ssm2006 03 PDF
ssm2006 03 PDF
Leslie A. Brownrigg
Anthropologist
Statistical Research Division
U.S. Census Bureau
Disclaimer: This report is released to inform interested parties of research and to encourage discussion. The views
expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Abstract
Leslie A. Brownrigg
The number and types of hotels and similar accommodations hosting residents, sojourners on open-
ended stays and regulars who spend part of every week or month or year in hotels began to increase
in the late 1980s. People from all walks of life are settled, onindefinite stays or cycling through
hotels. Multimillionaires enjoy services and facilities even they cannot afford to replicate in private
household settings, and often buy equity in the unit they occupy. Hundreds of thousands of
Americans at any time are in establishments that offer discounts or subsidies arranged by third
parties – employers, government housing programs, insurance companies, universities, the military,
and social service agencies. Accommodating settlers, sojourners and regulars reflect innovative
business strategies adopted by most hospitality brand families and property owners. New
construction and remodeled hotels offer complete housing units – studio or bedroom apartments with
kitchen and bath – where local ordinances permit. States and localities markedly vary in how they
define, tax, and regulate accommodations not exclusively geared to transients. The report concludes
with a discussion of ways the Decennial Census, Service Census, and both population and economic
surveys can respond to the present reality of people living in hotels.
CONTENTS Page
SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
ACCOMMODATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
GOVERNMENT REGULATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
State and local definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Resident tax abatement and rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Zoning and local ordinances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
BUSINESS STRATEGIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Changes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Services and price . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
FEATURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Rooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Apartments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Length of stay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Prime Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Displaced locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Stylistic displacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
DEALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
SELF PAY AT THE LOW END . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Cash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Reduced weekly or monthly rates with reduced services . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
“Permanent and Transient” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Single room occupancy hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Units rented by partial days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
By the hour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
By the sleeping shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
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Organizational connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
THIRD PARTY PAY AND GRANT/DISCOUNT STAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Social service and emergency governmental placements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The displaced . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The homeless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Church charity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Subsidized dispersed Section 8 hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
PLACEMENT, REIMBURSED STAYS AND SELF-PAYS IN THE MIDRANGE . . . . . 38
Corporate connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
“Corporate suites” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Home insurance companies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Government and military discount rates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Policies and strategies of brands, owners, and managers . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
“Long Term Stay” and “Extended Stay” rates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
“Long Term Stay” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Extended Stay Hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
“All suites” brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Apartment extended stay units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
COLLEGE STUDENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
University use of hotels and motels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Privately operated student quarters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
THE HIGH END: PRESTIGE, SERVICE, AND CONVENIENCE AT A PRICE . . . . . 50
Self pay in high end hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Owner/occupants of high end hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Condos in hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
“Condotels” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Fractional unit ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Residence clubs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Investment hotel condos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Trickle down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
SOCIAL ATTRACTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN ACCOMMODATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Relationships with staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Communities of residents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Privacy and convenience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
AT HOME IN HOTELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
“Attachments” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Eating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
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CONVERSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
TEMPORARY USE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Leased hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
PHYSICAL AND LEGAL CONVERSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
New construction single room occupancy hotels and housing . . . . . . . . 68
Remodeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
“Retirement” hotels and assisted living facilities for seniors . . . . . . . . . . 69
Hotel to housing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
CREATING COUNTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
TREATMENT OF ACCOMMODATIONS IN U.S. CENSUSES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
1890 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
1950 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
1954 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
1970 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
1970 “T Night” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
1970 “M Night” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
1972 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
1980 “T-Night” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
1980 “M-Night” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
1992 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Treatment of units in condotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2000 Decennial Census . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
2002 Economic Census . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Table 1 : Number of hotel, motel, and like lodging
establishments 1997-2002, United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Enterprise concentration patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
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DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
NEXT STEPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Recommendations for change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Recommended research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
APPENDICES
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
People live in hotels and similar indoor accommodations across the entire range of
prices and quality. Residents settle in and consider their hotels as their homes. Other
people live on open-ended stays lasting months or years as perpetual sojourners: they
subjectively believe their hotel-living is “temporary” until their lives change. “Regulars”
repeatedly stay at particular hotels, part of each week, or month, or year, often on
schedule.
Government regulations and management policies shape where people can take up
residence, stay long term, or routinely cycle through accommodations.
State and local governments legally define and regulate lodging types. Laws naming,
regulating, licensing, zoning, and setting building code and operating standards
recognize classes of lodgings and largely determine how each is allowed to operate
and where each may locate. Federal law holds most establishments offering “five or
more” units to paying guests or tenants as public accommodations, however states and
localities have other criteria. Some jurisdictions impose maximum and minimum stays in
each class of accommodations defined. Hotels and motels tend to cluster in those
commercial, office, and industrial zones where local ordinances specify they must
locate.
Hospitality policies to attract residents and regulars may be set by property owners,
operators, or managers and policies may run through all properties operated under an
exclusive or franchised brand. About half the hotels, motels, and inns identify with a
national, association, or exclusive brand; the others are independently owned and
operated. Properties operated under the same brand name commonly share marketing
strategies and standardized unit styles, facilities, and distinctive details.
Local managers may need to adapt to brand policies and strategies to the parameters.
and effects of local laws. For example, a national brand design may need to modify its
architecture to meet building codes and requirements for licensing. In states which
recognize that occupants of hotels, motels, inns, rooming houses, and similar
accommodations gain “tenants’ rights” if they stay a month or more or which control the
rates hotel can charge “permanent residents”, some hotel managers impose limits on
stays to prevent guests from acquiring tenants’ or residents’ rights.
At the low end of price and quality, physically or stylistically displaced properties are
more likely to drift into relying on residents than are newly constructed or recently
renovated hotels and motels which are optimally oriented to transportation points. In the
midrange, hosting residents, sojourners on long-term, open-ended stays, and “regulars”
during the work week is the main business of hotels self-characterize as extended
stays. A surprising number of familiar national brands offer deep discounts for long-term
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stays. At the high end, living in downtown and resort full service luxury hotels is once
again a preferred lifestyle of the wealthy.
Brands and properties designed as “extended stays” have been a growth sector of the
industry since the 1990s. Guest units that are physically complete “housing units” –
studio or bedroom apartments with complete bathrooms and kitchens – are increasingly
popular. A development encouraging people to settle in metropolitan, full service,
downtown hotels is the opportunity to buy hotel “condo” units.
Different features attract people paying out-of-pocket to reside in hotels at the “low
end”, in the midrange or high end luxury accommodations.
Hotels and motels offer “deals” crafted to appeal to certain clienteles. For example,
people with low fixed or indeterminate incomes are interested places where rents are
cheap and where the management accepts cash, payments day-to-day or week-to-
week, does not check credit, and does not require a credit card as a security deposit.
Deep discounts for weekly or monthly or longer continuous stays are also attractive. In
the mid-range. Relocating and displaced people find hotels with prices compatible with
their employers’ or insurance reimbursement levels and comparable or lower than the
cost of living in rental housing. They may forgo daily housekeeping to lower the
monthly rent but require conveniences they regard as essential for their lifestyle (like
cable TV and high speed Internet). At the high end, wealthy people willing and able to
pay top price for the convenience of luxurious and high status settings with optimal
services and high caliber on-site facilities (athletic clubs, gourmet restaurants).
Many people are placed or steered into particular hotels through arrangements made
by an organization with which the occupant and the hotel are affiliated. Organizations
arranging or placing people in long term hotel stays include government, military, and
corporate employers, insurance companies, colleges, social service agencies and
churches, among others.
The phenomenon of second parties placing people in hotels for grant stays exists
across the spectrum of price and quality. Just as public agencies lease units in (or
takeover) hotels to place homeless families that may last two or more years, in parallel
so too do corporations lease or purchase units where they grant their executives,
employees, or clients the right to stay or live long term. The properties public agencies
lease as “welfare hotels” are often rundown; the hotels corporations select reflect their
image: whether well known chain brands in suburban office parks or magnificent
metropolitan palace hotels.
The section on “Creating Counts” sketches how hotels, motels, and like
accommodations have been treated in late 20th and early 21st century United States
Economic and Decennial Censuses, citing key results; in government surveys, and in
specialized surveys conducted for the industry and reported in its trade literature.
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Recommendations for enhancing the Census Bureau’s mission include recognizing that
an increasing number of hotel/motel units are complete apartments that qualify for
listing as housing units for Decennial and demographic frames, and recognizing
“extended stays” as a distinct subtype classification of commercial hotel/motel
accommodations and residential hotels, as a distinct subtype of real estate lessors.
An end note discusses the ethnographic methods for studying a “culture at a distance”
applied to explore the domains of hotel dwellers and their hosts. The annotated
bibliography includes quotes and concepts cited and referenced in the main text and
includes both print and Internet sources. Appendix A provides a glossary of legal,
trade, and vernacular terms important in the accommodations industry. Contrastive
legal definitions are given for such basic terms – as “hotel” and “motel”. Appendix B
lists alphabetically hundreds of brands hung on two or more businesses and gives for
many of these brands the number of properties and guest units operating under the
brand in the United States in 2005. Appendix B2 details brands that identify as
“Extended Stays”, offer “Long Term Stay” discounts, sell condo residential units in
primarily transient hotels. Appendix C lists illustrative companies which own five or
more properties or a thousand or more guest units and notes their brand associations.
Appendix D lists illustrative conversions of former hotels into single room occupancy
permanent rental residences, care facilities, condominium residences, and so on.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to hotel and motel managers, staff, and residents who graciously volunteered
explanations and narratives. Open-ended ethnographic interviews were conducted in
hotels and motels representing different brands and business models in a metropolitan
city in the Midwest and along a travel corridor through four East Coast states. By
agreement with these consultants, the establishments, brands, and individual people
interviewed or canvassed in the research areas are not identified or located. Illustrative
cases are indented in the report. Information about brands, companies, and hotel
conversions noted in Appendices A, B, and C have redundant sources in self-publicity,
the cited bibliography, and industry profiles. The ethnographic method applied in this
research, known as “the study of culture at a distance” is described in an end note.
People in the United States have resided in hotels (and precursor boarding houses)
since at least the 1790s. People from all walks of life can and do settle permanently,
sojourn on open-ended stays, or regularly cycle through because lodgings across the
spectrum of prices, services, and quality cater to long term stays.
People live in those hotels, motels, and like indoor accommodations where
management encourages – or at least tolerates– residence and open-ended stays.
This report explores circumstances which result in people of all economic stations living
for months or years in hotels, motels, and like indoor accommodations continuously or
cumulatively and the business strategies and practices of their hosts. Basic patterns of
hotel living identified are A) residence: 1) settling in permanently or 2) sojourning on
open-ended stays, and B) cycling between a particular hotel and other places.
RESIDENTS
People residing in hotels tell fundamentally the same story. Something happened –
they got a job; their car broke down – and they needed a place to stay. They found a
particular hotel; they liked it; they stayed.
Settlers
Settlers made a conscious decision and lifestyle choice to live in the hotel, motel, or like
accommodations. For various personal reasons, they don’t want to rent or own an
apartment or house, or can’t. The hotel is their home. Many settlers personalize their
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rooms with possessions, decorate their windows, or keep gear on stoops and
balconies. Settlers are comfortable and content living in their hotel. They are often
friendly with the management and other residents and feel they are living in a
community.
Examples of the events which sojourners on open-ended stays believed would end their
hotel residence included: the house they are building (or rebuilding) would be
completed and they will move there; their job, contract, or posting in the area would
end and then they would have to go work somewhere else; a person they are waiting
for (who is away) would come back, then, together, they would move somewhere else;
they would get enough money to repair or replace the car that broke down; their credit
might improve; their position on a waiting list for housing would eventually get to the
top; the divorce property settlement would kick in.
“REGULARS”
Cycling through stays in hotels and like accommodations is more variable in duration
than the continuous residence of settlers and sojourners. Regulars have a greater
variety of schedules and reasons for their repeated stays in the same hotels. Some
“regulars” spend part of the year in a hotel, motel, boarding house, or other commercial
or nonprofit lodgings while they work seasonally or study during the academic year.
Some contractors stay at hotels near their work sites four or five nights during the “work
week” and go away or “home” on weekends. Hotels prize those “business” or
“professional” “regulars” who stay part of every month and book far in advance.
Another pattern involves workers who repair to a particular hotel as their “home base”
in between jobs and gigs that involve travel or who patronize the same hotels during
their periodic labor migrations.
with part-year residents who operate the attraction months before the
season began. Midpoint between the closing and reopening of the
attraction, occupancy falls to the few who live in these motels year-round.
Transient visitors arrive during the “season” when these properties are
least likely to have vacancies. Larger, newer motels nearby, which have
fewer permanent residents, sojourners, and seasonal part-timers, take up
the slack and accommodate the attraction’s fans.
e
The night clerk called residents of the highway exit motel where he works
“geographically disabled." He explained this is a code term that
employees of his large national motel chain call people who stay in a
motel for months or years at a stretch on the weekly rate.
One set are the “locals” who move in for the winter because it costs less
to stay in a motel room than to heat their rustic wood houses. A few RV
campers stay over the winter, too. Those whom the night clerk recalled as
staying the longest --three to five years --first showed up for a job or
contract they didn’t think would last, but it did.
At any given time, long term sojourners live at this motel along with
transients. This chain brand with hundreds of roadside motels nationally
offers weekly rates (7th day free) and deeply discounted monthly rates.
e
ACCOMMODATIONS
GOVERNMENT REGULATION
The buildings and businesses generically called “hotels” in this report include
accommodations of varied architectural styles licensed to operate as some class of
indoor lodgings and locally known as hotels, motels, motor courts, inns, lodgings, tourist
or guest houses, rooming houses, room and board houses, and bed and breakfasts
(B&Bs), among other terms. The 2005 federal Commerce Clause (United States Code,
Title 42, Chapter, 21, Subchapter II § 2000a) applies to “public accommodations”
offering five or more “rooms” to “transients” and not to lodgings with fewer units or in
private clubs or private homes. However, many government jurisdictions in the United
States do not distinguish between the “residential” or “transient” character of occupants
or between “public” and “private” status in defining categories of accommodations.
Appendix A quotes a selection of contrastive federal, state, and local definitions and
regulations. Some of the legal definitions that do distinguish between residential and
transient quarters hinge on threshold limits: for example, on the number of days each
12
class of locally recognized lodgings may host a “transient” or on the per cent of units
occupied by permanent residents. Some jurisdictions that do distinguish between
accommodations “open to the public” and private clubs or membership hotels make the
distinction on varied criteria, such as the degree to which rent paid by member
occupants sustain the living quarters.
Some states and local governments reserve terms for accommodations that serve at
least some transients. In Ohio, "facilities which have (any) transient guests staying for a
period of 30 days or less" are hotels and motels. Tennessee defines a hotel as any
building in which any number of sleeping accommodations are furnished for pay to
transients or travelers, whether or not food is served. In Virginia, “hotels” are “any place
offering to the public for compensation transitory lodging or sleeping accommodations,
overnight or otherwise” ... “including but not limited to facilities known by varying
nomenclatures or designations as hotels, motels, travel lodges, tourist homes....”
(Virginia Code, § 35.1-1. Definitions. 7)
Some jurisdictions specify the maximum and/and minimum number of days a guest is
permitted to stay in each class of accommodations recognized in legal definitions,
zoning, licensing standards, and/or tax regulations. In jurisdictions which make no legal
distinction between “transient” and “residential” accommodations, establishments are
licensed as “hotels” or other classes by criteria having nothing to do with guests length
of stay. In jurisdictions which make fine distinctions among categories, some hotels
13
The Appendix A glossary quotes contrastive state and local definitions standards, and
applicable laws for or applied to classes of lodging. See Appendix A for varied legal
definitions for “hotel”, “motel”, “SRO hotel”, and boarding house, among other terms.
In one state with a 30-day residency requirement, for example, hotels and motels drop
the “luxury” tax on unit rentals on the 31st day. Also, on the 31st day, the new state
resident is legally endowed with full tenants' rights to unit occupied, even in hotels
which “lease” week to week or month-to-month. Another state which conveys residency
after 70 days not only requires hotels to stop charging occupants the state and local
“hotel taxes” once hotel occupants become “legally resident” but also to rebate the
hotel/motel tax occupants paid before they became “residents.”
An occupant who is considered a jural “tenant” or “legal resident" of a hotel unit gains
certain rights and, in several jurisdictions, caps the rent on their unit.
Since the advent of Euclidean Zoning in the 1920s, local government zoning codes
have specified land use and what kinds of buildings and business are allowed to
operate in each zone. Local ordinances echo more general state-level definitions of
types and classes of accommodations, and prescribe detailed standards. Local codes
may set the frequency and types of services guests receive, maximum building height,
14
set back from thoroughfares, footprint on acreage and required fire safety equipment,
the size and furnishings of units, layout and other matters.
Local zoning commonly restrict hotels and motels to commercial, industrial, or “mixed
use” (residential-industrial-commercial) land use zones. Commercial accommodations
are typically banned from areas zoned residential, except for establishments protected
by “grandfather” clauses operating continuously since before zoning or, where
permitted, converted from houses. The historic concentrations of urban hotels in
downtown “central business districts” and the modern concentrations of hotels in
suburban “office parks” reflect the predominant historic and most recent zones
approved for hotels and motels. Sites zoned “commercial” or for a specific class of
accommodations can make its real estate more valuable than the building property and
business.
Zoning and other local laws in multiple jurisdictions have driven rooming and boarding
houses into the ubiquitous underground of private residential houses and apartments.
Several California counties define as “hotels” accommodations with a low cutoff number
of guests (five or six) and accommodations serving fewer as “boarding houses” or
“rooming houses”. In New York City, where a ‘rooming house’ or a ‘furnished room
house’ has been defined as a multiple dwelling other than a “hotel” with less than thirty
sleeping rooms since 1929, has recently redefined thousands of former rooming
houses (and former single family private houses subdivided into rental rooms) as
“commercial SRO hotels” to enjoin their demolition. Codes, ordinances, and regulations
in various local jurisdictions prohibit rooming and boarding houses from operating in
certain residential zones, from housing “transients” (staying less than 30 or other
lengthier periods), from advertising their services, and from posting signs; restrict the
number of occupants, and require proprietors to take out business licenses and submit
the property to building and fire inspections. These laws are either unknown or ignored
by many recent immigrants and landlords who “illegally” subdivide houses and
apartments to create and rent rooms and other sleeping spaces (Federation of Citizens
Associations of the District of Columbia 2002; Mahler 2005, 1995, 1993; McKay 1992).
This report excludes room and board rooms and sleeping spaces in private homes from
the “hotel” subject category.
BUSINESS STRATEGIES
Many establishments that polish their image to attract transients nevertheless tolerate
or even rely on people settling in or staying a long time to provide a dependable floor of
revenue. This report discusses various strategies hoteliers deploy to attract a core of
15
The proportion of units occupied by people who are residing, sojourning, or regularly
cycling through varies in any given hotel. Some mainly “residential hotels” rent units to
tourists; some predominantly travelers’ lodgings host long term residents.
The situation is perhaps best conceived as a distribution curve. Various situations and
strategies fix any particular property at a point somewhere between the pole of
accommodating only transients to the pole of completely residential. Some business
strategies encourage residents, while others are incompatible.
Accommodations in the “low end” charge rates lower than area and national averages
and generally offer “limited” services. Many are older properties operating as
independents or “economy” brands. “Midrange” hotels and motels have more facilities
on site, greater amenities, and are of a better “quality." Midrange properties are more
often recently built or recently remodeled and commonly trade as franchised brands.
There is a gap between the highest rates of “midrange hotels” and the lowest rates of
the several times more expensive “high end” hotels.
Unit rates vary by market within types, chains, and franchised or association brands. In
16
metropolitan areas, day rates at “low end” hotels come in under $50; in rural areas, at
less than $30. Regular day rates in the “midrange” cap around $200. Discounts for
stays of a month or more can drop “midrange” rates to within ten or twenty dollars of the
top horizon rate charged at local “low end" – a financial lure attractive for settlers,
sojourners, and regulars. “High end” hotels routinely charge more than $200 and on up
to thousands of dollars per unit per night. People who reside in high end hotels, as
discussed below, are more attracted by convenience than bargains.
FEATURES
Various hotel/motel features intersect to attract or repel residents and regulars. Among
these are unit style, deals, brand and company policies, social attractions, and at the
high end, prestige. Local ordinances may constrain what accommodations are
permitted to offer.
Units
Zoning codes, state, local and federal laws, and industry publicity use different terms to
describe and define the rental units in hotels, motels, rooming and boarding houses,
and like indoor lodgings. Modern units are minimally a room furnished with a bed for
sleeping and access to sanitary facilities. Units may have common or private baths,
group multiple rooms, or be complete apartments with private bathrooms and kitchens.
Certain hotel brands advertise their more spacious rooms with private baths as “suites”
while the suites of other brands have a bedroom, sitting room and bath or complete
studio or bedroom apartments. What bed and breakfast inns (“B&Bs”) advertise as
“suites” usually consist of a sleeping room with either a private bathroom or attached
sitting room. A “suite” in legacy luxury hotels may have multiple bedrooms and baths, a
living room, dining room, and butler’s pantry, but lack a kitchen. In different contexts, a
“Single Room Occupancy” (“SRO”) unit may be a studio apartment or a room with or
without a private bath, with or without a kitchen, with or without food preparation
permitted in the unit or in a common kitchen on the premises. The Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines SRO units as either apartments with
both private bathrooms and kitchens or rooms lacking private bathrooms and/or
kitchens. States and local jurisdictions which recognize the SRO or “compact living
quarters” units have disparate definitions. Legal definitions for units quoted in Appendix
A give a flavor of the variation and degree to which local regulations dictate unit style,
size, and furnishings for different classes of accommodations.
Rooms
Here the following units are called “rooms”:
Room with a shared bath: one sleeping room whose occupant(s) shares
toilets and bathing facilities on the same hallway or floor with
occupants of other rooms;
Room with a private bath: one sleeping room with a private bath
17
“Rooms” and “suites” lack kitchens. Local ordinances may prohibit cooking in
commercial accommodations. Laws or management may limit the portable equipment,
such as electric coffee makers, “mini-fridges," microwaves and the popular combination
mini-fridge/microwave appliance furnished, available for rent, or permitted to be brought
in to units. Even minimal equipment for storing and warming food are conveniences for
people living permanently, staying long term, and cycling. Residents of units in which
cooking was prohibited vary in their compliance with this rule. Roomers and guests
units of rooming houses, boarding houses, guest houses, and B&Bs often share baths,
and, in these classes of lodgings, cooking is commonly prohibited.
Apartments
A complete apartment is a unit with at least a sleeping area or separate bedroom, a
private bathroom, and a kitchen. The kitchen may be in a separate room or arranged as
a “kitchenette” located in a room designed for activities other than preparing and storing
food. Cooking is permitted and apartment kitchens are equipped with appliances for
preparing, storing, and washing food: a full stove or stove-top cooking burners and oven
or a microwave, a full or "mini" refrigerator, a separate sink with running water, and,
occasionally counter tops, cabinets, table, a dishwasher, pots, pans, plates, and
utensils.
A “studio” (or “efficiency") apartment is a compact unit with a sleeping
area and fully equipped kitchenette in the same room and a separate
private bathroom.
Rates for units do not necessarily correspond with layout and equipment. Several
limited service “economy” brands offer complete studio apartments with private baths
and kitchenettes for considerably lower rates than midrange and high end hotels with
full services and ample facilities charge for one “guest room” with a private bath.
Length of stay
Limits on the period of time a guest may stay can be imposed by the local ordinance
governing the class of accommodations, by brand or company management policy, or
as a hospitality management strategy responding to local opportunities or constraints.
Unless local laws require that their licensed class of lodgings exclusively serve
transients, businesses can opt to fill units opportunistically with varying percentages of
long term residents.
18
Hotel management may limit the duration of a guest’s stay in advance (upon reserving
or upon check-in) either to honor pending reservations or as a policy. Some
establishments adopt a blanket policy of limiting the time anyone may stay to avoid
guests from acquiring rights under local laws as “tenants” or as “permanent residents."
Hotels which derive major revenues from contracting blocks of rooms for conferences,
conventions, trade shows, or tours are less likely to encourage residence because
these hotels need to maximize the number of guest rooms they can offer and commit to
large groups. Residents, sojourners and regulars erode the capacity of the property to
accommodate large groups. To fill gaps between the departure and arrival of groups,
several large “conference hotels” market weekend romantic “get away” packages to
locals whom they expect will go home Sunday afternoon.
Some larger boarding houses and nonprofit hotels only accept residents in an eligible
age bracket, of one gender, one status (for example, employed women age 18-30,
registered students) or other specified characteristics. Bracketing eligibility by age
functions to limit the duration of stays as boarders and occupants age. Some
establishments lease for periods of less than one year (for example, by the academic
semester) and/or set the maximum length of stay, for example, at two years.
During seasons when tourists are plentiful, youth hostels are most likely to limit guests’
stays to periods reckoned in days or weeks; at other times, over the winter, several
urban U.S. youth hostels rent rooms and beds in dormitories to college students by the
semester.
Minimum stays may be required by law or business policy. Several jurisdictions prohibit
boarding or rooming houses from hosting transients and peg the minimum
boarding/rooming house stay to that period of time (30 days, 90 days) it takes for a
person to qualify as a legal resident of the state. Some legacy independent hotels and
other high rent properties in urban and resort locations require minimum stays (of three,
four, or five days) during periods of peak demand or all year round. Several brands of
“extended stay” hotels charge for a minimum 30 day stay; extended stay properties that
even offer overnight or weekly rates are exceptions.
Hotels are known to impose stay limits to prevent occupants from obtaining resident or
tenant status (Cell 1998) – a practice called “churning" in California.
In New York City, hotels accepting the clients of City agencies recently
19
In San Francisco, the City Attorney sued several hotels in the Tenderloin
and Mission districts for their practice of “musical beds”: evicting guests
every few weeks, so none could qualify for residents’ rights (Cell 1998).
Location
Local zoning and business orientation to transportation routes explain why hotels and
motels occur in clusters. In 2000, American Hotel and Lodging Association found that
42.2 per cent of the 53,500 hotel properties surveyed were located on highways, 33.6
per cent were in suburbs, 10.2 per cent were urban, 7.7 per cent were at airports, and
6.3 per cent were at resorts (AH&LA 2001). The properties surveyed in 2000 were all
operated by members of the association and were of various sizes. A commissioned
survey in 2003 of 47,584 properties with at least 15 units found slightly more were in
suburban locations than on highways and that in each of these two generic locations,
there were over 18,000 hotel properties with over a million units (AH&LA 2004).
Legacy, casino, and resort hotels located in or near seasonal or specialized attractions
like hot springs, beaches, ski areas and hunting preserves spots sometimes themselves
become attractions as resorts or gambling centers. Conference hotels cluster in and
near major metropolitan and regional urban centers with airports. As accommodations
often converted from houses rather than specially built and as among the few types
permitted in some residential zones, bed and breakfast inns are scattered in
unexpected places.
Prime locations
Locations on well-frequented transportation routes, at transit hubs, and in key travel
destinations are strategic for businesses aiming to attract a stream of transient guests.
Historically, hotels located at such transit points as stage coach stops and ports, and
later around railroad stations, bus stations, and airports. Points on currently well
traveled air, rail and vehicular transportation routes are prime and prevalent locations
for business primarily or exclusively interested in hosting transients. Lots on highway
exits off Interstates and near airports are prized spots for constructing new properties
positioned to capture transients in current travel flows. Developers scout routes
connected to Interstates for land in unincorporated rural areas with lenient or no zoning
and along commercial strips. Hotels and motels lining the rare stretches where
Interstate highways run through destination cities enjoy prime locations for the transient
20
trade. "Mixed use" zones for commercial, light industrial, warehouse, and office
activities where accommodations are permitted near airports are prized because similar
zones tend to be located some distance away from well transited routes.
Low end and midrange hotels and motels in prime locations for transient customers
may have less business interest and need for permanent residents or sojourners on
open-ended stays than do accommodations in more marginal locations. Hotels
squarely located in central business down towns are prime and actual locations for
midrange, high end, and partially residential hotels, whereas urban low end hotels
pepper fringe semi-industrial and warehouse areas.
Displaced locations
Changes in the road system and travel flows leave some accommodations stranded.
After the Interstate highway system was constructed, travelers’ accommodations built
along what used to be the main U.S. highways found themselves located on side
tracks: their properties were no longer oriented to travel flows. Urban renewals of
American cities physically changed roadways and zoning, setting in motion repetitive
sagas of once grand hotels decaying in place, stranded in marginal locations, no longer
on main thoroughfares, fallen out of fashion.
Locations on older main highways bypassed by vehicle traffic traveling the Interstate
21
Stylistic displacement
Without constant remodeling and updating, a property can become stylistically
outmoded and unable to meet the expectation of modern transient guests. Property
deterioration leads to another sort of displacement, regardless of location. Dozens of
formerly “grand” hotels at the fringe of the central “downtown” of the Midwest city offer
week-to-week or month-to-month discounted room rents at prices that workers earning
minimum and low wages can afford. Originally built in the late 19th and early 20th
century to host business and elegant society guests, these hotels survive by functioning
as commercial Single Room Occupancy hotels.
In the areas researched, certain rural motels and urban hotels that lost their original
customer base due to physical or stylistic displacements drifted into hosting permanent
residents as a survival strategy.
In January 2005, six units were occupied by people who had been living in
the motel for six months or more; one had been living there three years.
Staff recalled nine years as the longest anyone had continuously lived in
the motel. The manager characterized people living in the motel as
experiencing “hard times” or on “work assignments” or “just in transit
with their lives”. She noted, “It just happens here. It’s no corporate policy.”
e
Twenty years ago, “Dot” moved into a room in the “Star” Motel. She didn’t
mind it was just a bedroom and bathroom; she ate at the restaurant where
she worked. She could easily afford to rent the room on her tips.
The two storey motel was built in the shape of an “L” in the 1950s, along
what was then a main truck and tourist route between two east coast
states. During its heyday in the 1960s, top rock and roll stars played at
the Star’s casino. People came from states away to catch the acts, play
slots and stay at the motel.
22
Then, the state outlawed slot gambling machines and the casino was torn
down. Next, an Interstate was built parallel a few miles west. Fewer and
fewer truckers and interstate travelers drove by; fewer still stopped and
spent the night.
Local people followed Dot’s lead and moved into rooms at the Star Motel:
carpenters, dry wall specialists, mechanics, stock clerks, waitresses. A
few miles north, a commercial strip began forming on either side of the
highway: first automobile dealerships and restaurants, then “big box” retail
stores, then a few modern brand hotels. More low wage jobs became
available locally. Land along the strip sold for record prices. In 1998, the
Star’s owner put up a big “for sale” sign in front of the motel, hoping to
cash in.
But development was slow to reach as far south as the Star Motel.
No retail chain was interested in the location. More local people came by,
though, interested in moving in.
Five years ago, the owner put kitchenettes in every unit and did not fix the
Star’s neon sign when it broke. News about any vacancies spread by
word of mouth to people who needed a place to settle in.
In the winter of 2004-2005, Dot was still living in the same unit at the Star,
on the second floor at the corner on the “L” furthest away from the
highway and hotel office. Luckily for her, by the time she hung up her
work apron and retired, so could no longer eat free at her employer’s
restaurant, her room and bath had been transformed into an “efficiency”
studio apartment with a stove, fridge, cabinets, and sink. The couple who
managed the Star, opening the office at 9:00 a.m. to collect rents in cash,
call plumbers to fix sinks and toilets, and handle residents’ complaints
until 5:00 p.m., were planning to retire soon. The owner hoped to
finalize a deal with a buyer.
As far as the county where it is located is concerned, the Star was a motel;
it did not fit the definition of or meet the code for an apartment building.
The county has no such thing on the books as a “single room occupancy”
or residential motel or hotel, but they do have zoning and business
licenses: the land the Star sat on is zoned commercial and the Star was
licenced as a motel.
The Star was sold in the spring of 2005 and every one was evicted. The
Star’s residents had always been living there week-to-week; no one had a
lease. The local county’s law had no provision on its books for tenants’
rights in motels, not even for Dot, after 20 years. The property was fenced
off and scheduled for demolition. A mini-mall will be built on the site.
23
The Star’s residents moved to other motels. The exodus of residents evicted from the
Star completed the transition of one smaller hotel further north on the same highway
from semi- to completely residential. It, too, had once been a casino hotel and was
already flanked on all sides by new commercial developments. Former residents of the
Star also moved south into side-of-the-road motels which offered “apartments” and plain
rooms along more rural stretches of the highway, away from the built-up commercial
strip. Two old-fashioned court-style motels sit side-by-side. One still curries for
transients and keeps its “vacancy” sign shining. Before the evicted exodus from the Star
arrived, local people had been living in four of its guest units for years. The court motel
next door had painted over the word “motel” on its sign and lettered in “apartments”.
Though still licensed and listed in the phone directory as a motel, it is almost fully rented
out to residents.
Dot, other older retirees, and sober currently employed Star refugees skipped over one
motel further south where “the bad element” reputedly live -- drug dealers, strippers,
winos, though some younger, single men evicted at the same time had to consider it.
The motels closest to the state border have small colonies of settlers living in the units in
the back, away from the highway, and still get a few transients traveling by car. One was
already full of residents: mainly young families with children crowded into single guest
bedrooms rooms with private baths. Couples with working cars considered moving into
these more distant motels, though far from their jobs. Options that former residents of
the Star did not good prospects included deserted court motels “open for business” but
totally empty on northern rural stretches of the same highway– nobody knew their new
foreign owners; an independent hotel in the next town south where construction workers
and tradesmen stayed while they working temporarily in the area– too much of a bar
scene at night; and the various newer “fancy” mid-rise hotels built at the edge of the
commercial strip–too expensive.
In a rural 60-mile stretch along another old main highway, the various fates of roadside
motels displaced by changes in traffic patterns were on display. Two former motels,
one court style and the other, a tourist court with cabins, lease all their units as
“apartments." Two former motels had been converted into residential care institutions for
people with mental disabilities. One well-kept independent hotel thrives on business
lunches at its restaurant and its reputation for “no tell” discretion about short middle-of-
the-day stays. Two new, branded, mid rise motels were built where the old highway
intersects with routes leading to the Interstate within a mile: this is a typical location for
“exit” motels. Two former hotels were abandoned. One was recently boarded up; the
other had collapsed beyond repair.
In another rural stretch, a set of no-tell “love motels” is located close to the city limits and
“gentlemen’s clubs” (strip joints). A motel wedged between the “no-tells” and a shopping
mall posts its welcome to families, Biblical passages, and AAA/AARP insignia. Two
former motels have been converted into retail stores. The rest of the motels combat
24
high vacancy with varying percentages of permanent and transients. One of the
scruffiest also had the most residents and recently added on a new cement block double
storey wing.
DEALS
The deals that attract or channel people to the particular hotels where they reside,
sojourn on open-ended stays, or regularly cycle through are as economically stratified as
the clientele. Individuals paying their own way in hotels across the spectrum of price,
quality and services may negotiate customized deals with managers. People paying
their own way are in a fundamentally different situation than people who land in a hotel
through intermediaries’ arrangements. The next sections discuss management policies
that attract people paying low rents; various deals that government, corporate, religious,
and other types of organizations negotiate with hotels that result in the placement, third-
party payments or benefits, or discounts for the organizations’ affiliates; and the
convenience and prestige of hotel living among some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens.
People who had been living in economy hotels and motels for months or years explained
they originally found the place by inquiring “around” for weekly or monthly rates.
Residents personally paying out-of-pocket to live for a long time in low-end hotels and
motels were attracted by certain financial arrangements:
Cash 1) accepting cash payment and not requiring a
credit card to secure charges
Credit 2) no credit check
Rate 3a) discounted weekly or monthly rate,
3b) discounted day rate for “long term stays”
3c) a “flat” day rate
lower than the same establishment’s daily rate and/or
lower than rent for comparable accommodations
in the local market.
Cash
Hotels and motels that accept cash attract people in certain circumstances.
“Miss Penny” owns and operates an 11-room hotel next to her thriving
neighborhood restaurant, bar, and ribs barbeque. Miss Penny explained
she stopped “fooling with weekly rates, monthly rates” years ago. She has
one “flat rate” ($43/day, payable in advance and in cash). As for credit
cards, she does not “like them and won’t take them any where in my
business." If her customers want lunch, beer, ribs, or a room for the night,
they must lay down cash up front. If a guest has the “where with all” and
wants to pay room rent for a whole week or a month “ahead," that was fine.
25
That did not happen as often as people staying in one of her rooms “got
behind” and “had to be catching up” paying rent back due. Staying in
business depended on Miss Penny making sure “it all evens out."
Miss Penny sometimes sits people down who’ve been staying in her hotel
a long time to try to “talk some sense into them." She’ll write down on a
tablet the dollars and cents figures to show them that “for what you’re
paying me every day, you could rent an apartment, rent a town house. But
they say they don’t want to be bothered with utilities. They don’t want to
buy furniture. Things like that make it less trouble to stay here.”
e
Credit
“Samantha," a woman in her thirties residing in a 29-room motel explained
why paying cash attracted her. Back when she worked for a mortgage
company, she checked her own credit reports and discovered she had a
problem. The nature of her problem was “not having enough credit." She
owed no debts; she had paid off and cut up all her credit cards back when
she was making good money managing a retail store. She hadn’t used
credit for more than ten years. The negative void rated her a low credit
score. She believed that if she ever were to want to rent an apartment or
townhouse, she would be expected to put up a larger than usual deposit.
Samantha said paying for her room in cash, and each week was good
practice and good discipline. She felt independent. She liked having her
own place without feeling “tied down” by a lease.
e
Friends explained how bad credit drove “Minnie," a woman in her mid-20s,
to live in a downtown hotel for four years. Minnie had fallen deeply in debt
– she was supposed to start paying back her college education loans and
somehow couldn’t. She spent a lot of money on clothes, then, the next
thing she knew, her credit cards were cancelled. Pretty soon after that, the
phone and electric company cut off service and put Minnie on “some kind
of ‘black list’” (the utilities have), refusing her new service. The hotel where
she took up lodgings was less than ideal. It was hard to see if the lobby
carpet had a design through the dirt. Hallways were dark. She moved in
because the hotel took cash and did not require a credit card guarantee. It
was supposed to be temporary until she could get ahead, get out of debt,
could qualify to rent an apartment, get the phone company “off her back":
none of which happened.
e
26
Both managers and residents explained that discount rates were tied to reduced
services.
Local ordinances define the standard services that each class of lodging business must
provide. Many jurisdictions require businesses licensed as a hotel, motel, inn, or tourist
home to provide housekeeping services and regular changes of linens. From the
perspective of managers, reducing the frequency a unit is cleaned and sheets and
towels are changed make discounts for residents and people staying long terms
financially feasible. One eight-room, side-of-the-road, cement-block motel built in the
1940s distributes thin hand towels once a week. A more minimal compliance with the
requirement that hotels change linens was the one hour window of opportunity one
urban hotel gave guests once-a-month to turn in bed sheets and towels for laundering.
From the perspective of residents, reduced housekeeping and fewer linen deliveries
enhanced their sense of privacy and home.
One hotel resident explained he did not like people coming into his room
when he was not there. He asked the manager to have the housekeeper
skip his room if he was out. He used the towels the hotel provided but
arranged to have the hotel wash the bed sheets he purchased: he did not
like the idea of sleeping on sheets others had used.
e
The thin towels the motel gave out hardly served to dry hands. Sojourners
at a six-unit cement block motel built on a wide median strip between the
lanes of a highway in the 1940s learned from their neighbors where to buy
bath towels and where to wash them along with their clothes at a coin
laundry in the nearest town.
e
In urban as in rural areas, older hotels displaced by urban renewal that offer low rates
are a magnet for the residents and regulars who need inexpensive lodgings.
One of the few surviving “workers’ hotels” in the Midwest city canvassed
stands alone on a triangle lot bordered by the entrance to an overpass, a
27
park, and the rubble of demolished buildings. The warehouse district, row
house residences, and high rise apartment project that once surrounded
this hotel and optimized its location as a place to stay have been torn
down. On the its front wall, the hotel touts free parking; on its back wall, a
realtor’s sign offers the property for sale.
Long term residents of one hotel on a busy commercial street walk upstairs
and unlock the second storey entry door themselves, unattended. No “tourists”
find accommodations here, though the hotel advertises a daily rate.
e
Four older low end hotels clustered on a hip commercial strip have narrow
entry ways to maximize ground floor space for commercial retail rentals.
The owner-operator of a three-storey independent hotel bans women.
28
Residents and transients who bring women to their rooms are immediately
evicted. Though listed in at least one travel directory, the second
independent hotel is almost entirely occupied by permanent residents who
live in private sleeping rooms and share bathrooms off hallways. A nearby
privately operated “men’s residence," also three floors, rents by the week
or the month, mainly to seniors. Shops almost completely occupy the
ground floor of a low rise hotel that spans an entire city block. Full with
permanent residents, this hotel does not advertise. A visually stunning
aspect of this hotel is every upstairs window is individually decorated.
Some windows have curtains; some have plants on window sills; some are
plastered with posters and political bumper stickers.
e
While “permanents” renting their own hotel rooms (for months or years) are not absent in
low end hotels and motels that also accommodate travelers and visitors for short stays,
permanent residents are more characteristic of statutory “SRO hotels."
In the Midwest City researched, SRO hotel units are usually rooms without kitchens,
some with private bathrooms, others with shared sanitary facilities and showers.
Properties legally classified as “SRO hotels” name and call themselves “hotels." Many
are known by a unique name --“The Palace” or “The Roxy”, for example. Inhabitants of
SRO-hotels are largely single locals of the city and its surrounding suburbs who meet
their need for housing by taking advantage of low rates. Several “SRO hotels” mix
income derived from the lower discount rates that residents and sojourners pay with
occasional revenues from guests who pay higher prices for shorter stays. This business
model of older properties formally classified as “SRO hotels” resembles that of several
brands of “extended stay” hotels, described below, which operate in jurisdictions which
do not distinguish “SRO hotels” as a legal class and were recently constructed to
optimize their attraction for long-term stays.
SRO hotels are commonly regarded as “more” residential than “transient” though few
studies have ever examined the precise mix. A 1992 study based on financial filings
compared residential hotels, SRO hotels, and rooming houses in New York City. Hotels
that the city classified and taxed as “residential” derived 40 per cent or more of their
income from accommodating transients; hotels the city classified as SRO hotels
29
collected less than 22 per cent of their incomes from transients, while boarding houses
had practically no income from transients (New York DHCR 1992).
California jurisdictions generally recognize SRO (or “compact living”) hotels although
these are classified differently in various counties and cities, as transient, as residential,
or in a special category. (In Appendix A, compare how the City of Fullerton 2004, City of
Oakland 2004, and City of San Diego nd, define SROs.) A recent study of 22
“residential SRO hotels” in central Oakland concluded 75 per cent of the occupants'
households had been living in their respective units for longer than one year and a third
had been residing in the same hotel for longer than five years. In a prior 1985 survey of
Oakland SRO hotels, 37 per cent of the residents reported they had been staying longer
than one year (City of Oakland HCD/CEDA 2004).
San Francisco history and architecture reveal a wide variety of styles and situations in
the well-established category of residential hotels. Residential hotels range from low
end SROs to legacy elite hotel residences [Groth (1994) 1999; San Francisco Board of
Supervisors 2001]. Both Chicago and New York recognize SRO hotels as a distinct
legal class of hotels (Cook County Assessor’s Office nd, 2002; see Appendix A for New
York legal definitions). Chicago offers hotels which accept housing assistance vouchers
a real estate tax break which requires their reclassification as an SRO hotel. New York
restricts occupancy of SRO units to a maximum of one or two adults and although New
York classifies SRO hotels as “commercial” hotels rather than “residential” hotels, New
York stabilizes the rental rate for hotel units of any style which are occupied by legal
permanent hotel residents and tenants (on leases). New York and Chicago also both
have separate categories for “residential” hotels (including so-called “retirement” or
“senior” hotels. The properties classified as residential or retirement in these cities
mainly contain apartment units, and by law, must function as hotels by providing
housekeeping, linen service, and 24-hour reception. Both cities distinguish between
SRO housing units from units in SRO hotels. In New York, rental units in subdivided
privately owned homes in New York City risk reclassification as “SRO” units (WNYC
2003) and into a legally protected class of “SRO” housing, whereas jurisdictions
elsewhere identify rental units carved out of single family homes (and apartments) as
creating licensed or unlicensed “rooming” houses.
Loss of the stock of SRO units in U.S. cities from the late 1960s through the present – in
hotels, rooming houses, tenements subdivided during the 1930s, and apartment
buildings cut up into small single room rentals after World War 2 – has been identified
as a major factor in precipitating urban housing crises and upsurges in urban
homelessness. See Hoch 1989 on Philadelphia; Lakefront SRO Corporation 1990 and
Rossi 1989 on Chicago; Brodhead 1999a, Manning 2001, and Coalition for the
Homeless 2003 on New York City; Koegel, et al, 1996 on New York, Chicago, and San
Francisco in the period 1970-1985; Dolbeare 1996 for the estimate a million SRO units
between 1970 and 1985; Wright and Rubin 1997 on SRO loss and increase of
homeless in the streets of San Francisco, Portland, and Denver in the period 1975-1988;
Fannie Mae Foundation 1997 on the period from the 1970s through the early 1990s;
30
Lipscomb 2001 on St. Louis; Bloom 1998 and McKnight (2002) on Seattle; Rymer 2001
on Los Angeles’ “skid row” SRO hotels and SRO housing from the early 20th century
through the present; Fletcher 2005 on the current downtown SRO hotel situation in
Sacramento, among others.
Many jurisdictions passed laws to protect or remodel their remaining stock of SRO units.
(See, among others, Levine and Snider 1985 for New York; Cell 1998 for California;
Davis nd and City of San Diego nd on San Diego; and McKnight 2002 on a well
intentioned fire safety law that had the unintended consequence of mass closure of SRO
hotels and boarding houses.)
The remodeling of former commercial hotels into SRO room units leased as permanent
housing is discussed in the section on conversions. “SRO” units may be rooms (with
private or shared bathrooms) or complete studio apartments. SRO units are currently
featured in buildings operating as hotels, as residential rental real estate, as supportive
facilities, and as owner-occupied condos. Units in new construction SRO housing and
SRO hotels are almost universally complete studio (or larger) apartments.
By the hour
Although no more universal than other aspects of governmental regulation of public
accommodations, many jurisdictions require that rates be posted. Posted signs stating
room rates by the hour and by the week or month are clues to the business mix of hiring
rooms for trysts or for the sex trade and also housing residents. “No tell” motels and sex
trade hotels, rural and urban, will rent rooms by the hour as well as overnight and on
monthly rates. The “love motels” that cater to adults checking in for an hour or two
during the work day often have attached restaurants or night clubs on the premises and
promote weekend specials for getaway “dates." Fancier “no tells” in recycled older
airport motels and downtown “theme” hotels discourage prying eyes with high fences
around parking lots or valet parking. Some run down motels in rural areas on displaced
highways, desperate for business, or more optimally located near military bases, mix
very short term with residential occupants. Some hotels that rent rooms by the hour are
the place of business for resident and sojourning sex workers the properties host at
discount rates.
New owners bought two properties better known for prostitution than as
tourist accommodations and refashioned the properties as national
franchise brands. The now nationally branded two floor court motel prices
itself for tourists at a moderate $89/night, offers its franchise’s standard
national discount for longer stays, has managed to keep “clean”
(by demanding to see guests’ drivers’ licenses and other identification
at check in) and has even attracted a few student sojourners from a
university up the street.
With the larger high rise hotel on a busy commercial street, a core of
resident sex workers conveyed with the property. As “permanent hotel
residents” they were protected from eviction and they continued to ply
their trade. The residents are mainly professional transvestites (males
impersonating females) who loiter out front and take clients up to their
rooms. According to one streetwise commentator, this hotel has “always”
had “permanent residents." According to one gay activist, the hotel is the
only place in the city where transvestite sex workers feel safe.
The owner-manager just hopes the association won’t “pull”
his right to use the national brand he adopted when he revamped
the hotel. So far, association inspections have been scheduled
in advance, and the residents have cooperated by taking a few
hours off until the inspections are over.
e
Organizational connections
Contracts and informal handshake deals between hotels and private corporations,
branches of government, universities, membership associations, social services, and
other organizations steer tens of thousands of individuals and families into commercial
32
Some organizations directly pay hotels, granting to the people they place a unit where
they stay for free. Other organizations act as middleman, collecting rent from occupants
and paying hotels. Other organizations reimburse affiliates lodging expenses up to an
established limit. Agreements for “corporate rates” or “membership discounts” may be
struck between an organization and a nationally franchised brand, a chain, a hospitality
management firm, or hotel property owners – good at all their facilities. Managers of
particular hotels combine discounts negotiated nationally on their behalf with “back yard”
(or “back door’) local deals they negotiate on their own.
People placed by an organization that directly pays or reimburses for their hotel stay,
and, to a lesser extent, people benefitting from a discount or subsidized rate due to their
affiliation with an organization have less leverage or authority to deal directly with hotel
management than individuals paying for themselves. As clients of “bulk” deals between
their hotel and an intermediary organization, their primary influence on their living
conditions is transmitted via that third party which made the placement, pays the bills, or
negotiated the discount deal. People dependent on the government agency that placed
them and pays their rent may have little influence, while sojourning corporate executives,
on the other hand, may be in a position to cancel or not renew contracts important for
the economic bottom line of a property or whole chain or brand.
Although organizations that contract fixed rates for their employees, members, or
assignees focus on and prefer mid-priced hotels, chains, franchised brands,
management companies and individual proprietors at the low and high end poles are
amenable to “corporate” deals.
Hotels and motels left standing in the wake of hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, floods,
mud slides, wild fires, and volcanic eruptions or nearby may volunteer or be
commandeered to lodge people displaced by natural disasters. After twin hurricanes hit
Florida in the late summer of 2004, among the 30,000 Floridians placed in hotels were
farm workers based in Homestead. Farm workers and their families were still living in
the motel rooms where emergency services had placed them months after their trailer
33
homes were leveled. A state agency funneled federal emergency relief funds to pay
directly for the farm workers' families’ stays in “side of the road” motels that usually cater
to tourists and seasonal vacationers during the winter. Some farm workers had been
previously displaced for three years after Hurricane Andrew. Reconstruction on the heels
of disasters can take years, whether from a fire affecting a single house and one
household or a regional event affecting thousands.
The week after Hurricane Katrina in the 2005 hurricane season, 653,000 people
displaced by the destruction and flooding of their homes on the Gulf Coast were staying
in commercial accommodations: in hotels, motels, and resort rental condos.
One budget hotel chain hosted 15,000 evacuees the first week of September, and more
later.
Whole national and regional chains and brands of hotels and individual proprietors
operating in the Gulf states and as far away as Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, California,
and Washington, D.C., offered evacuees deeply discounted “hurricane” rates, though
with limited lengths of guaranteed stays (Gary 2005, Gordon 2005, Rodriguez 2005,).
One regional chain slashed rates at all its full service resorts for anyone with a valid
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, or Florida driver’s license through September
8th. At least five brands of luxury hotels reduced rates for evacuees to “low end” level
rates (AH&LA 2005). One regional brand globally cancelled advance reservations to
take in people evacuated from New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.
By the last week of September 2005, 400,000 people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita were living in 140,000 units in hotels, motels, extended stays, and resort rental
condotels at an average cost of $56/unit/night and up to $100/night (Hsu and Williamson
2005, among other sources). About half had been placed by the Red Cross. The
federal program to reimburse agencies for providing evacuees with temporary housing
was originally scheduled to end on October 15th, 2005. Tens of thousands were
expected to remain in hotels, paying for themselves or with emergency vouchers for
housing once that program began (Opdyke and Schatz 2005). Under the 2005 housing
assistance plan, eligible families can receive cash assistance for as long as 18 months
up to a maximum of $14,148; housing assistance is included in the cap of $26,200 per
family Congress established for any combination of cash, rental assistance and home
repairs that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could pay. The deadline
for cutting off hotel payments was successively extended to December 2005, then well
into 2006.
34
The accommodations industry itself was impacted by the natural disasters. Property
damage by Katrina alone closed at least 290 hotels with an estimated total of 42,000
guest units. Some hotels reopened, however about 14,000 guest units were not
expected to return to use within the calendar year (Schneider 2005; Smith Travel 2005).
The hospitality industry responded with corporate donations, fund-raising programs
(donating “rewards” program points), and offers for evacuees’ relief. With much of New
Orleans uninhabitable and flooded, FEMA negotiated a six-month, $192 million contract
with an American flag cruise line to house temporarily up to 10,000 people for six
months. Displaced New Orleans first responders (police, firemen, health workers) and
their families and federal workers detailed to work in the disaster were housed in the
cruise line’s floating luxury hotel (Weisman 2005; U.S. Congress, 2005). A hotel
association announced FEMA had entered negotiations for 650,000 hotel/motel rooms
in various locations in the United States prone to natural disasters (AH&LA 2005a).
The homeless
In the late 1980s and 1990s, metropolitan agencies in Washington, D.C., New York,
Boston, San Francisco among other cities, paid commercial hotels market rates to
house homeless families. Laws in New York and other jurisdictions restricting Single
Room Occupancy units to one or two adults forced local governments to place families
with children in other types of hotels (Bach and Steinhagen 1987; Coalition for the
Homeless 2000; Bernstein 2002; Rivera 2004; Barnes 2004; Sorrentino 2005). Until
court injunctions banned the practice, city homeless services in New York separated
mothers and children from their respective husbands and fathers (Dehavenon 1996),
placing mothers and children to rooms in contract hotels and men to male group
shelters. Rural and suburban jurisdictions and some cities clung to the older system of
issuing “tickets” (also known as vouchers or coupons) good for stays or opted to stagger
cash advances and reimbursements for hotel or motel receipts (Coalition for the
Homeless 2000; Nassau County 2005). Complaints about what came to be known as
“welfare hotels” focused on cost, code violations, and deplorable conditions (Siegal
1974; Simpson 1984; Kozol 1988; United States General Accounting Office 1989;
United States Congress, House of Representatives 1994a and b; Bernstein and Eddings
1996; Gorta 2002; Bernstein 2002).
The “shelter system” operated by New York’s Department of Homeless Services (“DHS”)
includes leased whole hotel and motel properties (Gorta 2002): a dozen whole
hotel/motel properties were leased during the winter of 2004-2005. 1 In addition, DHS
1
“In January 2005, som e 36,600 hom eless m en, wom en, and children were sleeping each night
in the New York City shelter system , including 15,100 children, 12,700 adult fam ily m em bers, and 8,800
single adults. Thousands m ore sleep on city streets, park benches, and subway trains. Since 1998 the
New York City hom eless shelter population has increased by 73 percent, from 21,100 people in shelters
each night to 36,600 people per night currently. Over the past seven years, the num ber of hom eless
fam ilies sleeping in New York City shelters and welfare hotels has increased by 95 percent, from 4,429
fam ilies at the end of January 1998 to 8,722 fam ilies at the end of January 2005. The average stay for
hom eless fam ilies in the m unicipal shelter system has nearly doubled over the past decade, from six
35
One hotel that leases rooms for the city to place the homeless during the
cold winter months is among the only four located in an urban, ten square
mile majority minority neighborhood. The hotel’s owner would like to host
tourists and lists itself on travel directories, but makes do with the business
mix it’s got. During the summer months, the hotel attracts paying guests
with “free adult movies and air conditioning”; individual air conditioners jut
out of the hotel’s second, third, and fourth storey windows which are not
boarded up. During the winter, it leases itself out to the City.
e
A city government in the East Coast corridor researched which formerly housed
homeless families in notoriously substandard hotels contracted at outrageous costs (up
to thousands per unit per month) adopted a “continuum of care” program of shelters
and transitional supportive housing in the mid 1990s. As part of this program, the city
began signing annual contracts with multiple commercial hotels and motels establishing
fixed rates for guests of the city. One standard agreement sets the day rate for people
displaced by emergencies, like fires or the interruption of water or electricity services in
their housing; another standard agreement covers the homeless. Both types of guests
arrive with purchase orders issued by the city. Hotels may contract to host one or both
categories of guests. Since the primary business strategy of hotels in this destination
city is hosting tourists, and since city referrals increase in the winter when tourism is slow
and especially on “below freezing” nights when shelter is mandated, hotels expected that
taking city contract might cushion high vacancy during the tourist “off” season.
Hotel managers in this city explained various reasons why they opted to sign
agreements to accept one or both classes of city referrals, and why they decided not to
seek or renew their contracts. Hotel managers said they prefer the “emergency” cases.
A declining number of establishment sign annual contracts to accept the homeless the
city sends. Managers worried the “disruption” of homeless people might damage their
hotels’ reputation with tourists and tour operators. Managers who had current contracts
m onths in 1992 to nearly twelve m onths today.” (Coalition for the Hom eless 2005)
36
in 2005 complained that because the city had similar agreements with so many hotels,
the resulting trickle of business was hardly worth the extra inspections the city required
and long waits for the city to pay the purchase orders they submitted.
Some suburban and rural counties in the east coast research area set up similar annual
contracts with commercial hotels and motels. The beginning and end date and renewal
schedules differ by jurisdiction. On the contract anniversary date, a hotel can opt out
and not renew. Both contracts leasing whole properties and agreeing to accept
displaced and homeless guests paying on vouchers typically specify a term. The
functions of providing lodging for emergencies have expiration dates. In the system
sketched, the term is only annual.
In other east coast counties, social services keep lists of local hotels and motels which
are, in principle, willing to accept the temporarily displaced or homeless, if they have
vacancies. County staff “call around” to find available rooms and directly pay hotels.
The American Red Cross maintains a comprehensive list of hotels that will accept
displaced homeowners and that are approved by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency or are also on FEMA’s master list (Department of Homeland Security nd1).
Many civil divisions either contact or contract a Red Cross chapter to refer them hotels
or to handle placing the displaced. One hotel manager stated their brand works with the
Red Cross and the stays of the majority of their sprinkling of sojourners for weeks and
months at a time are paid by the Red Cross. The manager and the brand will not work
with the county; she prefers to have the non-profit volunteer organization collect
reimbursements rather than deal directly with the county.
Church charity
Managers of several suburban and rural motels discussed their experiences receiving
placements and payment from churches.
The Midwest City researched is among the urban centers which are demolishing
concentrated public housing and dispersing renters with portable housing assistance
vouchers from the federal Section 8, program, the city, or state to “scattered sites”
throughout the metropolis. The city offers various incentives to landlords and hotels
which accept Section 8 vouchers.
People paying with housing vouchers are giving new leases on life to some older,
unique, independent hotels engulfed by gentrification and escalating real estate values.
A hotel in the city that rents at least 30 per cent of its units on Section 8 vouchers can
apply to be classified as an SRO hotel and receive real estate tax breaks. The city
forced seven hotels formerly associated with the sex trade to “clean up” and accept
families with housing vouchers.
The name the six-storey building used when it was a sex trade hotel is
etched in stone above the entry. The hotel registered a change of name
after certifying as a SRO hotel. It is now almost completely occupied by
Section 8 permanent residents including families with children. It sits on a
side street with low rise residences and light industry in an improving
neighborhood. A resident child said her mother had chosen to spend her
housing voucher for a room in the hotel so she could go to a good school
in the neighborhood. Two other hotels on the same side street, still half
involved in the trade, always semi-residential, have also decided “to go
dispersed Section 8.”
e
It is not clear whether there are similar situations in other cities. Reports on Los Angeles
suggest real estate developers are once again reducing the stock of low rent,
commercial workmen’s and SRO hotels by demolishing or converting them into other
forms of real estate, forcing displaced hotel settlers into the suburbs. As in the Midwest
city, the first wave of “urban renewal” in the 1970s and early 1980s reduced the stock of
low rent hotels. In LA’s Skid Row, non-profit organizations remodeled over half the 63
SRO hotels left standing into supported permanent or transitional housing (“SHOs”) in
the 1980s and 1990s; the non-profits juggle funding from various government and
charitable sources to subsidize this housing. In the Midwest city, workmen’s hotels all
but disappeared from industrial areas in the 1970s but survived in light industrial zones
of Los Angeles, including the wholesale market area of Skid Row and Little Tokyo
garment manufacturing districts, only to face conversion, in the 21st century, into
condominium lofts and other forms of real estate. (Liberty Hill Foundation 2005; New
Media 2005; Rymer 2001; Rivera 2004; Romero 2004; Dyrness, Thompson and Spoto
2004; Schultz 2003; University of Southern California 2001).
Corporate connections
Guests directly placed by their employer or some other benefactor corporation are
important target markets for hotels and motels. Hotels and motels attract this clientele
by contracting with corporations to offer discount rates close to or exactly the amount the
corporation will reimburse. According to industry reports, about a quarter of all incidents
of hotel stays are “business travel” and business guests are predominantly male
(American Hotel and Lodging Association 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000; Smith Travel,
various dates). Notable beneficiaries of corporate lodging arrangements are midrange
properties located in central downtown business districts or near workplaces with large
numbers of contract, assigned, or detailed staff.
“Corporate suites”
In high end hotels, corporations may lease or buy units in primarily transient hotels in
key business destination to secure places for officers and staff to stay and to host
clients. Marketing hotel units to corporations figures in one model of “condos in hotels,"
39
Deals that hotels and chains strike with various corporations include “discount” rates--
per night, week, and/or month, reservation guarantees up to daily ceiling limits, and
contracts for mass relocations. Hotel properties may negotiate and sign annual
agreements or arbitrarily set a blanket rate for all the “corporate” entities with which their
franchise brand, hospitality management company or chain have agreements.
One manager explained the national brand of his hotel has a contract with a particular
insurance company for lodging homeowners covered by that insurance. The manager
of an all-apartment brand extended stay hotel told me the bi-coastal partnership chain
which operated under that brand and a brand unique to the chain had informal
arrangements to accept clients referred or paid by several home owner insurance
companies. Each manager in the chain and the chain as a whole were responsible for
expanding this source of customers. One extended stay hotel prized its “back door”
corporate contracts with home insurance agencies to lodge their clients at discount rates
slightly lower than these insurances’ maximum reimbursement.
Individual managers may consider reimbursement limits and “customize” rates for
individual home insurance clients. Managers of several hotels, motels, and extended
stay hotels identified individuals and families rebuilding houses as the guests whom they
remembered as having stayed the longest.
“What can I say about this one family?” a motel manager asked.
“They’ve lived in this motel for a year and a half because their house
is being rebuilt, but if you ask the man, he will always say he lives
where his house burned down, even though there is no house there.”
e
When the United States began the Base Closure and Realignment (“BRAC”) process of
decommissioning military bases in 1988, it also began to phase out having the Armed
Services directly operate quarters and housing on existing bases. The services planned
to pare to operate only barracks and tents for trainees. Active duty military personnel
were offered the incentive of housing allowances to live in private quarters off-base after
completing basic training.
The accommodations industry responded to this change in base housing policy. Active
duty military in need of private lodgings stimulated chains and brands to construct new
hotels in the radius of bases that offer furnished “all suite” and “extended stay”
apartments on a month-to-month basis. Older hotels near bases fashioned discounts
for long stays to attract unaccompanied military. Base housing offices also leased
blocks of rooms in commercial hotels and motels and whole properties to serve as off-
base military quarters. Near the Midwest City, one motel was entirely leased to serve
as bachelors’ quarters for a military base as recently as 2004.
The business of accommodating the military in the nation’s hotels and motels slowed
after the “9/11" event. Certain bases were “sealed” for security reasons. Managers of
hotels and motels near three bases in the study areas described their loss of active duty
military clientele, who filled their rooms and stayed for months and years, and their
issues with the new types of the contracts from these bases.
Managers of hotels and motels contacted in a five-mile radius of one base all stated
that-- “prior to 9/11"-- they hosted military service personnel who privately paid and
stayed as long as they were stationed at the base, some as long as two or three years.
The manager of one “all suites” brand, in particular, lamented the economic impact of
losing the business of military sojourning on long-term, open-ended stays.
Certain motels near this base now have standing contracts to provide multiple rooms on
short notice for groups of trainees or transferees and for military in transit. The contracts
permit bases to access quarters as needed. From the perspective of the participating
hotels and motels, the time between notification and the arrival of occupants is so short
that they experience difficulties in supplying rooms. Rather than fulfill their contracts by
subcontracting rooms in other hotels and motels at a loss, neighboring motels formed an
41
informal consortium to supply each other with rooms to lodge intermittent bursts of
populous short stays without disturbing their long term residents and sojourners.
One motel used to fill all the rooms it previously blocked to supplement bachelor
quarters on the base across the road. This installation had contracted out the
renovation and management of on-base housing and on-base quarters on a multi-
decade lease, when, for security reasons, it “closed” and prohibited active duty military
from living off base. By the winter of 2004-2005, the motel that formerly served as
supplemental barracks was sparsely occupied by families and “significant others” waiting
for a person to return from duties overseas or required to stay on base except when “on”
a weekend pass. This motel adapted by putting in a night club to attract a party crowd to
enjoy those weekend passes.
Discount rates which associations of automobile clubs or retirees negotiate with brands,
chains or individual properties on behalf of their members do not appear to result in long
term stays. Several chains and brand families have created their own membership
associations, enrolling hotel guests in “loyalty” or “rewards” programs. Program
incentives for long stays and repeat business include discounts and “free” days at any
hotel in the group. Hotel managers speculated that the “rewards” program of their brand
family influenced sojourners’ and regulars’ choices; long stays “on business” earned
credits toward free stays in vacation resorts.
This well known national brand’s “LTS” discount reduces the daily rate to
less than half that usually charged. The hotel, like most in its brand, is
medium sized (120+ rooms), moderately priced ($100-120/ night), and
has a restaurant, bar, ballroom, meeting rooms, ample free parking on
site, and other facilities. The LTS deal brings the price of living in this
“nice” hotel to about the same price per night residents were paying
on the weekly rate at nearby less well maintained motels.
The sales manager stressed that the Long Term Stay rate had to be in
continuous blocks of 30 days; checking in for the work week and out on the
weekends was not allowed in the LTS arrangement. This hotel had “regulars”
who did that. If they were to apply, they would actually pay less on the LTS
than checking out on weekends. A few people living on open-ended stays
and throughout the academic year had been a dependable supplementary source
of income for 30 years in this hotel which primarily hosts guests
from out of town who arrive with reservations. Despite its location off an Interstate
exit, travelers spontaneously pulling up without reservations contributed less to
the hotel’s all over “sales” revenues than the core of guests on the LTS rate and
the “regulars” checking in and out every week.
e
succeed would be to entice tour operators he knew from his former job to
select his hotel as their local stop.
e
The sales staff “customized” rates for the displaced who paid the hotel
directly to mesh with reimbursements their home insurers would pay, using
the national franchise’s negotiated rates with insurance companies served
as guidelines. The hotel sales staff had fixed a low rate for families
referred by the local chapter of a national charity. People who had and
were at the time staying the longest at this hotel (for over two years) were
44
In the midrange brand and chain hotels investigated, managers estimated long term
residents and sojourners constituted approximately two per cent of their unit rental
business. By contrast, managers of extended stay hotels estimated individuals and
families staying for six months or more constituted roughly half their business.
Most extended stay brands with apartment units are “limited services” hotels which have
fewer common facilities than other midrange hotels, which they compensate with
services appropriate to those settled in and sojourning long term. Extended stays
commonly serve free hot breakfasts, arrange evening social hours (“manager’s
receptions”), offer free parking and shuttle buses to public transportation, and may offer
various concierge/valet services.
From the 1990s through the present, major national hotel franchise families and national
and regional chains proliferated brands of extended stay hotels; there are now more
than 2,600 dedicated extended stay hotel properties with more than a quarter million
studio or bedroom apartment units. During the first quarter of 2005, at the monthly rate,
the per night charge at an extended stay ranged from a low of about $24/night (for one
economy brand in a rural area) to $127/night in one midrange brand in metropolitan
areas. Prices per night were higher across the boards for stays of less than one month
(30 days) in those brands which permit shorter stays. Appendix B, Part 2, Extended
Stays lists extended stay brands and sub-brands of major franchise families and
independent chains. Appendix C, Hotel Companies, illustrates how major franchise and
hotel property companies have diversified into extended stay brands.
Extended stays do not offer “leases” for multiple months or for a year. Policies toward
lodging guests for periods shorter than 30 days and for renewing month-to-month vary
within and among brands. Some brands require a “security deposit” and/or non-
refundable month’s payment in advance. Policies are largely set by managers adapting
the extended stay concept to the local market.
Where local ordinances prohibit cooking in hotel units, extended stay hotel brands that
offer studios or bedroom apartments with kitchens may only offer suites. Newer entrants
are building all apartment hotels and locate in jurisdictions where that is possible. More
detail on the extended stay brands appears in Appendix B and in a comparison of
several brands (Biz-Stay.com, 2005).
I visited the extended stay hotel of one well-established national brand six
weeks after it opened. About half its studio apartment units were already
occupied. Several guests told me they moved in precisely because they
planned to stay for six months or more while they were working in the area.
The hotel staff greeted and talked with men and women returning from
work, wearing business suits and construction protective clothing. Common
areas on site were limited to the lobby, a laundry room, and large free
parking lot, although guests were entitled to use the facilities at another
hotel in the chain about 30 miles away. Nationally, the brand normally
requires a one month minimum. At the new hotel, until the units fill with
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guests who “meet the profile” of their target sojourner clients, staff had
decided to waive the one-month minimum and take in transients who saw
their vacancy sign by the highway.
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At an “all suites” hotel of one of the more expensive extended stay brands,
the manager explained payment and length of stay policies were set by the
company that owned and managed the particular hotel, not by the
franchise. This hotel did not rent units for less than a month, guaranteed
its current guests could renew for the next month, and only accepted
reservations after current occupants gave formal notice of the date when
they would vacate. Occupants rented continuously within the month-to-
month framework; those who left temporarily departed from and returned
to the same unit. The hotel lays out breakfast in the lobby and organizes
evening social activities: extras common in many brands of extended stay
hotels.
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The managing partner is willing to rent units for a few days and sets three
tiers of day rates and corresponding services. Stays of seven or fewer
days cost more than stays of 8-21 when housekeeping services and linen
changes are reduced to twice a week. The standard month-to-month
arrangement was charged the lowest rent per day and had the least
frequent housekeeping services. The hotel did not offer leases. Almost
half of the residents had been living there six months or more, the longest
three years.
All 150 units in the extended stay of a fourth franchise brand are
apartments with kitchens and bathrooms. Most have one or two
bedrooms; some of the studios have a shower and no bathtub and
two burners instead of full ranges.
The hotel charges daily. Regular rates are broken down by the number of
days and unit size. A studio or one bedroom unit rented for one to four
nights cost $149/day; if rented for five to twelve nights, the rate dropped
twenty dollars; for 12 to 30+ nights, the daily price drops to $109/day. The
manager’s standard discount took the daily rate down about ten dollars at
each tier. Lower rates could be negotiated by individuals and families
staying for months (or years) and by companies. The franchise does not
provide any national accounts, however the management firm has
"backyard accounts" with local companies, giving lower rates to companies
which commit to rent hundreds of unit/days per year for corporate affiliates.
The hotel will give the "government rate" but caps the number of rooms
reserved at that rate; once the cap is met, the hotel will offer a discount,
but will not meet the government rate.
Opened in 2003, the hotel’s first resident has been continuously living
there for over two years. The manager estimated 15 per cent of the
present occupants have been living in the hotel for at least six months, and
about 70 per cent stay for one month or more. The multi bedroom
apartments are usually occupied by families in the process of relocating.
The hotel also has "regulars" who sleep there Monday through Thursday
nights during the work week and pay at the highest one-to-four night rate.
The hotel will, but prefers not to take in transients. They don’t want “to turn
into the ‘scene’” at a nearby Interstate exit where several “all suites” brands
they consider competition are clustered.
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“Dr. Vaughn,” a Ph.D. scientist, was delighted with his extended stay hotel.
He came from out of town to begin work at a government agency months
before, staying in a new national brand hotel located off an Interstate exit.
He had no free time to hunt for or set up a house or apartment; he wanted
to be close to his workplace –ten minutes or so; his work was urgent and
intense, performance based; he was proud his country called for his
services; he wanted to do a good job. He had no idea how long he would
stay in the furnished efficiency. He simply did not know. He had no plans
to move. As long as his job lasts, he figured. He moved in before the
holidays and spent Christmas and New Years in residence. He had no
particular plans to go anywhere else, although he hoped he could take a
few days off around Valentine’s Day. He wanted to drive across a few
states to present a rose to a lady he knew. Just that.
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COLLEGE STUDENTS
49
Private nonprofit, commercial, and membership lodgings legally registered as “room and
boarding houses” flourish around campuses.
New and widespread alternatives are privately owned and corporately managed
apartment buildings and extended stay hotels located, oriented, and advertising to
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attract college students but technically open to the “public.” Some real estate
management companies that own and/or manage off-campus student housing near
multiple academic institutions rent (bed) “space” in furnished apartments by a fixed time
“block.” Time blocks are more often a full calendar year, an academic semester or
quarter than by the month. Although units in student housing are complete bedroom
apartments, the only way a person or group can rent a whole apartment is to lease
simultaneously the two, four, six, or eight “spaces” in the unit.
Areas researched contain complexes owned and/or managed by two private national
“college housing” corporations which rent spaces in hundreds of off-campus apartments
located in more than a dozen college towns. The first two skyscrapers built by one of
these “student housing” companies in another region have dining rooms and food
courts, include the cost of meals in “space” rentals, and are legally registered and
operate as large boarding houses. Complexes this company has opened within the past
five years are low rises (2-4 floors), featuring minimally furnished apartments. These
units have two, three, or four “double bedrooms” (respectively with four, six, or eight bed
“spaces”), one or two “semi-private” (shared) bathrooms, and one full kitchen. The
newer complexes lack common dining rooms and food service, although some have
common facilities like “club” houses. One student housing brand puts a coin laundry in
each building; the other brand equips each unit with a clothes’ washer and dryer.
Some recently built privately owned off-campus “student housing” buildings resemble the
latest styles of rental apartment complexes and extended stay hotels: low rises,
surrounded by parking lots and grounds, clustered around central common facilities and
containing furnished apartments. Others are stark high rises. Differences are the legal
and financial arrangements.
In the southwest, “student housing” brands of the extended stay models compete in the
off-campus housing market by locating complexes within a few miles of several colleges.
These brands rent whole studio or bedroom apartments, rather than just bed space, and
often offer attractions like outdoor swimming pools, dance floors, and other hotel
facilities and, of course, hotel services and lease-free obligations.
By law, these apartments and hotels are open to the general public. Absent contracts
with universities, private businesses have no right to restrict or prefer student renters. In
fact, different brands are occupied by differing proportions of students and non-students.
Wealthy residents have lived and leased in luxury hotels in the United States for well
over a hundred years (Groth 1999), and the practice is currently experiencing a revival
(Otley 2005). At the high end of hotel living, prestige, service, and convenience overrule
price considerations (Coolidge 1998).
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The economics of living in high end hotels have alternative logics. Policies like discounts
or paying in cash that attract residents to low end and midrange hotels do not figure in
the calculations at the high end. In this strata of hotel units priced at hundreds or
thousands of dollars per day, corporate connections and third party payment enter the
equation of residents, sojourners, and regulars staying in units owned or leased by
corporations for their benefit.
Residence, sojourns, and regular stays in high end hotels buy entry to a social set which
excludes the majority who cannot afford the high prices.
Self-pay at high end hotels is generally charged day by day and item by item, with
various timetables for settling bills. For more than 150 years, certain luxury metropolitan
nonresidential hotels have selectively offered annual or longer term leases to people
who effectively reside in the hotels. Lease opportunities in hotels are becoming
increasingly rare. Both the legacy hotels which traditionally hosted a core of residents
and new luxury urban hotels are moving to change the terms for exclusive use of a unit
from leasing to ownership.
As discussed above, the ownership, management, and operation of hotels and motels
can be divided many ways. The “property” may be owned by a corporate chain, limited
liability company, partnership, or a real estate investment trust (REIT). The owner may
directly operate the hotel business and hire employees, and/or contract a hospitality
management firm, and/or contract divisible hotel services including advertising,
telephone and Internet reservation, group purchases of supplies and other services. A
number of services are bundled in franchise or association agreements. A hotel
corporation without employees may be a small owner-operated family business or may
own multiple properties managed and operated by contracted or subsidiary companies
with employees.
“Condos” in hotels
The hotel units sold may be any style: guest rooms, studios, or bedroom apartments.
“Condo units” may exist in otherwise transient hotels. Selling condo units is an
increasingly popular model for financing remodeling and new construction of hotels.
Individual owners may occupy the hotel units they own personally as their primary
residence, use them as vacation “second” homes, as a business or leisure travel pied-a-
tierre, or treat their hotel units as a passive equity investment in real estate with income
potential. Corporate owners typically use their hotel units to lodge their staff or clients.
How owner occupants are charged for hotel services differs among these arrangements.
The hotel charges each unit owner a basic monthly fee on a permanent basis to cover
taxes and common maintenance of the building and grounds as condominium apartment
buildings do. Condo hotels include blanket fees for a suite of hotel services and access
to facilities like health clubs in the basic “condo” fee more often than do hotels with
privately owned units interspersed with guest units. Hotels with interspersed units more
commonly bill residents for hotel services and facility use item for item. This system
allows owners more flexibility and reduces costs when they are not occupying the unit.
Hotels that rent privately owned units during their owners’ absence bill hotel services to
whomever occupies the unit. Thus, owners pay an additional hotel service fee and
itemized bills while they are in residence, but not if the unit is vacant or rented to hotel
guests.
The rights of owners to occupy their hotel units differ significantly from property to
property. The owner’s right to occupy the unit may be unfettered and essentially full
time or limited to a fixed schedule and number of days, weeks, or months each year.
Some deeds mandate the owner must lease the unit back to the hotel when the owner
or a person designates is absent. Mandatory leaseback clauses typically prohibit the
owner from subletting independently and establish the formula for sharing profits from
the hotel’s rental of the privately owned unit. Mandatory leasebacks and profit sharing
arrangements characterize deeds which also limit the owner’s occupancy rights and may
occur in deeds of fundamentally residential units as well.
Luxury condo hotels are concentrated in resorts and in central business districts of the
largest metropolitan cities, both new starts and conversions of older hotel properties and
apartment, office, and warehouse buildings. Remodeling and new construction of
interspersed and adjunct condo units are notably transforming luxury resort hotels in
Florida and Nevada. Make overs and new starts have created four or five star full
service hotels serving condo unit residents alongside well heeled transients in such
metropolitan hubs as Boston, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis. Within the next few years, high end urban hotels
with condo units are scheduled to open in Baltimore, Houston, Dallas, and other cities
(Coolidge 1998; Berkey-Gerard 2005; Gregor 2005; Ernst and Young 2005).
Condo hotel units are developed and sold by the entity that owns the hotel as a whole.
Like other hotels, condo hotels may be owned by real estate investment trusts, limited
liability partnerships, or hotel or real estate corporations which can be separate from
54
firms the property owner hires to manage and run the hotel and/or “brand” the hotel.
Although ownership of condo hotels or a physically separate building with units entitled
to hotel services and facilities by a “condo association” is theoretically possible, no
examples were found in the areas researched or in the literature.
In one model, a “hotel” real estate investment trust (REIT) or the developer’s holding
company retains the majority ownership of the physical facility as a whole, establishes
the level and cost of hotel services, and manages the hotel directly through a subsidiary
and franchise or otherwise indirectly through contracted companies. Several national
franchised brands and small chains specialize in full service and luxury five star hotels
interspersed with “condo” units. Appendix B indicates brands with condos in hotels and
Appendix C indicates several companies involved.
In this model, the owners of individual hotel units are “minority” partners, who agree in
their title deeds to the terms, costs, services, and management arrangements set by the
corporation that owns the hotel as a whole. Owners of units in “condo” hotels have
fewer rights than usual in condominiums (or cooperative) buildings.
“Judy” and “Dave” spent a lot of nights sleeping in downtown hotels before
they bought their condo in a new five star luxury hotel. When they lived in
a house in the highest bracket suburb, commuting home to the “palace”
never took less than an hour and they both often had to work over time
and make early morning appointments -- Judy, to represent corporations’
interests in political matters, Dave as a partner in a high pressure law firm.
They had a full time housekeeper to manage the landscapers, tradesmen,
and cleaning services that came in and to oversee the regular maid
and cook. Their clients were busy people, too, and often begged off Judy or
Dave’s invitations to come to dinner or parties at their suburban home.
The trip out of time was simply took too much time. They bought one of
the larger condo apartments in the new hotel for $1.5 million in the
mid 1990s.
Their hotel levies a “condo fee” which covers real estate taxes, insurance,
general building upkeep) and a “basic hotel service fee” which gives Judy,
Dave, and their guests open access to the hotel’s health club, parking
garage, reception and concierge services. When they first moved in,
the condo fee was about $8000/month for their two bedroom
and the basic hotel service fee was originally $7000/month per condo unit.
Both fees have gone up. Their hotel bills optional services extra, like
preparing and serving dinners in their unit, Judy’s spa treatments,
dry cleaning, and so on.
They’ve lived in the downtown hotel nearly ten years. Their costs
for living at the hotel have hardly dented the small fortune they pocketed
after selling their “suburban palace.” They estimate the resale
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This hotel sold less than half its bedroom apartments units as condos at $500 - $800 per
square foot to “famous people” --star athletes, current and former government officials
and politicians-- and other “working stiffs” like Judy and Dave. The hotel rents its non-
condo apartment and guest room units to transients and others who stay long term.
(Also see Gregor 2005.)
A 38th floor condo listed at nine million appeared in the New York City
real estate market in an established luxury hotel with more than 200 units.
This hotel charges a monthly “maintenance fee” of $12,000.
The penthouse condo in the same hotel, last purchased in 1992 for
$21 million, was listed at $70 million at the close of 2004. Retail room
rentals in this hotel start at $395/night and top $3,800/night for
the 12 larger suites. A bathrobe is included in the price, but a high speed
internet connection costs an extra $10/day (Coolidge 1998; Otley 2005).
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“Condotels”
Hotels in which all units are available for private purchase are known as “condotels” and
are sometimes called "apartotels” if the units all have kitchens and baths or if the hotel is
emerging from a former condominium apartment building. In “condotels” all (or almost
all) units are privately owned. Units in condotels are frequently originally sold at
“preconstruction prices” to finance property construction, conversion, or renovation by
distributing costs and debt burden among multiple mortgages. This model originated,
and remains concentrated in resorts. It has been applied in major metropolitan areas
where the condotel units are likely to be their owners’ primary or work week residences.
At owners’ request, during their temporary absences, the management can arrange to
rent units retail for short stays to vacationers, or to lease units to “temporary housing”
brokers.
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Voluntary one-time agreements to have the hotel rent out a private unit to transient
guests during the owner’s absence (or sub-let a leased hotel unit) are gaining such
popularity that in summer, occupancy of several older urban hotels changes from
dominantly residential to dominantly transient. In New York City, there are examples of
condo associations of residential apartment buildings (some originally built as
apartments; some historically converted from former hotels) obtaining hotel licenses and
contracting hospitality management firms so residents can more easily rent out their
primary homes when they vacation or spend time at their second homes.
Hotel services are seamlessly provided to whomever occupies a condotel unit. The
management of other condotels write standing agreements with unit owners and/or put
legal provisions in unit deeds ceding to the hotel the right to lease units when not
occupied by owners or their designees. Some portion of rental receipts are credited to
condo owners. (See Ernst & Young 2005.)
Residence clubs
Resort hotels and sections of metropolitan hotels have been refashioned into “private
residence clubs.” Club members buy the right to occupy a unit of a certain caliber for a
specific number of days per year and must schedule their stays by advance reservation.
Although the arrangement is somewhat similar to “time shares” and to fractional
ownership of hotel units, membership in a modern American residence club conveys the
right to occupy the same class of units in the multiple hotels participating in the club but
conveys no property rights on a particular unit. However, unlike most time share and
mandatory lease back deeds, when club members may occupy a unit is not limited to
prescheduled days in each calendar year. Residence club membership fundamentally
boils down to buying a preferred reservation status and partially prepaying for hotel
rooms on a use it or lose it basis. A sprinkling of individuals buy annual rights and reside
full time in club hotels; “regulars” are more common.
estate. Ownership of a condo unit in a hotel may be conveyed without the right to
occupy the unit. Complicated provisions stipulate how costs of hotel management,
operations, taxes, condo upkeep fees, and other items will be charged before any profit
from renting the unit will be shared.
This model of “creative” financing diffused to the hotel sector from specialized real
estate and domiciliary care industries. Models for investing in units of other categories
of rental residences have influenced arrangements for buying units in hotels and vice-
versa. Offers of hotel units purely as investments resemble similar sales in other
classes of real estate. For example, at least one national company builds and manages
“student housing” and “senior housing” assisted living buildings in which the company
rents by the bed space rather than by the apartment. The company finances its chain of
new buildings by selling investors “condo” apartments before construction. Investors are
obliged to lease the apartments to the company to rent to the target customers for a
share of any profits.
Trickle down
The practice of interspersing condo units in primarily urban and resort hotels is racing
through luxury (five stars) independent and brand hotels, fast filtering to the mid-range
brands, and trickling downscale. In Florida in 2005, a motel operating as franchise of a
familiar national economy brand was selling furnished 300 square foot guest rooms for
$69,000 and a former residential condominium apartment building being renovated into
a condotel offered units for a pre-construction price of $169,000.
SOCIAL ATTRACTIONS
Across the economic spectrum, social features attracting residents to hotels, motels,
rooming houses, and like accommodations include a good relationship or friendship,
even honorary kinship with the management, a sense of community with others living in
the same accommodations, privacy, quiet, and convenience.
“Lionel”, a retired elderly widower in his 70s, has resided in the same hotel
for more than seven years. After his wife died, he gave away his furniture,
sold his house, and moved in with a niece and her children “to help her
out”. But his niece moved away from a place where Lionel likes to spend
his time, where he pursues a life long avocation in retired leisure. So
Lionel moved into a motel a short walk away from that attraction.
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Lionel locks his room when he takes a Christmas trip if the weather is not
too bad. He likes to spend that holiday with his surviving brother and
sisters.
For seven years, Lionel stayed at only one place other than the hotel
for as long as one week.
Samantha says the room with a private bath where she settled down
is her “first own real home”. She bought and brought in her own sofa
and book cases, which she has filled with the books she spends most her
time at home reading.
About half the rooms with private baths in the motel where Samantha
lives are occupied by people who have lived there continuously between
two and 19 years. Three guest rooms are used for storage, filled with
furniture the motel furnished taken out of units so residents could fit in
59
beds, couches, chairs, tables, and other things they bought for themselves.
The rest of the rooms are rented out to seasonal sojourners and regulars.
Regulars at this motel are locals who get too drunk to drive home on
Saturday nights, or often “on the outs” with people where they usually
stay. Transient travelers rarely check in. Traffic on the old highway the motel
faces are mainly commuters; few trucks even go by. The new
chain highrise motel a few blocks down can’t even seem to
attract transients.
Samantha and the other residents respect the absolute ban on cooking
in their units. They understand violation of that rule could cause a
fire, hazardous for them all. It’s not a problem. The motel has a
24 hour diner on the premises where most of the motel’s permanent
residents eat and several also work there full or part time.
Across the spectrum of contemporary hotel prices and conditions, from third party
placements in commercial hotels to multi-million dollar owner-occupied condos in legacy
luxury hotels, where fundamental understandings between the management and
residents break down, disputes commonly erupt into lawsuits and evictions that
dismantle the attraction for new residents.
In the hotels, extended stays, and motels inhabited by settled residents, sojourners on
open-ended stays, and regulars observed in this research, how hotel staff and residents
interacted was striking. Desk clerks, receptionists, doormen personally greeted and
engaged residents and regulars in conversation when they came back home, after work,
after errands. In these encounters, hotel staff spoke to residents about their individual
concerns and conditions. Staff and long term occupants get to know each other
personally, and neither develop familiar relationships with transient guests. Even in
economy motels with diminutive and bare bones office/lobbies, the desk clerk on duty
and residents “hang out” socializing with each other, falling silent, watching and wary,
when “transients” check in or come by the desk to discuss their bill, room temperature,
what stations the cable TV gets, or other matters residents took for granted.
Communities of residents
Communities of hotel or motel residents have different demographic compositions,
different socioeconomic traits (City of Oakland 2004; Cell 1998), and distinct social traits,
60
making generalization difficult. In some hotels, individuals and households defend their
“privacy” with anonymity in close quarters and avoid contact with hotel neighbors (“Turtle
62 in da Loin” 2005); in others, hotel neighbors form collaborating cliques (Eckert 1979a;
Simpson 1984), or actively socialize just outside the hotel (Fletcher 2005).
People placed in hotels and motels by third parties or constrained by personal finances
and situations to sojourn in hotels and motels may develop altogether different attitudes
about their situation (Foley 1998a) than settlers, who consciously chose and continually
reaffirm their choice of living quarters. Ironically, sojourners may reside in the same
hotel for longer periods of time than their settled neighbors, all the time bitter and aloof
from their surroundings.
On porches of court style motels and on the balconies of mid-rise hotels, residents set
out chairs, barbeques, bicycles. In the late afternoons, early evenings, and weekends,
residents were observed emerging from their units to click into community, waiting until
some others also stepped outside as a signal that they were interested in socializing to
start a chat or shout conversation. In several of the low end residential motels observed,
parking lots served as lively social arenas, day and night. In midrange hotels which have
common areas like a lobby, breakfast room, or pool, residents met spontaneously and
once acquainted, chatted pleasantly when they share the space. Different brands of
extended stay hotels encourage long term sojourners to socialize at evening “events”
staged by the management. In the high end hotels, residents mingle and gradually
select resident friends as they repeatedly rub elbows in these hotels’ exclusive spas,
weight rooms, bars, restaurants, and other facilities.
Hotels and motels with residents, sojourners, and “regulars” often have people at home
and coming in and out during the day, walking out with laundry or in with purchases.
Where families live, school children with back packs trudge to their hotel or motel home,
then come back outside to stand around waiting for a playmate to emerge.
In the 1970s, when the population of residential hotels was declining and predominantly
elderly (Burke 1982), the gerontological literature debated whether elderly hotel
residents were socially alienated or connected. The few ethnographic participant
observer studies (Erickson and Eckert 1977; Eckert 1979a, 1979b, and 1980; Eckert and
Haug 1984) and personal social network surveys (Sokolovsky and Cohen 1981) of
elderly residents and other sub-populations living in hotels (Sokolovsky, Cohen, Berger
and Geiger 1978) observed that managers were central figures in residents’ circle of
personal relationships and that the personal social networks of many residents were
largely bounded within the residential community of their respective hotels.
Different personalities may be attracted to inhabit hotel or motels that suit their wish for
either a sort of pseudo-familiar communal intimacy or leave-me-alone! self isolation.
In open ended ethnographic interviews with settled hotel and motel residents in the
present research, the same residents who expressed they felt “safe” where they lived
61
and discussed their friendly or quasi-familial relationships with staff and other residents
also routinely interacted with large personal social networks outside their motel or hotel
homes. They interacted with kin, outside acquaintances, co-workers, and clients. By
contrast, the lone resident of a primarily transient hotel wanted to be a recluse and the
transitory environment gave her cover.
“Miss Elliot,” a retired woman on a fixed income, has been living for two
years in a motel at the edge of the city paying week-to-week. She and the
resident manager are the only people living in the motel; tourists and city
placements come and go. Many out-of-town guests stay on the weekly
rate: one of the cheapest in the city.
Miss Elliot lives in a room in the center of the court. From her window, she
has a wide angle view of the parking lot and the entrances to most
the units. She keeps an eye on who comes and goes. She yells
at transient guests who get out of line, blare music, or talk too loud.
Miss Elliot walks out to buy prepared food at fast food restaurants
and brings it back to eat in her room. Living in the transient motel gives
her more “privacy” than other situations where she has lived before
because people leave each other alone. No one expects motel
transients to act friendly, the way some apartment buildings expect.
And the transient guests are not there long enough to target her as
an older woman living alone for robbery or worse. She believes
the counter help at the fast food restaurants where she buys meals
think she is a tourist. Besides, living in a motel room is cheaper than
renting a “whole apartment” and a lot cheaper than an “old age home”.
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“He said you can’t get no sleep there – people come banging on your
door all hours of the night, for money for liquor. If you aren’t a drunk
62
before, you become one if you stay there, just to pass out and
get some sleep.”
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AT HOME IN HOTELS
“Attachments”
A research survey of a thousand households (in housing units) conducted in the
early 1990s was analyzed by applying twelve “objective” (or “empirical”) “measures
of attachments to households” (Schwede 1993; Schwede and Ellis 1994, among
others). Eight of the twelve measures involve an individual person’s control and
behavioral use of the unit occupied; four measure interactions with co-residents.
Most of these “measures of attachment” apply equally well to living units in hotels,
motels, rooming houses, boarding houses, and the like, as to “housing.” The
remaining measures are qualified by the characteristics of commercial
accommodations.
Resident settlers and sojourners sleep in their hotel or motel unit “most of the time.”
Depending on the reference time frame for “most of the time” (last six months? last
year?), many “regulars” who stay in hotels or motels during their work week or for a
work season sleep in their hotel or motel units more often than they sleep anywhere
else. Either the unit resident or a third party on the resident’s behalf must regularly
pay the rent and bills for extra charges or else face eviction; in jurisdictions where
hotel and motel occupants have no tenant rights, eviction for nonpayment is
instantaneous. Whether an individual resident in a hotel or motel has his or her “own
room or space” depends on how many people live together in a unit and the unit’s
configuration–a single room or suite of rooms. People living or just staying short
term at commercial accommodations typically enjoy the right to “receive mail, phone
calls, and messages.” In practice, hotel staffs are generally dependable about
recording or relaying messages from the “outside.” Hotel, motel, and rooming or
boarding house residents routinely “have a key” to their unit and possibly, to the
building entrance. Hotel residents may “keep personal belongings such as clothing
or jewelry” in their units: mid- to upscale hotels frequently offer safes in units or on
the premises. How “free” residents are “to come and go anytime” depends on the
physical and staffing security arrangements around the properties’ entrance doors
and barriers. Accommodations may limit entry or reception hours. Electronic key
63
cards are programmed to restrict access to occupants who have paid their bills. One
urban walk-up hotel canvassed had dispensed with staffing reception and given
each resident a key to the main door of the hotel. At one suburban motel
canvassed, desk clerks warned people registering they had to “be in” between
midnight and 6:00 in the morning. The management’s solution to a once chronic
problem with theft was to lock gates on the property’s high exterior perimeter fence
and post guards who let no one enter.
Hotels, motels, and boarding house rooms are usually rented furnished. It is less
necessary so less common for hotel residents to keep their own “furniture, T.V., and
other large belongings” in their units, although this does occur. The motel where
Samantha lives filled three rental rooms to store motel furniture that residents cast
off as they substituted their own. In owned hotel condo units and rooms in private
residences, however, residents may be required to supply furnishings.
Residents of most hotels, motels, and rooming houses do not have leases nor
mortgages; absence of contractual obligation like a lease is part of the “freedom” and
“flexibility” some hotel/motel residents stated they prefer. There are, however, hotel
residents who have annual or longer term leases on their respective units and the
owner-occupants of condos in hotels may mortgage their units.
Whether residents are allowed to “invite visitors anytime” into their units is a matter
of at the discretion of management policies. Many hotels and motels don’t care and
discretion on this point enhances the revenues of some establishments. Hotels and
motels that charge more for two people to occupy a room than one or that post rental
rates on a per person basis may closely watch “visitor” patterns. The managers of
some low rent urban single room occupancy hotels, rooming houses, and nonprofit
single sex boarding houses prohibit visits to rooms, or visits by adults of the opposite
sex.
Residents of commercial and nonprofit lodgings may not have as direct a “say in
making house rules” as residents of housing units potentially do, however, their
status as “customers” can influence “rules,” policies, and practices through
communications with the immediate managers, property owners, upper hierarchies
of chains, administrators of franchise brands, hospitality firms, and, in the case of
nonprofit hotels, boards, supporting foundations, and in the case of placements, the
64
contracting local agency and its officials. Associations of hotel residents and their
community allies have historically influenced the laws, ordinances, and government
regulatory practices governing whole classes of accommodations through political
pressure and lawsuits. And, typically with greater freedom than residents of
households in housing units, residents of hotels and motels can express discontent
with “house rules” by simply checking out.
The degree to which a resident of a hotel or motel might “help with chores, such as
cleaning house or watching children” depends on the composition of co-residents in
a unit, the demographics and nature of the community at the accommodations, and
the pace of hotel services. In hotels where children have been present, residents
have been observed to “watch children” – their own or neighbors (Sorrentino 2005,
Rivera 2004; Kosol 1988). It is up to hotel and motel residents on discount deals
with less frequent housekeeping services to keep their own units clean and tidy and
put out the trash. In the full service hotels, residents pay a great deal extra to have
staff do “chores.”
Eating
Whether people eat in their hotel units “most the time” depends, in part, on physical
facilities in the property – whether cooking is permitted in units, whether units are
equipped with microwaves and fridges or full kitchens, whether “food and beverage
service” is available on the premises – room service, a restaurant, a meal plan in a
dining room on the premises. Eating in also depends, in part, on residents’ personal
preferences for ordering or carrying food “in” or “eating out.” At all price ranges and
across styles of units and sleeping arrangements, those hotels, motels, rooming
houses, and other lodgings without cooking facilities (in units or in common kitchens)
and without food and beverage services, are the antitheses of "complete" housing
units (which do have cooking equipment, internal kitchens, and bathrooms for the
occupant(s)’ exclusive use) and also the anthesis of “full service” hotels.
Facilities containing living quarters can arrange for residents (and casual occupants)
to procure meals on the premises with various solutions: either
equip the units where people sleep for them to prepare, eat and store food;
or provide common areas and equipment outside sleeping rooms where
occupants may cook, eat, and store their own food,
or serve prepared meals in common dining rooms,
or sell food prepared in restaurants or in the facility’s kitchen on demand,
or combine two or more of these solutions within the building, campus,
complex, or other space(s) controlled by an organization that constitutes the facility.
In addition to hotels and motels with food and beverage service, examples include
the varied layouts collectively known as "assisted living" facilities. Like some other
facilities for multiple families and individuals, some hotels and motels also place
wash basins, showers and tubs for bathing, sanitation, recreation, laundries for
washing clothes and other self-serve equipment in dedicated rooms, structures, or
areas outside sleeping rooms. Many of the larger migrant and seasonal labor camps
65
Residents of rooms without access to food and other essential services in the
building or on the campus of their accommodation facilities must meet their basic
human, social, and cultural needs by extending the functional space of their personal
survival support "homes" into community and commercial arenas outside the unit,
building, and facility within which they sleep. They may purchase prepared food at
restaurants and food shops, arrange to "take meals" from (or "board with”) outside
entrepreneurial cooks, or eat free food at social receptions, "soup kitchens,” or out of
dumpsters.
As Groth (1999) observed, people in “sleeping space” or “room only” quarters are
better off in those "urban ecology" settings where businesses or nonprofit
organizations serve food and provide indoor contexts for socializing nearby. Groth
suggests "room only" accommodations survive in urban commercial areas with
restaurants, lunch counters, food shops, and bars. The same principal can be
extended to explain the common co-location of single room occupancy hotels with
external charitable and community social services like "soup kitchens" and adult day
centers.
In meeting the biological essential need to eat, "rooming" houses diverge from
"boarding" houses, despite the grouping of these two accommodations in
classification systems and their merging in many legal definitions of lodgings.2
"Rooming" houses function more as do hotels and motels in which guests are not
allowed to prepare food in their units and in which there are no “food and beverage
services” -- abbreviated "w/o F&B" in trade publications – on the premises. Without
cooking equipment in the unit, without a common kitchen, and without food and
beverages available on the premises, residents are forced out to eat or find food.
Some licensed or unlicensed rooming houses allow roomers "kitchen privileges": that
is, the right to store food stuffs in what may be the only refrigerator, kitchen, and
pantry in the house and to prepare and cook food, perhaps at set times of the day.
Boarding houses, on the other hand, serve residents (and temporary occupants)
prepared meals at scheduled times, usually in a common dining area. Localities that
recognize the "boarding house" as a distinct legal category require accommodations
2
Local ordinances m erging "room ing" and "boarding" houses often also 1) lim it the num ber of
guests to a single digit, and/or 2) set m inim um guests stays and prohibit transient guests from staying day
to day or week to week, and/or 3) allow this lodgings in m ulti-fam ily residential zones and/or 4) require a
resident owner/operator or an agent. The popular connotation that room ing houses and boarding houses
are physically sm aller and less populous than hotels and m otels is m ore consistent with those converted
from or functioning in houses designed for private households than those originally built as lodgings.
There are exam ples of m ultistorey buildings where hundreds of people sleep long term in m etropolitan
areas and college towns licensed as "boarding" houses (or the lodging class that includes them ).
66
that include meals in the room rent or that offer residents and guests an optional
"meal plan" to obtain licenses as boarding houses, no matter what their sleeping
room or building styles or what logo they display. Such ordinances may sweep into
the boarding house legal category commercial hotels, nonprofit single room
occupancy supportive housing, and organization/membership hotels with dining halls
or common kitchens, including YMCAs and fraternity/sorority houses, and highly
transient bed and breakfast inns. Some hotels that serve meals evade classification
as boarding houses with various arrangements that distance food from their
business. They may contract outside companies to offer food services, establish
restaurant concessions on the premises, or separately incorporate their food and
beverage services. Another dodge is to characterize the meals served as "free" and
strictly optional perks that come with the room.
Hotels with food and beverage services provide guests with access to purchase
snacks, meals, and drinks through various mechanisms: by establishing restaurants,
pubs, and banquet halls in common areas of the hotel; by offering "room service"
delivery of prepared food and drinks to guest units; by serving meals prepared in the
kitchen of the hotel or its on site restaurant(s) from butlers’ pantries in the dining
areas of units; and/or by furnishing units with kitchens or food related equipment like
mini fridges and microwaves, and either stocking units with food and beverages or
selling items like frozen dinners and canned drinks at reception or in hotel
concession stores.
“Full service” hotels proliferate food and beverage options among a multitude of
other services. Full service hotels dress up how they meet residents' and guests'
basic biological needs inside units with high thread count bed sheets, dining tables,
marble wash basins, and similar touches. And they rachet up the facilities’ internal
capacity to meet all manner of cultural, social, and idiosyncratic personal needs.
"Conveniences" routinely available include housekeeping, linen, and installed and
staffed communications. Various brands and properties heap on combinations of
services and dedicated facilities for occupants’ needs for recreation, business,
entertainment, procurement, shopping, personal grooming, maintenance and
cleaning of clothing, car, pet, and possessions, and myriad others. About the only
other types of domiciliary facilities within which some Americans sleep and eat as
potentially insular and self-contained as full service hotels are institutions. Residents
of institutions, however, are confined, committed, compelled, or placed by other
actors such as courts, parents or legal guardians. People chose to reside in grand
hotels of their own free will. Domiciliary institutions like residential nursing homes,
psychiatric hospitals, prisons, juvenile justice centers, job training centers, private
boarding schools for minors provide full but decidedly more bare bones furnishings
for sleeping, eating, and sanitation, bare minimum personal "convenience" services,
and coercive "supervision". Such skimping and supervision is unknown in upscale
hotels. (Private hotels prefer to "inform" and "remind" "guests" of the norms observed
at the establishment, although, as discussed, hotels can generally rapidly evict and
ban violators.)
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CONVERSIONS
TEMPORARY USE
Leased hotels
A property legally licensed as a hotel (or some other class of accommodation) that
and continues to change bed sheets and towels (or continues whatever services
local law requires that accommodation establishments provide) remains a “hotel”
even if units are rented for longer terms or atypical use. Hoteliers more focused on
business strategies oriented to hosting transient tourists occasionally express
discontent that properties functioning as “rooming houses” continue to be licensed
and zoned as hotels (Washington Hotel Association 2003).
Over the last twenty years, many former hotels were converted into permanent
residential buildings or either permanent or transitional supportive housing options
(“SHO”) (Bholai-Pareti and Stern 2002; United States Department of Housing and
Urban Development 2001a-c, nd, Brodhead 1999a; Lewis 2003; Lake front 2003 a-d;
see Appendix E, Conversions.) The layout of rooms in hotels made possible their
conversion into single room occupancy or apartment units with the “moderate”
investment subsidies available (United States Code 1988). HUD’s definition of
“Single Room Occupancy units” -- sleeping rooms (with or without private baths,
with or without kitchens) and “studio” apartments (with private baths and
kitchenettes) – is broad enough to characterize the majority of the nation’s stock of
more than five million rental units in commercial establishments trading and licensed
as “hotels” and “motels.”
chronically ill (Section 22 et al) are listed in Appendix E. The process of hotel
conversions is continuing, though more often today with state, city, and private
funding than with HUD subsidies. San Francisco’s “Care not Cash” program reduced
monthly stipends paid to the registered homeless granted permanent housing in
former commercial SRO hotels the City took over, refurbished, and contracted
nonprofit organizations to operate (Lelchuk 2002; City of San Francisco 2005; News
Hour 2005).
Although nonprofit developers of urban low cost, permanent housing “have their eye
on” hotel properties they hope to buy and convert, fewer hotel properties are
available for conversion in the major metropolitan centers today. Developers of
affordable permanent housing subsidized by Section 8, Section 811, state,
municipal, or private programs are constructing new buildings, featuring studio
apartments and larger bedroom apartments for families and on site service facilities
for residents including job training, day care centers, and senior dining halls (Dineen
& Fletcher 2003; Levavi 1996, Lakefront 2003e, among others). Several California
jurisdictions have defined styles for “compact living quarters units” (mainly studio
apartments with specified floor space) and other building code requirements that
increase the cost of constructing new SRO residential hotels (Dineen and Fletcher
2003). Innovative designs of for-profit residential buildings with studio apartments
units rented at market rates identified as “single room occupancy” units have been
and are being constructed in western states. Examples are given in Appendix E.
Remodeling
Other projects compete to remodel (or demolish) inexpensive urban residential
hotels, SRO hotels, former “welfare,” and abandoned hotels to create upscale hotels
or residential condo apartment buildings. New urban hotels are being constructed
from scratch on the site of former hotels and by remodeling former apartment, office,
and warehouse buildings, and in suburban and rural areas, wherever zoning
permits. (See above, “Condos in hotels.”) Attempts to revitalize and upgrade older
hotels with legally protected tenants in rent stabilized or subsidized units have led to
unusual combinations of permanent residents and transient guests.
Transient guests come in the main entrance, are issued plastic key
cards, and are entitled to use and charge at the hotel’s bar, restaurant,
spa, Zen meditation room, and other facilities.
One hotel family built hundreds of “retirement hotels” nationwide in the 1990s
only to confront the problem that their concept simply could not be licensed in many
localities. In adapting their national line of “retirement hotels” to local legal
environments, the developers determined that in many jurisdictions, assisted living
domiciliary health care facilities were about the closest any operating license
category came to the chain’s template. The company spun most the properties it
built intended to be retirement hotels into a separate division, creating a chain of
assisted living facilities managed by a health care company well distanced from any
brand in the hotel family.
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In the East Coast area canvassed, two properties legally registered as hotels built
during the 1990s in suburban office parks turned out to be functioning as assisted
living facilities. The properties were in counties that lack any legal class of real
estate resembling a “residential” or a “retirement” hotel. No class of public
accommodation may “discriminate” on the basis of age. Owners of these buildings
classified and taxed as hotels leased to companies who hold licenses from state and
county health departments to operate “assisted living” facilities. It would require
further research to determine whether this phenomenon is widespread or how
frequently properties originally developed, permitted, zoned, legally classified, and
taxed “hotel” real estate function as assisted living (rental) facilities or other “senior
(rental) apartments”.
Hotel to housing
Older hotels and motels are commonly transformed into rental (or condo) residential
apartments with minimal remodeling. (See Berkey-Gerard 2005 for New York City;
California HCD 2004 for San Francisco; Lakefront for Chicago). Conversion of hotels
into housing can be seamless.
Thirty years ago in the West and Southwest, a motel chain pioneered
an innovative style designed and marketed to attract young, single
adults with site facilities such as pools, weight rooms, dance halls,
bars, and laundries. The concept was popular: many singles moved
into these motels. Before the chain of properties were sold and formally
converted into residential rental estate by adding kitchenettes, the motel
chain influenced the design of suburban rental apartment complexes
nationwide.
e
Two years ago on the East Coast, a corporation built one of its
extended-stay apartment brand hotels, using a standard architectural
plan. The structure built was just like brand hotels already operating in
several states and two others less than 20 miles away in an adjacent
state.
The county where the hotel was built, however, refused to issue the
corporation a license to operate the building as a hotel. The minimal
services this brand provides to its month-to-month occupants did not
meet the county’s standards for the level and frequency of services that
hotels are required to provide.
Certain traits seem to predispose hotels and motels as more likely than others to
host residents and sojourners on long, open-ended stays.
Locality specific
Local zoning and licensing categories and requirements for accommodations,
location, competition, and owner-operators’ strategies in the local business climate
appear to indicate which hotels and motels welcome or tolerate residents and long
term stays. Commercial accommodations with residents may, for example, cluster in
jurisdictions with legal codes favorable to settlers and long term stays just over the
“line” of jurisdictions with hostile regulations. Legal environments more hostile than
favorable to residence and long stays include those prohibiting cooking in hotel/motel
rooms, restricting the length of time guests are allowed to stay or requiring high
frequency of services (housekeeping, linen change) in defined types of lodgings.
Hotel policies
Policies favorable or unfavorable to residents, long term sojourners, and “regulars”
may be set by the franchised or associated brand, by the property or chain
owner/operator, or by third-party management companies. Although, perhaps,
modified to fit local ordinances, sites, or local business climates, policies favorable to
settlers and sojourners are intended for application at all the multiple establishments
of a given “hotel group” or chain or brand.
Brand
Brand broadly indicates hotels and motels that encourage or discourage long term
stays. Branding seeks to differentiate and conform a clear and uniform “product” to
communicate for mass consumption and broad advertisement. Policies and
practices that promote or deter long-term and residential stays stamp certain brands.
A brand either waves its welcome mat for settlers, sojourners, or settlers or discretely
excludes them from the profile of its target customers.
At the low end, certain brands accept cash, waive requirements for credit card, and
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nationally offer discounted weekly and/or monthly rates: policies that invite long term
stays. Among the midrange hotels, some hotel brands labeling themselves as
“extended stays” (or “corporate housing”) offer customized, flexible rates and deals,
and extra “reward” credits, and/or contract with organizations that need to house
their employees, contractors, and clients for long stays or during relocations. At the
high end, luxury hotels are doubling over to offer unit buy-in opportunities.
Various policies that encourage long stays may be set by the brand, chain, or
individual property managers. As discussed above, these include discounts
available for members or affiliates of organizations, rates and ceilings on the “block”
3
Com panies that own properties operated under the franchise brands of different “hotel groups”
m ay hire staff experienced in each brand or contract hospitality m anagem ent com panies specialized in
particular brands.
73
of rooms available for the personnel of corporations, government, or the military and
“rewards” for repeat or long term stays.
In the brands that clone the architectural and facility details of properties, the
question is moot as to whether a property bearing that brand name has a “manager’s
apartment” on the premises. All properties operating under the brand either do, or
do not have such features as quarters for resident staff, a coin laundry, an indoor or
outdoor pool, a large lobby, a restaurant on site, an exercise room, meeting rooms,
and many, many more.
“Extras” distinguish one brand from others. Bathrooms in hotels of one brand supply
only a mini-bar of soap wrapped in wax paper with the brand logo; bathrooms in
another brand array plastic bottles, sealed pouches, and other containers of soap,
shampoo, hand creme and conditioner. Depending on brand, units come with or
without high-speed Internet connection, for free or for an extra charge and with or
without a television and cable and a recliner lounge chair in every guest unit. In
order to advertise and meet national expectations, all hotels or motels operating
under a given brand cooperate to equip units with coffee makers, serve morning
coffee and wrapped pastries near the reception desk, lay out a free breakfast buffet
in the lobby, or else don’t. Individual properties do or don’t have an on-site
restaurant; units are or are not priced by day or by the number of occupants;
children under 12 (or 16 or 18) do or else do not “stay free”. Brand practices,
however, may be need to be conditioned by business strategies or adapt to local
rules, conditions, and opportunities.
Over 300 brands mark multiple hotels in the United States. Appendix B lists
numerous brand names in alphabetical order used by two or more hotels or motels in
2005. Three of the brands listed each operates more than a thousand properties.
Appendix B1 highlights brands of extended stay hotels and condotels and brands
offer weekly, “Long Term Stay” or similar discounts. Most brands identified as
extended stays or as encouraging residential stays by offering standard discounts
usually allow franchisees to lease part of their property to organizations and some
brands originate national contracts with FEMA, the Red Cross, or the Armed Forces
on behalf of all their franchisees.
Independents
A true “independent” hotel operates without a “brand” identity, under a unique name,
and adopts idiosyncratic management practices. About half the hotel and motel
properties and majority of single room occupancy hotels, residential hotels, rooming
houses, boarding houses, and bed and breakfast inns in the United States are not
affiliated with a franchise or exclusive brand. Legacy independent hotels and bed
74
and breakfast inns have formed consortia to share centralized publicity and booking.
The regional consortia that provide hospitality business services to associations of
independent hotels or bed and breakfast inns do not rise to level of complexity and
detail of services available through franchised or association “brand” channels. Each
independent projects an unique – rather than a standardized identity.
Independence by itself does not indicate that a hotel welcomes settlers, sojourners
and regulars. Independent hotels are more diverse than branded hotels and range
from country’s finest and most expensive resort and urban luxury hotels to down and
out motor courts on country roads and urban hovels.
The “hotel groups” ranked in some industry literature consist of diverse entities.
Some are chains; some “groups” are sets of property owners and management and
service companies which operate franchises affiliated in a “family” of brands; others
are associations of independent owners operating under brands franchised by the
association, consortia that buy or supply services to multiple hotels, and other
entities. The “hotel group” identified in industry literature as having the largest
number of properties and guest units in the United States is a service company that
provides a consortium of independent, uniquely named, legacy hotels with
centralized representation and services like marketing, booking reservations, and
management consultation.
More than 9,000 companies own and/or manage hotel and motel properties in the
United States including franchises, subsidiaries and parent corporations. Appendix
C illustrates companies that own five or more properties and/or at least a thousand
units and the brands associated with these property owners. This list includes
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examples of vertically integrated chains which own, operate, and directly employ
hotel workers and companies that primarily franchise the brands they originated or
purchased; hospitality companies that incidentally own some of the hotels they
manage; hotel real estate investment trusts, developers and holding companies
which hand management off to contractors or related subsidiaries. This list dates to
2005; during its preparation, three major mergers occurred.
Likely hosts
Categories of hotels, motels, and like indoor accommodations most likely to lodge
settlers, sojourners, and regulars include:
older hotels – rural or urban – displaced from the transient trade,
“extended stay” hotels,
“all suites” and other brands and independents which offer discount weekly
and/or monthly rates to individual patrons
and/or
negotiate discount rates with organizations;
predominantly residential or retirement hotels,
and
hotels which sell units, notably select and high end.
Physically displaced hotels tend to cluster in rural areas on highways built before the
Interstate system and in certain urban areas. Stylistically displaced hotels include
any built 30 or more years ago which have not been recently renovated. (As a rule of
thumb, branded hotels remodel and update every five years to remain attractive to
transients.) More of the physically and/or stylistically displaced properties are
independent “Mom and Pop” operations or “starter hotels” of immigrants entering the
business, although several national motel/hotel economy brands also cater to
residential stays.
At extended stay hotels, over half and up to 80 per cent of the month-to-month
guests would qualify as “resident” applying either Census 2000 rules of residence or
those proposed for Census 2010 (Byerly 2006, 2005). Extended stays are
predominately located in suburbs, office parks, near airports, or off Interstate exits.
While hotels expressly built as “extended stays” after the mid-1990s generally offer
complete apartment units, “all suite” properties compete for the same market. The
national and regional brands and independents that offer weekly, monthly, or the
more-than-one-month “Long Term Stay” rates extend a significant discount off their
least expensive regular and corporate rates to attract individual clients.
Those brands and independents that negotiate blanket rates or contract with
organizations to lodge their associates are implementing a business strategy which
results in hosting people for long stays.
Predominantly residential or retirement (“senior”) hotels lodge people for years who
may, or may not, be considered legal “permanent residents” or “tenants” under local
76
ordinances and who may, or may not, have the option of securing leases on their
units. Predominantly residential hotels may, as noted, reserve units for short term
guests to avoid regulation; in legal environments where settlers and sojourners
cannot achieve legal tenancy hotels may represent residents as transients.
The high end, “full service” or “luxury” hotels most likely to have residents in the units
they offer for sale are in major metropolitan areas and in retirement resorts.
Residents may personally pay on a variety of terms, ranging from day to day to multi-
year leases or may have their stays paid by a third party (e.g., a corporation). The
residents or their benefactor may rent or “own” the unit. These metropolitan hotels
include those which have traditionally served as residences for the wealthy and
certain brands of newer hotels which cater to this trade, including those that sell
guest room and apartment units as “condos” interspersed with units rented for short
term stays.
Among the hotels, motels, B&Bs, and room and board houses contacted in this
study, in all properties where managers told me someone had ever stayed for six
months or more, there was currently at least one person who had been staying at the
hotel for years, well settled or on an open-ended sojourn at the time I canvassed the
property. In conversations about practices in a particular accommodations, the
presence of a resident manager did not have to be probed. In places where people
live long-term, the resident manager figured in narratives about co-residents living
under the same roof.
Hotels, motels, and other commercial and nonprofit accommodations are highly
stratified by economic and condition/ stages of cycle characteristics.
Despite these predictors, people find ways to inhabit all types of hotels, motels, and
like accommodations. The point is that people settle or sojourn for long periods in
some proportion of the units priced across the spectrum – living in situations ranging
from the squalid to the splendid -- where most expected and where least expected.
77
1890
Boarding houses (and military forts) were enumerated as “institutions with a head” in
the 1890 Census of Population (Census Bureau 1979). The scope of “institutions”
and “non-institutional group quarters” treated as census units of population
enumeration expanded and has varied in every subsequent Decennial Census of the
Population.
1933
In 1933, the Census of Business began covering service trades.
1950
The 17th Census of Population enumerated as separate “dwellings” those units in
hotels, lodges, motels, motor courts, tourist courts, rooming houses, lodging houses,
tourist homes, and like paid accommodations which had a separate entrance and
either were equipped for separate cooking or were a suite of two or more private
rooms. People living in such dwellings were enumerated as households. Lodgings
without cooking equipment in units or without suites of rooms were considered “other
types of living quarters” containing “non-dwelling units” whether found in hotels, large
rooming houses, residential club hotels, motels, motor courts, YMCAs, YWCAs,
YMHA, YWHAs, or ”flop houses.” People boarding or lodging “at least four nights a
week” in such places ”even if they spend the weekend at home” were considered
permanent “residents” and the lodgings were considered “their usual place of
residence.”
Groups of at least five residents living in quarters not classified as a dwelling unit, for
example, rooms in a house or hotel “with at least five lodgers ...” were enumerated
on a form (“schedule”) like that used in dwelling units and were tabulated as “quasi-
households.” The population tabulated for 1950 in such “quasi-households” was
5,666,473 (nearly four times larger than the institutionalized population). A “quasi-
household” population of 4,050,950 was estimated to have resided in urban areas,
2,045,660 of whom were white males and 1, 378,738, white females, most of whom
were single or widowed, over age 14, and in the labor force.
Transients –defined as people who did not ordinarily live in the Enumeration District
where they were staying in hotels, lodging houses, tourist homes and other places
where guests normally pay for quarters -- were enumerated on Individual Census
Reports. Transient guests who had no “usual place of residence” were attributed to
the Enumeration District where their respective hotels, motels, rooming houses, or
other lodgings were located. By contrast, transient guests with no fixed place of
work (like traveling salesmen and railway workers), who maintained a “family home”
somewhere else were attributed to the Enumeration District where their families lived
“even though they sleep most of the time away from their family residence.”
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Roomers, lodgers, and boarders staying in “dwelling units” (like houses, apartments,
tents, etc.) were enumerated on a household “schedule” as “unrelated” to the
resident landlord “head of household,” or a married couple, or resident family, along
with live-in domestic employees. Unrelated individuals were aggregated into the
universe in households, along with married couples and families. Roomers and
boarders in populous commercial and nonprofit lodgings were enumerated and
tabulated as a rooming and boarding house population.
1954
The first integrated Economic Census was conducted in 1954. Additional service
industries were added in 1967, 1977, and 1987. Mid to late twentieth century
economic censuses classified industries, firms/companies, and individual
establishments using definitions of the Standard Industrial Code (SIC) and
expressed hierarchies of main industries and their subcategories with numeric codes
from one (most inclusive) to six digits (most detailed). Hotels, motels, organization
membership hotels and clubs, and rooming and boarding houses were classified in
the “Accommodations” industry. Predominantly residential hotels were classified in
the Real Estate Industry.
1960
People residing in living quarters with a kitchen or cooking equipment were once
again enumerated as households. The 1960 Census of Population tabulated the
population living in "rooming and boarding houses” (without cooking equipment) in
the universe of “institutions and other group quarters.” In 1960, the population
tabulated in rooming and boarding houses constituted 12.8 per cent of males
enumerated in all types of institutional and non-institutional “group quarters” and 13.1
per cent of the 1960 females.
1970
1970 T-Night
In the 1970 Decennial Census, large hotels, motels and other lodgings with 50 or
more rooms were enumerated on T-Night. Employees of the accommodations
distributed one envelope containing two blank Individual Census Reports (ICRs) and
an envelope addressed to the local Census office to the units occupied March 31st,
1970. Respondents either mailed in completed forms themselves or left at the
reception desk. Hotel staff destroyed unused envelopes on April 1st.
1970 M-Night
In the M-Night operation on April 6, 1970, Census takers dropped off ICRs at
missions, “flop houses” and “similar accommodations (priced) at $2.00 or less a
night” -- as well as at jails, detention centers, bus depots, railroad stations, and other
such places where people stay. Managers of these sites distributed forms and left
some out for newcomers registering for the night; enumerators returned to pick up
completed forms the next day.
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Accommodations with fewer than 50 rooms renting for more than $2 /night were
included in the case load of the Enumeration District where each was located.
Although some residences that did not meet the 1970 definition of “housing units”
(ibid.:15-3) fell into the residual class of “group quarters,” some were enumerated on
household forms with designated authority entered as the “head of household” (ibid.:
15-5). An example used in census manuals noted that the “landlady” of a rooming or
boarding establishment should be listed as the “head of household” and residents’
relationship to her described by checking the “roomer/ boarder/ lodger” category
printed on the form.
“Special places” designated for “special methods” were separately listed before
enumeration. The list of 1970 Census special places included hotels, motels, and
large rooming or boarding houses, college dormitories, military bases, institutions
such as hospitals, jails, and psychiatric facilities where populations were enumerated
on ICRs, but also Indian reservations and other places singled out for other special
methods (Bureau of Census 1976:5 - 28-29).
Forms for enumerating “households” were designed for “living quarters” that qualified
as “housing” and included questions about physical aspects of the residential units--
whether kitchen facilities were complete (sink with piped water, range or cook stove,
and refrigerator, Q H3) and in the same building, whether entryway access was
direct from the outside or a hall (Q H2), and other items. Questions on these
“housing items” were absent on the Individual Census Forms (ICRs) used to
enumerate residents of living quarters classified as group quarters. The ICR form
had a space where transients staying temporarily could state the address of their
“usual residence”; ICR forms with this blank filled were to be forwarded to the
appropriate Enumeration District.
Beginning in the 1970 Census of Population, the definition of the "college quarters"
(or "college dormitory”) as a “group quarters” unit of population enumeration was
expanded to include residential fraternity and sorority houses.
1972
In 1972, the Census Bureau conducted the first Census of Services and the first
"Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises" was conducted as a supplement of
the 1972 Economic Census. The Census of Services covered Accommodations in
greater detail than had Business Censuses between 1933 and 1967.
Also in 1972, a major revision of the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) was
published. Classes of industries and occupations in the 1970 Decennial and 1972
Economic Censuses were modeled on the 1967 SIC. The 1972 SIC revision was
fully implemented in the second Census of Services in 1977 and other economic
censuses of that year. More nonprofit entities were classified. Nonprofit lodging
establishments including residential fraternity and sorority houses were classified as
organization or membership hotels in the national Standard Industry Classification
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1980
An instruction at the top of the 1980 Census forms mailed to and administered in
housing units instructed respondents to include "lodgers or boarders" living in their
households. Non-relatives paying to live in housing units would continue as a
household “relationship category” in the next two censuses. This change coincided
with a period when rooming houses were being demolished throughout the country
and “roomers,” “boarders,” and other “tenants or subtenants” dispersed into private
households.
Other "rooming houses" and “transient quarters (outdoor accommodations like camp
grounds)” fell into the 1980 universe of “non-institutional” group quarters.
Hotels, motels, and rooming and boarding houses ”with nine or more residents not
related to the householder” were listed as “Special Places” in advance of 1980
census enumerations.
1980 “T-Night”
The 1980 T-Night targeted hotels, motels, YMCAs, YWCAs, and other
accommodations charging more than $4 per night. Individual census reports (“ICRs”)
forms were primarily distributed by cooperating hotel/motel/Y staff, completed by
respondents, and mailed back in envelopes provided. T-Night respondents who
reported no (other) fixed addresses were included in the population of the areas of
their accommodations’ addresses. As in 1970, ICRs returns stating a home address
were supposed to be forwarded to the district Field office covering that address for
checking. People enumerated in rooming and boarding houses, in the T Night
"hotels, motels, and Y's charging more than $4 a night, and (all) residential clubs"
where a "small number of persons were temporarily residing ...at the time of
enumeration who had no permanent residence elsewhere" were tabulated together:
a population of 176,257.
1980 “M-Night”
A tabulated population of 50,794 in “low-cost transient quarters” was largely
collected in the 1980 “M-Night”: a personal visit enumeration sweep conducted April
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8-9, 1980. “M-Night” accommodations were identified as ...” flop houses, hotels,
motels, and similar habitations with accommodations renting for $4 per night or less”
and, as in 1970, other places including missions, local jails, all night movie theaters,
bus depots, train stations and similar venues “known to have persons staying
overnight who had no usual residence elsewhere (URE)” (Census 1984: pages A-3
to-A-7, 58a and page 808, Table 43).
The 1980 list of "special places" with "group quarters" grew in April and May 1980
when Field staff personally visited addresses mailed forms from which no returns
had been received. Enumerators who discovered institutions or group quarters at
these addresses (rather than household “living quarters” where people “prepared
and ate food together”), registered identifications and delivered each a form letter
(D-22) explaining how census information would be gathered at the facility.
Ascription of the “type” of institutions and group quarters discovered by thousands of
Field workers may explain the jump up to 23.5 per cent (from 3.3 per cent in 1970) in
the imputation of group quarters type. Many institutional and non-institutional group
quarters were enumerated by “mop up” consolidated crews after the "follow up"
operation in housing units was concluded.
1988
In the 1988 Dress Rehearsal Census for the 1990 Decennial Census, differential
application of the criteria “ten or more unrelated persons” cast some
accommodations into the household universe and others into the universe of Group
Quarters. Commercial and nonprofit lodgings including rooming houses and
workers’ dormitories were among places enumerated and tabulated as
"non-institutional group quarters” if the establishment had "ten or more unrelated
persons" but as housing units and households if the address had fewer than ten co-
residents. Among the types of accommodations which were classified as "group
quarters" regardless of the number of residents were "flop houses" and "college
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student dormitories." It was either not clear what a “flop house” was or else these
were absent in the 1988 Dress Rehearsal sites, displaced by public and charity
overnight homeless shelters.
The 1988 Dress Rehearsal Post Enumeration Survey (PES), conducted weeks after
and overlapping the last of follow-up enumeration, included "non-institutional group
quarters" like ..."flop houses" and college quarters. Prior to this experiment, the PES
regarded "rooming houses" --and marina and camp outdoor accommodations
establishments --as "no different than the household population”...except "within unit
coverage cannot be assumed to be low" and the proportion of movers might be
"high." After this experiment, the PES excluded the population in units classified as
group quarters from the 1990 PES coverage measurement on the grounds it was too
“mobile” to reconstruct or to verify in a survey conducted well after the “Census Day”
reference date and census enumeration.
1990
For the 1990 Census of Population, rooming and boarding houses were screened for
the presence of “10 or more unrelated persons” necessary to class these places as
“group quarters” rather than as households in housing units. The group quarters
universe was expanded by adding a variety of specified and unspecified (other)
types of places to be treated as group quarters if “10 or more unrelated” co-residents
were found upon enumeration. Application of the rule of 10 added some business
locales to the universe of “housing” units. Census processing collapsed the
population enumerated in those rooming and boarding houses which did meet the
criteria of 10 or more unrelated residents into the more global tabulation category of
“other non-institutional group quarters population.” For the first time in a hundred
years, the population in rooming and boarding accommodations was neither broken
out nor reported in any published tabulations.
The 1990 definition of “emergency shelters for homeless persons (with sleeping
facilities)” included hotels/motels, and ‘flop houses’ charging $12 a night or less
(excluding taxes) per unit per night;...hotels and motels used entirely for homeless
persons regardless of the nightly rate charged; rooms in hotels and motels used
partially for the homeless where people who stayed the night of March 20th.” On that
night, the national sweep enumeration known as “S Night” was conducted. In 1990,
public social services were preferentially placing homeless families with children in
commercial so-called “welfare hotels,” paying “market rates” for hotel rooms with
substandard conditions.
The Census Bureau made a systematic effort to identify and list units in residential
hotels (including SRO hotels) as “housing units” and enumerate these via the mail
out distribution method in the “household” universe. Less attention was paid to the
majority of hotels and motels which were neither used as “shelters” nor primarily
residential.
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Ethnographic evaluations of coverage in the 1990 Census provided insights into the
treatment of motels and rooming houses and people living in them. Ethnographers
independently listed living quarters and enumerated households; their alternative
enumerations were compared to Census results. In Oregon, Spanish-speaking
households of recent immigrant farm workers had spontaneously converted a rural
motel into Single Room Occupancy residences, bringing in their own cooking
equipment (Montoya 1992). In California and New York cities and suburbs, low
income residents were discovered crowded in Single Room Occupancy rooming
house units carved out of former single family homes and former apartment buildings
(Mahler 1993; Romero 1992; Velasco 1992).
1992
The 1992 Economic Census classified and tabulated 48,619 “firms” subject to
federal income tax separately from nonprofits operating "hotels, rooming houses,
camps, and other lodging places” in the SIC 70* Accommodations Industry. Hotels
and motels (SIC 7011) were distinguished from "other lodging places" (SIC 702*,
703*) and from (nonprofit) "organization hotels and lodging houses on a membership
basis" (exclusively accommodating members, SIC 704*). Breakouts tabulated
hotels, including casino hotels, separately from motels, and within the hotel category,
hotels with 25 or more guestrooms and hotels with fewer than 25. Motels were
distinguished from “tourist courts and motor hotels.” A total of 1,993 membership
hotels exempt from federal income tax were reported. In the 1992 Economic
Census geographical area tabulations and in comparisons between 1992 and 1987
Economic Census data, tax-exempt membership hotel and lodging establishments
were combined with tax exempt camps (SIC 7032).
1990s
During the 1990s, the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) was
developed and adopted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. The 1997
Economic Census assigned codes to “bridge” between the old SIC and the new
NAICS systematics.
Establishments and companies that pay taxes and forward employees’ withholdings
produce administrative records more frequently than non-profit establishments,
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businesses without employees, and other concerns that file taxes once a year.
Because information on employers was more copious and updated more often, hotel
establishments, separate statistics were produced for employers and for non-
employers. In the Accommodations industries, establishments with employees tend
to be the larger hotels and chains and non-employers the just as numerous family
run independents.
Prior to Census 2000, around 43,000 hotels, motels, bread and breakfast inns, and
similar lodgings were listed as “Hotel/motel/SRO” type “Special Places.” The
inventory of commercial lodgings was largely copied from the directory of one
national hotel association. “Special Places” identified as “Hotel/Motel/Single Room
Occupancy (SRO)” were screened by telephone and personal visit interviews for the
presence of managers’ apartments and other criteria. The 1996 (pilot) Facility
Questionnaire asked
if their lowest regular night rate, excluding taxes, was $12 or less;
if they were a single room occupancy “SRO” and
if they were associated with a “..shelter, soup kitchen or outreach program for
homeless people.”
In 1996, the national average rate for a hotel or motel guest room was $70.93 and by
2000, it was $85.89 (AH&LA 2000, 2001). The 1990 Census mark of $12 per night
per room was less than half the average unit day rate in the nation’s least expensive
limited service hotels, motels, and motor courts in rural poverty areas. An industry
survey estimated only three per cent of the nation’s entire stock of hotel or motel
guest rooms were available in 2000 for $30 or less per night per room (AH&LA 2001;
see Table 3, below). In 2000, $12 was lower than the average rate of $15/night
charged for a camping or trailer hook/up site in outdoor commercial camp grounds
and equal to about one sixth of the average room day rate charged by bed and
breakfast inns and full service hotels. The cut off figure was calculated “per room
85
per night” rather than per person/per night. If three people, for example, shared the
cost of renting a $25/night hotel room, the cost per night per person would be lower
than the cutoff.
Slightly reworded questions were applied in the 1998 Dress Rehearsal version and
the national telephone and personal visit “Facility Questionnaire” operations
implemented to screen “Special Places,” list group quarters and housing units in
Special Places, and assign type codes prior to Census 2000. The Special Place
Facility Questionnaire (Form D-351 of the United States Census 2000) asked in
facilities identified as hotels, motels, and “single room occupancy (SRO)”
“Do you have units where staff or guests live permanently?” If the response was
affirmative, then field workers asked the name and address or a description of the
physical location of these units.
The units listed as “housing” in these resort condo hotels did not correspond with
their various layouts: some are apartments with full kitchens and private baths;
others are typical hotel guest rooms or suites with private baths with “kitchen”
furnishings limited to portable, plug-in equipment like mini-fridges and microwaves.
Along this stretch of the ocean coast, units, facilities, services, furnishings,
ownership arrangements, sublet management, and style distinguish condo hotels
from vacation condo apartment buildings. The units in condo hotels are rooms or
suites with private baths; even “studio” apartments are rare. Condo hotels have more
and a greater variety of attractions on the premises, including like pools, fitness
centers, parking garages, beach side bars, restaurants, and night clubs than do the
vacation condo apartment buildings. Condo hotels provide uniform housekeeping
and linen services to units regardless of the occupants’ status as owner, sub-letter,
or temporary hotel guest. Condo hotels furnish units with standard furniture, fixings,
and appliances; retain ownership of the majority of units, and directly manage renting
condo units to non-owners. Guests reserving and renting units in one of these
condo hotels, which are among the few hotels open year round at this beach resort,
deal exclusively with the hotel management.
86
In the 2000 Census, units in various functioning and former hotels were alternatively
listed as “housing” and as “group quarters”. All units in some residential hotels and
accommodations with a mix of permanent residents and transient guests were listed
as housing while other, similar establishments were classified as some type of group
quarters. Buildings formerly operated as hotels which non-profit organizations had
remodeled into supportive, permanent, or transitional housing were alternatively
listed as housing, unit by unit, or as group quarters. Equivalent residential
arrangements, hotel units and properties were treated differently.
How Decennial census workers classified the hotels, motels, boarding houses,
YMCAs, YWCAs, SRO hotels (and SRO housing converted from hotels) listed as
“group quarters” in some cases influenced which occupants were enumerated.
In some commercial hotels and motels classified on 2000 Decennial lists as
emergency shelters, self-paying residents were collectively enumerated together with
homeless guests enjoying third-party stays, while in such establishments, people
paying for themselves (even if from the proceeds of public assistance) were ignored,
87
In 2000 and later, several commercial SRO hotels in the “skid row” district were
evicting occupants every 21 to 28 days to prevent them from achieving rights as
“residents” or “tenants” under local rent ordinances. Counting only the officially
homeless placed by third parties could be attributed to the Decennial’s narrow focus
on homeless placed in hotels or to hotel gatekeepers interested in denying that other
occupants could be considered “residents” even though they lived no where else
indoors.
The units of some “side of the road” court motels like the “Star” canvassed as
predominantly occupied by permanent residents were listed and enumerated as
“apartments” in Census 2000 while other, similar motels on the same highways were
classified as “shelters” thus inflating the count of the “homeless” with motel residents
paying their own way. In debriefings after Census 2000, Field staff formally stated
their opinion that a Western style of motels called “six packs” were full of residents
and should have been listed and enumerated. Six packs were not listed or
enumerated, apparently due to a decision that they neither fit definitions for the
“housing” nor of any “group quarters” units of enumeration (Bureau of Census, Field
2000a&b).
Contemporary editions of the Business Register frame used in the Census Bureau’s
Economic Directorate listed tens of thousands more commercial accommodations
and hotel and motel establishments than were ever inventoried as “special places” or
included on any editions of the 2000 Census Decennial component frame of special
places and group quarters. As of the Fall of 2000, the Business Register listed
107,058 establishments classified by 70* bridge SIC Accommodation Industry
codes. This count included employers and non-employers, single unit
establishments and enterprises with multiple locations, but excluded indoor lodgings
for hire operated by public, local, state, or federal government agencies or by the
military.
(Also reported were 4,157 recreational vehicle park and camp grounds other than
recreational camps, cf. 2002 Accommodations, Table 3, Production Lines by Kind of
Business for the United States, line 2 - product code 20010, page 3).
Table 1 :
Number of hotel, motel, and like lodging establishments, 1997-2002,
United States
Employers Non-employers
(Sources for Table 1 :1997 Econom ic Census Non-em ployer Statistics, United States
http://www.census.gov/epcd/nonemployer/1997/us/US000.HTM; 1997 Non-em ployer Statistics,
Accom m odation and food Services, United States
http://www.census.gov/epcd/nonemployer/1997/us/US000_72.HTM; 2002 Econom ic Census Non-
em ployer Statistics, Accom m odation and food services, United States
http://www.census.gov/epcd/nonem ployer/2002/us/US000_72.HTM; Accom m odations 2002 Industry
Series EC 02-721-01 (Septem ber 2004)
http://www.census.gov/prod/ec02/ec0272i01t.pdf)
In contrast, rooming and boarding houses and bed and breakfast inn are remarkably
unconcentrated. The four largest rooming and boarding house firms (measured by
employees and receipts) each operated a single establishment. Together, the 50
largest rooming and boarding house firms in the United States accounted for 21.3
per cent of the rooming and boarding establishments with employees reported. The
50 largest companies operating Bed and Breakfast Inns with employees together
operated only 12.6 per cent of the B&B establishments enumerated in the 2002
Economic Census (Bureau of Census 2004b).
These questions build in the assumption that units are “rooms”– an assumption
outdated by the present stock of more than five million complete studio and bedroom
apartment units in hotels and motels. Although asking about people who “live or stay
most of the time” improves upon screening questions used in earlier Decennials that
inquired about “permanent” residents, the term “rooms” could confuse contacts,
especially in businesses intent on attracting long term stays with studio and bedroom
apartment and “all suites” units. The term “apartment” appears in the question
intended to screen for units where managers –rather than clients– live.
Table 2:
Number of hotel, motel, rooming houses and other lodging establishments
operated by business controlled by members of minority groups in 1997 and the per
cent in 2002 of the minority businesses among all accommodations businesses,
United States
1997 2002
Taxed With Employees
Num ber Num ber Per cent
MINORITY OW NED 18,539 11,318
ASIAN 5.9%
by Asian Indians *4 11,390 7,924
by Chinese 1,306 884
by Hispanics 1,795 571 3.9%
by African Am ericans 1,222 236 1.6%
by Am erican Indians or 589 249 0.5%
Native Alaskans
by Native Hawaiians and 589 249 0.1%
Pacific Islanders
(Sources for Table: 1997 Minority Business Owners; 2002 Survey of Business Owners advance report,
Census Bureau)
New York City sponsors a “Housing and Vacancy Survey” conducted by the Census
Bureau which include “SRO” units, defined by the city as lacking bathrooms or
kitchens or both. Data from this survey is widely used by city planners and by
housing analysts. (See Blackburn 1986; Schill and Scafidi 1997, among others.)
The 2002 survey iteration estimated 6,777 housing units in New York City were used
for single room occupancy and 15,924 had been converted into rooming houses.
The Bureau conducts a triennial “Housing and Vacancy Survey”. Prior to 1978, the
Housing and Vacancy Survey excluded “SRO-type” and “Single Room Occupancy”
rooming houses and hotels where at least 25 percent of units were used for transient
occupancy.
The principal respondents for the one-time “National Survey of Homeless Assistance
Providers and Clients” conducted by the Census Bureau in 1996 were nonprofit
providers of services in any way linked to funding or programs designed to benefit
the homeless. In the arena of shelter and housing, although a few providers which
operate nonprofit Section 8 hotels were included, operators of shelters and
supportive or “transitional” housing were over represented; operators of commercial
hotels contracting to house the homeless were not considered “providers”.
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Industry surveys
American Hotel and Lodging Association (AH&LA) publishes an annual profile of the
lodging industry (AH&LA 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, and see 2000). AH&LA is a dual
membership association of partnered state and city lodging associations. The
association claims to represent 10,000 "property members" who control 1.4 million
guest rooms, These profiles characterize the number or per cent of properties
surveyed by location (quoted above in the section on locations), price, and other
features. Figures on the hotel and motel properties and guest units in the United
States surveyed priced under $30/day in the period 2000-2003 are summarized in
Table 3, below:
Table 3:
Per cent of hotel and motel properties and guest units surveyed priced
under $30/night, 2000-2003, United States
Since 2001, this association’s annual profiles have summarized information on the
47 thousand hotels with 15 or more rooms enrolled in Smith Travel Service’s
continuously updated proprietary “US Lodging Census Database.” Entries contain
the name, address, contact information, date of construction, date of last renovation,
room count, chain affiliation, amenities, and census tract, among other
characteristics for each property listed. Hotels are classified as “luxury, upper
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upscale, upscale, mid-scale with food and beverage, mid-scale without food and
beverage, economy chains, or as upper, middle, and lower tier independents.” The
entire data base is available for purchase as are breakdowns by state, county,
census tracts, or geographical "markets" areas.
Smith Travel Service also collects monthly surveys from hotels voluntarily
participating in the firm’s Accommodation Reports (STAR) program, returning
aggregate statistics to participants. As of late 2005, about 22,000 hotels were
participating. Many industry analysts rely on the lodging data base or the STAR
volunteer sample, although hotels with 14 or fewer guest units are not excluded by
definition and less than half the hotels and motels in the United States are enrolled.
For example, based on this travel service’s data, Ernst and Young (2005) calculated
the supply of hotel/motel properties grew at the rate of three to four per cent a year
between 1997 and 2000, dropped to 1.34 per cent in 2003, one percent in 2004.
They projected growth in 2005 around 0.7 per cent. Though growth of whole hotel
properties may be leveling, the “new” hotel/motels opening in the first five years of
the 21st century tended to have more units with more “complete” facilities. Properties
newly constructed or remodeled from existing hotels or other structures brought the
number of units in hotels and motels with 15 or more up over 4 ½ million.
Prospectively, between 125,000 - 200,000 “new” units may be built every year.
Given industry’s perspective that remodeled properties count as “new” this does not
imply that a net million more units will be added by 2010 as some existing units will
be recycled and some will disappear. The physical plants of hotels and motels
decline; businesses which depend on attracting a stream of customers believe hotels
must be constantly upgraded and remodeled. As noted in the section on
Conversions, many older “displaced” properties are formally or informally turned into
some other class of real estate or are demolished. Industry sources do not track the
attrition of hotel/motel properties, nor the loss of hotel/motel rooms. Except in areas
of natural disaster, unit loss disproportionately occurs among the smaller, older,
independent and “displaced” properties – the “low end” where people are more likely
to reside, sojourn long term, and cycle through.
The problem of multiple companies laying claim to the same location as their place
of business ("establishments") affects statistics produced by, for, and on the
accommodations industry.
To sort out differences between hotel brands and the companies that own properties
operating under brand or unique names, compare the attached appendices, B and
C. Appendix B lists national and regional brand names alphabetically. The brands
and “sub-brands” included operated a minimum of two properties in 2005. Appendix
B is an extract from a data base prepared for the research reported here. The
appendix notes which brands are chains (multiple properties under common
ownership and management), which are franchised and operated by multiple owner-
operators, and which are both franchised and operated by a core chain. Other items
noted are each brand’s parent corporation, the number of properties and guest
units, and unit types: guestrooms with bathrooms, suites, studios, or bedroom
apartments.
Appendix B, Part 2 focuses on brands of “extended stay” hotels (most of which offer
studio or bedroom apartment units), brands which offer long term stay (“LTS” /
monthly) discounts on "suites" and guestrooms, brands with owner-occupied condo
units, brands of private residence clubs, and illustrative brands in the rival industry of
renting “corporate” furnished temporary housing. Properties operating under these
brands are more likely than other brands to have a core of resident settlers and
sojourners.
DISCUSSION
For decades, the Census Bureau defined and refined the concepts of the “dwelling”
and later the “housing unit” as the primary unit of population enumeration and
tabulated into the “population in households” people enumerated at addresses
classified as “housing units.” People living in units classified as housing/households
have been contrasted and tabulated separately from the population classified as
living in institutions or “non-institutional group quarters.”
Today, there are more hotels, motels, and like accommodations in the United States
than ever before. An increasing number and proportion of hotel/motel units are
“complete apartments” that fully meet the Census Bureau’s physical definition of
“housing units.”
NEXT STEPS
Considerations
Studio and bedroom apartments in hotels, motels, and especially, “extended stay”
hotels meet the Census Bureau’s physical definition of a “housing unit.”
The accommodation industry’s trend of building and retrofitting properties with studio
and/or bedroom “complete apartments” needs to be considered in deciding how to
list units in hotels and motels. Complete apartments are housing units which the
Census Bureau has traditionally treated as a basic unit for the enumeration of the
population and includes in samples for demographic surveys.
Extended stay hotels merit attention on several counts. First, most extended stay
hotels offer complete apartments, that is, housing units with kitchens and bathrooms.
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Second, extended stays hotels are inhabited by residents, primarily sojourners who
stay for months or years while they are “in between” other solutions for housing, in
the process of relocating, or working. However “temporary” they may conceive their
situations, many sojourners have no homes other than their hotels. Third, extended
stay hotels converge with "serviced" rental apartments. The physical units,
furnishings, and services each provide are similar; the main differences are in how
they are licensed locally and how they bill tenants. (In the rival industry of temporary
or “corporate” housing, intermediary agencies lease apartments in serviced
apartment buildings for subletting to clients.) Extended stay hotels charge and
renew occupancy by calender periods measured by the day, week, or month;
furnished serviced apartments lease for "temporary" periods typically by the week or
month. Some “corporate housing” agencies claim they can move their clients in and
out of apartments day-by-day and several promote extended-stay hotels along with
serviced apartment or house rental options. If apartments in rental real estate
buildings available for short stays are considered “housing units” then why not treat
apartments in hotels the same way?
Census 2000 methods appear to have avoided people who reside in hotels, with the
exception of those in the low end. First, less than half the commercial
accommodations operating in the United States in the late 1990s and in 2000
country – a little over 40,000-- were identified as potential hotel/motel “Special
Places” on the pre-census inventory. Second, during listing operations, the facility
questionnaire screened hotels and motels by asking contacts to identify only those
units occupied by “permanent” residents, resident managers, and the homeless.
Appraisal of an individual’s occupancy as “permanent” is highly subjective, even in
the mind of the residents. Settlers, content with living in their respective hotels,
might admit to being “permanent” residents, however, in jurisdictions where
occupants of hotels, motels, boarding houses, and other commercial
accommodations lack tenants’ rights, they might filter this sense of permanence.
Sojourners – no matter how long they have lived in commercial accommodations,
or how dim the chances they will move on– regard their stays as temporary. Hotel
staff are in a better position to answer questions based on observations and
business records than they are to second-guess occupants’ intentions of staying
forever.
In the fieldwork for this research, I found hotel staff and managers willing and able to
answer the question:
Has anyone been living in this hotel for a month or more? For six
months?
A de facto rule of residence focused on where a person lives and sleeps “most of the
time” clearly places settlers and sojourners as residents of their hotel, motel, or like
accommodations. Were “most of the time” correctly calculated, it will also include
those “regulars” who routinely sleep four or more nights a week at a hotel, motel, or
B&B, or who seasonally sojourn in a motel for a longer period each year than they
“live” anywhere else.
People across the entire spectrum of economic circumstances live in hotels, motels,
and like accommodations. Wealthy and middle class people live in hotels of different
styles, price ranges, and locations than those where low income and very poor
people live.
Inner-city single room occupancy hotels received more attention in the 1990 and
2000 Decennial Censuses than rural low end, and far more than the midrange and
high end establishments. The practice of setting an artificial and antiquated ceiling
amount charged per night to qualify commercial accommodations as a potential unit
of enumeration needs to be suspended. The low rate ($12/night in 2000!) introduced
a bias prejudicing the enumeration of retirees, working people, and multimillionaires
who live in hotels.
Among the hotel residents and sojourners interviewed in this research during 2005,
most were paying between $45 and $90 /night. The lowest rent paid worked out to
$19/night and the highest, to $1,500/night. The settlers paying the least paid weekly
in cash for a bedroom and private bath. The settlers paying the most paid their
condo and services fees monthly on the bedroom apartment they owned and
occupied.
Industry. Apply the 7th and 8th digits (reserved for country use in NAICS) to identify
these subtypes. Extended stay hotel establishments are already far more populous
than the “casino hotel” type currently distinguished under NAICS. The reliance of
extended stay hotels on lengthy stays make them an odd fit under the rubric of
‘travelers’ accommodations.
The U.S. Code requires that federal definitions rely on and conform to NAICS,
although various pre-existing public laws and the Decennial Census and
Demographic Surveys refer to types of accommodations that NAICS does not
specify.
3)Enumerate residents of hotels, motels, and large boarding houses like residents of
housing units in demographic surveys and the Decennial Census without prejudice
or preconceptions.
4) List and enumerate all “complete apartments” (that is, with private bathrooms and
kitchens) as housing units, regardless of their location in buildings named or licensed
101
Define, list, and enumerate units in hotels, motels, and like accommodations
according to the physical characteristics and equipment of the units, rather than by
rental arrangements made by their occupants.
List complete apartments in hotels and motels as "regular" housing units, subject to
mail out and classify them as "vacant" housing if unoccupied.
5) Use the 2007 Economic Census results by county and last minute information
from industry sources to reference and update Master Address File listings of hotels
motels, boarding and rooming houses, and organizational hotels.
Recommended research
1) Research social behaviors and communities in different kinds of hotels and
motels. Fund ethnographic participant observation research to take place
simultaneously in various types of hotels, motels, and larger boarding houses in
different regions of the country, and in rural, suburban, and urban settings, following
a uniform protocol of observations during a one month stay in each accommodation
study site.
In any jurisdiction in the United States, local understanding of terms like “hotel,”
“motel”, “bed and breakfast inn” and “rooming house” are forcefully conditioned by
state and local legal definitions. Regulations literally prohibiting certain variants
influence what locals have available to observe. Even the most fundamental names,
beginning with the term “hotel”, refer to physically and legally different businesses
and layouts in different jurisdictions. The Census Bureau staff attach the meanings
common in the vernacular vocabulary around headquarters to various terms they
formally use to describe “types” of accommodations. Elsewhere, the same terms are
102
legally enforced to mean other things. Census Bureau name labels for classes of
accommodation establishments and “special places” are more compatible with
vernacular understandings in jurisdictions around headquarters (Washington, D.C.,
Maryland, and Virginia) than in other parts of the country due to application of the
personal cultural knowledge of staff.
A few examples follow. The Decennial lists and enumerates rooming houses as
Special Places, on the blanket assumption that rooming houses are places where
people live, yet, as elaborated above, assumes occupants of hotels are transients
and screening only for resident managers’ apartments and sections where the
homeless are placed, skips out most hotels. These assumptions buttressed by law
in the District of Columbia. D.C. explicitly prohibits rooming houses and boarding
houses from accommodating “transients” who intend to stay less than 30 days;
“transients” lodge in establishments D.C. classifies as hotels or hostels. However,
Humboldt County, California, is among the jurisdictions which place no restriction on
brief stays in rooming and boarding houses. As noted, state laws in New York State,
Illinois, and California recognize numerous fine classifications of hotels, including
residents and for transients, which are further specified in the regulations of local
jurisdictions like Humboldt County.
A compilation of the current legal definitions, standards, licensing criteria, and zoning
for accommodations open to the public or privately hosting members could be used
to identify terms taken for granted in the Census Bureau which mean different things
in different parts of the United States and to analyze the convergences and
divergences in definitions and regulations and more commonly understood terms.
Definitions from the laws of the 50 states, the most populous counties or county
equivalents in each state, and Puerto Rico could be systematically compiled from
government Internet sites and law data bases. A bonus would be to identify in each
state, county, city, and local civil division the pertinent licensing and zoning
authorities; these often maintain complete database lists of the facilities they
regulate which could be useful for inventory and frame development.
Currently, the Census Bureau does not have a complete list of properties licensed or
operating as public and private accommodations. Changing categories and
definitions have destabilized counts and statistical information about this universe.
For example, in the Economic Directorate, the classification and reporting on
accommodations establishments have been based on such characteristics as:
During the course of this research, several national "brands" were withdrawn from
the market and, in the areas researched, properties bearing those brands were
104
The nature of the accommodations industry has changed. The historic American
tradition of living in hotels, motels, and like accommodations is reviving and
reinventing itself in unexpected places.
105
Tools from the ethnographic method known as the study of culture at a distance were applied
in this research. These are useful when the subject population or cultural system is either
inaccessible or too populous for participant or other direct ethnographic observation. The
method was developed by anthropologists and psychologists seeking to understand the
national cultures of allies and enemies during World War 2 (Benedict 1946; Mead [1951]
2000; Mead and Métraux 1953, among others). Its elements include semantic and thematic
analysis of propaganda, in-depth open-ended interviews with representatives of various social
strata, review of the known historical, geographical and legal framework, and analysis of
newspaper and other contemporary popular accounts.
There are tens of thousands of properties and actors in the accommodations industry of the
United States: a single researcher working for a few months could not possibly access and
observe this domain. However, hotels and other public accommodations profusely depict
themselves in media outlets, notably on the Internet. In the case of hotels, their own publicity,
ads, press releases, and other self-representations, industry surveys and profiles, press and
historical accounts were reviewed. In-depth interviews were conducted with residents,
occupants, managers, and staff at selected hotels and motels.
Areas researched were one Midwest metropolis and a transect within 10 miles of an older
highway on the East Coast, including the cities, counties, towns, and planned areas this
highway crosses. Hotels, motels, boarding houses, rooming houses, establishments licensed
as bed and breakfast inns and similar accommodations within the two research areas were
listed and canvassed. Systematic information items from media sources were collected on
hundreds of establishments and verified by “windshield” canvassing. Selected examples were
contacted to represent national brands, physical configurations, zoning locations, and local
variations of legal types. About as many independent hotels and motels were contacted as
brand establishments and no more than one example of the same brand was contacted.
By agreement with the people I interviewed, the exact study areas; the identity, brand, and
address of hotels contacted, and, of course, the identities of the volunteer respondents and
consultants are Census confidential. (Identifying information on national brands and property
conversions in the appendices are from publicly available sources.)
The types of hotels, motels, and similar accommodations in the jurisdictions along the East
Coast transect highways, both rural and urban, shared certain conceptualizations, perceived
limitations, physical forms, and locations that were very different than those found in the
Midwest city, and reported in metropolitan centers other than those in the study areas. This
led to a look at the local laws and regulations that set parameters which resulted in many of
the observed differences, clarified by conversations with local government officials and
expanded by sampling variations in legal definitions and regulations elsewhere in the United
States.
106
When I first began screening for residents, I set my sights low. I asked the staff at the hotels
selected for contact, if --as far as they personally knew-- anyone had ever stayed there for
“one month or more” and if there anyone “now” who had been staying for at least a month.
Staff had one of two reactions to these questions. One reaction was the immediate positive
acknowledgment that, yes, people had and were currently staying -- but for a lot longer than
one month! -- for more months or for many years. The alternative reaction was a definite
negative: no, guests never stay for long -- sometimes followed by a volunteered explanation of
why not, the reasons why long stays did not occur. My initial contacts led me to screen hotels
and motels more boldly, for people who had been living in the hotel for “6 months or more”
or whom staff believed would be staying for a long time.
In the establishments where people were living, I recruited residents for private discussions
directly or by asking staff to take my business card and give it to one resident they selected.
The resident respondents had been living in their respective hotels for years. They signed and
received a consent and confidentiality agreement and were compensated for the time they
spent in-depth, open-ended conversations with me about their lifestyle of living in a hotel. At
the request of the volunteer resident respondents, these sessions took place in the hotel or
motel unit where they lived.
Each discussions lasted over an hour. I took notes and sessions were tape recorded if
respondents gave that optional consent.
REFERENCES CITED
(HOTEL ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY)
107
Ahhaitty, Glenna
1999 Testimony before the United States Senate.
http://indian.senate.gov/1999hrgs/census5.4/ahhaitty.pdf/
Voices concerns for the undercount of urban American Indians, noting that the Los
Angeles Agency on the Elderly found 1/6th of the American Indian seniors the
agency surveyed in 1990 were living in single room occupancy hotels.
http://www.ahma.com/products_info_center_lip_2002.asp/
Indicator data as of the close of 2001 based on information from The American
Economics Group, Inc.; D. K. Shifflet and Associates, Ltd.; Smith Travel Research
(survey); the Travel Industry Association of America; and the U.S. Department of
Commerce, International Trade Administration, Office of Travel and Tourism
Industries.
Arkansas Legislature
nd Arkansas Code (non annotated) Title 1 General provisions, Chapter 2
The Code and Regulations, 3-9-402. Definitions Hotel; 10 (A) (I)
Private Club Posted at: http://arkleg.state.ar.us/
Arkansas’ definition of a hotel or motel as having 50 or more rooms for sleeping
accommodations and 50 or more chairs in a restaurant for serving food is quoted in
Appendix A.
Barnes, Jeff
109
2004 Proposed NYS TANF plan New York State’s tier II family shelter
system. Power Point Presentation, October 7-8, 2004.
http:// www.hrsa.gov/homeless/
pa_materials/nlm/ny_barnes_presentation.ppt/
Presents slides explaining how New York State plans to allocate funds for “second
tier” family shelters in 2005.
Berkey-Gerard, Mark
2005 Hotels in New York, Gotham Gazette (February 21, 2005).
“The first building built in New York specifically as a hotel was the City Hotel
in lower Manhattan in 1794... By the early 1900s, there were approximately 700
hotels in the city. Today, there are approximately 70,000 hotel rooms in the city, the
most of any city in the country....New York City's real estate market is so strong that
many hotels are converting part or all of their space into residential apartments - and
hoping New Yorkers will want to live there. Hotels like The Mayflower, Helmsley
Windsor, Delmonico and Empire have all been sold in recent years and will be at
least partially converted into residential buildings. ....Beginning in April, The Plaza
will convert 650 of its 800 hotel rooms on the upper floors into luxury condos, which
will sell for between $2,500 to $3,000 a square foot. The Plaza will still maintain 150
hotel rooms... "Today, people are really buying a lifestyle, and owning [an apartment]
at The Plaza will be like living in a hotel, but you own it..." (Note: The *Mayflower in
New York City was demolished to construct a condominium apartment building.)
Bernstein, Nina
2002 Once again, trying housing as a cure for homelessness,
New York Times (June 23, 2002).
“By February 2001, the number of people lodging nightly in the shelter system
equaled the 1980s peak of 28,737.... The Giuliani administration, like the Koch
administration in the 1980s, turned more and more to hotel rooms, which cost about
$3,000 a month, far more than permanent apartments. Last July (2001), the number
of homeless families with children in the system surpassed all previous records, and
that trend has only accelerated. Last month, a record of 33,887 homeless people
slept in the shelters each night, including 14,553 children and 11,612 adults in 7,879
families....”
See Coalition for the Homeless, New York (2005) for more recent numbers.
Biz-Stay.com
2005 Extended Stay hotels compared. Posted as:
http://www.biz-stay.com/home/cfm?page=extendedstaychains/
(Version accessed April 4, 2005)
One source for information presented in Appendix B, Brands, Part 2, Extended Stay.
This site publishes the facilities, prices, offers and other characteristics of extended
stay brand hotels surveyed in December and June.
Blackburn, Anthony J.
1996 Single room living in New York City, New York City Department of
Housing Preservation and Development (September 1996).
This study more broadly defines “single room” units, covering those in many New
York’s Class A SRO hotels, rooming houses, transient hotels, and
supportive/supported SRO non-profit housing.
111
1986 Single room occupancy in New York City, New York City Department of
Housing Preservation and Development, (January 1986) Part 1-1 to
1-8.
Identifies the forms and stages of creation of SRO residential buildings in New York
City suggesting most were converted from “old- and new-law tenement buildings”
subdivided during the 1930s and analyses trends in data from the Housing and
Vacancy Survey. This study adopts the pre-1978 H&VS definition excluding SRO
units in hotels and boarding/rooming houses which rent 25 per cent or more units to
transients.
Bloom, David C.
1998 The growth of homelessness in Seattle and King County,
Proceedings of the Community Conference on Homelessness:
Causes and Solutions. (October 10, 1998)
In Seattle in the early 60ºs there were 24,000 SRO units in downtown renting for
about $60/month.”Seattle was a working man’s town. There were loggers, railroad
men and seamen, and there was (a)...huge supply of low-income hotels....During the
80ºs, most of the old SRO stock was removed to make way for office, commercial
and condominium development, convention center construction, and parking lots
....Coinciding with the loss of over 4,000 (SRO) units in the 80ºs was... an explosion
of homelessness".
Brodhead, Frank
1999a Harlem’s gentrification and its discontents. Posted on Tenant Net
in April 1999.
http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Apr99/harlem.html/
“According to the best statistics available from HPD, some 2,000 of Manhattan's
3,800 SRO addresses are in the Harlem area covered by Community Boards 9 and
10, and these buildings include more than 28,000 SRO rooms.” Discusses eviction of
tenants in a Harlem SRO (rooming house) by the non-profit “Family Preservation
Center, incorporated as a not-for-profit social-services organization in 1994... (FPC)
had no visible activity in the low-income housing field until March 1998. Since then, it
has purchased at least 16 Harlem brownstones with about $5 million in federally
backed loans.”
1999b SRO housing: for tourists or New Yorkers? Posted on Tenant Net
March 1999. http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Mar99/sro.html/
“A large portion of Manhattan’s SRO housing is in residential hotels, especially on
the West Side. It is here that the tourist boom has had it greatest effect, tempting
even fourth- and fifth-string hotels to dress themselves up as tourist hotels offering
rooms at $75 and $100 per night. To cash in on this bonanza, hotel operators must
not only advertise widely and make cosmetic improvements, but force out permanent
residents to make room for the tourists....”
1998 SRO tenants-- affordable housing under siege. Posted on Tenant Net
112
October 1998.
http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Oct98/sro.html/
“...in Harlem, SRO housing usually means a 12 to 24-unit brownstone, often
converted long ago from a single-family residence to a rooming house. Most people
who live in SRO housing have incomes of under $10,000 per year, and 50% pay
more than half of their income as rent. About two out of five are employed, and most
of the others are disabled or retired. About 20% of SRO residents receive the
public-assistance shelter
allowance of $215 per month. Typical rents range from $90 to $125 per week.”
Describes on-going conversion of two SRO hotels into tourist hotels and new
measures proposed to prevent illegal harassment of hotel residents.
Brownrigg, Leslie A.
2003 Ethnographic social network tracing of highly mobile people.
Posted as http://www.census.gov/pred/www/rpts/J.2.pdf/
or http://www.census.gov/pred/www/rpts/J.2.wpd/
http://www.census.gov/pred/www/rpts/J.2%20Appendix.pdf/
Considering how highly mobile people were documented as using hotels, motels,
rooming houses, and camp grounds in six independently researched ethnographic
evaluations of Census 2000 coverage, this report recommended that the Decennial
Census list all public indoor and outdoor lodging accommodations and enumerate
occupants without screening for those with “usual home” rather allow respondents
who have one to write their “permanent” residential addresses on forms. The report
compares where, with whom, and for how long participants in the six interacting
social networks traced lived during a six month period which included Census Day
2000. Public accommodations figured among the places where the more highly
mobile participants in the social networks stayed. Fishermen who had no homes
anywhere on land stayed in off-season beach hotels in between fishing trips (Kitner
2001). Haitian migrant contract crop harvesters stayed at “farm workers motels”, in
rental labor camps, and in rooming houses while working away from their base
community (Marcelin and Marcelin 2001). Poultry industry employers paid those
participants in a social network of settling Mexicans who worked as itinerant
“chicken catchers” to stay in rural hotels while on the job (Chavira-Prado 2001). One
man ended up living in a YMCA after he wore out his welcome by imposing on the
generalized hospitality of his social network (Gilley 2001). Participants in a social
network of young seasonal workers who lived in a tourist lodge appropriated as work
quarters were found enumerated (Murray 2001). Participants in two social networks
stayed in camp grounds on public land (Southard 2001; Gilley 2001). No evidence
was found in Census 2000 files that any of the rural homeless habitual campers
were enumerated, although most recreational campers were correctly enumerated
at their permanent homes.
Burke, Paul
1982 Hotel and rooming house dwellers. Washington, D.C.:
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
113
This vintage study estimated that as of the late 1970s one-tenth of one percent of
the total U.S. population lived in hotels or rooming houses and another one-tenth of
one percent lodged as roomers or boarders in private family homes, however half a
percent of the poor (with under 50 per cent of the median income) lived in hotels or
rooming houses. Burke calls hotels with three quarters of the rooms occupied by
permanent tenants “residential hotels” and all others, "transient". Burke characterizes
residential hotels as a phenomenon of the Western United States. (Note: The basis,
merit, and source of the fractions estimated is unknown as only the author's abstract
and references to the internal HUD document were seen; the full document was not
located. Estimates may draw on the 1970 Census, the last to break out the
population enumerated in hotel/rooming houses and the National Housing Survey,
which included hotels and rooming houses among types of “atypical” housing
through 1981. Compare Groth 1994/1999.)
Byerly, Edwin
2006 2006 Census Test resident rule and residence situations. 2010
Census Test Memoranda Series No. 31. Issued January 6, 2006.
2005 The proposed 2010 Census residence rule and its applications
to residence situations. Issued April 2005.
California
nd (1) California Health and Safety Code §17958.1 (Residential SRO hotels).
Cell, Kelci
1998 Single Room Occupancy hotels (San Francisco).
http://www.media-alliance.org/archives/housing/singleroom.html/
Certain San Francisco SRO hotels concentrated in the Tenderloin, Mission, and
SoMa areas are notorious for substandard slum conditions and managers evicting
tenants every few weeks to prevent them from staying continuously long enough to
114
gain rights as legal "permanent residents"--30 days under state law; 32 under city
law. The City Attorney sued the Hotel Alder, the Henry, the Elm, and Alkain to bring
them up to code, and sued proprietors of the Drake Hotel, Hotel West, Edgewater
Hotel, the (new) Minna Lee, and Alder for evicting tenants. Other hotels the City of
San Francisco has cited
for safety violations and where occupants were injured or removed include the Old
Minna Lee, the Alpine, Mission Hotel, Folsom Street Hotel, Delta Hotel. Between
1981 when San Francisco law restricted conversion of hotels from residential to
tourist accommodations and 1997, fires eliminated at least 684 low cost SRO
hotels.”
Chavira-Prado, Alicia
2001 Ethnographic social network tracing among Mexican former migrant
farm workers in the Midwest. Census 2000 Census Ethnographic
Evaluation Report 3. Final Report for Purchase Order Contract 43-YA-
BC-030731.
In 2000, their poultry packer employers placed and paid for the stays of recent
immigrants in hotels and motels across four states while the men worked itinerantly
as “chickens catchers” on various farms.
http://www.ci.fullerton.ca.us/dev_serv/zcode/ch_15_04_interpretation.pdf/
Fullerton County’s legal definitions for “bed and breakfast inn”, “boarding house”,
“hotel”, “motel”, “rented room”, “SRO residential hotel”, and “unit in an SRO” are
quoted in Appendix A.
nd Facts for residence owners: How can I tell if I own a Single Room
Occupancy (SRO) building and what regulations apply?
http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/for-owners/
faqs-for-res-owners.html#HowcanItell
various New York City Administrative Code, §11-243 and § 11-244, Multiple
Dwellings; § A7-C, Real Property Law; §226-B; §235-F; Real Property
Tax Law, 423; T27C2, Real Property Tax Law, 421-A; § 26-51,
Definitions (b); § 26-518 (a) History.
2000 New York City Administrative Code, § 2520.6(e), (f), (I), (n), (o),(s),(t),
(u) (as amended and added December 20, 2000).
1999a Rent Guidelines for Hotels, Rooming Houses, Single Room Occupancy
Buildings and Lodging Houses.
1999b New York City Administration Code, Rent Stabilization Law of 1969, as
amended, Chapter 26 § 510 (e) Adjustment of rent in hotels.
1994 Guidelines adopted by the board: hotel units (June 20, 1994).
nd(2) City Code, Chapter 6.04. Sales tax rules §10, Definitions §§010.020
Transient lodgings tax, 6.04.010 Definitions,
B (bed and breakfast home), C (bed and breakfast inn), I (hotel),
and P (transient).
http://www.ador.state.al.us/salestax/Rules/6513.html/
City of Portland’s legal definitions of bed and breakfast inn, “hotel”, “motel”, and
transient are quoted in Appendix A.
2003 San Diego Municipal Code 1301:7-5-08 Hotel and SRO Facility License
(A) §124.0 (a) General; §124.1.1(I & c); §124.1.2. Transient hotel;
§ 124.1.3.
117
City of Seattle
2003 Seattle Municipal Code SMC 23.44.051(6).
Quoted in Appendix A.
number of days children live in shelters has risen to 350 in 2005. (In New York City,
the majority of city shelters housing children are leased hotels.)
Collins, David
119
Cook, Patricia M.
1995 Like the phoenix: the rebirth of the Whitelaw Hotel,
Washington History 7:1 (Spring/Summer 1995): 4-23.
Describes the conversion of the former Whitelaw hotel into housing.
Common Ground
2003 The Times Squares
http://www.commonground.org/housing/times_square/index.asp/
Describes the Common Ground organization’s renovation and conversion of a
former hotel into supported housing.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1988 § 830 CMR 64G.1.1, Establishments subject to the room occupancy
excise (May 27,1988).
http://www.massdor.com/rul_reg/reg/Old_REG_64g_1_1.htm
Definitions for lodging house and hotel are quoted in Appendix A.
Commonwealth of Virginia
nd Virginia Code, § 35.1-1. Definitions. 7. "Hotel".
Coolidge, Carrie
1998 Condos with room service, Forbes (June 7, 1998).
http://www.millenniumptrs.com/
pressrelease.cfm?presscenter_index=108/
http://www.forbes.com/
investmentguide/forbes/2004/0607/182.html
"The hotel-condo lifestyle is now considered to be up there with the G5.... It's the
120
private jet of living." Hotel condos are generally around 25% more expensive than
comparable non-hotel units, despite the fact that their conveniences, like concierges,
routine maintenance and access to the gym, also raise the monthly maintenance
charges. Over the past five years, hotel-managed apartment projects have sprung
up in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Whereas a
three bedroom condo residence in the downtown Washington, D.C. Ritz Carlton only
cost $1.5 million in 1995, a three bedroom condo in new Boston Ritz Carlton hotel
costs $2.1 million and is subject to a monthly fee of $2,197 and monthly property tax
contribution of $1,611. A three bedroom condo among the 66 in the "Mandarin
Oriental" atop the Time Warner Center in Manhattan are priced at $12 million. Other
condo in hotel projects include the Starwood Hotels & Resorts' "St. Regis
Residences" in San Francisco (42-stories/ 102 units); the 71 residential condo units
in the "W Dallas Victory” hotel opening in 2007 and redevelopment of the MGM
Grand Hotel in Los Vegas scheduled to open in 2006 as a condominium-hotel.
Cosgrove, Julia
2005 What does a homeless person need most? Barnard (Winter 2005): 4.
Rosanne Haggerty, the president and founder of the Common Ground Community
discusses the work of this non-profit housing and community development
organization begun in 1990. Common Ground bought the 735 room Times Square
Hotel, remodeled the building into 652 efficiency apartments with private baths and
kitchenettes, and currently operates permanent housing for formerly homeless, low
income, elderly or disabled tenants in the “Times Square” and 1,600 units of
supportive housing Common Ground built elsewhere in New York City.
Davis, Kelly
2004 Maryland Hotel suit challenges City Council to take action,
San Diego City Beat. http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=1031/
Discusses the recent court decision to exempt the Maryland Hotel from San Diego’s
historic December 1985 SRO (single-room occupancy) ordinance that recognized “at
that point, 72 percent of the city's SRO units had been lost to developers who
demolished the grungy old hotel buildings in order to erect tourist hotels, condos and
upscale shops. The ordinance required that every SRO unit (room) a developer
converts or demolishes must be replaced, one-for-one, elsewhere in San Diego.
Comments on court decision to invalidate application of the SRO ordinance to the
Maryland Hotel,”a 200-plus room SRO slated to become a boutique hotel. Tenants
were served 30-day eviction notices in December.”
the most expensive and luxurious single-resident-occupancy hotel The City has ever
seen, with a price tag to match of nearly $150,000 for each tiny room. Call it the
Trump Tower of Sixth Street or a poor folks' Fairmont." Bayanihan House is owned
by the San Francisco Redevelopment Authority, which purchased the site after a fire
destroyed the 180 room Delta SRO hotel. "It was then developed by the Tenants
and Owners Development Corporation, a nonprofit group. Of the project's total cost
($22 million), $14 million was supplied in federal tax credits by the Fanny Mae
Foundation and through the Enterprise Social Investment Corp. The rest of the funds
came from the redevelopment agency's seismic-retrofit loan program.... Those lucky
enough to land a $485-a-month room in the Bayanihan are ecstatic." "I'm going on
one week here and it feels like home already," Ward Loggins said, a 45-year-old
San Francisco native (who) was picked as a tenant (from 3000 applicants).... "These
people really care, and there's something here and the way they devote themselves
to the job. It's the kind of place I was hoping and praying for because I needed to
start over again."
District of Columbia
nd The District Of Columbia Municipal Regulations,
Chapter 10, Rooming houses; Chapter 11, Boarding houses,
http://www.abfa.com/dcdocs/dcmrlist.htm/
Dolbeare, Cushing
1996 Housing policy: a general consideration,
IN: Homelessness in America. Oryx Press.
Estimates that between 1970 to the mid-1980s one million single room occupancy
units were demolished.
2001 Needs assessment for Skid Row women. DWAC: Los Angeles,
California.
The women surveyed in 2000 ranged in age from 14 to 79 years. Median age was
44. Largest number of respondents identified as African American (63%) with the
next largest categories being non-Hispanic white (13% ) and Hispanic/Latina (11%).
The majority of women had at least a high school education or GED. Most of the
women (85%) had at least one source of income or public benefit.
Eckert, J. Kevin
1980 The unseen elderly: a study of marginally subsistent* hotel dwellers.
San Diego State University: The Campanile Press. (*stet in original)
Fagan, Kevin
2005 Fewer homeless people on streets of San Francisco:
28% drop since fall of '02, but other counties report higher numbers,
San Francisco Chronicle (Tuesday, February 15, 2005).
http://www.sfgate.com/
cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/15/MNGTKBB73I1.DTL
Provides impressions of the decline of street homelessness, attributing this to San
Francisco’s initiation of converting SRO hotels into permanent housing.
Fike, Adam
1999 GWU to convert Howard Johnson's hotel into dorm,
Washington Business Review (May 28, 1999).
Fletcher, Ed
2005 City weighs fate of low rent hotels, Sacramento Bee
(February 10, 2005). Posted as:
http://www.knowledgeplex.org/news/72663.html/
Intersperses cameos of the residents of Sacramento's downtown hotels with a
discussion about Sacramento’s remaining SRO hotels. A woman, 74, has been
living for 12 years in the Hotel Berry ever since her Chevy Citation died; a man in his
20s on SSI disability wandered into the Marshall Hotel during a layover of his bus trip
to Reno in January and stayed; a man, 70, moved into the Hotel Shasta (which the
city renovated in 1994) after the Biltmore Hotel closed. "The word "hotel" in many of
the SROs' names is a bit misleading. While some offer rooms for the night, SROs
serve as their tenants' primary residence and most accept only monthly stays.
Check-in requirements very widely, but the hallmark of an SRO is the tenant's ability
to get a room fast, without much fuss. Renting from about $300 to $500 a month,
rooms don't offer much as far as amenities or space....” At the Shasta Hotel, near
10th and K streets, rooms measure about 100 square feet and guests share
bathrooms, showers and cooking facilities. ...A room at the Hotel Berry ...was a little
125
larger than those at the Shasta and offered a minimalist bathroom, with a sink, toilet
and shower. ..On the plus side, rooms renting for $45 a night offered satellite
television.”... "Over the past five years, the Biltmore, Royal, Clinton and Flagstone
have closed, taking 190 SRO (hotel) beds out of the market. About 890 SRO beds
remain downtown, according to a 2000 inventory of residential hotels by the
Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.
Of those, 673 are located between J and L and Seventh and 12th streets,
the corridor the city is targeting for redevelopment. It's an area where SRO (hotel)
residents can often be seen socializing or smoking with friends outside their hotels,
in part because the facilities don't allow in-room guests or charge a stiff guest fee.”
Foley, Dylan
1998a Hellish conditions at Single-Room Occupancy hotels,
Body Positive 11: 8 (August 1998).
http://www.thebody.com/bp/aug98/sro.html/
Reports harassment of the four remaining clients of New York City’s Department of
AIDS Services and Income Support [“DASIS”] in the California Suites SRO hotel in
Manhattan, where DASIS once housed 100 clients. The hotel was gut rehabbed in
1997 and reopened in July 1998 as a boutique hotel, charging tourists $80 to $120
a night. In January 1998, 33 commercial SRO owners housing DASIS clients
organized a boycott of new referrals claiming DASIS owes them $3 million in back
rent. “DASIS routinely pays rents as high as $1200 a month for rooms that do not
have bathrooms and are less than 100 square feet.” [“DASIS” is known as “HASA”
as of 2005.]
years. The task force urged the city to enact code changes, such as classifying
buildings as commercial hotels rather than multifamily residential, thus reducing a
number of code barriers; and to provide financial incentives."
Gordon, Ed
2005 Atlanta hotels fill up with Katrina refugees, National Public Radio.
(September 1, 2005)
Reported that evacuees from Hurricane Katrina heeding forecasts that Katrina might
hit as far east as Alabama headed inland to Atlanta and filled smaller hotels and
motels.
Gilley, Brian
2001 Ethnographic social network tracing among Native American men in
Oklahoma. Census 2000 Ethnographic Evaluation Report 2.
Final report for purchase order contract 43 YA BC- 031738.
Traces a social network of American Indian men involved in a ritual society
dispersed across the West. Generally, the men welcomed visitors and newcomers
and were themselves welcomed in the homes of other members of the society or
clients when they traveled. They related to those staying for months as contributing
room mates and short term guests as honored visitors. After members tired of one
man’s exploitation of their hospitality, he moved into a YMCA. Members of the social
network occasionally rented cabins to gather with others traveling from society
chapers to rural sites of ritual importance.
Gregor, Alison
2005 Hotels check in condo buyers, The Real Deal 3: 1 (January 2005).
http://www.therealdeal.net/issues/January_2005/1105450441.php/
Reports on condos in hotels and conversion of former hotels into condominium
apartment buildings in New York: ...” the venerable Pierre and the stately Carlyle
hotels have long been in the apartment selling business – one triplex at the Pierre
127
recently listed for an astounding $70 million. In 2001, the developers of the top-floor
residences at the Ritz Carlton Hotel at 50 Central Park South started a trend that
rapidly gained momentum as travel dwindled after the Sept. 11 terror attacks,
causing luxury hotel revenues to plunge...The Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central
Park South, and the nearby St. Regis, at 2 East 55th Street on Fifth Avenue, are
expected to fetch prices of as much as $2,000 a square foot for their planned
top-floor residences.” Plans are also “in the works to create luxury condominiums
among the hotel rooms at the Stanhope Park Hyatt at 995 Fifth Avenue, the
Sheraton Russell Hotel at 45 Park Avenue, and the Gramercy Park Hotel at 2
Lexington Avenue; to intersperse 65 co-op units in the 27 floor Inter-Continental
Hotel at 110 Central Park South; and to convert the old Windsor Hotel at 100 West
58th Street entirely into condominiums and the 373-room Empire Hotel at 44 West
63rd St into to 125 condominiums.”
Gorta, William J.
2002 The Aladdin is a throwback to welfare hotels of the past,
New York Post (March 11, 2002).
“The city's Department of Homeless Services has rented all (137) rooms at the
Aladdin Hotel on West 45th Street off Eighth Avenue to house homeless families
without children... one of 40 hotels ...the city uses to house the homeless, but the
first in Midtown since the closure of (the) notorious welfare the Holland and the
Martinique - now a Holiday Inn.” The “Deputy Commissioner of the Department of
Homeless Services (said). "We have 7,000 families in our system - a record number
- and we were happy to get this building...(The) department is under a court order to
provide a homeless family with shelter within 24 hours after intake.”
Groth, Paul E.
[1994] Living downtown: the history of residential hotels in the United States.
1999 University of California Press. (Second, paperback edition.)
Groth’s history covers the period between 1800 to 1980.“People live in hotels full
time throughout the United States when living in residential hotels was a well
established throughout the country. Americans have been living in hotels “for more
than 200 years, often choosing hotel living over other housing options.... In 1990,
between 1-2 million people lived in hotels, more than in public housing and in San
Francisco, 270,000 hotel homes were 10% of housing....In boarding houses, tenants
rent rooms and proprietor puts food on a common table; in private room houses or
lodging houses, tenants rent rooms and obtain food elsewhere...” Groth, an
architect, focuses on residential hotels in San Francisco and political and economic
factors leading to the decline of residential hotels and kindred accommodations in
cities and the resultant “hotel housing” crisis.
Manhattan. HSI began by renovating the “landmark” Cecil Hotel on West 118th
Street in Harlem hotel which had been vacant for 10 years, reopened in 1988 for 115
formerly homeless. With a loan from a commercial bank, later purchased as a fixed
rate mortgage investment by the New York City Pension fund insured by the State of
New York Mortgage Agency (SONYMA), HSI purchased and renovated the
Narragansett SRO hotel on Manhattan's Upper West Side as supportive housing for
100, 60 of whom are HIV positive. HSI recently bought the Kenmore SRO hotel,
renovating to create larger efficiency apartments with kitchens and baths.
Halasz, Piri
nd The Gerswin Hotel. Lingo 7.
http://www.cultureport.com/newhp/lingo/authors/halasz.html/
Profiles the transformation of a former welfare hotel in Manhattan on 27th Street
east of
Fifth Avenue, renamed the Gershwin, charging $75 to $100 a night for a single and
$22
a night for a shared room. The Gershwin has attracted resident artists and serves as
the home base for musicians when not on the road performing.
Hawaii (State)
2005 Hawaii Revised Statutes §467-1 Definitions, Hotel.
Effective July 1, 2006, amending "§514A-3" changed
to "§514B-3". Law 2004, Chapter 164, §13; Law 2005, Chapter 93, §7.
http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/
Hevesi, Dennis
129
2002 On the New Bowery, down and out mix with up and coming,
New York Times (April 14 2002). As posted by Common Ground:
http://www.commonground.org/
org_info/media/articles/2002-04-14/
Updates fast moving real estate developments in the Bowery: the non-profit housing
provider Common Grounds purchase and renovation of the Andrews cubicle hotel at
197 Bowery, while at 199 Bowery, the Washington-based Carlyle Group is
constructing a new 12-story luxury rental residential building -- 65 studio,
one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments called “NoLIta Place” (short for “North of
Little Italy”.) New owners plan to develop the Prince Hotel at 218 Bowery, purchased
in December 2000 for $2.2 million -- “even though, at the time, 53 of the building's
195 cubicles still housed elderly lodgers” (protected by the hotel stabilization
laws)...."Between attrition and buying some out, ... down to 26." In the renovated
building next door to the Prince,
the duplex, 2,400 square foot penthouse rents for $5,500 a month and, for the 2,000
square foot apartment below it, “they got $4,500."
Hoch, Charles
1989 New homeless and old: community and the skid row hotel.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Argues the old SRO hotels served a positive function and that their demolition
precipitated the crisis of urban homelessness in the late 1980s.
Howard Johnson
nd History. Posted as:
http://www.hojo.com/HowardJohnson/
control/home?sid=0&pop=no
By 1961, there were 88 franchised Howard Johnson Motor Lodges in 33 states and
Bahamas and 605 restaurants, 265 operated by the company and the others,
franchised. The brand’s popularity was displaced by more modern style Ramada,
Holiday Inn, and Marriott brands. In 1979, the Howard Johnson brand and the chain
and franchises for 1,040 restaurants and 520 motor lodges operated under the brand
were acquired by Imperial Group PLC of Great Britain. In 1990, the Howard Johnson
name, franchising system, and owned properties were sold to HJ Acquisition
Corporation. This subsidiary of Hospitality Franchises Systems Inc. (“HFS”) was
renamed Howard Johnson International. HFS merged with other companies
emerged as CENDANT in 1997.
Illinois Legislature
2006 House Bill 2047 Engrossed LRB094 02756
RXD 32757 b § 5,. Hotel; 35 ILCS 145/2 from Chapter 120, paragraph
481b.32 Amends the Hotel Operators' Occupation Tax Act. 35 ILCS
145/2 From Ch. 120, Par. 481b.32
Quoted in Appendix A. This 2006 Bill proposes changes to expand the definition of
hotel and imposition of hotel tax on certain private clubs. Quoted in Appendix A.
Ingram, Paul L.
1996 The rise of hotel chains in the United States, 1896-1980.
New York : Garland Publishers.
131
Iowa
nd Iowa Code, Chapter 422A; 701-105.3 Tax base.
1999 Iowa Code, Chapter 137C Hotel Sanitation Code 137C.2 Definitions
1 Bed and Breakfast Inn, 4 Guest Room, 5 Hotel
http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IACODE/1999/137C/2.html/
Quoted in Appendix A.
court” cottages – the first commercial step up from auto camps– present the greatest
variety, with private units aligned in a row, in a U shape, or organized around
features. The authors term “motor courts” an “integrated type” with private units
either in rows or facing out from U-shaped buildings. What the authors call “motels”
per se arrange units in a row, or an L-shape, or attach units in a narrow U-shaped
building. They call “highway hotels” those structures which arrange private units in
rows (some multistoried) or in a cruciform pattern so that the (main entrance)
building can have a hallway without private entrances. The authors contrast Holiday
Inn and Imperial 400 chains. Wilson opened his first Holiday Inn in 1952 then three
more on main roads near Memphis; by 1958, Wilson’s company (owned 50 and) was
operating 79 Holiday Inns within one day's drive of Memphis. By the early 1970's, the
chain claimed a new Holiday Inn was opening every 52 hours; by 1972, the company
had franchised 1,405 and in 1993, when Wilson sold out, his company owned and
operated 1498 Holiday Inn motels. Holiday Inns were typically "two story structures
organized around a central recreational courtyard –often with pools– in a U or L
shape. A dedicated building contained public areas: a lobby, a restaurant, meeting
rooms, and managers’ offices. Exterior walls of guest-rooms were “made almost
entirely of large glass panes, metal sheathed doors, and metal frames" to “strike a
modern appearance.” From the beginning, Holiday Inns offered and continuously
added conveniences and services for guests and were child and pet friendly. The
Imperial 400 chain began in 1959 with a different business model. The central
company built the motels then entered into partnerships with local owners who who
bought a half interest in the property and operated the business. Jakle et al praise
the Imperial 400s for their “ideal place product packaging” ....: All members of the
chain were expected to operate in exactly the same way.” The motels’ design, signs,
services and format were standardized. Imperial 400 motels had distinctive gull-wing
shaped roof over the building containing the lobby and owners’ residence. Private
units were on two floors in U shaped buildings. Imperials were ‘limited service”
motels without restaurants or meeting facilities. The Imperial 400 chain grew fast,
but was bankrupt in 1965, and by 1987 when the chain was sold, only 85 motels
were still in business.
sample was much more likely to be currently employed full time (36 vs 7.3 per cent)”
(:9) ... part time
(10.7 vs 6.2 per cent, or working day labor for room and board (3.7 vs. 0.4 per cent)
(:19)]. The proportion of the SRO sample reported they earned $5000 or more last
year also was much greater than for the shelter sample (74.5 vs 31.6 per cent)”
(:20)... People in SRO hotels “interviewed were generally satisfied with their hotel as
a place to live. Almost half (49 per cent) were somewhat satisfied, and 27.6 per cent
were very satisfied. Less than one quarter were either somewhat dissatisfied (14 per
cent) or very dissatisfied (9.5 per cent). Less than half the SRO residents (44.3 per
cent) indicated that they had ever been without a room, apartment, or houses of their
own in which to live....Most SRO residents (56.4 per cent) indicated that getting
enough food to eat was never a problem for them....During the past 30 days, SRO
residents were most likely to have received their meals from the following sources:
food that they had bought and cooked themselves and food purchased in non-fast
food restaurants (75.8 per cent each), fast food restaurants (63.5 per cent) and from
friends and relatives (43 per cent).” (:23). More subjects interviewed in single room
occupancy were “white” (33.7 v 12.5 per cent) and male (77.5 v. 45 per cent) (:18)
than in the shelter sample.
Kentucky (State)
nd Kentucky Administrative Regulations
902 KAR 45:006 Kentucky bed and breakfast (4).
http://www.lrc.state.ky.us/kar/902/045/006.htm/
Quoted in Appendix A.
Kershaw, Sarah
2000 New life for a welfare warehouse, The New York Times
(March 29, 2000).
In the mid-1980s, the “14-story Prince George” (on 28th Street) was the country's
largest homeless shelter for families, housing as many as 1,600 children and
adults... Like other 19th- and 20th-century Beaux-Arts buildings, the hotel’s life cycle
went from a crack-infested welfare hotel and notorious homeless shelter closed by
court order in 1990 to idle vacant ...real estate to its latest incarnation renovated by
the non-profit Common Ground into 416 subsidized apartments housing the
homeless, AIDS patients, and recovering addicts....Tenants...receive federal rental
subsidies and pay 30 percent of their income in rent.. More than 1,700 people
applied... The Prince George apartments brings to 5,548 the number of supportive
housing units the city has added to the low-income housing pool in the last few
years, with another 1,200 under construction, officials said.”
Kitner, Kathi R.
2001 Ethnographic social network tracing of South Atlantic fishermen.
Census 2000 Ethnographic Evaluation Final Report 5. Final report
for Memorandum of Agreement 91-00-MOA-01 between the Bureau of
the Census and National Marine Fisheries Service of the United States
134
Koebal, C. Theodore
1995 The tortuous path to nonprofit development. Center for Housing
Research, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Posted
as:
http://www.arch.vt.edu/caus/research/vchr/pdfreports/torturous.pdf
Case study of the conversion of the vacant Hotel Warwick in Newport News,
Virginia, built in 1883 into a SRO hotel for the formerly homeless (95-6; 22 pages).
Kozol, Jonathan
1988 Rachel and her children: homeless families in America.
New York: Fawcett Columbine.
This account of conditions families endured in New York “welfare hotels” rallied
reforms.
Lakefront Single Room Occupancy Corporation (Chicago)
2003a (Website): http://www.lakefrontsro.org/index.html
Levavi, Peter
1996 Citywide CDCs: Chicago CDCs increase efficiency,
National Housing Initiative Newsletter (May/June 1996).
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/87/citywidecdc.html/
Describes renovations and construction of new SRO housing in Chicago by the
Lakefront SRO Corporation and Century Place Development Corporation (CPDC).
Lewis, James
2003 Evaluation report of the Lakefront SRO Near South Employment
Center.
Chicago, Illinois: Institute for Metropolitan Affairs, Roosevelt University.
Evaluates Lakefront’s program to train and hire tenants in the SRO buildings the
organization developed and manages.
Link, Blenda
2005 City moving to enforce ordinance, Thomasville Times Enterprise.
http://www.timesenterprise.com/
content/1/5321/City+moving+to+enforce+ordinance.htm
The city government of Thomasville, Georgia, believes there are as many as 13
boarding house operating illegally in 2005, four of which have been the subject of
complaints. The city plans to issue an "informative brochure” outlining Thomasville’s
ordinances “defining the criteria boarding houses must meet if located within city
136
Lipscomb, Robert E.
2001 A place in the sun.
http://www.whatsupstl.com/Archives/issue3.2/sro.html/
In St. Louis, former boarding houses and rooming houses that once packed the
Soulard neighborhood are “long closed and torn down. Today, most rooming houses
are located on the north side of the city, some operating on the sly under the radar
view of licensing officials. Other large SRO’s (single room occupancy) buildings such
as the Mark Twain Hotel downtown, the Lincoln Hotel in midtown, and the Salvation
Army’s restrictive Railton Residence on 18th Street represent the last of a once
common housing option for the city’s poorer residents.”
Lelchuk, Irene
2002 San Francisco homeless advocates push for permanent rooms in
hotels,
San Francisco Chronicle (page A - 32, Wednesday, December 18,
2002).
“A report released by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which runs six existing
residential hotels funded by the city, says taxpayers would get more bang for their
buck if the city spruced up rundown hotels rather than expanded the shelters.
Operating 1,000 hotel rooms would cost nearly 40 percent less than 1,000 extra cots
in a shelter, or $2 million less, according to the report.”
Lobo, Susan
2001 American Indian mobility in the San Francisco Bay Area. Final report
for purchase order contract 43-YA-BC-030121submitted to the United
States Bureau of the Census. Unpublished report.
“Doris”, one of the chronically homeless Bay Area American participants who kept
journals of where each went and slept and ate during the spring and early summer of
2000, noted when she and her husband “had money,” they paid by the day or week
to stay in a particular downtown hotel. After her husband stopped drinking, he
“began staying consistently at a hotel” while “Donna” stayed on the streets. Other
participants living mainly on the streets reported their stays in inexpensive motels
outside town and additional downtown hotels. None of the participants in this
research “were enumerated in the inexpensive hotels and motels where they often
stayed.”
Louisiana (State)
nd (1) Louisiana Civil Code, Article 3232 §6 Innkeepers, definition;
Privileges of innkeeper...
1896 Louisiana Revised Statutes, Title 21, Hotels and Lodging houses,
Chapter 1, Sanitary Conditions, §1. Bed linens
http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=81989/
Quoted in Appendix A.
Mahler, Sarah J.
2005 Suburban transmigrants: Long Island's Salvadorans IN: Héctor R.
Cordero-Guzmán, Robert C. Smith and Ramón Grosfoguel (editors)
Migration, transnationalization, and race in a changing New York.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Manning, Jason
2001 The eighties: the homeless.
http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id343.htm/
"In New York City, tax abatements in the early '80s encouraged developers to
replace flop houses with luxury condominiums. Similar urban policies had the same
effect across the nation. Restrictions on the sale and rent rates of subsidized federal
housing, approved in the 1960s, were expiring. Between 1974 and 1983, according
to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, nearly 900,000 SRO
(single-occupancy units) that rented for less than $200/month were lost. The number
of SROs in New York fell by 89%, from 127,000 to 14,000.”
during their seasonal work migration to contract work sites further north. In their
base community, the participants in this Haitian social network took in or were
themselves boarders; during their migrations and stays at harvest work sites, crews
lived together in buildings rented in labor camps, in “farm worker” hotels, and some
staying longer roomed in local houses.
Maryland (State)
nd Maryland Administrative Code, Business Regulation, Title 15 Lodging
15-201.
Quoted in Appendix A.
Matloff, Judith
2002 Neighborhood is uneasy as hotel becomes a shelter, New York Times
(July 7, 2002).
“The (170 room) Parkview Hotel (in Harlem) reopened as a youth hostel three and a
half years... After September 11th, its occupancy rate shrank to 30 percent;.. The
hotel's owner...decided to lease (the renovated rooms) to the Department of
Homeless Services for $60/night. “
McConahay, Mary Jo
2005 Chinatown Community Development Center, San Francisco, California.
Marguerite Casey Foundation
http://www.caseygrants.org/
pages/stories/stories_popup_chinatown.asp
Notes prevalence of Chinese families living in the 120 SROs originally built for
Chinese single male immigrants in Chinatown, San Francisco.
McKay, Ruth
1992 Cultural factors affecting household coverage and proxy reporting
in Hispanic (Salvadoran) households, IN: Proceedings of the
Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, pages 614-
618.
McKnight, Reuben
2002 The legacy of the Ozark ordinance, Preservation Seattle (on line
magazine, October 2002).
http://www.cityofseattle.net/
commnity/histsea/preservationseattle/publicpolicy/defaultoct.htm
After two deadly hotel fires, in 1970 Seattle retroactively amended the fire and
housing codes; the laws known as the "Ozark Hotel Ordinances" required older
hotels and apartments to upgrade, which owners could not afford. "As a result,
thousands of low-cost housing units were lost, buildings were vacated, redeveloped
or demolished, and the character of some of Seattle's oldest urban neighborhoods
was forever
139
changed." By one estimate, 5000 low rent units were lost. Demolition and urban
redevelopment claimed most Seattle SRO “skid row” hotels; by 1998, only four were
left: the Alps, the Panama, the Publix, and the St. Regis.
MKG Group
2005 Global hotel chain ranking, 1995-2005, HRT Magazine 129
(November 2005). Excerpt posted by Hospitality Trends.com
http://www.htrends.com/trends-detail-sid-19308.html
Ranks the 11 leading hotel groups (eg. 1=InterContinental, 2=Cendant, 3=Marriott,
Accor, et al) by growth in the number of properties and guest units world wide in the
decade between 1995 and 2005. Identifies Marriott International, Hilton, Accor,
InterContinental and Choice as the groups which experienced the largest increases
in capacity – Marriott’s American group alone increasing its supply of rooms 2.5
times by 285,000 guest units. Signals “American economy hotels” as the most
dynamic growth sector world wide. Lists “chains” which experienced “biggest
increases in capacity in the past decade by the increase (up between 75-104
thousand) and net number of “rooms” world wide. Listed as “chains” are some
brands (eg. Hampton Inns, Super 8, Ibis, Mercure, Marriott), sub-brands (eg.
Express by Holiday Inn). Information is taken from the MKG DataBase which
140
contains a sample of “more than 40,000 hotels” with 1.1 million guest units
worldwide.
Murphy, H. Lee
2002 Roadside respite - hotels suffer in wake of 9/11,
National Real Estate Investor (May 1, 2002).
In 2001 the number of hotel rooms increased 2.4% to 4.2 million rooms;
in the “mid-scale segment without food and beverage” room supply rose 8.1% to
561,000 rooms. Development of limited-service hotels and motels surged in the
1980s; “many...built back then are nearing the end of their useful
lives...Limited-service hotels that are five years old still seem new and fresh. But
properties that are 12 and 15 years old have to worry....The architecture on a
low-rise roadside hotel begins to look awfully dated after 15 or 20 years An old
limited-service property typically doesn't lend itself to refurbishment like a big luxury
hotel does. ..The architecture in high-rise hotels is more timeless.”
Murray, Nancy
2001 Ethnographic social network tracing among young adult seasonal
workers.
Census 2000 Ethnographic Evaluation Report 4. Final report for
purchase order contract 43 YA BC- 032735.
Participants the social network Murray observed lived in a lodge provided by their
common employer at a national park where they worked before, during, and after
2000 Census field enumeration operations. This lodge, built and formerly used to
accommodate park visitors, was effectively converted into their workers’ quarters.
The lodge was the domicile where each of them lived the longest (six to ten months)
in the year 2000 and where they had repeatedly lived seasonally during prior years.
“None acknowledged having tenure rights anywhere except temporarily and through
their employment in remote rural locations or spoke of any "permanent" home”...
once they entered their itinerant occupation.” The lodge and the young workers in
this social network were not found enumerated. Although the lodge appears on pre-
Census lists as a “Special Place” and “Group Quarters”, it is located in one of ten
141
contiguous blocks deleted from the Census enumeration case load in May 2000
along with other staff quarters, a hotel, cottages, cabins, and large camp ground.
Nash, Margo
1996 Times Square owner tries to oust tenants for tourists,
Tenant/Inquilino (October 1996). Posted as:
http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Oct96/longacre.html/
Longacre Hotel at 317 West 45th St ... was like the Barbizon, a place where young
women from out of town found safe haven in the big city. Some of those women are
still there. But they are no longer young, and the Longacre is no longer safe. The
163-unit single-room-occupancy hotel fell on hard times about 15 years ago..(its
owner recently defaulted on the mortgage and the court sold the SRO hotel. The
new owner is “fixing up the top floors...and renting the rooms to European tourists.
Downstairs, he has been trying to force out the tenants including 80 or 90
Senegalese immigrants who call the Longacre home. ...There are only 83 units left at
the Longacre with permanent tenants...”
Nassau County (Long Island, New York State), Office of the District Attorney
2005 Dillon announces welfare fraud sweep and calls for procedural
change. Press Release, March 15, 2005.
http://nassauda.org/dawebpage/pressreleases/
2005/Welfare%20Fraud%20Filing%20Charges%203-15-2005.htm
Seven individuals are criminally charged with submitting falsified receipts for stays in
commercial motels reimbursed by the Nassau County Department of Social Services
as housing assistance.
National Trust
nd Wabash YMCA: The Renaissance Apartments, Chicago, Illinois
http://www.nationaltrust.org/
issues/housing/Wabash_YMCA_IL.html/
Describes the resurrection of a venerable former residential YMCA as permanent
housing.
New Media
2005 Rumor mill roils tenants at JVP low rent hotels,
Los Angeles Garment and Citizen (May 11, 2005).
http://www.garmentandcitizen.com/
category/archives/archived-news-stories/
downtown-residential-low-rent-hotels.php
Tenants in the Japanese Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles fear losing the rooms
they rent in the $400 to $600 range in the Alexandria Hotel (5th Street at Spring
Street), the King Edward Hotel, and the Baltimore (across the street from each other
at the corner of 5th Street and Los Angeles Street). All three are owned by Yacobian
Enterprises; the new owners "plan to convert the buildings into higher-end lofts or
apartments" that combined currently provide about 800 low rent housing units.
New York State, Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), and New
York City Department of Finance
1992 Transient rentals in SRO-type buildings, Summary, Appendix Q1, IN:
1992 Hotel Study, pages Q-1 to Q3.
Compared income and expense statements filed with the city’s Department of
Finance and rent rolls filed with the state to derive rough estimates of the proportion
of income hotels, residential SRO buildings, and rooming houses received from
residents versus transients. Only 55 per cent of the hotels, 58 per cent of the
rooming houses, and 67 per cent of the “SRO” buildings were registered with DHCR;
of those filing with both agencies, the percent of registered rent stabilized units was
about the same (87 per cent of the rooming house units, 88 per cent of the hotel
units and 91 per cent of the SRO buildings) however rooming houses and SRO
buildings derived a much higher (44 per cent plus) part of their income from those
units than hotels.
News Hour
2005 Care not cash. (Transcript of segment aired April 8, 2005).
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
bb/economy/jan-june05/homeless_4-8.html
This radio broadcast featured interviews with San Francisco officials and street
homeless on the new program.
nd(2) Ohio Revised Code, Title 53, Chapter 21, §5321.01 - Definitions.
144
http://www2.onu.edu/
Otley, Tom
2005 The Pierre, New York, Business Traveler (January 2005).
http://btonline.co.uk/default.asp?
Page=14&PUB=65&ISS=12749&SID=473981
“The restored 1930s Georgian-style 41-story (Pierre Hotel, Fifth Avenue at 61st
Street) is a mix of 201 rooms, including 52 suites, plus 72 condominiums. The
condominiums are “known as “co-ops” and run by a committee who can reject
potential purchasers”... and ... take the lion's share of the Central Park views.
But with Pierre Bergé's 38th-floor apartment recently on the market for $9 million
– with a monthly maintenance fee of $12,000 – they certainly pay for the privilege....
A typical floor might have both co-ops and hotel rooms, giving the hotel a unique
feel.”
Pennsylvania (State)
nd (1) Pennsylvania Code § 50.1. Occupancy groups; (d) Group C—Group
habitation. (2) Division C-2; Chapter 55 (relating to Division C-2)
Peters, Jeremy W.
2002 Four-star dorms, New York Times, Section 4A, page 7
(Sunday, November 10, 2002).
Describes the "lavish” dorm rooms offered by several colleges in leased “botique”
hotels.
This 600 page novel depicts the lives of drunks, junkies, and prostitutes stuck in a
flea-bitten single-room occupancy hotel in Harlem, New York City in the 1960s.
Powell, Dave
2000 Digression, repression: the RGB is now in session!
Posted on Tenant Net in July 2000.
http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Jul00/repression.txt/
At a Cooper Union hearing on rent hikes, tenants of single-room-occupancy units
(SROs)”told horror stories of living in SROs that were converting to tourist
hotels—most often by illegal means “ The Westside SRO Law Project presented
photographic
evidence of the difference between rooms rented to tenants vs. those rented to
tourists—in the same hotels. One set of photos pictured pristine floors and fresh
linen. The other showed torn floors, holes in walls the size of basketballs, and lead
paint chipping from the ceiling.”
Project Renewal
nd http://www.projectrenewal.org/housing.html/
Profiles the "incarnations" of the Holland Hotel. Built in 1918 as an elegant
residential building, the Holland deteriorated into a “seedy” SRO hotel the land lord
leased in the 1980s to the City as a family shelter. In 1995, Project Renewal
renovated the building as supportive housing for 307 residents, renaming it Holland
House. Also describes other Project Renewal supportive housing: the Clinton
Residence for 57 mentally ill on West 48th Street in Manhattan, Tinton Residence in
the Bronx and the new St. Nicholas Residence in Harlem.
Reese, Ronnie
2005 Lake View YMCA considers future of aging building,
Inside Chicago's Near North (weekly newspaper).
http://www.insideonline.com/site/epage/24064_162.htm/
146
The 77 year old Lake View YMCA, formerly know as the Lincoln-Belmont YMCA,
"was originally built as a hotel for men who had come to Chicago seeking
employment. At the time, the average stay was two days. Now, residents of (Lake
View Y’s) 224-unit SRO (single room occupancy) facility stay for five, 10, 20 years or
more...”
Rivera, Carla
2004 Growing up fast in Skid Row hotel, Los Angeles Times (October 9,
2004)
Posted on the School on Wheels website as:
http://www.schoolonwheels.org/artman/publish/article_32.shtml/
Profiles families with children to illustrate the more than 800 children living in Los
Angeles’ “Skid Row” hotels and missions. Families with four or five children
frequently occupy a single room, with a hot plate or microwave for cooking and share
community bathrooms. "Surveys counted more than 140 children living in the Ford
Hotel, 112 in the Frontier Hotel on 5th Street, and about 70 at the Huntington Hotel
on Main.” One mother profiled has been living with her 3, 11, 13, 14, and 16 year
old children for two years in a cramped room in the Ford Hotel. She "pays about
$340 monthly for two connecting rooms" where "she and her five children sleep on
two sets of bunk beds. She purchased a tiny refrigerator and has a microwave oven.
When funds run low, they sometimes go to a mission or soup kitchen to eat." Their
father is in prison.....
The Ford is "a gloomy-looking six-story tan structure with 295 rooms and nearly 500
residents, is in a commercial zone dotted with garment and printing shops, seafood
processors and wholesale produce markets." ..."Built in 1925, (the Ford) has been a
target of the city's slum task force "; in 1999, it was declared a public nuisance;.."by
2002, the hotel was being run by a nonprofit organization and operated primarily as
transitional housing for homeless families. Authorities determined that conditions had
improved and lifted the public nuisance designation. In 2003, the hotel changed
hands again and is now owned by Ford Hotel LLC, a company headquartered in
Arcadia.
"Although the Ford is a place where people usually stick to themselves, it can
sometimes take on the air of a community, with the rhythms of Tejano music pouring
out of some rooms.”
(Note: During 2005, the Shelter First organization began renovating the Ford Hotel.
Its typical SRO rooms are 8 by 12 feet. This article refers to recent studies by the
USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the Downtown Women’s 2001 and
2004 needs assessments.)
Rodriguez, Yolanda
2005 Katrina: the aftermath: evacuees at home in hotels,
The Atlantic Journal and Constitution (September 29, 2005).
Profiles 300 Katrina evacuees living in 55 units of an extended stay hotel outside
Atlanta over a month after the storm.
147
Romero, Mary
1992 Ethnographic evaluation of behavioral causes of census undercount
of undocumented immigrants and Salvadorans in the Mission District of
San Francisco. http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/ev92-18.pdf
Romero, Dennis
2004 From Desolation Boulevard, Los Angeles City Beat 35
(Cover story, February 5, 2005).
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=634&IssueNum=35/
Developers are planning to turn some transient housing (or “SROs” for single-room
occupancy) buildings into “market rate” yuppie lofts and apartments, pulling
available beds from Skid Row...encouraged by state and city “adoptive reuse” tax
and code breaks intended to foster inner-city preservation. "New York transplant
Gilmore sparked interest in Skid Row as more than just a homeless zone when, in
1998, he
purchased three early-1900s buildings at Fourth and Main, converted them to lofts,
and christened the northwest corner of the Row as the Old Bank District. Since then,
he’s been a principal in the purchase of such nearby mainstays as the El Dorado
Hotel, the Palace Theater, and St. Vibiana’s Cathedral – all slated for
redevelopment. “All of those buildings were empty and didn’t require relocation or
dislocation, and our future plans don’t involve relocation or dislocation,” Gilmore
says.”... The “owner of the Frontier Hotel at Fifth and Main streets has bought the
adjacent Rosslyn Hotel for more than $5.5 million and hopes to convert both
buildings into “market rate” dwellings. The Morrison Hotel near Staples Center, long
a spot for transients, is up for sale. The Cecil Hotel, another single-room-occupancy
haunt for the sometime-homeless, has undergone $4 million in renovations and is
targeting a Euro-traveler market....”
Rossi, Peter
1989 Down and out in America: the origins of homelessness.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Rossi’s was perhaps the most influential in a chorus of academic writings pointing to
the loss of affordable indoor accommodations as a cause of the upsurge in
homelessness.
Rymer, Russ
2001 Rules of the row, Mother Jones (March/April 2001). Posted as
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/03/skidrow.html/
Los Angeles has the largest skid row in the nation --50 square blocks, 11,000
residents, 85 percent black ; 80 percent, men. "The fortunate among them stay in
missions or emergency shelters or subsidized hotels. The rest -- an estimated 4,000
-- live on the street." LA’s skid row is "an intentional place ...designated and nurtured
by the city fathers. In 1976, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a redevelopment
plan included a 'policy of containment.' Those to be contained were the homeless,
148
and the area they were to be contained in was the neighborhood known officially as
Central City East."
"By the early 1980s, half of the hotels in Central City East had been torn down (many
for parking lots) or had burned. Of the remaining 63 SROs, 18 have since been
bought and rehabbed by the (Skid Row Housing) Trust, and another 19 by a sister
nonprofit, the SRO Housing Corporation. Between them, the two organizations own
more than a third of all the residential rooms in the Row." "'The Trust' ....renovated
Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels as clean and modern and architecturally
stylish as anything in Beverly Hills. The hotels are relics of a venerable heritage of
male transiency: Built to house the seasonal agricultural workers, ambitious
adventurers, and layover railroad personnel who filled downtown Los Angeles in the
early years of the 20th century,
they weren't considered disreputable at the time. But their standard layout -- small
rooms with a bed and a dresser, communal bathrooms down the hall -- made them
convenient dormitories for despondency when Central City East became a dead end
instead of a way station...”
Schneider, Mike
2005 Report: Hotels are one of few industries benefiting from Katrina.
Associated Press Wire. Posted Sep. 23, 2005 on:
http://www.hospitalitynet.org/
A Smith Travel Research report released in September 2005 estimated 290 hotels
with almost 42,000 rooms in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, representing
almost 1 percent of the nation's lodging supply, were ...out of use because of
damage from Katrina; as many as 14,000 rooms could be closed through the end of
the year.
Schultz, Barbara
149
Schwartz, Fred
2005 Getting to know the Asian American Hotel Owners Association,
International Franchise Association Bulletin (March 2005).
http://www.franchise.org/news/fw/mar05j.asp/
Sixty five per cent of the hotels and motels owned by AAHOA's 8,700 members are
franchises and 60 percent of AAHOA members' last names are Patel and in families
which originated from Gujarat, India. "AAHOA members now own 20,000 hotels with
more than one million rooms, representing more than 50 percent of the economy
lodging properties and nearly 37 percent of all hotel properties in the United States.
Approximately 13,000 of the properties are franchised while 7,000 are independent.
The market value of the properties owned by AAHOA members is estimated to be
$29.9 billion in franchised properties and $8.1 billion in independent properties."
to come and go any time? 10. Contribute money for rent, food, or bills? 11. Keep
furniture, T.V., or other large belongings (t)here? 12. Keep personal belonging such
as clothing or jewelry (t)here?” (:328).
Simpson, John H.
1984 Struggling to survive in a welfare hotel.
New York: Community Service Society.
Forty heads of households, representing their 194 family members, describe what it
was like living the Martinique in midtown Manhattan while it was a “welfare” hotel.
Smith, Edward L.
1987 Considerations in starting. B&B Fact Sheet. Caldwell, Ohio: Ohio
Cooperative Extension Service, The Ohio State University, East
District.
[2002] Posted as: Starting a bed & breakfast. Business Management and
Marketing: Bed and Breakfast. Tourism Educational Materials -
33420037 June 6, 2002 by Michigan State University Extension.
http://web1.msue.msu.edu/imp/modtd/33420037.html/
Smith Travel Research
nd U.S. lodging census database fields.
Lodging survey definitions.
Monthly lodging survey participant profile.
Definition of segments for daySTAR PLUS.
STAR Trend Report for Sample Hotel, May 2003.
http://www.smithtravelresearch.com/SmithTravelResearch/
products/BrowsAllPublication.aspx
Name, address, contact information, date constructed, date last renovated, room
count, chain or franchise affiliations, amenities, census tract, and other
characteristics of 47,000 participating hotels. Smith classifies brands (and some
chains) as Luxury, Upper Upscale, Upscale, Mid-scale w/ F&B (“with food and
beverage service”), Mid-scale w/o F&B (without food or beverage service), or
Economy and independents, as Upper, Middle, or Lower Tier. The entire data base
is available for purchase; also extracts of state, county, census tracks, or "market"
geographical areas. The “segments” for room revenues systematically surveyed
include “contract” (sources) defined as “rooms occupied at rates that are stipulated
by contracts including airline crews and permanent guests”, the “transient segment”
includes rooms occupied at corporate, government and other negotiated rates.
Smith Travel’s Accommodation Reports (STAR) are provided monthly to enrollees
that compare the Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR and other numbers reported by the
survey participant property to the aggregated local market. daySTAR PLUS analysis
151
Sorrentino, Joseph
2005 Kids on the skids, Los Angeles Alternative Press 3: 16.
http://www.laalternativepress.com/
v03n16/feature/sorrentino.php/
Profiles a single mother with twin boys. After stays in missions while wait- listed for
a place in non profit housing, the family received charitable assistance to rent a room
in the Huntington Hotel at 752 S. Main Street-... a three-story brick building with 200
rooms. She pays $700/month for a room with "two beds and a bathroom, but no
kitchen .... After rent, she has $200/month left for everything else. She explained: "
“I knew it was a lot of money but that’s how important it was to have my family
together.” ..."The managers of the Huntington made tenants do the 28-day shuffle,
which involves evicting tenants every 28 days to keep them from gaining tenancy
rights. While this practice is illegal, current tenants of the Huntington say its still
being used.
While at the Huntington in 2003, (she)... heard rumors that the owner was going to
kick everybody out and convert the place into loft apartments.” ...She said “ she
remembers paying the Huntington’s manager on July 4, 2003. She also remembers
he didn’t give her a receipt. Later, the manager said she hadn’t paid the month’s
rent, and he was evicting her. Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles intervened and
finagled her another three months. From the Huntington, the (family) moved to the
San Fernando Valley Rescue Mission.”
“For low-wage workers and people living on general relief, welfare or social security,
hotels like the Huntington are the only affordable housing. Landlords can get away
with rent gouging because their tenants usually have bad credit, no money for a
deposit, and nowhere else to go." Urban pioneers pay upwards of $2 a square foot
152
a month to live in a loft-style apartment a plaster-board away from Skid Row. Non-
profits, meanwhile, say they can no longer afford to build affordable housing in
downtown where real estate costs $100 a square foot. As downtown becomes
uptown, slumlords covetous of loft developers’ profits are trying to clear the way for
their own lofty ambitions. The private owners of the Frontier, Cecil and Bristol hotel
have announced plans to convert their buildings into loft apartments or boutique
hotels. ... "Years ago landlords liked Section 8 because it was a guaranteed
paycheck. But hotel owners are no longer hungry for the families on Section 8,
welfare, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and other public assistance.”
Southard, Dee
2001 Ethnographic social network tracing among non-recreational homeless
campers in the Pacific Northwest. Census 2000 Ethnographic
Evaluation 1. Final report for purchase order contract 43 YA BC-
030126.
In the rural Pacific Northwest, “non-recreational” campers who have no other homes
effectively live on publicly owned land and in public camp grounds. The recreational
campers with whom they interacted in camp grounds were found enumerated at the
addresses they gave as their permanent homes. None of the campground or camp
sites occupied by the rural homeless traced in this research were found listed or
enumerated in Census 2000.
South Carolina
2004 South Carolina Code of Laws (unannotated), Title 45 Hotels, motels,
restaurants, and boardinghouses.
http://www.scstatehouse.net/code/t45c001.htm/
Tennessee (State)
nd Tennessee Code, Title 68 Health, Safety and Environmental
Protection, Chapter 14 Hotels, Food Service Establishments
and Swimming Pools, Part 3 Inspection of Hotels... 601 Definitions
(68.14.3.601) (8) Hotel; Part 5 Bed and Breakfast Establishment
Inspection, 68-14-502 Definitions (1) Bed and breakfast establishment,
(2) bed and breakfast homestay
Tennessee definitions are quoted in Appendix A.
Texas (State)
2002 Texas Occupations Code, Chapter 2155 Hotels and boarding houses,
Subchapter Liability, § 2155.051, Definitions.
http://www.legaltips.org/texas/OC/oc.013.00.002155.00.aspx/
Turner, Magery A., Kingley, G., Pettit, Thomas, Katherine D. and Noah Sawyer
2004 Rental market challenges, IN: Housing in the Nation’s Capital, 2004.
DC: Fannie Mae Foundation/Urban Institute. Posted as:
http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/
publications/reports/hnc/2004/pdf/hnc04_chap4.pdf
“Turtle 62 in da Loin”
2005 How to die in an SRO hotel: exiting from San Francisco's Tenderloin
district. Posted Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 9:21 PM
“Yet another death notice appears in the hallways of my Tenderloin SRO hotel:
‘To all tenants: It is with great sorrow and regret that we inform you of the death of
your fellow tenant John Schuett -- lived in unit #325 on February 14, 2005. --
Management.’
That's a typical T-loin epitaph. I didn't know John at all, though he was my
‘downstairsnik’, living two floors below me. I don't know his sexual orientation, his
color, his past, his hopes. And googling doesn't help. Some day, unless I get
evicted, Management will post the same notice for me. By the time my neighbors
sink down to homelessness, then rise one step up to this hotel, most of us are over
forty, sick in body and in mind, and afflicted with substance issues. Our death rate is
high. We're lucky if we can die here in a private room, rather than on a sidewalk or in
a noisy hospital. If we overdose, friends wonder whether it was really accidental. So
I'll say to John:
‘Hello, goodbye, and congratulations.’"
United States
2005 United States Code, Title 42, Chapter 21, Sub-chapter II, § 2000a,
Prohibition against discrimination or segregation in places
of public accommodation and Chapter 126, Sub-chapter III.
(Released February 25, 2005).
Revises and expands the so-called “Interstate Commerce clause” affirming that “all
persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services,
facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public
accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on
the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin” by adding establishments
“supported in their activities by State action” to those “affecting interstate commerce”;
defines public accommodations as including “any inn, hotel, motel, or other
establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other than an
establishment located within a building which contains not more than five rooms for
rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as
his residence” and to a limited degree, private clubs.
154
1990a Public Law 101-391: The Hotel and Motel Fire Safety Act of 1990.
Created the Section 8 SRO program to modify existing structures to create single
room occupancy housing for people with low incomes.
Many of these welfare hotels are squalid. The heat and hot water are inadequate;
bathrooms are inoperable; single rooms with one or two beds serve an entire family
and doors have broken locks. Sometimes, families are split up because a hotel has a
limit on the number of children allowed. Recently, a homeless woman living in the
Center City Hotel in Washington, D.C., could bring only two of her four children with
her. She had to chose which two to bring and also find places for her other two
children to stay. Some families are forced to move from hotel to hotel, because there
are limits on the number of days a family can stay in one hotel. This affects the
children's schooling, requiring them to repeat grades and lowering their achievement.
2004b Table 4: Concentration by largest firms 2002 for the United States,
pages 10-1, IN: Accommodation... 2002, Industry Series, EC
02-721-01
(September 2004).
http://www.census.gov/prod/ec02/ec0272i01t.pdf/
2002 Selected estimates, IN: 2002 New York City Housing and Vacancy
Survey.
2001 2002 Economic Census, Public Use Form AF 721 for Traveler
Accommodations, Special Inquiry Q; 2002 Economic Census,
Public Use Form AF - 72101.
___________.Field Division
2000a Census 2000 Field Managers Debriefing Report. Internal report.
“homeless service providers” who reported “staying on the day of the survey or
during the seven-day period prior to being interviewed for NSHAPC: in an
emergency shelter or transitional housing program, or a hotel or motel paid for by a
shelter voucher, or an abandoned building, a place of business, a car or other
vehicle, or anywhere outside.”
1992 Fact sheet for 1990 Decennial Census: counts of persons in selected
locations where homeless people are found. CPH-L-87.
(Revised July 1, 1992). Washington, D.C.
1984b IN: 1980 Census of Population. Persons in institutions and other group
quarters, volume 2, Subject reports, PC80-2-4D. Appendix A, Area
classifications and definitions and explanations of subject
characteristics, pages A-3 - A-7; Table 43, Non-institutional persons in
group quarters by type of group quarters for regions, divisions,
and states, United States, page 808. Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office.
1963 IN: U.S. Census of Population 1960. Inmates of Institutions, Table 182,
Persons in group quarters by type of quarters, age, color, and sex for
the United States, urban and rural, 1960, page 1-453.
Final Report PC (2) 8-A. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office.
1953a IN: U.S. Census of Population 1950. A report of the 17th Decennial
Census of the United States, Volume II, Characteristics of the
Population, Part I, United States summary Table 47, Married couples,
families, unrelated individual households and quasi households,
United States, urban and rural areas 1950, page I-97; Table 69,
Married couples, families, unrelated individuals in households and
quasi households, United States, by regions, divisions, and states,
1950; Table 108, Persons in households and persons in quasi
households by age, color and sex for the United States, urban and
rural, 1950, page I-203; Appendix,
Enumerators Reference Manual, 80. Interpretation of rules for special
classes, c. boarders and lodgers, pages 1-465; 89. List of special types
of living quarters, pages 4 B 1-8; Other Hotels, missions, flop houses,
pages 466-467.Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
nd (2) Applications of the Hotel and Motel Fire Safety Act of 1990
Public Law 101-391 to hotels. Posted as:
http://www.usfa.fema.gov/applications/hotel/
1989 Welfare hotels: uses, costs, and alternatives: briefing report to the
Chairman, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee
on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives.
(January 1, 1989) Washington, D.C.
1988 is the reference year for this report on “welfare hotels” used as temporary or
permanent housing for families which GAO defined as: "commercially owned,
single-story or multistory hotels or motels providing shelter to a clientele composed
exclusively or primarily of homeless families receiving some type of public
assistance". The study compared the costs of sheltering families at the widely
varying market daily rates welfare hotels typically charge to the cost of housing
alternatives and traces federal reimbursements to local governments’ costs of paying
for extended stays in hotels, which at that time flowed through Federal Aid for
Families with Dependent Children (“AFDC”) and the Emergency Assistance
Program. The study includes observations from site visits to six motels where each
homeless family occupied a guest room with a private bath and received the basic
services of linen changes, room cleaning, and facility maintenance. The report
suggests the use of hotels and motels to shelter homeless families was widespread
nationwide at that time.
Friday, August 13 (2004) was ...” the last day a homeless (Massachusetts) family
was placed in a state funded motel used as shelter...Just one year ago the state was
spending in excess of $20 million for hotel placements for 599 families....The
Commonwealth's Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) created a new
approach...: from the first day a family enters shelter, focus is on the day the family
will exit (by implementing a Self-Sufficiency Plan (SSP).... “On the North Shore, DTA
experimented with an intake/assessment:...families were put into a 30- to 45-day
assessment shelter that helped identify their needs and barriers to housing.... DTA
crafted Shelter to Housing (S2H), a one- time, $6000 placement bonus for housing
providers who placed employed homeless families into apartments with a 12-month
lease. Over 200 families have been placed in private apartments, further freeing up
(shelter) capacity and (social service) resources for other families. ...Along with the
new ICMs came the Motel to Shelter (M2S) initiative focused on moving remaining
hotel families into vacant shelter units.”
Velasco, Alfredo
1992 Ethnographic evaluation of the behavioral causes of undercount in the
community of Sherman Heights, San Diego, California.
http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/ev92-22.pdf
Depicts tenants in an old mansion, broken down into single room occupancy
housing, occupied primarily by recent immigrants from Mexico.
Weisman, Jonathan
2005 FEMA spending $236 million cruise ship deal criticized,
Washington Post (September 28, 2005, page A1).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701960.html
Wisconsin (State)
(nd) Wisconsin Statute, Chapter 254.63 (Motels); Chapter 254.61(3)
Chapter 77.52(2)(a)1.
Wisconsin state law explicitly equates and considers synonymous the terms
hotel, motel, and inn, but to represent an establishment as a motel, the hotel must
provide “free” parking in the room charge. Sections are quoted in Appendix A, under
hotel/motel.
WNYC
2003 Minutes of the WNYC radio community Advisory Board, held at Public
School 217 on March 12, 2003.
Citizens complain that NY’s Department of Housing is not enforcing building codes
and needs to levy fines on home owners in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section who have
illegally subdivided Victorian brownstones into Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units
and sublet basements and attics without emergency exits. Since 2001, the biggest
local issue in Victorian Flatbush, an immigrant portal and one of the most diverse
neighborhoods in the city, has been private homes being used as SROs (single room
occupancies) by families to meet mortgage payments. Hundreds of thousands of
dollars in violation fines went uncollected every year.
Yellowsprings, Ohio
nd Municipal ordinances, Title 4, Zoning.
http://www.yellowsprings.com/vlg_ords/1240.html/
Quoted in Appendix A.
APPENDIX A
GLOSSARY: DEFINITIONS AND ACRONYMS
Accommodation
NAICS 2002: 721 “Industries in the Accommodation subsector provide lodging or
short-term accommodations for travelers, vacationers, and others. There is a
wide range of establishments in these industries. Some provide lodging only;
while others provide meals, laundry services, and recreational facilities, as well
as lodging. Lodging establishments are classified in this subsector even if the
provision of complementary services generates more revenue. The types of
complementary services provided vary from establishment to establishment.
The subsector is organized into three industry groups: (1) traveler
accommodation, (2) recreational accommodation, and (3) rooming and boarding
houses. The Traveler Accommodation industry group includes establishments
that primarily provide traditional types of lodging services. This group includes
hotels, motels, and bed and breakfast inns. In addition to lodging, these
establishments may provide a range of other services to their guests. The RV
(Recreational Vehicle) Parks and Recreational Camps industry group includes
establishments that operate lodging facilities primarily designed to accommodate
outdoor enthusiasts. Included are travel trailer campsites, recreational vehicle
parks, and outdoor adventure retreats. The Rooming and Boarding Houses
industry group includes establishments providing temporary or longer-term
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accommodation, public
Federal law: “Each of the following establishments which serves the
public is a place of public accommodation within the meaning of this
subchapter if its operations affect commerce, or if discrimination or
segregation by it is supported by State action: (1) any inn, hotel, motel, or
other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other
than an establishment located within a building which contains not more
than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the
proprietor of such establishment as his residence.... ...the provisions of
this subchapter shall not apply to a private club or other establishment not
in fact open to the public....” [SOURCE: United States 2005]
all-suite hotels
Federal, BLS: "All-suite facilities, especially popular with business travelers, offer
a living room and a bedroom. These accommodations are aimed at travelers
who require lodging for extended stays, families traveling with children, and
business people needing to conduct small meetings without the expense of
renting an additional room." [SOURCE: US Department of Labor, Bureau of
Labor Statistics 2005]
apartment hotel
New York City: see Class A hotels (hotels containing apartments leased or
owned by their occupants)
apartment buildings, and town homes. Included in this industry are owner-
lessors and establishments renting real estate and then acting as lessors in
subleasing it to others. The establishments in this industry may manage the
property themselves or have another establishment manage it for them."
[SOURCE: Census Bureau 2005a
http://www.census.gov/epcd/naics02/def/ND531110.HTM#N531110]
Michigan: "a private residence that is also the innkeeper's residence, has
sleeping accommodations meant for lodgers, has up to 14 rooms and that
serves breakfast at no extra charge to the lodgers." [SOURCE: Michigan 1972]
Ohio: “any bed and breakfast with five or more rooms available for transient
guests” must purchase a motel license, comply with requirements of the State
Fire Marshall's office, be inspected by several agencies, and is considered a
hotel that must apply and collect sales tax on room rental and an additional tax
per bed.” [SOURCE: Ohio nd]
City of Seattle, Washington prohibits “any and all exterior structural alterations
that are made to a home to accommodate its use as a bed and breakfast.”
[SOURCE: City of Seattle 2003]
[SOURCE: Tennessee nd (Tennessee Code, Title 68, Chapter 14, Part 5)]
Iowa: “‘Bed and breakfast inn’ means a hotel which has nine or fewer
guest rooms.” [SOURCE: Iowa 1999 (Iowa Code 137C.2.1)]
Kentucky: “a private inn or other unique residential facility having not more
than nine (9) guest rooms and in which the only meal served to guests is
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boarding house
Humboldt County, California: "a dwelling or part thereof where meals or meals
and lodging are provided for compensation for three (3) or more persons, not
transient. Also referred to as "Rooming House" in this Code.
[SOURCE: Humboldt County 2000]
City of Fullerton, California: a "dwelling with not more than five guest rooms
where lodging (with or without meals) is provided for compensation for not more
than ten persons other than members of the family but shall not include a large
group home or a residential care facility for the elderly. A dwelling with six or
more guest rooms shall be considered a hotel."
[SOURCE: City of Fullerton 2004 (Zoning Ordinance, Chapter 15)]
Equivalents —
for District of Columbia, see rooming house
for New York City and Massachusetts, see lodging house
for NAICS industry, see rooming and boarding houses
(b)...Compact living units of at least 150 square feet are permitted as efficiency
units as defined in California Health and Safety Code...with a maximum
occupancy of two persons.
(c) A full or partial kitchen is not required in every unit.
(d) No more than 50 percent of non-rent restricted units within a compact living
unit project may have a full bathroom....”
[SOURCE: City of San Diego 2002 (Municipal Code §141.0626)]
cubicle
New York State: “a small partially enclosed sleeping space within a dormitory
with or without a window to the outer air.”
[SOURCE: New York State 1929 (as amended MDL Chapter 713, 21]
DASIS Acronym for New York City’s Department of AIDS Services and Income
Support, the former name of an agency currently known as HASA
displaced family
State of Arkansas: "one who temporarily resides in transient facilities such as
motels, hotels, or shelters; temporarily resides as a household guest; or is
otherwise ‘homeless‘ or living in ‘substandard housing‘ as defined in preferences
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B.1 and B.2. A family living in ‘standard, permanent replacement housing‘ is not
displaced. ‘Standard, permanent, replacement housing‘ is defined as:
(1) decent, safe, and sanitary; (2) adequate for the family size; and
(3) that the family is occupying pursuant to a lease or occupancy agreement."
[SOURCE: State of Arkansas, Arkansas Code, Title 1, Chapter 2 ]
dwelling unit
City of Chicago: "dwelling unit means a structure, or the part of a structure that is
used as a home, residence or sleeping place by one or more persons who
maintain a household, together with the common areas..."
[SOURCE: City of Chicago nd (1) (Code Title 5, Chapter 12, § 030]
City of Santa Cruz : "one or more rooms, designed, occupied or intended for
occupancy as separate living quarters, with cooking, sleeping and sanitary
facilities provided within the unit for the exclusive use of a household"
[SOURCE: City of Santa Cruz 2002 (Municipal Code)]
Humboldt County, California : "one (1) room, or a suite of two (2) or more rooms
designed for, intended for, or used by one (1) family, which family lives, sleeps
and cooks therein and which unit has one kitchen or kitchenette."
[SOURCE: Humboldt County 2000 (amended Zoning Chapter 4 § CD)]
Island County, California: "any building or portion thereof which contains living
facilities including provisions for sleeping, cooking, eating, and sanitation, as
required by Island County, for not more than one family. . .”
Euclidean zoning
Dates to 1926 when the town of Euclid, Ohio's comprehensive zoning ordinance,
the first in the United States, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Each Euclidean Zone has: prescribed standards (set backs, lot size, building
height, defined types of activities and structures, property lines, etc) permits
certain land uses by right, as long as standards are met.)
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group habitation
Pennsylvania: Buildings primarily used or designed for the purpose of habitation
by four or more persons shall be classified as Group C—Group Habitation.
Group C is divided.... Group C Division 2 (C-2) ....”applies to a building, or a part
thereof, where the occupants are in group habitation and are not included under
Division C-1, C-3, C-4 or C-5. Hotels, apartment buildings, multiple dwellings,
dormitories, lodging houses, orphanages, children’s residential institutions, large
personal care homes, group homes, group foster homes, and the like, shall be in
this classification.
[SOURCE: Pennsylvania nd (1) (Code § 50.1. (d) (2) and Chapter 55)]
guest
Georgia: “A boarder or guest is one who pays a fee for the right to use a room
and receive services, generally for a short period of time. If you are not a tenant
but are a guest or boarder, you have limited protection under the law. If the hotel
171
owner or boarding house owners wants a resident to move he need only give
notice equal to the time for which the occupancy is paid. For example: if payment
is made weekly, one weeks notice to vacate is all that would be required.
[SOURCE: Georgia 2004 (Landlord/Tenant Handbook)]
guest house
Guest house is a term widely used in English-speaking countries which
in different contexts may refer to a smaller hotel, a bed and breakfast inn or
hostal (if food is served), a separate house or cottage available for rent or to
private homes, rooming houses, boarding houses and other dwellings
shared by lodgers and hosts.
guest room
City of San Diego: "any room that is intended or designed to be used, or which is
used, rented or hired out, to provide sleeping accommodations for one or more
guests in hotels, motels, bed and breakfast establishments, private clubs,
lodges, fraternity or sorority houses, compact living unit projects, or group living
accommodations."
[SOURCE: City of San Diego 2004 (City Code, Chapter 11 Revisions, Changes
to definitions § 11.0103, Draft 7, December 6, 2004]
“homeless person”
Federal law: "An individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate residence or
a person who resides in a shelter, welfare hotel, transitional program or place not
ordinarily used as regular sleeping accommodations, such as streets, cars,
movie theatres abandoned buildings, etc. In addition, individuals who are
staying in their own or someone else’s home but will be asked to leave within the
next month are considered homeless. People in jail are not homeless."
[SOURCE: Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act 1987]
homestay
an arrangement by a resident to host in the resident’s home a small number of
overnight guests, lodgers, or boarders (commonly specified as four or fewer)
See bed and breakfast homestay.
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hotel
Arkansas: “ ‘Hotel’ means every building or other structure commonly referred to
as a hotel, motel, motor hotel, motor lodge, or by similar name, which is kept,
used, maintained, advertised, and held out to the public to be a place where food
is actually served and consumed and sleeping accommodations are offered for
adequate pay to travelers or guests, whether transient, permanent, or residential,
in which fifty (50) or more rooms are used for the sleeping accommodations
of such guests and having one (1) or more public dining rooms with adequate
and sanitary kitchen facilities, and a seating capacity for at least fifty
(50) persons, where meals are regularly served to such guests, such sleeping
accommodations and dining room being conducted in the same building or in
separate buildings or structures used in connection therewith that are on
the same premises and are a part of the hotel operation.
[SOURCE: Arkansas State Arkansas Code 3-9-402. Definitions.]
hotel Commonwealth of Virginia: “any place offering to the public for compensation
transitory lodging or sleeping accommodations, overnight or otherwise, including
but not limited to facilities known by varying nomenclatures or designations as
hotels, motels, travel lodges, tourist homes, or hotels."
[SOURCE: Virginia Code, § 35.1-1. Definitions. 7. ]
hotel Humboldt County, California: "any building or portion thereof containing living
quarters or dwelling units and designed for or intended to be used by six (6) or
more transient guests, whether the compensation or hire be paid directly or
indirectly, and shall include resort hotel, lodging house, boarding house, rooming
house, dormitory, residence club, fraternity, sorority, and other similar uses."
[SOURCE: Humboldt County Zoning Chapter 4, § C and D]
hotel City of Fullerton, California: " a building in which there are six or more guest
rooms where transient occupancy with or without meals is provided to overnight
guests for periods of thirty or fewer consecutive calendar days for compensation,
and where no provision is made for cooking in any individual room or suite. A
hotel may include a building in which there is one apartment for use by the
resident manager, but it shall not include jails, hospitals, asylums, sanitariums,
orphanages, prisons, detention homes, single-room occupancies, and similar
buildings where human beings are housed or detained under legal restraint or for
care or treatment. A hotel may include ancillary retail and service businesses
which provide a convenience to the traveling public; such businesses include,
but are not limited to, giftshops, tour and/or travel agencies and car rental
services. [SOURCE: City of Fullerton, Zoning Ordinance Chapter 15]
hotel City of Portland: "Any structure containing six or more dwelling units that are
intended, designed, or used for renting or hiring out for sleeping purposes by
residents on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis." ... “Hotel” means any structure, or
any portion of any structure which is occupied or intended or designed for
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hotel New York State: “an inn having thirty or more sleeping rooms.”
[SOURCE: New York State 1929 : 12]
hotel New York City: “any Class A or Class B multiple dwelling which provides all of
the services included in the rent as set forth in § 2521.3 of this Title.
[New York City * (9 NYCRR § 2520.6 Definitions (b))]
New York City: "a hotel is any Class A or B Multiple Dwelling which provides
basic hotel services such as maid, linen, use and upkeep of furniture, and
switchboard and other desk-type facilities. This full range of hotel services may
not necessarily be required to qualify as a hotel in” certain Class B Multiple
Dwellings, such as rooming-houses and some SRO's. [§ 2521.3]
(4) lobby staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by at least one
employee....
(b) A building's classification as a hotel will not be retained or continued where
the DHCR determines that 51 percent of the permanent tenants are not receiving
maid and linen service, except that all tenants receiving such services shall be
entitled to receive the services for the duration of their occupancy. Where an
owner is providing maid and linen service to 51 percent of the permanent tenants
and the owner wishes to maintain the building's classification as a hotel, the
owner shall be afforded 90 days to restore all four hotel services described
above, without any additional rent increase for such services, to all of the
building's permanent tenants, except that those tenants whose housing
accommodations were rented to them as apartment (not hotel) housing
accommodations shall have the option of rejecting restoration of hotel services
and be subject to the RSL, pursuant to the provisions of this Code applicable to
apartment buildings, until they vacate, at which time the owner shall be required
to restore hotel services to the housing accommodations.
hotel Whitfield County, Georgia: “Any structure or any portion of a structure, including
any lodging house, rooming house, dormitory, turkish bath, bachelor hotel, studio
hotel, motel, motor hotel, auto court, inn, lodge, tourist camp, tourist cabin,
or any other place in which rooms, lodgings or accommodations are furnished for
value. (Exclusions:) It does not include any jail, hospital, asylum, sanitarium,
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hotel Hawaii: "’Hotel’ includes a structure or structures used primarily for the business
of providing transient lodging for periods of less than thirty days and which
furnishes customary hotel services including, but not limited to, front desk,
restaurant, daily maid and linen service, bell service, or telephone switchboard;
(Exclusions:) provided that for the purposes of this chapter, apartments in a
project as defined by §514A-3 that provide customary hotel services shall be
excluded from the definition of hotel. The definition of hotel as set forth in this
section shall be in addition to and supplement the definition of "hotel" as set forth
in the various county ordinances.”
[SOURCE: Hawaii 2005 §467-1 Definitions, Effective July 1, 2006, "§514A-3"
changed to "§514B-3". L 2004, Chapter 164, §13; L 2005, Chapter 93, §7.]
hotel Illinois: "’Hotel’ means any building or buildings maintained, advertised, and held
out to the public to be a place where lodging is offered for consideration to
travelers and guests. "Hotel" includes inns, motels, tourist homes or
courts, and lodging homes.”...” the term "hotel" includes a facility advertised and
operated exclusively as a romantic getaway by an entity operating as a
private club that provides, for a consideration, living quarters,
sleeping, or housekeeping accommodations to its members.”
[SOURCE: Illinois Legislature 2006 (House Bill 2047)]
hotel / hotel-condo
Hawaii: " ‘Hotel/hotel-condo’ means an establishment consisting of any building
or structure used primarily for the business of providing for consideration
transient accommodation lodging facilities and that furnishes, as part of
its routine operations, one or more customary lodging services, other than
176
living accommodations and the use of furniture and fixtures, including, but
not limited to, restaurant facilities, or room attendant, bell, telephone
switchboard, laundering, or concierge services, and is subject to the
transient accommodations tax under chapter 237D.”
[SOURCE: Hawaii nd (Revised Statutes 467-1)]
hotel / motel
Ohio: "those facilities which have transient guests staying for a period of 30 days
or less". [SOURCE: Ohio nd (2)]
hotel or motel
Wisconsin: "hotel" or "motel" means a building or group of buildings in which the
public may obtain accommodations for a consideration, including, without
limitation, such establishments as inns, motels, tourist homes, tourist houses or
courts, lodging houses, rooming houses, summer camps, apartment hotels,
resort lodges and cabins and any other building or group of buildings in which
accommodations are available to the public,
(Exclusions:) except ...mobile homes as defined in s. 66.0435 (1) (d), rented for
a continuous period of more than one month and accommodations furnished by
any hospitals, sanatoriums, or nursing homes, or by corporations or associations
organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable or educational
purposes provided that no part of the net earnings of such corporations and
associations inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.
[SOURCE: Wisconsin nd {Wisconsin Statute 77.52 (2) (a) 1)}]
"Hotel" means all places wherein sleeping accommodations are offered for pay
to transients, in 5 or more rooms, and all places used in connection therewith.
"Hotelkeeper", "motelkeeper" and "innkeeper" are synonymous and "inn", "motel"
and "hotel" are synonymous. [SOURCE: Wisconsin nd {Chapter 254.61(3)}]
Upon the written request of the hotel operator... the department may classify a
hotel as a "motel", if the operator of the hotel furnishes on-premises parking
facilities for the motor vehicles of the hotel guests as a part of the room charge,
without extra cost.
[SOURCE: Wisconsin nd (Wisconsin Statute Chapter 254.63 Motels)]
Prince George's County, Maryland: "....Each guest room shall have its own toilet
and washroom. Cooking facilities shall be prohibited.” A hotel or motel in an
industrial or office use zone must have "frontage on a street with (at least) a 70
foot right of way."
[SOURCE: Prince George’s County nd {Code Chapter 27-365 (5)}]
facility covered by Iowa Code Chapter 422A. Facilities which are covered are
defined as any hotel, motel, inn, public lodging house, rooming house, tourist
court or any place where sleeping accommodations are furnished to transient
guests for rent, whether with or without meals. Gross receipts from renting
include any direct or indirect charge for the rooms. ...The rental of a mobile home
which is tangible personal property rather than real property is subject to tax
under this chapter in the same fashion as a sleeping room. The renting of
all sleeping rooms would be exempt from the tax if rented by the same person
for a period of more than 31 consecutive days. ...The hotel -motel tax shall not
apply: (a) when rooms are furnished to a person if that person rents any rooms
or facility for more than 31 consecutive days, (b) to the renting of sleeping rooms
in dormitories and in memorial unions at all universities and colleges located in
the state, (c) to contracts made directly with the federal government, or (d) to the
renting of a room to the guest of a religious institution upon real property exempt
from tax as the property of a religious institution, if the reason for renting the
room is to provide a place for a religious retreat or function and
not a place for transient guests generally.
[SOURCE: Iowa nd & 1987 {Iowa Code 422A 701-105.3; 103.1(2) Rooms;
105.3(1) (Exceptions)}]
hotel occupant
New York City: “Hotel occupant. Any person residing in a housing
accommodation in a hotel who is not a permanent tenant. Such person shall not
be considered a tenant for the purposes of this Code, but shall be entitled to
become a permanent tenant as defined in subdivision (j) of this section, upon
compliance with the procedure set forth in such subdivision...
[SOURCE: City of New York 1987 (9 NYCRR, § 2520.6 Definitions (m)*]
(Note: In New York, a hotel occupant may only be protected by rent stabilization
if he or she becomes a ‘permanent tenant’.)
hourly rental
Louisiana: “Any municipality or city or parish governing authority may prohibit
any hotel, motel, or inn or bed and breakfast from charging for a room for less
than a twenty-four-hour period. No such entity shall charge an hourly rate.”
[SOURCE: Louisiana 2001 (RS §20-4.920.1.)]
housing accommodation
New York City: “That part of any building or structure, occupied or intended to be
occupied by one or more individuals as a residence, home, dwelling unit or
apartment, and all services, privileges, furnishings, furniture and facilities
supplied in connection with the occupation thereof. The term housing
accommodation will also apply to any plot or parcel of land which had been
regulated pursuant to the City of Rent Law prior to July 1, 1971, and which
became subject to the RSL after June 30, 1974.”
[SOURCE: New York City 1987 (9 NYCRR § 2520.6 (a) Definitions*)]
innkeeper
Alabama: equates innkeepers, boarding house keepers and hotel keepers
[SOURCE: Alabama Department of Revenue 2001]
South Carolina: " ‘Innkeeper’" as used in this section [§ 45, lodging tax] shall
mean the proprietor of any hotel, inn, boarding house, motor court, or motel
where beds or lodging are for hire. ...Keepers of boardinghouses shall have the
same rights and remedies for enforcing and collecting claims for board as are
allowed by law to innkeepers or hotelkeepers....”
[SOURCE: South Carolina 2004, (Title 45); 2001( § 45-1-40)]
Louisiana: “Those are called innkeepers, who keep a tavern or hotel, and make
a business of lodging travelers.”
[SOURCE: Louisiana nd(1) (Civil Code, Article 3232 §6 Innkeepers)]
lodger
Michigan: "a person who rents a room in a bed and breakfast for fewer than 30
consecutive days." [SOURCE: Michigan 1913]
lodger or boarder
Ohio: one, two and three family dwellings, bed and breakfasts, motels, and
hotels with more than 5 lodgers or boarders; must meet the Ohio Basic Building
Code as transient (Group R-1) or non-transient ( Group R-2) residential building.
lodging establishment
Missouri: “any building, group of buildings, structure, facility, place or places
of business where five or more guest rooms are provided ...advertised or
held out to the public for hire which can be construed to be a hotel,
motel, motor hotel, apartment hotel, tourist court, resort, cabins, tourist homes,
bunkhouse, dormitory or similar place by whatever named called;
includes all accommodations for hire for either transient guests, permanent
guests, or both transient and permanent guests.”
[SOURCE: Missouri Business Net 2005] (Missouri state law
further includes in the regulated and taxed “lodgings establishment” class of
buildings: inns, bed and breakfast inns, boarding houses, rooming houses, and
all condos, cabins, houses, apartments, resorts, ranches or other forms of real
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lodging establishment
Tennessee: “any structure or space, or any portion thereof, which is occupied or
intended or designed for occupancy by guests of the lodging establishment for
dwelling, lodging or sleeping purposes, and includes any hotel, inn, tourist camp,
tourist court, tourist cabin, motel, bed and breakfast establishment or any place
in which rooms, lodgings or accommodations are furnished to guests for a
consideration; whether or not meals are served therein.”
[SOURCE : Tennessee nd (§68.14. 601)]
lodging establishment
Maryland: " ‘Lodging establishment’ means an inn, hotel, motel, or other
establishment that has at least four rooms available for a fee to transient guests
for lodging or sleeping purposes.”
[SOURCE: Maryland nd (Administrative Code Business Regulation §15-201(c))]
lodging house
New York City: the formal legal term for a room and board house.
New York State: “a ‘lodging house’ is a multiple dwelling, other than a hotel, a
rooming house or a furnished room house, in which persons are housed for hire
for a single night, or for less than a week at one time, or any part of which is let
for any person to sleep in for any term less than a week.”
[SOURCE: New York State 1929 (as amended*)]
lodging house
Commonwealth of Massachusetts: ““an establishment where lodgings are let to
four or more persons not within the second degree of kindred to the operator,
and which is licensed or required to be licensed under M.G.L. Chapter 140, s.
23.... The presence of one or more of these factors may indicate that an
establishment is a lodging house in determining whether an establishment is ... a
lodging house...for the purpose of the room occupancy excise....The occupancy
is characterized by a degree of permanency, so that the establishment is
considered the occupant's residence or temporary residence. The relationship
between the operator and the occupant is not that of landlord-tenant, with an
exclusive right or privilege in any particular room. Instead, the occupant merely
has an agreement with the operator for the use or possession of a particular
room or rooms. The operator may provide maid and linen service, meaning the
operator may clean the room or rooms and may change the linen on a regular
basis as part of the rent or as a separate charge. The operator may provide
meals or may furnish individual cooking facilities for the preparation, serving,
eating, and storage of food.”
[SOURCE: Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1988 (§ 830 CMR 64G.1.1)]
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lodging tax
Alabama: “The lodgings tax shall be collected by all persons who operate any
hotel, motel, rooming house, apartment house, lodge, inn, tourist cabin, tourist
court, tourist home, camp, trailer court, or any other place where rooms,
apartments, cabins, sleeping accommodations, house trailer parking
accommodations, or other accommodations are made available to travelers,
tourists, or other transients. ... (10) “Exemptions from the lodgings tax are as
follows: (a) On or after December 1, 2001, charges for rooms, lodgings, or
accommodations supplied for a period of 180 continuous days or more in any
one place are exempt from state, county, and municipal lodgings tax.
Prior to December 1, 2001, the tax did not apply to charges for rooms, lodgings,
or accommodations supplied for a period of 30 continuous days or more in any
one place.”
[SOURCE: Alabama Department of Revenue 2001 (§ 810-6-5.13. (4) and (10) ]
MDL Acronym used in New York for Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929 as amended.
motel
Humboldt County, California: "a building or group of buildings
comprising individual living quarters or dwelling units for the accommodation of
transient guests which is designed so that parking is on the same building site
and is conveniently accessible from the living units without having to pass
through any lobby, and where luggage is moved between the parking area and
living unit without necessarily having to pass through any lobby or interior court.
This definition includes auto court, tourist court and motor hotel, but does not
include accommodation for manufactured homes or recreational vehicles.
[SOURCE: Humboldt County 2000]
Prince George's County, Maryland: “ a motel (in R-R zone) must be on 5 (or
more) acres, have a 200 foot frontage on a right of way (at least) 120 feet wide."
See hotel or motel.”
[SOURCE: Prince George’s County 2005 (County Code § 27-365)]
multi-family dwelling
City of Santa Cruz: "a building containing two or more dwelling units for the use
of individual households; an apartment or condominium building is an example of
this dwelling unit type." [SOURCE: City of Santa Cruz 2002]
multiple dwelling
New York State: ”A ‘multiple dwelling’ is a dwelling which is either rented,
leased, let or hired out, to be occupied, or is occupied as the residence or home
of three or more families living independently of each other. On and after July
first, nineteen hundred fifty-five (July 1, 1955), a "multiple dwelling" shall
also include residential quarters for members or personnel of any hospital staff
which are not located in any building used primarily for hospital use provided...
(Exclusions) A ‘multiple dwelling" shall not be deemed to include a hospital,
convent, monastery, asylum or public institution, or a fireproof building used
wholly for commercial purposes except for not more than one janitor's apartment
and not more than one penthouse occupied by not more than two families. For
the purposes of this chapter "multiple dwellings" are divided into two classes:
"class A" and "class B."
multiple dwelling ‘class A’
New York State: “a multiple dwelling which is occupied, as a rule, for
permanent residence purposes. This class shall include tenements,
flat houses, maisonette apartments, apartment houses, apartment hotels,
bachelor apartments, studio apartments, duplex apartments, kitchenette
apartments, garden-type maisonette dwelling projects, and all other
multiple dwellings except class B multiple dwellings.
occupant
New York City: "any person occupying a housing accommodation as defined in
and pursuant to § 235-f of the Real Property Law. Such person shall not be
considered a tenant for the purposes of this.
[SOURCE: New York City 2000 (NYCRR § 2520.6 (l))*]
“palace hotel”
vernacular term applied to first-class luxury grand hotels in the early 20th century
which housed elite residents in addition to accommodating visiting transients.
Examples of these hotels include New York City's Plaza Hotel, built in 1907, the
residence of families "the closest New York had to royalty"; Los Angeles' former
"crown jewel", The Alexandria Hotel, also built in 1907 and the Waldorf-Astoria,
which is still home to multimillionaires. (See Groth1994/1999.)
primary residence
New York City: “Although no single factor shall be solely determinative, evidence
which may be considered in determining whether a housing accommodation
subject to this Code is occupied as a primary residence shall include, without
limitation, such factors as listed below:
(1) specification by an occupant of an address other than such housing
accommodation as a place of residence on any tax return, motor
vehicle registration, driver's license or other document filed with a
public agency;
(2) use by an occupant of an address other than such housing
accommodation as a voting address;
(3) occupancy of the housing accommodation for an aggregate of less
than 183 days in the most recent calendar year, except for
184
public accommodation
Federal: ”The following private entities are considered public accommodations
for purposes of this subchapter, if the operations of such entities affect
commerce— (A) any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides
lodging to transient guests, other than an establishment located within a building
which contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually
occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as his residence;...”
[SOURCE: United States 2005 (USC 42. 21. II § 2000a and 126.III)]
rent control
New York State: beginning in 1969, Rent Stabilization has been gradually
phased in to replace "Rent Control" for most the regulated apartments and
hotel dwellings in New York City. See rent stabilization.
New York City: RSC "applies to dwelling units in all hotels built prior to July 1,
1969 with 6 or more dwelling units that charged no more than $300/month or
$88/week the week of May 31, 1968 and/or eligible for benefits under (rent
control).
[SOURCE: City of New York 1969 (NYC Rent Stabilization Law § 26-506)]
a. ... this (city rent and rehabilitation) law shall apply to dwelling units in all hotels
except hotels erected after July first nineteen hundred sixty-nine (July 1, 1969),
whether classified as a class A or a class B multiple dwelling, containing six or
more dwelling units, provided that the rent charged for the individual dwelling
units on May thirty-first, nineteen hundred sixty-eight (May 31, 1968) was not
more than three hundred fifty dollars per month ($350/month) or eighty-eight
dollars per week ($85/week); and further provided that, notwithstanding the
foregoing, this law shall apply to dwelling units in any hotel, whether classified as
a class A or a class B multiple dwelling eligible for benefits pursuant to the
provisions of § 11-244 of the code.
185
New York City: The allowable level of rent adjustment over the lawful rent
actually charged and paid on September 30, 1999 shall be:
1) Residential Class A (apartment) hotels: 4%
2) Lodging houses: 4%
3) Rooming houses (Class B buildings containing less than 30 units): 4%
4) Class B hotels: 4%
5) Single Room Occupancy buildings (MDL § 248 SRO's): 4%
Except that the allowable level of rent adjustment over the lawful rent actually
charged and paid on September 30, 1999 shall be 0% if: Fewer than 70% of the
residential units in a building are occupied by permanent rent stabilized or rent
controlled tenants paying no more than the legal regulated rent, at the time that
any rent increase in this Order would otherwise be authorized. Furthermore, the
allowable level of rent adjustment over the lawful rent actually charged and paid
on September 30, 1999 shall be 0% on any individual unit if the owner has failed
to provide to the new occupant of that unit a copy of the Rights and Duties of
Hotel Owners and Tenants...” [SOURCE: New York City 1999b (Rent Guidelines
for Hotels, Rooming Houses, Single Room Occupancy Buildings and Lodging
Houses) ]
rented room
City of Fullerton: “a room or rooms within, and part of, a single-family residence
that may be rented to individuals as living accommodations. A rented room is not
a separate dwelling unit having its own kitchen facilities; it may or may not have
separate access from the exterior.
[SOURCE: City of Fullerton 2004 (Zoning Ordinance)]
residence
City of Fullerton, California : a building or structure or portion thereof, which is
designed for or used to provide a place of abode for human beings, but not
including hotels. The term "residence" includes the term "residential" as referring
to the type of or intended use of a building or structure.
[SOURCE: City of Fullerton 2004 (Zoning Ordinance)]
residential hotels
BLS: "Residential hotels provide living quarters for permanent and
semipermanent residents. They combine the comfort of apartment living with the
convenience of hotel services. Many have dining rooms and restaurants that also
are open to the general public."
[SOURCE: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005]
186
rooming house
New York: "Class B buildings containing less than 30 units" (maybe a private
home that rents rooms, see multiple dwelling); the proprietor must live on the
premises. ... A ‘rooming house’ or a ‘furnished room house’ is a multiple
dwelling, other than a hotel, having less than thirty sleeping rooms and in which
persons either individually or as families are housed for hire or otherwise with or
without meals. An inn with less than thirty sleeping rooms is a rooming house.
[SOURCE: New York State 1929]
individual unit; and (e) In a rooming house, no central dining or food preparation
area is provided for guests."
[SOURCES: District of Columbia 2002 (Municipal Regulations Zoning- 49DCR
2750 of March 22, 2002)
50 percent or below the area median income are eligible to participate in the
program [SOURCE: City of Santa Cruz 2002 (City Code)]
Tenant-Based Rental Assistance that contracts directly with the tenants who
qualify as low-income.
Project-Based Rental Assistance that contracts directly with the building owner.
Federal: “`Single room occupancy housing' means a unit that contains no sanitary
facilities or food preparation facilities, or contains one but not both types of
facilities (as those facilities are defined in 887.251 (a) and (b), that is suitable for
occupancy by an eligible individual capable of independent living.”
[SOURCE: United States 1992 (USC 24CFR887.481 §. 887.481)]
City of Santa Cruz: "a SRO is a cluster of residential units of a smaller size than
normally found in multiple dwellings within a residential hotel, motel, or facility
providing sleeping or living facilities in which sanitary facilities may be provided
within the unit and/or shared, and kitchen or cooking facilities may be provided
within the unit or shared within the housing project."
[SOURCE: City of Santa Cruz 2002]
New York State: "Single room occupancy" is the occupancy by one or two
persons of a single room, or of two or more rooms which are joined together,
separated from all other rooms within an apartment in a multiple dwelling, so that
the occupant or occupants thereof reside separately and independently of the
other occupant or occupants of the same apartment. When a class A multiple
dwelling is used wholly or in part for single room occupancy, it remains a class A
multiple dwelling. [SOURCE: New York State 1929: 16]
SRO building
New York City: [Applicable laws include New York City Local Law 19 requiring
landlords to file a certificate of no harassment" (of tenants) to obtain a permit to
alter or demolish a SRO unit or building.]
SRO buildings are subject to unique regulations. SRO buildings must provide one
toilet, one washbasin, and one bath or shower for every six SRO units. Every floor
on which tenants reside must have bathroom facilities. Each room has a
maximum occupancy of two adults. No residents may be younger than 16 years
old. Each sleeping room must have at least one window that faces outside. The
manager of a SRO building is required to reside in the building. The NY State
Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) regulates rents for most
SRO buildings.
SRO building owners who wish to alter the number of rooms, transform rooms
into apartments or alter the number of kitchen and bathroom facilities must first
receive a Certificate of No Harassment from HPD.
[SOURCE: NYC Housing Department, HPD SRO Compliance Unit]
SRO building
Chicago, Cook County, Illinois: “a class of residential buildings subject to low
assessment and consequently lower real estate taxes that meet the legal
definition and eligibility criteria established by law.
SRO, Class 2 - Definitions and Eligibility:
190
SRO facility
San Diego, California: "a facility with more than five sleeping rooms
that is kept, used, maintained, advertised, or held out to the public as a place
where sleeping rooms are offered on a single room occupancy (SRO) basis and
intended for use as a primary residence for residential guests for a period of more
than thirty days."
[SOURCE: City of San Diego 2003 (Municipal Code 1301:7-5-08 (A) §124.1.2).]
SRO facility
State of Ohio: "A facility with more than 5 sleeping rooms that are kept, used,
maintained, advertised, or held out to the public as a place where sleeping rooms
are offered on a single room occupancy (SRO) basis and is intended for use as a
primary residence for residential guests staying for a period of more than 30
days....that offer such rooms to 1 occupant with the intent of the room being the
occupant's permanent residence for period longer than 30 days. Note: Various
state titles and housing authorities define SRO buildings."
[SOURCE: Ohio nd(2)]
San Diego: (A protected class of residential hotels which must be replaced in kind
or with a contribution to the SRO construction fund if demolished or converted
and (since 1985) for which repair, rehabilitation, and new construction is
encouraged with City tax breaks, loan guarantees, loans and grants, and other
incentives.) [SOURCE: City of San Diego 2002 (Municipal Code, Chapter 14)]
SRO housing
Federal, HUD: "A residential property that includes multiple single room dwelling
units. Each unit is for occupancy by a single eligible individual. The unit need not,
but may, contain food preparation or sanitary facilities, or both."
City of Salinas CA: Single room occupancy housing. (a) Purposes. The purposes
of single room occupancy housing are to:
(1) Provide affordable, long-term housing for small nontraditional households and
for people with special needs;
193
(2) Provide high density housing in close proximity to transportation and services
in a commercial environment; and
(3) Provide the highest possible livability standards of design, environment,
conform and security given the constraints of limited living space and the need to
maintain affordability.
(b) Development Standards. Single room occupancy housing shall conform to the
following development standards:
(1) Density. Single room occupancy housing which conforms to the requirements
of this section shall not be considered to exceed the allowable lot area per unit for
the lot upon which it is located.
(2) Floor Area. Maximum three hundred square feet per living unit, including
bathrooms. Minimum one hundred fifty square feet per living unit, including
bathrooms.
(3) Kitchen. Each living unit shall contain kitchen facilities including a sink,
cooking apparatus and refrigerator.
(4) Bathroom. Each living unit shall contain a bathroom including a toilet, sink and
shower or tub.
(5) Entryways. Living units shall not have separate external entryways.
(6) Common Area. Four square feet per living unit, designed and furnished for the
use and comfort of residents. No common area shall be less than two hundred
square feet. Common areas shall not include storage rooms, laundry facilities or
hallways.
(7) Maximum Occupancy. Two persons per living unit.
(8) Manager's Unit. A manager's unit shall be provided in a central location which
may exceed the maximum allowable square feet per living unit.
(c)Design Guidelines. The following guidelines are intended as a reference to
assist the designer and operator in understanding the city's purposes in allowing
single room occupancy housing which meets the purposes stated in this section.
(6) Supply Room. A supply room should be provided adjacent to the manager's
unit.
(7) Internal Security. There should be a security plan emphasizing residents'
safety without unreasonably imposing on residents' activities.
(d) Exemptions.
(1) Property Development Regulations. The requirements for lot area/unit,
bedrooms per unit and usable open space applicable to residential uses shall not
apply to single room occupancy housing.
(2) Existing Structures. Existing structures may be converted to single room
occupancy housing and exempt from the development standards contained in this
section provided the following findings can be made:
(A) There is substantial compliance with development standards;
(B) Alternative means of compliance with development standards are provided
which contribute to livability; and
C) Strict compliance with development standards would render conversion of the
structure to single room occupancy housing impractical.
(f) Affordability.
(1) Percent Affordable. A minimum of fifty percent of the living units shall be
affordance and available to very low income households, as defined in §50501 of
the Health and Safety Code, or low income households, as defined in
§50079.5 of the Health and Safety Code.
(2) Affordable Housing Plan. An affordable housing plan shall be included as a
condition of a conditional use permit issued in accordance with Division 22:
Variances and conditional use permits, which shall include:
(A) The number of units to be affordable to very low and low income
households; and
(B) The means by which permanent maintenance and affordability of the
units will be achieved.
[SOURCE: City of Salinas nd (Ord. No. 2245 NCS § 29 City of Salinas Municipal
Code, Sec. 37-161.1)]
195
Rental assistance for SRO units is provided for a period of 10 years. Owners are
compensated for the cost of some of the rehabilitation (as well as the other costs
of owning and maintaining the property) through the rental assistance payments.
To be eligible for assistance, a unit must receive a minimum of $3,000 of
rehabilitation, including its prorated share of work to be accomplished on common
areas or systems, to meet housing quality standards (HQS).
Assistance provided under the SRO program is designed to bring more standard
SRO units into the local housing supply and to use those units to assist homeless
persons. The SRO units might be in a rundown hotel, a Y, an old school, or even
in a large abandoned home. "
[SOURCE: United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),
Community Planning and Development 2001a and b]
New York City: "SRO units consist of one or two rooms that either lack complete
kitchen and/or bathroom facilities, or share them with other units. SRO units are
often furnished, and rent may be paid weekly or monthly."
[SOURCE: New York 1929 (MDL) and see * footnote ]
sleeping accommodations
Pennsylvania: “Rooms in which people sleep; for example, a dormitory or hotel
or motel guest room.”
[SOURCE: Pennsylvania nd(2) (Administrative Law § 60.1]
sleeping accommodations
“The City of Chicago requires a business which offers seven or more sleeping
accommodations for rent to pay a base annual license fee ($82.50 plus $1.10 per
room) and be inspected by zoning and the police.”
[SOURCE: City of Chicago nd (4) (Municipal Code 4-208)]
temporary residence
"means dwelling unit accommodations offered for pay to persons for a period of
one year or less."
[SOURCE: 1301:7-5-08 Hotel and SRO Facility License A § 124.0
General (a) 124.1.1(a)]
tenant
City of Chicago: "Tenant means a person entitled by written or oral agreement,
sub-tenancy approved by the landlord or by sufferance, to occupy a dwelling unit
to the exclusion of others." (applies to all dwelling units -housing, hotels, SROs, et
al.) [SOURCE: City of Chicago nd (1) {5.12.030 (h)}]
subtenant, sublessee
New York City: "Subtenant or sublessee: Any person lawfully occupying the
housing accommodation pursuant to an agreement with the tenant by
authority of the lease or by virtue of rights afforded pursuant to §226-b of
the Real Property Law. Such person shall be entitled to all of the benefits of
and be subject to all of the obligations of this Code except the right to
renew, and the right to purchase upon conversion to cooperative or
condominium ownership. [SOURCE: 9 NYCRR § 2520.6 Definitions (k)*]
time share New Mexico: “‘time share’ means a right to occupy a unit or any of
several units during five or more separated time periods over a period
199
tourist court Georgia State: “a tourist court is any facility consisting of two or more rooms
or dwelling units providing lodging and other accommodations
for tourists and travelers and includes tourist courts, tourist cottages,
tourist homes, trailer parks, trailer courts, motels, motor hotels, hotels, and
any similar place by whatever name called and any food, beverage,
laundry, recreational or other facilities, or establishments operated in
conjunction therewith.” [SOURCE: Georgia nd ]
transient City of Portland, Oregon: “Transient” means any individual who exercises
occupancy or is entitled to occupancy in a hotel for a period of 30
consecutive calendar days or less, counting portions of calendar days as
full days. The day a transient checks out of the hotel shall not be included
in determining the 30-day period if the transient is not charged rent for that
day by the operator. Any such individual so occupying space in a hotel
shall be deemed to be a transient until the period of 30 days has expired
unless there is an agreement in writing between the operator and the
occupant providing for a longer period of occupancy, or the tenancy actually
extends more than 30 consecutive days. In determining whether a person
is a transient, uninterrupted periods of time extending both prior and
subsequent to the effective date of this Chapter may be considered.
[SOURCE: City of Portland, nd(3) (City Code §010.020. I “Transient”)]
transient accommodations
Hawaii: ‘Transient accommodations’ mean the furnishing of a room,
apartment, suite, or the like which is customarily occupied by a transient for
less than one hundred eighty (180) consecutive days for each
letting by a hotel, apartment hotel, motel, condominium property regime or
apartment as defined in chapter 514A, cooperative apartment, or rooming
house that provides living quarters, sleeping, or housekeeping
accommodations, or other place in which lodgings are regularly furnished to
transients for consideration.”
Exceptions: “ (1) Health care facilities... (2) school dormitories... grades
kindergarten through twelve, or of any institution of higher education, (3)
lodgings provided by nonprofit corporations or associations for religious,
200
transient hotel
San Diego: “ Any structure consisting of one or more buildings, with more than five
sleeping rooms, that is kept, used, maintained, advertised, or held out to the public
to be a place where sleeping accommodations are offered for pay to transient
guests for a period of thirty days or less, including but not limited to, such a
structure denoted as a hotel, motel, motor hotel, lodge, motor lodge, bed and
breakfast, or inn.... “Hotel” does not include agricultural labor camps, apartment
houses, lodging houses, rooming houses, or hospital or college dormitories.
[SOURCE: San Diego 2003 (1301:7-5-08 (A) §124)]
“pink” collar workers. These hotels provided small furnished private bed rooms
and such services as laundering and pressing clothes and meals in dining rooms.
Bathrooms were generally shared and entire hotels or floors were restricted to one
sex. Work men’s hotels were the most expensive of the low rent
accommodations. Around 1900, a room in a workman’s hotel cost as much as a
dollar a night when a cot in dormitory or sleeping shift in cage lodgings cost a
nickel or a dime, and a “flop house” or “barrel house” cost a penny. Beginning in
1950s, new building standards curtailed new developments of workingmen’s
hotels. In the period between about 1975 and the present, many of these hotels
“were demolished, converted into commercial Single Room Occupancy hotels, ...
into permanent housing", or into supportive permanent or transitional housing.
The principal surviving ‘workingmen’s hotels’ are in urban areas --in New York
City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities– where they are generally known as
"commercial" Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels. The variant ‘workman’s’
hotel or workmen’s hotel is still used in popular speech in Chicago.
_______________________________
Laws, ordinances, state, municipal, or county codes, rules, zoning, legal definitions, and
regulations were in force in 2005 unless noted as draft or bills. Legal material is
referenced to the year in which it became effective in the jurisdiction, the year a
compilation was made public or as “no date” (nd).
* The New York City laws, rules, definitions, and other legal materials quoted and directly
referenced rest on the following additional statutory authority: New York City
Administrative Code, § 11-243, 11-244; Multiple Dwelling, § A7-C; Real Property Law, §
226-B, § 235-F; Real Property Tax Law, 423; New York City Administrative Code,
T27C2; Real Property Tax Law, 421-A, N.Y.C. Administrative Code, 26-511(b), 26-
518(a) History: Added 2520.6 on 5/01/87; amended 2520.6(c)on 12/20/00; repealed and
added 2520.6(e) on 12/20/00; repealed and added 2520.6(f) on 12/20/00; amended
2520.6(I) on 12/20/00; amended 2520.6(n) on 4/04/90; amended 2520.6(n) on 12/20/00;
amended 2520.6(o) on 4/04/90; amended 2520.6(o)(1) on 12/20/00; amended 2520.6(q)
on 4/04/90; amended 2520.6(s) on 12/20/00; amended 2520.6(t) on 12/20/00; added
2520.6(u) on 12/20/00.
203
APPENDIX B: BRANDS
MAIN TYPE
Full service (FS) -includes food and beverage service, restaurant on premises
Limited service (LS)
w F&B = with food and beverage service
w/o F&B =without food and beverage service
Resort Full service (with food and beverage services) located at a resort
Extended Stay (ES) Property with all studio or bedroom apartment units and
monthly rates available or required
Chain (C) Brand is exclusive to the same organization that owns and operates (or
contracts private management for) a chain of multiple hotel properties.
Both (B) Brand is both franchised and operated by a core chain. (In most cases,
the core chain developed the brand system then spun off franchises.)
BRANDS & Sub-brands A M AIN TYPE BRAND PARENT U.S. hotels U.S. uUnits
Abbott Resorts Condotels (I) Resort Quest 7
Adam s Mark (+nam e of Conference hotels HBE 17 10,826
city) (Chain)
Adm iral Benbow Inn Econom y TQ (B) Adm iral Benbow of 4 350
Am erica
Affinia Urban hotels (Chain) Affinia Hospitality 7
Am alfi Condo hotels (Chain) Hostm ark Hospitality 1
Group
Am erica's Best Inns and Econom y (F/IOO) Buckhead Am erican 85
Suites Corp
America's Best Inn Econom y (F/IOO) Buckhead
** America's Best Suites Economy (F/ IOO) Buckhead
Am erica's Best Value Inns Econom y (A/IOO) Best Value (Mem bership 268 15059
Association)
Best Value Econom y (A/IOO) Best Value
Best Value Inns Econom y (A/IOO) Best Value
America's Best Value Inn and LTS (IOO) Best Value
Executive Suites
Best Value Inns & Suites Econom y LTS Best Value
(A/IOO)
Best Value Inn and Extended Extended Stay Best Value
Stay
(A/IOO)
Best Value Inn Hotel Econom yTQ (A/IOO) Best Value
AmericInn Lodge & Limited Service AmericInn 195 10316
Suites (F/B) International, LLC
Am erica's Inn Econom y (I) Independent 2 140
Am eriHost Inn ® (since Econom y (F) Am eriHost /Cendant 104 7077
1989)
**A m erihost Inn & Suites SM Econom y (F) Am eriHost /Cendant
**AmeriSuites "All Suites" ES Hyatt (prior to 12/04: 147 18000
(Chain) Blackstone/US
Franchise)
AmeriTel Inns 10 1000
**Arcadia Residential Extended Stay Independent / Extended 2 144
Suites (IOO) Stay Netw ork
Aston Hotels & Resorts ® Condo rentals Resort Quest Hawaii 4
Hawaii (Chain)
Bally's Casino hotels Harrah's (fka Ceasar's 3 5802
(Chain) Entertainment)
Baymont Inns & Suites LS "all suites" ES M arcus 89
(Both chain & Corp./Baymount & La
franchises to IOO) Quinta
Bella Vista Suites (Third party Hostm ark Hospitality 6
managed) Group
Best Inns & Suites -See America's Best Inns
and Suites
Sonesta Hotel and Suites Full service resort Sonesta International 6 2,066
(F/IOO) Hotel Corp.
Sol M elia
Southern Suites Economy (Chain) Independent operator
**SpringHill Suites by Limited service "All M arriott 130 14,950
M arriott Suites" Extended
Stay (F/IOO)
**Staybridge Suites by Extended Stay (B) InterContinental Hotel 110
Holiday Inn Group
St. Regis Full service, upscale Starw ood 7
(F/IOO)
St Regis Club Timeshares in Starw ood 2
hotels
St Regis Residences Condos in hotels Starw ood 5
**Studio 6 Extended Stay ACCOR Econom y 40 5,135
(Chain) Lodging Division
**Studio PLUS Deluxe Extended Stay (B) Extended Stay America 95 7,675
**Suburban Extended Extended Stay (F) Suburban Franchise 67 8,821
Stay Hotel System s
**Suburban Lodge Extended Stay
**Suites of America Extended Stay (C) Bigelow M anagement 2
**Suite One Extended Extended Stay (C) SuiteOne Hotels 7 696
Stay Hotels
**Summerfield Suites by Extended Stay (C) W yndham/HPT/Candle 23
W yndham w ood
Summit Hotel
Sundow ner Inn TQ /B&B (former Now BW , Best Values, 8 350
chain beginning to Independent
franchise)
**Sun Suites Extended Stay (C) Sun Suites Interest LLP 22 2,798
Super 8 M otel (since Economy (F/IOO) Cendant 2,076 125,844
1974)
"Sw iss Chalet" (not a brand) (Unaffiliated 4
independent operators)
Sw issôtel Full service, luxury Colony Capital Asia 3
(Chain) Limited LLC
Thrifty Inn Economy (Chain) Drury Inns Inc.
**Tow nePlace Suites ES all suites (F) M arriott 112 11,462
Travelodge Economy limited Cendant
service TQ (F)
Thriftlodge® Economy limited Cendant
service w/o F&B
(F/IOO)
Travelodge Suites ® Limited service "All Cendant 8
suites" (F)
Trendw est Resort / W orld Resort timeshare Cendant / Trendw est 50
M ark condotels (Chain)
Trump Casino&condotels Trump Hotels & Casino 6
(Chain) Resorts, Inc.
214
APPENDIX B, Part 2:
EXTENDED STAY BRANDS
WITH ALL STUDIO OR
BEDROOM APARTMENT UNITS C =Chain, F=Franchise, B=Both,
A=Association, I=Independent
1day EXTENDED STAY HOTELS
AV$ GROUP, Brand, Sub-brands States #Prop#Units Rooms Studios BR apts
BEST W ESTERN
Best Western Extended Stay & Suites ® NJ A 3 300 Rooms Studios
(line begun in 2005, expanding)
$66 InnSuites® CA,AZ, C 12 1,848 Suites Studios no
NM,TX
CARLSON
Country Inn and Suites by Carlson 358
(W yndham Franchises)
$80 Summ erfield Suites by W yndham ® 12 F 23 3,245 no no 1&2 BR
states
HILTON
$122 Homew ood Suites by Hilton® 36 F 155 15,442 Suites Studios BR apts
states
US FRANCHISE SYSTEM S
$99+ Hawthorne Suites 33 F 99 10,528 no Studios BR apts
states
$109 Staybridge Suites by Holiday Inn ® B 78 8,850 Rooms Studios 1BR apts
M ARRIOTT
$127 Residence Inn by M arriott® 45 F 482 54,019 Rooms Studios 1 BR apts
states
LA QUINTA CORPORATION
La Quinta Suites B 363 Suites some some
Baymont Inns & Suites TX B 89 Suites some some
W oodfield Suites 5 B 6 no Studios 1 BR apts
states
SUN SUITES INTERESTS LLP/
Longhouse Hospitality
$24 Sun Suites Extended Stay 7 C 22 2,798 Rooms Studios no
states
Crestw ood Suites ® 5 C 18 1,487 Rooms Studios 1 BR
states
HILTON
DoubleTree GuestSuites 19 B 32 Suites no no
states
HYATT
$109 AmeriSuites ® --> 32 B 147 18,000 Suites Studios BR apts
states
(Changing to "Hyatt Place")
M ARRIOTT
M arriott Suites B 14 Suites no no
219
US FRANCHISE SYSTEM S
M icrotel Inn and Suites 39 F 262 Suites no no
states
Extended Stay
InSuites SW 12 1,848 Suites
Oxford Suites OR,WA, 14 Suites no no
CA
Phoenix Inn Suites OR, 13 Suites no no
WA,AZ
SUBTOTAL Additional “all 502
suites”hotels notes:
OTHER
M ARRIOTT
Execustay by M arriott F Suites Studios BR apts
Marriott Executive Apartments F no Studios BR apts
Executive Suites AL,AZ, 3 Suites Studios no
TX
Extended Stay
The Gilmore Group, Inc. (TGG) Broker 20,000 Suites Studios BR apts
Habitat Corporate Suites LLC Broker Suites Studios BR apts
Just Like Home Corporate Housing Broker Suites Studios BR apts
M edStay Broker
Oakwood Corporate Housing Broker 20,000 Apt&TH
Oakwood Apartments (rental apartments) Broker no no BR apts
Oakwood Residence (serviced apartments) Broker no no BR apts
Oakwood Premier (serviced apartments) Broker no no BR apts
RESORTQUEST A 5,000 Suites Studios BR apts
(rent resort condos & houses)
SuiteAmerica Broker Suites Studios BR apts
"corporate living" 20,000 interim stay apts no no BR apts
(Hundreds of local brokers)
APPENDIX C: COMPANIES
Companies included owned at least five hotels or one thousand hotel units at some
point in 2005 and, together, over 20,000 hotel properties with 2.7 units. Major
associations and consortia included not “independent owners” as the property owners.
Information is based on industry sources (AH&LA), the company’s own publicity, and
financial analyses of the company. The company websites consulted are listed at the
end. (No confidential Census Bureau information was reviewed or used in any way
used in the preparation of this appendix.)
Number of Number of
Properties Units Company Name
in the U.S. in the U.S. Subsidiary
Associated Brand Names
Accor Hotels
(Ranked 4 th largest; worldwide owns and operates 4,000 properties with
466,000 room s in 90 countries)
1,252 136,385 Accor North America
Ibis ® Hotel
Accor Economy Lodging Division
M otel 6 ® (360 in U.S.; 600 in North Am erica)
(fka Red Roof Inns, Inc.)
Red Roof Inns ® (350 in U.S.)
Red Carpet Inn ®
Studio 6 ® Extended Stay (30 in U.S.)
Accor International (W orldwide, owns and
operates 1705 properties )
Novotel Hotel Division
Novotel ® ( "Midscale" only 3 of 346 in US)
Sofitel ® (“up scale”)
12 Good Nite Inn, Inc. (Chain in California trading under its exclusive
brand:)
Good Nite Inn ®
Great Wolf Resorts, Inc. with CNL Income Properties
(Expanding chain of exclusively branded fam ily vacation resort hotels with
indoor water parks and other them es:)
11 40,000 Great W olf Lodge ®
1 Blue Harbor
8 Great Western Hotels
(Hotels in California, Oklahom a, and Missouri; uniques or branded as:)
Best W estern ®, Ram ada ®
22 16,514 Harrah's Entertainment
(Owns and operate 28 casino hotels in 13 states-- 30 casinos
worldwide-- as large uniques and as chains under exclusive brands:)
Harrah's ®
3 properties Horseshoe ®
Harvey's
1 hotel, 1,561 units Laughlin
1 hotel, 2,551units Rio
28 26,101 (Added group of casinos hotels fka Caesar's Entertainm ent and "Park
Entertainm ent" and Im perial acquired in 2005)
Caesar's ®
Bally's ®
Flam ingo
Grand Casino
Caesars at Sea/Crystal X
1 hotel, 3,400 units Caesar's Palace, Los Vegas
1 hotel, 2,916 units Paris, Los Vegas, Unique
1 hotel, 2,700 units Im perial Palace Hotel, Los Vegas
21 HBE Corporation (Conference and resort hotels in 13 states
branded as:) Adam 's Mark Hotel ®
Adam ’s Mark Resort ®
5 Helmsley Hotels (4 luxury hotels in New York; one in Florida)
22 Hersha Hospitality with Hersha Hospitality Trust
(Owns 22 of the 37 properties operated in the Northeast franchised as:)
Courtyard by Marriott ®
Hilton ® Four Points by Sheraton ®
Residence Inn by M arriott ®
Holiday Inn Express ®
various Choice Hotels International brands
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Red Lion Hotel Corporation (formerly known as) WestCoast Hospitality Corporation
http://rlhcorp.rdln.com/
Red Lion® Hotel, Red Lion® Inn http://www.westcoasthotels.com/
Remington Hotel Corporation http://www.remingtonhotels.com/
APPENDIX D: CONVERSIONS
Chicago
The Harold Washington Apartments, converted the former Morland Hotel built in the
1920s into 70 SRO supported permanent housing units in 1989. All units have
kitchenettes, 10 are complete studio apartments, four are one-bedroom apartments,
and the rest share bathrooms on hallways. This housing developed and managed by
Lakefront Single Room Occupancy Corporation was the first renovated Single Room
Occupancy (“SRO”) residential building in Chicago.
The Belray, opened 1996, 70 SRO units; Lakefront converted from a hotel built in the
1920s; as in all Lakefront’s buildings, tenants pay 30 per cent of their income and sign
one year leases; (Lakefront website; Prosio and Houghton 2003)
Renaissance Apartments, opened 2000, 101 SRO units, developed and operated by
the Wabash 'Y' Renaissance Collaborative (TRC)’s, remodeled the vacant and
abandoned Wabash YMCA Hotel built in 1913 in the Bronzeville with Section HUD
Section 8 SRO permanent housing support (National Trust nd)
Sutherland Apartments, converted from the former Sutherland Hotel into 154 units
(studios and one bedroom apartments) by Century Place Development Corporation
(CPDC), a commercial real estate firm.
The YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago converted the majority of its non-profit hotel units
into permanent residences and describes itself as “the “largest and longest-serving
Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing provider in the Midwest, supplying more than
2,100 SRO units at seven YMCA residences”. In these hotels, retired or low income
elderly and working singles privately pay about $100 more per month for a room with a
private bath than for a room which shares a bathroom (YMCA Metro Chicago website).
The Somerset, a high rise former hotel property that occupies a quarter city block was
converted --without remodeling-- into a residence for people with mental disabilities in
1995. Some rooms have private baths; some share.
The Narragansett SRO Hotel and The Kenmore SRO Hotel, were purchased and
renovated by Housing and Services, Inc. in the early 1990s as supportive housing.
(Haaga 1997).
The Prince George Hotel was built at 14 East 28th Street in Manhattan in 1904-1912 as
a luxury hotel in the Parisian Beaux Arts style. By the mid-1980s, the hotel was entirely
leased by the city as “welfare hotel” and sheltered up to 1600 homeless women and
children until it was closed for uncorrected building code violations. The non-profit
housing organization Common Ground bought the 14 story hotel in 1996, thoroughly
restored the building and remodeled guest rooms into 416 efficiency apartments. The
Prince George opened in October 1999 as supported, subsidized housing for previously
homeless and working low-income working single adults, including some who are
elderly and terminally or chronically ill. (Kershaw 2000; Common Ground 2003).
Times Squares Hotel was originally built in 1923 at the corner of 43rd Street and Eighth
Avenue as an upscale residential hotel and converted into supportive, permanent
housing by Common Ground in the period 1991-1994. By the 1980s, the hotel had
deteriorated and complimented its business of renting self-pay residential single room
occupancy units by leasing rooms to the city for use in its system of emergency
shelters. Common Ground acquired the Times Square in 1991 and worked the
renovation construction around the 210 tenants who remained in residence. The Times
Square supportive SRO currently houses for 652 permanent tenants : 200 of whom are
people with disabilities placed under the New York/New York agreement program, 50
DAS placements (AIDS patients), 74 DHS placements (formerly homeless in need of
supportive services), and 328 low income tenants from the “community”, including the
legacy hotel tenants. (Common Ground 2003; Cosgrove 2005)
In 2000, Common Ground purchased the former residential hotel annex of the
McBurney YMCA built in the early 1900s at 24rd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan
and remodeled into The Christopher with 167 units of permanent supportive housing for
low-income or formerly homeless adults, 20 units for New York’s Work-Related
Housing program, and 40 four-bedroom suites for transitional supported housing for
participants in the 18-month post-foster care Foyer program for foster children "aged
out" of the system when they turn 18. (Common Ground 2003)
“The Andrews” at 197 Bowery was one of nine surviving New York cubicle lodgings
when Common Ground acquired the building early in 2002 and began renovations. The
Andrews had rented 7-by-5-foot sleeping cubicle units partially enclosed with
chicken wire for nearly 100 years with one common bathroom on each of the Andrew's
six stories. In 2000, 110 of the Andrews' 200 cubicles renting for $9 per night and 90 of
the cubicle units were occupied by permanent tenants paying at a weekly rate that
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worked out to half that --$4.50/night. The renovation plan Common Ground selected
from entries to an international design competition reduced the number of units to 150
single room occupancy units each 8 by 6 1/2 feet with complete walls, floors, ceiling
and doors, and put in one common bathroom for each five SRO units. The 90 Andrews
residents were gradually moved into renovated units where they have the right to stay
permanently and now pay $36 a week. The other renovated units in the Andrews are
currently reserved for stays limited to 21 days for participants in a supported transitional
housing program for formerly homeless individuals who privately pay $7 per night to
stay in one of the SRO units. (See Hevesi 2002 and Isay, Abramson, and Wang 2000.)
The Palace Hotel at 313 Bowery, the largest old style “Bowery lodging house” was
leased in the mid-1990s by the Bowery Residents Committee in the mid 1990s which
uses the building for transitional housing, emergency shelter and social service offices,
while preserving the permanent hotel residences of the Palace’s legacy lodgers.
The Woodstock Hotel, at 127 West 43rd Street in central Manhattan between Sixth and
Broadway, was turned into Glaves House, supportive housing for low income, older
adults on public assistance. The non-profit operator, Project Find, serves residents two
meals six days a week, and provides on site social workers who manage and advocate
residents’ cases and program entitlement and a part time ambulatory medical clinic.
Los Angeles
The Panama and The Russ hotels in the east central Los Angeles’ section known as
“Skid Row” were remodeled by the SRO Housing Corporation. The Panama Hotel was
remodeled into a multipurpose facility: 100 private pay single room occupancy housing
units; 90 units accept housing assistance (DPSS vouchers) for rent, 42 units are
reserved as EEHP continuum of care supported transitional housing, and 29 function as
an emergency shelter. The SRO Housing Corporation remodeled the smaller Russ
Hotel into 44 private pay permanent housing units and 42 EEHP transitional supportive
units.
The Sommerville Hotel, built in 1926 on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, later known as
the Dunbar Hotel when it was a cultural center for African American artists and
musicians, was remodeled into apartments for low income elderly in the mid 1990s.
San Francisco
The Ritz Hotel was converted between 1991 and 1992 into 88 single room occupancy
(SRO) units and street level commercial space by the Tenderloin Neighborhood
Development (TNDC) Housing Corporation and the Chinese Community Housing
Corporation.
The Dalt Hotel was converted into 177 SROs and commercial spaces by TNDC.
The West Hotel was converted into 105 SROs and commercial space beginning
in March 2001.
Ambassador Hotel was rehabilitated 1999 - 2002. The redeveloper and operator,
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By March 2004, six SRO hotels which had previously been enrolled in San Francisco’s
Hotel Master Lease Program had been converted into 793 SRO units of supported
housing under the "Care not cash" program initiated in 2003:
The Arlington (25 units) operated by St. Vincent de Paul,
The Royan (69 units) run by Tenderloin Housing Corporation (THC),
The Cal Drake (51 units) run by THC,
The McAllister -Conard House (80 units),
The Graystone (74 units) run by THC , and
The Elm (86 units) run by Episcopal Community Services.
San Francisco hotels and SRO hotels being remodeled and refurbished as residential
buildings in 2005 with funding from other sources include:
The Cadillac Hotel (159 SRO units),
Cambridge Hotel (61 one bedroom SRO units),
Clayton Hotel/Chinese Community Housing (82 SRO units),
Dorado Hotel (57 SRO units),
Hamlin Hotel (68 studios),
Knox Hotel (140 SRO units),
Madrid Hotel (47 one bedroom and studio apartments),
Midori Hotel (77 SRO units),
Park View Hotel (41 one bedroom and studio apartments),
Ritz Hotel (90 one bedroom and SRO units),
Saint Claire Hotel (41 SRO units),
San Cristina Hotel (58 SRO units),
Swiss American Hotel (66 SRO units),
Tower Hotel/Chinese Community Housing (34 SRO units),
William Penn Hotel (91 SRO and studio units), and the
Woodward Gardens Hotel/Mission Housing (59 one bedroom units).
Santa Barbara
Victoria Hotel, an historic hotel property was remodeled and is operated by Peoples
Self-Help Housing Corporation (PSHHC) of San Luis Obispo, California, as supportive
single room occupancy housing with on-site health, social services, and case
management. Rents range from $290 to $550; the Victoria has a zero vacancy rate and
a long waiting list.
Seattle
The Bush Hotel, built in 1915, was converted into 96 units of affordable housing by the
Seattle Chinatown International District Public Development Authority and opened in
2002.
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The historic “OK Hotel” at Pioneer Square was renovated into 44 units of affordable
housing, artist work spaces, and retail by Triad Development and opened in 2002
(McKnight 2002).
Washington, DC
The Whitelaw Hotel at1839 13th NW, constructed in 1912 by entrepreneur Henry
Whitelaw Lewis to accommodate African American visitors to Washington during the
period (1875-1964) when hotels were by law segregated under U.S. law. The Whitelaw
was a popular stop for out-of-town entertainers and notables who called it "the
Embassy” and for local banquets, dances, and debutante balls. After public
accommodations in the United States were desegregated, the Whitelaw declined to the
point that in 1977, the city closed it down for building code violations. Manna Inc.
remodeled and reopened the Whitelaw in 1992 as a subsidized (Section 8) apartment
complex. (Cook 1995).
LUCHA SRO, a new construction residential building with 68 units, was completed in
1996 by a Hispanic community organization.
The Studios, opened in 1997, which claims to have been the “first new SRO built in
Chicago in 25+ years”, has 170 furnished units, each 225 square feet in size, and is
operated by The Chicago Christian Industrial League (http://theleague.org/)
An eight floor new construction building at 600 S Wabash with 169 SRO units ,
developed and managed the Chicago Christian Industrial League, is scheduled to open
in late 2005 to house employed and disabled low income workers.
The South Loop Apartments at 1521 South Wabash opened 207 new construction SRO
units in 1999, developed and operated by Lakefront.
Lakefront developed and operates its second totally new construction residential
building at 1801 S. Wabash, which opened in February 2004 with 110 SRO units.
A third new building which will combine studio and bedroom apartments is under
construction. (See Lakefront, CCIL websites, and Levavi 1996.)
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New York
The Peter Jay Sharp Residence, opened in 2000, has 74 apartments, each equipped
with a private bathroom and kitchen, plus communal lounges and a dining room serving
low cost meals. It’s sponsor, the Doe Foundation, describe its as --“the first newly
constructed SRO in New York City in 50 years”.
(See http://www.doe.org/programs/DoeFundPrograms.cfm?programID=18.)
The Aurora, a new 200 unit supportive housing built in downtown Brooklyn by the
Actors’ Fund of America to provide permanent supportive housing, is managed by
Common Grounds. One hundred units are reserved to house formerly homeless single
adults with special needs or other adults at risk; the other 100 units will house low
income single adults earning less than $26,400 annually employed in the performing
arts and entertainment industries.
San Francisco
Bayanihan House’s 154 SRO units were built at a total cost of $22 million--nearly
$150,000 per unit on the site where the 180 unit Delta SRO hotel burned down. This
new construction SRO housing is owned by the San Francisco Redevelopment
Authority and was developed by the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, a
nonprofit group. Fourteen million was supplied in the form of federal tax credits by the
Fanny Mae Foundation and through the Enterprise Social Investment Corp. Other
funding came from the redevelopment agency's seismic-retrofit loan program. Units
rent for $485-a-month. Residents were chosen from among 3000 applicants.
Pundits dub the building for low income residents the “the Trump Tower of Sixth Street”
and the “poor folks' Fairmont." (Dineen and Fletcher 2003)
New York
California Suites was one of 33 commercial SRO hotels where the New York City’s
agency that assists people living with AIDS (formerly known as DASIS, now known as
HASA) formerly paid rents of $900 to $1200 a month for each single room occupancy
without private bathrooms. DASIS used to place up to 100 of its AIDS patient clients in
this hotel. The hotel was “gut rehabbed” in 1997 and reopened in 1998 as a boutique
hotel (charging $80-120/night) with four DASIS clients resident still living in unrenovated
rooms (Foley 1998).
The Martinique, a 17 floor, 600 room hotel in Manhattan has continuously operated
since 1900 as a hotel; during the 1970s and 1980s, the Martinique was leased to the
city to serve as a "welfare hotel". In the late 1990s, it was remodeled and reopened as
a Holiday Inn.
The Mayflower Hotel, on the West Side near Columbus Circle near New York Opera
House, was demolished to build a condominium apartment building on its site.
Empire Hotel (373 rooms) was converted into 125 luxury residential condos.
New owners closed The Sutton Hotel, an upscale East Side hotel, in June 2005 for
conversion into condos.
The Morgan Hotel Group converted the former Gramercy Park Hotel at 50 Gramercy
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Park North into 23 luxury condos, celebrated with a grand opening/ open house held
Sunday, April 24, 2005.
At the legacy New York landmark hotel The Plaza, unionized workers arbitrated a
tentative deal in April 2005 forcing new owners, Elad Properties, to trim back the
number of guest suites they plan to convert into residential condominiums from 348 to
150 and to preserve the grand hotel's public spaces, including the Oak Room and Palm
Court.
The owner of the New Plaza Hotel, which previously sold about half its units as
residential condos scattered among guest units, is negotiating in 2005 to sell part or all
of its remaining “hotel half” to a chain operating as a luxury brand.
The Millennium U.N. Plaza Hotel announced plans to turn 200 units into condos, “going
halfsies”– about half guest units and half residential condos.