THC Surveys SRO Tenants about living conditions – the survey comes back with mixed responses.
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What’s Happening in the Hotels
Survey of SRO Residents Produces Mixed Results
83% “FEEL SAFE IN THEIR HOME”
On September 18, over 75 hotel operators from the Indian community met with Clinic Director Randy Shaw, Deputy Mayor Brad Paul and other city officials to address a wide range of issues. The meeting succeeded in breaking down barriers of mistrust and misinformation that have often impeded efforts to expand and improve our city’s low-income housing supply. Strategies were discussed to enable hotel operators to improve conditions and hotel staffing levels while maintaining low rents. The fruits of this meeting should become increasingly evident in the weeks and months ahead.
FEMA TO FUND HOTELS
As many of you know, the Clinic has sought for several months to obtain funding from FEMA to rehabilitate hotel rooms for earthquake victims. A tentative settlement has been reached, which would result in the rehabilitation of forty-seven hotel rooms (and nearby common areas), and provide additional hotel staff. We should be able to provide complete details next month.
Fifty-two percent of formerly homeless residential hotel tenants said they were satisfied with their new homes, even though twenty-five percent said they were “overrun” with roaches, according to a THC survey of Modified Payments Program participants.
Since March,1990, the Housing Clinic has campaigned for improved living conditions in San Francisco’s low-income residential hotels, working together with tenants and management. In September, a random sampling of MPP tenants was asked to rate the hotels, and 15 percent (nearly 150 people) responded.
The results were not entirely conclusive, with tenants often having radically different opinions of the same buildings. For example, 40 percent of Sai tenants’ responses said the hotel was overrun with roaches, while 50 percent said there was no roach problem whatsoever. 30 percent of Sai tenants also rated bathroom maintenance to be poor, while 40 percent said it was good and 20 percent said it was excellent. (Perhaps this says more about Sai tenants than about the Sai)
Thus, these “results” should be used only as a rough sketch of the hotels, and a guideline for tenants and management to determine the positive and negative aspects of their homes. Please keep in mind that these responses were gathered on September 1st, and certain problems or situations may have been resolved since then.
