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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 righ

• 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.
  • Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
    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).
    • jordanb 11mo ago
      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.
      • stackskipton 11mo ago
        >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.
• brightball 11mo ago
  This tracks. There was a problem, the market solved the problem, regulations killed the solution and now we have a bigger and worse problem.
• potato3732842 11mo ago
  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.
  • RajT88 11mo ago
    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).
    • potato3732842 11mo ago
      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.
      • RajT88 11mo ago
        I don't think we fundamentally disagree: HOA's exist for a good reason, for all the hate they get (and often have earned).
• smelendez 11mo ago
  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.
  • wat10000 11mo ago
    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.
• Tiktaalik 11mo ago
  > 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.
  • bunderbunder 11mo ago
    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%20Room/Press%20Releases/2014/November/11.12.14APPSRO.pdf https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/mayor/Press%2...
• CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well: Anti-discrimination laws • 1968 Fair Housing Act made SROs “dwellings” subject to full federal anti-bias rules • 1974 McQueen v. City of Detroit: an SRO that refused welfare recipients was liable • 1982 Sullivan v. SRO Management: an owner who turned away unmarried couples violated marital status discrimination • 1988 FHA amendments added “familial status” making “no children after 8 pm" illegal Also building code and tax incentives • 1974 UFC required sprinkler retrofits • 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits • 1986 low-income housing credit gave 130% write-ups for new construction but only 90% for rehab of existing SROs
  • BobaFloutist 11mo ago
    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.
    • CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
      More supply wouldn't fix the problems? Adding supply for one group leaves more supply for the others (e.g. welfare, couples and families)
• MangoToupe 11mo ago
  > 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.
• DavidWoof 11mo ago
  > 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