The article paints a very friendly picture of SROs but dismisses problems as unwarranted moral panic.
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.
In the 1920's SRO occupants were much more likely to be immigrants, with different cultural values and living expectations. So norms may have declined over time, but norms are much more uniform today than they were 100 years ago.
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.
> 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.
In my jurisdiction I once had a roommate who stole from me. I was the homeowner, and he was renting from me. I was able to kick him out without notice. If he had his own separate bathroom & kitchen I wouldn't have been able to due to those tenant protection laws you mention. But because we were in a shared space those laws didn't apply.
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.
It sounds like I had the option. I had called the cops and talked to them, and she told me that the only option she had at that point was to arrest him and we didn't really have grounds for that at the time. But when she learned we had a shared kitchen she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
> she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
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.
I was told that becase of the shared living situation, it became a safety issue. That my right to safety trumped the roommate's right to live in my house. Of course, the cop may well not had a complete understanding of the law either.
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.
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.
> Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time
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.
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
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.
>>in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble
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?)
> And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
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.
> Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's.
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.
By that criteria, Baumol's doesn't even apply to symphony orchestras. Technology has made symphony orchestras marginally more productive. Instruments are better and more consistent, recording technology improves practices, et cetera.
Baumol's applies to anything where technology has improved the field significantly less than average. That includes both symphony orchestras and janitorial services.
If the function of a symphony orchestra is to perform symphonies, there has been essentially zero change in their productivity for several hundred years. Contemporary instruments are no better than they were in the mid-1800s. Their rehearsals are rarely recorded, and even if they were, it is much less common for this to contribute to future rehearsals.
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.
What is your proposed alternative? If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
> If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.
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.
> If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
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.
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).
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…
>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?
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.
The kitchen is a cost, the availability of food outside lessens the need to pay that cost.
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.
Eating out in the US being crazy expensive is somewhat of a self-causing problem.
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.
Go back in time 2000+ years to Rome and most apartments didn't have kitchens. Eating out was far cheaper than eating in. The primary cost was fuel, and restaurants use far less fuel per diner than a home kitchen.
Right, NYC ironically had the cheapest eating out options even though it's one of the most expensive metros. But now the dollar slice is dead, and bringing back a single SRO building isnt bringing it back. The transition period is too rough for anyone to invest enough to make it happen, so now we're stuck with everyone having a kitchen and eating out being expensive.
It's because commercial real estate is eating businesses alive, but the government can't do anything about it because a good chunk of the economy depends on propped up commercial real estate valuations
Not necessarily. I have a stew place by me that is $12 for a plate of veggies + meat that is easily two meals for me. There are plenty of food trucks around with good options in the $5-10 range. And that's before we're looking at stuff from a bodega.
And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.
$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.
It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?
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?
Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?
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.
Add an 'instant pot' or similar (or replace the microwave with one if you're really short on space) and you actually have a huge variety of available meals with a regular outlet + countertop. Home kitchens are designed around old fashioned stoves that required a lot of space to produce heat, and they've stayed around because everyone likes to have lots of counter space. These days the actual cooking process can be done quite well even in a very small area.
WeLive/WeWork used to do this before the CEO fiasco. They operated a shared living space for working professionals. It wasn’t $231/mo but it was a great way for younger professionals to get their foot in the door living and working in the city.
The SROs discussed in the article were prominent long after that.
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.
In my opinion, your entire comment is suffering from the "out of sight, out of mind" bias that drives so much policy around housing and mental illness, mostly for the worse. The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
As always, I'm firmly of the mind that none of this has to do with balance sheets or what things cost. There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits, thanks to decades of propaganda saying as such. The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line. The fact that housing assistance and other such things would clean up the streets of the same people while giving them the help they need, and at a lower cost than rolling the cops on them to beat them with batons and shove them into coach busses to other cities doesn't matter, because the violence is what they want.
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.
> There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits,
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.
The Y and religious shelters have a zero-tolerance policy. You get kicked out immediately for drugs or alcohol. So no, they're generally not intermingled.
> The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line.
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.
> 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,
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.
> Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income.
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.
> The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
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.
> “I can’t imagine what it would look like today with a communal kitchen shared by strangers…”
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 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.
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.
A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).
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.
> they would need to be able to vote to kick people out.
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.
I don’t think any of the problems you quote are related to shared living arrangements.
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.
Interestingly, churches are one of the ways you still could, given that when zoning conflicts with practice of a religion zoning often has to give way. Get some folks with development experience and start a Hospitaller order.
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.
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.