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Old Posted May 26, 2007, 10:26 PM
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ozone ozone is offline
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Sacramento California
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Single-room-occupancy hotels sprang up in the early part of the century to house transient workers. But over time, most turned into slum housing for alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill.

I understand that SRO's are supported in order to keep people from becoming homeless. However, the negative impact of so many terminally anti-social people living in slum hotels (SRO) in the heart of the city is intolerable. Its basic economics. Downtown Sacramento has more than its share of SRO’s and the concentration of anti-social “undesirables” scares off those with money to spend and destroys the drive for a revitalized downtown.

The homeless/low-income housing activists support inclusionary zoning laws which I think are fundamentally unfair to those who are not unemployable or anti-social. Most SRO's do not provide open and affordable housing to general public. They are mostly for those who are on government assistance or for those who find it hard to live elsewhere because of their criminal past or substance abuse problems.

The city’s “inclusionary” policy which promises to maintain the number of single-room-occupancy hotel rooms is basically unfair to the working poor or those with moderate incomes –it’s actually an exclusionary and unfair housing policy because it excludes them from downtown residency.

To make our downtown truly inclusive and diverse I think we need change the current policy to encourage single room occupancy hotels to convert to mixed-income, semi-market-rate housing. Maybe they could receive low-interest loans to make improvements -upgrading their property to market-rate standards. A percentage (say 10%-30%) would be required to remain single-room-occupancy units (or efficiencies) and rest would be converted to rent-stabilized ‘workforce” units.

Mitigation for the units lost could be spread over the entire city through efficiency units which are subsided by the city as sugit mentioned.

Last edited by ozone; May 27, 2007 at 2:00 AM.
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