With your experience, what solution would you offer knowing the situation better than many here?
http://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Just as one data point, we have torn down more than a million SROs in recent decades while population has risen. SROs used to be a normal form of market rate housing that worked well for people just starting out who didn't have much money and didn't need much space because they were single and childless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
We also need to resolve the health care coverage issues in the US. Health insurance eats up a high percentage of the US GDP. Most homeless people have serious health issues, either physical health or mental health issues.
This is a significant contributing factor to homelessness. There are studies that show that when people get affordable health coverage, it reduces the risk of eviction.
https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/12/14/one-side-effect-of-th...
We don't need "homes for the homeless." We need homes for the people. We currently tend to build homes for rich people only and basically shrug and say "not my problem" when the rest of the US can't make their life work.
Then we act like homeless individuals are simply defective individuals and weren't screwed over by a broken system. No, they just need to stop drinking/using drugs, obviously. "It's just a personal issue."
Never mind that new housing has more than doubled in size since the 1950s and added substantial additional amenities at the same time that the average number of occupants has declined. These changes in housing pushing up housing costs couldn't possibly be related, no. Ask anyone with a good income and cushy life.
I'm curious if you have any short term solutions to give the people that keep pooping in front of my office at night a place to poop while we try to implement these solutions.
I've suggested just handing out key fobs and the key for the first floor bathroom of our building but it was turned down by management. I'm not sure what we can do but I'm sad that the best option for a poo for whoever is doing this is our doorway.
If it were me, I would create a "homeless map" for the area. I would list all bathrooms nearby that are reasonably publicly accessible. I would probably also include other useful information. I would print multiple copies and hand them out liberally.
If you want to do this:
If your city has actual public bathrooms, make sure to specify where those are. List park bathrooms. List mall bathrooms and grocery stores and department stores, like Walmart or Target. List hours available if possible. Highlight anything available 24 hours.
Put a blurb on the bottom half of the page about cleanliness and health and the rise in disease among the homeless population caused by unsanitary conditions. Recommend that they carry hand sanitizer and spray peroxide to clean up after toileting. (Spray peroxide is available at Walmart and CVS Pharmacy -- it's cheaper at Walmart).
Do not put the info on the internet. I have reason to believe that publicizing such things online just attracts more homeless to your area. Instead, make it a paper handout and hand it out.
Give it a few weeks and then start calling the cops on these people if it doesn't stop. In nearly six years on the street, I never pooped in anyone's business doorway. Some homeless people intentionally do assholish things like that because they are mad as hell at how the world treats them and they want to express themselves.
This is a sanitized version of the flier I have been giving out to local homeless services and the local police department. I removed the paragraph with local information. Anyone here is welcome to adapt it for their own use.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5CsLmHLPUV1uehvRtu17H9y...
Oops. Updated the link to a "shareable" one. Let me know if you have any problems accessing it.
On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to live in an SRO, so why should I accept that for homeless people?
When I was in college, I loved living in the dorms. I don't understand why that isn't more of an option for people. It's a community in a building rather than along a street.
I totally 100% agree, but your suggestion for SRO's sort of seems to counteract your statement above. Why would we build tenements for homeless, if no reasonable person would want to live in one?
If we want people to not be homeless, shouldn't we build them homes. Like real homes (where "real" means that at minimum, it meets all the same legal requirements that a 'market-rate' 1-bed or studio apartment would?)
If we need "homes for the people", shouldn't we actually build that? And not tenement/dormitory/SRO things that aren't really housing?
To my mind, SROs work just fine. They weren't always perceived the way they are currently. Our current American expectations for space, a full kitchen, etc etc etc is not the historical norm.
It isn't even the norm from around the world. In Japan, which has much more affordable housing than the US, from what I gather, it's common to room with other people in a two room rental where one room is a bathroom with only a sink and toilet and the other room is where everyone sleeps. Japan has public bathhouses. They related differently to various things than we do.
From what I gather, ovens are an oddity in Japanese kitchens. They typically have a wok and maybe stove top, I'm not sure. They usually don't have an oven.
When I got divorced, the two and three bedroom apartments I inhabited with my two sons had fully outfitted American-style kitchens. We often kept sodas in the fridge, not because we needed them cold, but because the fridge was too big for our needs. If we didn't keep something extra in it to keep it full, the milk would spoil because it didn't stay cold enough.
I don't think our standard American housing expectations are currently serving us well in a number of metrics. Our expectations are rooted in the assumption of a four or five person household consisting of a stay-at-home mom, two or three minor children and a breadwinner father. It was dreamed up in the 1950s post WW2. In the years since, our demographics have diversified and such families are much less common while single young adults, childless couples and single parents have become more common.
I have also seen on TV shows that when you house hunt in Japan, they tell you the time it takes to walk to the nearest public transit station, not the time it takes to drive various places. I have heard a lot of good things about how Japan handles housing. They seem to generally do a much, much better job than the US.
SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing. Additionally, this style of housing is often far cheaper to build than even tiny studios, enabling more units to be built on a faster timeline. Some would even consider the social aspect a positive, as living completely alone can be very isolating.
I don't think it's the only solution, but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.
I did list it as "just one data point" in my above comment. I am generally promoting the idea of Missing Middle Housing, not SROs. SROs are simply one form of many that we largely no longer build. I provided a link to the Missing Middle Housing website that defines the various forms of housing we largely no longer build.
The website doesn't even list SROs, though I think they could reasonably be assumed to fit under the heading "residential above commercial" in most cases.
Of course I have (I explicitly mentioned them in my first comment). But are you volunteering to move back into your college dorm room right now? No? Why not? Reasonable people do live there, right?
> SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing.
So, I partially agree. Calling an SRO "temporary housing" is totally fine by me. But if, by your own admission, they're 'best considered temporary housing', then it's not really housing, is it?
If my home burns down, so I move into an extended-stay hotel, I'm still homeless, despite being in a hotel room. That hotel room does not mean I am no longer homeless, just because I'm living out of it. If I run out of money for the hotel room, so I start living out of my car, my car does not count as "housing", just because I'm living out of that instead.
> but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree -- the studio and 1-bed units should be those very low-cost housing options.
It's one thing to use SROs in places where we don't want to fully respect human autonomy (like College Dorms, or Hotels, or similar). But these are not replacements for housing, they are only temporary placeholders at best.
Port-a-pottys work because they are temporary toilets. We don't use port-a-potty's as a long-term solution to sanitation, we build real bathrooms instead. For the same reason, why would we burn money building SROs for poor/working-class people, when what we really need is long-term housing?
Or in general, why is everyone so quick to devalue the importance of quality housing? As the OP put it, why are we so quick to push ideas that "no middle class person would accept".
Bungalows are basically small houses, not trailers.
In practice, it still needs clarification on preventing sprawl and allowing car-free transportation:
1. This type of housing (various mid-level multiplex housing) seems to pragmatically fit in the area between urban (high-rises) and suburban (single-family homes) for cost and accessibility. To prevent sprawl, more people would have to choose middle housing over detached (single-family) housing, and there would need to be more of a geographic cap to the suburbs. There needs to be some compulsion to discourage developers from buying cheaper rural land to push the suburbs out further with more detached homes and McMansions for people who want to be further removed (thus having an unintended consequence of more sprawl).
The US in particular has so much damn land its been crazy to see new suburban developments pop up in just a few years. Conversely, in Europe (or Japan), it would be astounding to see suburbs being built the way they are in the US where there always seems to be a supply of land.
2. Public transportation needs to seriously catch up to allow for car-free middle housing. US cities have had so much planning around cars that public transportation is still a greater inconvenience in various cities. Buses and trains need major improvement to be cheap and reliable. Bicycles (and mopeds) also need to be less of an afterthought to appropriately integrate with the other forms of transportation.
I don't know how to fix this without city grid changes and/or more transportation investment (or incentives to use it). Relying on a $10 metro ride, or 2 hour bus ride, or 3 hour walk is not convenient to get across town on a daily basis.
In some ways, SROs may be more immediately impactful than middle housing. SROs can house more people for the given real estate in urban areas, and could offer shorter/easier commutes to work. Perhaps they are also cheaper to maintain if they are in high rises setups.
In NYC, there are "Projects" buildings next to newer, "luxury" apartments in various neighborhoods. If that kind of setup works, why does adding SROs not?