Reviving Flophouses: Can Single‑Room Occupancy Help Solve Today’s Housing Crisis?

Can we — and should we — bring back flophouses (SROs)?

This piece revisits a debate sparked by Ryan Puzycki’s recent essay on the decline of single‑room occupancy hotels (SROs) — also called rooming houses, boarding homes, or more pejoratively, flophouses. Once a widespread, privately provided safety net for very-low-income urban residents, SROs largely disappeared under twentieth‑century building codes, zoning rules, and urban renewal policies. Below I summarize that history, survey modern policy experiments, and assess whether reintroducing SRO‑style housing is feasible or desirable today.

From the late 1800s through the mid‑1900s, SROs provided extremely low‑cost shelter: for the equivalent of a few hundred dollars today, a single occupant could rent a small room and share bathrooms and kitchens with others. In some cities SROs may once have accounted for roughly 10 percent of housing stock. Today they survive mostly in historical fiction and film as a symbol of urban poverty.

Paul Groth’s historical scholarship and Puzycki’s account trace the SRO decline to a mixture of forces. Long‑term economic changes pushed people and jobs out of dense cores, but regulation played a decisive role. Early building and public‑health codes often outlawed the cheapest SRO configurations by imposing minimum plumbing and fixture standards. Zoning and urban renewal policies — occupancy limits, single‑family and single‑use zoning, bans on certain hotel types, and large slum‑clearance projects — removed existing SROs and made replacement construction difficult or illegal.

“Once [the SRO] market was dismantled, the result was predictable: the homelessness wave of the late 1970s and 1980s followed directly from the destruction of SROs,” Puzycki observes, linking regulatory change to long‑run increases in homelessness.

Given that history, many housing advocates rightly argue for regulatory reforms that would permit SROs, coliving, or microapartments. If these options are legally allowed, owners and developers will create more low‑cost units. But political and practical barriers mean a broad revival is unlikely without additional reforms.

On the political side, permissive SRO laws today frequently carry strings that blunt their cost‑reducing potential. When Minneapolis relegalized SROs, it required new projects to be nonprofit‑ or government‑run — a deliberate constraint on purely private low‑cost provision. A statewide liberalization elsewhere included unexpected requirements like parking minimums for developments more than half a mile from transit. Even where officials touted monthly rents of roughly $850–$900 for microapartments, that price remains out of reach for the very poorest households SROs once sheltered.

Beyond zoning, conventional building, health and safety codes raise construction and operating costs for shared‑facility models. Many voters and policymakers would resist deep rollbacks of those safeguards. Strong tenant‑protection regimes in progressive cities also complicate operations: evicting a disruptive or nonpaying resident with shared bathrooms and kitchens can take months, making the business model much riskier.

Economics further works against an SRO renaissance in high‑value neighborhoods. Where land values and rents justify new construction, developers typically earn higher returns building conventional apartments or condos. Similar dynamics have limited the impact of “missing middle” reforms (duplexes, triplexes): modest upzoning often yields few net new units because developers prefer more lucrative alternatives. Research by Alex Horowitz found that converting vacant office buildings to SRO‑style units generally requires public subsidies — and offices are among the easiest conversion candidates because of large floor plates.

Still, there is a policy argument for subsidized SRO conversions: public dollars can sometimes house more people when spent on efficient, small‑unit conversions than on conventional subsidized apartments. San Francisco’s recent investments — roughly $400 million in conversions of hotels and other properties into supportive SRO‑style housing — have been cost‑effective per unit, and yet the city’s overall unhoused population has continued to grow. That shows the limits of targeted programs when supply constraints and rising demand dominate the market.

By contrast, cities that build far more housing tend to keep costs lower across the board. Houston’s relative success in reducing unsheltered homelessness is tied less to a single housing type than to much greater housing production overall.

So the deeper remedy is broader deregulation and productivity gains in construction. The more housing that gets built, the more downward pressure there is on prices — and the less need to rely exclusively on a narrow, historically specific form like the SRO. If regulatory barriers fall and construction methods improve, the cheapest housing of the future could be better‑designed, safer, and more humane than the flophouses of the 1920s.

This is not an argument against relegalizing coliving or microunits. Loosening rules would likely produce more SRO‑style developments and give policymakers an additional tool. But those reforms should be part of a broader agenda: freeing up construction across the housing spectrum — from triplexes and starter homes to apartments near transit — rather than an exclusive focus on reviving one historic form.

Recent legal and policy developments

Landlord groups and public‑interest litigators continue to litigate rent regulation changes. One current lawsuit challenges post‑2019 caps that limit rent increases on vacant apartments, alleging the caps prevent lawful repairs and amount to an uncompensated taking of property. Meanwhile, some cities have tightened rent‑increase limits for rent‑stabilized units, shifting the balance between tenant protection and landlord incentives to maintain and invest in housing stock.

On the national policy debate, some proponents of temporary price controls argue they can hold costs down while new supply comes online; critics say such controls discourage investment and reduce long‑run supply. These tradeoffs appear in many policy proposals and underscore a central point: there is no single silver bullet. A mix of deregulation, targeted subsidies, creative conversions, and sustained housing production is more likely to deliver large‑scale affordability gains than a narrow campaign to “make flophouses great again.”

Bottom line

Relegalizing SROs and permitting coliving or microapartments are sensible, targeted reforms that can expand affordable options. But their potential is limited by political constraints, tenant‑protection rules, and market economics. The most reliable path to broadly affordable housing is to remove barriers to building more supply and modernize construction — which will create a variety of low‑cost, higher‑quality housing options that surpass the cramped, shared‑facility flophouses of a century ago.