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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 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?
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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