The Marlton Hotel in New York City.

The Times has a story about how cities are taking a new look at shared housing situations in light of the increasing cost of individual units in many places. Single-room occupancies and variations on the SRO model get some positive attention.

I lived in an SRO in New York (above) when I was a freshman at the New School. Apart from the fact that the rooms were incredibly small, it was a good living arrangement. In our case, the building was almost entirely occupied by private college students, which may or may not have been a good thing. (However, there was one old man whose long-term tenancy could not be terminated and who was reputed to have been, um, a procurer, in his productive years.)

Today, the same building has been converted to a luxury hotel, trading on its history as place where famous people lived while they were still striving. (I apparently missed being neighbors with Lillian Gish by a mere 85 years.) The renovation is beautiful, and the building is much better appointed today than it ever was when it housed workers, or artists, or students. But where could those kinds of people, on their own dime, sleep in Manhattan tonight?

All this is to say that such arrangements can be fine, and can even have salutary effects for civilization when they create spaces in our great cities for those who arrive with more dreams and talent than riches. There are bad rooming houses, too, of course. So it’s case by case. But as a matter of equity, the need for efficiency accommodations that are genuinely affordable for working people and young people is not being met. SROs and other sharing arrangements can work in that space, and permitting a lot more of them could be part of the solution.