Single-room apartments once symbolized everything wrong with New York City. They didn’t have private kitchens or bathrooms and were seen as cheap places where crime festered, drugs flourished and the poor suffered daily indignities.
Today, city officials say the solution to the housing crisis involves building a lot more of them.
Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan, is expected to introduce a bill on Tuesday that would allow the construction of new single-room-occupancy apartments as small as 100 square feet for the first time in decades. The legislation, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would make it easier to convert office buildings into these types of homes, also known as S.R.O.s.
The apartments can resemble dormitories or suites, and could become cheaper housing options in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.
Such apartments, where kitchens and bathrooms are often shared, can cost $1,500 or less in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, where median rents easily exceed $3,000 per month.
The push underscores how an extreme shortage of housing has led to a turnaround in attitudes toward forms of shared housing, which have long been a controversial feature of cities worldwide.
Cities like London, Zurich and Seoul, with a thirst for cheap homes, are exploring similar ideas, as are other places in America. Other cities, like Hong Kong, still struggle to make the homes livable.
Few cities, though, have their histories as intertwined with these types of homes as New York. A population boom in the first half of 20th century led to thousands of people cramming into flophouses, boardinghouses and S.R.O.s.
There are about 30,000 to 40,000 left, down from more than 100,000 in New York City in the early 20th century, according to a 2018 study from the N.Y.U. Furman Center. But the homes became associated with poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The city passed laws preventing the construction of new units and the division of apartment buildings into S.R.O.s, leading to their steady decline over the decades.
“Overcrowding, overcharging and the creation of disease and crime-breeding slums have been the direct result of this conversion practice,” Mayor Robert F. Wagner said in 1954 when signing one of these bills. An adviser to a City Council committee said at the time that the growth in S.R.O.s would “reduce New York City to cubicle-room living.”
In some ways, that is now part of the idea.
The obvious benefit, city officials said, is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also better match the city’s changing demographics.
The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.
Because of the housing shortage, many people end up joining together to rent bigger homes better suited for families, said Michael Sandler, the housing department’s associate commissioner of neighborhood strategies. Building new shared housing might free up those apartments.
He said there are a number of companies today that market themselves as “co-living” providers that operate in a “gray,” unregulated legal area. For example, they may own a building or a few units and rent out individual rooms to people in a shared suite, but tenants do not have real leases and are not allowed by city regulations to do routine things like place locks on bedroom doors.
The legislation set to be introduced on Tuesday would also improve certain safety standards for shared housing, such as allowing only up to three apartments per kitchen or per bathroom, Mr. Sandler said. It would require shared housing to have sprinklers and provide enough electricity per room to run small appliances.
Allowing new shared housing could help provide new living options for young single people; people experiencing homelessness; older people and people just moving to city, city officials said.
“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” said Mr. Bottcher, the councilman. “They’re modern, flexible, well-managed homes that can meet the needs of a diverse population.”
Still, single-room-occupancy housing may not be a panacea, said Paul Freitag, the executive director of the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing, a nonprofit that runs a shelter and three S.R.O. buildings on the Upper West that were built before the laws changed years ago.
He said they are not ideal for older people who may not want to share bathrooms and may find the cramped space hard to move around in.
Mr. Freitag said that people often stay in shelters longer to find one-bedroom or studio apartments, rather than move into S.R.O.s. His group is looking to convert its existing S.R.O. buildings into bigger apartments.
“I think it’s a very challenging setting in which to age,” he said.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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