> As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs.

For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.

I'm skeptical that there are landlords who want to run SROs, having interacted with landlords, they see SROs as being more work (maintaining lots of public space like shared kitchens) for undesirable tenants. Further, in the unlikely event that a landlord would want to run an SRO, they will have to deal with nimby opposition. I just find it difficult to believe that laws designed to keep existing SROs open would be the threshold for preventing new ones. Additionally, we don't have to speculate because there were no new SROs being created before the law passed.

> For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.

Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.

Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.

>For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.

Another way of seeing this is "Sure, I'll give it a shot, but if it turns out to be a bad business I want the option to bail, rather than getting trapped slowly going bankrupt with a 90% empty building because I'm not allowed to evict 4 tenants and do something else with it."

It's possible to concoct a theoretical landlord who has that thought, although in your example it would cost $8000 to evict those people under the law ($2000 per).

The bigger problem is that no SROs were created in recent history before the law was passed. To say that there's some demand by landlords to create SROs but for the law you would have to show SROs getting created before the law, and that stopping after the law. The law was written to preserve the existing SROs with the understanding that the era in which SROs were an attractive investment was already past.

Secondly the OP claims without evidence that the law didn't slow the rate that SROs are being redeveloped. But gentrification in Chicago has accelerated so even if that's true the law is doing its job if the rate of SRO destruction didn't likewise accelerate.

SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.

But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?

I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.

I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.

That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."

So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.

One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.