For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homeshttps://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
Missing Middle housing is being widely advocated for. It is also, to use your phrasing, "shittier housing." It is smaller and more dense.
Part of why we have such a big problem is because housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and housed about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is over 2400 sqft and houses about 2.5 people.
Our housing standards have gotten ridiculously inflated such that only rich people can afford them. The solution is absolutely to start setting some more reasonable standards for basic housing such that we stop actively pushing people out into the street.
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...
I'm not saying "Let's go back to grass huts with dirt floors and no plumbing." I'm saying that renting a room was a perfectly normal thing at one time and wasn't considered to be "slum" housing.
It was fairly normal for young people from even wealthy families. This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.
These are typically intended for people in their late teens to early twenties who are unmarried and childless. In both cases, it is normal for them to eat at a dining hall of some sort as a routine thing.
We cannot solve our current housing crisis by arguing that housing is a basic right and then setting such high standards that we can't afford it as a society.
I have six years of college. I have an incurable medical condition. I occasionally get a bit of money out of compassion from people who don't know me well, but charity is not enough to resolve my problems.
I'm not suggesting we need SROs everywhere. But I'm hardly the only person recognizing that we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere. If I were, YIMBY would not be a movement and there wouldn't be resources promoting the idea of Missing Middle housing.
Our housing standards were shaped by the events surrounding the end of WW2 and American housing caters to an idea that a home designed for a nuclear family is the only acceptable housing. Meanwhile, people are delaying marriage, delaying having kids, having fewer kids, living longer after the kids grow up and move out, etc.
We have more families with three or fewer members than we had at the end of WW2 and we don't design housing for their needs. When I got divorced and my husband physically moved out, my sons and I had to start storing sodas in the fridge because the fridge was too large for our needs and if we didn't find some way to fill it up, milk would spoil.
I lived in Germany for a few years. Entire families have fridges the size of what are mostly found in college dorms in the US. You don't absolutely need a 20 cubic foot fridge to serve the needs of a household, but that's what we get, whether it works for us or not.
And in Japan, it's weird to have an oven. Americans who buy homes in Japan typically have to add an oven because that's just not standard over there. But they cook plenty and eat well and have world famous cuisine that has inspired restaurants and restaurant chains around the world.