9 ms·

The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market

• jmclnx 11mo ago
  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.
  • BoiledCabbage 11mo ago
    Boarding house likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
  • manithree 11mo ago
    Yeah, I feel so much safer now that the state has protected me from the Y./s
  • iso1631 11mo ago
    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.
• taeric 11mo ago
  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.
  • giantg2 11mo ago
    There is no "cheap place to live" due to property taxes in most areas.
    • taeric 11mo ago
      I mean... this article discusses how this used to be done? It winds up looking a lot like dormitories at schools.
      • giantg2 11mo ago
        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.
        • taeric 11mo ago
          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.
          • giantg2 11mo ago
            "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.
            • 11mo ago
• acyou 11mo ago
  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.
  • schmidtleonard 11mo ago
    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.
    • hat_monger 11mo ago
      [dead]
  • treis 11mo ago
    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.
  • roguecoder 11mo ago
    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.
• hrimfaxi 11mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tidbits 11mo ago
    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.
    • epicureanideal 11mo ago
      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.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • tastyfreeze 11mo ago
        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.
• watchakorn-18k 11mo ago
  [dead]
• jeffbee 11mo ago
  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.
  • CalRobert 11mo ago
    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.
  • euroderf 11mo ago
    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.
  • Tiktaalik 11mo ago
    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.
    • lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      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).
• helle253 11mo ago
  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.
  • draw_down 11mo ago
    [dead]
• Aurornis 11mo ago
  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.
  • oluwie 11mo ago
    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.
    • dzonga 11mo ago
      but it wasn't cheap.
      • oluwie 11mo ago
        didn’t say it was perfect. just a cheaper option than a traditional studio or one bedroom.
• renewiltord 11mo ago
  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.
• cpfohl 11mo ago
  I'm pretty sure the Y in my city (Beverly, MA) actually still has SROs. It certainly needs more options like this...
  • cpfohl 11mo ago
    Yep. But it's twice as expensive as the ones mentioned in the article. https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2023/09/Cabot-Housing-2021-application-and-cover.pdf https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...
• cyberax 11mo ago
  Yeah. Urbanism death spiral. Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.
  • oluwie 11mo ago
    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.
    • cyberax 11mo ago
      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.
      • rangestransform 11mo ago
        Smaller cities aggressively eject the target demographics of SROs through aggressive zoning and outright buying bus tickets to the nearest large city
        • cyberax 11mo ago
          Rent for a real apartment in a smaller city costs less than an SRO in a large city.
          • array_key_first 11mo ago
            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.
• encoderer 11mo ago
  SROs do not seem compatible with modern tenants rights. It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
  • parlor7751 11mo ago
    Whoa 6 months is wild. It's 30 days in my city.
• astroflection 11mo ago
  > 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.”
  • ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
    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.
    • throwup238 11mo ago
      I think the Ghost Ship fire [1] was the final nail in that coffin. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire
      • ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
        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.].
• almosthere 11mo ago
  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.
• andrewla 11mo ago
  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.
  • jordanb 11mo ago
    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.
    • HDThoreaun 11mo ago
      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.
    • andrewla 11mo ago
      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.
• dzonga 11mo ago
  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
• Tiktaalik 11mo ago
  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.
  • f1shy 11mo ago
    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.
    • Tiktaalik 11mo ago
      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.
    • eucyclos 11mo ago
      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.
  • crooked-v 11mo ago
    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.
• catlover76 11mo ago
  [dead]
• Tiktaalik 11mo ago
  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/ 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!)
  • neilk 11mo ago
    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-granville-strip-luugat-sro-closing-9.6976930 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.
• bendbro 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• roguecoder 11mo ago
  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.
• MagicMoonlight 11mo ago
  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.
  • websiteapi 11mo ago
    why do you think sharing houses with many others creates crime or that the people would be criminals and addicts?
    • eucyclos 11mo ago
      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.
      • array_key_first 11mo ago
        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?
        • rjp0008 11mo ago
          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...
• cs702 11mo ago
  There are a bunch of companies trying to make co-living mainstream again. The largest one appears to be PadSplit (https://padsplit.com 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-deloitte-technology-fast-500-for-third-consecutive-year-302619760.html https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...
• pessimizer 11mo ago
  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.
• breakingrules3 11mo ago
  [dead]
• kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
  > 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.
• simonsarris 11mo ago
  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
• johnea 11mo ago
  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/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option 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...
• stego-tech 11mo ago
  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.
• jhancock 11mo ago
  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.
• BenFranklin100 11mo ago
  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.
• eucyclos 11mo ago
  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?
• esbranson 11mo ago
  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.