OFF THE
STREETS
HOW MOTELS BECOME HOMES FOR HOMELESS
BY MATT LEVIN
S
alvador Bradford takes pride in keeping his studio apartment tidy. His converted hotel room has around 250 square feet for a bathroom, stove and mini-fridge. There is space for the trappings of a home: a shelf of Star Wars and Star Trek DVDs, and a small shrine to Jesus Christ, to whom Bradford credits his past five years of sobriety. He lives at the former Hotel Berry in Downtown and says his twin mattress sure beats the past two years sleeping on the streets of San Francisco and Sacramento. “It was horrible. I was dying, slowly but surely,” Bradford, 64, says. “People (were) having sex in the alleyways, people (were) shooting up crystal meth.” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to make a permanent dent in California’s homelessness crisis—more than 150,000 unhoused individuals, including more than 100,000 sleeping outside—would create hundreds of properties like the Hotel Berry, an 80-year-old motel transformed into
38
POC AUG n 20
Hotel Berry resident Salvador Bradford jokes with supportive services manager Bruni Rocha in one of the common spaces. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters. 104 supportive housing units for the formerly homeless. Newsom wants to spend $600 million in federal emergency dollars to expand Project Roomkey, a joint state and federal program that has leased more than 15,700 hotel rooms for homeless Californians deemed especially susceptible to the coronavirus. Roughly 9,600 rooms were occupied in June. Phase Two of the project is buying as many hotels or motels as possible for permanent homeless housing by the end of the year. That’s when the $600 million must be spent or returned to the feds.
California has never tried buying so many properties to house its homeless population in such a short period of time. It won’t be easy. Here’s how motels are typically converted to more permanent homeless housing:
STEP 1: BUY THE HOTEL Cost: $100,000–$175,000 per room, but varies across the state. Time: Two to three months of negotiations, not including escrow. Land isn’t cheap in California, especially in coastal regions where the homeless are disproportionately located.
Data provided by the California Hotel & Lodging Association, a hospitality industry advocacy group, indicate hotels that could be targeted by the state—budget chains like Motel 6 with 150 units or less—fetch more than $100,000 per unit in Los Angeles County. A 40-room Travel Plaza in Compton sold for $4.5 million last year. Costs are steeper in the Bay Area. Low-income housing developers caution that prices vary from region to region and according to the quality of motel. Extended-stay hotels that come pre-furnished with kitchenettes will be more expensive than deteriorating single-room-occupancy
