Until the late 1970s, hardly anyone in the nation lacked a home, because even someone living below the poverty line could afford to rent a room, typically with a shared bathroom and kitchen. These rooms were often located in apartment buildings, boarding houses or single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels. Much like a college dorm, residents lived in small spaces, sometimes less than 80 square feet, and in those days the accommodations were often bare-bones and lacked modern amenities. But they were homes.
Single-room dwellings like this were so common that they once made up a tenth of the rental stock in big cities such as New York and San Francisco. Although the population of Los Angeles’ Skid Row was larger 100 years ago than it is today, its residents lived inside, often in SRO housing — not on sidewalks and under overpasses.
But in 1955, New York City became the first large city to ban new SRO housing, an effort led by a combination of activists who sincerely wanted better homes for SRO residents and others who simply didn’t want low-income workers living nearby. Other cities followed suit, typically making their building, fire and zoning codes so restrictive that new SROs couldn’t be created and operators of existing ones faced the need to make costly upgrades.
Since SRO tenants could only afford the modest rents charged — about $100 to $300 a month in 2025 dollars — SRO landlords couldn’t afford to provide the larger apartments with separate baths required by the new zoning regulations. (By contrast, the median U.S. rent for a one-bedroom apartment today is about $1,200 a month.) So the old buildings were razed or remodeled into higher-cost units.
As SROs declined, homelessness surged. A 1980 survey of residents at a New York City homeless shelter found that half of those moving in were coming directly from SROs. An advocate explained: “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market. They aren’t anymore.”
More than 1 million SRO units have been lost nationwide. One and half million units should have been added just to keep up with growth of the overall housing stock. Those 2.5 million missing SRO units could accommodate about triple the number of people homeless in the U.S. today.
Modern versions of SROs can be created in many ways, with plenty of light, more space and updated safety features. One approach would be to convert some of the more than 1 billion square feet of vacant office space in the U.S. to dorm-style apartments, which is less costly than converting them into regular apartments. Texas lawmakers made it easier to do that with two laws passed in 2025: One removes regulatory barriers to office-building conversions while the other allows new apartments on commercially zoned land.
A second option is simply removing restrictions on unrelated people living together by passing a so-called “Golden Girls” law, named after the 1980s sitcom. Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Oregon have done that for housing statewide, and Texas did the same for college towns. Homes shared by roommates are usually more affordable than other housing options.
And a third approach is removing zoning barriers that prohibit SROs near jobs, stores and transit. Small apartments above Main Street businesses were common in the past and could be again.
Bringing back SROs is only one piece of the solution. States and cities also need to scale back regulatory barriers to other types of housing: townhouses, duplexes, basement or backyard accessory dwelling units, and apartments, especially near jobs and commerce. Cities that have made it easier to add homes, such as Minneapolis, Houston and Raleigh, N.C., have seen housing production surge, rent growth slow and homelessness begin to fall.
But for homelessness to largely disappear, we’ll need housing that Americans earning the lowest incomes can afford. Unnecessary and costly mandates require large units, redundant stairways, extra-large elevators, windows that open even though they’re not required in hotels, and parking spots for people who often can’t afford cars. They force people to sleep on the sidewalk because the best housing option they could afford is prohibited.
Overregulation, mostly by localities, has been a major driver of mass homelessness. Today, that red tape stands in the way of ensuring that virtually all Americans have a place to call home. Returning to a time when homelessness barely existed is not a utopian dream. It was a reality for decades and is within our reach again.
Alex Horowitz is a project director with the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative. John Bonura is a policy analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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