It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
> That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.