The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the US

From the article:

Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. Over the next several decades, governments and developers gradually demolished thousands of SROs or converted them to other uses, including boutique hotels for tourists. And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide.

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A wealth of research has examined the causes of homelessness over the past two decades. These studies consistently find that the cost of housing is by far the primary driver. For example, several studies have concluded that an area’s median rent correlates far more closely with its homelessness rate than factors such as weather, poverty rate, and rates of mental illness or substance use.

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This relationship is apparent whether comparing cities or states. High-rent states such as California, Hawaii, and New York have persistently high rates of homelessness; states with low rents, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia, have low rates.

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Homelessness first became an issue on a national scale in the 1870s. Continued upheaval in the aftermath of the Civil War and industrialization pushed more people into “riding the rails” on the nation’s new railroad system in search of jobs.19 The rise of these itinerant workers, in turn, drove the development of early rooming houses and residential hotels, particularly for Americans at the lower end of the income scale. Rooms could be rented by the night, week, or month.

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Residential hotel construction peaked in the early 20th century in most cities. By the 1920s, many cheap hotels in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago offered a mix of private rooms; large rooms converted to tiny, cubicle-style bedrooms with partitions that did not reach the ceilings; and open-air wards with rows of cots.21 At the time, a private room might rent for 25 cents to 40 cents a night and the semiprivate cubicles and open wards for 15 cents to 25 cents a night. That’s far less than anything available in modern U.S. cities: 40 cents in 1924 is the equivalent of about $7.40 in 2025, roughly $230 a month. That would be affordable even to a person living below the federal poverty line (defined as $15,650 in income for a one-person household in 2025).

Hotels nationwide were much different than they are today. They were much more likely to host long-term occupants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One 1930 survey of hotels throughout the country found that long-term residents occupied an average of 20% of the rooms in the most expensive third of American hotels, and at least 75% of rooms in low- and mid-priced hotels.

In New York City, low-rent, single-room occupancy exploded during the Great Depression and World War II, when tens of thousands of people moved from the South and Puerto Rico to work in the city’s munitions factories and on major construction projects. By the 1950s, the city had more than 200,000 SRO units, accounting for more than 10% of the city’s rental housing stock.23 In 1986, 87,000 New Yorkers still lived in hotels, according to what was then the largest study of inexpensive hotels undertaken by a city government in the U.S. Across the five boroughs, 43% of SRO residents were under 40 years old and 32% were 40 to 60 years old; a third were Black; and a quarter were Latino.

During the same era in San Francisco, many long-term occupants of residential hotels were retired Filipino or Chinese laborers or newly arrived families from Southeast Asia. In 1977, 330 sheriff’s deputies and policemen showed up to evict 40 elderly Filipino and Chinese residents from the International Hotel, triggering outcry and concern as well as a congressional report.

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Some politicians scapegoated SRO residents, increasingly portraying them as poor, dependent on alcohol or drugs, reliant on public welfare, transient, and immoral. This image was compounded by the condition of many SRO buildings, which even in the early 1900s were often run-down and neglected. Reformers blamed crowded apartments and unsanitary shared bathroom facilities for the spread of common diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Some policymakers and activists viewed residential hotels and SROs as a public nuisance and a decaying form of housing that should be eliminated. “The SRO should not be accepted as lawful housing for any segment of our population,” an aide to New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner reportedly said in 1965. “ No community should equate such housing with the acceptable living standards of the 1960s.”

Many city and state governments began crafting policies in the 1950s and 1960s that encouraged property owners to convert SRO buildings to tourist-oriented hotels or traditional apartments. Newly enacted zoning codes and building codes made creating SROs illegal or economically unviable. Researchers have noted that market forces alone would have been unlikely to decimate the stock of SROs because they were profitable to operate when allowed and declined only when new laws targeted them.

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As the nation’s least expensive source of housing disappeared, homelessness soared in major cities across the United States. In New York City, for example, the number of homeless residents increased from a barely visible population to almost 30,000 by 1987. About half of men entering homeless shelters in the city in 1980 reported they had previously lived in SROs. The sudden loss of SROs and commensurate rise in homelessness prompted an advocate in New York to remark: “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market … they aren’t anymore.”

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As early as the mid-1980s, the problem of homelessness in New York City had gotten so severe that legislators tried to reverse course on SROs. The city government passed Local Law 19 in May 1983, adding protections for SRO tenants. The city ended tax benefits for converting SROs in 1983. Eventually, the City Council banned the conversion, alteration, demolition, or warehousing (holding units vacant for years to make them eligible for conversion or demolition) of SRO units altogether. But the New York Court of Appeals ruled these bans unconstitutional because they prevented property owners from determining how their buildings could be used.53 Similarly, Chicago officials passed an SRO preservation ordinance to discourage conversions or sales of SROs in 2014, but by that time, the large majority had already been lost. The city’s zoning and building codes made it challenging to build new ones.

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Despite all of this, New York City probably still has the largest remaining stock of SRO hotels and rooming houses in the country. A paper from the Furman Center at New York University estimated that there were as many as 30,000 SRO units remaining in the city in 2014. The city regulates SROs as part of its rent stabilization program, meaning owners can raise rents by only a low amount each year and need to file documentation with the city on each unit’s rent. In 2022, the state housing agency reported 322 regulated SRO buildings with 11,051 units, of which nearly half—more than 5,300—were rent-stabilized. The median monthly allowable rent for these units was $1,018 in 2022, compared with $1,641 for a regular rental apartment in the city in 2023 (including public housing, rent-controlled housing, subsidized housing, and conventional, market-rate housing).