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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

Exactly what kind of "sub-standard" are we talking about, here? Sleeping in a tent definitely is better than in a house that might fall on you or electrocute you.

Ed: I like the idea of dialing back some building standards, but I'm worried about defining the conditions where it would be allowed (in particular, making sure it doesn't become a de facto default), and whether it would in fact be logically equivalent to just living in tents.

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I specified as clearly as I could. SROs are typically one room. They typically have a sink, refrigerator and closet and shared bathroom facilities and shared cooking facilities down the hall. Some are more like a hotel room, with their own private bathroom, but no kitchen. They typically allow hot plates and the like.

We tore down up to 80% of them over the course of a couple decades. If it isn't designed to house a family of four, the US seems to think it should not exist. So, many of our youth end up living with roommates because they can't afford a family home on their own and there aren't more modest options available.

Edit in response to your edit: You might find this article a good read elucidating the issue: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo...

Many millions of Japanese people live in these conditions (ワンルーム) and consider it to be normal. It’s all a matter of perspective, setting reasonable expectations, and adhering to standards. If everyone acts like these conditions are tantamount to failure, it is failure. If everyone shrugs it off as a fact of modern life, there’s no shame in it.

This is one of those times you should have used romaji

ワンルーム = wanruumu = one room

Thank you, all three of you. This little snippet has been such a delight, for so many reasons.

If you’re googling, it’s better to use katakana, since ‘one room’ will pull lots of false hits and no one writes ‘wanrumu’. It’s easy enough to translate if you can’t read it.

We also destroyed public housing by failing to fund it (and make it desirable to people who could afford to live elsewhere). Now we just rent the space from private companies that proceed to skim off large chunks of cash, all while selling the now really valuable land under old housing projects to fund such short term logic.

Why the government would ever 'rent' something like housing is beyond me.

Not only that, but we have millions of churches sitting around getting tax breaks for their "community contributions" while locking their doors 5 days a week so that taxpayers are building homeless shelters to keep the bums from stinking up the pews.

Ok, "sub standard" is entirely the wrong term for this. When you replace it with "unconventionally small", I'm unreservedly in favor.

Also, "SRO" is ambiguous without the expansion. Even when I googled "sro housing", the result seemed to be an organization, not a type of housing unit. I still don't know exactly what you're referring to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

I put the term sub standard in quotes for a reason. It is only sub standard by crazy American cultural standards. Most parts of the world would have no problem with such housing, as attested to by comments here about how common this is in Japan.

But in the US, SROs have largely died out as a market based solution. Many of them today in the US are part of the shelter system, which creates substantial differences in reputation, quality, application and intake process etc.

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