Council Floats SRO Comeback for NYC, Betting Microflats Can Outgrow Old Stereotypes

As New York reaches for old solutions to its acute housing crisis, the city’s plan to revive micro-dwellings signals a tense balancing act between affordability, dignity, and urban change.

By some counts, New York City claims more empty office space than Cleveland has buildings—over 90 million square feet lying fallow, even as more than 100,000 residents sleep in shelters or on the streets. In an emblematic turn, City Councilman Erik Bottcher last week dusted off a nearly vanished concept to address skyrocketing rents and homelessness: the return of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing. These micro-dwellings, notable for shared kitchens and bathrooms, might seem a relic of a sootier, meaner Manhattan. But their proposed comeback comes with new rules and a promise to look forward, not back.

Bottcher’s bill, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would legalize once-taboo SROs—tiny rooms, typically around nine square meters, with residents sharing facilities. The legislation also hopes to ease conversions of derelict offices into SRO-like microunits, aiming to shrink the city’s dire mismatch between available housing and need. The broader intent is clear: to rapidly and affordably house adults—single workers, newcomers, and formerly homeless New Yorkers—priced out of glossier options.

SROs, largely phased out since the 1980s after years of negative association with crime, fire hazards, and overcrowding, inspire both nostalgia and unease. Images of poorly managed “flophouses” with dangerous conditions linger in popular memory and policy. Bottcher and his allies, mindful of this, argue the past need not dictate the present. The new bill requires robust fire protection, sets modern electrical standards, and limits the number of units sharing communal facilities. Proponents thus hope to avoid the pitfalls that doomed SROs before—namely, scant oversight and cynical landlords.

Supporters point out that the city’s social fabric has been changing at a clip. Data from the past five years show a 9% jump in single-person households and an 11% rise in non-family living arrangements. Meanwhile, the economics of shelter remain forbidding. The median monthly rent in Brooklyn now surpasses $3,000; shared-room options, by contrast, hover at $1,500 or less in neighbourhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant or Clinton Hill. For social workers and housing advocates, the appeal is pragmatic: not every adult needs—or can afford—a one-bedroom apartment.

Critics of the plan warn, however, that a return to “dormitory living” risks creating modern tenements or institutionalising a lower standard of dwelling for the poorest. The answer from policymakers is that the status quo—a record number of people in temporary accommodation and a swelling “shadow market” of illegal, unregulated room rentals—is hardly more dignified, and far more dangerous. They argue that, unlike Airbnb-filled brownstones or poorly maintained basements, registered SROs will be held to enforceable codes.

Such changes, if enacted, would mark a sizable shift in the city’s housing policy, especially after decades spent scrubbing out the “eyesore” of the SRO. The effort to rebrand communal living as a valid, if frugal, choice also dovetails with current demographic trends. Rising numbers of childless adults, ageing singles and migrant newcomers often prioritise affordability and location over square footage. As New York struggles to keep pace with its own costs, SROs may offer both budget relief and a chance to rejuvenate neglected building stock, especially underused offices now seen as urban liabilities.

For some, this approach bodes well: it could help developers fill lease-averse towers in Midtown and elsewhere, all while chipping away at an affordable housing deficit that grows more intractable by the year. Yet the economics are not guaranteed to delight. Office-to-residential conversions cost real money, and SROs—despite their modest dimensions—require thorough overhauls of plumbing, fire egress, and ventilation. City incentives, public-private partnerships, and clear regulatory guidelines will be needed to ensure microunits do not fall prey to the fate of their ancestors.

History and modernity under one (shared) roof

New York’s flirtation with SROs is hardly unique at a national or international level. Cities from Tokyo to London have, at various times, embraced micro-apartments and co-housing to absorb demand and buffer runaway rents. But results vary. Some London boroughs, for instance, now restrict new “bedsit” conversions, wary of landlord abuse; Tokyo’s famed capsule hotels seldom appeal beyond short-term or emergency stays. In North America, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Toronto have all wrestled with the question of what is an “acceptable minimum”—and who decides.

The proposed legislation’s success will rest on administrative teeth and prudent implementation. If narrowly confined to reputable operators, closely inspected and maintained, microunits could broaden housing options for thousands. Poor execution, by contrast, could fill headlines with more tales of squalor, undoing the entire venture—and fortifying public opposition for another generation.

On the political stage, the revival of SROs tests local leaders’ nerve to balance property interests, neighborhood resistance, and humanitarian need. Few New Yorkers, after all, cheer at the prospect of new “flophouses” nearby; but even fewer seem prepared to pay the taxes or accept neighborhood upzoning that true housing abundance would demand. SROs, in this view, exemplify the city’s perennial recourse to kludges: imperfect fixes for crises that neither voters nor landlords wish to face squarely.

Our view is cautiously optimistic. New York’s housing crisis is too acute, and its budget too constrained, to sneer perpetually at ideas that worked—albeit fitfully—in the city’s past. With proper oversight, fireproofed design, and robust tenant protections, SROs could provide a palatable middle ground between market-rate towers and illicit, partitioned apartments. The city’s talent for reinvention deserves a chance to prove that a shared kitchen need not portend misery, and that dignity can exist in even the most compact of quarters.

Civic memory may be long; but necessity, in New York, often proves longer. If SROs can deliver safety and shelter where little else exists, the city’s embrace—tentative as it is—will scarcely be the worst of its urban compromises. ■