The Time is Now: Invest in Hotels As a Permanent Housing Solution

Despite the devastating loss of life and economic injury, the upheaval caused by COVID-19 has had some silver linings. Exposing systemic racial and economic injustices and their related symptoms has forced communities to rethink our core institutions and interventions. Everything from our approach to public safety, to our food distribution, to how we treat our workforce, to where and how we live is up for review and reinvention.

In every area of society as we know it, we have an opportunity to reimagine the status quo and focus on what is really important—what we need to build, what we need to invest in, and, in some cases, reclaiming what we have lost.

Among the most important is creating deeply affordable housing for low income working people.

During the pandemic, the very term “stay at home order” highlighted perhaps the ugliest disparity in America. We have not only accepted homelessness as inevitable, but have made things worse year after year by letting affordable units slip away from our urban centers.

Look no further than the decline of the single room occupancy (SRO) unit, once the bedrock of “first rung” urban affordable housing. From a height of 200,000 SRO units in the mid-twentieth century, the City has retained 40,000, of which only 11,000 are operated by nonprofits and the rest by commercial landlords who overwhelmingly fail to maintain decent conditions. The loss of these units has played a major role in perpetuating homelessness.

And while New York City and State have adopted rigorous efforts to fund new construction of subsidized housing for people with disabilities and people in middle-wage jobs, such policies have ignored the need to preserve and incentivize development of housing for low income and entry level workers.

On any given night, 560,000 people are without a home in America, and the number is growing. In NYC, the right to shelter guarantees just that—shelter for the night—but nothing even close to a home as many of us know it. The Department of Homeless Services spends billions of dollars each year to honor this right while nonprofits work around the clock to keep people off the street and safe. Program shelters, like our own Ready, Willing & Able, add in services and opportunities to help people in the shelter system acquire jobs, skills and support, but without an affordable place to live after leaving such programs, the cycle of homelessness continues. Despite resources, excellent intentions and abundant effort, we are still falling short in moving people out of shelter and into housing.

The solution is simple. We must bring SRO housing back to NYC now. The good news is we have the bricks and mortar ready and waiting: hotels.

In March 2020, hotels in NYC saw their customer base disappear faster than a guest with express check out. By October 2020, the hotel room occupancy rate was 39% compared to pre-pandemic of 90% and 10% of hotel rooms permanently offline. As of January 2021, some 200 of the city’s 700 hotels were closed. Many of those—perhaps even more—will remain so permanently.

A short term effort was to use hotels for density reduction through the Department of Homeless Services as we did through The Doe Fund’s successful partnership with The Bentley Hotel. That was always a temporary solution. But through the collaboration of public and private partnerships, we can turn shuttered hotels that are unable to reopen into permanent housing immediately. With tens of thousands of hotel rooms in NYC vacant, we could instantly create thousands of microunits without the normal 3+ year timeline and exorbitant capital cost per unit of new construction.

This is both practical and mutually beneficial for a sector that had already been inflated and needs to be right-sized, while addressing the needs of New Yorkers. We can add back a type of housing that has vanished, much to the detriment of the City overall.

At The Doe Fund, we believe that having a home is more than just a practical need. The dignity of paying your way, the empowerment of controlling your space, the security of knowing you have a place to go must be accessible to all New Yorkers.

We are committed to advocating for the funding streams necessary to convert hotels to housing, and to work with our partners in both government and the private sector to get this done.

Isabel McDevitt is the Executive Vice President of The Doe Fund.