Pew’s Work on Co-Living Spaces

Co-living spaces such as rooming houses and residential hotels—known broadly as single-room occupancies, or SROs—used to be common in the United States, providing low-cost homes for millions of people. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, many cities revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate such units and to prohibit the development of new ones.

Housing costs, which are on the rise, are the primary driver of homelessness. Creating more co-living units would help low- and moderate-income renters find housing they can afford. Converting vacant offices into co-living units could help address a glut of unused office space while also allowing workers to live near employment opportunities.

Private developers build most housing in the United States, using money from both investors and private lenders. But new construction is expensive, and developers rarely build apartments that low-income tenants can afford because such buildings don’t generate enough profit to attract private investment. To make low-rent buildings profitable enough to attract private capital, governments typically provide public subsidies, paying a portion of development costs. Small co-living units cost much less to build than traditional apartments; if public subsidies were used to support the construction of co-living units—modern SROs—that money could stretch further, leading to the construction of two to four times more co-living units than traditional apartments.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative provides data and analysis to help policymakers better understand how an increase in co-living options could expand the availability of housing and help single people find more affordable places to live. The initiative also examines how reforming policies such as zoning laws and building codes could spur the building of more of these centrally located low-cost homes.