Single-room occupancy
Single-room occupancy is a type of low-cost housing typically aimed at residents with low or minimal incomes, or single adults who like a minimalist lifestyle, who rent small, furnished single rooms with a bed, chair, and sometimes a small desk. SRO units are rented out as permanent or primary residence to individual occupants within a multi-tenant building in which tenants typically share a kitchen, and may share toilets or bathrooms. SRO units range from. In some instances, contemporary units may have a small refrigerator, microwave, or sink.
SROs are a form of affordable housing, in some cases for formerly or otherwise homeless individuals. SRO units are the least expensive form of non-subsidized rental housing, with median rents even in New York City ranging from $450 to $705 per month in 2013. The term is primarily used in Canada and US. Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been an increasing displacement of SRO units aimed at low-income earners in a process of gentrification, with SRO facilities being sold and turned into condominiums. Between 1955 and 2013, almost one million SRO units were eliminated in the US by regulation, conversion or demolition.
The term SRO refers to the fact that the tenant rents a single room, as opposed to a full flat. While roommates informally sharing an apartment may also have a bedroom and share a bathroom and kitchen, an SRO tenant leases the SRO unit individually. SRO units may be provided in a rooming house, apartment building, or in illegal conversions of private homes into many small SRO rooms. There is a variety of levels of quality, ranging from a "cubicle with a wire mesh ceiling", at the lowest end, to small hotel rooms or small studio apartments without bathrooms, at the higher end. They may also be referred to as "SRO hotels", which acknowledges that many of the buildings are old hotels that are in a poor state of repair and maintenance. The initialism SRO has also been stated to mean "single resident only". The terms "residential hotel" or "efficiency unit" are also used to refer to some SROs.
History
The term originated in New York City, probably in the 1930s, but such accommodations predate the nickname by at least fifty years. SROs exist in many American cities, and are most common in larger cities. In many cases, the buildings themselves were formerly hotels in or near a city's central business district, typically built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Theodore Dreiser described early SRO hotels in his 1900 "naturist novel of urban life" Sister Carrie.By the 1880s, urban reformers began working on modernizing cities; their efforts to create "uniformity within areas, less mixture of social classes, maximum privacy for each family, much lower density for many activities, buildings set back from the street, and a permanently built order" all meant that SRO hotels had to be cut back. By the 1890s, SRO hotels became "forbidden housing; their residents, forbidden citizens." New York City police inspector Thomas Byrnes stated that rather than give SRO hotels "palliative" care, they should be dealt with using a "knife, the blister, the amputating instruments."
Reformers used moral codes, building codes, fire codes, zoning, planning committees and inspections to limit or remove SRO hotels. An example of moral critiques is Simon Lubin's claims that "unregulated hotels" were "spreading venereal diseases among the soldiers". Other reformers tried to ban men and boys from rooming in the same hotels, due to concerns about homosexuality. The building and safety codes criticized SRO hotel problems such as "firetraps, dark rooms, inadequate plumbing, an insufficient ventilation." In San Francisco, building code inspections and restrictions were often used to racially harass Chinese laborers and the places they lived.
In 1917, California passed a new hotel act that prevented the building of new hotels with small cubicle rooms. In addition to banning or restricting SRO hotels, land use reformers also passed zoning rules that indirectly reduced SROs: banning mixed residential and commercial use in neighbourhoods, an approach which meant that any remaining SRO hotel's residents would find it hard to eat at a local cafe or walk to a nearby corner grocery to buy food. Non-residential uses such as religious institutions and professional offices were still permitted under these new zoning rules, but working-class people were not allowed to operate businesses such as garages or plumbing businesses.
The United States saw a decrease in single-room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980. Since the early 1970s, the supply of SRO spaces did not meet the demand in US cities. In 1970, newspapers in the US wrote about an "SRO crisis". Downtown SRO hotels offer few and possibly no rooms to rent to tourists. Indeed, since the end of WWII, the inexpensive hotels that became SROs were lost and not replaced, with the losses coming from conversion to office space, demolition, or upgrading to tourist rental. For example, in San Francisco from 1975 and 1980, 6,085 SRO rooms were lost; in Chicago, from 1973 and 1984, more than 23,000 SRO units were lost. Some viewed the removal of SRO hotels as a good thing, as it meant the "removal of substandard housing and unwanted neighbors" and their "public nuisance"; on the other hand, it was also viewed as causing more homelessness.
Paul Groth states that some downtown "residents literally cannot exist without them " as they have "ew, if any, housing alternatives." There are "myths about today's hotel residents", claiming that they are all "isolated, needy, and disabled; all elderly; all on welfare; all elderly men; or all welfare mothers with three young children... socially marginal, all mildly psychotic, all alcoholics or drug addicts, all drifters and transients", with some journalists using the derogatory term "welfare hotel". A 1985 study in Chicago revealed "a large minority of impoverished workers". In New York City, about one third of SRO dwellers are black and one quarter are Hispanic. Most SRO residents do not move more often than apartment renters, contrary to media references to "transients".
In the mid-1990s, many "city health officials, architects, city planners, and politicians still argue that no one should live in hotels", which are viewed as leading to "severe social and physical maladjustment" and "public nuisance". Apart from media criticism, SRO residents are typically "unseen" and "invisible" in housing reform policies and reforms. SRO residents are typically not referred to explicitly in legislation, considered by city housing communities and urban development efforts, which means that SRO residents often have to move from district to district according to changes in real estate planning. San Francisco architect John Liu called SRO hotels the "most controversial, the most neglected, and the least understood of all housing types." The invisibility of SRO residents is caused by a lack of interest in the lives of the poor and in their lack of a "political constituency", as most housing policy focuses on the family. With the huge reductions in the number of SRO rooms available to the lowest-income populations in the US, the role of SROs is being taken over by homeless shelters; however, many homeless people avoid staying at shelters because they find them to be "dangerous and unappealing" or because they do not meet entry requirements, leading to more people sleeping on the streets.
SRO hotels may be invisible to higher-income passers-by when they are discreetly located on the upper floors of a restaurant or retail store. There is a debate as to whether SRO hotel residents are "homeless". Paul Groth states that SRO residents are "not homeless. They are living in admittedly minimal and unusual dwelling units, often in hideous repair and under woefully inadequate management but dwelling units nonetheless." SROs were considered socially acceptable even as late as the late 1950s: the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo depicted young administrative staff living in downtown SRO hotels. An equivalent term to SRO is "residential hotel".
YMCA
In the US, the YMCA began building SRO facilities in the 1880s to house people from rural areas who moved into cities to look for work. The typical YMCA SRO housing provides "low-income, temporary housing for a rent of $110 per week " for stays that are typically three to six months long. By 1950, 670 of the 1,688 YMCAs in the US provided SRO spaces, which made 66,959 beds available. By the 1970s, the typical YMCA tenant was more likely to be homeless people and youth facing life issues, rather than people migrating from rural areas.The pop song and gay anthem "YMCA" by the Village People describes the YMCA's mix of "gay culture and working-class workouts coexisting in a single communal space", creating "a mix of white-collar and blue-collar residents, along with retired seniors and veterans", with about half of residents being gay. While the song gives the impression that YMCA SROs in the 1970s had a party atmosphere, Paul Groth states that YMCA SRO units actually had "more supervision of your social life—a kind of management as to how you behaved... in a commercial rooming house, which mostly wanted to make sure the rooms were rented", without monitoring who you brought to your room. While some YMCAs hired professionals to help homeless people and troubled youths, overall, by the 2000s, most YMCAs decided to move away from providing SROs. By 2004, only 81 of the 2,594 YMCAs still had SRO units.
United States
New York City
For much of New York City's early history, housing was provided in shared accommodations that would probably be described as SROs today. These units provided housing for single, low-income men, and to a lesser degree, single low-income women. In New York City, the number of SRO units increased a great deal during the Great Depression, but with the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people, SRO units became filled with tenants with mental health diagnoses, which led to bans on the building of new SRO units in the 1950s and taxation benefits for landlords to convert SROs into regular apartments.In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of Puerto Rican families moved to the Upper West Side; in response to this new demand for housing, landlords harassed tenants of rent-controlled apartments to get them to leave and turned apartments into multi-room SROs, in some cases almost tripling their rental income for the same apartment building. Housing aimed at Puerto Ricans rose in price in response to the demand, while landlords reduced their maintenance. As the numbers of Puerto Ricans increased, overcrowding developed and bodegas and Hispanic-oriented stores opened; the elderly white middle-income residents became "hysterical on the subject of crime and safety", with community meetings held to deal with the issue of "foreigners" and "low types".
The anti-SRO policies of 1955 were introduced when the demographics of SRO residents changed towards immigrant families; in an environment influenced by "varying degrees of xenophobia and racism", the city took steps to ban new SRO unit construction, prevent families from living in SROs, and change building codes and zoning to discourage SROs. In the 1970s, the city introduced tax incentives for landlords to encourage them to convert SROs into regular apartments, a program which from 1976 to 1981 eliminated two thirds of the SRO stock in the city.
While the city realized by the 1980s that SRO units needed to be preserved, due to their role in housing homeless people, and introduced policies to encourage SRO retention, the number of SRO units had fallen by one half. In 1985, the city tried to stop the loss of the remaining SRO units by banning the "conversion, alteration, or demolition" of SRO buildings, but by 1989, this law was struck down by an appeals court. The huge loss of SRO units in New York City is "not the inevitable result" of "market forces"; it was caused by an interaction between city housing policies and market forces.