The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market

Loss of the bottom of the market

• Commenters recall cheap single-room occupancies (SROs), boarding houses, YMCA rooms, and even rented garages as crucial first rungs for immigrants, young workers, and people “down on their luck.”
• Their disappearance is widely linked to the visible rise in homelessness; several note that people who once would have been low‑income tenants are now on the street or in cars.

Why they disappeared: multiple causes

• Cited drivers include: exclusionary zoning, minimum-unit/amenity standards, building and fire codes, moral panics about “undesirables,” gentrification and land speculation, and HOAs and local politics opposed to low-cost density.
• Others emphasize legal shifts: strong tenant protections, anti‑discrimination rules, and requirements like private bathrooms and sprinklers increasing costs or making the business model unworkable.
• Some argue financialization and redevelopment into high-end apartments and offices, rather than regulation per se, is the primary force.

Tenant laws, eviction, and adverse selection

• Many argue SRO-style housing is incompatible with modern tenant protections: if eviction takes months and is expensive, operators cannot quickly remove violent, destructive, or heavily disruptive residents.
• This is said to create a “Dead Sea effect”: stable but poor tenants leave, problematic ones remain, and buildings spiral into disrepair.
• Others counter that protections are needed against abusive landlords and that overprotective laws also discourage small landlords from renting to higher‑risk tenants at all.

Neighborhood impact, NIMBYism, and zoning politics

• Nearby residents complain about noise, parking, trash, and crime from high‑occupancy houses; defenders respond that these costs must be weighed against street homelessness.
• Several see local control of zoning as structurally exclusionary: people who can’t afford to live in an area don’t get a vote on rules that keep them out.
• HOAs and suburban municipalities are portrayed as powerful anti‑density forces; some say they themselves are creatures of environmental and infrastructure rules.

Design, amenities, and modern feasibility

• Debate over what low-end units should include: shared kitchens vs microwaves/mini‑fridges vs cafeteria-style food; some note that truly cheap units can’t support hotel-level cleaning staff.
• There is disagreement over whether property taxes are a main cost driver; some see them as a large, perpetual burden for low-income housing, others see land and construction as more important.

Drugs, mental illness, and social order

• Several insist today’s concentrated mental illness and hard-drug use (e.g., opioids) make communal living far harder than mid‑20th‑century SROs.
• Others argue these issues already exist in encampments and shelters; SROs with private locking rooms would still be an upgrade and a platform for services.
• There is tension between calls for more supportive, even involuntary, mental health housing and fears of repeating past institutional abuses.

International and modern analogues

• UK HMOs, Vancouver and Chicago SROs, Japanese low-end lodging, co‑living startups, and Chinese ultra‑cheap studios are cited as current or partial analogs, often with tradeoffs: landlord abuse, fire risk, underfunding, or being pushed out by gentrification.
• Some note that in many US regions, informal high‑occupancy housing (bunk beds in apartments, room rentals) persists, often in legal gray areas.

Policy ideas and ideological splits

• Proposals include: nationalizing zoning or “NIMBY‑busting,” Georgist land taxation, more state‑owned or 99‑year lease housing, legalizing high‑occupancy rentals, and church‑run or nonprofit SROs.
• Others argue for stricter limits on urban density and more incentives for remote work and smaller cities, seeing megacity concentration as an “urbanism death spiral.”
• A separate thread debates universal basic income and attitudes toward the poor, with some claiming cruelty and control, not cost, drive resistance to more generous support.