot.
The only thing UBI changes is it gives THEM the money instead of police departments, courts, healthcare companies so they can actually DO SOMETHING about their problems, rather than being shuffled from one awful system to another on an eternal loop because being homeless is just illegal in practice in America.
And better still, UBI strips a LOT of the administrative overhead involved, because it's very easy to calculate what everyone gets, it's literally back-of-napkin tier math. No means testing, no investigations. Just money to people who don't have enough so they have enough. I'm sure it won't solve EVERY social ill, of course. But it'll do a damn sight better job than the current system.
> Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income.
This is not how UBI is typically discussed, and it wasn’t how the regional pilot projects I am familiar with worked. Rather, every single citizen of a community gets the same amount regardless of how much money they earn from other sources.
That is part of the “universal” and it is precisely how UBI improves employees’ position against employers: an employee can safely quit at any moment because he already has the UBI as backup with no further actions required. What you are describing is more the “negative income tax” form of universal income that has been criticized for not empowering the working class this way.
> 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.”
Over a decade ago I grew weed in the East Bay, and regularly sold weight to many of the warehouse artist collectives. Often they'd be stealing utilities (either directly from the utility, or more commonly from neighbors), but they were well-tolerated parts of their surrounding communities. The HPS lamps they often bypassed (for electricity) resulted in lower power usage, net.
I cannot imagine these still existing, at least not in the capacities they were after the last great recession brought rentals down. I used to grow/rent an entire five bedroom house for $1400 month (split with 2.5 others), although it was a mom&pop landlord [good rate even then] just outside of Castro Valley. About $2k/month commercial rent would set up an entire commune of about a dozen "artists," ~2010~, in LA outskirts... but these couldn't support grow operations (too much attention to hide).
Several of these "rat holes" burned down and often lead to stricter enforcement actions against similar hovels.
In retrospect, these fatalities were preventable. Safety codes are written in blood.
Ghost Ship burnt a few years after I'd left California; what surprised me most was that it still existed into 2016!
I never saw their specific electrical infrastructure, but it's absolutely surprising that more structure fires aren't sparking up daily (everywhere). My recommendation (as a former IBEW electrician) to DIY sparkies is if you can't afford a thermal camera to verify your own inexperienced handywork then you can't afford to be doing your own electrical work [yes especially YOU Mister E.E.].
I think this discounts the fact that many of the most visible homeless are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, and would struggle to regularly pay a rent bill even if it were $100 a month. There is a fundamental lack of social services but also a fundamental lack of an ability to compel these people to make use of social services should they be available.
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.
Immigrants still do this. Except now they fill apartments and houses with bunkbeds. I know because my dad did this in the early 2000's and is still in contact with the local immigrant community.
I think many Americans have the impression that this violates the terms of their lease, and without other-country kinship connections and networks, they’re not aware of how to find people who would lease under high occupancy conditions. It may even be illegal. So we may need to explicitly make these legal again so Americans will rent in this way.
There is a ridiculous perception that privately run high occupancy housing is abusive. I don't understand that at all. They are running a business that is compassionate enough to offer, at the bare minimum, shelter from the elements. If there is competition in that market, as there used to be, then the bad actors go out of business.
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
>If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
Disagree, you can have impact on your neighbors. We had SFH doing that near me, they had 9 people in 4 BDRM SFH. That was 9 cars so all street parking was occupied. Trash Company sent notice to our HOA wanting price increase since they were generating a ton of trash (some of it commercial I believe) It was much noisier than average home since they would do more outside bringing noise like listening to music inside, outside with noise problems that develop.
County finally shut it down and most of neighbors were thrilled.
There is a reason for zoning laws and it's not 100% NIMBY but yes, your actions can have impact on your neighbors.
What different worlds we live in. If I had a problem with my neighbors making too much noise during "quite hours" I would go talk to them. But, my neighbors are only blasting music for occasional personal parties, 4th of July and New Years. Everybody likes to celebrate, I'm not going to begrudge them for having some fun.
On the trash I'm a bit confused. The HOA should have paid more if the neighborhood was generating more trash than the trash company had negotiated to take away. If everybody didn't like this house why didn't the HOA make rules to restrict it. Isn't that the point of an HOA?
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.
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.
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.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
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.
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
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.
All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.
There are countries in the world where homeless are pretty good hidden, by means of extreme expensive welfare, or are moved away from big cities, or at least touristic centers.
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.
Yes I think Japan does this as well. For example in Shibuya Miyashita Park, a recent traveller would find a nice mall here, but not too long ago it was a genuine park, one full of homeless.
The government pushed away people with nowhere to live to who knows where and built a luxury mall. All the tourists visiting assume Japan has no homeless.
A shrinking population like Japan's also changes the supply/demand curve in favor of people looking for housing options. That's probably a major factor.
Japan's also got plenty of dubiously legal operations for that kind of thing, like "24-hour cafes" with private booths obviously set up as illegal capsule hotels.
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.
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.
If you set it up as a charity or something, then maybe you could. Otherwise, there's still likely $100+ in property tax per occupant per month even on a dorm sized space. That's before utilities, upkeep, paying off construction, admin costs, etc. Just look at what they charge for dorm rooms, and many of those aren't even in expensive areas.
I'm curious where you get that it is property tax driving costs? I know it isn't free, by any means. But compare dorms in a place like Atlanta to rent. Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month? That is rather substantial. Being colocated at the school helps save transportation costs, as well.
"Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month"
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.
I'm... not even really clear what you are aiming for, to be honest.
So, first to directly answer. The naive search showed dorms costing about 1000 a month, with standard rent being 1600. Which is a dramatic savings to be had.
Now, do I think dormitories are the low cost option in the cities today? No. In large part because they are for students only. By definition you are not aiming to solve homelessness with that.
But if you see them as the main surviving case of the type of housing this article is discussing, it does look clear that that can help drive to lower cost housing. With the obvious fact that some places will remain more expensive than others.
And as long as we are discussing lowest cost options for someone, I think assuming a direct path to ownership is probably not appropriate. These options are far more substitutes for standard rent. Which, I don't think anyone is saying that property tax is the reason giant rental complexes have higher rent? Any more so than property tax causing the high cost of school dorms.
I think you're vastly over estimating property taxes. Texas is less than 2% on average assessed on home value. I'd be curious about your example of what "most mortgages" payment breakdown looks like, like year 5 in texas on a 300k house putting 5% down and a 5% interest rate. Look at principle, interest, property taxes, and avg insurance payment.
"I think you're vastly over estimating property taxes."
You're implying that this needs to be the biggest monthly cost, which I don't agree with. Eventually you will pay off your mortgage, leaving you with just property tax and (technically optional at that point) insurance. The duration of payment matters. I will end up paying more in property taxes in my life than I will in interest - 20 years below 4% vs 50+ years of paying 2+%.
2% on even a $200k house is $333/month. That's a lot for low income people. The principal and interest on $180k is about $960/mo on a 5% 30yr. So he property tax is 25% of the payment.
So instead of me overestimating property tax, I feel that you are underestimating how much that money is worth to low income people.
30 year loan at 4% (not feasible today) means 115k in interest paid after putting 20% down. It would take way longer than 50 years to pay more in property taxes than interest.
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?
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.
> “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!)
Thanks for bringing Vancouver into the discussion.
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
When I lived in Ireland it was full of people moaning about “family homes” but then they build nothing but 3bed 2 bath semi d’s only to watch them get filled by young roommates. Who would have preferred their own flat.
As I understand it, Helsinki made this mistake. They wanted to attract families to the city, so they mandated a minimum portion of larger apartments in new construction. Unfortunately these apartments ended up being too expensive for their intended market, real-world families.
Unfortunately amongst the few that genuinely are calling for family homes because they need one, there are plenty more disingenuously using "family homes" as a tool to keep "undesirables" of renters, single people, young people, new immigrants, homosexuals etc out of their established low density, wealthy communities.
Family homes and family apartments are not the same thing. You are referring to zoning restrictions only allowing detached single family homes to be built, which are more expensive per occupant, and hence keep poorer people away.
There are multiple reasons for why dense areas only have 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, while less dense areas only have detached single family homes. One is, as you say, to keep the poorer people away. But another big one is also the change in household size due to people's preferences. And yet another is people's preference for detached single family homes once they do have kids (by and large).
So, to repeat myself, no. There is an overabundance of 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers and we continue to build too many of these. There is a shortage of 0-1 bedroom apartment in dense urban centers.
I should've been clearer, I meant development of new abodes is bifurcated, it's either a low density region with homes with multiple bedrooms, or a high density region with homes with 1 or 2 bedrooms.
The 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers were probably built a while ago, but I have never seen new homes built in dense urban centers (I'm referring to NYC/SF/SEA/etc). The low density suburb regions that border the dense urban center usually try to keep their low density status.
You won't see an apartment building with units that have 3 and 4 bedrooms going up in Manhattan, and you won't see apartment buildings with 1-2 bedrooms going up in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
That's not really the case, though. We don't have detailed statistics for bedroom count in New York because a city of just 8 million people with the largest urban economy on the continent can't be expected to track building permits. However in my city, Berkeley, California, the densest city in California outside San Francisco, we get mostly larger apartments. For example I point to the nearly-completed 2587 Telegraph Avenue with 485 bedrooms across 4, 5, and 6-bedroom apartments but only 5 studios. This is a direct outcome of the zoning code that denominates "density" in terms of units, therefore incentivizing the construction of gigantic units with too many bedrooms and forcing people into roomate situations that they don't actually want.
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.
These are in the UK as HMOs and widely used, and are known for a lot of abuse by landlords. They have stemmed part of the population problem but they still rise to massive costs. Even 20 years ago I knew the bottom of the bracket were not just sharing those one rooms, but even time-sharing beds - you'd have 4 people sharing a room with 3 beds in.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
Beats living on the streets if that’s the only thing you can afford.
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.
Well, yes. See above about the urbanism death spiral. Large cities suck the life away from smaller cities.
This is the direct consequence of allowing dense housing, and it's made _worse_ by allowing abominations like SROs or "microapartments". And then bunk beds (already happening in Singapore).
The correct action here is to STOP doing this. Prohibit building dense housing and, more importantly, dense office space. Provide tax incentives for remote work and for offices outside of city cores. Ideally, start un-densifying cities by creating more park spaces in place of dense housing.
How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs? The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.
Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc. Already, this type of work is not very viable in suburban or rural areas because they're too inefficient. Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
If everyone is spread out everywhere, how do you provide them with the stuff they need in an economically viable way? That's the entire reason urbanism exists!
> How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs?
That's the reality. The _only_ way to make housing less expensive is to reduce the dense population. Examples abound: Austin, Denver, etc.
> The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.
Nope. The denser the housing, the MORE EXPENSIVE it gets. Even on a per-unit basis. That's why we have this drive to allow SROs. It'll push prices of all housing even higher.
> Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
_Most_ of the modern post-industrial work is divided into two areas:
1. Office work. Can just as well be WFH.
2. In-person services (restaurants, childcare, hospitals, etc.). They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
There are some areas that will require specialized communities around them, like universities or large hospital centers. But they for sure don't need 4 million people monstrosities like NYC.
> Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
It's vice versa. Most of the economic value in the US is created by people living in suburbia. This is easy to see if you look at personal income tax stats.
Cities receive the majority of _corporate_ taxes because corporation HQs are located in cities (duh).
> That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc.
Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.
If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
In a suburban area, you just ask nearby houses to temporarily live in a hotel for a week, do the dig, and you're done. Even if you need more raw material, you end up spending less.
This is not a theory, btw. There's a study that shows that the city efficiency peaks at around 300k people.
> Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.
> They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
> This is not a theory, btw
You're right, it's not a theory, it's literally just wrong. Like, obviously so.
The idea that people in the suburbs commute less is patently insane. It's just so obviously not true that I legitimately cannot believe someone could think this. Have you lived anywhere, ever, for any period of time?
The more rural the area you are in, the longer your commute will be, because where you live has no economic activity. So you have to drive somewhere that does.
Consider sanitation: why don't we have this in the suburbs? Because turning 1 sanitation facility into 100 distributed sanitation facilities across 100x more land, all while servicing the SAME AMOUNT OF PEOPLE, is insane. So we don't do that. So then you drive.
It is indisputable that density brings efficiency. From computer chips, to transit, to cities.
> If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
Okay, this is a perfect demonstration.
If you change 1 mile of sewer in Manhattan, you've serviced 100,000 people. If you change 1 mile of sewer in the suburbs, you've serviced 100 people. Are you seeing the problem?
Yes, there is obviously more friction to getting stuff done, but the amount of stuff you need to get done to impact the same people is orders of magnitude less. The cost ends up being much, much, much lower. This only works if you're comparing like and like though.
A lot of people will compare dense areas to the suburbs and they won't compare the same amount of people. Yeah, that's cheating. NYC has about as many people as north Texas. When you put it that way, then it seems clear that the efficiency of NYC is orders of magnitude higher than your average suburban hellscape.
That's because many smaller cities and suburban or rural areas are economically defunct, so property is cheap because it's essentially worthless (you can't make money off of it).
Property is expensive in, say, NYC because you can use that property to do A LOT of economic activity. Property is cheap in Ponder, Texas because you can use that property to do fuck all, so you better take what you can get.
You can choose to live in Ponder, Texas, but the economics of that aren't too hot.
> Property is expensive in, say, NYC because you can use that property to do A LOT of economic activity. Property is cheap in Ponder, Texas because you can use that property to do fuck all, so you better take what you can get.
Well, exactly. And allowing SROs and then bunkbeds will only make this _worse_. Your housing costs in NYC will keep _rising_, while the living conditions for _everyone_ will keep going down.
The COL goes up in cities because they continue to be more productive, and that's just how money works. I don't know what to tell you, there's just no way around that. Opting to anarchist mode implode the economy so you get slightly cheaper housing is insane.
"The pollution in cities goes up because they continue to be more productive, and that's just how money works. I don't know what to tell you, there's just no way around that. Opting to anarchist mode implode the economy so you get slightly cleaner water is insane."
Sounds familiar?
And no, I'm not proposing anything "anarchist". Tax (or cap&trade) the dense office space, provide tax breaks for remote work, provide incentives for jobs in smaller cities.
That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
Suburbs cause more pollution per capita than cities, and you know that. Because, again, obviously, suburbs are just less efficient. Moving, say, water 100 miles to reach 100 people is worse than moving water 1 mile to reach 100 people.
> That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
It's not, at all. We 'solved' it by just pushing it somewhere else, and then we actually helped it by making more efficient processes.
It's not that by you living in the suburbs you have no pollution. No, the pollution is made in the city, and then we just transport the end result sometimes thousands of miles to your house so you don't have to see it. That process is horribly inefficient - which is why it's fair to say that suburbs are essentially on the welfare of the cities around them.
Everything you have - water, concrete, food, electricity - is coming from denser centers. You don't actually pay enough in taxes to cover that, but it's fine, because that's the cost of typical American culture.
And, speaking of American culture - what you're advocating is very much the status quo. The US is extremely distributed compared to the rest of the developed world, and we pay a high price for it. We use absurd amounts of water, energy, and money to maintain our suburban lifestyle.
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.
from OP's tone I'd guess personal experience - I lived in one in my late teens/early twenties (Alberta still allowed them at the time, maybe it still does IDK). We had a guy attempt suicide in the kitchen one night. I heard after moving out that another roommate I'd been friendly with got kicked out after relapsing and getting 'back into the crack', according to the landlady's boyfriend.
It is a fact that criminals and addicts will flock towards the cheapest housing options and bring their problems with them. That's just the nature of being the cheapest option.
The main question we need to be asking ourselves is if we prefer these people do crack in those places, or on the street in makeshift camps.
The idea that if we just remove tools from poor people that they go away is patently insane. We want to... kick people while they're already down... and we expect that to help anyone?
I'd prefer they have housing somewhere to live and not in the streets! Just not in my neighborhood, man that's a mouthful, maybe NIMNH? Doesn't really roll off the tongue though...
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.
Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).
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 (they do). 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.
I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.
IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.
>O an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality
Don't forget snow plowing and sidewalk maintenance and the cluster of mailboxes down by the gate where the driveway meets the main road and the pool and and and and and and....
It's like the touchscreen in a goddamn car. Once you have it you get lazy and use it for everything because it lets you cheaply add "premium" features.
I agree that a lot of these HOAs should be dissolved, but like everything else involving real-estate it's less painful in the moment to keep on bending over and taking the status quo and hoping you can pass the buck to the next sucker.
If you really want your blood to boil, a some of the larger stormwater features (for example those drainage ponds commonly found in certain regions beside the highway or on the outskirts of strip malls and other large commercial development) wind up getting regulated as wetlands, they are constantly wet after all, and the legally implied setback and permitting requirements can push over the property line depending on the details. And that's assuming they build them right, that water being returned to the ground affects the height of the water table, with potentially huge negative affects on nearby properties.
> an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality.
The problem in many cases is that it's against state law to do that.
Also, once the HOA is in existence, it starts accreting other powers that have nothing to do with storm drainage, simply because it can.
It is more than storm drainage. I am fine clearing my own snow, I don't want the city doing it for me at a cost. However not everyone is.
What I don't understand is why it isn't the municipality's responsibility for this kind of thing
For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.
But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.
right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)
Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.
In practice HOA’s are just another level of government in that they hold elections, get policing power, provide services, and collect taxes.
That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.
there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.
Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.
Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.
The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.
It should be, except that a lot of people demand taxes too low for that municipality to function if it actually did everything, so legally required HOAs get used as a shitty stopgap because the work still has to be done.
That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.
I don't think we fundamentally disagree: HOA's exist for a good reason, for all the hate they get (and often have earned).
I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
Is there anything stopping one kind from turning into the other kind after the fact though?
I looked at the rules for dissolving an HOA in lived in. There were a couple of procedural barriers, but the biggest one was that it required 75% of homeowners to sign a petition within a 3 month period. That’s a pretty high bar and lets a minority perpetuate the HOA.
The fact that you can't turn a condo into a development of single family homes, and vice versa?
My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
But are the rules actually the same as those imposed 20 years ago for regulatory reasons, or are they now stricter without good reason? Are there really good regulatory reasons for restricting exterior paint color and other things that HOAs do?
American HOAs simply have too much power. In Canada HOAs exist, but their ability to levy fines or put liens on property is much more limited[1] and usually requires actual damage. This effectively eliminates a lot of the ridiculous rules about the size of someone's shed or the species or grass because there's no real way to enforce them.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/acd767...
SFH HOAs do not exist for a good reason.
How have you not come across SFH HOAs when there are so many of them?
https://www.calassoc-hoa.com/about-us/our-objective-hoa-data...
You misunderstand. Of course they exist, but not for good reason.
Yes, typically the local government require a HOA-like structure for all new housing developments.
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
That doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. An HOA that only existed to maintain the stormwater plan and just collected small dues to maintain it would be almost completely unrecognizable compared to how actual HOAs function. Come to think of it, even my standard explanation of HOAs being prevalent because local government use them as a backdoor way to increase property taxes is inadequate, since an HOA that just maintains the roads and parks would also be pretty unrecognizable.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
I think the thousand cuts analogy applies in general to the housing crisis, specifically affordability.
You announce or plan some "affordable" housing in an area, or actually these days ANY housing that would increase housing units and decrease demand for existing homeowner homes, and it's like a telepathic demon takes over every homeowner regardless of Trump or Biden signs on the lawn.
The knives come out, and it gets killed.
People would rather have homeless outside their houses than any sort of project that will dilute their unsustainable growth in housing values.
Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:
Anti-discrimination laws
Also building code and tax incentivesI mean SROs that aren't subject to full federal anti-bias rules, are allowed to refuse welfare recipients, that turn away unmarried couples, or reject children after 8 pm probably wouldn't really fix the problems that people want SROs to fix.
I'm not sure if > 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits means that SROs are required to have private bathrooms, which would absolutely damage the model and doesn't strike me as strictly necessary.
More supply wouldn't fix the problems? Adding supply for one group leaves more supply for the others (e.g. welfare, couples and families)
> 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
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
Here in Chicago there are still some SROs. Chicago has middling tenants rights: not as strong as New York or SF but stronger than most of the country. If tenants rights ended SROs you'd expect them to not exist in a place like Chicago.
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.
Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
>If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights
Tenants rights can make existing SROs harder to get rid of since evicting everyone so you can refurb into apartments or whatever is too costly.
>As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants
That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
> That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.
There are still a decent number of sros in uptown. We’ll see how long that lasts with the new towers and zoning probably making them prime redevelopment targets.
> 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.
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.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
It may be that there's no one answer because every city is different.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
1: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/mayor/Press%2...
> As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs.
For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
I'm skeptical that there are landlords who want to run SROs, having interacted with landlords, they see SROs as being more work (maintaining lots of public space like shared kitchens) for undesirable tenants. Further, in the unlikely event that a landlord would want to run an SRO, they will have to deal with nimby opposition. I just find it difficult to believe that laws designed to keep existing SROs open would be the threshold for preventing new ones. Additionally, we don't have to speculate because there were no new SROs being created before the law passed.
> For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.
Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.
>For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Another way of seeing this is "Sure, I'll give it a shot, but if it turns out to be a bad business I want the option to bail, rather than getting trapped slowly going bankrupt with a 90% empty building because I'm not allowed to evict 4 tenants and do something else with it."
It's possible to concoct a theoretical landlord who has that thought, although in your example it would cost $8000 to evict those people under the law ($2000 per).
The bigger problem is that no SROs were created in recent history before the law was passed. To say that there's some demand by landlords to create SROs but for the law you would have to show SROs getting created before the law, and that stopping after the law. The law was written to preserve the existing SROs with the understanding that the era in which SROs were an attractive investment was already past.
Secondly the OP claims without evidence that the law didn't slow the rate that SROs are being redeveloped. But gentrification in Chicago has accelerated so even if that's true the law is doing its job if the rate of SRO destruction didn't likewise accelerate.
SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.
But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?
I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.
I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.
That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."
So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.
One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.
This tracks. There was a problem, the market solved the problem, regulations killed the solution and now we have a bigger and worse problem.
The high-end SRO market arguably still exists. There are plenty of young Americans rooming with strangers they found on the internet, not infrequently converting the living room into an additional bedroom, and nobody in power really seems to complain unless they throw too many parties, even if the zoning laws prohibit it. I also think it's unlikely they'd rent to a down-on-his-luck, 45-year-old (even if they could afford it).
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.
A lot of those laws are meant to prohibit brothels, without the hassle of needing to actually prove that the house is being used as a brothel.
> 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.
You could also just as easily argue it was naive reliance on the market that led to this failure. It doesn't take much thought to come to the conclusion that this approach will never fully alleviate basic housing concerns.
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.
In the 1920's SRO occupants were much more likely to be immigrants, with different cultural values and living expectations. So norms may have declined over time, but norms are much more uniform today than they were 100 years ago.
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.
> 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.
In my jurisdiction I once had a roommate who stole from me. I was the homeowner, and he was renting from me. I was able to kick him out without notice. If he had his own separate bathroom & kitchen I wouldn't have been able to due to those tenant protection laws you mention. But because we were in a shared space those laws didn't apply.
The laws for SRO should be the same as shared living, but I imagine it varies greatly.
> I was able to kick him out without notice.
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.
There are incredible stories of serial abusers of the system - https://www.thecut.com/article/nanny-drama-hillsdale-carano-...
It sounds like I had the option. I had called the cops and talked to them, and she told me that the only option she had at that point was to arrest him and we didn't really have grounds for that at the time. But when she learned we had a shared kitchen she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
> she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
Right, so you didn't have to follow the eviction process. This is a key distinction. If you tell someone they're no longer welcome and they have to move out immediately, you're not technically following the eviction process. If the person had refused to leave, you'd have to follow the eviction process which can require some evidentiary collection, such as being able to prove that the person was notified that they were being evicted on a certain date.
In extreme cases (not like your ex-roommate) squatters will go so far to game the system that they only come and go in the middle of the night to avoid being officially served the eviction notice.
I was told that becase of the shared living situation, it became a safety issue. That my right to safety trumped the roommate's right to live in my house. Of course, the cop may well not had a complete understanding of the law either.
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.
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.
> Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time
Sadly, this is how most squatting situations start. Having an empty housing unit is very risky.
When my friend had squatters break into his house while it was being renovated, the police said their hands were tied. They had become squatters first, and the breaking and entering couldn't be definitively proven. They got to stay in the house for months while he paid lawyers to do the eviction proceedings.
This is why housing should be majority owned by the state and leased to people for 99 years at low rates to prevent an uncontrolled market.
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
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.
>>in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble
The words "can" and "minimal" are doing a lot of work there. An angry tenant who knows they are getting evicted can do an incredible amount of damage in a few weeks, even without deliberate vandalism.
And landlords can be insanely abusive.
Perhaps a system wherein not only the tenant must pay a deposit, but the landlord must also put three month's rent in escrow. They can evict a tenant nearly immediately for certain issues (violence, drugs, etc.) but the tenant can sue in small claims court (for low time and overhead) and recover the extra three months escrow funds if landlord found to be abusing it. (Obviously just he rough outline of an idea, but maybe it'd work?)
> And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
> Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's.
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.
By that criteria, Baumol's doesn't even apply to symphony orchestras. Technology has made symphony orchestras marginally more productive. Instruments are better and more consistent, recording technology improves practices, et cetera.
Baumol's applies to anything where technology has improved the field significantly less than average. That includes both symphony orchestras and janitorial services.
If the function of a symphony orchestra is to perform symphonies, there has been essentially zero change in their productivity for several hundred years. Contemporary instruments are no better than they were in the mid-1800s. Their rehearsals are rarely recorded, and even if they were, it is much less common for this to contribute to future rehearsals.
Wikipedia says that Baumol's is:
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
while it's not the canonical source for the definition, it is notably more specific than your version.
Recording technologies makes training musicians much more efficient. Listening to others play is a crucial component of becoming good.
The effect is not small.
What is your proposed alternative? If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
> If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
The person who runs the hotel isn’t doing it to house the homeless out of the goodness of their heart.
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.
> If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business.
Not any business, it's a landlord-tenant relationship.
You can't simply kick out a tenant. You have to do a formal eviction process. In many cities this requires collecting evidence of contractual breach, proving that the tenant was notified they were being evicted (such as through a paid service to officially serve and record delivery of the notice), and then following the appropriate waiting period and other laws. It could be months and tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees before you can kick someone out of a house.
Contrast that with the $213 inflation-adjusted monthly rent that the article touts. How many months of rent would they have to collect just to cover the legal fees of a single eviction?
>It forces people to actually abide by the social contract.
"social contract" is just "abide by the terms of the contract they signed" or "hold up their end of the deal" in this case.
> you would get something far, far worse.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43280456
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
“Americas doesn’t correct problems - we over-correct.”
Bill Maher
related: "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."
I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).
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…
> People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?
Dining out is expensive. It's essentially incompatible with the target demographic who need extremely low cost housing.
Add an 'instant pot' or similar (or replace the microwave with one if you're really short on space) and you actually have a huge variety of available meals with a regular outlet + countertop. Home kitchens are designed around old fashioned stoves that required a lot of space to produce heat, and they've stayed around because everyone likes to have lots of counter space. These days the actual cooking process can be done quite well even in a very small area.
>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?
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.
The kitchen is a cost, the availability of food outside lessens the need to pay that cost.
In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.
There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.
Maybe in Asia, but in the us eating out is crazy expensive. People living in cheap housing are not eating out all the time post covid.
Eating out in the US being crazy expensive is somewhat of a self-causing problem.
When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.
And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.
Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.
Go back in time 2000+ years to Rome and most apartments didn't have kitchens. Eating out was far cheaper than eating in. The primary cost was fuel, and restaurants use far less fuel per diner than a home kitchen.
Right, NYC ironically had the cheapest eating out options even though it's one of the most expensive metros. But now the dollar slice is dead, and bringing back a single SRO building isnt bringing it back. The transition period is too rough for anyone to invest enough to make it happen, so now we're stuck with everyone having a kitchen and eating out being expensive.
It's because commercial real estate is eating businesses alive, but the government can't do anything about it because a good chunk of the economy depends on propped up commercial real estate valuations
Not necessarily. I have a stew place by me that is $12 for a plate of veggies + meat that is easily two meals for me. There are plenty of food trucks around with good options in the $5-10 range. And that's before we're looking at stuff from a bodega.
And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.
$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?
Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
It's fine that it's broadly treated as a luxury good, but it feels like more and more even the traditionally "cheap" options are getting pricier.
People value convenience and most people are poor cooks.
Grocery store margins are pretty high on prepared food.
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?
Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.
And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
Are you thinking of making a stew at home, or warming up a pre-made can of stew?
Making a stew at home. Canned stew would be a few dollars a can in my area.
WeLive/WeWork used to do this before the CEO fiasco. They operated a shared living space for working professionals. It wasn’t $231/mo but it was a great way for younger professionals to get their foot in the door living and working in the city.
but it wasn't cheap.
didn’t say it was perfect. just a cheaper option than a traditional studio or one bedroom.
> Then there’s the problem of widespread drug use. The availability and also the strength of street drugs is an extreme problem right now.
In 1875 San Francisco adopted an ordinance banning opium dens. A little history might provide some perspective.
The SROs discussed in the article were prominent long after that.
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.
Fentanyl came around decades after the zoning changes targeting these.
Wouldn't you agree that the difficulties of homelessness pale in comparison to disputes over shared spaces?
> 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.
Who in the world are you talking to?
For $230 a month the college students I know would sleep on a shared dirt floor of a cabin.
I don’t think any of the problems you quote are related to shared living arrangements.
People have become selfish bastards and drug use is rampant. Of course those people are going to congregate in the only places they can pay for. Having them living on the street instead is definitely not the solution.
A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).
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.
This is part of the advantage of SROs: every person has their own space, with a locking door.
> they would need to be able to vote to kick people out.
Not possible. Tenant laws are highly protective of the tenants. There is zero chance you could allow people to vote to kick another person out and not get immediately crushed by discrimination lawsuits.
Evictions also take a lot of time and legal fees. If you rent a room to someone and they break the contract you can't just kick them out. You have to follow the eviction process. Even if someone stops paying rent and tells you they're done paying, it could take months before you can actually evict them.
> maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
That already exists. It's underfunded.
Let churches run them. That's the C in YMCA. It was founded as a mission to guide the development of young men in health directions.
Interestingly, churches are one of the ways you still could, given that when zoning conflicts with practice of a religion zoning often has to give way. Get some folks with development experience and start a Hospitaller order.
Not always: https://www.live5news.com/2025/01/23/pastor-charged-with-vio...
Wouldn't want to endanger the homeless by letting them sleep under a church roof without the the state's approval, much safer to keep them sleeping on the side of the highway and arrest the pastor /s.
> The article barely touches on important details like the relocation of low-wage jobs away from the SRO locations...
That could be addressed by creating SRO housing near the locations where the low-wage jobs are now.
In the modern regulatory environment what that will likely wind up doing is effectively being a housing subsidy for Walmart workers or comparable.
In my opinion, your entire comment is suffering from the "out of sight, out of mind" bias that drives so much policy around housing and mental illness, mostly for the worse. The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
> The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
As always, I'm firmly of the mind that none of this has to do with balance sheets or what things cost. There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits, thanks to decades of propaganda saying as such. The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line. The fact that housing assistance and other such things would clean up the streets of the same people while giving them the help they need, and at a lower cost than rolling the cops on them to beat them with batons and shove them into coach busses to other cities doesn't matter, because the violence is what they want.
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."
> There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits,
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.
Living on the street sucks. It is painful. It is a lot harder to stop using pain killers when one is in actual pain.
The Y and religious shelters have a zero-tolerance policy. You get kicked out immediately for drugs or alcohol. So no, they're generally not intermingled.
Those people are also struggling. The fact that you refuse to empathize with them doesn't change that.
> The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
There have been plenty of UBI pilot programs.
They didn't have the problems you describe.
Most people, including addicts, when presented with the money to get their lives together in meaningful ways, do just that.
> If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people,
It's impressive you managed to be this wrong right out of the gate. Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income. So if we set UBI to be $35k a year, and you make $30k a year, you get $5k a year in UBI payments. The vast majority of employed adults wouldn't get anything, because they don't need it, so saying we're paying out $3 trillion in benefits is flatly ridiculous.
> and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever
And there shouldn't be. It's a Universal Basic Income. You can spend it on food, housing, a car, a model train set, hard Nicaraguan cocaine, prostitutes, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Poor people do not need to be shepherded: study[0] after study[1] after study[2] has proven that when you give people who are broke money that actually has the ability to change their circumstances, shock of shocks, they use it to change their circumstances. If somebody wants to take their UBI and then live on the street, weird choice, but that's also completely their choice and it is not your or anyone else's place to judge them for it.
And under the current system: You ARE paying for their ER visits. You're paying for their ER visits, you're paying to house them in prisons, you're paying for men with guns to beat the shit out of them and then drive them around, you're paying a justice system to move them about place to place and have hearings with judges, stenographers and guards, public defenders, and then when they do get out of jail, you're paying for the bus stop they're living in to boot.
The only thing UBI changes is it gives THEM the money instead of police departments, courts, healthcare companies so they can actually DO SOMETHING about their problems, rather than being shuffled from one awful system to another on an eternal loop because being homeless is just illegal in practice in America.
And better still, UBI strips a LOT of the administrative overhead involved, because it's very easy to calculate what everyone gets, it's literally back-of-napkin tier math. No means testing, no investigations. Just money to people who don't have enough so they have enough. I'm sure it won't solve EVERY social ill, of course. But it'll do a damn sight better job than the current system.
[0] - https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/2025/11/08/universal-ba...
[1] - https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
[2] - https://basicincome.stanford.edu/uploads/Umbrella%20Review%2...
> Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income.
This is not how UBI is typically discussed, and it wasn’t how the regional pilot projects I am familiar with worked. Rather, every single citizen of a community gets the same amount regardless of how much money they earn from other sources.
That is part of the “universal” and it is precisely how UBI improves employees’ position against employers: an employee can safely quit at any moment because he already has the UBI as backup with no further actions required. What you are describing is more the “negative income tax” form of universal income that has been criticized for not empowering the working class this way.
> 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.”
Over a decade ago I grew weed in the East Bay, and regularly sold weight to many of the warehouse artist collectives. Often they'd be stealing utilities (either directly from the utility, or more commonly from neighbors), but they were well-tolerated parts of their surrounding communities. The HPS lamps they often bypassed (for electricity) resulted in lower power usage, net.
I cannot imagine these still existing, at least not in the capacities they were after the last great recession brought rentals down. I used to grow/rent an entire five bedroom house for $1400 month (split with 2.5 others), although it was a mom&pop landlord [good rate even then] just outside of Castro Valley. About $2k/month commercial rent would set up an entire commune of about a dozen "artists," ~2010~, in LA outskirts... but these couldn't support grow operations (too much attention to hide).
Several of these "rat holes" burned down and often lead to stricter enforcement actions against similar hovels.
I think the Ghost Ship fire [1] was the final nail in that coffin.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire
In retrospect, these fatalities were preventable. Safety codes are written in blood.
Ghost Ship burnt a few years after I'd left California; what surprised me most was that it still existed into 2016!
I never saw their specific electrical infrastructure, but it's absolutely surprising that more structure fires aren't sparking up daily (everywhere). My recommendation (as a former IBEW electrician) to DIY sparkies is if you can't afford a thermal camera to verify your own inexperienced handywork then you can't afford to be doing your own electrical work [yes especially YOU Mister E.E.].
I think this discounts the fact that many of the most visible homeless are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, and would struggle to regularly pay a rent bill even if it were $100 a month. There is a fundamental lack of social services but also a fundamental lack of an ability to compel these people to make use of social services should they be available.
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.
Immigrants still do this. Except now they fill apartments and houses with bunkbeds. I know because my dad did this in the early 2000's and is still in contact with the local immigrant community.
I think many Americans have the impression that this violates the terms of their lease, and without other-country kinship connections and networks, they’re not aware of how to find people who would lease under high occupancy conditions. It may even be illegal. So we may need to explicitly make these legal again so Americans will rent in this way.
There is a ridiculous perception that privately run high occupancy housing is abusive. I don't understand that at all. They are running a business that is compassionate enough to offer, at the bare minimum, shelter from the elements. If there is competition in that market, as there used to be, then the bad actors go out of business.
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
>If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
Disagree, you can have impact on your neighbors. We had SFH doing that near me, they had 9 people in 4 BDRM SFH. That was 9 cars so all street parking was occupied. Trash Company sent notice to our HOA wanting price increase since they were generating a ton of trash (some of it commercial I believe) It was much noisier than average home since they would do more outside bringing noise like listening to music inside, outside with noise problems that develop.
County finally shut it down and most of neighbors were thrilled.
There is a reason for zoning laws and it's not 100% NIMBY but yes, your actions can have impact on your neighbors.
What different worlds we live in. If I had a problem with my neighbors making too much noise during "quite hours" I would go talk to them. But, my neighbors are only blasting music for occasional personal parties, 4th of July and New Years. Everybody likes to celebrate, I'm not going to begrudge them for having some fun.
On the trash I'm a bit confused. The HOA should have paid more if the neighborhood was generating more trash than the trash company had negotiated to take away. If everybody didn't like this house why didn't the HOA make rules to restrict it. Isn't that the point of an HOA?
It can also be incredibly dangerous in the event of fires.
It seems homelessness and deaths of despair are also dangerous though, so maybe we should reassess the risk adjusted proper balance of standards?
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.
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.
This is why zoning should never have been made a local question.
People who want to live in the area but can't because it is unaffordable don't get a vote, and the exclusionary communities become self-reinforcing.
But Americas really, really like being racist, so now our housing market is f'ked.
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.
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.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
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.
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
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.
American-style zoning is illegal in Japan: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.
There are countries in the world where homeless are pretty good hidden, by means of extreme expensive welfare, or are moved away from big cities, or at least touristic centers.
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.
Yes I think Japan does this as well. For example in Shibuya Miyashita Park, a recent traveller would find a nice mall here, but not too long ago it was a genuine park, one full of homeless.
The government pushed away people with nowhere to live to who knows where and built a luxury mall. All the tourists visiting assume Japan has no homeless.
Out of sight, out of mind.
A shrinking population like Japan's also changes the supply/demand curve in favor of people looking for housing options. That's probably a major factor.
Japan's also got plenty of dubiously legal operations for that kind of thing, like "24-hour cafes" with private booths obviously set up as illegal capsule hotels.
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.
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.
There is no "cheap place to live" due to property taxes in most areas.
I mean... this article discusses how this used to be done? It winds up looking a lot like dormitories at schools.
If you set it up as a charity or something, then maybe you could. Otherwise, there's still likely $100+ in property tax per occupant per month even on a dorm sized space. That's before utilities, upkeep, paying off construction, admin costs, etc. Just look at what they charge for dorm rooms, and many of those aren't even in expensive areas.
I'm curious where you get that it is property tax driving costs? I know it isn't free, by any means. But compare dorms in a place like Atlanta to rent. Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month? That is rather substantial. Being colocated at the school helps save transportation costs, as well.
"Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month"
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.
I'm... not even really clear what you are aiming for, to be honest.
So, first to directly answer. The naive search showed dorms costing about 1000 a month, with standard rent being 1600. Which is a dramatic savings to be had.
Now, do I think dormitories are the low cost option in the cities today? No. In large part because they are for students only. By definition you are not aiming to solve homelessness with that.
But if you see them as the main surviving case of the type of housing this article is discussing, it does look clear that that can help drive to lower cost housing. With the obvious fact that some places will remain more expensive than others.
And as long as we are discussing lowest cost options for someone, I think assuming a direct path to ownership is probably not appropriate. These options are far more substitutes for standard rent. Which, I don't think anyone is saying that property tax is the reason giant rental complexes have higher rent? Any more so than property tax causing the high cost of school dorms.
I think you're vastly over estimating property taxes. Texas is less than 2% on average assessed on home value. I'd be curious about your example of what "most mortgages" payment breakdown looks like, like year 5 in texas on a 300k house putting 5% down and a 5% interest rate. Look at principle, interest, property taxes, and avg insurance payment.
"I think you're vastly over estimating property taxes."
You're implying that this needs to be the biggest monthly cost, which I don't agree with. Eventually you will pay off your mortgage, leaving you with just property tax and (technically optional at that point) insurance. The duration of payment matters. I will end up paying more in property taxes in my life than I will in interest - 20 years below 4% vs 50+ years of paying 2+%.
2% on even a $200k house is $333/month. That's a lot for low income people. The principal and interest on $180k is about $960/mo on a 5% 30yr. So he property tax is 25% of the payment.
So instead of me overestimating property tax, I feel that you are underestimating how much that money is worth to low income people.
You're moving the goalpost now.
Here's a 200k house: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1404-36th-St-N-Birmingham...
Here's how much they pay in property taxes ($1270): https://eringcapture.jccal.org/parceldetail/23%2000%2019%203...
30 year loan at 4% (not feasible today) means 115k in interest paid after putting 20% down. It would take way longer than 50 years to pay more in property taxes than interest.
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...
I'm pretty sure the Y in my city (Beverly, MA) actually still has SROs. It certainly needs more options like this...
Yep. But it's twice as expensive as the ones mentioned in the article.
https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...
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!)
Thanks for bringing Vancouver into the discussion.
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-gr...
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When I lived in Ireland it was full of people moaning about “family homes” but then they build nothing but 3bed 2 bath semi d’s only to watch them get filled by young roommates. Who would have preferred their own flat.
As I understand it, Helsinki made this mistake. They wanted to attract families to the city, so they mandated a minimum portion of larger apartments in new construction. Unfortunately these apartments ended up being too expensive for their intended market, real-world families.
Unfortunately amongst the few that genuinely are calling for family homes because they need one, there are plenty more disingenuously using "family homes" as a tool to keep "undesirables" of renters, single people, young people, new immigrants, homosexuals etc out of their established low density, wealthy communities.
Family homes and family apartments are not the same thing. You are referring to zoning restrictions only allowing detached single family homes to be built, which are more expensive per occupant, and hence keep poorer people away.
There are multiple reasons for why dense areas only have 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, while less dense areas only have detached single family homes. One is, as you say, to keep the poorer people away. But another big one is also the change in household size due to people's preferences. And yet another is people's preference for detached single family homes once they do have kids (by and large).
So, to repeat myself, no. There is an overabundance of 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers and we continue to build too many of these. There is a shortage of 0-1 bedroom apartment in dense urban centers.
I should've been clearer, I meant development of new abodes is bifurcated, it's either a low density region with homes with multiple bedrooms, or a high density region with homes with 1 or 2 bedrooms.
The 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers were probably built a while ago, but I have never seen new homes built in dense urban centers (I'm referring to NYC/SF/SEA/etc). The low density suburb regions that border the dense urban center usually try to keep their low density status.
You won't see an apartment building with units that have 3 and 4 bedrooms going up in Manhattan, and you won't see apartment buildings with 1-2 bedrooms going up in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
That's not really the case, though. We don't have detailed statistics for bedroom count in New York because a city of just 8 million people with the largest urban economy on the continent can't be expected to track building permits. However in my city, Berkeley, California, the densest city in California outside San Francisco, we get mostly larger apartments. For example I point to the nearly-completed 2587 Telegraph Avenue with 485 bedrooms across 4, 5, and 6-bedroom apartments but only 5 studios. This is a direct outcome of the zoning code that denominates "density" in terms of units, therefore incentivizing the construction of gigantic units with too many bedrooms and forcing people into roomate situations that they don't actually want.
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.
Boarding house likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
These are in the UK as HMOs and widely used, and are known for a lot of abuse by landlords. They have stemmed part of the population problem but they still rise to massive costs. Even 20 years ago I knew the bottom of the bracket were not just sharing those one rooms, but even time-sharing beds - you'd have 4 people sharing a room with 3 beds in.
Yeah, I feel so much safer now that the state has protected me from the Y./s
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 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.
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.
SROs do not seem compatible with modern tenants rights.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
Whoa 6 months is wild. It's 30 days in my city.
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...
Yeah. Urbanism death spiral.
Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.
Beats living on the streets if that’s the only thing you can afford.
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.
See? Exactly the decay I was talking about.
There are no other options. Like smaller cities with a lower cost of living. The big cities just suck away life from everything.
There are no jobs in the small cities, plus they typically try to keep out anyone that doesn't fit their white picket fence ideal.
Well, yes. See above about the urbanism death spiral. Large cities suck the life away from smaller cities.
This is the direct consequence of allowing dense housing, and it's made _worse_ by allowing abominations like SROs or "microapartments". And then bunk beds (already happening in Singapore).
The correct action here is to STOP doing this. Prohibit building dense housing and, more importantly, dense office space. Provide tax incentives for remote work and for offices outside of city cores. Ideally, start un-densifying cities by creating more park spaces in place of dense housing.
How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs? The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.
Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc. Already, this type of work is not very viable in suburban or rural areas because they're too inefficient. Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
If everyone is spread out everywhere, how do you provide them with the stuff they need in an economically viable way? That's the entire reason urbanism exists!
> How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs?
That's the reality. The _only_ way to make housing less expensive is to reduce the dense population. Examples abound: Austin, Denver, etc.
> The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.
Nope. The denser the housing, the MORE EXPENSIVE it gets. Even on a per-unit basis. That's why we have this drive to allow SROs. It'll push prices of all housing even higher.
> Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
_Most_ of the modern post-industrial work is divided into two areas:
1. Office work. Can just as well be WFH.
2. In-person services (restaurants, childcare, hospitals, etc.). They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
There are some areas that will require specialized communities around them, like universities or large hospital centers. But they for sure don't need 4 million people monstrosities like NYC.
> Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
It's vice versa. Most of the economic value in the US is created by people living in suburbia. This is easy to see if you look at personal income tax stats.
Cities receive the majority of _corporate_ taxes because corporation HQs are located in cities (duh).
> That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc.
Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.
If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
In a suburban area, you just ask nearby houses to temporarily live in a hotel for a week, do the dig, and you're done. Even if you need more raw material, you end up spending less.
This is not a theory, btw. There's a study that shows that the city efficiency peaks at around 300k people.
> Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.
> They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
> This is not a theory, btw
You're right, it's not a theory, it's literally just wrong. Like, obviously so.
The idea that people in the suburbs commute less is patently insane. It's just so obviously not true that I legitimately cannot believe someone could think this. Have you lived anywhere, ever, for any period of time?
The more rural the area you are in, the longer your commute will be, because where you live has no economic activity. So you have to drive somewhere that does.
Consider sanitation: why don't we have this in the suburbs? Because turning 1 sanitation facility into 100 distributed sanitation facilities across 100x more land, all while servicing the SAME AMOUNT OF PEOPLE, is insane. So we don't do that. So then you drive.
It is indisputable that density brings efficiency. From computer chips, to transit, to cities.
> If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
Okay, this is a perfect demonstration.
If you change 1 mile of sewer in Manhattan, you've serviced 100,000 people. If you change 1 mile of sewer in the suburbs, you've serviced 100 people. Are you seeing the problem?
Yes, there is obviously more friction to getting stuff done, but the amount of stuff you need to get done to impact the same people is orders of magnitude less. The cost ends up being much, much, much lower. This only works if you're comparing like and like though.
A lot of people will compare dense areas to the suburbs and they won't compare the same amount of people. Yeah, that's cheating. NYC has about as many people as north Texas. When you put it that way, then it seems clear that the efficiency of NYC is orders of magnitude higher than your average suburban hellscape.
Smaller cities aggressively eject the target demographics of SROs through aggressive zoning and outright buying bus tickets to the nearest large city
Rent for a real apartment in a smaller city costs less than an SRO in a large city.
That's because many smaller cities and suburban or rural areas are economically defunct, so property is cheap because it's essentially worthless (you can't make money off of it).
Property is expensive in, say, NYC because you can use that property to do A LOT of economic activity. Property is cheap in Ponder, Texas because you can use that property to do fuck all, so you better take what you can get.
You can choose to live in Ponder, Texas, but the economics of that aren't too hot.
> Property is expensive in, say, NYC because you can use that property to do A LOT of economic activity. Property is cheap in Ponder, Texas because you can use that property to do fuck all, so you better take what you can get.
Well, exactly. And allowing SROs and then bunkbeds will only make this _worse_. Your housing costs in NYC will keep _rising_, while the living conditions for _everyone_ will keep going down.
Death spiral, in other words.
The COL goes up in cities because they continue to be more productive, and that's just how money works. I don't know what to tell you, there's just no way around that. Opting to anarchist mode implode the economy so you get slightly cheaper housing is insane.
"The pollution in cities goes up because they continue to be more productive, and that's just how money works. I don't know what to tell you, there's just no way around that. Opting to anarchist mode implode the economy so you get slightly cleaner water is insane."
Sounds familiar?
And no, I'm not proposing anything "anarchist". Tax (or cap&trade) the dense office space, provide tax breaks for remote work, provide incentives for jobs in smaller cities.
That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
Suburbs cause more pollution per capita than cities, and you know that. Because, again, obviously, suburbs are just less efficient. Moving, say, water 100 miles to reach 100 people is worse than moving water 1 mile to reach 100 people.
> That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
It's not, at all. We 'solved' it by just pushing it somewhere else, and then we actually helped it by making more efficient processes.
It's not that by you living in the suburbs you have no pollution. No, the pollution is made in the city, and then we just transport the end result sometimes thousands of miles to your house so you don't have to see it. That process is horribly inefficient - which is why it's fair to say that suburbs are essentially on the welfare of the cities around them.
Everything you have - water, concrete, food, electricity - is coming from denser centers. You don't actually pay enough in taxes to cover that, but it's fine, because that's the cost of typical American culture.
And, speaking of American culture - what you're advocating is very much the status quo. The US is extremely distributed compared to the rest of the developed world, and we pay a high price for it. We use absurd amounts of water, energy, and money to maintain our suburban lifestyle.
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.
why do you think sharing houses with many others creates crime or that the people would be criminals and addicts?
from OP's tone I'd guess personal experience - I lived in one in my late teens/early twenties (Alberta still allowed them at the time, maybe it still does IDK). We had a guy attempt suicide in the kitchen one night. I heard after moving out that another roommate I'd been friendly with got kicked out after relapsing and getting 'back into the crack', according to the landlady's boyfriend.
It is a fact that criminals and addicts will flock towards the cheapest housing options and bring their problems with them. That's just the nature of being the cheapest option.
The main question we need to be asking ourselves is if we prefer these people do crack in those places, or on the street in makeshift camps.
The idea that if we just remove tools from poor people that they go away is patently insane. We want to... kick people while they're already down... and we expect that to help anyone?
I'd prefer they have housing somewhere to live and not in the streets! Just not in my neighborhood, man that's a mouthful, maybe NIMNH? Doesn't really roll off the tongue though...