The concept of single room occupancy (SRO) dwellings has a long and varied history in the United States. More than 10 years ago, Los Angeles County’s homeless population had already reached “epidemic proportions” and the city was trying to transform the 50-square-block area inhabited by people who are very poor, and people who are experiencing homelessness.

At the time, wrote C. Reagan, “Of the around 65 SROs on Skid Row, 70% are owned by non-for-profit organizations that maintain the rent-control of the units.”

Activists wanted more SROs, but with an agenda. They believed it was important to maintain Skid Row as the poverty colony, rather than send the area’s indigent residents out to other parts of the city.

To support this point of view, they made the altruistic argument that shelters, food distribution centers, shower facilities, detox programs, and other amenities were already located conveniently within that radius. Developers, on the other hand, wanted to knock things down and build lofts for young professionals.

In New York City, businessman George McDonald created a non-profit organization and ran for various political offices. Much of his activism was based on recognizing affordable single-occupancy housing units as an essential component in ending the cycle of poverty, incarceration, homelessness, and recidivism that ensnares so many people.

He opposed the conversion of SRO buildings into fancy apartments. Carol Tannenhauser wrote:

SROs had historically served as “first rung” housing for low-income people. He succeeded in having one such building turned over to a non-profit for use as permanent housing for homeless and low-income adults. Later, as President of The Doe Fund, he would personally oversee the development of a supportive SRO for homeless persons with AIDS and the first newly constructed SRO in New York City specifically for formerly homeless working adults.

The history of SROs in San Francisco is fraught with dissension. Last year, an attempt was made to introduce legislation that would prevent SRO owners from renting space for less than 32 days. Landlords can’t charge permanent, indigent residents as much as they make off tourists, but on the other hand they get some breaks and privileges. But such a law, although it would prevent some short-term very lucrative tourist rentals, can’t prevent owners from converting buildings into college-style dorms for young professionals who can pay astronomical rents.

Of course there were other voices in the debate, such as that of hotel owner spokesperson Larry Kamer, described by journalist Sara Gaiser:

Extending the minimum stay, he said, would effectively turn SRO units into apartments and bring them under rent control laws. The change would require tenants to come up with first and last month’s rent and a security deposit before moving in.

No one seems to mention whether it would be mandatory for landlords to charge last month’s rent and security deposit. Presumably, landlords would have the power to make things easier by waiving those two charges. The reporter also quoted Housing Rights Committee spokesperson Tommi Mecca, who said that SRO units already fall under the rent control laws and added that “It’s totally to the tenant’s advantage […] to stay long enough to gain those rights.”

Six months ago, writer Joe Eskenazi investigated the labyrinthine details of San Francisco’s SRO situation. According to the Department of Building Inspection,

[…] as of early September, 1,827 residential rooms were known to be sitting vacant in the city’s 404 privately owned single-room occupancy hotels. That is around 14 percent of the 13,190 residential rooms available for rental in private SRO hotels — around one out of every seven.

 

Of course, despite the nominally mandatory nature of the reporting requirement, property owners ignore the law. “Submitted information” is far from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Private SRO owners told the reporter there might be as many as 4,000 rooms deliberately kept empty, for reasons that make sense to them and are permissible under the rules.

In some buildings, a single room goes for $1,750 per month and the residents are young professionals. In one SRO building, a single room costs $4,500 per month. Eskenazi writes of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing:

A decade ago, $400 or $500 a month could get you an SRO room. Now the average monthly rent across all hotels is $816, city data show… The department currently offers hoteliers rental rates of around $650 or $700 — sometimes even $800 — per room per month… Through a master-leasing program, the city has taken over 44 SROs during the past two decades and contracted nonprofits to run them. Some 4,000 units are filled with residents who could otherwise be homeless.

But landlords complain that it is too expensive to do the upgrades necessary to qualify for government money, and especially too costly to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Building Inspection has some power, but in wading through the 12,000 complaint violations it receives every year, it has to concentrate on the big issues, like lack of heat, water, or electricity for tenants who are already in place.

Some problems can never be solved because, although the American respect for private property rights is a beautiful thing, it often conflicts with the greater good. As Eskenazi says:

And, on top of all that, Rosemary Bosque, the city’s chief housing inspector, confirmed there is no tool, no law — no means — to compel private property owners to rent out their rooms rather than leave them vacant.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless on Skid Row: Is it a Lost Cause?,” Broowaha.com, 09/30/06
Source: “Ready Willing and Able — Help the Homeless,” Blogspot.com, 01/22/08
Source: “San Francisco lawmakers pass SRO rental cap,” Curbed.com, 02/01/17
Source: “SRO owners sue city over short-term rentals,” SFBay.ca, 05/08/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Photo credit: bfishadow on Visualhunt/CC BY

In in 1989, in Austin, Texas, Richard R. Troxell, President of House the Homeless (HtH), started Legal Aid for the Homeless. His specialty is helping disabled people apply for the benefits to which they are entitled, because otherwise they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off the streets. According to the latest HtH Annual Survey, more than half of Austin’s unhoused people are disabled to the point of being unable to work, so obviously, the need is enormous.

The application process often consumes a year, or even 18 months. If the effort succeeds, the Supplemental Security Income check is $735 a month — or a bit more than half the national minimum wage — which is in itself laughably, tragically inadequate.

With an income like that, the only kind of housing a person can possibly afford is subsidized. To be eligible for subsidized housing, a person must have some kind of income, and for a staggering number of Americans, this is the only kind they can get. Richard says:

I know who was the last family member that ever spoke to them and what year and what month that was. I know every demeaning job they ever worked at, or were abused at, or were robbed by the employer. I push them to try to participate in applying over and over again for housing that does not exist on pathways that we can now show are broken. Along the way, they quietly hate me. I push them very hard. All odds are are against our success.

In Austin, the housing crunch is especially brutal because of upcoming renovations that will affect people who live beneath bridges and overpasses. Many business and government figures had been under the impression that they had only to notify an agency that someone needed a place to live and poof! like magic, it would be done. What a misapprehension that was!

House the Homeless and other agencies are urging contractors to make use of the contingency funds attached to each infrastructure project to create transitional housing, and give the community time to catch up with the need.

A very real threat to mobile home parks

Austin’s affordable housing picture has become even more grim for a specific demographic. The residents of mobile home parks face not only code changes, but a consciousness on the part of speculators and developers that the urban land they occupy is a cash cow waiting to be milked.

These business people are unlikely to regard new, improved mobile home parks as a legitimate real estate sector. They want to build pricey condominiums and townhouses, and once they have decided to go that way, the process is rarely stoppable.

For renters, this is bad enough, because they will never find apartments as inexpensive. For people who own their mobile homes, the prospect of displacement is a nightmare. In the unlikely event that they find a new place to set up, the cost of moving such a structure is at least $5,000 — even more, in many cases, than the apartment-dweller’s moving expense of first and last months’ rent, plus security/cleaning deposit, plus truck rental.

The human element

Mobile home parks are often more than neighborhoods — they are villages, where relationships have grown and flourished over the years. When people are forced to relocate, their mutual babysitting and ride-sharing networks are shattered, friendships are fractured, and children are traumatized by school changes.

Some trailer parks still have RVs parked in them, where people actually live, and the likelihood of their being able to find a different spot to park is almost nonexistent. Altogether, changes in this ecological niche could potentially affect thousands of low-income residents.

According to researcher Gabriel Amaro, quoted in the article linked above, “Mobile home parks are the last bastion for affordability in Austin.” But very little importance is attached to their survival or continuing viability as an acceptable way to meet housing needs. Far-reaching adjustments are in the works, as the city overhauls its housing blueprint via a program called CodeNEXT.

Not just in Austin

These same problems exist in cities all over America, where housing costs eat up an increasingly large portion of family incomes, and every day more and more people face the specter of homelessness. Some complacent members of the housed population imagine the poor as privileged beings who have endless amounts of leisure time, so they should not mind jumping through a lot of procedural hoops. It gives them something to do and saves them from the threat of boredom, right?

In reality, this easy assumption could not be farther from the truth. For a mother of three who has just received an eviction notice, every phone call, every appointment, every official requirement is a monumental challenge. This fragile family might have the tremendous luck to be assigned a shelter room right away, but now there are even more necessary meetings.

Who is willing to watch the children, and can they be trusted? What if somebody is sick? How does she, or how do they, travel to the appointment? Does she have to carry food for the kids, and how will they behave while she has that all-important talk with the person at the counter or behind the desk? When they leave the office, will the ex-husband violate the restraining order and confront her?

A single person faces his or her own set of obstacles. Which of their belongings do they have to carry along, so they won’t be stolen? Is there any chance of getting a shower appointment the day before an important meeting?

What about their so-called criminal record, consisting of class C misdemeanor tickets for violating “Quality of Life Ordinances” that were enacted out of consideration for everyone’s quality of life but theirs? Even the federal Department of Justice gets it:

Needlessly pushing homeless individuals into the criminal justice system does nothing to break the cycle of poverty or prevent homelessness in the future. Instead, it imposes further burdens on scarce judicial and correctional resources, and it can have long-lasting and devastating effects on individuals’ lives.

In the homeless community, discouragement is widespread. Negative experiences pile up unrelentingly. It is easy to slip into hopeless apathy, the sensation that there is no point to anything. All over America, people in need feel like all they ever get are empty promises.

On the other side of that equation, even the staunchest advocates, the best and most highly motivated helpers, suffer from burnout. Eventually, their souls are scorched by the knowledge that they are unwillingly and unavoidably part of the monstrous fabric of lies.

A dedicated social worker can help people retrieve lost documents or fill out forms until the cows come home, as the old saying goes. But if the government has no money, or insists on spending what it has in useless ways, all the caring and trying amount to nothing.

Reactions?

Source: “Justice Department Files Brief to Address the Criminalization of Homelessness,” Justice.gov, 08/06/15
Source: “Mobile home parks at risk of redevelopment,” MyStatesman.com, 02/06/18
Photo credit: PJ Nelson on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Recently, House the Homeless outlined the thoughts of a man who has spent 20 years working in organizations to aid people experiencing homelessness in Seattle. Today, we look at someone who has spent almost that long as a professional writer whose main topic is the unique homeless situation in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Back in 2005, the National Coalition for the Homeless named Las Vegas one of the five most inhospitable and punitive cities, citing with overcrowded shelters and a closed Crisis Intervention Center, frequent “sweeps,” and a vengeful mayor who encouraged law enforcement personnel to criminalize homelessness with an iron fist. For some reason, the local homeless community is atypically youth-heavy. This is worrisome because people who grow up in dire situations may be even less prepared than other kids to find a path to a happy and productive life.

Or perhaps not. Matthew O’Brien provides examples of industrious, ambitious people he has met in the tunnels. Beneath Las Vegas are about 250 miles of flood channels, inhabited in some sections by courageous survivors who deal with barriers and setbacks that safely housed “solid citizens” can’t even imagine. He says:

Call the homeless what you will, but don’t call them lazy. They’re the toughest, most industrious people I’ve met.

O’Brien wrote a book about them, and founded Shine a Light, which collaborates with other organizations to help people get back up onto the earth’s surface. As of mid-2017, he estimated that probably only 300 people remained underground. Progress had been made among the tunnel residents, and many military veterans had been helped.

For most of the city’s homeless, however, the situation had not improved. Today, many people live in vehicles, abandoned buildings, motels, and tents.

Out of sight, out of mind

Most people experiencing homelessness aspire to stay “under the radar,” and especially to not attract police attention. This is one of the problems with the official census, for which O’Brien has volunteered, and about which he repeats some often-heard truths:

It’s conducted in the middle of the night during the week in January, which discourages volunteers. Those who do show are tasked with covering a large tract of land in a short period of time. Also, at night in January, the homeless are burrowed in and less visible to the volunteers or perhaps temporarily off the streets… While the jargon-filled, 200-page-plus census suggests otherwise, my eyes are telling me the numbers are surging.

Most recently, the county’s official total was 6,200, which O’Brien believes to be a woeful underestimate. He puts the number much closer to 10,000.

What about mental illness? Other cities are different, but according to someone who has every reason to know Las Vegas seems to contain only a small percentage of mentally ill homeless people. But addicts, that’s a different matter. O’Brien concedes that the great majority of homeless people in Las Vegas are hooked on something. The local substances of choice are crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Just as a point of interest, he says:

Many of these addicts have told me that gambling is the worst addiction of all, because of the false hope it creates and it’s available 24/7. This, however, does not mean the addiction caused them to become homeless. Oftentimes, the drug, alcohol or gambling is used to drown out a traumatic event or as an escape from their present predicament.

Like anywhere else, Las Vegas is made up of people who got messed up by the city, and people who were already messed up when they arrived. It became a rich and famous place by selling popular commodities: liquor, gambling, hard drugs, and sex. Not surprisingly, many of the local homeless people are, one way or another, victims of that very tolerance.

Also like anywhere else, a lot of righteous citizens still refuse to understand is that addiction is a disease as much as diabetes or multiple sclerosis. But compassion does not pick and choose:

Eventually, they’ll hit rock bottom, and we should be there for them when they’re ready to make a change.

Because of the addiction problem, O’Brien advises against donating cash to individuals. His personal solution is to buy a meal for the needy person, or donate a prepaid card for a fast-food outlet. His habit is to keep bottled water, snacks, shampoo, deodorant, underwear, and socks in his car, and in his backpack when he goes on tunnel expeditions.

But even more important are the friendly greeting, the handshake, the encouraging word. O’Brien says of the tunnel-dwellers:

They’re uniquely appreciative, and I’ve seen “small” acts such as these lift their spirits and boost their confidence. They can even inspire them to make a change.

More recently, O’Brien announced that he would be “moving to Central America to teach and write.” He has another book in the works, which will tell the stories of some former tunnel dwellers who have achieved more conventional existences..

Important!

Infrastructure renovation in the U.S. threatens as many as 100,000 people who live beneath bridges, overpasses, and other elements of the built environment. Before the work begins, we want to see them relocated to safe temporary housing, and we ask the agencies involved to use their allotted contingency funds for that purpose.

Please call the White House, your elected representatives, and HUD boss Ben Carson to urge that this be done.

No offense to the life-saving help given by shelters, soup kitchens, storage lockers and mail services, but what the bridge people need is exactly what the Las Vegas people need — permanent housing, bolstered by supportive services. People need help to deal with bureaucracies, handle their money, solve their health problems. They need rehab programs and job training programs. The infrastructure renovation plan could provide the impetus for real change.

Reactions?

Source: “What I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Writing About the Homeless in Las Vegas,” DTLV.com, 05/17/17
Source: “Man who shined light on Las Vegas’ tunnel dwellers moving on,” ReviewJournal.com, 07/28/17
Photo on Visualhunt

Actually, in King County, Washington, there is no such thing as a “homeless czar,” and that might be one of the problems, according to Mark Putnam. Until last month, he was executive director of All Home, the coordinating board that serves the whole county. Before that, he worked for almost two decades in the homelessness alleviation field. Putnam explained to interviewer Jonathan Martin that responsibility is shared by All Home, the county, and the city of Seattle.

If not for the fabled Gold Rush that made Seattle the jump-off point for sailing to Alaska, it might still be a fishing village. Back then, population growth was a great thing, because it might bring to town the cabinetmaker who could fix your antique credenza, or the doctor who could cure your baldness, or the blushing young lady who would become the mother of your children. A city should be proud that people want to join it.

But things are different now. In recent years, Seattle’s population has exploded, and so has the number of unsheltered people, which is reckoned to have doubled since 2014. Critics have charged that Seattle makes abject poverty look so easy and attractive, people even come from out of state to be homeless and enjoy the amenities.

In reality, most new arrivals come (as in the Gold Ruch days) because they hear rumors of opportunity and success. Putnam says:

I talk with families from Arizona and Georgia… I don’t hear that, somehow, people in Atlanta know Seattle has a good soup kitchen, or something. When we asked, 5 percent — 50 out of 1,100 people — said they came here homeless and because of the services.

At the same time, there is undoubtedly a magnet effect within the county and even the state. Putnam says:

We have most of our services in Seattle, and therefore we have most of our unsheltered homelessness in Seattle. When Bellevue or Federal Way says, “We don’t want to become the next Seattle,” I don’t think the solution is to not have the services.

It seems obvious that if other cities provided comparable services, people in need of them would not flock to Seattle. If the availability were spread out, the clients would be more evenly distributed, rather than bunched up. This is the kind of dilemma that bureaucracies tend to go round’n’round with.

The accountants point out that economy of scale can be achieved by centralizing services. But people who come from far away to access those services are poor, so they don’t have any place to stay in the city. If they begged a ride from a friend — or took a bus — and ran out of money, they might be stuck without a way back to the small town they came from. The homeless statistics grow.

So, then it is decided that local branches for services are much preferable. Or an agency figures out a plan where a traveling social worker hits one town each day on a rotating schedule. Different jurisdictions handle things differently, as they should. The day inevitably comes when the financial pragmatists say, “Hey, this is costing a lot of money. Let’s put all the services in the big city, and make needy people go there.”

It is one of the eternal problems that every city has to deal with. Like all responsible policy-makers, Putnam and All Home would welcome more research, saying:

I’d be interested in seeing how recently all Seattle residents have come to this community, and where they came from, and what they were earning, and why they came…

There seems to be a particular lack of communication with people who live in cars and RVs, making up an estimated 40 percent of Seattle’s unsheltered folk. There is not much information about their needs, or what could be done to improve their situations. The city nudges agencies to concentrate on the people who live in tents. As far as Putnam knows, no agency applied to the city to do outreach to the vehicle dwellers.

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Putnam illustrated the old saying by mentioning a meeting where it would have been advantageous to be a homeless czar, because bringing in a bunch of people can make things cumbersome. Though the project was in the exploratory stage, 12 city and county officials felt they absolutely had to be there. The consulting firm they met with seemed baffled, and not totally pleased when such a mob showed up for a very preliminary talk, whose results could easily have been shared by sending out a memo.

In this case, the three-way sharing of authority worked well because of the personalities involved. But it could so easily have been different, and in many places, it is different. Which is why Putnam feels that the chain of command, rather than being relationship-based, needs to have clear-cut institutional parameters.

What would a different structure look like? He admires how the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health runs its show:

That department director is responsible for all things public health, and she reports to both the mayor and county executive… It’s not the solution to homelessness; it’s not going to solve everything. It would just put in place a structure that people will know who is accountable and will drive toward results, delegate and everyone knows who is making a decision.

What causes homelessness?

The journalist asked, and Putnam answered:

It’s not always an individual failure. It’s what has happened in their lives, and it’s what has happened in society… The causes of homelessness are far more complex than I even knew. I probably learned the most from people who were experiencing homelessness, getting to know them and why it happened.

And what is happening in society?

Putnam says:

The spike on the charts is very similar to the spike in rents. It’s the same line… I don’t think it’s the only thing, but I think it’s the thing that pushes people over the edge, that rise in rent…

We’re being asked to end homelessness, which also has multiple, national factors at play that are really outside the control of one of the thousands of counties in the United States…

I think everyone at the local level has felt it is unfair for the federal government that isn’t doing its part to encourage mayors’ challenges, and local responses and local taxes, when there hasn’t been much movement beyond treading water with our federal funding for decades.

Reactions?

Source: “King County’s former homeless ‘czar’ on homelessness,” SeattleTimes.com, 02/21/18
Photo on Visualhunt

This is the last of a connected series of posts examining first the phenomenon of families living in motels for years at time; the activities of the giant corporation known as Airbnb; and then asserting that these two things together constitute a monstrous crisis.

In any municipality where more than half of Airbnb’s listings are entire houses or apartments laws are probably being violated. If a city decrees that the owner must be present on the premises to make it legit, landlords with multiple Airbnb listings are obviously out of compliance.

Not long ago, it became widely known that in many cities, in the words of journalist Tim Redmond, “the vast majority of units rented out through the company are not rooms in apartments or flats but are entire buildings.”

Could it be greed?

What landlord in her/his right mind would settle for hard-working long-term tenants, when several times the profit can be made by renting to a series of travelers from out of town. The lavish availability of Airbnb spaces does not do much for the middle-class or lower-class American.

The poor who urgently need to travel for family emergencies or in pursuit of employment are probably not prospective Airbnb customers. In former days, they would stay in cheap motels. Now, when motels are filled with people who are one step from homeless, how do impoverished travelers cope? Spend nights in the parking lot of the hospital where the relative they came to see is dying?

Some perceive Airbnb as an upper-class mutual aid society. Sure, landlords take advantage of the situation to extract every possible dime. But their renters are often members of the same class, who are property owners back where they came from. Yet they have the means to occupy another place that is not their home — a place that could be an actual home to a local family —
if prices were not so absurd. Airbnb affects low-income people by removing from the market the kind of rental stock needed by families of modest means.

Airbnb regulation

In some places, even having a job does not make it possible to live under a roof. Airbnb enjoys a brisk trade in Telluride, Colorado. The people who live in the mountains, and do the work to make things nice for the tourists, sleep in tents and cars, and spend hours per day commuting in winter weather conditions.

The Verge tech reporter Nick Statt wrote in late 2016:

In October, Airbnb sued the state of New York after Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that imposes steep fines on hosts that list empty residences in multi-unit buildings for less than 30 days. The state says these short-term rentals open the door for landlords to operate illegal hotels…

Five months later, Reason.com commented on the result:

New York passed one of the nation’s most onerous anti-homesharing laws last year, but residents don’t seem to be taking it all that seriously. There were more than 55,000 Airbnb rentals in the Big Apple on the final night of 2016… despite the state law that prohibits the advertising of short-term rentals and the threat of $7,500 fines.

A two-week-old news story bearing the title “NYC’s hotels need homeless people to stay in business” relates how competition from Airbnb is making hotels go broke, and consequently…

[…] the city now pays to put up a mind-boggling 11,000 homeless people in hotels — nearly one in six of the roughly 61,000 previously in shelters — costing taxpayers an average $222 a night compared with $150 a night in shelters.

 

Part of the reason why hotels go belly-up is oversupply. But for some perverse reason, developers insist on building more and more of them — despite the clear evidence that the desperate need is for long-term housing. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin explains how…

[…] what bills itself as a company that lets homeowners rent out spare bedrooms has now spawned, globally, thousands of what can — rightly, I believe — be called private hotels. The problem with running private hotels is that cities have various ways they tax and regulate the hotel industry, and Airbnb is largely skirting them…

 

She quotes urban design expert Gabriel Metcalf:

From a policy perspective, the real issue is whether there are a lot of units that have been removed from the housing market because of short-term rentals…

Sure, other factors affect the supply of hotel rooms and rental housing in the overall market. Restrictive zoning has been an inhibiting force for decades. In the few cities that have some kind of rent control ordinances, that is where blame for the housing shortage is likely to be directed. But the unavoidable truth is that, because of Airbnb’s wild success, landlords take their properties out of the long-term rental sector.

The insanity of it

There is a pattern of ugly circularity to all this. With more Airbnb spaces, fewer families and individuals can find housing, and people barely escaping homelessness stay in motels, which encourages the conversion of more housing to short-term rentals. Travelers inhabit premises originally meant for permanent residents, including families. They relax in spacious, well-maintained quarters, and are granted privacy, respect and dignity.

Meanwhile, people who actually live in the city are holed up in what were meant to be temporary accommodations for travelers. Local residents make do with cramped, neglected conditions, with their whole lives on public display, vulnerable to persecution by both criminals and law enforcers.

Let’s take this post and the previous three, and boil them down to an “elevator pitch.” If you had 15 seconds to tell somebody the homelessness problem in a nutshell, this is one effective way to frame it: We have a nation full of families living in places meant for travelers, while travelers are in places meant for families. Whatever the solution is, we need to find it fast.

Reactions?

Source: “Most Airbnb listings are entire houses,” 48hills.org, 11/02/15
Source: “Airbnb is transforming itself from a rental company into a travel agency,” TheVerge.com, 11/17/16
Source: “Is Airbnb Public Enemy No. 1?,” Reason.com, 04/08/17
Source: “NYC’s hotels need homeless people to stay in business,” NYPost.com, 02/03/18
Source: “Stop Calling Airbnb the ‘Sharing Economy’,” Inc.com, 06/17/14
Photo credit: Nrico on Visualhunt/CC BY

A trend is developing that cannot be headed in a good direction. House the Homeless looked last time at parts of America where increasing numbers of people live in a weird limbo between homeless and housed. With varying degrees of official help, they live in motels.

The rules and customs are different according to locality, but everywhere there is a version of the “nuisance motel.” Often, this means nothing more sinister than that people who live there tend to litter, and sometimes need to work on their cars.

New Jersey has its own set of laws, and a motel can be divided between short-term and extended-stay lodgings, which complicates things more. Code violations abound, because the owners are not concerned about pleasing customers to earn good Yelp ratings.

When a housed person who is merely traveling leaves a bad online review “homeless shelter motel” might be the chosen insult. Generally, tenants just put up with bed bugs, roaches, broken windows, and non-functioning locks — because they have nowhere else to go.

Double standard in hospitality industry

Even if there is government financial support to convert motels into housing for those who have no permanent addresses, approval is often hard to get. Local residents say that housing the homeless will attract drugs and violence. Now, consider the system in place in a pricey establishment where the rooms are paid for with performance bonuses, trust funds, and corporate expense accounts. In fancy hotels, drug transactions routinely happen that put the paltry nickel-and-dime motel deals to shame.

If there is trouble, the upscale hospitality business handles the matter discreetly. Favors are called in, and awkward circumstances are swept under the carpet. Witnesses are paid off or intimidated. Except in very extreme cases, authorities are not notified. Apparently, it is not actually the illegality that society worries about but the economic standing of the people who do the deeds.

Shrinking need for motels

In Central Florida, things changed a lot after the 2008 economic crash. The former massive number of Disney World travelers shrunk, and so did the need for roadside motels. 

Typical of news articles covering this story was one by Saki Knafo, which centered on a family that had lost their New Orleans home to Hurricane Katrina, and then had been flooded out again in Nashville. The husband had put in applications at 167 restaurants and only heard back from one of them. The parents and young daughter were able to rent a motel room for $149 per week, and even then found it necessary to sublet the room’s second bed to a Vietnam veteran. There are thousands of similar stories in Florida.

California is different. Herds of travelers still turn up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Expedia.com says “Motels are in high demand in Los Angeles.” When some motels are repurposed to shelter local unhoused people, it cuts down on the number of places where out-of-towners can stay. For those who can afford them, expensive lodgings are always available. People on a strict budget might try sleeping in their car in a parking lot or, more likely, just stay home.

Enter the villain

Another option is signing up with Airbnb, and here is where the circularity kicks in. House the Homeless has written about this business model before. In cities that still get plenty of commercial travelers and tourist action, its existence has totally changed the rental landscape. Too often, regulations that try to mitigate the damage are weak or unenforceable.

Early in 2014, Katy Steinmetz described how San Francisco landlords were evicting long-term tenants in order to take apartments off the market, not even willing to forego the extra profit that would be lost by waiting until their leases expired. To describe what Airbnb greed was doing to the local stock of housing, critics used the word “cannibalize.” People who could afford to invest would rent apartments they had no intention of living in, but that they could, in turn, rent out by the night or weekend to travelers.

Property owners resented their tenants making fortunes from short-term referrals and started writing “no subletting” into leases if they hadn’t already. Ambitious middle-man mini-landlords were kicked out, so the actual owners could go into the Airbnb racket.

Rents continued to rise. Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness told the press, “Eviction is the driving force of homelessness.” And Maria Zamudio of Causa Justa said, “There are over 3,000 homeless children in San Francisco. Airbnb’s practice of turning homes into hotels is exacerbating those conditions.” Outside the corporation’s San Francisco headquarters, activists demonstrated vigorously.

(To be continued…)

Reactions?

Source: “15 arrested for drugs in Toms River hotel raid,” APP.com, 10/05/17
Source: “Homeless Children Living On The Highway To Disney World,” HuffingtonPost,com, 04/22/12
Source: “San Francisco Cracks Down on Airbnb ‘Abuses’,” TIME.com, 04/15/14
Source: “Housing and Homeless Activists Storm and Occupy Airbnb HQ,” SFWeekly.com, 11/02/15
Photo credit: Chris Waits (waitscm) on Visualhunt/CC BY

Last week, House the Homeless (HtH) brought up a vexed question: When the nation’s infrastructure is renovated, what will happen to the estimated 100,000 Americans who live beneath bridges and overpasses?

The topic is of major importance right now in Austin, where construction is underway and people are being evicted from whatever fragile, makeshift shelters they had. An estimated 200 people will be directly affected, or already have been.

Somehow, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) formed the mistaken impression that removing people from the planned construction sites would be the work of a moment. As HtH President Richard R. Troxell puts it, he and other advocates came to realize that TxDOT believed that “they could simply contact us and we would come get these people and house them.”

For housing to be supplied, it merely needs to be asked for — what a fanciful notion! If only it were so. This unwelcome introduction to reality slowed things down a bit.

Visiting etiquette

Meanwhile, TxDOT understood that its representatives were being sent out to do what might be interpreted as barging in and invading the homes of people who live under bridges. To bring a gift would be polite, and they thought up a helpful one — a reflective bag that can be carried by hand, worn like a backpack, or attached to the person’s outer layer of clothing and baggage. They are given out by representatives of the state and the contractors, when telling people to move on.

The “Be Safe, Be Seen” bags are not empty: They were processed through volunteers from House the Homeless and Austin’s First Baptist Church, who included extras, as described by Richard:

In each bag, we placed a stamped survey asking each person if they knew how to enter the process to apply for housing so that when we get housing they will know how to access the system. Next, we put in a half page with the name of the First Baptist Church, its address, phone number and mission statement.

Then, we included two ways to contact me to apply for disability benefits. This can help the disabled (52 % by a previous HtH Survey) leverage housing. We also included a House the Homeless Plastic Resource Guide (it folds down into a pocket) so people can locate all homeless services in Austin.

Also included were copies of Richard’s recent op-ed column from the Austin American Statesman, with his recommendations on how to address the causes of homelessness generally. The volunteers also stuffed the bags with tangible and potentially life-saving items: rain poncho, thermal underwear, knit hat, socks, gloves, scarf, hand sanitizer, safety whistle, and pen.

Along with House the Homeless, First Baptist Church, and TxDOT, others who helped out with this “winterizing” project are: Eddie and Ritamay Mire, Jeff and Alyssa Korn, and Bruce Agnes —
Community First. Austin’s KVUE made a very nice television news story. All this was in addition to the nearly 500 people “winterized” at the Thermal Underwear Party, and please check out the beautiful photo album of this year’s event.

What next? Richard says:

House the Homeless is advocating that, in order for contractors to be able to meet the timeline of their contractual obligations, they tap into their contingency funds for each individual renovation project and create emergency transitional housing for our bridge dwellers while local communities get time to create appropriate housing.

As the nation moves toward this revamping of our infrastructure, the potential for a humanitarian crisis looms over the nation when as many as 100,000 people become subject to dislocation of their lives for a second time. If only there was someone with a national vision that could call upon all state Departments of Transportation to use those “Contingency Funds” all the contractors could meet their contractual deadlines and all these folks could be treated with dignity, fairness, and some transitional housing.

That’s a tall order, and meanwhile, there is a darker side to the upcoming relocation of humans. Formerly, city police have not been responsible to enforce anti-trespassing laws on TxDOT property. With permission from the City Council, that will probably change.

Meanwhile, advocates for the people experiencing homelessness are still objecting to three city ordinances concerning Class C misdemeanor offenses. Such an ordinary action as sitting in the wrong place can create a criminal history for a person who never had one before, and act as a barrier to that person to escaping homelessness, when they apply for housing or employment.

Reactions?

Source: “Commentary: How Austin could atone for policies that harm the homeless,” MyStatesman.com, 12/05/17
Source: “TxDOT, House the Homeless team up to provide warm items to those in need,” KVUE.com, 01/12/18
Image: House the Homeless