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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?
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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