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In very few places in the US would "no heat and no toilet" be acceptable, regardless of price.

No heat seems bad, but I'd bet SROs with shared bathrooms would be extremely popular in NYC if they were legal.

I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a startup trying to do this: https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-housing.htm...

“In the city of New York there were laws passed to push the private sector out of the SRO business [and eliminate SROs] on the theory that SROs were inhumane. Consequently, people sleep on grates outside.” — George McDonald

SROs, residential hotels, boarding houses and the like were all banned in the 1950s (and the surviving ones dismantled through the 1980s), a loss of about 100,000 units of affordable housing.

Consider this lovely e-book for further reading: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

Or this lovely Simon and Garfunkel song about the NYC homeless on the streets of SoHo, contemporary to that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVnPIE3juc

"Acceptable"? It wouldn't even be code.

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