SRO

Single-room occupancy housing rents individual rooms with shared facilities — the rooming houses, lodging houses, and residential hotels that once housed a large share of the city's low-income single population. The stock is heavily regulated precisely because it shrank catastrophically: conversion and demolition restrictions, harassment protections, and certification requirements guard what remains.

For property analysis, SRO status is a high-consequence classification: buildings with SRO history carry restrictions on conversion — including certificate-of-no-harassment requirements before alteration permits — and their legal-use questions are among the records puzzles where classifications, certificates, and enforcement history must be read together.