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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 balanc

• oluwie 1y 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 1y ago
    but it wasn't cheap.
    • oluwie 1y ago
      didn’t say it was perfect. just a cheaper option than a traditional studio or one bedroom.
• kagakuninja 1y ago
  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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    This is part of the advantage of SROs: every person has their own space, with a locking door.
  • Qwertious 1y ago
    > maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security. That already exists. It's underfunded.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > 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.
• hamdingers 1y ago
  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.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > 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.
    • ang_cire 1y ago
      > 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.
    • Negitivefrags 1y ago
      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.
• aorloff 1y ago
  > 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.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    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.
    • roguecoder 1y ago
      Fentanyl came around decades after the zoning changes targeting these.
• Analemma_ 1y ago
  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.
  • ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    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."
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > 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.
• kelseyfrog 1y ago
  Wouldn't you agree that the difficulties of homelessness pale in comparison to disputes over shared spaces?
• bryanlarsen 1y ago
  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.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > 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.
    • bryanlarsen 1y ago
      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.
• euroderf 1y ago
  > 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.
  • andrewla 1y ago
    Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding. In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43280456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43280456
    • HDThoreaun 1y ago
      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.
  • arwhatever 1y ago
    “Americas doesn’t correct problems - we over-correct.” Bill Maher
    • 1y ago
• michael1999 1y ago
  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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
    • quasse 1y ago
      Not always: https://www.live5news.com/2025/01/23/pastor-charged-with-violating-fire-safety-codes-letting-homeless-people-sleep-his-church-overnight/ 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.
• AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  > 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.
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    In the modern regulatory environment what that will likely wind up doing is effectively being a housing subsidy for Walmart workers or comparable.
• bee_rider 1y ago
  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…
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    >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.
    • bee_rider 1y ago
      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.
  • HDThoreaun 1y ago
    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.
    • roguecoder 1y ago
      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.
• jancsika 1y ago
  > 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.
• Aeolun 1y ago
  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.
• xtiansimon 1y ago
  > “I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers…” Hope you never have to, but people have a way of working together nevertheless. Each place is its own kingdom, but with similar ethos—mind your own business. Clean up your $#!t. People either get along, or they have problems. Some people stay a long time, and others take their cues from the long-time-people. Others are non-conforming trouble makers and will not be staying. Yes. I lived in an SRO. However, the “moral panic” comes from the outside—- rational or irrational judgment of outsiders who pass laws and zoning rules which impose their own moral codes and judgment. Well meaning, corrupt or just plain ignorant, the result is the same. (It’s like people who complain at the election polls about voter IDs. They’re privileged people who _already have_ driver licenses, because they own cars and drive everyday. They simply can’t imagine the difficulty of having, keeping or maintaining valid ID. As a result, they confuse voter enfranchisement with the privilege to drive.) Add economic development and 100 years, shake and bake. Poof. Today SROs may not be available on the same scale as 100 years ago, but they’re here and there and a sight better than roach infested rooms above a dive bar.