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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?
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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