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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced at the narrative presented here, thought it seems compelling and worthy of further research.

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.

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Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).

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.

I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.

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).

There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree: HOA's exist for a good reason, for all the hate they get (and often have earned).

My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).

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.

But are the rules actually the same as those imposed 20 years ago for regulatory reasons, or are they now stricter without good reason? Are there really good regulatory reasons for restricting exterior paint color and other things that HOAs do?

SFH HOAs do not exist for a good reason.

How have you not come across SFH HOAs when there are so many of them?

https://www.calassoc-hoa.com/about-us/our-objective-hoa-data...

You misunderstand. Of course they exist, but not for good reason.

I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.

>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.

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.

Is there anything stopping one kind from turning into the other kind after the fact though?

The fact that you can't turn a condo into a development of single family homes, and vice versa?

I looked at the rules for dissolving an HOA in lived in. There were a couple of procedural barriers, but the biggest one was that it required 75% of homeowners to sign a petition within a 3 month period. That’s a pretty high bar and lets a minority perpetuate the HOA.

American HOAs simply have too much power. In Canada HOAs exist, but their ability to levy fines or put liens on property is much more limited[1] and usually requires actual damage. This effectively eliminates a lot of the ridiculous rules about the size of someone's shed or the species or grass because there's no real way to enforce them.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/acd767...

What I don't understand is why it isn't the municipality's responsibility for this kind of thing

For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.

But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.

Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.

In practice HOA’s are just another level of government in that they hold elections, get policing power, provide services, and collect taxes.

right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)

That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.

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.

Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.

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.

The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.

It should be, except that a lot of people demand taxes too low for that municipality to function if it actually did everything, so legally required HOAs get used as a shitty stopgap because the work still has to be done.

IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.

>O an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality

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.

It is more than storm drainage. I am fine clearing my own snow, I don't want the city doing it for me at a cost. However not everyone is.

> an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality.

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.

That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.

That doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. An HOA that only existed to maintain the stormwater plan and just collected small dues to maintain it would be almost completely unrecognizable compared to how actual HOAs function. Come to think of it, even my standard explanation of HOAs being prevalent because local government use them as a backdoor way to increase property taxes is inadequate, since an HOA that just maintains the roads and parks would also be pretty unrecognizable.

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?

Yes, typically the local government require a HOA-like structure for all new housing developments.

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.

I think the thousand cuts analogy applies in general to the housing crisis, specifically affordability.

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.

Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:

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

Also building code and tax incentives

  • 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 SROs

I mean SROs that aren't subject to full federal anti-bias rules, are allowed to refuse welfare recipients, that turn away unmarried couples, or reject children after 8 pm probably wouldn't really fix the problems that people want SROs to fix.

I'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.

More supply wouldn't fix the problems? Adding supply for one group leaves more supply for the others (e.g. welfare, couples and families)

Here in Chicago there are still some SROs. Chicago has middling tenants rights: not as strong as New York or SF but stronger than most of the country. If tenants rights ended SROs you'd expect them to not exist in a place like Chicago.

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.

There are still a decent number of sros in uptown. We’ll see how long that lasts with the new towers and zoning probably making them prime redevelopment targets.

SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.

Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.

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).

It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."

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.

>If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights

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.

> 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.

> 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

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

> 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.

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.

It may be that there's no one answer because every city is different.

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...

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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."

It's possible to concoct a theoretical landlord who has that thought, although in your example it would cost $8000 to evict those people under the law ($2000 per).

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.

SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.

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.

That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."

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.

This tracks. There was a problem, the market solved the problem, regulations killed the solution and now we have a bigger and worse problem.

The high-end SRO market arguably still exists. There are plenty of young Americans rooming with strangers they found on the internet, not infrequently converting the living room into an additional bedroom, and nobody in power really seems to complain unless they throw too many parties, even if the zoning laws prohibit it. I also think it's unlikely they'd rent to a down-on-his-luck, 45-year-old (even if they could afford it).

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.

A lot of those laws are meant to prohibit brothels, without the hassle of needing to actually prove that the house is being used as a brothel.

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.

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