The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market
ryanpuzycki.com
ryanpuzycki.com
My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
And rather than being refuges for same-sex couples and generally "[offering liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores", they were the opposite -- often being extremely stringent in "morality" clauses and forbidding mixed company after dark. They were frequently racially exclusionary in ways that became incompatible with civil rights laws.
The reality is that the situation was probably a mix of both attacks -- attacks through over-regulation and tenant rights, as well as direct attacks on SROs as hotbeds of crime and illicit or immoral behavior, but I'm curious as to the mechanics of how this came to be.
I moved to logan square before gentrification. There were two SRO buildings that I knew of. Both were redeveloped by the time I moved out.
SROs often serve as half-way houses for people getting out of prison so there's a lot of community opposition. All the SROs that are left in Chicago have been around a long time, there aren't new ones being built and the old ones slowly go away when the area gentrifies.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
Tenants rights can make existing SROs harder to get rid of since evicting everyone so you can refurb into apartments or whatever is too costly.
>As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants
That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
The reason we see these simplistic narrative is because nobody wants to blame their pet favorite regulation for having any hand in it.
A great example is HOAs. Everyone wants to complain that they stand in the way of diversification of housing stock or use of land (they do). Nobody wants to address the fact that they're infinitely more prevalent than they would otherwise be as a side effect of environmental regulation and often their absurd rules were a condition of approval of the development in question in the first place.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
https://www.calassoc-hoa.com/about-us/our-objective-hoa-data...
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/acd767...
there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.
Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.
Don't forget snow plowing and sidewalk maintenance and the cluster of mailboxes down by the gate where the driveway meets the main road and the pool and and and and and and....
It's like the touchscreen in a goddamn car. Once you have it you get lazy and use it for everything because it lets you cheaply add "premium" features.
I agree that a lot of these HOAs should be dissolved, but like everything else involving real-estate it's less painful in the moment to keep on bending over and taking the status quo and hoping you can pass the buck to the next sucker.
If you really want your blood to boil, a some of the larger stormwater features (for example those drainage ponds commonly found in certain regions beside the highway or on the outskirts of strip malls and other large commercial development) wind up getting regulated as wetlands, they are constantly wet after all, and the legally implied setback and permitting requirements can push over the property line depending on the details. And that's assuming they build them right, that water being returned to the ground affects the height of the water table, with potentially huge negative affects on nearby properties.
The problem in many cases is that it's against state law to do that.
Also, once the HOA is in existence, it starts accreting other powers that have nothing to do with storm drainage, simply because it can.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
You announce or plan some "affordable" housing in an area, or actually these days ANY housing that would increase housing units and decrease demand for existing homeowner homes, and it's like a telepathic demon takes over every homeowner regardless of Trump or Biden signs on the lawn.
The knives come out, and it gets killed.
People would rather have homeless outside their houses than any sort of project that will dilute their unsustainable growth in housing values.
You can also find medium-term, single-room rentals on sites like FurnishedFinder, often explicitly catering to traveling nurses and other medical professionals. Again, my strong suspicion is that many of these violate local zoning laws, and nobody really cares.
Possible that tenant rights could have had some negative impacts as you say, what's the timeline on when that would have been happening? We do know that very early on that wealthy neighbourhoods were working hard to prevent SROs (prevent multi-unit buildings at all really) for class and racial exclusionary reasons. We have a great deal of direct evidence of this in contemporary reporting on these issues.
> By the early 1900s, cities and states were classifying lodging houses as public nuisances. Other laws increased building standards and mandated plumbing fixtures, raising costs and slowing new construction. Urban reformers next embraced exclusionary zoning to separate undesirable people and noxious uses from residential areas. SROs were deemed inappropriate in residential zones, and many codes banned the mixed-use districts that sustained them.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
1: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/mayor/Press%2...
For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
I'm skeptical that there are landlords who want to run SROs, having interacted with landlords, they see SROs as being more work (maintaining lots of public space like shared kitchens) for undesirable tenants. Further, in the unlikely event that a landlord would want to run an SRO, they will have to deal with nimby opposition. I just find it difficult to believe that laws designed to keep existing SROs open would be the threshold for preventing new ones. Additionally, we don't have to speculate because there were no new SROs being created before the law passed.
Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.
Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.
Another way of seeing this is "Sure, I'll give it a shot, but if it turns out to be a bad business I want the option to bail, rather than getting trapped slowly going bankrupt with a 90% empty building because I'm not allowed to evict 4 tenants and do something else with it."
The bigger problem is that no SROs were created in recent history before the law was passed. To say that there's some demand by landlords to create SROs but for the law you would have to show SROs getting created before the law, and that stopping after the law. The law was written to preserve the existing SROs with the understanding that the era in which SROs were an attractive investment was already past.
Secondly the OP claims without evidence that the law didn't slow the rate that SROs are being redeveloped. But gentrification in Chicago has accelerated so even if that's true the law is doing its job if the rate of SRO destruction didn't likewise accelerate.
But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?
I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.
I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.
So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.
One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.
Anti-discrimination laws
• 1968 Fair Housing Act made SROs “dwellings” subject to full federal anti-bias rules
• 1974 McQueen v. City of Detroit: an SRO that refused welfare recipients was liable
• 1982 Sullivan v. SRO Management: an owner who turned away unmarried couples violated marital status discrimination
• 1988 FHA amendments added “familial status” making “no children after 8 pm" illegal
• 1974 UFC required sprinkler retrofits
• 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
• 1986 low-income housing credit gave 130% write-ups for new construction but only 90% for rehab of existing SROsI'm not sure if > 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits means that SROs are required to have private bathrooms, which would absolutely damage the model and doesn't strike me as strictly necessary.
You could also just as easily argue it was naive reliance on the market that led to this failure. It doesn't take much thought to come to the conclusion that this approach will never fully alleviate basic housing concerns.
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
However, I don’t get the impression that this is a balanced look at the problems facing SROs in modern times. The article barely touches on important details like the relocation of low-wage jobs away from the SRO locations or the rising amount of mental illness collected within such arrangements:
> In the 1970s, states emptied mental hospitals without funding alternatives, pushing thousands of people with serious needs into cheap downtown hotels unequipped to support them. What was left of the SRO system became America’s accidental asylum network—the last rung of shelter for those the state had abandoned.
I think low cost communal living arrangements with shared kitchens and more are much easier in theory than in practice. Especially today as norms have changed. When I talk to college students the topic of roommate conflict or debates about keeping common areas clean are frequent topics, and this is among friends who chose to live with each other. I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers paying $231 inflation-adjusted dollars per month to be there.
Then there’s the problem of widespread drug use. The availability and also the strength of street drugs is an extreme problem right now. Combine this with seemingly absent enforcement in some cities and I have no idea how you’d expect communal living low-cost SROs to not become the primary destination for people with drug problems.
We need tiers of low cost housing. Some people could make a communal space work, they would need to be able to vote to kick people out. People who are difficult to deal with need their own place, maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
That already exists. It's underfunded.
Not possible. Tenant laws are highly protective of the tenants. There is zero chance you could allow people to vote to kick another person out and not get immediately crushed by discrimination lawsuits.
Evictions also take a lot of time and legal fees. If you rent a room to someone and they break the contract you can't just kick them out. You have to follow the eviction process. Even if someone stops paying rent and tells you they're done paying, it could take months before you can actually evict them.
Drug use and mental health are also problems that need to be addressed, but you cannot cure someone of their issues while they're sleeping on the street. Unlike shared apartments, homeless shelters, or the street, SROs provide each resident with a private room and a locking door. If those were the four options I could afford, I would choose the SRO every time.
Arguing over who cleans the kitchens is the version of the problem for friends who know each other. If you try the same arrangement and add people with severe mental health problems or drug problems randomly into the communal kitchens you would get something far, far worse.
I only brought that up as an example of what happens in the best case of friends choosing to live together, not as a suggestion of what it would be like with public strangers mixing together.
Those 'far far worse' things are already happening to the unhoused, they're not unique to SROs and low-cost hotels, so all that keeping people unhoused does is make their lives even worse.
If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business. Maybe don’t do it next time.
And that is a good thing. It forces people to actually abide by the social contract.
And there will be people who can’t deal with that, and can’t live anywhere, but here’s the thing.
You need a first step on the ladder for people who are ready to actually enter society. Otherwise they never will.
"social contract" is just "abide by the terms of the contract they signed" or "hold up their end of the deal" in this case.
Not any business, it's a landlord-tenant relationship.
You can't simply kick out a tenant. You have to do a formal eviction process. In many cities this requires collecting evidence of contractual breach, proving that the tenant was notified they were being evicted (such as through a paid service to officially serve and record delivery of the notice), and then following the appropriate waiting period and other laws. It could be months and tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees before you can kick someone out of a house.
Contrast that with the $213 inflation-adjusted monthly rent that the article touts. How many months of rent would they have to collect just to cover the legal fees of a single eviction?
In 1875 San Francisco adopted an ordinance banning opium dens. A little history might provide some perspective.
Modern synthetic fentanyl is a different situation than opium for many reasons, including the relative strength and difficult controlling dosages. The current opioid epidemic is really bad for drug users, even with historical perspective.
And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement? There's no reason why publicly-funded SROs wouldn't have these things, probably at much lower cost than we currently end up paying for the revolving door of law enforcement, jail, mental hospital, regular hospital we have with the homeless right now. Again, I think this is "out of sight, out of mind" bias - you don't think the current spending is "real" because you can't see it, but this hypothetical new spending would be, even though the total cost to the taxpayer would be less.
There's a substantial slice of this country that legitimately hates poor people, whether they want to admit it or not, and they will die on the hill of spending a thousand taxpayer dollars making their life a living hell, before they will willingly accede to giving them a hundred bucks to buy food.
This is not a reasonable position and as such, you cannot reason with it.
As they say, "The cruelty is the point."
I wasn’t talking about people struggling. I was talking about the actual, visible drug users on the streets. The struggling people looking for temporary housing would be intermingled with these people and suffer the most.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
They didn't have the problems you describe.
Most people, including addicts, when presented with the money to get their lives together in meaningful ways, do just that.
It's impressive you managed to be this wrong right out of the gate. Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income. So if we set UBI to be $35k a year, and you make $30k a year, you get $5k a year in UBI payments. The vast majority of employed adults wouldn't get anything, because they don't need it, so saying we're paying out $3 trillion in benefits is flatly ridiculous.
> and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever
And there shouldn't be. It's a Universal Basic Income. You can spend it on food, housing, a car, a model train set, hard Nicaraguan cocaine, prostitutes, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Poor people do not need to be shepherded: study[0] after study[1] after study[2] has proven that when you give people who are broke money that actually has the ability to change their circumstances, shock of shocks, they use it to change their circumstances. If somebody wants to take their UBI and then live on the street, weird choice, but that's also completely their choice and it is not your or anyone else's place to judge them for it.
And under the current system: You ARE paying for their ER visits. You're paying for their ER visits, you're paying to house them in prisons, you're paying for men with guns to beat the shit out of them and then drive them around, you're paying a justice system to move them about place to place and have hearings with judges, stenographers and guards, public defenders, and then when they do get out of jail, you're paying for the bus stop they're living in to boot.
The only thing UBI changes is it gives THEM the money instead of police departments, courts, healthcare companies so they can actually DO SOMETHING about their problems, rather than being shuffled from one awful system to another on an eternal loop because being homeless is just illegal in practice in America.
And better still, UBI strips a LOT of the administrative overhead involved, because it's very easy to calculate what everyone gets, it's literally back-of-napkin tier math. No means testing, no investigations. Just money to people who don't have enough so they have enough. I'm sure it won't solve EVERY social ill, of course. But it'll do a damn sight better job than the current system.
[0] - https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/2025/11/08/universal-ba...
[1] - https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
[2] - https://basicincome.stanford.edu/uploads/Umbrella%20Review%2...
This is not how UBI is typically discussed, and it wasn’t how the regional pilot projects I am familiar with worked. Rather, every single citizen of a community gets the same amount regardless of how much money they earn from other sources.
That is part of the “universal” and it is precisely how UBI improves employees’ position against employers: an employee can safely quit at any moment because he already has the UBI as backup with no further actions required. What you are describing is more the “negative income tax” form of universal income that has been criticized for not empowering the working class this way.
What are you talking about? I brought them up because it’s a front and center problem that anyone who walks through a big city will have to encounter on a daily basis. It’s not out of sight out of mind at all.
> And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement?
At $231 inflation adjusted dollars per month, just how much do you expect to be left over for daily cleaning staff? If you expect nearly hotel level frequency of cleaning common spaces, you’re going to have to expect nearly hotel level monthly rents.
Law enforcement isn’t going to arrest someone for refusing to clean their plates. It’s the responsibility of the SRO operator to evict people. Do you know how hard it is to evict anyone these days? Even literal squatters or people who stop paying rent can take months to evict.
And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
I think what made it more feasible in the 1920's was two things:
- much higher staffing levels. Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's. They had staff cleaning kithcens and bathrooms, and staff warning and kicking out tenants that consistently left a mess. I can't imagine that being feasible today on a $231/month room rent.
- a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
You probably brought up the biggest problem with making this model work today.
In the 1920s the threat of being evicted rapidly for violations was real and present. Either you follow the rules or you’re getting kicked to the street.
Modern tenant laws are unbelievably protective of tenants and require extremely long periods to evict people. I know someone who spent months and tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict squatters who broke into their house while they were doing some construction work on it. If it takes months to kick non-paying tenants who were never invited out of a place you own, it would be a nightmare to try to evict people from an SRO fast enough to keep any peace.
The laws for SRO should be the same as shared living, but I imagine it varies greatly.
Do you mean have him forcibly removed by the police? Or just terminate his rental agreement?
Depending on the location, there’s a difference between being able to tell someone their contract is terminated and they have to leave versus actually having legal standing to have them removed.
The tenants who abuse the laws know that they can just refuse to leave and nothing can be done for so many days. In the last case I heard of, the tenant knew this and waited until a day or two before the clock ran out to actually leave, despite being declared unwelcome and asked to leave many weeks prior.
Right, so you didn't have to follow the eviction process. This is a key distinction. If you tell someone they're no longer welcome and they have to move out immediately, you're not technically following the eviction process. If the person had refused to leave, you'd have to follow the eviction process which can require some evidentiary collection, such as being able to prove that the person was notified that they were being evicted on a certain date.
In extreme cases (not like your ex-roommate) squatters will go so far to game the system that they only come and go in the middle of the night to avoid being officially served the eviction notice.
Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time & eat more rapid price cuts while trying to sell it than try to be a single unit landlord in NYC.
Likewise small time landlords are going to be much pickier about who they let rent from them, in possibly discriminatory ways. It's a much lower risk than having a bad tenant occupy your unit, fail to pay rent, cost you legal fees and possibly damage unit on way out after 6 months.
A landlord is not going to take a chance on a drug addict in recovery or other higher risk tenant in this context.
Sadly, this is how most squatting situations start. Having an empty housing unit is very risky.
When my friend had squatters break into his house while it was being renovated, the police said their hands were tied. They had become squatters first, and the breaking and entering couldn't be definitively proven. They got to stay in the house for months while he paid lawyers to do the eviction proceedings.
It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.
The words "can" and "minimal" are doing a lot of work there. An angry tenant who knows they are getting evicted can do an incredible amount of damage in a few weeks, even without deliberate vandalism.
And landlords can be insanely abusive.
Perhaps a system wherein not only the tenant must pay a deposit, but the landlord must also put three month's rent in escrow. They can evict a tenant nearly immediately for certain issues (violence, drugs, etc.) but the tenant can sue in small claims court (for low time and overhead) and recover the extra three months escrow funds if landlord found to be abusing it. (Obviously just he rough outline of an idea, but maybe it'd work?)
IIUC, this is an inappropriate of use of Baumol's cost disease. That is intended to apply in cases where the fundamental issue is that technology and/or process changes cannot improve the productivity of those performing a task, such as a symphony orchestra. Janitorial work has been subject to productivity increases, and ultimately, it's a bit of a stretch to use Baumol's to talk about a case where you can't for some reason reduce the number of people doing the work from one to zero.
Supervisory roles might, possibly, be an appropriate Baumol's example.
Baumol's applies to anything where technology has improved the field significantly less than average. That includes both symphony orchestras and janitorial services.
Wikipedia says that Baumol's is:
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
while it's not the canonical source for the definition, it is notably more specific than your version.
The effect is not small.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
In the runup to this, there were stories appearing regularly of people being committed to institutions against their will, and without valid cause. In other words, putting someone away for other people's convenience (or financial benefit).
I interpreted the outflow of mental patients as an unexpected side effect of efforts to halt the above-mentioned abuses. Of course it's also possible that reform of abuses was used as a cover for simple, unintelligent budget cutting.
In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution.
Bill Maher
Wouldn't want to endanger the homeless by letting them sleep under a church roof without the the state's approval, much safer to keep them sleeping on the side of the highway and arrest the pastor /s.
That could be addressed by creating SRO housing near the locations where the low-wage jobs are now.
A person might be fine, like in a typical dorm, with a microwave, microfridge, and electric kettle.
Especially if there was a low-cost cafeteria in the lobby.
People live in the city because they want to eat out, right? We should start at the realistic assumption for typical city-dweller behavioral patterns, not, like, take a suburban house and try to randomly time-multiplex part of it…
No? Having a usable kitchen does not mean you cannot eat at restaurants, and surely a good portion of people who like to eat at restaurants also want to be able to cook at home sometimes, if only to save money. This is not even going into the fact that eating at restaurants is almost always unhealthy.
In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.
There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.
$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.
And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
Grocery store margins are pretty high on prepared food.
When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.
And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.
Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.
Dining out is expensive. It's essentially incompatible with the target demographic who need extremely low cost housing.
Who in the world are you talking to?
For $230 a month the college students I know would sleep on a shared dirt floor of a cabin.
People have become selfish bastards and drug use is rampant. Of course those people are going to congregate in the only places they can pay for. Having them living on the street instead is definitely not the solution.
Hope you never have to, but people have a way of working together nevertheless. Each place is its own kingdom, but with similar ethos—mind your own business. Clean up your $#!t. People either get along, or they have problems. Some people stay a long time, and others take their cues from the long-time-people. Others are non-conforming trouble makers and will not be staying.
Yes. I lived in an SRO.
However, the “moral panic” comes from the outside—- rational or irrational judgment of outsiders who pass laws and zoning rules which impose their own moral codes and judgment. Well meaning, corrupt or just plain ignorant, the result is the same. (It’s like people who complain at the election polls about voter IDs. They’re privileged people who _already have_ driver licenses, because they own cars and drive everyday. They simply can’t imagine the difficulty of having, keeping or maintaining valid ID. As a result, they confuse voter enfranchisement with the privilege to drive.)
Add economic development and 100 years, shake and bake. Poof. Today SROs may not be available on the same scale as 100 years ago, but they’re here and there and a sight better than roach infested rooms above a dive bar.
I cannot imagine these still existing, at least not in the capacities they were after the last great recession brought rentals down. I used to grow/rent an entire five bedroom house for $1400 month (split with 2.5 others), although it was a mom&pop landlord [good rate even then] just outside of Castro Valley. About $2k/month commercial rent would set up an entire commune of about a dozen "artists," ~2010~, in LA outskirts... but these couldn't support grow operations (too much attention to hide).
Several of these "rat holes" burned down and often lead to stricter enforcement actions against similar hovels.
Ghost Ship burnt a few years after I'd left California; what surprised me most was that it still existed into 2016!
I never saw their specific electrical infrastructure, but it's absolutely surprising that more structure fires aren't sparking up daily (everywhere). My recommendation (as a former IBEW electrician) to DIY sparkies is if you can't afford a thermal camera to verify your own inexperienced handywork then you can't afford to be doing your own electrical work [yes especially YOU Mister E.E.].
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
Disagree, you can have impact on your neighbors. We had SFH doing that near me, they had 9 people in 4 BDRM SFH. That was 9 cars so all street parking was occupied. Trash Company sent notice to our HOA wanting price increase since they were generating a ton of trash (some of it commercial I believe) It was much noisier than average home since they would do more outside bringing noise like listening to music inside, outside with noise problems that develop.
County finally shut it down and most of neighbors were thrilled.
There is a reason for zoning laws and it's not 100% NIMBY but yes, your actions can have impact on your neighbors.
On the trash I'm a bit confused. The HOA should have paid more if the neighborhood was generating more trash than the trash company had negotiated to take away. If everybody didn't like this house why didn't the HOA make rules to restrict it. Isn't that the point of an HOA?
It's hard (or at least, unattractive) to run a flophouse if you cannot easily + risklessly kick highly disruptive individuals out.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
People who want to live in the area but can't because it is unaffordable don't get a vote, and the exclusionary communities become self-reinforcing.
But Americas really, really like being racist, so now our housing market is f'ked.
There are multiple reasons for why dense areas only have 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, while less dense areas only have detached single family homes. One is, as you say, to keep the poorer people away. But another big one is also the change in household size due to people's preferences. And yet another is people's preference for detached single family homes once they do have kids (by and large).
The 3-4 bedroom homes in dense urban centers were probably built a while ago, but I have never seen new homes built in dense urban centers (I'm referring to NYC/SF/SEA/etc). The low density suburb regions that border the dense urban center usually try to keep their low density status.
You won't see an apartment building with units that have 3 and 4 bedrooms going up in Manhattan, and you won't see apartment buildings with 1-2 bedrooms going up in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
I can still picture one building that had probably 100 rooms. I can see a few men leaning out their window smoking.
That is a shame they are gone, seems no one down on their luck has a way to rebuild their life these days.
[1] this was a real setup in a grandfathered SRO apartment in Hudson, New Hampshire in the early 2000's that I knew about
The answer to why there is less visible homelessness in Japan than NA is a rather more boring one in that they simply didn't destroy their last resort low income housing as much as Canada and America did and so there remain many more options for someone in Japan to duck out of the cold at a very low cost.
I have no idea in Japan. As I was there I saw extremely poor people (deduced from cloths and lack of hygiene) I doubt they had an own house. Even worst, I saw middle-class neighborhoods that I would associate with a favela in Brazil (albeit very clean and organized, each flat was smaller than a space in Rio.
The government pushed away people with nowhere to live to who knows where and built a luxury mall. All the tourists visiting assume Japan has no homeless.
Out of sight, out of mind.
All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.
Good article. Thanks for sharing.
What does it cost? Otherwise, this is like saying I saved $100 buying a pair of shoes on sale. Property tax is a major component of most property expenses (maybe not for schools). Even dorm rooms tend to run over $500/mo. That's not cheap for most people, especially the homeless population. If we look at most mortgages, property taxes are 25%+ of a monthly payment in many cases. Even in apartments the tenants are paying this indirectly.
You're implying that this needs to be the biggest monthly cost, which I don't agree with. Eventually you will pay off your mortgage, leaving you with just property tax and (technically optional at that point) insurance. The duration of payment matters. I will end up paying more in property taxes in my life than I will in interest - 20 years below 4% vs 50+ years of paying 2+%.
2% on even a $200k house is $333/month. That's a lot for low income people. The principal and interest on $180k is about $960/mo on a 5% 30yr. So he property tax is 25% of the payment.
So instead of me overestimating property tax, I feel that you are underestimating how much that money is worth to low income people.
Here's a 200k house: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1404-36th-St-N-Birmingham...
Here's how much they pay in property taxes ($1270): https://eringcapture.jccal.org/parceldetail/23%2000%2019%203...
30 year loan at 4% (not feasible today) means 115k in interest paid after putting 20% down. It would take way longer than 50 years to pay more in property taxes than interest.
So, first to directly answer. The naive search showed dorms costing about 1000 a month, with standard rent being 1600. Which is a dramatic savings to be had.
Now, do I think dormitories are the low cost option in the cities today? No. In large part because they are for students only. By definition you are not aiming to solve homelessness with that.
But if you see them as the main surviving case of the type of housing this article is discussing, it does look clear that that can help drive to lower cost housing. With the obvious fact that some places will remain more expensive than others.
And as long as we are discussing lowest cost options for someone, I think assuming a direct path to ownership is probably not appropriate. These options are far more substitutes for standard rent. Which, I don't think anyone is saying that property tax is the reason giant rental complexes have higher rent? Any more so than property tax causing the high cost of school dorms.
All landlords know this, which is why the pod living people are pretty selective about only getting techies.
The largest one appears to be PadSplit (https://padsplit.com), claiming 27,000+ rooms nationwide.[a]
But I don't know if any these new co-living solutions work as advertised, or whether the companies providing them are actually making any money. Does anyone here know?
---
[a] According to the company's own PR: https://www.prweb.com/releases/padsplit-recognized-on-the-de...
https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...
Even back in 2007 when the housing crisis was only just starting to become noticible and we didn't yet have a full blown fentanyl crisis people that worked closely in low income communities were hitting the panic button about the implications of the destruction of existing SROs and other low income housing. Despite occasionally building new social housing buildings, the pace of destruction of existing affordable housing was so great that the city was net losing housing that low income people could afford.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/
> “The City of Vancouver has finally acknowledged that we are losing more low-income housing than we are building, and that vacancy rates are functionally zero,” said housing activist David Eby, of Pivot Legal Society.
(Irony here is that the activist quoted here, David Eby, is now Premier of the Province. Has he built a remarkable amount of low income housing? Nope!)
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-gr...
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
If I recall correctly, the strongest correlation with homelessness is housing prices. SROs used to be a way to keep people at the bottom of the market housed. Now it’s a Toyota Camry.
Progressive New Englanders hold their NIMBYism close to the heart and would rather someone sleep in a car (or worse) than allow sufficient amount of housing to keep prices down.
This portrays them just as an option for poor people, but if they were legal we would have high-end SROs also, for people who want high-end amenities but don't need giant amounts of space. Removing them hurts the people without other options the most, but zoning has hurt everyone's options.
- cheap housing for young people like the rooms mentioned in the article at around $250~$500/month range - no communal kitchens - but communal cafeterias serving cheap food at $5/meal or even better go for the packed elsewhere - microwave option - lots of rooms (cafes / study's) for people to interact & have people with diverse goals / interests meet
Government-funded propaganda like NPR and PBS and their local affiliates have been instrumental in the obfuscation and half truths, so good riddance to them. Replacing them with blogs like this will be slow but ultimately better for everyone.
The problem is "desirability" i.e. employment in small towns being destroyed so people have to move to big cities to look for work. There are plenty of housing units, what's gone is the manufacturing and retail that used to support them.
If ownership is diverse (not "diverse," but just meaning lots of different owners rather than a few megagiant equity rollups), and incentives are lined up, I'd absolutely be happy about a return to being able to rent a room.
Legal System Average Price-to-Income Ratio
Common Law 8.9×
Civil Law 6.1×
Mixed / Hybrid 6.5×
Islamic Law 5.1×
I'm not sure of the accuracy but it sure seems like common law systems have quite the surcharge, do any scholars of comparative law have theories as to why?
I share an apartment with two other people. I've been in the housing market for years, but have had to repeatedly walk away from affordable units specifically because of the long tail of these sorts of regulations against tenements, flophouses, SROs, etc. Condos and neighborhoods with HOAs almost always have boilerplate covenants that arbitrarily restrict households based on blood relations and family lineage, such as barring permanent residents who aren't married or blood-related to the owner within a single generational branch (so Great Grandma can't live with her Great Grandson, for instance); if they don't, then cities often have ordinances barring cohabitation of more than two unrelated individuals outside of rented apartments.
The net result is that for the three of us to find a home, we have to look solely at the most expensive stock out there: single-family homes on lots outside of subdivisions, in a major metropolitan area.
These laws suck in the context of the current housing crisis, and we need to repeal such arbitrary bullshit. At the very least, prohibiting cohabitation based on blood relation can be incredibly queerphobic in effect, if not intent, and that's reason alone to repeal or reform it.
This might be true of certain demographic groups but it isn't a valid statement without more specificity.
It doesn’t work if it takes you 6 months to evict a sociopath.
Loss of the SRO model in residential real estate was a major setback to low income residents, and is undoubtedly a significant contributor to modern homelessness.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
Instead of facing this, the comments are full of the typical "gubment regulation" bullshit.
This is related to the other typical bullshit regarding homelessness, namely that the problem, again, is the gubment getting in the way of free enterprise and preventing it from saving the world, in the form of building more housing.
Here in San Diego, almost 9000 new units were permitted in 2024. Thousands of rental units came online in the last year. However, the average rental price of one of these new apartments is about $4000/month, for 1 bedroom.
What ended the prevalence of SROs was real estate being redeveloped for more profitable buildings, including high end housing and office space. To the extent that regulations affected closing SROs, it was for the purpose of facilitating this upscaling.
Even if the accusations leveled against SROs are all true, would you prefer psycho drug-addled homeless peoplle live in flop houses, or on the freeway overpasses?
If it's offensive to you to have to step over some crack heads encampment to walk to the opera, maybe it's worth spending some of the ballooning wealth of the nation to put them into cheap housing...
“The poor yearn for the HMO. They yearn to share houses with 20 other men.”
No. These places are horrible. They cause huge amounts of crime both inside the property and in the community around them. Putting a bunch of criminals and addicts into a building is not good for anyone.
It is a fact that criminals and addicts will flock towards the cheapest housing options and bring their problems with them. That's just the nature of being the cheapest option.
The idea that if we just remove tools from poor people that they go away is patently insane. We want to... kick people while they're already down... and we expect that to help anyone?
Why have an SRO when a shared bunk bed should be enough? That's the future of this approach.
Like the article said, there’s fine hotels for some and some truly terrible ones for others. Still beats being homeless. Also, just because something isn’t perfect and has its flaws, doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
There are no other options. Like smaller cities with a lower cost of living. The big cities just suck away life from everything.
Property is expensive in, say, NYC because you can use that property to do A LOT of economic activity. Property is cheap in Ponder, Texas because you can use that property to do fuck all, so you better take what you can get.
You can choose to live in Ponder, Texas, but the economics of that aren't too hot.
Well, exactly. And allowing SROs and then bunkbeds will only make this _worse_. Your housing costs in NYC will keep _rising_, while the living conditions for _everyone_ will keep going down.
Death spiral, in other words.
Sounds familiar?
And no, I'm not proposing anything "anarchist". Tax (or cap&trade) the dense office space, provide tax breaks for remote work, provide incentives for jobs in smaller cities.
That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
> That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
It's not, at all. We 'solved' it by just pushing it somewhere else, and then we actually helped it by making more efficient processes.
It's not that by you living in the suburbs you have no pollution. No, the pollution is made in the city, and then we just transport the end result sometimes thousands of miles to your house so you don't have to see it. That process is horribly inefficient - which is why it's fair to say that suburbs are essentially on the welfare of the cities around them.
Everything you have - water, concrete, food, electricity - is coming from denser centers. You don't actually pay enough in taxes to cover that, but it's fine, because that's the cost of typical American culture.
And, speaking of American culture - what you're advocating is very much the status quo. The US is extremely distributed compared to the rest of the developed world, and we pay a high price for it. We use absurd amounts of water, energy, and money to maintain our suburban lifestyle.
Nope. Most of the excess pollution is attributable to gas cars, and they're being replaced by EVs. And small/mid-size EVs have less carbon footprint than transit.
> It's not, at all. We 'solved' it by just pushing it somewhere else, and then we actually helped it by making more efficient processes.
We solved the pollution by forcing companies and consumers to clean up their act. And yes, this caused them to be less efficient initially.
> Everything you have - water, concrete, food, electricity - is coming from denser centers.
Now you're just incoherent. Food is coming from dense cities? Electricity is generated in office buildings? Sorry, but no.
> And, speaking of American culture - what you're advocating is very much the status quo.
No, I'm advocating the return to status quo ante, with improvements (EVs, self-driving taxis, remote work).
This is the direct consequence of allowing dense housing, and it's made _worse_ by allowing abominations like SROs or "microapartments". And then bunk beds (already happening in Singapore).
The correct action here is to STOP doing this. Prohibit building dense housing and, more importantly, dense office space. Provide tax incentives for remote work and for offices outside of city cores. Ideally, start un-densifying cities by creating more park spaces in place of dense housing.
Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc. Already, this type of work is not very viable in suburban or rural areas because they're too inefficient. Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
If everyone is spread out everywhere, how do you provide them with the stuff they need in an economically viable way? That's the entire reason urbanism exists!
That's the reality. The _only_ way to make housing less expensive is to reduce the dense population. Examples abound: Austin, Denver, etc.
> The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.
Nope. The denser the housing, the MORE EXPENSIVE it gets. Even on a per-unit basis. That's why we have this drive to allow SROs. It'll push prices of all housing even higher.
> Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.
_Most_ of the modern post-industrial work is divided into two areas:
1. Office work. Can just as well be WFH.
2. In-person services (restaurants, childcare, hospitals, etc.). They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
There are some areas that will require specialized communities around them, like universities or large hospital centers. But they for sure don't need 4 million people monstrosities like NYC.
> Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.
It's vice versa. Most of the economic value in the US is created by people living in suburbia. This is easy to see if you look at personal income tax stats.
Cities receive the majority of _corporate_ taxes because corporation HQs are located in cities (duh).
> That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc.
Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.
If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
In a suburban area, you just ask nearby houses to temporarily live in a hotel for a week, do the dig, and you're done. Even if you need more raw material, you end up spending less.
This is not a theory, btw. There's a study that shows that the city efficiency peaks at around 300k people.
> They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.
> This is not a theory, btw
You're right, it's not a theory, it's literally just wrong. Like, obviously so.
The idea that people in the suburbs commute less is patently insane. It's just so obviously not true that I legitimately cannot believe someone could think this. Have you lived anywhere, ever, for any period of time?
The more rural the area you are in, the longer your commute will be, because where you live has no economic activity. So you have to drive somewhere that does.
Consider sanitation: why don't we have this in the suburbs? Because turning 1 sanitation facility into 100 distributed sanitation facilities across 100x more land, all while servicing the SAME AMOUNT OF PEOPLE, is insane. So we don't do that. So then you drive.
It is indisputable that density brings efficiency. From computer chips, to transit, to cities.
> If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.
Okay, this is a perfect demonstration.
If you change 1 mile of sewer in Manhattan, you've serviced 100,000 people. If you change 1 mile of sewer in the suburbs, you've serviced 100 people. Are you seeing the problem?
Yes, there is obviously more friction to getting stuff done, but the amount of stuff you need to get done to impact the same people is orders of magnitude less. The cost ends up being much, much, much lower. This only works if you're comparing like and like though.
A lot of people will compare dense areas to the suburbs and they won't compare the same amount of people. Yeah, that's cheating. NYC has about as many people as north Texas. When you put it that way, then it seems clear that the efficiency of NYC is orders of magnitude higher than your average suburban hellscape.
OK. You're throwing around words like "obviously" without obviously bothering to check them. The commute time for large cities is longer.
The average commute time is less for small cities and suburbs.
Moreover, the average US commute for small cities (22 minutes according to the ACS) is faster than in ANY large US or European city. In particular, commute time in NYC is 37 minutes.
> Consider sanitation: why don't we have this in the suburbs?
Just sigh.
> Yes, there is obviously more friction to getting stuff done, but the amount of stuff you need to get done to impact the same people is orders of magnitude less. The cost ends up being much, much, much lower. This only works if you're comparing like and like though.
Have you ever deigned to actually verify your claims? Just to give you a hint, building a mile of subway in NYC now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway.
You clearly have never actually looked into the subject in question, and you're just repeating whatever sounds right.