Rooming houses are the housing stock nobody will defend

The units are small, often poorly maintained, and easy to campaign against. They are also the cheapest legal accommodation in the city, and when one closes its tenants do not move into a new build. They move into a worse room, a couch, or nothing.

Nobody runs for council on rooming houses. There is no constituency for them: the tenants are transient and rarely vote, the neighbours are organised and always do, and the buildings are frequently owned by people it is satisfying to be angry at. Some of that anger is earned. None of it produces a unit.

Enforcement is necessary; nobody should live somewhere unsafe, and the fire code exists for reasons this city has had cause to remember. But enforcement without replacement is a housing loss dressed as a standards win, and the city reports it as the latter — a closure appears in the record as a problem solved, not as three people who now need somewhere to sleep.

The honest version of the argument is that these units are the bottom of the stock and the bottom should be raised, even at a cost. That may be right. It is a policy with a price, and the price is currently paid entirely by people with no way to appear in the minutes.

There is a constructive version of the same enforcement power, and other cities have found it: licensing that brings the units up to standard while they stay occupied, with the work ordered on a schedule and the tenancy protected during it. It is slower than closure and considerably less satisfying, and it ends with a habitable room and a person in it.

Report the units lost to enforcement each year beside the units gained, in the same table, on the same page. If the city is comfortable with the trade, it should be comfortable publishing it.