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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

> We need SRO's. (snip) We don't need "homes for the homeless." We need homes for the people.

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?

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I currently live in an SRO. It has real walls. It has real plumbing. I have internet access and electricity 24/7. There is a kitchen down the hall and I am allowed to cook in my unit, though you have to supply your own means to cook, such as a microwave or hot plate.

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.

Regarding the housing in Japan, I've heard from an expat that a lot of tenants are discriminating against foreigner, often explicitly.

Reasonable people DO live in SROs - surely you've heard of college dormitories? Sharing a bathroom and kitchen while having your own bedroom (or one shared with just one other person) is worlds apart from living in a tent without plumbing or real protection from the elements.

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 don't think it's the only solution

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.

There's startups doing exactly this, "dorms for adults": https://www.geekwire.com/2018/quasi-dorms-adults-gain-popula...

> surely you've heard of college dormitories?

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".

There are loads of people who would be perfectly happy to live in an SRO. They've been outlawed by people who either want to run off the riff-raff or just don't understand housing.

we have built them recently in Seattle, but they are called "micro-apartments", and they seem pretty popular, although we are making them harder to build. I used to live next door to one seemed like a pretty decent place to live and had excellent bus access.

https://apodment.com/capitol-hill-apodments/videre/

Just because you wouldn't want to live in an SRO doesn't necessarily mean others wouldn't. I don't think she is suggesting building Hong-Kong style cage beds, but it sounds like something more like a college dormitory. It's not ideal housing, but for many maybe worth the price. Look at all the people renting bunk beds in SF - maybe they would prefer a single room?

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