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17 CUNY L. Rev. 113 (2013-2014)
Single-Room Occupancy Housing in New York City: The Origins and Dimensions of a Crisis

handle is hein.journals/nyclr17 and id is 119 raw text is: SINGLE-ROOM OCCUPANCY HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY: THE ORIGINS AND DIMENSIONS OF A CRISIS BrianJ Sullivant Jonathan Burkett CONTENTS INTRODUCTION................................................ 113 I. THE BASICS OF SRO HOUSING .......................... 115 II. THE NEED FOR SRO HOUSING .......................... 117 III. THE DESTRUCTION OF SRO HOUSING ................. 119 A. Rent Regulation ................................... 125 B. Certificate of No Harassment (CONH) ............... 128 C. H omelessness Policy................................. 129 IV. NEW YORK CITY'S PERMANENT HOUSING CRISIS ........ 132 V. SROs AND THE CRISIS................................. 136 VI. BRINGING SROs BACK................................. 138 A. Lift the Ban on the Construction of New SRO Units .. 139 B. Preserve Existing Units ............................. 140 CONCLUSION ................................................. 143 INTRODUCTION Single-room occupancy (SRO) housing once dominated the New York City housing market. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, there were hundreds of thousands of SROs spread throughout the City. Today, following a half-century of concerted attacks by City government, SROs constitute a fraction of a single percent of New York's rental housing stock.' t Senior Staff Attorney, MFY Legal Services, Inc., SRO Law Project. J.D., Ge- orgetown University Law Center. Thank you to Jon Burke, my co-author; to my col- leagues at MFY Legal Services, in particular Chris Schwartz, Elise Brown, and Jeanette Zelhof for their editorial input; and to my wife Erica Chutuape. tt Staff Attorney, Community Legal Aid. J.D., New York University School of Law. Thanks to Brian Sullivan, my co-author; Christopher Schwartz, Supervising Attorney at the SRO Law Project; and Lindsay Manning, my wife. I In the mid-twentieth century there were approximately 200,000 SRO units in New York City. See Malcolm Gladwell, N.Y. Hopes to Help Homeless by Reviving Single Room Occupancy Hotels, L.A. TIMES (Apr. 25, 1993), http://articles.atimes.com/1993- 04-25/news/mn-27098_1_single-room-occupancy-hotels. By 1993 there were approxi- mately 46,744 SRO units. ANTHONY J. BIAcKBuRN, SINGLE RooM LIVING IN NEW YoRK CrrY 15 (1996). By 2002 this number had dropped to 35,227. See U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, SER. IA, TBL. 15, NEW YORK CYY HOUSING AND VACANCY SURVEY (2002), http://www. 113

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