The summer we turned 27, my ex and I bought a house together in a five-street subdivision in the suburbs of a small town. There were three water shut-off valves and, I guess, three water meters for those five streets which is part of what made those three bedroom, one bath homes something in our price range.
Because the homes did not have individual water meters, there was a Home Owners Association. You paid a small amount to the HOA every month and they paid the water bill for the five streets.
There was a history of people not paying their HOA dues in full and on time and so by the time we bought a house there, they had instituted a policy of digging up your yard to find the unmapped pipes (another cost saver: not documenting everything) and installing a shut-off valve for YOUR individual home if you got too far in arrears. Then they would bill you for the cost of that in addition to the monies you already owed them and the cost of that was probably a LOT more than you owed them.
My recollection is the dues were a few tens of dollars a month -- something well under $100/month -- and installing a meter and shut off valve on your individual home was like $1800 or something relatively crazy high like that. So if you got in arrears, they cut your water off and held you hostage for the money and tacked on this painfully high cost of making it possible to shut off the water to YOUR home and ONLY your home.
So if you owed them, say, $200 because you hadn't paid in, say, six months and they dug your yard up and cut off your water, NOW you owed them more like $2000.
I have lived for the past five years in two different hundred-year-old buildings. One of the things they have in common is they both have a single water shut-off valve for the entire building and there is commercial below and residential above. (Well, to be fair, I have shut off valves in my current apartment and under my sink in the previous building. But when they need to do certain kinds of work on the building, they shut it down for the entire building.)
This may have helped make it affordable to build at the time but it also may have just not occurred to people yet that this might be a problem. There are a lot of little differences between these old buildings and newer ones and some of those differences seem to boil down to "They hadn't yet thought about those details." (Though other differences strike me as "We were more in touch with things like weather than modern peoples are.")
I don't actually know why these buildings were designed this way. I haven't researched the history of the individual buildings and I haven't researched anything in general about such practices, so I don't really have context to guess.
But I know from having lived in a much newer subdivision with a HOA paying the water bills that limiting the number of water shut-off valves and water meters is something that impacts affordability of residential development and seems to be a place where developers cut costs by doing less. From what I gather, it's also common in newer apartment buildings for water to be paid by management and for there to be one or a few water meters for the entire complex rather than individual water meters for individual units.
Again, this is my understanding as someone who has LIVED IN such places. I haven't done a lot of industry research and I'm not an industry insider.
I'm just an American who has lived in a bunch of different places in the US in part because I was a military wife for a lot of years. I've also researched housing in various places for purposes of considering moving there, so most of my research has not been done from the point of view of someone intending to develop residential construction but simply as a human being who needed a place to live.
I have a serious medical condition and it's problematic for me when water gets shut off for the whole building for sometimes hours or 24 hours or longer while they do repair work. You can effectively flush the toilet ONE time after the water gets shut off because the tank still has water. After that, if you use the toilet, it sits there for hours until the water gets cut back on in the building.
For me, it interferes substantially with my life when the water is off for long stretches because I have a compromised immune system. It interferes with eating and many other things because I need to wash my hands repeatedly when I am eating and so on.
This is likely a bigger hardship on my family than other households in these units for a long list of reasons that I don't really want to get into for privacy reasons. Suffice it to say that me living in these old buildings has been a kind of "stress test" and the entire building having a single water shut off valve is something I have concluded is a very big problem.
The building I'm currently in is like studio apartments and maybe a few one or two bedroom units, I'm not entirely sure. Unlike the previous building, it has no shared bathroom facilities for the residents. The shared bathroom facilities helped make my life work and would be key to my thoughts on how to build an updated, modernized SRO as basic, decent housing -- NOT "micro apartments" that you see advertised in San Francisco for crazy high rents and include a gym on the premises and a zillion other amenities and are aimed at young, single people with extremely good jobs who nonetheless can't find a place they can afford in the big city.
I would like to design a building with TWO shut off valves and shared bathroom facilities such that even if the water were off for 24 hours, life could go on because the shared bathrooms in the other half would still have water and still be accessible to the residents impacted by the repair work and in units with no running water while the repairs were made.
I think designing this right would be a key detail to keeping the development and construction costs down so that units could be naturally priced at an affordable price point without necessarily requiring government subsidies and "affordable housing" credits and such to make it make financial sense for the owner to rent them out at NOT nose bleed prices.
I have a lot more on my mind but I think this is a key point: Limiting tbe number of water meters and shut-off valves seems to be a means to keep construction costs down but when you limit them too much, it causes problems for the residents. Getting this right should hit a sweet spot that makes it feasible to develop units that make sense for the owner to rent out at a lower price point without it being poverty housing with serious quality of life issues right out the gate.
When I began this project, I felt it was a shame that we have torn down a million SROs. Having lived in these two different old buildings for the past five years, I feel differently.
I think most likely on an individual case-by-case basis, those units/buildings needed to be torn down. They were likely old and poorly designed and out of date. They likely had mold issues and vermin and other problems that were not something you could readily remedy for a reasonable cost.
What is a shame is we have not updated the concept of an SRO and built new ones with adequate electrical supply for the units and which solved myriad design issues in the old ones. Instead, SROs have been replaced with things like The Tiny House Movement and the trend towards living in RVs as people look for some means to live affordably in a small space with the options society reasonably makes available to them. (And homelessness for far too many people today.)
Living in just a room or a room with a private bath is not necessarily a bad life. Those units were likely torn down not due to the size of the rooms per se but due to other issues, like mold or asbestos in the buildings, inadequate electrical supply, fire safety issues (some may have simply burned down in fact) and so forth.
I would like to bring back the SRO, but updated so it makes sense for life today. I think a lot of people living in RVs or Tiny Houses are people who might be happy to rent a room or a room with a bath IF they were new, clean, well-designed with adequate electrical supply, etc.
It's not that the concept is bad. It's that the units currently available are poverty housing rather than merely small spaces priced accordingly.
Because the homes did not have individual water meters, there was a Home Owners Association. You paid a small amount to the HOA every month and they paid the water bill for the five streets.
There was a history of people not paying their HOA dues in full and on time and so by the time we bought a house there, they had instituted a policy of digging up your yard to find the unmapped pipes (another cost saver: not documenting everything) and installing a shut-off valve for YOUR individual home if you got too far in arrears. Then they would bill you for the cost of that in addition to the monies you already owed them and the cost of that was probably a LOT more than you owed them.
My recollection is the dues were a few tens of dollars a month -- something well under $100/month -- and installing a meter and shut off valve on your individual home was like $1800 or something relatively crazy high like that. So if you got in arrears, they cut your water off and held you hostage for the money and tacked on this painfully high cost of making it possible to shut off the water to YOUR home and ONLY your home.
So if you owed them, say, $200 because you hadn't paid in, say, six months and they dug your yard up and cut off your water, NOW you owed them more like $2000.
I have lived for the past five years in two different hundred-year-old buildings. One of the things they have in common is they both have a single water shut-off valve for the entire building and there is commercial below and residential above. (Well, to be fair, I have shut off valves in my current apartment and under my sink in the previous building. But when they need to do certain kinds of work on the building, they shut it down for the entire building.)
This may have helped make it affordable to build at the time but it also may have just not occurred to people yet that this might be a problem. There are a lot of little differences between these old buildings and newer ones and some of those differences seem to boil down to "They hadn't yet thought about those details." (Though other differences strike me as "We were more in touch with things like weather than modern peoples are.")
I don't actually know why these buildings were designed this way. I haven't researched the history of the individual buildings and I haven't researched anything in general about such practices, so I don't really have context to guess.
But I know from having lived in a much newer subdivision with a HOA paying the water bills that limiting the number of water shut-off valves and water meters is something that impacts affordability of residential development and seems to be a place where developers cut costs by doing less. From what I gather, it's also common in newer apartment buildings for water to be paid by management and for there to be one or a few water meters for the entire complex rather than individual water meters for individual units.
Again, this is my understanding as someone who has LIVED IN such places. I haven't done a lot of industry research and I'm not an industry insider.
I'm just an American who has lived in a bunch of different places in the US in part because I was a military wife for a lot of years. I've also researched housing in various places for purposes of considering moving there, so most of my research has not been done from the point of view of someone intending to develop residential construction but simply as a human being who needed a place to live.
I have a serious medical condition and it's problematic for me when water gets shut off for the whole building for sometimes hours or 24 hours or longer while they do repair work. You can effectively flush the toilet ONE time after the water gets shut off because the tank still has water. After that, if you use the toilet, it sits there for hours until the water gets cut back on in the building.
For me, it interferes substantially with my life when the water is off for long stretches because I have a compromised immune system. It interferes with eating and many other things because I need to wash my hands repeatedly when I am eating and so on.
This is likely a bigger hardship on my family than other households in these units for a long list of reasons that I don't really want to get into for privacy reasons. Suffice it to say that me living in these old buildings has been a kind of "stress test" and the entire building having a single water shut off valve is something I have concluded is a very big problem.
The building I'm currently in is like studio apartments and maybe a few one or two bedroom units, I'm not entirely sure. Unlike the previous building, it has no shared bathroom facilities for the residents. The shared bathroom facilities helped make my life work and would be key to my thoughts on how to build an updated, modernized SRO as basic, decent housing -- NOT "micro apartments" that you see advertised in San Francisco for crazy high rents and include a gym on the premises and a zillion other amenities and are aimed at young, single people with extremely good jobs who nonetheless can't find a place they can afford in the big city.
I would like to design a building with TWO shut off valves and shared bathroom facilities such that even if the water were off for 24 hours, life could go on because the shared bathrooms in the other half would still have water and still be accessible to the residents impacted by the repair work and in units with no running water while the repairs were made.
I think designing this right would be a key detail to keeping the development and construction costs down so that units could be naturally priced at an affordable price point without necessarily requiring government subsidies and "affordable housing" credits and such to make it make financial sense for the owner to rent them out at NOT nose bleed prices.
I have a lot more on my mind but I think this is a key point: Limiting tbe number of water meters and shut-off valves seems to be a means to keep construction costs down but when you limit them too much, it causes problems for the residents. Getting this right should hit a sweet spot that makes it feasible to develop units that make sense for the owner to rent out at a lower price point without it being poverty housing with serious quality of life issues right out the gate.
When I began this project, I felt it was a shame that we have torn down a million SROs. Having lived in these two different old buildings for the past five years, I feel differently.
I think most likely on an individual case-by-case basis, those units/buildings needed to be torn down. They were likely old and poorly designed and out of date. They likely had mold issues and vermin and other problems that were not something you could readily remedy for a reasonable cost.
What is a shame is we have not updated the concept of an SRO and built new ones with adequate electrical supply for the units and which solved myriad design issues in the old ones. Instead, SROs have been replaced with things like The Tiny House Movement and the trend towards living in RVs as people look for some means to live affordably in a small space with the options society reasonably makes available to them. (And homelessness for far too many people today.)
Living in just a room or a room with a private bath is not necessarily a bad life. Those units were likely torn down not due to the size of the rooms per se but due to other issues, like mold or asbestos in the buildings, inadequate electrical supply, fire safety issues (some may have simply burned down in fact) and so forth.
I would like to bring back the SRO, but updated so it makes sense for life today. I think a lot of people living in RVs or Tiny Houses are people who might be happy to rent a room or a room with a bath IF they were new, clean, well-designed with adequate electrical supply, etc.
It's not that the concept is bad. It's that the units currently available are poverty housing rather than merely small spaces priced accordingly.