Standards of living have changed since the age of rooming houses. Our founding fathers and protagonists in 19th C. novels shared rooms and even beds with strangers, but nowadays, personal privacy is a as basic an amenity as heat and running water.
We could offer tiny single rooms with shared bathrooms. Pod apartments.
In your last paragraph you've basically described Co-Living spaces that have popped up in Hong Kong and Singapore (two cities where prices per square metre are even more eye-watering than San Francisco). There is very little stigma to living in one, although this is also, a little bit, due to the nature of hyper-dense Asian megacities. A friend of mine's partner opened one building (8 stories, I believe) back in 2018 and it was let out in 6 weeks. She now maintains 9 buildings. These types are certainly more for the urban white collar worker who would be difficult to describe as "poor" (or even, "under resourced") but when a one-bedroom, 250sqf flat rents out for US$3-4,000 per month, even people with great jobs but no capital find it hard to live there.
Back to the Asian megacities cities though. This gets to some cultural generalising, but in the USA (and Australia) a general feeling is that "Home is where the heart is" your home (ideally a house, ideally under a mortgage) is where your grow your family in your life. In more urban areas in Europe, this is slightly less true, but in a hyper-dense city like Hong Kong, where *everyone* is in a tiny flat, home is seen as a small, private refuge, whereas *life* however we might define that is largely lived and experienced outside the home (in the community).
Don't really have a thesis here. This is an excellent idea and it should happen more.
I'd prefer the windowless bedroom. Less street noise. Less light waking me up in the morning. I'd get dressed and go outside for light and social interaction.
Windowless bedrooms may be against some fire codes, at least in some cases. In college, I lived with 3 roommates in the windowless den of a 3bd/4ba. After a year or two, I was informed I would need to move my bed out of the den because it couldn’t legally be used as a bedroom due to fire code. It might have been an edge case because the door faced the kitchen, which might be considered a bad combo?
Great piece but one correction or caveat needed. I personally lived in two NY City units that were less than 680 square feet in area (and visited many others), so this rule cannot possibly apply without exception:
“ current New York City zoning code, the smallest allowed is 680 square feet per apartment.”
Here in Oregon we have enthusiastically embraced just about everything YIMBY. We have outlawed single-family zoning state-wide, allowed all kinds of tiny homes, and just about everything else YIMBY. One recent example here in Bend:
"... a three-story apartment complex with 40 lofted flats and four common kitchen/living room areas, is coming to Bend" ... "the city's 'micro-apartment' code that the complex will adhere to" ... "Because of the micro-apartment coder, it will only have 20 parking spots for the 40 units, along with a number of electrical bike charging stations."
There has been little opposition to all the YIMBYism. We wanted it to work. But the results are not good. Prices have skyrocketed, everything is more crowded, people are flocking to the state from all over the country (we just got another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives), and we are running very low on water in parts of the state.
Are there any data showing that YIMBY works? Oregonians are discouraged. So far, it seems like a failed experiment.
How would you define success? If rents were going from $2000 to $2500 and because of YIMBY they only went to $2250 that would be a success, would it not?
The other big advantage of allowing old-style SROs is that millions on such units already exist and don’t need to be built. Walk the old downtown of any tertiary city and you’ll see lots of buildings with first floor storefronts (often vacant) and several unused stories above. That space above used to operate as SROs. Current codes prevent it from operating that way again and economic realities prevent apartment conversion like in high rent cities. We could provide millions of SRO units almost immediately with some simple changes in local codes and/or state laws.
You could see this style of living all the time in pre-war Hollywood movies, and not necessarily in a negative way, either. SROs and boarding houses let people get started in the big city, while actually living in the big city.
Libertarian troll here, at your service with a friendly reminder that free markets and property rights would go a long way toward alleviating a lot of social ills.
Before spending billions, maybe trillions, on a new government program to “solve” a problem, let’s first peel back existing policies which either caused the problem or made it a lot worse.
This is exactly what I work to achieve every day, and it is refreshing to see such well-reasoned points in favor of more housing. My company, Brownstone Shared Housing, makes sleeping pods which transform existing spaces into shared living arrangements without the need for construction. We currently operate two houses in California: One in Palo Alto, and another in Bakersfield.
Brownstone has been in the news a lot lately, most recently on Good Morning America this morning, and the polarizing response to our sleeping pods has been baffling to me. Many people love that we're taking an innovative approach to increasing the density of single family homes so people can share cost and space more efficiently while preserving privacy. However, a loud minority acts as if we are committing crimes more serious than robbery or assault by providing people with an alternative to having to rent their own $2,000 bedroom. What's perhaps most shocking is that it is people in my (millennial) generation who are leading the charge in the Twitter comments, acting as if we are forcing people into the sleeping pods.
This is all to say, irrespective of laws and NIMBY activism, there is a nontrivial culture on the internet of otherwise progressive young people effectively arguing against the type of innovation that will relieve pressure on the housing market and the environment. In my experience, that has been the most counterproductive force as we've grown in California.
Thanks for your exceedingly well-informed commentary. However, regarding homelessness, I think that intractable mental illness and drug abuse are the major players in the US, and more affordable housing will help only moderately.
Hello - I agree that substance abuse and mental illness are prominent among homeless people, and that “affordable” housing would help few. Where I want to plant a stake is on the point of the need for actual housing for people who have been destabilized. No illness of any kind, including addiction, gets better untreated. The illnesses spreads out in ways that affect everyone - mafia’s, violent street crime, theft, human trafficking, cost of responders (police, medical, fire) and actual diseases that transfer through interaction. The more getting people safely housed, the better the opportunity to insulate “them” and “us” from the stuff we don’t want. Despite the appearance of material difference, there is not really a”them”. There’s only us. We just have to look the lessons learned from AIDS for the evidence .
Standards of living have changed since the age of rooming houses. Our founding fathers and protagonists in 19th C. novels shared rooms and even beds with strangers, but nowadays, personal privacy is a as basic an amenity as heat and running water.
We could offer tiny single rooms with shared bathrooms. Pod apartments.
In your last paragraph you've basically described Co-Living spaces that have popped up in Hong Kong and Singapore (two cities where prices per square metre are even more eye-watering than San Francisco). There is very little stigma to living in one, although this is also, a little bit, due to the nature of hyper-dense Asian megacities. A friend of mine's partner opened one building (8 stories, I believe) back in 2018 and it was let out in 6 weeks. She now maintains 9 buildings. These types are certainly more for the urban white collar worker who would be difficult to describe as "poor" (or even, "under resourced") but when a one-bedroom, 250sqf flat rents out for US$3-4,000 per month, even people with great jobs but no capital find it hard to live there.
Back to the Asian megacities cities though. This gets to some cultural generalising, but in the USA (and Australia) a general feeling is that "Home is where the heart is" your home (ideally a house, ideally under a mortgage) is where your grow your family in your life. In more urban areas in Europe, this is slightly less true, but in a hyper-dense city like Hong Kong, where *everyone* is in a tiny flat, home is seen as a small, private refuge, whereas *life* however we might define that is largely lived and experienced outside the home (in the community).
Don't really have a thesis here. This is an excellent idea and it should happen more.
I'd prefer the windowless bedroom. Less street noise. Less light waking me up in the morning. I'd get dressed and go outside for light and social interaction.
When i was in the military it was two guys two a room.
Later my wife and I moved in with my parents for two years to save up to buy a house.
This is how you get ahead. It should be legal
Windowless bedrooms may be against some fire codes, at least in some cases. In college, I lived with 3 roommates in the windowless den of a 3bd/4ba. After a year or two, I was informed I would need to move my bed out of the den because it couldn’t legally be used as a bedroom due to fire code. It might have been an edge case because the door faced the kitchen, which might be considered a bad combo?
Question: are there places where SROish housing (downmarket, single room, shared bathroom) are being provided through Air BnBs?
Great piece but one correction or caveat needed. I personally lived in two NY City units that were less than 680 square feet in area (and visited many others), so this rule cannot possibly apply without exception:
“ current New York City zoning code, the smallest allowed is 680 square feet per apartment.”
Here in Oregon we have enthusiastically embraced just about everything YIMBY. We have outlawed single-family zoning state-wide, allowed all kinds of tiny homes, and just about everything else YIMBY. One recent example here in Bend:
"... a three-story apartment complex with 40 lofted flats and four common kitchen/living room areas, is coming to Bend" ... "the city's 'micro-apartment' code that the complex will adhere to" ... "Because of the micro-apartment coder, it will only have 20 parking spots for the 40 units, along with a number of electrical bike charging stations."
There has been little opposition to all the YIMBYism. We wanted it to work. But the results are not good. Prices have skyrocketed, everything is more crowded, people are flocking to the state from all over the country (we just got another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives), and we are running very low on water in parts of the state.
Are there any data showing that YIMBY works? Oregonians are discouraged. So far, it seems like a failed experiment.
How would you define success? If rents were going from $2000 to $2500 and because of YIMBY they only went to $2250 that would be a success, would it not?
The other big advantage of allowing old-style SROs is that millions on such units already exist and don’t need to be built. Walk the old downtown of any tertiary city and you’ll see lots of buildings with first floor storefronts (often vacant) and several unused stories above. That space above used to operate as SROs. Current codes prevent it from operating that way again and economic realities prevent apartment conversion like in high rent cities. We could provide millions of SRO units almost immediately with some simple changes in local codes and/or state laws.
You could see this style of living all the time in pre-war Hollywood movies, and not necessarily in a negative way, either. SROs and boarding houses let people get started in the big city, while actually living in the big city.
Thanks
Libertarian troll here, at your service with a friendly reminder that free markets and property rights would go a long way toward alleviating a lot of social ills.
Before spending billions, maybe trillions, on a new government program to “solve” a problem, let’s first peel back existing policies which either caused the problem or made it a lot worse.
I feel like we've read this article before.
This is exactly what I work to achieve every day, and it is refreshing to see such well-reasoned points in favor of more housing. My company, Brownstone Shared Housing, makes sleeping pods which transform existing spaces into shared living arrangements without the need for construction. We currently operate two houses in California: One in Palo Alto, and another in Bakersfield.
Brownstone has been in the news a lot lately, most recently on Good Morning America this morning, and the polarizing response to our sleeping pods has been baffling to me. Many people love that we're taking an innovative approach to increasing the density of single family homes so people can share cost and space more efficiently while preserving privacy. However, a loud minority acts as if we are committing crimes more serious than robbery or assault by providing people with an alternative to having to rent their own $2,000 bedroom. What's perhaps most shocking is that it is people in my (millennial) generation who are leading the charge in the Twitter comments, acting as if we are forcing people into the sleeping pods.
This is all to say, irrespective of laws and NIMBY activism, there is a nontrivial culture on the internet of otherwise progressive young people effectively arguing against the type of innovation that will relieve pressure on the housing market and the environment. In my experience, that has been the most counterproductive force as we've grown in California.
My great grandmother supported her family by running a boarding house. I think the upside of the additional income is really important
Thanks for your exceedingly well-informed commentary. However, regarding homelessness, I think that intractable mental illness and drug abuse are the major players in the US, and more affordable housing will help only moderately.
Hello - I agree that substance abuse and mental illness are prominent among homeless people, and that “affordable” housing would help few. Where I want to plant a stake is on the point of the need for actual housing for people who have been destabilized. No illness of any kind, including addiction, gets better untreated. The illnesses spreads out in ways that affect everyone - mafia’s, violent street crime, theft, human trafficking, cost of responders (police, medical, fire) and actual diseases that transfer through interaction. The more getting people safely housed, the better the opportunity to insulate “them” and “us” from the stuff we don’t want. Despite the appearance of material difference, there is not really a”them”. There’s only us. We just have to look the lessons learned from AIDS for the evidence .