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.
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.