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Another round of naive techno-optimism :
I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.
I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?
I have some experience with building services security engineering and design, including for specialised correctional facilities.
Not difficult, but the rooms would not be comfortable. You are looking at various design elements used in detention and forensic mental health facilities. No carpet, but lanolin flooring with drainage in each room. Vandal resistant paint. Plastic furniture like you've suggested. Potentially anti-ligature fixtures and fittings. Basically you'd be able to (and need to be able to) high pressure hose the place out. I would start with a basic expectation that people will smear shit on the walls and roof and potentially start a fire on the floor and go from there.
It would be unjust to get private citizens or companies to fund this type of housing out of their own pockets.
Unhappily, yeah. And that's only the people who are mentally unable to live independently, not the malicious fucks who love to destroy things just because (and then complain that they're not getting replacements and upgrades and how it's unfair and they're being discriminated against).
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This is such an extremely poorly-thought-out idea that it's kind of hilarious.
The obvious problem is that any kind of substantial homeless presence in hotels would have such a negative impact on business that hotels would go to great lengths to avoid it. Perhaps they would follow some of the suggestions listed in other comments and sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking (e.g. booking day of, or willing to move around their booking) or even gift some guests an extra room or two. More simply, they could gift employees free rooms whenever there's a vacancy. It's also possible that most hotels in LA proper would simply close and relocate to cities in the LA area which wouldn't be affected by this law (there are many other municipalities essentially embedded in the city of LA).
But after thinking about it a bit, I think an even bigger problem is something pointed out in the article: the number of vacant rooms in a hotel can change unpredictably from day-to-day so you either have to constantly kick out homeless residents on short notice or essentially accept a permanent fraction of your rooms being used to house the homeless. Even worse, if you opt for the latter then every time there's a dip in your number of regular customers, you risk having to increase the "permanent homeless" fraction of rooms. And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly. Not to mention it would be insanely disruptive to regular customers.
I think the hypothesis mentioned in the article—that this is a negotiating tactic by the hotel workers' union—makes a lot of sense. Basically it is a threat against hotel owners that if they don't increase salaries then they will be put out of business by an insane law. If this is really the union's strategy then it seems a bit risky. There is always a chance that even the law will take on a life of its own and get passed even if negotiations succeed and salaries are raised. And then everyone (hotel owners and workers alike) will be out of a job.
Special off-peak booking! Bargain prices! Stay three days for the price of two! kinds of promotions. If the choice is between "take a cut on pricing to get the rooms occupied by normal people" and "be forced to accept government vouchers for the homeless", then any sensible decision is going to be "cut the prices".
If the voucher scheme was for a filtered set of applicants (i.e. people temporarily needing accommodation who are not crazy, druggies, or criminals) then it might work for a while. But if it's "take anybody we send with no discretion", it never will get off the ground because a hotel is not set up to be a supervised living support system.
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I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition. Though someone else could propose it if it truly took off, they'd have to go through the efforts of getting signatures etc.
It would be interesting to see what chaos arose if it did somehow pass.
Interesting, I didn't notice that part. Even taking this into account, it still seems a bit dangerous: if the union hasn't reached a deal with hotel management by the deadline to withdraw the proposition then they need to either reveal their threat to be an empty one or go through with it, in which case it could well pass.
I generally am pretty open to unions and employers playing hardball with each other. The reason this sticks in my craw a bit is that, if it is a cynical maneuver, it's transparently an empty one: the union won't pull the trigger on it because it hurts workers at least as much as the employers, so it gives no actual leverage.
I guess the ambiguity of whether it's cynical or borne of genuine progressive beliefs does give it some edge, though.
Depends on the relative mobility. In many unlearned/non-specialized professions, anything that blows up the entire profession gives leverage to the workers over the employers, since the workers will just move to a different profession with minimal friction, while the employers will need to accept large losses if they want to switch to anything else. Though I guess it's still an odd move for the unions in particular, since the union itself also has a lot more to lose.
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Who counts as homeless in America? In Ireland putting homeless people up in hotels is the standard thing to do but I haven't seen any news of hotels complaining about business being affected by an intake of rough sleepers and drug addicts. Add refugee accomodation and it's very lucrative and a much more stable source of income for a hotel owner or landlord than serving the market.
That kind of temporary accommodation is paid for by local councils/homelessness services and is generally because the shelters and other places are full to the brim and can't take any new entrants. It's for families and is meant to be short-term emergency accommodation, not rough sleepers and "people with complex needs". Councils don't like having to fall back on it because it costs money and isn't a permanent solution, but if you don't have beds or spaces and you have, say, a woman with three kids who otherwise is going to be on the street - well, there's not much choice.
A lot of hotels also took on refugee/asylum seekers in Direct Provision. Usual sort of complaints about this, from the people in that accommodation to the locals; general perception (unfair or not) is that the hoteliers were making profit at the expense of the community.
I don't know if the Californian proposal does mean the rough sleepers etc., it sounds like it (because if they're going to discriminate amongst the homeless based on 'are they normal or not?' I can imagine seventeen different lawsuits from seventeen different NGOs and activist groups about that).
Report for July 2023 here, it seems to be a mess to download but that's the government websites for ya!
Irish homeless numbers are way smaller than California; the latest data is as follows:
By comparison, the numbers for Los Angeles (where this bill is proposed) alone, for June 2023:
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This is very interesting and thanks for bringing it up! Do you know a place where I can read the details about this program? Everything I was able to quickly find (e.g. this article) talks about "homeless families" being provided accommodations in hotels in Dublin. Depending on what homeless families means, this might be quite different from the most visible segment of the homeless population in LA, which seems to consist of single people with no children present. This makes me wonder if there is some screening that goes into who is eligible for the program in Ireland or if the homeless population in Ireland is just significantly different from the homeless population in LA. Also, I believe the rate of opiod abuse is much lower in Ireland, which might make a big difference.
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In practice I suspect hotels would call the cops to remove them, and just deal with it if they don’t show up. Employees would then be gifted that room in perpetuity unless someone tried to reserve it.
I thought we (or rather the enlightened ones) were doing away with police and replacing them with social workers or mediation teams?
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Having cops constantly going to your hotel also sounds disastrous for business. I agree that hotels would do a lot of things to try to keep rooms from going empty, including gifting all excess rooms to employees each night, if allowed. A lot would depend on what enforcement looked like I guess.
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There used to be cheap, minimal lodgings for those who would otherwise be homeless; they were called flophouses.
The point there, though, is that the people using them were at least trying to work and make some kind of money. They catered to transients and the poorest working class, not the homeless as we know the term now.
And the problem is not "get the guy off the street by giving him a (temporary) room in a hotel, problem solved". For the homeless who are "down on my luck, living in my car/couch surfing, otherwise trying to get my life back together", sure, this would help. If what they basically need is a bed to sleep in, a way to wash themselves, and some means of cooking basic meals or finding cheap meals while they look for work/help/have work just need to find somewhere to live, that's enough.
But the really hardcore homeless, the people who don't want to go to shelters where they are allowed to drink and take drugs, the criminals, the mentally ill - this won't do a damn thing. Even having to talk about making the rooms destruction-proof demonstrates this. You'll have people who cannot live independently because they can't take care of themselves and will clog the toilets by trying to flush rubbish down it, you'll have people who are criminals and will steal for sale anything not nailed down, and you'll have the crazy/malicious types who wreck shit just for the sake of it.
Unless you're going to discriminate between the "just need transient accommodation" and the hardcore types, this won't work. The hardcore need supervision, support, social workers, counselling, and someone calling in at a minimum once a week to check on them and make sure they aren't neglecting to eat or endangering themselves by trying to light fires in the middle of the room.
Hotels won't like or want that kind of hassle, and who can blame them? They're not set up to be asylums or halfway houses. Regular guests won't want to be staying in rooms besides the crazy and criminal. And that kind of intensive support is so expensive that the city won't/can't pay for it.
So the bill may be passed, all will congratulate themselves that they're Tackling The Problem, and it'll end up worse than ever.
At best, you'll get a new version of flophouses where dilapidated properties are turned into tiny 'rooms' with no facilities and the vouchers are going to pay what, in effect, will be a slum lord. Maybe that's better than nothing, but it's not a lasting solution.
But probably this is indeed a cynical bargaining tool by the union: give in to us on this particular demand, or we'll flood your premises with the feral and nobody sane will ever want to stay in your hotel again and you'll go broke.
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You can get prison-style furniture and toilets and whatever that are relatively resistant to trashing. Not trashing-proof, some asshole might try and burn through your rock-solid prison toilet with homemade thermite or something. However, one of the issues that comes to mind is flooding, either deliberately or through drug-fueled incompetence or just idiocy. How do you deal with assholes blocking the drains in your units and getting the water running? Maybe you can have some kind of shutoff meter or something, but those can be defeated and even IDK 10 gallons of water just sitting in a unit is a lot and can cause mold and other damage.
Prisons have guards that walk by and see if an inmate is flooding his cell with toilet water or some shit like that, and they put a stop to it reasonably quickly - within hours, I think, but I'm no corrections officer.
Smart thing would be to have each unit have a concrete waterproof curb around the perimeter and multiple drains throughout. Preferably some large drains such that blocking them would be an actual challenge.
You have people with privacy and tools. If they have a grudge against you, they could very well remove the grates and seal the drain with contractor bags stuffed full of rags or something. You also have toilets and plumbing. Flushing a bunch of old T-shirts down the toilet and chasing it with something like rancid fat or concrete can block pipes pretty badly. Any halfway determined asshole with access to the entire contents of a goddamn hardware store can create a pretty damn bad clog with $20 worth of goods from the local hardware store plus or minus commonly available scavenged or stolen items like trash bags, old fryer oil, paint/glue/adhesives, or something else.
I suppose that you could just use a Singapore-style solution where you beat or flog people for damaging the hell out of the apartment and then maybe boot them out, and the hobos that can live in apartments without royally fucking it up get to live there.
Also how do you deal with these guys deciding to cook meth or something in the apartments? IDK - maybe you just do the same thing as you do to the guy that floods the place.
If you let angry prisoners get $20 worth of goods from the local Home Depot and a whole week unsupervised, they could probably burn down the prison.
Oh, yeah. The homeless aren't a monolithic block, there are a lot of degrees and shades of difference. There's the people who are just temporarily homeless and still have it together enough that if they get support, they get back on the ladder of normal society, there are the unfortunates who are mentally disturbed or mentally ill in some degree, there are the people fucked up by alcohol/drugs, there are the people who lost jobs/got divorced/got sick and their lives fell apart bit by bit to where they're homeless, there are the criminals and so on. And the kind of grifters who do want to milk the system will indeed have grudges if they're not getting everything they want and perceive that they are owed. So if they steal shit, sell it, and want it replaced (often by better stuff) and you don't comply - they have no problem doing the likes of the above.
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This is the problem in a nutshell. In prisons, there is monitoring with cctv cameras and physical patrols.
If people aren't in custody under mental health laws or under criminal arrest, then you must allow them privacy. You can't deny them tools like cutlery, lighters, crowbars, sheets, kerosene and all sorts of other mundane items denied to prisoners.
You can build a room that is vandal resistant and will hold out against limited tools for the time it takes for the custodians to respond. You can't build a room where people with unlimited tools and time can maliciously or negligently work towards the room's destruction (or even the entire building).
To even build a vandal resistant room would make it unsuitable for use by paying customers. You either cater the facility to housing the homeless, or you acknowledge that designing the rooms this way will not make them viable for generating income from paying hotel guests.
Yeah. There's definitely a use case for a shit tier hotel room like this but I wouldn't want to be around a bunch of people that can't even live in an apartment...it seems like it would be safer for me to just camp in the woods or something.
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Or you discriminate against those who get vouchers for hotel accommodation to be the people who aren't crazy, criminal, or addicted enough that they'll get roaring drunk/high and smash shit up (getting quietly blotto and just passing out in bed is another matter).
And if you do that, and leave the hardcore on the streets, then you the city will be facing lawsuits out the wazoo from every activist do-gooder and 'homelessness industrial complex' out there. How dare you make it so that Crazy Joe who would steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes, deals drugs, and beats and terrorises the shit out of his fellow homeless, can't get a hotel room beside normal people!
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It seems very unlikely the people of Los Angeles will vote for this given popular sentiment has now turned thoroughly against the homeless.
SF voted to ban homeless tents on streets years ago, a judge stepped in and forced them to allow it.
These sort of things aren't decided democratically in California. The bill will fail but then a left wing group will get a friendly judge to mandate it's major points.
There's a specific ruling for the 9th circuit where you can relocate the homeless, but only if you have a place to relocate them to, which SF didn't. (And regardless of whether that's a good ruling, if you don't have a place to put homeless people you're probably not really getting rid of tent cities, just moving them around.) AFAIK there's no similar law/ruling that would apply to the above situation, though IANAL.
To be more precise about that ruling, SF didn't have to merely have a place for an individual person to move to, but places for the entire estimated homeless population. I.e. it could have a space open for someone, but unless it had spaces open for every homeless person on the streets that night, it wasn't allowed to force that individual to move his tent. Given that many homeless refuse any offer of shelter, the ruling requires SF to have a substantial overcapacity of shelter beds before doing anything.
Gotcha, thanks for the added context.
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Do the vouchers at least insure the hotel against damage and lost revenue if the room is trashed? If they just cover the cost of a single night at some government rate, no hotel will accept a voucher like that, ever.
Not that difficult, it's called a prison cell.
Prison cells are also supported by guards, unlike apartments. Can't bring a sledgehammer into a prison cell.
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Not even just damage what if the homeless person rapes people or robs them or steals stuff out of rooms?
Infests it with bedbugs, contaminates it with a diy meth lab, etc, etc.
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The government forcing private businesses to fix their screw ups is so obviously morally wrong.. Plus this will obviously not work. A bad event will happen and this will go away. It blows my mind people still propose these kinds of solutions.
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I haven't seen @grendel-khan here in a while, so I'll chime in and say that the problem is the lack of housing, as usual. And so, instead of working to fix the housing problem by building more, LA wants to tackle it with a bizarre solution guaranteed to generate Culture War heat (granted, not that a fight against NIMBYs would be any less hot, but even so).
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Just chiming in with the usual reminder that what desperate people look and act like after decades of neglect and deprivation is not a very useful indicator of what they would look like had they been receiving aid and care that entire time instead.
Which is to say: yes, many people living on the street are now destructive and oppositional, making it difficult to treat and assist them in the short-term. But that's not an indication that there's some percent of the population that's genetically and inevitably incapable of not destroying everything around them, it's the result of what they've suffered under our system, and the self-medicating they've done to live through it.
A comprehensive system of social welfare that didn't let anyone fall through the cracks to begin with would prevent most of them from getting to that point, making schemes like this much more practical and useful.
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That depends on the tenant. These are homeless people, so generally not long term planners(who can wear through anything) or possessing tool collections(they’d pawn them for drug money). But they do have small items- lighters, knives, etc.
Now Sheetrock is delicate, but you don’t need it. Bare, polished(a rough surface can itself be used to damage things) concrete with electrical/plumbing access routed through stainless steel conduit. You’re probably going to want to seal everything; liquids can do a lot of damage. Obviously, you don’t have built in furniture, or if you do it’s the same concrete and stainless. That means you need to worry about the other furniture being used to smash things up, so it’s flimsy ikea. You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.
Also, the doors have to be decent and locking, because I’m assume you’re hosting multiple homeless people in this facility and letting them run away instead of fight is probably a necessity.
Congrats, you’ve invented the prison cell.
Bars or grates could be used over the windows; they could be made out of Lexan or something, too.
Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.
Pretty sure that's illegal. That's a fire safety violation. "But concrete doesn't burn." Fire code doesn't care.
Concrete may not burn, but lots of other things do. You might get away with "can only open the window a limited amount so people can't commit suicide by flinging themselves out the window" but bars/grates like that, very probably not.
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No ensuite bathrooms is the answer. If you want to use the bathroom, just go to the shared one that is supervised. Actually, the most malicious customers would just piss on the floor and smear everything with their feces.
I mean these things are designed to be able to be cleaned by a guy hosing the place down with a power washer. Shitting all over the place isn't as bad as flooding it or cooking meth in it.
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I am curious: the hotel workers' union organized the petition, but I have a hard time imagining it originates from the rank and file. Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this, but 1) existing workers would have to deal with homeless people and 2) it would almost certainly reduce the proportion of their work that results in tips. If you're an existing worker, what's the advantage here?
This is really more than an aside. More work for their members seems like a pretty slam dunk argument for a union supporting a ballot initiative. See in a different vein;
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In a world where AirBnB is even marginally legal it wouldn't reduce their work resulting in tips, it would eliminate it entirely. Over time the average hotel aims for a 60% occupancy rate assumption, maybe it's higher in LA so call it 80%, that's a huge number of rooms going to the homeless every night. And given that it's impossible to know which rooms won't be booked or when, that means mingling in the lobby and the elevator with the homeless, it means that I'm probably getting one of those indestructible concrete rooms.
Getting a hotel room is already often a tough sell over an Airbnb cost wise, throw this ordinance in and unless they entirely ban Airbnb and any other kind of system, Airbnb will dominate. I don't hugely object to sharing public space with the homeless, but I'm going to prefer paying for private spaces where I don't when I'm traveling. No hotel nicer than a motel 6 can possibly survive this.
Yeah. If I'm a hotel owner, this is pretty bad, but I can in theory just get a perpetual income stream of "market rate" vouchers from the city. Workers are just screwed. If owners have any moral obligations at all toward their workers, they need to fight this as much as possible. Preferably with a bunch of commercials featuring rank and file workers talking about how bad it will be for them, with little to no reference about how it affects hotels as an industry.
Oh, no, it will absolutely destroy the hotel industry if any alternative exists for any hotel nicer than a roadside drunk-tank.
Why would I choose to stay in a nice hotel if I share the space with homeless derelicts? If I walk out to get ice for my drinks and have to be leered at by various vagabonds? If I have to worry about my car being vandalized in the parking lot by my fellow guests.
When I could just stay at an AirBnB that is a similar cost and doesn't have a homeless person next door? Or, if I'm a tourist, why would I travel to the town where my hotel will be part homeless shelter when I could travel to literally anywhere else?
Airbnb not necessary, you can just get a hotel room outside city limits.
Especially in LA, which has tons of other municipalities embedded within it.
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I didn't even consider it from the perspective of the paying hotel guests.
If I was confronted with a hotel where 40% of the guests were homeless, then believe me I'm cutting out the middle man and pitching a tent myself, in terms of proportions, there are fewer of them on the streets.
Now consider it from the perspective of a hotel guest with a wife or even worse a child. You going to be comfortable with them going down the hall to grab some ice or a soda? You going to let them run down to the front desk to buy a snack or even turn the corner ahead of you?
What happens when in the inevitable inability to effectively empty and clean full hotel every night, with a large percentage of unruly and mentally ill guests, a cleaning woman misses something and your kid steps on a needle walking around the room barefoot or jumping onto the bed?
What happens when someone's girlfriend gets raped in a stairwell
What happens when a toddler finds some candy that fell on the floor or in a corner and puts in in thier mouth before you can stop them, but whoopsie! it's** fentanyl and now their dead!**
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The workers union organized the petition against the vouchers, surely.
Not so, source. Seems like it's a pressure tactic from the unions:
Ok, I nearly thought I understood, but now I'm confused again. If my union was campaigning to impose a special tax on unionized businesses where I work, then I would leave the union. Is the idea that guests will still use unionized hotels even with this tax increase?
To the extent this is thought through at all, the idea seems to be that the tax would be set aside to give housing subsidies to hotel workers, with an implicit assumption that demand for unionized hotels is highly inelastic.
Ah, thanks.
Assuming that monetary incentives won't make a significant difference to behaviour seems to be the first principle of left-wing economics, much of the time.
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I'm seeing speculation that it's leverage in a labor dispute. Since the union brought the proposal, they can withdraw it at will. Therefore the hotels should accede to their demands or the hotels will risk the proposal getting put to a popular vote.
Apparently union construction labor is known to bring lawsuits against projects that don't use them, in the same vein.
If the union in question is SEIU, then "calculated dick move" is a racing certainty. If any other union, I would take the over on "maggot extremists on the paid staff acting without meaningful membership supervision".
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None. Your union boss is a liberal activist and he is responsible for it. He will never have to clean shit out of sheets for minimum wage.
Maybe you sign it because you're supposed to, but you, as a hotel worker, have no skin in the game. It's just a job - and a crappy one at that. You'll flee for greener pastures the second the obvious consequences of this bill become apparent.
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Ask the Department of Corrections. Such rooms tend to be all hard surfaces (cinder block and concrete) with stainless-steel appliances (by which I mean this, not this). Even then, they need to make sure the occupants don't have any tools.
Hilarious. Thanks for the link.
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Yeah. Preventing potentially hostile people from destroying these things is a system; not only are there tough, destruction-resistant fixtures but there is also a lot more restriction on tools and equipment and guards or orderlies surveilling the place and checking in on people to make sure they're not flooding the place with toilet water.
Flooding is the weak point, because homeless people don’t hold on to many tools- anything beyond ‘lighter, Swiss Army knife, maybe a screwdriver’ gets pawned. You could fix that with redundant drains and shutoffs for every room, I guess. These aren’t evil geniuses, they’re drug addicts with borderline mental retardation.
Still seems like it would be better not to do this.
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Prediction: If this passes nice hotels will almost never have vacancies. They will have some rewards program that guarantees there are never vacancies because any empty room will be given to a person in the rewards program or perhaps given to a friend of a hotel employee. Or, you go to the hotel expecting to have one room, and the hotel decides to give you two as a bonus for being such a good customer.
It really is striking that people that propose these sorts of things seem fundamentally incapable of arriving at this simple level of second order thinking. Problem with people on the streets? Well, give them hotel rooms, simple as! If confronted with fairly obvious workarounds like this, the answer would be to litigate against the hotels, of course.
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New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.
If it means cheaper or even free hotel rooms for the likes of me, I don't think I'd mind at all, although you'd probably get a bunch of them shutting down as it's no longer profitable for them to pay to keep rooms full, and letting them go empty is even worse. Long term almost certainly a net negative for society, but you can apply that label to so so many modern government programmes.
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