Studios for Hotel Tenants

Although residential hotels were designed to be temporary or transitional housing, they have in recent years become permanent homes for the majority of the elderly, disabled, and working class people who live in them and cannot afford the skyrocketing rents of studios in the city. In March of 2002, an opportunity to change this came when a San Francisco developer who had permits to build over 170 live-work lofts at 4th and Freelon Streets decided that he would rather build 335 apartments on the site. In exchange for getting permission to change his plans, the developer agreed to construct at least 56 studios to be owned and rented by a non-profit firm to residential hotel tenants for just $561 a month. Hotel residents organized testimonies and a petition drive to convince the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors to allow the project to move forward so that the studios would be built. They were successful, and soon there will be at least 56 new, truly affordable studios available for hotel tenants to move into.