Marquitta Kirwan recently had a âhuge epiphany.â Her company, Home Sweet Home Rentals, owns nearly 60 properties in the metro area. One is a spacious brick three-story that was built in 1912 just a block from Fairgrounds Park, on the Northside. Its hardwood floors creak when you step on them and its stained-glass windows glow in sunlight. Kirwan bought it in 2024, hoping to rehab it into a short-term rental for officials visiting the new National Geospatial Agency facility, which is nearby. But at a recent meeting of the St. Louis Metro Housing Collectiveâa group that connects unhoused folks with willing landlordsâKirwan realized that she had another option. She could convert the house into eight bedrooms, outfit each with its own lock and furnishings, and make the kitchen and three bathrooms communal to keep the rents as low as possible. Her plan now is to finish up the rehab and accept both tenant referrals and rental subsidies from service providers such as St. Patrickâs Center, a ministry of Catholic Charities.
âThe city just passed a law allowing this,â she says. âI told St. Patrickâs Center, âIf you show me this works, Iâll keep building these.ââ
Across the U.S. and now in St. Louis, a near-extinct housing model is getting a fresh look. What were once known as rooming or boarding houses are now described variously as âco-livingâ or âsingle-room occupanciesâ (a.k.a. SROs), but the concept is the same: tenants rent a bedroom and then share the bathrooms and kitchens, generally beyond the short-term. Think of them as college dorms for grown-ups. In some cities, theyâre being used as a cheap housing option for medium- to low-wage workers. In Seattle, they have been used to house young, upwardly mobile professionals. In Minneapolis, theyâre being used as an exit out of homelessness.
While those municipalities have been outspoken about opening back up to SROs (here and here), St. Louisâ changes have stayed under-the-radar. City Hall watchers will recall how poop puns proliferated when, in 2023, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnierâs plan for an âunhoused bill of rightsâ foundered over its proposal to let homeless folks defecate in public. What happened next drew less notice: Sonnier succeeded, the following year, in pushing through a different bill making it easier to open emergency homeless shelters in the city. And tucked into that bill was a provision that overturned a 75-year zoning ban on SROs in most areas of the city. Now, thanks to the new ordinance, theyâre permissible again almost everywhere, albeit with certain restrictions, including no more than two per block, and only after a conditional use hearing.
Some advocates laud the change. Hannah Policy, a landlord engagement manager at the nonprofit Youth In Need, sees SROs as âa creative solutionâ that diversifies the bottom of St. Louisâ housing market. âIt doesnât always make sense for a single person to move in somewhere by themselves,â she says.
And indeed, there are worrisome signs that that segment of the market will soon tighten. The recent boom in construction of new multifamily units in the region appears to be over, even as median rents keep rising. The average monthly number of homeless people known to service providers is already up year over year, from 1,723 in 2024 to 1,994 in 2025âand St. Louis hasnât even seen its first post-tornado winter. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has signaled its desire to make deep cuts in 2026 to federal funding of permanent supportive housing for the homeless. All of this suggests that rents and homelessness are likely to rise. SROs could, in theory, relieve some of that pressure.
Yet SROs can be a tough sale, Policy says, even for her young clients: âA lot of people want their independent living space.â
Standards werenât always so high. A hundred years ago, as rural Americans and European immigrants poured into U.S. cities, they found all kinds of SROs, from residential hotels to rooming houses (which are lodging-only) to boarding houses (which offer lodging plus meals). By one estimate, as many as one-half of urbanites shared their homes with boarders or were boarders themselves.
But by mid-century, the public was souring on SROs. In St. Louis, the 1950 comprehensive zoning code restricted boarding and rooming houses to what the Post-Dispatch estimated to be 15 percent of the cityâs residential area. âRooming houses are not compatible with one- and two-family districts,â wrote the editorial board in 1957. âWhen the rooming houses come in, the families move out and the whole area starts down hill.â
The zoning failed to stanch the demographic bleeding: The city kept losing residents over the next 60 years, and unauthorized SROs survived here and there. In 2009, one across the street from Benton Park in South City became such a nuisance that the alderman at the time, Ken Ortmann, shepherded into law a requirement that SROs obtain licenses and permits before operating. He later discovered a second one nearby. It had been managed so well that he hadnât even known about it. His takeaway: The problem lay not in the SRO model per se but rather in its execution. âI think any model will work as long as itâs managed,â Ortmann says today.
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