PadSplit-
One of the reasons that we have an acute homelessness crisis in the United States is that we have lost (and no longer provide) certain kinds of housing that used to shelter our poorest and most vulnerable populations.
Single Room Occupancy (SRO's) were once a critical source of housing for those living on the edge. People could rent single rooms by the week, with shared baths and kitchens, all at a very affordable rate. Often times, these "flophouses", as they came to be known, were the last line between someone having a roof over their head or living on the street (see Paul Groth's essential book, Living Downtown). Over the last 30-40 years, most of these have been destroyed through urban renewal and redevelopment, essentially eliminating one of the most vital sources of deeply affordable housing in cities.
We have also moved away from housing designs that provided flexibility that also provided small and affordable housing for people on the margins. Much of the early housing stock in cities was medium-density, low-rise construction, often referred to as rowhouses. Ubiquitous in the cities of the Northeast US and elsewhere, these were designed in a way to be flexible and adaptable so that rooms could easily be rented out to non-family members who needed a cheap place stay. Think of a parlor that was right off the front door that would allow someone to come and go easily, while allowing the host family to still occupy and enjoy the rest of the house. Renee Chow has done a great job documenting the design such houses in her book, Suburban Space.
These rooming house designs have given way to a large, inflexible house designs (think suburban track homes) that often devote more space to objects than people. Even worse, so many of these spaces just sit empty and unused. The current most common housing designs do not incorporate the flexibility that older houses employed, which easily allowed various non-family members to live in a house without significant disruption. Furthermore, the majority of the housing stock produced over the last few decades does not respond to the reality that almost 1/3 of households in the United States consist of a single person living alone.
My graduate school thesis explored the repurposing and rethinking of suburban track homes, with their excess of space and inflexible layouts that were not conducive to change and adaptation. One of the approaches was to completely change the layout of the house, so that it could be subdivided into duplexes or triplexes. Converting such houses into multiple separate units is not really that practical or affordable, making such conversions out of reach of most. So, I was intrigued when I came across PadSplit, which is a platform for people to rent out rooms only in their house. According to the website, PadSplit hosts "convert under-utilized space into additional bedrooms, increasing earnings while lowering the per room cost for members."
The graphic below from PadSplit's webpage shows how:
Room rates vary depending on the location, but a quick search found many rooms available between the $150-200 a week.
And while PadSplit does not fundamentally change the design of houses, it does provide a simple and straightforward way to convert houses to offer smaller, more affordable housing options for people of limited means, or with challenging financial histories. Given the persistent challenge of providing and building small and affordable housing, this is a great alternative that provides a solution for a population that has been the hardest to house. And it does it without any public subsidy or support.
For more information, see:
The Old New Way to Provide Cheap Housing (nytimes.com)
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