The Post discovered the Sun Bright hotel, a single-room-occupancy hotel on Hester Street, where for $10 a night, residents "live in tiny cells bounded by chicken wire."

The reporter (who once sensationally recounted her night in the "sliver of madness" that was Occupy's Zuccotti Park) isn't looking for any Joe Goulds in this flophouse. Longtime residents of the SRO—a disabled construction worker, a retired cab driver, and a double amputee—make appearances in the story, but the humans shrink behind descriptions of the squalor.

“It was horrible — like an animal shelter,” a first responder, recently summoned to the hotel, told The Post. “I picked up a suit on the wall and roaches fell out,” the rescuer said, “hundreds of them.” More than 100 men on the floor share one bathroom with two shower stalls, four toilets and one urinal. Wet, moldy spackle peels off the ceiling like snakeskin. Black mold spreads over filthy walls in two shower stalls. “I called the inspector a couple of times to come and check it,” he said. “They don’t do nothing.”

And so on. The Sun Bright seems to be flouting the law, as the DOB has issued it 46 summonses in the past 25 years; 22 of the citations remain open.

The final quote in the piece is worth remembering the next time you see a new rendering of a $95 million floating penthouse or another op/ed advocating for the abolition of rent control.

On the way out, another man, who works in a restaurant, said matter-of-factly that this was the life the residents can afford in the city. “We’re not millionaires,” he said.

Here's the Times' report on the Sun Bright from 2006.