Rooms for improvement: single-room occupancy in your state
By D. Dowd Muska | March 12, 2026
“I would never want to live like that, so therefore [insert housing type] should be illegal.”
Online chatter generates intense heat, and measly light, but occasionally, a profound truth is posted. The quote above appeared on Reddit last year. It well encapsulates the opposition to single-room occupancy (SRO). Fortunately, there’s fresh, bipartisan, pan-ideological momentum for the resurgence of what is sometimes referred to as “co-living.”
The Boston Foundation describes SRO as “housing where tenants rent individual rooms while sharing communal spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms,” with “rooms … typically smaller than studio apartments, usually ranging from 100 to 300 square feet” — and “each tenant holds their own lease, often on a month-to-month or weekly basis.” No, SRO isn’t useful for parents with a couple of kids. But in a nation where living alone is surging, the option is worthy of revival. And thanks to a public-interest law firm, states now have model legislation to supercharge SRO.
Before we explore the draft bill, some history is instructive. As The Minnesota Star Tribune reported last year, before “they fell out of favor, boarding and rooming houses were a common thread in people’s lives, offering a low-cost way to live independently.” According to the American Enterprise Institute, a century ago, “working-class residents had a greater variety of housing options at low price points.” SROs, as well as “boarding homes … and residential hotels were all popular living arrangements in metropolitan centers, enabling relatively easy access to housing for transient populations and extra income for homeowners that took in boarders.” As many as “one-third to one-half of urban residents were either boarders or opened their own home to boarders.”
Then progressives decided to “help.” Per the Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning, in the 1910s, “California began regulating rooming houses and other hotels, setting standards for bathrooms (one per 10 bedrooms), window area per room, floor space per room and more.” Whatever the benefits of the rules, “they knocked the cheapest rooms off the market without providing substitutes,” and as the decades passed “building and health codes demanded ever larger rooms and more bathrooms.” California’s fumble was repeated across the country. AEI scholar Howard Husock wrote that in New York City, “the same crowd that saw any modest housing as slums, and deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, declared war on SROs, phasing them out by law starting in 1954.”
It’s been a long banishment to the wilderness. But SROs are poised for a comeback. A recent analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that in 2017 Iowa “passed bipartisan legislation to strike down local codes that prohibit house-sharing” — a reform adopted by Oregon and Colorado several years later. In 2024, Washington’s governor signed House Bill 1998, which deregulated residential properties “with sleeping units that are independently rented and provide living and sleeping space, in which residents share kitchen facilities.” Democrats in Olympia’s lower chamber described the bill’s core components as “requirements for cities and counties to allow co-living in zones permitting multifamily housing, prohibitions against excessive regulations that hinder development, and allowing for flexible parking requirements.”
Progress continued in 2025, when New Hampshire’s governor signed into law a ban on local governments “adopting or enforcing any ordinance that restricts the number of occupants of any dwelling unit to less than two occupants per bedroom or is based on … familial or non-familial relationships or marital status, occupation, employment status, or … educational status.” Opposition in notoriously parochial New England was predictable. Durham’s town manager warned that the measure “would require every residential zoning district to allow group living arrangements such as dormitories, fraternities, boarding houses and similar uses regardless of neighborhood character or infrastructure limitations.” But a Republican state representative supported the bill, as a means to end “discriminatory” ordinances that prevent “disabled veterans or nontraditional families from living together.”
In December, the Institute for Justice, “the national civil liberties law firm that represents everyday people — free of charge — when the government violates their most important constitutional rights,” published the Restoring Options in Occupancy Models (ROOM) Act, a “model bill to help combat the ongoing housing and homelessness crises across America.”
The proposed legislation finds that co-living enhances options for people who “wish to lower their housing expenses by paying less for a smaller home,” “value shared community spaces that facilitate social connections,” “wish to trade space for location and the ability to live in a high-opportunity neighborhood that would otherwise be out of reach” or “want a more private alternative to having a roommate in a traditional rental.” Most prominently, it permits SRO “by right on each parcel that is zoned for single family, multifamily, commercial, or mixed use or in any area where residential is permitted.” (If compromise is necessary, drafters are encouraged to strike “single family” from the bill.)
IJ’s Samuel Hooper called reaction to the initiative “very positive.” He told the Free Cities Center that the Golden State is a prime candidate for its own ROOM Act: “California cities were once a major source of co-living housing inventory, but what little remains today tends to be very bottom-of-the-market, government run or social service operated SRO buildings that struggle with lack of funding and other issues.”
Skeptics doubt that blast-from-the-past housing will attract much interest. Atticus LeBlanc disagrees. He’s the founder and CEO of Atlanta-based PadSplit, “the largest co-living marketplace in the U.S.” The platform offered just 82 units in 2017, but expects to reach 50,000 by the end of 2026. PadSplit enables its “hosts” to “generate income by converting underutilized spaces into affordable housing solutions,” and empowers its “members” to “pursue their dreams without the burden of excessive housing costs.” Speaking at an IJ webinar, LeBlanc said his company has received “zero dollars in taxpayer funding” and is “filling rooms very, very quickly.”
SRO alone won’t overcome cities’ affordable-housing challenge. But there was a time when it assisted Americans in search of a no-frills place to live. Why not let it try to do so again?
D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.