BOARDING HOUSES, ROOMING HOUSES, AND FLOP HOUSES.

Once upon a time, those were ways for consenting adults to make money off properties they owned.  But those ways were repugnant to Our Progressive Betters, and they had to go away.  "[Mike Royko] had written a column about the proliferation of beggars in the Loop, in which he suggested that closing the asylums and condemning the flophouses in the name of urban renewal provided the cause."  The aesthetes therefore had their laws, the petite bourgeoisie could no longer let a room out to a stranger, and the lumpenproletariat (or, in some cases, itinerant workers, there's a rich literature set in part in the rooming houses where the railroaders laid over) ... had to shift for themselves.

I noted, a few months before "Wuhan coronavirus" became a thing,

What's it going to take, a full-on outbreak of the bubonic plague before the Smart People catch on?  "America abandoned a custodial approach to mental illness a half-century ago, and the results have been obvious in the nation’s streets and public spaces ever since — and never more so than on the Bowery early Saturday morning." "Bowery," dear reader, is New York for "skid row," and, although it has always been with us, New York Post columnist Bob McManus is making the same point Mr Royko made about Chicago, in the pre-digital era.

Matt Yglesias will be the Designated Smart Person today.

This decline in housing crowding is in part a triumph. Our society has gotten richer, our homes have gotten much larger on average, and material living standards have improved.

But in addition to reducing housing crowding through economic growth, the United States has also waged a multi-faceted war against the legality of small dwellings, with boarding houses and single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels driven out by zoning codes. But rather than improve life for those who would have previously lived in these accommodations, the move has largely shifted people into homeless shelters or sleeping on the street. As long as the unhoused are in shelters, they are largely out of sight out of mind as far as the electorate is concerned. But a mix of objective scarcity of shelter space and rising drug addiction has helped increase the number of visibly homeless people sleeping rough in American urban centers.

And I think one lesson urban politicians are going to take from Chesa Boudin’s recall is that as they try to help central business districts recover from the pandemic and the Zoom Shock, voters want them to be less tolerant of encampments and other manifestations of homelessness-related disorder.

Do read the entire post, there's something charming about a space alien learning a few things about the planet he's visiting by checking into a rooming house.  I want to commend Mr Yglesias, though, for helping make a point I made a few years ago.  "It's somebody else who ends up paying the price for the virtue signal. The best we can do might be to add 'progressive' mental health policy changes to all the other failed technocratic impulses of the past fifty years."  Mr Yglesias notes,

A market in low-end housing, as opposed to a network of nonprofit- or government-operated shelters also accounts for the fact that tastes and preferences differ. Some people might prefer to stay in an SRO with very strict rules as a way to protect themselves from disorder and nuisance. Others might prefer much laxer rules so they could indulge in alcohol or other private vices.

So what happened? Well, we made cheap units illegal. According to the dwelling unit factors in the current New York City zoning code, the smallest allowed is 680 square feet per apartment.

He continues with a favorable reference to a new analysis of zoning, Arbitrary Lines, that has also received favorable references from some of my libertarian-leaning sources.  No end of interesting questions, are there?

For today, let us note that it was the aesthetes that got those laws.

It’s worth underscoring that the problem here is fundamentally deliberate. If you read the American Planning Association’s 1957 report on rooming houses, they are quite clear that the minimum quality standards are largely pretextual, writing that “besides protecting the roomers, enforcement of these codes can do a great deal to assure that rooming houses do not harm districts in which they are properly located.”

The main thrust of the report is the idea that it is challenging, logistically, to come up with a viable way to define and ban rooming houses which they characterize as attracting “real down-and-outers” that serve “as both symptoms and causes of neighborhood decay in many cities.”

It's.  Always.  Deliberate.  Technocrats inhabit a fantasy world in which what's drawn up on a blackboard or presented in Futurama form will be orderly and free of decay.  Until it's not, and thus does reality come to Chicago.

[Planners -- heck, High Modern Authoritarians] celebrate the potential to use regulatory parking minimums as a way to discourage the operation of rooming houses, and argue that “since conversions are the usual source of additional rooming houses, it is particularly important that off-street parking requirements not be limited to new construction.”

In other words, they say towns should adopt laws that requiring anyone subdividing a large single-family home into multiple small rooms with individually locking doors and shared washrooms to increase the number of off-street parking units associated with the building. Since in most cases this will not be possible, you will have de facto banned conversions.

Their broader concern is that it was long customary in the United States for people with room to spare in their home to occasionally supplement their income by taking in boarders. So a young person new in town might rent a bedroom from an empty nest couple. Or a family in need of extra resources might make the kids double-up in a room to free up space for a boarder. One countermeasure they advise is to make it illegal to advertise your willingness to accept a boarder.

To really and truly clarify the intention, they specifically praise an ordinance adopted in Chicago in 1957 that, in certain areas, requires everyone living in the house be part of the same family — but with an explicit carve-out for servants.

Mike Royko was a young reporter, and he noticed.  It's fine, by the way, if the transition out of Excessive Zoning is messy.  Emergence is like that.  "There likely will be some false starts. The best thing, though, will be for the professional planners, policy wonks, and process worshippers to leave the modifications well enough alone, maybe for fifty years, before deciding on best practices."