New York City may be ready to reclaim a controversial piece of its past as a tool for its present housing emergency.
On Tuesday, Council member Erik Bottcher introduced a bill — backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — that would once again allow construction of single-room occupancy units as small as 100 square feet, the New York Times reported. Such units typically omit private kitchens and bathrooms and rely on shared facilities.
The proposal would also make it simpler to convert office buildings into these micro units.
City officials argue S.R.O.s and other shared housing can be delivered fast and cheap enough to meet demand from single adults, newcomers to the city and people exiting homelessness. In neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, shared rooms with communal kitchens can rent for $1,500 or below, compared with median rents well north of $3,000.
Officials point to shifting household patterns as part of the rationale: single-person households rose almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023 and nonfamily households grew more than 11 percent over the same period.
But others have pointed to the perception S.R.O. units have had in the city as sites of crime, drugs, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The legislation speaks to this and would not resurrect the flophouses of a century ago; it sets operational and safety standards — for example, limiting kitchens or bathrooms to serve no more than three units, requiring sprinklers and mandating minimum electrical capacity — and would attempt to bring co-living operators out of a largely unregulated gray market.
“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” Bottcher said, pitching modern, well-managed shared housing as a pragmatic addition to the city’s housing stock.
The measure places New York alongside global peers like London, Zurich and Seoul, which have experimented with compact shared housing. City Council banned the construction of new S.R.O.s in 1955. Today, there are approximately 30,000 to 40,000 S.R.O. units in New York City, less than half of what existed in the early 20th century, according to the NYU Furman Center.
If enacted, the policy could free up larger units by legalizing smaller alternatives, offer lower-cost options for a growing cohort of single households and reshape how the city thinks about density.
— Holden Walter-Warner
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