Mayor Eric Adams opened a new window into his vision for building New York City out of the current housing crisis, with a riff on “dormitory” style accommodations generating a fair amount of backlash from fellow New Yorkers.

During a conversation on Monday at the Greene Space, New York Public Radio's live events venue, Adams said he wants to “do a real examination” of the laws that require windows in bedrooms — a major tweak that could make it easier for developers to convert empty offices into apartments.

“When you’re just sleeping, it should be dark, you know,” he said.

The comment was part of a larger point the mayor was making about easing regulations to streamline housing creation. He went on to name-check WeWork’s failed “WeLive” shared housing experiment and the experience of his son, who he said has an apartment with a stove he apparently does not know how to use.

Adams’ windowless musings faced criticism from everyday New Yorkers as well as elected officials concerned about lightless, airless, claustrophobic quarters that resemble battleship barracks or stacks of "Matrix"-style containment pods.

Assemblymember Emily Gallagher pointed out that some of the city’s earliest tenant protection laws, dating back to the 19th century, required bedrooms to have windows for light and ventilation to stave off illness in the tenements housing the poorest New Yorkers — an all-too-familiar concern three years into the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the mayor’s off-the-cuff remark about windowless rooms isn’t a novel concept.

Nationally, the idea of dormitory-style dwellings are taking off. As Curbed reported, windowless bedrooms are legal elsewhere in the country, fueling a push to allow the same in unused office buildings.

“A lot of the [Multiple Dwelling Law] was written to reflect a different century,” said real estate consultant Jordan Barowitz, who is also a former Durst Organization vice president and city housing official. “You can make a perfectly livable space today with conditioned air and transoms.”

It’s likely that some wealthier New Yorkers would choose to live in relatively cheap, stripped-down “micro-units” in ailing business districts, but advocates for low-income New Yorkers say changing building laws, like getting rid of window requirements, could lead to worse conditions for the poorest residents who are forced to take whatever housing they can get.

“Do we need more housing opportunities available to single adult households and households of very small size? Absolutely we do.” said Shelly Nortz, the Coalition for the Homeless' deputy executive director for policy. “But if we’re building new housing, let’s make it dignified housing — with windows in bedrooms.”

She called for major government investment in new housing specifically for the poorest residents, without waiting for lower rents to “trickle down” as a result of new housing supply.

Still, Adams’ comments kicked off conversations about housing shapes and sizes.

The mayor suggested that New York City consider a “modern-day, almost-SRO concept” — a reference to once-ubiquitous “single-room occupancy” buildings, where tenants have traditionally lived in studio apartments while sharing common kitchens and bathrooms.

“There's some great models of SRO growth across the globe,” Adams said. “It's affordable. We could tie in real affordable prices to it. And then we do a lot of the cross pollination of ideas and people living together.”

In the mid-20th century, New York City had around 200,000 of those units, providing a cheap housing option for poor residents, returning military veterans, actors and recently arrived immigrants — particularly single men. But the city banned new SRO construction in 1955, as the buildings became associated with crime and general seediness driven by racist stereotypes and poor management. In the ensuing decades, tens of thousands of the apartments were demolished or converted to fancier, pricier accommodations, eliminating an important form of housing for low-income residents with nothing to replace them.

They’re not completely gone. Today, many SRO buildings continue to house New Yorkers, including several converted into permanent supportive housing sites for formerly homeless residents. (The units have windows.)

Reviving the dorm-style model has been considered by policy experts in recent years, including by supportive housing providers and affordable housing developers who saw it as the easiest way to convert hotels to apartments early in the pandemic.

But homeless New Yorkers who participated in drafting legislation to ease those conversions said they did not want to recreate the shared bathrooms and kitchen models. Instead, they said they want in-unit kitchenettes and bathrooms, with those requirements making it into the final rules.

Architect Mark Ginsberg, who specializes in office or hotel conversions, has supported reintroducing the small units and said they could serve a range of New Yorkers, including young adults.

“An SRO is not that different from a college dorm and people coming from college need an inexpensive place to live,” Ginsberg said.

He said they could also house immigrant workers who are now forced to pack into apartments in Corona, Queens, or parts of the Bronx.

A 2011 report from the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, an organization later led by Adams’ current Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz, estimated that 2 million New Yorkers were living in shared spaces with non-relatives — arrangements that drive overcrowding, particularly among low-income immigrants. They also found that 33% of New York City households were single adults living alone. The report asked whether there was “room in the housing market for a new SRO model and new lodging houses?”

Supportive housing pioneer Roseanne Haggerty, head of the organization Community Solutions, said there is.

Haggerty, a MacArthur fellowship awardee and one of the first leaders to turn old dorm-style studios into supportive housing, said New York City was hurt by “taking away lower rungs on the housing ladder.”

She said she’d “totally endorse” a re-examination of the shared living model, so long as the new, small apartments were safe and well maintained.

“What we see is we just need more housing options,” Haggerty said.

She said her conversations with street homeless New Yorkers often yield similar responses.

“They say ‘What I need is something small, private, clean, safe… Somewhere I could live on my own terms,’” Haggerty said.