A big part of what's long been known as the American Dream has been owning one's own home. It's a vital part of achieving any level of net worth; for most people, most of their net worth is tied up in real estate - in their home. However, for many reasons, in the United States, today, it's not just home ownership that is unaffordable for many young Americans; it's keeping a roof over their heads at all. I've written in the past about our younger two daughters, who can afford a nice rented townhome in a suburb of Denver only because our youngest lives with her sister and brother-in-law, making it a three-income household. They all get along and are content with the arrangement.
So why shouldn't more people be able to seek our - or provide - arrangements that suit them? My paternal grandfather used to tell me of his pre-Great War arrangement, when he was a young man (he was born in 1894) and lived in a rooming house. He had a room and a place at a shared table for breakfast and dinner. There was one bathroom on the second floor, where the rented rooms were. He had use of the living room for reading or shooting the breeze and playing cards with the other residents, one of whom was his uncle. The old rooming house arrangement was good for people who needed cheap housing, and it was good for people who had the room to spare in their homes.
A recent piece at the Pacific Research Institute is now asking why arrangements like this aren't in use today. That's a good question.
“I would never want to live like that, so therefore [insert housing type] should be illegal.”
Online chatter generates intense heat, and measly light, but occasionally, a profound truth is posted. The quote above appeared on Reddit last year. It well encapsulates the opposition to single-room occupancy (SRO). Fortunately, there’s fresh, bipartisan, pan-ideological momentum for the resurgence of what is sometimes referred to as “co-living.”
The Boston Foundation describes SRO as “housing where tenants rent individual rooms while sharing communal spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms,” with “rooms … typically smaller than studio apartments, usually ranging from 100 to 300 square feet” — and “each tenant holds their own lease, often on a month-to-month or weekly basis.” No, SRO isn’t useful for parents with a couple of kids. But in a nation where living alone is surging, the option is worthy of revival. And thanks to a public-interest law firm, states now have model legislation to supercharge SRO.
Why would legislation be required? Well, as it turns out, new (good) legislation may be required to undo old (bad) legislation.
Before we explore the draft bill, some history is instructive. As The Minnesota Star Tribune reported last year, before “they fell out of favor, boarding and rooming houses were a common thread in people’s lives, offering a low-cost way to live independently.” According to the American Enterprise Institute, a century ago, “working-class residents had a greater variety of housing options at low price points.” SROs, as well as “boarding homes … and residential hotels were all popular living arrangements in metropolitan centers, enabling relatively easy access to housing for transient populations and extra income for homeowners that took in boarders.” As many as “one-third to one-half of urban residents were either boarders or opened their own home to boarders.”
Then progressives decided to “help.” Per the Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning, in the 1910s, “California began regulating rooming houses and other hotels, setting standards for bathrooms (one per 10 bedrooms), window area per room, floor space per room and more.” Whatever the benefits of the rules, “they knocked the cheapest rooms off the market without providing substitutes,” and as the decades passed “building and health codes demanded ever larger rooms and more bathrooms.” California’s fumble was repeated across the country. AEI scholar Howard Husock wrote that in New York City, “the same crowd that saw any modest housing as slums, and deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, declared war on SROs, phasing them out by law starting in 1954.”
So these affordable, voluntary arrangements, popular with single people with no children, were regulated out of existence. So why not deregulate? Why should this not be an option? Why shouldn't young people today have the same option my grandfather had in 1914, when he was 20 years old, unmarried, with no kids, and a job as a farm hand?
Because it's in the nature of government to grow ever larger and more intrusive, and that's what happened here.
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Nobody, of course, should be required to open their homes to anyone. Nor should anyone be forced into a housing arrangement like this that is not to their liking, and if they can afford some other arrangement. But there's no reason not to make it an option. And there are more options than just the rooming-house model. In high school, a friend of mine left home at 16 due to family issues that I won't go into here. He had a part-time job and found a room for rent in an elderly woman's house. His room was the only bedroom on the second floor; he had use of the second-floor bathroom, he had one shelf set aside for him in the refrigerator, and use of the stove when the homeowner wasn't using it. It was a good solution for a young man who may otherwise have been sleeping in his car.
These kinds of arrangements may solve a lot of the affordable housing issues that vex our major cities, and make it easier for young people to get their feet on the first rungs of the financial ladder by leaving them with a little more income to tuck away, to one day reach that goal of their own home.
We should be able to undo these stupid laws and regulations. Regulation of these things should be minimal. Private property should be private. The only way the government should be involved is in the event of a breach of contract or in the case of a crime being committed.
Maybe it's time to work on addressing today's affordable housing problems with some of yesterday's models.
