How America Destroyed Its Cheapest Homes
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. Fifty years ago, he had another option. A place to wash up, get a hot meal, meet other young men—even start over. All he had to do was put his pride on the shelf and get himself to—well, you can spell it out: the YMCA.
The Village People’s 1978 disco hit celebrated one of the less-remembered services offered by the YMCA. From the 1860s, the YMCA began building single-room occupancy (SRO) units “to give young men moving from rural areas safe and affordable lodging in the city.” At its peak in 1940, the YMCA had more than 100,000 rooms—“more than any hotel chain at the time.” The Y wasn’t the only provider of such housing; indeed, there was a vibrant market for hotel living that existed well into the twentieth century.
Variously and derogatively known by many names—rooming houses, lodging houses, flophouses—SROs provided affordable, market-rate housing to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. SROs were the cheapest form of residential hotels, specializing in furnished single rooms for individuals, usually with shared kitchens and bathrooms. A typical SRO rent in 1924 was $230 per month—in today’s dollars.
As late as 1990, as many as two million people lived in residential hotels—more than lived “in all of America’s public housing”—according to Paul Groth, author of Living Downtown. Today, not so much. SROs like those offered by the YMCA were the safety net that kept many people off the streets—and their disappearance from the housing supply explains much of modern-day homelessness. What we destroyed wasn’t just a housing type but an entire urban ecosystem: one that provided flexibility, independence, and affordability at scale.
As with so much of our urban history, this destruction was by design.
From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, hotel living was a normal way of life for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. As hotelkeeper Simeon Ford colorfully put it in 1903, “We have fine hotels for fine people, good hotels for good people, plain hotels for plain people, and some bum hotels for bums.” SROs, the “bum hotels,” were the backbone of affordable housing, serving “a great army” of low-paid but skilled workers. Clustered in lively downtown districts with restaurants and services that acted as extensions of the home, SROs offered liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores. Rooming house districts let young people mix freely and even allowed same-sex couples to live discreetly—signs of a more secular, modern urban culture. Downtown hotel life, Groth notes, “had the promise to be not just urban but urbane.”
And therein lay the problem: the urbanity of SROs collided head-on with the moralism of the Progressive Era.
Reformers drew on a long tradition of anti-urban bias, seeing the emergent twentieth-century city as a problem, with cheap hotels at its heart. They pathologized hotel dwellers as “friendless, isolated, needy, and disabled” and cast SROs as “caldrons of social and cultural evil.” Some of the cheapest hotels were unsafe and exploitative, but reformers cared less about improving conditions than about what the hotels symbolized. They blamed rooming houses for loneliness, sexual licentiousness, civic apathy—even suicide. To them, the presence of “social misfits” proved that hotels caused moral disorder. In reality, people lived in SROs because they were cheap and offered greater independence—especially for career-oriented young women. Firm in their belief in the “One Best Way to live,” the reformers exalted the single-family home as the “bulwark of good citizenship” and succeeded in stigmatizing hotel life.
By the turn of the century, they set their sights on changing the law.
Beginning in the late 19th century, reformers used building and health codes to erase what they saw as “aberrant social lives.” San Francisco’s early building ordinances targeted Chinese lodging houses, while later codes outlawed cheap wooden hotels altogether. 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 cities like San Francisco, zoning was used to erect a “cordon sanitaire” around the prewar city “to keep old city ideas from contaminating the new.”
Residential hotels, like apartments, were swept into the same category of “mere parasitic” uses that Euclid v. Ambler—the 1926 case that upheld zoning—treated as potential health hazards. Redlining and federal loan criteria starved urban hotels of capital, while planners simply omitted them from surveys and censuses—as if their residents didn’t exist. By the urban renewal era, the existence of the old city was itself seen as an affront, and it, too, had to be destroyed.
In effect, SROs became a “deliberate casualty” of the new city.
Economic and policy shifts hastened their decline. Industrial jobs moved to peripheral locations only accessible by car, urban highway expansion targeted lodging-house neighborhoods, and cities encouraged office development on increasingly valuable downtown land. The “moral blight” of hotel districts had increasingly become economic blight, necessitating renewal. And because SROs didn’t count as “permanent housing” in official statistics, clearance programs could claim to displace no one. San Francisco’s urban renewal experience was typical: redevelopment in and around the Yerba Buena/Moscone Center area ultimately eliminated an estimated 40,000 hotel rooms. The public housing that replaced hotel districts—if it was built at all—often failed to accommodate single adults. To bureaucrats, the bulldozer was salubrious, “eliminating dead tissue” and “clearing away the mistakes of the past.” To the people who lived there, it wiped out their last foothold in the housing market.
By the mid-twentieth century, “millions” of SRO hotel rooms disappeared through closures, conversions, and demolition across major cities, and the modest hotel market that remained was shrinking fast. With almost no new SROs built since the 1930s, the remaining stock was vanishing by the thousands in the 1970s. New York City had 200,000 SROs when it banned new hotel construction in 1955; only 30,000 remained by 2014. As tenants changed and land values climbed, owners who once fought to save their lodging houses now wanted out; it was officials who suddenly wanted to preserve them. Tenant movements and new government programs emerged in the 1970s and ’80s, but Reagan-era cuts gutted funding, and many remaining hotels decayed into the “street hotels” opponents had long imagined: unsanitary, unsafe, and unfit for all but the city’s most desperate residents.
At the same time, demand for SRO housing was rising sharply. 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.
Thousands of people were barely hanging on, and a full-blown homelessness crisis had emerged in American cities for the first time since the Great Depression.
The SRO crisis was no accident, Groth argues, but the result of government policy at all levels that picked winners and losers in the housing market. 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.”
As Alex Horowitz of The Pew Charitable Trusts writes, if SROs had “grown since 1960 at about the same rate as the rest of the U.S. housing stock, the nation would have roughly 2.5 million more such units”—more than three times the number of homeless individuals. While we can’t rebuild the old SRO market we destroyed, cities now face a new opportunity: a vast surplus of obsolete office space that could be converted into inexpensive rooms.
Horowitz argues cities should make shared housing—“co-living,” in today’s parlance—legal again. Office vacancies are soaring at the same time deeply affordable housing is vanishing. Horowitz and the architecture firm Gensler modeled what cities could actually build. Their analysis suggests that a vacant office tower could be converted into deeply affordable rooms for half the per-unit cost of new studio apartments. A typical 120–220 square foot unit with shared kitchens and bathrooms could rent to people earning 30–50% of area median income. Urban development has become so expensive that such conversions are likely to only be feasible if subsidized, but Horowitz argues that conversions offer a better way to leverage scarce public dollars: for instance, a $10 million budget might produce 125 co-living rooms instead of 35 studios, providing a way to scale deeply affordable housing much more quickly.
It’s a great idea—but in many cities, it’s illegal.
While several cities have made efforts to undo SRO prohibitions, in many American metropolises, restrictions abound—from zoning that bans shared housing or residential uses in office districts to minimum-unit-size rules that outlaw SRO-scale rooms. Building codes with strict egress and corridor rules and ventilation requirements make conversions technically infeasible, while parking mandates add unnecessary costs. Meanwhile, “unrelated occupancy” limits prohibit the very household types SROs serve.
None of these barriers is structural; every one is a policy choice.
We talk endlessly about the “missing middle.” But the real catastrophe was the “banished bottom”—the deliberate destruction of the cheapest rung of the housing ladder. Re-legalizing SROs won’t instantly restore a once deeply affordable housing market that provided housing at scale, but it would at least make it possible for cities to create a much cheaper form of housing that could benefit some of the 11 million extremely low-income renter households and the 800,000 homeless people in America. No city will meaningfully address the need for deeply affordable housing until it restores this missing rung—and accepts that not everyone needs a full apartment to have a full life. Surely, an SRO is better than a sidewalk.
Incidentally, while the YMCA is generally not in the SRO business anymore, its Austin branch is redeveloping itself as a mixed-use center with 90 deeply discounted affordable units for families. It’s a worthy project—but it highlights the gap: more than 80% of Austin’s homeless residents are single adults, the very group the Y once housed. We used to have a place they could go—but what happened to that?
The Y is as much a question as an answer.
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Comments
I'm not convinced at the narrative presented here, thought it seems compelling and worthy of further research.
My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
And rather than being refuges for same-sex couples and generally "[offering liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores", they were the opposite -- often being extremely stringent in "morality" clauses and forbidding mixed company after dark. They were frequently racially exclusionary in ways that became incompatible with civil rights laws.
The reality is that the situation was probably a mix of both attacks -- attacks through over-regulation and tenant rights, as well as direct attacks on SROs as hotbeds of crime and illicit or immoral behavior, but I'm curious as to the mechanics of how this came to be.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2017:254 reply 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).
By potato3732842 2025-11-2017:434 reply 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.
By ElevenLathe 2025-11-2018:173 reply 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.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2018:25 >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.
By pdonis 2025-11-220:21 > 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.
By bluGill 2025-11-2019:03 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
By quickthrowman 2025-11-2018:262 reply 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.
By monknomo 2025-11-2019:30 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.
By Retric 2025-11-213:26 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.
By quickthrowman 2025-11-2021:061 reply 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.
By bluGill 2025-11-2021:09 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.
By crooked-v 2025-11-2018:31 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.
By wbshaw 2025-11-2018:55 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.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2018:14 >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.
By deltoidmaximus 2025-11-2019:502 reply Is there anything stopping one kind from turning into the other kind after the fact though?
By topkai22 2025-11-215:18 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.
By ryandrake 2025-11-210:23 The fact that you can't turn a condo into a development of single family homes, and vice versa?
By potato3732842 2025-11-2018:001 reply 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.
By thfuran 2025-11-2018:54 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?
By AlexandrB 2025-11-2019:22 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...
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...
By wat10000 2025-11-2114:25 You misunderstand. Of course they exist, but not for good reason.
By briHass 2025-11-2018:16 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.
By wat10000 2025-11-2018:08 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?
By AtlasBarfed 2025-11-214:05 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.
By CGMthrowaway 2025-11-2018:031 reply Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:
Anti-discrimination laws
Also building code and tax incentives• 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• 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 SROsBy BobaFloutist 2025-11-2022:151 reply 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.
By CGMthrowaway 2025-11-2022:31 More supply wouldn't fix the problems? Adding supply for one group leaves more supply for the others (e.g. welfare, couples and families)
By DavidWoof 2025-11-215:01 > 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.
By Matticus_Rex 2025-11-2017:551 reply 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.
By stackskipton 2025-11-2019:371 reply >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.
By Matticus_Rex 2025-11-2021:19 > 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.
By andrewla 2025-11-2017:36 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.
By HDThoreaun 2025-11-2017:33 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.
By bunderbunder 2025-11-2018:192 reply 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.
By bunderbunder 2025-11-2020:33 > 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.
By BobaFloutist 2025-11-2022:171 reply >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."
By jordanb 2025-11-2022:26 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.
By bunderbunder 2025-11-2020:50 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.
By brightball 2025-11-2017:21 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.
By wat10000 2025-11-2018:11 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.
By MangoToupe 2025-11-2019:22 > 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.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2017:073 reply 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.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2017:201 reply 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.
By steveBK123 2025-11-2018:10 There are incredible stories of serial abusers of the system - https://www.thecut.com/article/nanny-drama-hillsdale-carano-...
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2019:231 reply 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.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2021:29 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.
By steveBK123 2025-11-2017:252 reply 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.
By Aurornis 2025-11-2020:40 > 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.
By tehjoker 2025-11-2018:54 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.
By toss1 2025-11-2019:49 >>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?)
By margalabargala 2025-11-2018:24 > 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.
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-11-2017:191 reply > 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 bryanlarsen 2025-11-211:201 reply 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.
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-11-2115:031 reply 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.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2115:19 Recording technologies makes training musicians much more efficient. Listening to others play is a crucial component of becoming good.
The effect is not small.
By hamdingers 2025-11-2017:021 reply 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.
By Negitivefrags 2025-11-2017:222 reply 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.
By Aurornis 2025-11-2020:34 > 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?
By potato3732842 2025-11-2017:54 >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.
By ang_cire 2025-11-2017:21 > 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.
By HDThoreaun 2025-11-2017:39 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.
By arwhatever 2025-11-2019:121 reply “Americas doesn’t correct problems - we over-correct.”
Bill Maher
By euroderf 2025-11-2020:22 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…
By Aurornis 2025-11-2020:36 > 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.
By eucyclos 2025-11-216:09 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.
By lotsofpulp 2025-11-2017:351 reply >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.
By bee_rider 2025-11-2018:02 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.
By HDThoreaun 2025-11-2017:403 reply 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.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2019:26 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.
By HDThoreaun 2025-11-2018:15 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.
By rangestransform 2025-11-2018:30 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
By roguecoder 2025-11-2017:571 reply 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.
By BobaFloutist 2025-11-2022:303 reply 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.
By BobaFloutist 2025-11-210:10 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.
By bpt3 2025-11-2114:28 People value convenience and most people are poor cooks.
Grocery store margins are pretty high on prepared food.
By bsder 2025-11-217:02 > 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?
By bpt3 2025-11-2021:07 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.
> 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.
By roguecoder 2025-11-2018:05 Fentanyl came around decades after the zoning changes targeting these.
By kelseyfrog 2025-11-2017:07 Wouldn't you agree that the difficulties of homelessness pale in comparison to disputes over shared spaces?
By jancsika 2025-11-2019:03 > 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.
By Aeolun 2025-11-216:14 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.
By kagakuninja 2025-11-2017:023 reply 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.
By roguecoder 2025-11-2018:06 This is part of the advantage of SROs: every person has their own space, with a locking door.
By Aurornis 2025-11-2020:38 > 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.
By Qwertious 2025-11-2018:09 > maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
That already exists. It's underfunded.
By michael1999 2025-11-2017:131 reply 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.
By roguecoder 2025-11-2018:211 reply 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.
By quasse 2025-11-2019:01 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.
By AnimalMuppet 2025-11-2017:141 reply > 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.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2017:32 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.
By Aurornis 2025-11-2017:19 > 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.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-2017:192 reply 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.
By roguecoder 2025-11-2018:23 Living on the street sucks. It is painful. It is a lot harder to stop using pain killers when one is in actual pain.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2017:26 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.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-2021:11 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.
By danaris 2025-11-2018:49 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.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-2018:571 reply > 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...
By HeinzStuckeIt 2025-11-213:43 > 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.
By astroflection 2025-11-2017:042 reply > The people we now call “chronically homeless” were once simply low-income tenants, housed by the private market in cheap rooms rather than by public programs. Once that market was dismantled, the result was predictable: the homelessness wave of the late 1970s and 1980s followed directly from the destruction of SROs. Today’s crisis—nearly 800,000 unhoused people in 2024—is the long tail of that loss, compounded by decades of underbuilding in expensive cities and soaring rents. As one advocate put it, “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market. They aren’t anymore.”
By ProllyInfamous 2025-11-2018:231 reply 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.
By throwup238 2025-11-2116:201 reply I think the Ghost Ship fire [1] was the final nail in that coffin.
By ProllyInfamous 2025-11-2117:12 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.].
By kjkjadksj 2025-11-2018:50 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.
