SROs & Boarding Houses Are More Than Hype

They might be the key to ending homelessness

Mar 15, 2024

A sit-down Lime scooter and a Lime e-bike in Austin

This series shares major takeaways and specific lessons from YIMBYtown 2024, a pro-housing advocacy conference held February 26-28 in Austin, Texas. Roughly 600 advocates and policy experts gathered from across the U.S. and Canada, and as far away as Australia.

Every $100 increase in Houston’s rents equates to a 9% increase in the local homeless population. That stunning statistic came from Mark Smith, director of strategic planning at the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County. The panel discussion on homelessness was sobering. Cole Chandler, who advises Denver’s mayor on the issue, described the city government’s homelessness services system absorbing three times as many people as it was designed for, in the form of Venezuelan migrants transported there by Texas Governor Greg Abbott*.

However, that morning session on day two of YIMBYtown was also focused and determined, living up to its title: “End Homelessness.” Panelists forcefully argued that homeless is a housing problem: Land use restrictions which bedevil housing in general disproportionately burden low-income residents in particular. This fit YIMBYtown 2024’s big tent theme, and echoed the “all of the above approach” to housing advocacy that my local YIMBY group’s leadership team regularly invokes.

It also prompted me to ask the panel: Are SROs (single-room occupancy apartments, such as boarding houses) a viable solution to homelessness, or just an overhyped idea that YIMBYs talk about on Twitter? The answer from Rosanne Haggerty, founder of Breaking Ground in New York City, was a resounding yes: SROs are a real solution. They were the historical norm a century ago, yet she explained that there are existing examples from forward-looking owners who often must fight the regulatory and legal status quo to operate. She said the primary objections to SROs relate to standards for management and fire-safe design, which are both solvable, basic regulatory issues.

I was hopeful, as I wrote pre-YIMBYtown, but hearing a world-class expert who has done celebrated community redevelopment work confidently endorse SROs was invigorating! The historical flip side is that homelessness as we know it only emerged in the early 1980s, as laid out in this curiously detailed and engrossing appendix to a 2018 multi-agency federal report, about the history of homelessness in the U.S. (emphasis added):

World War II emerged as an economic engine that put the nation to work. Over the ensuing three decades, the typical individual experiencing homelessness continued to be disproportionately white and male but became increasingly older (usually over 50 years old), disabled, dependent on welfare or social security, and resided in cheap hotels, flophouses, and in single room occupancy hotels (SROs) located in the poorest neighborhoods and Skid Row areas of urban America (Rossi, 1989). Ironically, these people living in SROs and rooming houses during this period would be considered “housed” under HUD's current definition of homelessness. This observation underscores the difficulty in defining and studying homelessness throughout U.S. history.
The early 1980s marked the emergence of what now may be considered the modern era of homelessness. Major forces that changed the complexion of homelessness in the modern era include gentrification of the inner city, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, high unemployment rate, the emergence of HIV/AIDS, an inadequate supply of affordable housing options, and deep budget cuts to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and social service agencies in response to what was then the country's worst recession since the Great Depression (Jones, 2015). In some cities, property values increased dramatically in the areas near downtown, and Skid Row areas disappeared as the SROs and rooming houses that were home to thousands of transients were razed or converted into apartments and condominiums. Since the 1980s, rents in metro areas across the country have been increasing while wages have stagnated (Katz, 2006). Recent research indicates that families experiencing homelessness are more likely to continue to face poverty and homelessness in the future (Desmond, 2016).
…
The confluence of [the HIV/AIDs epidemic] and other events changed the face of homelessness yet again. The typical homeless person of the 1980s was younger (less than 40 years old), more impoverished, and had a higher burden of co-occurring medical, mental health, and substance use disorders than previous generations of persons experiencing homelessness. For the first time, women and families appeared in significant numbers (Rossi, 1990). Shelters that had long served poor and older alcoholic men withstood a new and eclectic wave of impoverished men and women displaced from their homes, many of them struggling with undue burdens of co-occurring medical, psychiatric, and substance use disorders. Many others were simply living in poverty. Sociologists referred to this generation as experiencing “literal homelessness” with no access to conventional dwellings, such as houses, apartments, mobile homes, rooming houses, or SROs (Jones, 2015).

The first lesson from this account is that we traditionally had a much higher standard for whether we considered someone housed. The skid rows of yesteryear, where relief organizations tended to a fairly small number of men in flophouses, were viewed as a failure on the order of today’s tent cities and sidewalks crowded with people living in horrific conditions. We must confront the reality. There is nothing normal about it.

One line sticks out, describing 1980s homelessness: “For the first time, women and families appeared in significant numbers.” That drives home that the phenomenon we experience today, that people my age grew up seeing, is unprecedented in an important sense. Just as deinstitutionalization did not fix mental illness, ending the old model of housing the indigent did not fix homelessness or increase human dignity. And a mix of forces pushed significantly more people out of stable housing.

I would not try to argue that SROs are a panacea, but they are clearly a missing piece in the puzzle of how to undo decades of policy failure that fueled mass homelessness. They are, geometrically speaking, a highly land-efficient type of housing.

Two factors make me optimistic. Even if wages have stagnated since the 1980s, and construction productivity has stalled for decades (I wonder how much of that is due to overregulation), the U.S. is still much wealthier than it was 40 years ago, never mind a century ago. My semi-educated guess is that many people currently priced out of studio apartments would be able to afford a comparable SRO. In principle, SROs are analogous to studio apartments in the same way that studios are analogous to single-bedroom units. There is shared living space, but many or most apartment buildings have shared amenities already. Informal boarding houses like the “single-family” home where I rented a bedroom in my early 20s function just fine. My wife has daydreamed for years about a super-affordable co-living arrangement for students and recent graduates. (The step from living in a dorm to moving into her own apartment and furnishing it felt artificially large.) These arrangements, real and imagined, are simply new, largely illegal versions of SROs.

And because SROs would appeal to many different kinds of people, I am hopeful that they would be socially heterogenous, certainly more so than our existing housing stock. Which is to say, not only the province of people down on their luck, or yuppies for that matter. That is a recipe for healthy community and the kind of economic integration liberals such as myself (it’s complicated) and progressives say they want.

YIMBYs should advocate forcefully for SROs, given the pervasiveness of gray market group houses, and the obvious improvement over people sleeping rough. Their funding and how they are developed is almost secondary to the basic notion that SROs should be allowed. Knowing that there is probably an ugly recent political history around SROs, I still have to ask: As housing advocates, what are we waiting for?

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