Boarding house bans didn’t achieve their goal. End them. | Editorial

Like his now-former colleague Allan Domb, City Councilmember Derek Green is expected to announce his candidacy for mayor soon. Yet there is one important task Green should try to accomplish before jumping into the mayoral race — passing the bill he authored that would allow more legal boarding houses within Philadelphia.

Boarding houses, also known as single-room occupancies (SROs) or coliving arrangements, were once a big part of urban living, and in many parts of the world still are. Abraham Lincoln died in a Washington, D.C., boarding house after being shot. Ernest Hemingway lived in a Kansas City, Mo., boarding house when he was a cub reporter. While few remain today, all-women’s boarding houses helped ease the path of single women to greater independence by providing a safe and socially acceptable place to live.

Despite a decades-long campaign to restrict their existence, SROs still exist, albeit illegally, because of strong demand amid rising housing costs in Philadelphia and other cities. Their lack of oversight has led to calamities at unlicensed, gray-market operations, incidents that experts say could have been avoided with regulation.

» READ MORE: Longtime rooming house is for sale, leaving residents in limbo.

Legalizing and regulating SROs has support from a wide coalition of experts, including homeless services providers, poverty-fighting organizations, housing economists, and former Licenses and Inspections Commissioner Dave Perri. That’s because rooming houses offer the cheapest possible route to secure, private housing for those most in need, a crucial step for those seeking to get back on their feet. Unfortunately, they often face steep obstacles. Neighborhood groups have tremendous sway over district councilmembers who can impact land use and zoning decisions. (It’s no accident that the legalization proposal came from Green, who was elected at-large.)

Neighborhood groups’ complaints about density and negative assumptions about coliving residents’ lifestyles too often take center stage. Some critics even dredge up memories of “Skid Row,” a stretch of Vine Street synonymous with alcoholism and human failure for decades before it was slowly demolished to make room for the expressway, which opened in 1991.

Coliving opponents, including Green’s colleagues on Council, should remember that demolition of Philly’s Skid Row and similar sites across America did not end alcoholism, drug use, or itinerant living. It merely pushed many of those without consistent housing options into living on the streets or sleeping on buses and trains.

» READ MORE: 1,200 apartments are coming to West Philly

While coliving could represent a partial solution to homelessness, with rents in legal boarding houses possibly as low as $10 a day, there’s also interest in providing rooming houses across the price spectrum.

That could help cool the red-hot demand for rental housing that has led to bidding wars for available houses and apartments. In this era of food delivery apps and meal kits, many would rather be closer to work — or wherever they want to spend time — than have a full-size kitchen.

Green’s bill would allow new congregate living facilities to be located citywide in commercial corridors and multifamily districts. However, councilmembers representing the most bucolic parts of the city have requested opt-outs for their districts, and they are likely to get them, thanks to the councilmanic prerogative tradition that should have been discarded long ago.

Even with these likely carve-outs, Green’s bill provides a real solution to a long-standing problem. Council should pass it.