Since at least the 1930s, New York City’s Bowery was synonymous with the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels which lined its sidewalks. Homeless men could find cheap shelter in these “flophouses,” paying rent on a night-by-night basis or inhabiting them for the longer term. While the world immortalized in Lionel Rogosin’s On The Bowery still exists, in Manhattan, and other high-priced cities like San Francisco, it now has a swanky doppelgänger in the form of co-living startups. Renting a bedroom with shared kitchen and bathroom access may sound fun to millennials, but long before they were an expensive way to iterate friends, SROs provided affordable shelter to people at the lowest rungs of society.
In the late 1990s, photographer Harvey Wang read the writing on the wall as his Lower Eastside neighborhood transformed from working class to chic: