>Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO?

Definitively, I would have to invite my extended family to fill the building.

>Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market?

They definitively cost less than renting the entire building, which is what stickfigure's anti-apartment stance would mandate.

> It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.

Of course not, it can't look like a slum because the exterior hasn't changed. We are running into a problem here. The classification or living arrangement is apparently the deciding factor behind the "character of the neighborhood" and whether it is a slum. How can that be? Well, maybe it's not the building or the architecture or the zoning and so on, maybe it's the inhabitants that turn the place into a slum? You certainly can't see them from the outside.

We also run into another problem, if there are "evil" people that turn neighborhoods into slums by their mere presence then how do you distinguish between slum people and non slum people? It should be impossible in practice. Of course, there is a reliable(in the sense that it is self fulfilling) visual proxy for that.