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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) in an effort to remove slums or just neglect at increasing property value. There are now over half of a million homeless. It's honestly impressive the number is not more.

For the 1.2 billion dollars they are spending, if all of the apartments were built to the spec of a roadside motel room (~350 sq ft - or more than double the average SRO), they should realistically be able to build over 10,000 units for that kind of money (that's including California's exorbitant cost per square foot).

It would be like if the government banned motorcycles, and then said "okay, instead we'll make you a nice, compact crossover", and then handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows.

What's frustrating is that SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers! How much better a use of government money it would have been to just improve the situation in SROs than to quietly let them shutter and hope the poverty they represented just disappeared with them.

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This...is not wrong. Pioneer Square in Seattle used to have a lot of flop houses, part of it being the original "skid row" (logs skid to the saw mill, really muddy and not a desirable place to live). My grandfather in Spokane unwittingly ran a rooming house we cousins called the "empty arms" (inherited from his sister), which housed a lot of people who were just barely getting by.

Seattle's flop houses are mostly gone now...Spokane's are disappearing rapidly and is creating a new homeless problem in an area that used to be fairly immune to it (because of access to cheap housing).

China/Hong Kong and some of Asia have created a new spin on SROs with capsule and pod housing, China leverages a lot of sub-basements for SRO housing (without access to windows because underground), while Japan has cheap 2.5 tatami sized small room apartments. None of these would be allowed in the west, they are barely living, but maybe we should start thinking about them as an alternative to a much worse situation?

As a single guy and a software engineer, I would pay full price for a pod housing if the area is safe convenient. I'd rent a co-working desk nearby and save a ton of money.

These types of housing just aren't available in Vancouver (or NA in general), but I can totally see a market for it.

Yeah I'm past this point in my life but there was nearly a decade post-college where I would have really enjoyed continuing to live in dorm-style housing with other people at a similar stage of life. Saving money on top of it would've made that a no brainer. It's a bit tangential to the discussion on SROs to address homelessness, but I wish that SROs were a more acceptable housing style for a variety of use cases.

My girlfriend lives in a household with 11 people in it by choice. It's not for me but I get the attraction.

Montreal is kinda OK so far! Well until the Hongkongolese notice it if they haven't already!!

Saddens me that the top earners in our world have to dream of affordable housing so they can save a bit of money. Probably not enough to buy a house in that same area. Sigh.

He is in one of the most expensive places that pays below market pay. When money fled Hong Kong a lot of it moved to Vancouver.

Why is that sad that he doesn't want to spend money on housing he doesn't want?

It's sad because: how about average-earners? How about earners and non-earners?

But it's not because he can't afford it, it because he doesn't want to spend the money.

Publix in Seattle is a perfect example.

A developer bought them out, them combined every 2-3 SROs to make a (still small) luxury apartment.

I do not begrudge the developer. If you were to propose the opposite (taking an existing set of luxury apartments, and subdivide them into more rent paying units), it would probably be more profitable, but you would never get the plans approved.

> it would probably be more profitable, but you would never get the plans approved.

I'm not sure it would be in this market. Catering to people with money is pretty profitable. Catering to lower income tenants...even with more scale on your side, might not work out, especially with the extra overheads involved (with Seattle's strict eviction laws, for example). Most small-scale landlords in Seattle are trying to get away from even moderate income housing that might require them to fund moving costs because of future rent increases (as well as rising eviction costs...it doesn't make much sense to rent to anyone but a very well funded and low risk techie).

I remember watching this fight play out in real time in Seattle:

https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/somethings-rotten-in-roos...

> Most in the crowd were furious about the Sisleys’ refusal to help keep up the neighborhood. “I feel like I’m watching a neighborhood crumble,” said David Ahrens. Another angry resident added, “These are transient places. People are moving in and out. I think you need to get more aggressive with them.”

> In 1994, after the DCLU took action on a number of violations at Sisley properties, including the illegal conversion of a house that was zoned single-family into a six-unit “residents’ club” house, Gilbert brought a similar suit against city officials.

Then there's all of the Carl Haglund stuff.

I think people have tried to cater to low income tenants, and all of them have been run out of town.

Sorry, Publix in Seattle!!?

Ah, "The Publix" - I saw it a few times in ID and was confused with the SE/Florida based Grocery Store.

That's a possibility

The other possibility is that we should root out the corruption in this process. I am not generally a fan of privitization at all. In the private market however you're building 2/2s in LA for less than half of the cost including furnishings and fixtures.

By that I mean a 2 bed, 2 bathroom, with all of the traditionally middle class loved touches including faux marble, and faux wood flooring etc.

The situation LA is in is unconscionable as 4,000/mo apartments are going up for rent and developed for less than 350k.

The issue here is definitely corruption and not ability, cost, or the need to put people in Parasite style apartments.

> The issue here is definitely corruption and not ability, cost, or the need to put people in Parasite style apartments.

You claim corruption, but provide no evidence of such, just that the result doesn't make sense to you. But instead of corruption, maybe it is just capitalism at work here? Developers go with what the market demands, and that demand comes through what the market is willing to pay. In that case, they develop $350k units because they can rent them out for $4k, that sounds really profitable. Why would they bother doing what you think they should do if they can't make money doing it that way? Or is it alleged corruption that allows this behavior? If so, what kind of corruption?

I suggest its corruption because I also develop units in Los Angeles and have multiple (5 specifically) bids in my inbox from the last two weeks for building out completely fresh 2/2s on new ground with new foundations in the 350k mark. Including all of what I've mentioned. And they're definitely making a margin on me.

That would be why specifically 800+k for a unit described smells of corruption.

Heh I lived in one in Spokane, which was a former brothel. Rent was cheap and the people were OK but it was infested with endless spiders.

"I want these barely homless people out of my community" turned into "I want these homeless people out of my community"

How do you unwittingly run a rooming house?

You inherit property from your sister and...after putting work into it, realize that you are only getting low-end tenants. I guess it is hard to call it a rooming house, they were full apartments from what I remember, but we still thought of it as a flop house.

It didn't last long, he gave the place to my uncle after running it for a few years. My uncle quickly sold it after fixing it up a bit, he didn't want to be in that kind of business either.

I'm not convinced this isn't done intentionally to prevent a deflationary market.

I don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of Slums.

In fact, my first apartment, ironically in LA was a very small step up from an SRO. It had a private bathroom, but not much else.

Now the city has effectively made this housing illegal to build.

These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. It's never been about helping people, Garcerti and the boys just ripped off the people of Los Angeles.

A more realistic plan would be to offer relocation assistance or at the very least relax building requirements.

None of that will happen, my first, my beautiful 600$ apartment is now 1300$. I miss the city LA used to be.

I had the privilege of living in a neighborhood with 3$ bottles of Soju and 4$ Tortas. It was absolutely amazing.

> I don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of Slums.

"Criticizing hotel life was one thing; effectively controlling it was another. By 1910, reformers had established the idea that hotel housing was a public nuisance. From 1900 through the 1940s, interlocking groups of reformers and landowners transformed objections about hotel life into practices to control living in hotels. For the goals of the culturally and socially reorganized new city to succeed, aberrant forms of housing had to be prevented and removed—slum and hotel alike. Yet gaining control was neither automatic nor preordained. Hotel housing was entrenched in some areas and in others, still expanding (fig. 8.1). A few handfuls of reformers had to do more than galvanize public opinion against the notion of living in hotels; they also had to establish whole new governmental organizations and procedures to give cities and states the necessary legal and bureaucratic power." https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

"As with the SFRA's applications of blight and nonbuilding, the actions of other hotel-closing agencies were not (in their own minds) aiming the wrecking ball at the homes of the poor but "eliminating dead tissue," "applying the scalpel," "clearing away the mistakes of the past," and building "an attractive new city." About a Norfolk, Virginia, hotel district, one planning journal editor reported in 1961 that "progress had reached the demolition stage." Local agents crowed that they had "reduced to rubble . . . scores of flophouses not renowned for adding luster to their city's good name."

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

> These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos.

What is luxurious about them? Or are you referring to the price?

My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.

> My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.

Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?

My first apartment didn't have a kitchen. And it was fine, we are talking about a homeless shelter. You do not need to have stainless steel appliances, it should be a short-term stopgap until you find a better solution. Historically lower income people had to share common amenities like a shower. Just because it would be nice for every single person to have a big apartment with brand new appliances doesn't make it feasible .

I don't know about you, but given the choice between sleeping on the streets or having to share a shower with a reasonable number of other people, I'd share that shower.

Instead LA built a bunch of vanity projects which provide no real help to the vast majority of homeless people. The only thing you can really do is move your feet, which is what I did .

Anyone struggling to find affordable housing in LA should get out. You can move to Vegas and drive in every other week to see your friends.

No, we are not talking about a homeless shelter or a temporary stopgap, these kinds of units are the "something better" that people in homeless shelters and other temporary stopgaps are in a holding pattern waiting for.

Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

> Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather than junkies who moved in for better weather and benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.

Ask the Democrats and judges if they think that's reasonable.

And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves back where they can stay close to their drug sources and still rotate with their panhandling around enough that the locals don't get too familiar with them.

So if you want to do something about the vagrant encampments being in the city you live in, the most effective thing that you can do is move to where they aren't, which is what everyone else who cared that much about it already did long ago.

Ship them where? Can other cities ship to LA/SF? How does this work?

I assume the model would be to build the same kinds of supportive housing facilities but to do so in markets where the same budget buys more units.

> Why?

Morality and optics of forced relocations aside, because it leads to cycles of retaliation by the places they are shipped to.

> Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times

I don't know about LA, but this has been studied for SF, repeatedly, and they are.

That is preposterous. I believe all homeless should be provided some sort of shelter, but I absolutely don’t feel they have any entitlement to that shelter being in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.

My friends who couldn’t afford Santa Monica moved east. Riverside, San Bernardino, etc. They bear horrible commutes but did what they needed to do to afford housing for their families.

Why do we just assume that homeless have some god given right to be housed precisely where they happen to be sleeping. Regular people migrate all the time to accommodate their own economics. Let’s build homeless some cheap housing. And let’s do it somewhere in the middle of no where where land is cheap and building costs are low.

I fail to see how this is controversial if it isn’t controversial for my friends who voluntarily do the same.

I think the question is would you rather have a shared floor bathroom with no kitchen or live on the street. If the room is free, sure I'll take the room, but if the room has a price and I have no income, I might take the street and save the money. I think this comes down to the privileged arguing about what's best for the less fortunate. Our worlds are so different from theirs, even basic communication and understanding is difficult.

I lived for 3 years in a college dorm with no kitchen or bathroom. I even had to have a roommate.

Some of the best times in my life.

For my senior year I moved into an apartment with my own bathroom and kitchen. It turned out to be a step down.

I’m sure if we offered folks without homes the opportunity attend university and live on campus instead, then some would definitely accept the offer!

The army doesn't offer private baths and kitchens, either, for their troops.

This is shameless.

If the other option is living on the street, why not?

The problem is that not everyone has a well-paid IT job, and some people barely make ends meet. These people need a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build and maintain. It's still much better than living in a tent as your primary residence!

> If the other option is living on the street, why not?

That's a big "if." Surely not a significant portion of this $800k or the cost of any "luxury" apartment is due to it having a kitchen and bathroom.

building codes make a "luxury" apartment and an "affordable" apartment approximately the same. the main difference is how much rent can be charged.

The question was, is it luxury?

> If the other option is living on the street, why not?

Those aren't our only choices.

> some people barely make ends meet. These people need a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build and maintain.

And they also, like other humans, need kitchens and bathrooms. Also, kitchens save a lot of money - cooking is by far the least expensive way to eat.

I agree.

But it's better to have one kitchen for several units ("single rooms"), than none at all, and not even a single room.

Back to the beginning: I don't think that decrepit SRO buildings had to be perpetuated. But I suppose that moving people out of them should have included an offer of some other affordable housing, back in the time they were being removed, I need to find out what has been done.

> But it's better to have one kitchen for several units ("single rooms"), than none at all, and not even a single room.

I guess, but I wonder if kitchen construction is really holding back affordable housing.

> I suppose that moving people out of them should have included an offer of some other affordable housing, back in the time they were being removed, I need to find out what has been done.

I know that in the mid-20th century, in at least some cities, when the governments cleared African-American neighborhoods for freeways, white developments, etc., there were some promises but mostly people were left high and dry. Also, remember that black people couldn't get loans- direct policy of the Federal government and New Deal - or even decent-paying jobs (or an education to get jobs ...), so they didn't own the properties where they lived (they rented) and wouldn't have received that compensation.

My apartment in Lausanne had a bathroom and a kitchen, except the kitchen was one stovetop and a sink in a small cabinet next to the door. It was small, still cost me 900 CHF/month (in 2006!), but Lausanne is expensive.

I don't think those would be allowed in most (American) cities either, I don't think 20 sqm is rentable.

My first place in London in 2003 was £520 a month, about £875 today. It was a 10 square metre room with a shower in one corner, bed in one corner, small kitchen sink in one corner, and a door in the fourth corner. There was a shared toilet.

Ideally I'd have had a slightly smaller room, but with a private toilet (there was certainly enough space in the footprint for a 2m*1m toilet/sink/shower), but apart form that it was great (given the cost - about half my net income), far better than sharing a house. As a young person needing to be close to a London office but without the luxury of having parents giving me a free room.

> What is luxurious about them?

I'm reminded of a previous thread where I asserted that America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings :-/

Basically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.

Incentives for governments to deliver good results are much lower than in the private markets(not non-existent though), which is why governments are so bad at capital allocation. Its almost like the government wants to look like they are doing something, without ever actually following through.

I think you misunderstand the incentives. The elimination of the residential hotels and boarding houses of yesteryear (to be replaced with two-or-three bedroom apartments) was a deliberate exercise in class warfare, and the governments in question were largely delivering what voters wanted.

The remarkable part is the people who still defend the measures as for-the-poor's-own-good.

I very well might, but my particular observation is with government behavior towards most projects, not just the one in this headline.

Well, what should have been done is enforce laws (and pass legislation if necessary) to prevent the SROs from being allowed to decline into slums.

Then you're just back to where you began -- a situation where government is going to need to takeover, because nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent single men if they're required by law to make them as nice as middle-class apartments.

What modern Westerners seem entirely unwilling to acknowledge or accept is that if you require by decree that all accommodations look like middle-class accommodations, then you'll absolutely be able to get rid of all those worse accommodations, but you won't have done anything to address the reasons they existed in the first place.

> nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent single men if they're required by law to make them as nice as middle-class apartments.

What exactly do you mean when you say "as nice as middle-class apartments"? Are you talking about how nice the carpeting and hardwood flooring is? How nice the building looks from the outside? How likely the roof is to leak or collapse? How safe the electrical wiring and fire suppression systems are?

What if it's closer to the latter? Like, what if the building doesn't have GFCI outlets in the kitchens? And maybe the roof in one of the bathrooms leaks and there's been a bucket under it for the last few months? And maybe the heat was out for 12 days last month? What then? What if the price of saying, "sorry, that's unacceptable" is that those men sleep on the street, instead?

In the West that's exactly what we've done. We've said, sorry, no, you can't provide housing that looks like that, so the operators of those establishments said, OK, then, I won't. And now those men sleep on the street.

We seem to think that we can demand of proprietors whatever we want and they'll have no choice but to comply. But it's simply not true. At some threshold they'll just shut down. And then I guess we can celebrate the elimination of "substandard" housing and declare ourselves morally cleansed.

I get what you're saying, but surely there ought to be some limit on how unsafe a rental property can be, right? For one thing, at some point it actually won't even be true that "it's better than sleeping on the street." When the cheap electrical wiring causes a fire that burns down the apartment building and kills a few dozen people, that probably wasn't better than if the victims had slept on the street that particular night. So if your landlord is selling you a nightly probability that you'll be safer than if you had slept on the street, this "better than the street" sound bite sounds a little less appealing. Not to mention that the rentees probably aren't properly informed of these probabilities.

Secondly, I think it's a false dichotomy in practice. I find it very hard to believe that basic safety codes alone cause the difference between SRO-style buildings and "luxury" or even "middle-class" apartments. What percentage of that $800k was spent on the GFCI outlets in the kitchen?

To be clear, I'm not an ideological libertarian. I just happen to think these are genuinely difficult problems and the tradeoffs aren't always obvious. In some cases, we won't like any of the options.

So, yes, I agree with you. Surely there must be some limit. But what's optimal?

I don't claim to be able to draw up very specific legal code here, or even that there is some "objectively optimal" answer. I just don't think "it's better than sleeping on the street" is a great mode of argument, because 1) it might not even be true if people were fully informed of the risks associated with every rental unit and 2) even if it is true, society might not be willing to allow landlords to earn unrestricted profit from renting units that are infinitesimally "better than sleeping on the street."

Even if SROs would be slums, they would be better than the street slums of LA. How is a tent city better than a decrepit building?

The tent cannot fall on your head? But I get what you mean.

> The tent cannot fall on your head?

That is a good point.

Tent cities are preferable to poorly built dangerous masonry.

Well they were often considered slums by politicians by who lived there, not by the craftsmanship of the build.

I once saw a very beautiful large building on hackernews. Then one person commented that it was turned into a dozen condos so that it was affordable to everyone (including racial minorities).

The next HN comment immediately talked about how that building is a slum.

You literally cannot see the residents inside. It's impossible to tell. It's the same building but now somehow it was ruining the character of the neighborhood. Strange.

More like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-term actions with negative long-term effects.

Precisely this. In LA there are constant referendums about homelessness, in CA massive budget increases, and yet, nobody will allow a shelter or multi-family unit to be constructed in their neighborhood, lest their soaring land value peak.

In CA, it's my firm belief that people have a tad too much power over the minutae of government operations. What did we even elect people for if we are going to try to solve everything with referendums and protests?

For some reason, referendum-soaked Switzerland is governed somehow more sanely.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Switzerland

If you somehow could swap the US population with the Swiss (times 30, of course), I imagine our homeless problems would evaporate within a few years. I believe homelessness represents a social issue in North America, not a political one. I live in New York and I don't think any amount of affordable housing, handouts, or government intervention solve fix the problems of the people I walk past every day, nor will they stop the pipeline of people soon to be in the same position.

Luckily, SB9 and SB10 are massive pushes in the right direction for California, accompanied by incandescent rage of my local NIMBYs.

those bills are for political optics and favor, not to really make a dent in the homelessness issue. they're designed to allow people who already own land to make some extra cash, not to provide housing (less than 2% of CA residential properties can even take advantage of them). what we need are real, significant zoning reforms. things like making every residential zone mixed-use (residential + light commercial), and remove setback requirements, floor area ratio (FAR) restrictions, yard/parking specifications, and height restrictions.

So CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide more towards tyranny?

Sounds more like too much direct democracy, and needs to slide further towards representative.

You mean too little direct democracy. Only a handful of people are actually engaging in local politics and therey are no longer representing the community as a whole. Special interest groups are the opposite of democracy.

Is that your opinion on marijuana policy in California?

Which issues, pray tell, are best governed by local control and which are best governed by top-down, remote decision makers?

The emperor can also be your representative, and so is Putin to russians, and the slightly more complex US system. The slider is democracy to tyranny, just because we dont yet have democracy in most or all countries doesn't change anything here. We just have twisted its meaning to describe some decision power when choosing tyrants. Either all decide equally-democracy , or fewer to very few or one-tyranny.

Feels like a flamebaity false-dichotomy.

Is it really tyrannical to, say, elect officials to act on our behalf and consider long-term impacts and x-order effects?

Because to me that just sounds a little more "republic" and a little less "direct democracy".

Absolutely not. Democracy can be fair and open elections, not crowdsourced legislation.

That's exactly it. One of the reasons that the US (and other representative democracies) have limits on direct voter rule explicitly to prevent a "too democratic" situation yielding "mob rule" outcomes.

Sounds like a reason to justify tyranny to me. What do you mean mob rule. In a (true) democratic society just a small group can change something the majority disagrees with because they got together? The majority is also together in the same matter isnt it?

Well, the idea recognizes two concepts:

- We don't want the minority enforcing on the majority

- We don't want a plurality or even a majority enforcing on a minority under certain circumstances

So, for instance, even if 300 million Americans think "sfe22 should be stripped of their assets and have it given to us 300 million" that's not going to happen. Yes, that is 'tyrannical' of you to have such power but it is so nonetheless.

Unfortunately I don’t agree. If 95% Americans want to steal my assets, something is wrong with the them (or me), and I should have probably seen it coming and leave. Why would I want to live in such extreme society anymore. If I was used to set an example that still would tell many a lot about this hypothetical america. Would a tyrant really be of any help then, maybe if it was somehow “good” to me, for a limited time but definitely does not justify its existence and cost on freedom and wealth.

Right, and that's your thesis for the world, but America lives under a different thesis, and some individual rights are protected, _even_ if 95% of people disagree.

Who decides what are individual rights? Would they be held up if 95% disagree with it? I mean it might work idk, it would just not be a democracy.

You're right. 95% is a bit much since they'd just amend the constitution and whack me. But it goes up to 66%-1 in the legislature, and I think that would correspond to ~75% in real life, so that's good.

That's the paradox isn't it. Mob rule ends up being tyranny.

Democracy isn't a Boolean value, it's a cluster of loosely related concepts and practices.

Total democracy is mob rule of the majority.

Voters didn’t order the SROs in bunker hill destroyed. Follow the money. Who stood to gain in the time when that SRO was raized into a parking lot then turned into the hotel Bonaventure in downtown LA? It wasn’t voters, it was a handful of politically connected people.

I think you may underrate how much people in the local community hated SROs. It was definitely politically popular at the time to remove them.

And why not allow them now? If you compare the housing market to the job market, the general opinion (in the US) is that there should be very few restrictions for jobs in terms of low salaries and work conditions (and the lack of unions allows that). The same reasonning should allow to have low quality housing but cheap. But there are no downside for the ones who profit from employing people with very low salaries and very poor work conditions, whereas letting exist cheap housing indeed makes the property value around them go down. So it is really a choice made today not to reduce homelessness.

Yeah, voting whites hated the low income blacks latinos and asians who rented these, doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

You can drill-down to a specific SRO building to find a unique story, but the overwhelming trend from 1960-2010 was to eliminate SRO because of health and safety concerns.

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

A positive interest rate demands short term actions with immediate effects and disregards negative long term effects. Getting rid of positive interest rates requires eliminating all monopolies. It is a cat and mouse game but it is THE cat and mouse game. If you win you win big.

Collectively we would be better off but many individuals would not be which is the crux of the problem.

SROs have returned as urban co-housing dorms for z-llenials. They consist of a cramped bedroom, sometimes with a private bath. But shared cooking, dining and recreation spaces.

The only thing is they often cost a lot relative to what they are and therefore aren't exactly a viable solution to someone who can't even manage rent with roomates

Where do all these numbers and other claims come from? Without evidence, we're all writing works of fiction - compelling stories, but not reality.

> handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows.

Who is analogous to the snowplow building company?

> SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers!

What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?

>What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?

That they housed people who today live in nylon tents with no plumbing/hvac/security.

What is that based on? And what did SROs provide? Did they provide plumbing, HVAC, and security? I never heard of SROs being known for their a/c and security, and the plumbing didn't have a great reputation.

They provided your own room with a lock on the door and a bed, and a shared bathroom and kitchen, for a price that was substantially lower than any other unit of housing on offer in the area, so yes they provided these things. If these things were lacking, then it was the state of the times in code enforcement and you would expect these things to be lacking in any lower income housing unit during this time as well. That doesn't mean a modern SRO would be filled with any more code violations than your typical low income apartment today since code enforcement has gotten more modern.

Again, what is all that based on? A story without evidence is fiction - a nice story, but not reality.

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