[wburg]

ozone: It's not about living in the past--I've studied too much of it to romanticize about the "good old days" but making use of the existing built environment, and recognizing the value of existing building stock. Right now, with current prices for materials and labor, it is impossible to build housing for people in those income ranges without government subsidy. The advantage of currently existing buildings is that they can be cheaper, because they're already built. (Jane Jacobs' chapter on old buildings in Death and Life... addresses this--it also applies to things like local businesses and cultural uses like small theaters and used bookstores.) I don't want to live in the past--but I do want to learn from it. A lot of ideas we now consider "cutting-edge" like mixed-use buildings, transit-oriented development and walkable neighborhoods are just revisiting the way we used to build cities before the automobile.

With the exception of a couple of places, the existing SRO housing stock is not limited to those with low income. You can march right down to the Berry or the Marshall right now, plunk down your cash, and if they have a vacancy you can get a room. And, believe it or not, not everyone who lives in an SRO is on public assistance. Some of those folks work, they just don't get paid very well.

The problem is that most of the SROs are in miserably bad condition, indifferently maintained, physically dangerous, for the most part not air-conditioned, and generally pretty miserable places to live. Most feature shared bathrooms on each floor, and only a couple have any sort of cooking facilities. The people who live there do so because for the most part they literally can't afford to live anyplace else, or have bad credit histories and can't rent anyplace that does a background check.

In fact, most of the SROs aren't part of Sacramento's inclusionary housing program at all. They're cheap because they are run by slumlords, not because they are government-subsidized (once again, with a couple of exceptions.) Building substitute housing for SRO residents will probably require massive government subsidy, simply because housing is so expensive to build, and you quite literally can't build SRO-style housing (with shared bathrooms, no kitchens, etc.) legally anymore. Retrofitting and repair of the existing buildings, but maintaining the building's purpose, and introducing management slightly less indifferent to the population's well-being would solve many of the SRO hotels' perception problems.