Homelessness in America is at a record high. It may feel like an intractable problem, but our own history shows that extremely low rates of homelessness are not only possible but prevailed here just 50 years ago. The reason? Back then, millions of small, cheap housing units were available, but overregulation put in place decades ago decimated them. We can bring back a better-quality version of that housing, but only if policymakers cut the unnecessary red tape and take action.

Until the late 1970s, hardly anyone in the nation lacked a home, because even someone living below the poverty line could afford to rent a room, typically with a shared bathroom and kitchen. These rooms were often located in apartment buildings, boarding houses or single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels. Much like a college dorm, residents lived in small spaces, sometimes less than 80 square feet, and in those days the accommodations were often bare-bones and lacked modern amenities. But they were homes.

Single-room dwellings like this were so common that they once made up a tenth of the rental stock in big cities such as New York and San Francisco. Although the population of Los Angeles’ Skid Row was larger 100 years ago than it is today, its residents lived inside, often in SRO housing — not on sidewalks and under overpasses.

But in 1955, New York City became the first large city to ban new SRO housing, an effort led by a combination of activists who sincerely wanted better homes for SRO residents and others who simply didn’t want low-income workers living nearby. Other cities followed suit, typically making their building, fire and zoning codes so restrictive that new SROs couldn’t be created and operators of existing ones faced the need to make costly upgrades.

Since SRO tenants could only afford the modest rents charged — about $100 to $300 a month in 2025 dollars — SRO landlords couldn’t afford to provide the larger apartments with separate baths required by the new zoning regulations. (By contrast, the median U.S. rent for a one-bedroom apartment today is about $1,200 a month.) So the old buildings were razed or remodeled into higher-cost units.

Read the full article about inexpensive SROs by Alex Horowitz and John Bonura at Governing.