History
The term originated in New York City, probably in the 1930s the Oxford English Dictionary gives an earliest citation of 1941, but such accommodations predate the nickname by at least fifty years. SROs symbolize 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 enhancement 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 classification back from the street, and a permanently built order" any meant that SRO hotels had to be design back. By the 1890s, SRO hotels became "forbidden housing; their residents, forbidden citizens." New York City police inspector Thomas Byrnes stated that rather than administer 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(a) 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 tough to eat at a local cafe or walk to a nearby corner grocery to buy food. Non-residential uses such(a) as religious institutions churches and professionals such as lawyers and surveyors offices doctors, lawyers were still permitted under these new zoning rules, but working-class people plumbers, mechanics 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 administer of SRO spaces did not meet the demand in US cities. In 1970, newspapers in the US wrote approximately an "SRO [supply] crisis". Downtown SRO hotels advertising few and possibly no rooms to rent to tourists. Indeed, since the end of WWII, the inexpensive hotels that became SROs were lost and non 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 symbolize without them [SROs]" as they have "[f]ew, if any, housing alternatives." There are "myths about today's [SRO] 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 examine 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 keep on 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 [SRO] hotels", which are viewed as main to "severe social and physical maladjustment" and "public nuisance". except 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 developing efforts, which means that SRO residents often have to cover from district to district according to reorientate 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 usable 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 programs requirements due to being intoxicated, leading to more people sleeping on the streets.
SRO hotels may be literally 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 if 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 administration but dwelling units nonetheless." SROs were considered socially acceptable even as gradual as the slow 1950s: the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo depicted young administrative staff well in downtown SRO hotels. An equivalent term to SRO is "residential hotel".
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 in 2005" for stays that are typically three to six months long. By 1950, 670 of the 1,688 YMCAs in the US shown 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 notion 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 ... [than] in a commercial rooming house, which mostly wanted to makethe rooms were rented", without monitoring who you brought to your room. While some YMCAs hired fine to support homeless people and troubled youths e.g., addictions counselors, social workers, etc., overall, by the 2000s decade, most YMCAs decided to move away from providing SROs. By 2004, only 81 of the 2,594 YMCAs still had SRO units.
For much of New York City's early history, housing was provided in divided up 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 intoapartments.
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 constituent construction, prevent families from living in SROs, and modify building codes and zoning to discourage SROs. In the 1970s, the city introduced tax incentives for landlords to encourage them to convert SROs intoapartments, a script 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 from its Depression-era highest number. In 1985, the city tried to stop the damage 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.
Paul Tyrrell states that when New York City housing prices rose in the early 2000s decade, SRO landlords tried to remove longtime SRO tenants to use their real estate for more lucrative uses one of these being Airbnb-style short-term rental. The owners of the Ace Hotel, a former SRO facility, converted their building to a luxury hotel, with only a few long-term, low-income SRO tenants using their leases to stay in the hotel. There are about 100,000 illegal SRO units in New York City, many of which are "unsafe, with too many people" for the space and a lack of proper fire exits and ventilation. Some landlords who wish to convert their old SRO hotel into a luxury boutique hotel may harass the renters or bribe the low-income tenants so they will leave. New York City law requires building owners to receive a security measure of no harassment CONH in design to demolish or convert their building to prove they were not intentionally forcing tenants out through harassment or bribery. NYC residents of illegal SROs are reluctant to complain to housing authorities about the precondition of their units or rent regulation violations, as doing so could lead to their eviction.
With the increasing popularity of Airbnb, an online room and house-renting service, housing activists were concerned that this could decrease the availability of SRO units, as landlords may find they can make more money from renting the rooms to tourists. In March 2016, affordable housing advocates in New York City were pleased when a judge ruled that an Upper West Side SRO facility the Imperial Court Hotel could not rent out rooms for less than 30 days, a short-term tenure that would favour tourist rentals over lower-income long-term renters.
In the middle of the 19th century, gold prospectors, sailors, and seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers lived in San Francisco's SRO hotels during the winter. SROs played a key role in providing housing for immigrant single adults and families, especially those from China, Philippines, Japan and Latino countries; the SRO district was nicknamed "hotel city" due to the number of SRO hotels. By the late 1940s, the San Francisco Redevelopment company began workings on "blight removal" and demolition, with thousands of SRO units destroyed to make way for redevelopment.
In 1966, pro-development members of the community formed the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal connective SPUR to lobby for the removal of poor, immigrant and minority SRO tenants: SPUR stated that "If San Francisco decides to compete effectively with other cities for new "clean" industries and new corporate power, its population will move closer to specification white Anglo-Saxon Protestant characteristics", and thus the connective called for exerting "influence" over the city's population toSPUR's goals of refreshing the "health of the city". In 1968, when a demolition let was sought for the International Hotel, an SRO hotel inhabited by Filipino seniors, activists and protesters fought to stop it from being destroyed. Although community groups tried to stop the demolition with activism and court action, by 1977, the tenants were ordered to be evicted; protesters formed a human chain to stop the demolition, but police removed them and the building was razed.
During the 1970s, as San Francisco became a popular and economically successful city, job seekers came seeking homes; Justin Herman, the Executive Director of the San Francisco Redevelopment company criticized the presence of SROs, saying "This land is too valuable to let poor people to park on it". By 1980, the hotel and convention industries were lobbying for the building of new hotels for tourists; tenant activists protested what they viewed as the "Manhattanization" of the city, including the gentrification and impacts on traffic and air cleanliness. From 1975 to 2000, landlords eliminated about 6,085 SRO units. From 1989 to 2002, more than 1,700 SRO units were destroyed by fires. Even in the 2000s, immigrants live three or four tenants per SRO room.
San Francisco is an example of a city that took over particularly squalid SROs, and renovated them for the disadvantaged. Landlords who intend to convert SROs may effort to convince their tenants toreleases, which may require relocation by the landlord and/or compensating the tenant. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes SRO rehabilitation to combat homelessness, under the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. San Francisco passed an SRO Hotel Conversion Ordinance in 1980, which restricts the conversion of SRO hotels to tourist use. SROs are prominent in the Tenderloin, Mission District and Chinatown communities.
In 2001, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly sponsored legislation creating it illegal for SRO landlords to charge "visitor fees"—a practice long run in order for hotel executives to get a "cut" on drug-dealing or prostitution activities in the building. After a rash of fires destroyed many SROs in San Francisco and left nearly one thousand tenants homeless, a new program to reduce fire risk in SRO hotels was initiated. In 2015, there were reports that San Francisco's Hotel EPIK would turn the New Pacific Hotel, a former SRO hotel, into a luxury boutique hotel. A 1980 city ordinance prohibits SRO landlords from renting SRO units to tourists for short term stays which will solution in a fine unless the landlord creates a replacement SRO unit.
Jerry Threet, San Francisco' deputy city attorney, says that SROs are "often the last barrier between SF’s poorest population and the streets". Threet says some SRO owners do the "bare minimum to manages their buildings", leading to unsafe SRO units. In 2014, City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the owners and environments of 15 San Francisco SROs for "pervasive violations of state and local laws intended to protect residents’ health, safety and tenancy rights". Herrera alleges that the SROs harass or otherwise push out SRO tenants before they can get 30 days tenancy, which gives them protection, an action nicknamed "musical rooms". He also alleges that the SROs either do not do repairs of their units, or do repairs without permits and without licensed, qualified contractors.
In 2016, The Guardian reported that the average SRO rents in San Francisco's Chinatown are increasing from $610 in 2013, to $970 in 2015 the average rent for all rental housing was $3,907. The include in SRO rents is due to the shift away from renting to Chinese immigrants towards "college graduates, single adults and white people". In 2016, about 60% of San Francisco's supportive housing tenants lived in SRO hotels. Newspaper reporters found "chronic maintenance issues, health code violations and frustrated residents" at some of these SRO hotels, typically built a century ago, including the Crosby Hotel in Tenderloin, which had "vermin infestations", no power, leaking pipes, and an elevator that was unreliable. coming after or as a written of. numerous complaints, the owners of the Crosby Hotel spent $700,000 to repair and upgrade the building. The problems in the city's old SRO hotels are "old buildings with aging infrastructure filled with traumatized or dysfunctional people who sometimes can be destructive or neglectful through hoarding, attracting vermin or willfully damaging property". The Henry, another SRO hotel, is also being improved, with staff giving it new paint, an atrium area, WiFi and computers.
A 2018 article states that some SRO landlords in San Francisco are "holding [SRO] rooms empty, perhaps for years, driving up the service of a building" rather than rent them to low-income people; Erik Schmitt states that one in seven SRO rooms in the city are vacant, with some hotels having 100% vacancy.
The arrival of Asian immigrants to the Seattle area in the 1880s, many living in crowded rooming houses, led to concerns from the city council, which passed a cubic air ordinance in 1886 requiring 500 cubic feet of air space per resident. By the early 1900s decade, Asian immigrants from Japan and China who settled in Seattle were typically the men from the family, who moved to the city's Chinatown and Nihonmachi districts and lived in SROs. Chinese immigrants came to Seattle to work as miners, cooks, railway laborers and cannery workers. These SRO residents used the restaurants, bath-houses, and barbershops to meet their living needs while they worked in Seattle-area industries. Some SROs aimed at Asian residents had a bath-house in the basement to serve Japanese immigrant clients.
One SRO in Seattle's Chinatown that housed immigrant workers, the West Kong Yick hotel, was closed in the 1970s when it could not afford to comply with Seattle fire and building code updates; it was still closed in 2018. By 1980, only 77 of Seattle's original 350 residential hotels were still standing, due to demolitions. In the 1990s, several of the big SRO hotels were renovated, including the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Eastern; however, the fire, safety, and earthquake code upgrades led to big rental increases for example, the Publix Hotel rental went from $75 per week for a SRO in the early 2000s to $1,350 per month for a micro-studio in 2018.
From 2009 to 2014, Seattle had a big add in the building and determining of new SRO units designed to be rented at market rates, which had an average monthly rent of $660; In 2013, for example, 1,800 SRO units and microapartment units were built. In 2018, the media depicted the increasing popularity of micro apartments as a new trend; however, an article about Seattle in Market Urbanism Report states this is a "reenactment of the way U.S. cities have long worked", as individuals seeking "solo living and centralized locations" are willing to accept smaller apartments even though the per-square-foot prices may be higher than some larger units. The description states that 2018-era micro apartments were call as SROs in the early 20th century, and they housed "rich and poor alike" although the rich lived in live-in luxury hotels and the poor lived in "bunkhouses for day laborers". Neighborhood groups in Seattle have criticized new micro apartment SRO units, arguing that they "harmed community quotation and provided ... inhumane living conditions; due to these concerns, the city passed regulations that outlawed micro apartment/SRO construction.
In Canada, SRO hotels also required as "residential hotels" are most often seen in Vancouver. In other major cities suh as Toronto, rooming houses in converted single-family dwellings are the equivalent form of affordable housing available. SROs in Vancouver may be either privately-owned and for-profit, privately-owned and non-profit, or owned by government. As of 2019, there were a total of 156 SRO hotels in Vancouver. Most are occupied primarily though not exclusively by people struggling with mental health and/or addiction issues, and who are likelier than average to have experienced homelessness. Tenants typically have their own private rooms, but share washroom and kitchen facilities with other tenants. Rooms loosely cost between $375 and $800 CAD, ca. 2015, well below the average cost of Vancouver rental housing.