I can’t wait for some “'Job Creator” to bring Hong Kong’s “Coffin Apartments” to America.
intercst
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@intercst don’t sound so shocked or cynical. That attitude has led to regentrification and the “good intentions, bad unintended consequences” loss of practical low-income housing, like SROs. While SROs were once a standard housing option for seasonal workers, students, and lower-income individuals, most have been lost to gentrification, building code changes, or conversion into boutique hotels.
In cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, several hundred SRO buildings remain. They typically offer a small private room (often about 80 to 140 square feet) with a bed, a sink, and a closet, while the bathrooms and kitchens are located down the hallway and shared with other tenants.
San Francisco has finally realized the value of low-income housing and has strict “SRO Preservation” laws that prevent owners from converting these units into standard apartments or tourist hotels without jumping through significant legal hoops.
My grandfather told me about boarding houses where a bed could be rented by a low-income worker for 8 hours a day. The Yiddish was “Schlupf shness, m’dafen kuschin” which meant “Sleep fast, I need the pillow.”
When the alternative to shared housing, SROs or shared housing is homelessness, interference by shocked do-gooders (and NIMBYs) is not helping those who need help the most. Especially since landlords can make more money by converting them to higher-rent alternatives.
Wendy
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I agree. And it might be more helpful if more cities would allow people to build new SRO housing. You had cities all over the country basically banning new SRO developments starting in the mid-1950’s - some outright (like New York in 1955), and others through combinations of building, zoning and fire codes that made it all but impossible to do that.
But I wouldn’t hold your breath. There’s a lot of institutional and market pushback against those sorts of things. I recall the “micro-unit” trend of 10-15 years ago, and that never really caught hold.
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Depends. Building new SROs is legal in Seattle, although there have been some ups and downs over the years. But the developer only has to install one kitchen per floor, which saves a lot. There are typically no elevators, little to no parking (not required by code), and no common amenities. Leases are typically three to six months and utilities are typically included. So easy to move in, easy to move out.
Rent is cheap on an absolute basis. But the per square foot rents are downtown luxury prices.
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[ Single-Room Occupancy (SRO) housing and boarding houses are both low-cost, shared residential options offering private rooms with shared amenities (bathrooms/kitchens). SROs are typically converted hotels focusing on independent, long-term living for individuals, whereas boarding houses are smaller, often owner-occupied, and historically provide meals (boarding). ]
In my hometown, in the late 1960s, a couple school mates had been “kicked out by their parents” before graduation.
One lived in a boarding house - a single bedroom, shared bathroom n kitchen.
While a bit grim, it was clean cheap and his door had a lock. He was a busker for money at several local restaurants n bars. That boarding house is still functional, today. It had strict rules about comportment.
Another classmate had a small apartment, a little on the shabby side.
There were a couple families who “allowed stray kids to crash for a while”. And some kids who lived with “friends”. As far as I could tell, these “strays” lived in the family like one of the children - ie no exploitation.
Another classmate’s family had a large house with 8 or 10 BRs. The mom rented rooms (boarding house style) to “disabled, needy senior citizens”. The senior signed his (they were all male, veterans, IIRC) monthly check over to the mom, who managed the funds and served as a caretaker, made sure they were housed n fed, and got to their “errands n medical appointments”.
I was looking at buying a house 5-6 years ago, and toured a house that had bunk beds 4-6 beds per room in every room. The “story” was that it had been rented to “illegals” as a flophouse … Like your “rent for 8 hours, n get out cause the next renter needs the pillow”.
SRO, Boarding house, flophouse.
Have a place in society.
ralph
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@rainphakir I agree with you. The alternative to low-cost, low-frills housing for many would be homelessness.
Many well-meaning meddlers who try to bring up the level of the housing inadvertently make it unprofitable for landlords and unaffordable for the poor. That’s a lose-lose situation since the housing is taken off the market.
Interfering with the free market always has negative consequences which don’t seem to matter to the people who impose them. Another example is the well-meaning effort to protect home service workers which requires a $15/ hour minimum wage (even if the worker lives in the home) plus FICA and complicated tax paperwork. In-home service work used to be a stepping stone for immigrants who got housing and food plus a low wage which many middle-class families could afford. Now only the wealthy can afford servants and many potential jobs go unfilled. What some would call “exploitation” looked like “opportunity” to many…until the well-meaning made it illegal.
Wendy
3 Likes
I’m not sure that liberalizing regulations for SROs is all that likely to bring them back, though - or generate much in the way of new product. Construction and land costs are what they are. It’s expensive to build any given new floor of multifamily residential product - whether that floor is divided into 10 ‘normal’ units or 40 SRO units, it will cost a certain amount per square foot at a minimum. Maybe you fit more people into the space if its chopped into more units, and maybe get more rent - but your operational and maintenance costs will be much, much higher as you deal with all those different tenants coming in and out.
How do SROs compare w the mini houses that seem to be popular these days. SRO must be more efficient use of space in urban areas. Mini houses might work where you have open spaces or abandoned housing.
Immigrants often work to send money home to family. Flop house arrangements are probably common. But also face limits on number of occupants from zoning laws.
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I think they all suffer from the same types of issues. In urban areas, land is expensive. Construction is expensive. Covering your expected impacts on governmental services (impact fees, water and sewer connection charges, etc.) is expensive. It costs at least $X in order to deliver Y amount of square feet no matter what you do within a housing product (single family detached, duplex/triplex, or multifamily residential) - and none of that cost goes down if you divide the Y square feet into many or few units. Four units of 500 s.f. will be cheaper per unit than one unit of 2,000 s.f. - but it’s still expensive, and since that larger unit will probably have more than one person in it you’re sometimes not even reducing the cost person by all that much.
My own solution isn’t very practical, because it requires a time machine. Just like cars, cheap housing is used housing. It’s really hard to build new cheap housing. We’re in this mess because we took a decade or two off of building new housing in many urban areas, for reasons. So there’s a huge chunk of old housing that missing from the market - the stuff that didn’t get built and the old housing we converted into new housing rather than let it remain cheap.
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I think that very dense SRO housing — high tech “pod” housing — could be done on large scale at a low enough price to meet the needs of dense cities. I think we do not have it because of snottery, fear, and stoopidness.
Think of the density of military barracks, but provide individual security as well as strong personal privacy with physical structure rather than patrolling sergeants.
I ran an extremely efficient and loved boarding house while in college wherein I and my best friend sheltered and fed 14 students while turning a small profit. Later I spent months as a political organizing vagabond supporting myself as a low cost temp kitchen staff, secretary (fast as blazes on keyboard and could take notehand), and substitute teacher while living extremely minimally. Our urban elites went from being legitimately afraid of firetrap disease incubating tenements to developing an ill-thought allergy to sensible simple housing for the poor and/or simple.
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I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong - we certainly have plenty of snottery, fear, and stupidness. But I don’t think SRO would be at a low enough price to make it work.
Picture an apartment building floor. If you divide it up into a ten conventional 2BR apartments, you’ll fit a certain number of people. If you divide up into SRO rooms, you’ll fit some more people - the amount of square feet of residential space per person can be dropped, you’ll have shared common living areas and kitchens and bathrooms, so less overall space to those uses. So you’ll reduce price per occupant somewhat.
But then other costs creep in. Water and sewer is much higher - the amount of water in (and sewage out) is a function of the number of people, not the space. You’re going to ramp up your maintenance and repair costs on those common facilities - both because they’re used more often and because people tend to take a little less care of shared items. Your management operating costs also go through the roof, because you’ve simply got more leases/more vacancies/more issues that come with more people. And the more unrelated people you cram into a smaller area, the more behavioral and externality issues crop up.
I don’t know. I have to be cautious about universalizing my own experience, but my zoning practice here in Miami has fundamentally changed since the 90’s. Back then, most developers wanted to maximize the number of units they could put on a piece of property. They genuinely wanted a larger number of smaller units, up to the highest density they could get. Townhomes, zero-lot-line, duplexes - whatever they could get to squeeze more units. Nowadays, though, they absolutely do not want that. The per unit costs that they have to bear based on the number of people are too high to pencil out those kinds of projects.
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SRO rooms are nowhere near what Pod bed chambers can do. You do need a well designed bathing toilet structure that is efficient and quickly readily cleanable, and doing that correctly greatly cuts water power sewage usage.
See Pod hotels Japan… there are vids, and there are some detailed articles but you need to put up with translation issues to get them.
Here’s a video that reviews 3 Japanese Capsule Hotels from cheap ($26/night) to expensive ($50/night).
intercst
I’m familiar, but hotels are different than permanent housing. It’s unlikely that a pod solution would work as a residential use, rather than for a hotel transient use. Google AI tells me that typical pod hotels in Tokyo would cost more than an average small apartment there, which makes sense - the turnover and facilities upkeep and amenities costs for those units must be rather high.
Again, I come back to “cheap housing is old housing.” A lot of SRO buildings didn’t start off that way - they were hotels that were past their prime, and converted into rooming houses to accommodate a rapidly urbanizing country. Part of the “micro unit” phase that we went through a decade or so ago followed a similar model, with interested folks trying to find older and run-down hotels to convert to residential uses. Most of those efforts to find reclamation projects fizzled out (or at least the ones I looked at) because of a combination of building codes, school impact fees, parking requirements, and a strong hotel market that had a lot of these folks being outbid by actual hotel flags.
There you go!
After families, socialization of humans is crux work for landladies and their staffs, military and other disciplined forces, and hairdressers… I doubt AI robots would be very good at handling a guest returning to his pod drunk at 3 AM, but just maybe that will end up being a prime market for robots. At the least the cleaning of the pods, bathing areas, and common spaces could not be a better fit for robotics.