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Happy to hear in today's Mpls Housing Advisory Committee meeting about the work starting to legalize single room occupancy housing. I volunteered to meet with city staff to give input. https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/File/2020-00703
Single room occupancy (or rooming houses, or residential hotels) is a vital form of housing that can let people who would otherwise be sleeping outside have more privacy, security, and dignity (and would just be a good fit for others, too).
SROs were vital parts of American cities through WWII, then SROs were destroyed by urban renewal projects in the '50s and '60s. Around the same time, cities rewrote zoning codes to ban them. This was downtown Minneapolis:
Urban renewal treated SRO residents worse than some other victims. Officials didn't count SROs as permanent, so they didn't include them in reports of destroyed dwelling units. Feds gave displaced families $200, but displaced single people got just $5. (Living Downtown by Groth)
There are still a few SROs left in Minneapolis, but they're dwindling. The Drake burned down on Christmas day last year, leaving about 200 people homeless. There are rooms above the Schooner, which was damaged during the uprising.
