States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option
pew.org
pew.org
Single room with bed and desk, bathroom down the hall, shared cafeteria on the first floor with breakfast and dinner served every day (lunch expected to be eaten at the office).
Not a bad set up for a young single person. Especially considering a lot of the dorm residents left early in the morning and didn’t return until the last train home.
Of course, the dorm room setup is less vulnerable to exploitation if the dorm is rented or purchased separately from one's employer, otherwise you not only risk losing wages (and, in the US, access to health insurance) but also your home if you're laid off.
GP comment was obviously referring to Anatole France, who wrote sarcastically in 1894:
> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Youth hostels used to be able to discriminate with a lot of requirements to prevent chronic homeless from using them (you need a passport, you need to be under a certain age) but as soon as those criteria disappeared, they basically become unviable.
The elderly (or the lazy) would also benefit from this kind of living arrangements.
Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer.
Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
This oft-reported statistic is wrong. It's based on a survey that simply concluded that they wouldn't necessarily pull that amount from savings to meet an emergency expense. That doesn't mean they can't afford it or don't have more savings than that.
You're right that the question they used is a bit vague, but there is a ton of other data in there that points to affordability as the main cause e.g.
"Nearly a quarter of Americans have no emergency savings"
and:
"Sixty percent of Americans are uncomfortable with their level of emergency savings — 31 percent are very uncomfortable, and 29 percent are somewhat uncomfortable."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses...
WHAT?
The US Federal Government spends over $3 TRILLION on social services. US states collectively spend around $1 TRILLION on social services.
This is what's available just in my state:
- temporary housing
- free drug treatment programs
- free addiction services
- free food at hundreds of food shelves that also offer other amenities.
- free public transportation
- free and low cost job training
- free and low cost pharmaceuticals and medicine
I've never been homeless, because in several instances, I've actually used social services to survive and get back on my feet because that's why they're there. People complaining there is no support system are either willfully ignorant these programs even exist, or are just too lazy to take advantage of them. And I don't remember ANYBODY in ANY of the non-profit, state funded or state run offices asking me about my race or sexuality before they offered to help me.
I honestly don't know what you're on about man, but saying there is no support system is pretty crazy to hear someone say.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis or be inflammatory in your commenting style.
Rather than fulminating and attacking other community members, which is clearly against the guidelines, please think of a way you can draw on your experiences to educate others who may not share your experiences and thus may not be aware of the reality for people in this situation.
The "one missed paycheck away" is cited a lot, but it's not entirely false, if a bit of a hyperbole.
The majority of Americans (recent estimates I believe are around 60%) have no savings, and live paycheck to paycheck. So while not exactly "one missed paycheck away" it's pretty close. More accurate would be to say "Most Americans are one crisis away..."
Median weekly earnings for full-time workers in the US was $1,196 in Q2 - so, half of Americans make even less than that (~4,700/month). That's not a lot, and in a lot of areas of the country, that doesn't leave much room to save much of anything, especially if you have kids and need childcare.
Going off the BLS consumer expenditure survey from 2023 (most recent one I could find), average spent on housing was $25k/year or 2119/month, almost half the median monthly earnings. Just housing. Factor in food, transportation, healthcare, utilities and it's not hard to see how people can, and are, struggling, and are effectively one mishap from falling too far behind to catch up.
While most Americans don't have "emergency savings" (heck, I don't), most of the credible studies more realistically peg it as 25% of American adults or 1 in 4.
Even so, $80k household isn't a pretty picture with today's housing and food costs except for the most LCoL areas, and in those the income is going to be considerably lower. To afford the US today, we need to be closer to $80k+ individually rather than for the whole household.
This is why you see so many homeless veterans. They often end up geographically separated from family and see relationships weaken due to time and distance.
Whenever someone says “mental health” as a causative factor in a social problem, that’s saying “don’t know, wont fix”
Are they? Happy enough for what, exactly?
"Happy enough" that housing that excludes queer people, men (or people who look like men), people who need to not have their names be public information because they're hiding from abusive prior partners/parents, pets, people who are currently addicted to drugs (and thus cannot realistically never have drugs around), or any of a host of other restrictions, will not be something they consider an option.
(Note that these restrictions are a) from separate sources, not all on the same thing, and b) things I've heard about in the context of shelters, rather than low-income housing; however, it would not surprise me in the least if similar restrictions were placed on various programs to help house the homeless.)
There are cases where the street is safer or has more autonomy, like you say. Solutions need to offer similar things, so privacy, the ability to indulge in some little pleasures, to come and go at your own schedule are basic table stakes.
A housing unit that lets you stay there indefinitely, for free, in an apartment that you can have to yourself—but doesn't allow alcohol, or is sex-segregated, or where you're mandated to come out and work for a specified period every day, or even that gets regularly searched for drug paraphernalia, is not going to work for a lot of people.
Basically, housing for people like this needs to have, if anything, fewer restrictions on its use than housing for the general public. Give them the space to fuck up and to heal at their own pace, and not have to worry that those very normal kinds of problems will leave them worse off than before (eg, because if you're kicked out, your stuff gets confiscated—or even just because with these projects in place, there's less of a community of homeless people to support each other for those who still don't "fit").
Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.
If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
WTF are you even talking about.
There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-gr...
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.
Obviously crime is constantly a worry in a tent, but theft is rampant in shelters.
I mean, yes, shelters have issues and being away of them is often the reasonable choice. But, calling homeless in tents "middle class" is beyond absurd.
100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.
If a vagabond or drug user can keep their habit from interfering with my safety and health, they are more welcome to do as they please.
> their habit from interfering with my safety and health
Needing to shit isn't a habit. If you weren't aware, its a basic life function, like eating and breathing.
Its telling that you're piggybacking that on to your complaints about drugs (and also ignoring the untreated/poorly treated mental illness and straight up poverty legs of the homeless tripod).
Nobody says: "Well, I'd stand behind funding public roads, but I won't since people don't follow traffic laws on them."
But a person who tries to camp out in the bathroom because it's an indoor place and their tent was taken/destroyed by the police etc, does functionally prevent others from using it as just a bathroom. Similarly if someone locks themselves in to get high. The bathroom then not only doesn't give the broader public a place to pee, but also becomes a liability where whomever is responsible for it periodically has to have confrontational interactions. People and organizations seem to have a strong preference for avoiding such interactions and will go awkwardly out of their way to avoid them.
It's like once your city has a bad issue with homelessness, a bunch of public services get distorted around making them not be encampments. A couple examples:
- At one point SF was considering fare-free public transit and the mayor basically refused on the grounds that unhoused people would just use buses/trains as a place to hang out indoors rather than to go anywhere in particular. It's not that she hated the concept of public transit in particular so much as that having the ability to exclude the homeless was viewed as a way to keep transit as transit.
- The closest library to me got some press for shutting off its wifi after hours, not because anyone using the wifi was bad per se, but because a semi-permanent encampment was erected around it, so the unhoused population could access it.
Insane drivers doing dangerous shit are by far the biggest threat to my health and personal safety on a day-to-day basis. And next to nothing is done about them.
But we have to acknowledge that the instant you make a bathroom "public", it becomes a place to do drugs, turn tricks, and sleep. Even if you're fine with a bathroom being occupied for hours for non-bathroom tasks, it makes the public bathroom a toxic area, with drug paraphernalia (including needles and other waste products) and used condoms as discarded litter at best, and clogged infrastructure at worst.
We need to provide these services for any human who needs a toilet, *and also* figure out ways besides incarceration to effectively deal with uncooperative drug users.
I'm not ignoring a thing. If you follow the thread to which I'm replying, it starts with someone discussing the "homeless by choice" and follows with someone suggesting there is not difference between the impact of a homeless person and a housed person on the community.
My point is even if you entirely self-motivated, it's still something you should support for selfish reasons.
That said, streets and parks are public spaces meant for the enjoyment of all. Public urban camping robs civic value and turns public property into private spaces. Excessive tolerance of it is a failure of policy, not actual policy.
This must be one of the most brain-dead things I've read on this site. It's "not even wrong".
My guess is as the asset bubbles pop, the marginal 70s-90s apartment complexes and second ring suburbs will be the new slums. People aren’t going to be able to afford cars as policy changes accelerate cost increases and wages continue to erode. City and near suburbs will be more attractive and expensive.
You already see this happening in larger metro areas to some extent.
From reading the article:
1: I got the impression a lot of these places weren't drug infested slums.
2: I got the impression that young, independent middle-class people could live in the nicer ones and save money. (Which they could use when they were ready to buy a home, start a family, ect.)
SROs of yore came in all types, but one of the most notorious were flophouses, like the infamous "chicken-wire hotels".
That's what happens in a free society. We can't force people to be responsible adults when they don't want to.
(But we can, and should, contain any mess they create, which I think you and I agree about the bigger details.)
* No one wants to live next to low barrier housing (for drug addicts, that don't require drug treatment or other social programs), not just the most generous people who like you think these people should be helped, but even other homeless people! They will try their luck outside because you just put them in with a drug addict crazier than they are.
* If your city starts handing out free housing to all of its homeless, it will just attract more people in need of that housing, to the point that you started out with 50K on the street, housed 50K, and now you have 100K on the street! This is a problem with local solutions at least: the better you treat the problem, the worse the problem will get. Local resources quickly get exhausted with no visible progress made (and worse: things are worse than when you started!), even if you are technically making the country a better place.
SROs and rooming houses of the past...still had standards, they would kick out people who were causing problems. The only reason it seemed better is that enough people were afraid of losing the little housing they had to keep their problems/addictions in check enough to keep it. It was just crappy enough that no one wanted to be there who could do better, having a bunch of SROs didn't necessarily make your city a destination.
tl;dr low housing price (in a region with jobs of course) beats ANY negative factor. At least until it's not literally slums, and possibly not even then.
Anyways, none if what you said has anything to do with the visible homeless who have many other issues to work through before they can even think about paying even a little rent.
I feel as though there would be a different tenant in the modern era. Some would be migrant young men trying to save every dime, but many would be those suffering mental illness, and they'd fill the unit with tons of stuff. Can you imagine how much more stuff Americans have these days than they did back in say 1900? I genuinely think that the volume of stuff/garbage would be a legitimate fire or structural hazard. No landlord would want that. Back in the old days landlords had a lot more ability to force out any tenants they didn't want.
Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space. Our city has tried "housing first" and it's been a disaster. The units are filthy, damaged, and the buildings don't pass minimal standards when the housing department inspects them because the "tenants" and their associates have destroyed them.
I do believe most SROs had a "no visitors" policy so that might help somewhat but there would have to be strictly enforced requirements about not trashing or abusing the property.
Dirt is brown.
Therefore, dirt is a cow.
First, I'm challenging the statement:
> Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space.
Which is nonsense and a damaging stereotype. Drug addicts and mentally ill people exist in all areas of life and many are successful - more so than you or I.
Secondly, I'm challenging you on:
> The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
Because in fact there is now a great body of evidence that shows that housing-first, that is providing housing with no pre-conditions, is in fact extremely effectively at treating both uncontrolled addiction and untreated mental illness.
Proposed housing units are literally for them.
I pulled those numbers out of my ass and you can play with the numbers to change the proportions but the problem still stands. At any one time the system is going to be somewhat saturated with the "problem people".
Now, I don't think that's a problem. If someone thinks they can develop and profitably run SRO housing with a bunch of those people then good for them. But that makes some people feel icky about it.
This is exactly the kind of fact-free demonization the article described as responsible for the elimination of SROs which caused the explosion in homelessness.
Single-room units would bring down the cost of housing for everyone, but those with influence and money have decided that we don't want it in our community.
At this price point, you're essentially only going to be renting to people who are currently homeless, which is great from a societal standpoint. However, you can't ignore the fact that substantial portions of the homeless community, and therefore your potential tenants, are either drug addicts and mentally ill people.
1 out of every 10 of those people will cause more property destruction than could ever be recouped in rent from the other 9. It just doesn't work for private landlords.
Give it another couple years and I’m sure the courts will dismantle the FHA. Then landlords will have to find something else to complain about.
Not Tokyo, not Moscow, not Austin.
First one I clicked, $600 a month
https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320
I can find cheaper
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
For comparison, Seattle WA has a minimum wage around 2.5x higher than Tokyo. Here is a larger apartment [2] that is only 1.33x more expensive than your Tokyo broom closet.
Go ahead and find something more akin to the American sized apartments (500sq+ for 1 bd) and you'll see that the prices are almost the same, with much lower wages across the board.
[1]: https://kb.nkba.org/2016/11/new-nkba-research-defines-averag... [2]: https://www.apartments.com/amherst-micro-studios-seattle-wa/...
As a result, the US also doesn't have such a collapsing population as Japan.
All while just 3 hours away by car, beautiful houses are crumbling into dust. You literally can get them for the price of the land tax, and there are even companies that specialize in finding them.
Any questions?
Math has to take into account that if 30k people want to move to a city, and you build 40k houses ( to drop prices), well now maybe 50k people want to move to the city and prices will still go up!
If you create the regulatory climate that allows the market to provide housing, you can probably absorb a few tens of thousands of people over a few years. Most of these places don’t do that at all, other than Austin.
You're pointing yourself at a graph that shows an exponential spike in prices up until 2023, just as my model of density-price death spiral predicts.
And the only reason the prices stopped growing is the population _decrease_ after COVID lockdowns. The ACS data series ( https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S0101?q=Austin,+TX ) gives 979,263 people in 2019, and by 2023 it recovered to 979,200 after falling to 944,658 in 2021.
So no, Austin has not managed to lower prices by building more. It managed to do that by using a worldwide pandemic that lowered the city population.
And yes, lowering the population is the only way to lower the housing cost. You don't have other options.
Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
NYC did this over 100 years ago, it became one of the world's most important cities.
SF did the same thing, it became a tier 1 world city.
Same for Chicago.
Then they stopped doing it.
Then no other city in America even bothered trying.
Also housing prices don't go down immediately with new construction, there is a latency. More so, sometimes prices just stabilize, but if prices stay the same for 5 years, and inflation and wages go up, that means the effective price of housing went down. If you keep building and prices stay the same for a decade, all of a sudden houses are affordable.
SF
No, they won't. For the same reason adding a lane to a busy freeway doesn't increase the traffic speed.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> A massive apartment building boom in the Austin-Round Rock region has driven rents downward, real estate experts and housing advocates have said.
Why do you even think this?
The evidence is screaming that we are clearly in a massive housing shortage.
No, they don't. They got a one-time pause in the price growth from a _falling_ overall population. Here's the price chart for housing in Austin: https://imgur.com/a/WzauEIp
The population has either not yet recovered, or it has just recovered to the peak 2019 level. I have conflicting data. But nevertheless, once it comfortably passes the 2019 peak, the prices will continue growing.
Because it's not possible. Large cities can't sustainably grow at more than single digit percentage per year speed.
And at that speed, the density/price death spiral easily consumes all the housing.
Seattle was mentioned here, and it grew its number of housing units by 25% over 12 years. Oftentimes leading the country in the number of active cranes.
Can you guess what happened with housing costs? I give you three guesses.
> Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?
No. You get the fall of democracy, demographic collapse, and in general other nasty consequences when the bill comes due.
Because it's essentially a zero-sum game now. The population growth has mostly ended, so every new dense housing unit in NYC means a new abandoned house in rural Ohio.
Want a stat that will blow your mind? The US has 1.1 housing units per family. We literally have more houses than families in the country. Yet somehow it's a "housing crisis".
https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/26/apartment-rents-denver-fa...
Next "example", please.
Edit: as expected, the reason for the price pause is the falling population. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2019.S0101?q=Denver,+CO
2019 - 727211
2021 - 711463
2023 - 716577
More and more data seem to confirm my points.
For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.
Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)
So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.
Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.
And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.
So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
Hence why we are down to moving outlets over a inch every version
> Why Can’t American Cities Build 3-Flats Anymore?
1. The "homeless problem", that is, the problem of mentally deranged or violent vagrants that make public spaces less usable or unwelcoming. This is difficult to impossible to measure, both in impact and in extent.
2. The "transient homeless", that is, the down-on-their-luck or otherwise situationally homeless people. This is easy to measure because these people will attempt to secure housing and services to get back on their feet.
Fixing #2, while worthwhile in itself, does nothing to fix #1. But well-intentioned people trying to fix "homelessness" find it much easier to address #2 because there are measurable outcomes, and no messy compromises to be made about civil liberties or individual freedom vs civil order. And this relies on the fact that since the same word is used, that it carries the same connotations. People hear "reduce homelessness" and they think that this means fewer people screaming about brainwaves and starting fights on the subway, but that's a completely separate issue.
EDIT: removed discussion of SROs to another top level comment to avoid confusing discourse here
3. Transient homeless that tried to get back on their feet but was met with the notion that all the options were eventually exhausted (they lived on their friend's couch until he got married). They even had dishwasher jobs, but inevitably, because rent was $2000 more than they would ever have - they decided to do drugs and live on the street because no amount of work at the wage they would be paid would ever make their life meaningful.
Imagine struggling with addiction or mental health issues. Now imagine doing it without a safe and secure place to even sleep at night.
For drug addiction the problem is more subtle but I question whether this part of the pipeline is worth considering when looking at the problem at scale. There is no serious attempt as far as I'm aware to measure the number of people that transition from #2 to #1 style homelessness, and since it is difficult to measure this it is very likely that solutions to #2 will have no effect on this pipeline.
To be quite blunt: Someone who's making an SRO unlivable is mentally ill, and needs to be in a place that's appropriate to handle their needs.
Failing to clean up after yourself in the kitchen or bathroom; playing loud music or coming and going at odd hours, even things like having frequent visitors can be enough. SROs and boarding houses used to have all sorts of "unreasonable" restrictions because of the close quarters, and not having those restrictions makes this untenable.
Yes, this power will be abused arbitrarily by managers/landlords in racist and classist and ethno-cist (is that a word?) ways. Attempting to prevent that will lead to the same regulatory quagmires that got these things banned in the first place. You just have to accept the mild social injustice. If you cannot then SROs will have to be banned.
Yes: I'm trying to avoid mentioning a recent executive order that helps this.
Basically, SROs aren't a place for mentally ill people, because "You just have to accept the mild social injustice."
Not saying it isn't worth a shot, all for it. I just don't know if this eats up that much demand / houses that many people these days.
In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.
Here's just one source I found on: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...
I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.
- Homelessness, which likely worsens mental health, increases drug usage, reduces tourism, creates a massive eyesore for everyone else, etc.
- Lack of disposable income—if folks are spending more on a rent or mortgage payment, they're not spending as much on goods and services.
- Inequality—artificially constricting the supply of housing creates a game of musical chairs, where some inevitably get left out and, because of that, can't climb up the social ladder. It also favors incumbents who already own homes or received their parents' home.
- Sprawl—zoning restrictions stifle the construction of high-density housing, which makes cities inaccessible, increases car dependence, negatively affects the environment, etc.
Trad homeowners with solar, grid connection could offer cheap power to help recharge faster.
This is only becoming a problem because local communities are using their legal weight to prevent enough condos & apartments from being built to satisfy demand. So now we have more homeless people and high rent problems.
So the greedy landlords are the would-be heroes of the story and the politicians are the bad guys?
Curious to know about how homeless correlates to city / town / urban / suburban ect.
I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
Most likely because the cities have services available and the smaller towns don't. My wife works with the homeless where I live, and many in this small city are from the surrounding smaller, more expensive towns/suburbs - because of the lack of services in those towns, and their hostility to homelessness, they hop on a bus and come here because they receive much better care and have more opportunities.
I'd imagine this is common elsewhere too.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
Arkansas is the lowest-cost state and still spends $23,000/prisoner/year. The median is $65,000/prisoner/year. 11 states spend over $100k/prisoner/year.
Edit:
$100k/prisoner/year
That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
Yeah, there's either some severe inefficiencies there (or a ton of budget pork going to the wrong things), or it's a canary in the coal mine telling us that people actually should be making at least that much to live, and the fact that they aren't is a big problem, if not the main source of our societal problems.
I think you are on to something though. Get rid of the bad parts of prison and they are accommodation and a car-free city within.
> "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."
In the US we call it a Bed and Breakfast and some people pay a premium for such accommodations!
This is exactly what I rented when I moved to NYC two years ago. It was a month-to-month single room in a six-bedroom apartment. I’m not sure how legal it was, but I rented from a company with a web site, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, it was substantially more than $300/month - something like 4-5x
Lay this at the feet of the individuals who thought they knew what was right for everyone and leaned on the government to act. Be that action local zoning, state laws or federal thumb on the scale money with strings attached behavior.
Ideally, you'll even see the pattern and use it to crap all over contemporary examples of the same.
The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC.
By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.
Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_.
> Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich?
Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive.
This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact.
Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.
You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k.
Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.
What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
Who's talking about rural areas? There are plenty of small cities with ~100k population. With the WFH, it's entirely feasible to live there.
But no, we're spiraling into an ever more toxic housing density/cost pit.
But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH? Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
Certainly if you have a well-paying WFH job you can work from nearly anywhere. I'm an example! I live in a rural area, precisely because I have a WFH job that enables it. But I still acknowledge that I'm that exception, not the rule.
2. You can live in real rural areas without doing agriculture just fine.
> But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH?
There are estimates that go as high as 60% of the working population in the US. During COVID, it went up to 72% but that clearly was not optimal.
> Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
These service jobs can also work in smaller cities. The _only_ way to solve the housing problem is by creating _more_ of these smaller cities or by increasing the size of existing cities by a bit. There's no harm if a 50k city becomes 100k by adding a couple of suburbs. And this provides plenty of population to need baristas, waiters, hair stylists, etc.
I'm very anti-urbanist and I'd like to see abominations like NYC to be demolished, just like we did with polluting factories. But there's always going to be a need for central places for services and businesses, and it's fine as long as they do not start growing uncontrollably.
With this level of wealth inequality and these seeming like a good idea, I'd say we're gearing up for a bloody good time, to say the least.