Build Single Room Occupancy Hotels
DeParle, Jason
Build Single Room Occupancy Hotels BY JASON DePARLE My odd suggestion for social reform is "Bring Back the Flea Bag Hotels." The main goal is to get homeless people off the streets. But Jason...
...At the upper end, rents top $500 a month, and a few have a European feel, where foreign sailors sip espresso and students thumb novels...
...A solution to homelessness requires not only more housing but also more forcible commitments of the mentally ill, like Yetta Adams, the woman who died from exposure in December on the doorstep of the Department of Housing and Urban Development...
...And recognizing that few s.r.o...
...But the experiment offers some important lessons about where homeless people might go and how to help them get there...
...The unlikeliest touch of all was the addition of an open-air cafe, where workers from nearby offices will sit for a sprout sandwich at lunch...
...The changes allowed developers to use thinner fire doors, for instance, as long as they kept sprinklers in the ceiling...
...The hotels are slowly coming back, in an altered, flea-free form...
...Economy requires the building to be boxlike, but Quigley arranged a striking, two-tone, painted "V" that slashed across the facade...
...He got better with experience, finding a design that throws natural light into hallways, adding a small fountain for white noise in the lobby...
...units...
...Still, few people understood the value of the old hotels until it was mosdy too late...
...Downtown businessmen worried that they were attracting too many vagrants, and San Diego eventually abolished the parking waiver, effectively forbidding the construction of any new s.r.o.'s...
...Economy requires long halls, but he broke the monotony with alternating plastic baseboards: turquoise, navy blue, maroon...
...They sprang up in most downtowns during the early part of the century to house railroad workers and other transient laborers...
...Housing Corporation in Los Angeles, run by Andy Raube-son, an ex-poet who grew up in a New Haven orphanage where he acquired the kind of street smarts essential to operating what is now a 1,200-room empire for the down-and-out...
...A building boom followed, giving the city about 2,700 cheap new hotel rooms...
...One of the most impressive is the S.R.O...
...The federal money is often crucial, and ought to be increased...
...residents drive cars, the city waived expensive requirements to build new parking lots...
...Then came developers, who, enticed by cheap land, razed the skid rows and replaced them with galle-rias and office towers...
...He was just getting them off the streets...
...Much of the visual credit goes to Rob Wellington Quigley, an artsy San Diego architect accustomed to designing multimillion-dollar homes...
...But Jason DeParle, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1987 to 1989, covers social policy in the Washington bureau of The New York Times...
...A visit to Raubeson's corner of skid row was refreshing, since he wasn't dispensing any boilerplate talk of turning the downtrodden into architects or lawyers...
...But local governments can also help by (here's another good Monthly cause) ditching useless regulations...
...And not just to me...
...A few of the new hotels are extraordinary in their color and design...
...The place where there has been the most noteworthy effort to change the codes is San Diego...
...They could put toilets closer to kitchen sinks than codes usually allowed...
...Not all of the San Diego hotels are for the homeless...
...My suggestion for the Monthly's next crusade: redistribute not just money, but beauty, too...
...By 1985, redevelopment had devoured a quarter of the city's 4,600 s.r.o...
...The other villains include the emptying of the mental hospitals, the rise of housing prices, the decline in wages, and the spread of drugs...
...The new models aren't run by slumlords but by nonprofit groups which keep social workers on hand to make sure schizophrenics take their medication and addicts avoid relapses...
...A number of the groups have shown they can run a tight ship...
...projects, intrigued, he said, by the challenge of giving inexpensive buildings "emotional content...
...To encourage their replacement, the city approved a package of changes two years later...
...He gave me a tour earlier this year, talking about the buildings' "architectural vocabulary," but what people experience is simply a nice place to be...
...This is partly the result of lobbying by the construction industry—to require more expensive pipes, doors and wires than safety actually demands...
...Cheap, but not necessarily drab...
...Over time, many of them deteriorated into slum housing for drifters, drinkers, and the mentally ill...
...He cut his fee and took on a few s.r.o...
...The technical term here is "s.r.o.'s," for single room occupancy hotels...
...Most of the hotels couldn't break even without it since the rest of their money comes from the few hundred dollars a month that most street people can afford from welfare or disability checks...
...The Department of Housing and Urban Development now spends $350 million a year to help nonprofit groups build and operate s.r.o.'s, up from $76 million just a year ago...
...Many operate without subsidies and charge as much as $400 a month, meaning they cater to service workers in downtown hotels rather than street people...
...Walking through them, I couldn't get over how much the little details (the color of a baseboard, the shape of a tile) seemed to matter...
...Over the past several decades, as many as a million cheap hotel rooms have been destroyed...
...The lack of trash on the floor or holes in die wall suggested that residents appreciated, perhaps even subconsciously, the architect's care...
...Building and zoning codes often drive up construction costs more than is necessary...
...there are a few places where cheap, pensione-like hotels are even promoting the class-mixing this magazine values...
...The destruction of the s.r.o.'s, of course, isn't the only reason that street people are a fixture on the urban landscape...
...Some of the cheaper hotels did turn into instant slums...
...In the nicest ones, the fleas are gone, and open-air cafes are serving alfalfa sprouts...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 3
