The Last Men’s Hotel in Chicago
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
But there are still single-room occupancy buildings, or SROs, around. They are largely clustered in Uptown. I would link to them, but, perhaps unsurprisingly: not much of a web presence.
And let me tell you, as one of those gentrifying tech folks living in the new or refurbished developments in Uptown and Edgewater: there are some nice folks there. One of them gave me a clicker randomly to help me train my dog. Walk by these buildings every day, they always compliment my dog.
https://chicagoflaneur.com/2020/04/24/portrait-of-chicago-up...
Even lightening building codes, and zoning requirements (allow for very small rooms). If the Infrasctructure bill promised more of this type of housing I would be thrilled. I'd be happy with a few public restrooms strategically placed around cities, but I guess I'm the only one that needs easy access to a bathroom!
1. It's obvious homlessness is just getting worse. I just heard the head of the Federal Reserve comment on the increasing size of the homeless encampment mext to his office.
2. We need building codes that encourage small simple housing units.
3. I like the hotel doesn't have a list of rules. I feel giving people some control over their lives is very important. I like there are no mandatory religious meetings, or curfews. Treat a man like a thinking adult, and you might be suprised with the result?
4. Yes--I understand this place is in disrepair, but why couldn't we built simple housing? I sometimes think authorities make projects more complicated because they secretly don't want anything built, especially for the poor.
5. Oh yea, America needs more people like thus guy:
"Wesley Duran, a porter at the hotel. “I try to give everyone respect, treat people fairly here. There’s too much hatred in the world for me to go that way. We’ve gotta be nicer to one another.”
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way, so I see all the things wrong in my downtown and have some idea of what broke and why.
So one of my online projects is a website called Project: SRO trying to put together info about where things went wrong and how we could course correct.
The people opposing the projects absolutely don't want them built. For the one, there was also a discussion of having more poor people in the area that is a few hundred feet from the poorest census block in the county.
To a first approximation nobody wants an SRO on their back yard. Me? I am just fine with it, I have lived near SROs for years. But…oh whatever, I’ll be blunt: Karen doesn’t want a giant building full of itinerant men on her block, and she is going to fight tooth and nail to prevent such a thing.
I'd put this in the same category as "ok boomer" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Society may be divided about how ok those putdowns are relative to others, but in an HN context it's flamebait and name-calling, so it breaks the site guidelines. Your comment would be fine without it.
To many, this seems like exploitation. They’d rather have people living on the street than have a business make money off of them.
And it's not even the exploitation. Believe it or not, it's the fact that there is no one to hold liable if things go wrong. At root, it's about on which head does liability rest. You don't meet code, firefighters rush in, and the staircase collapses. Who do the cops and the firefighters go after? If it's the owner of the SRO, then no real estate investor will build one. (At least, not one that isn't up to code.) You can try to loosen the code, but the firefighters are only going to allow you to cut so much before their unions have your picture up on billboards around town as the big, bad, slumlord pushing for substandard housing.
Owning a lot of real estate is not a picnic, and you learn a lot of things you never knew before about how local politics work.
Slumlords who don’t maintain buildings to code are bottom of the barrel renting to a very limited and desperate clientele. Encouraging that is nuts.
The notion that evil firefighter unions are making real estate expensive by advocating for codes that put them out of business is probably the most ill-informed comment I’ve read in some time. Absurd. Getting rid of balloon frames and cocklofts raised construction costs... but saved thousands of lives.
Considering the way these cities are going they will end up with a lot of people on the street.
But since SROs are illegal almost everywhere in the US, the few that have stuck in our memory are the ones for folks who didn't have any other real choice, rather than the ones that were simply the best choice.
I'm not sure how perception might shift. If I were to spitball, steps might include finding catchy names that combine student housing, nursing homes, and general-audience SROs and finding a couple flagship projects where luxury towers have high-floor SROs geared toward minimalist tech/finance bros and rich people in need of a crash pad.
There needs to be SRO's catered to non-poor people just needing a place to crash while exploring a city, minimalists, etc.
Outside America the hostel/guesthouse scene worked well for me as a longer term traveler, I even met others doing the "digital nomad" thing and fairly well-off people so there isn't a stigma like in America. When I mention the concept of hostels (even private room ones) to less-traveled Americans, some rolled their eyes and made comments about personal safety, poverty, and "not having your own big space."
One such issue is busses. People with a choice will gladly ride trains and streetcars, but busses are stigmatized.
It turns out that if you design a bus line a certain way, busses are every bit as good a transportation system as light rail up to a pretty high throughput, and often cheaper (always cheaper upfront). But even places with really good Bus Rapid Transit lines, folks don't want to get on a bus to get them where they're going faster.
This is HN, I suspect many of us have taken company busses. I've known tons of people making over 500k/yr who took a bus to work in the US. And that was a bus that gets stuck in traffic! People not wanting to take a bus is not fundamental to the mode, it's a perception thing.
In much of the world, there's no stigma, and everyone will gladly take a bus if that's the best way to get where they're going.
I got rid of an SRO in my neighborhood. It was a shitshow... drug deals, issues with open containers and prostitution, car break ins, etc.
There are NIMBY assholes. But there are people who just want to live their life peaceably. Something like an SRO can turn from OK to a nightmare with a change in management or ownership. Nobody in their right mind wants one nearby.
To be fair, this is not necessarily one person holding a contradictory position, but the only realistic outcome of a process where people can't agree on a solution; several groups agree the encampments are a problem, but if they can't agree on a solution than the only action taken is removing the encampments.
Trying to pretend that the "bad part of town" can be removed if we just figure out the magic steps is part of the problem.
There are no easy solutions to these problems, at anyrate. We will all have to make a few trade offs, but they have to be more reasonable than dumping all of the problem in a few places.
On HN, fortunately, we have a simpler playbook than the Big Book of Social Norms Worldwide, which is impossible to make consistent. It's at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and I think that the rules "please don't call names" and "eschew flamebait" suffice for us all to just avoid the Karen thing here.
Notice I really haven't used the term myself (or "boomer" in a derogatory way) but it's the sort of thing that admittedly ruffles my feathers.
EDIT: Alright, apparently I did allude to someone being a boomer once, but it was fittingly in a generational way and not as gratuitous name-calling.
An example people probably won't like is those mixed income buildings (can't remember where now) that had separate entrances for the subsidized units. It's definitely not egalitarian in some sense, but if it allows more subsidized housing to be built for people that need it, is it really better just to not do it?
But the masses simply ignored the service provision aspect and screamed "Why do you guys have a poor people door!?!?!"
I've often wondered if mass transit would do better if we just openly had first class cars and otherwise segregated them on a price level.
I don't live in a dangerous area (Westminster), but targeted robberies happen here too. I (and much less my girlfriend with her high jewellery obsession) wouldn't feel super comfortable living in a townhouse or apartment building without 24/7 security staff.
If someone wants to kidnap or assassinate you, this kind of security will probably do nothing to stop them. At least it'll disincentivize robberies, there are easier targets out there.
You see this with other goods too, notably cars. Creating a car that meets all contemporary safety standards is hugely expensive.
Is that safety a net good? Yes. Does it have societal costs? You betcha.
And those kind of affordable housing schemes are a joke from a social perspective. Yes, it's great if you win the lottery. But it doesn't do much for the 99.998% of people who don't win the lottery.
We are going to build giant housing projects (with what capital or grants) and then create mass transit to them?
How’s that ended up working so far?
It survives in part because the neighbor across the street is the Metropolitan Correctional Center [1] (an architectural masterpiece that was ruined by painting it about 10 years ago). The other reason it survives is that many buildings are owned in full by people that just aren’t interested in huge piles of money. When they pass away, their children will surely cash out and another skyscraper will rise.
There are quite a few hole-in-the-wall lunch places along this block. My favorite was a fried chicken place with some homemade (?) hot sauce. Around the corner is a fantastic old-school pizza place and I think the guy who runs it owns most of the buildings.
[1] https://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/ccc/index.jsp
It's squeezed between Federal and county buildings, and the commercial district. It's not residential but neither is it an undesirable part of town (w/r/t physical location). Indeed, it's the site of the old Chinatown.
It's as if this singular block was forgotten as modernization/gentrification reshaped everything else. It's curious.
The pizza place is Boni Vino and the lunch crowd is floor traders and guys with thick Chicago accents. Full bar at lunch.
It should be noted that this is unlikely to happen, unfortunately.
https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/school-closures-and-gentri... https://prospect.org/education/gentrification-school-closing...
Like Campus 805 in Huntsville, Alabama, they're much more likely to be torn down or redeveloped into a play-space for new transplants. Any sort of public service runs directly counter to the purpose of shutting down those schools in the first place.
It doesn't help that it's across the street from a prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Correctional_Cent...) .
(edit, looks like OldHand2018 said basically the same thing I did!).