In the 1920's SRO occupants were much more likely to be immigrants, with different cultural values and living expectations. So norms may have declined over time, but norms are much more uniform today than they were 100 years ago.
And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
I think what made it more feasible in the 1920's was two things:
- much higher staffing levels. Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's. They had staff cleaning kithcens and bathrooms, and staff warning and kicking out tenants that consistently left a mess. I can't imagine that being feasible today on a $231/month room rent.
- a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
> a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.
You probably brought up the biggest problem with making this model work today.
In the 1920s the threat of being evicted rapidly for violations was real and present. Either you follow the rules or you’re getting kicked to the street.
Modern tenant laws are unbelievably protective of tenants and require extremely long periods to evict people. I know someone who spent months and tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict squatters who broke into their house while they were doing some construction work on it. If it takes months to kick non-paying tenants who were never invited out of a place you own, it would be a nightmare to try to evict people from an SRO fast enough to keep any peace.
In my jurisdiction I once had a roommate who stole from me. I was the homeowner, and he was renting from me. I was able to kick him out without notice. If he had his own separate bathroom & kitchen I wouldn't have been able to due to those tenant protection laws you mention. But because we were in a shared space those laws didn't apply.
The laws for SRO should be the same as shared living, but I imagine it varies greatly.
Do you mean have him forcibly removed by the police? Or just terminate his rental agreement?
Depending on the location, there’s a difference between being able to tell someone their contract is terminated and they have to leave versus actually having legal standing to have them removed.
The tenants who abuse the laws know that they can just refuse to leave and nothing can be done for so many days. In the last case I heard of, the tenant knew this and waited until a day or two before the clock ran out to actually leave, despite being declared unwelcome and asked to leave many weeks prior.
It sounds like I had the option. I had called the cops and talked to them, and she told me that the only option she had at that point was to arrest him and we didn't really have grounds for that at the time. But when she learned we had a shared kitchen she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
> she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.
Right, so you didn't have to follow the eviction process. This is a key distinction. If you tell someone they're no longer welcome and they have to move out immediately, you're not technically following the eviction process. If the person had refused to leave, you'd have to follow the eviction process which can require some evidentiary collection, such as being able to prove that the person was notified that they were being evicted on a certain date.
In extreme cases (not like your ex-roommate) squatters will go so far to game the system that they only come and go in the middle of the night to avoid being officially served the eviction notice.
I was told that becase of the shared living situation, it became a safety issue. That my right to safety trumped the roommate's right to live in my house. Of course, the cop may well not had a complete understanding of the law either.
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.
Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time & eat more rapid price cuts while trying to sell it than try to be a single unit landlord in NYC.
Likewise small time landlords are going to be much pickier about who they let rent from them, in possibly discriminatory ways. It's a much lower risk than having a bad tenant occupy your unit, fail to pay rent, cost you legal fees and possibly damage unit on way out after 6 months.
A landlord is not going to take a chance on a drug addict in recovery or other higher risk tenant in this context.
> Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time
Sadly, this is how most squatting situations start. Having an empty housing unit is very risky.
When my friend had squatters break into his house while it was being renovated, the police said their hands were tied. They had become squatters first, and the breaking and entering couldn't be definitively proven. They got to stay in the house for months while he paid lawyers to do the eviction proceedings.
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.
>>in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble
The words "can" and "minimal" are doing a lot of work there. An angry tenant who knows they are getting evicted can do an incredible amount of damage in a few weeks, even without deliberate vandalism.
And landlords can be insanely abusive.
Perhaps a system wherein not only the tenant must pay a deposit, but the landlord must also put three month's rent in escrow. They can evict a tenant nearly immediately for certain issues (violence, drugs, etc.) but the tenant can sue in small claims court (for low time and overhead) and recover the extra three months escrow funds if landlord found to be abusing it. (Obviously just he rough outline of an idea, but maybe it'd work?)
> And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
The different stereotypes of abusers of different drugs are not inaccurate.
If you had your choice of renting to someone who regularly abused mushrooms, alcohol, or methamphetamine, your preference is likely to be in that order and for good reason.
I would not want to share a room with someone constantly on mushrooms, would not want to share a house with someone constantly blackout drunk, and would not want to share a street with someone frequently on meth.
> Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's.
IIUC, this is an inappropriate of use of Baumol's cost disease. That is intended to apply in cases where the fundamental issue is that technology and/or process changes cannot improve the productivity of those performing a task, such as a symphony orchestra. Janitorial work has been subject to productivity increases, and ultimately, it's a bit of a stretch to use Baumol's to talk about a case where you can't for some reason reduce the number of people doing the work from one to zero.
Supervisory roles might, possibly, be an appropriate Baumol's example.
By that criteria, Baumol's doesn't even apply to symphony orchestras. Technology has made symphony orchestras marginally more productive. Instruments are better and more consistent, recording technology improves practices, et cetera.
Baumol's applies to anything where technology has improved the field significantly less than average. That includes both symphony orchestras and janitorial services.
If the function of a symphony orchestra is to perform symphonies, there has been essentially zero change in their productivity for several hundred years. Contemporary instruments are no better than they were in the mid-1800s. Their rehearsals are rarely recorded, and even if they were, it is much less common for this to contribute to future rehearsals.
Wikipedia says that Baumol's is:
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
while it's not the canonical source for the definition, it is notably more specific than your version.
And while drug use is a problem today, alcohol abuse was a problem 100 years ago.
I think what made it more feasible in the 1920's was two things:
- much higher staffing levels. Hiring a janitor or cleaning or supervisors etc was so much cheaper than it is now due to Baumol's. They had staff cleaning kithcens and bathrooms, and staff warning and kicking out tenants that consistently left a mess. I can't imagine that being feasible today on a $231/month room rent.
- a willingness to kick out problematic tenants. The Y has a zero-alcohol policy, and will kick you out with no notice for violation. Tenant's rights laws and social norms make this much harder today.