Life in a Hotel: From Comfort to Squalor : Conditions, Not Prices, Seem to Run the Gamut

Step, for a moment, into Charles Manns’ home.

On the third floor of the Coast Hotel at 7th and Island avenues, Manns, his wife and their two daughters live in a worn, single room the size of a large bedroom.

For $85 a week, they share two beds, cook on a hot plate, eat their meals and endure the rats and roaches that appear from time to time. When the family moved in two months ago, Manns said, he cleaned dog feces from behind one of the beds.

Outside the room--which the Mannses have spruced up with the possessions they were able to bring on a bus from Winston-Salem, N.C.--the situation gets worse. The common bathrooms in the residential hotel are filthy.

Syringes Reportedly Found

Manns said that he commonly finds human excrement on bathroom floors and that his children have found syringes left by drug users he claims live in the hotel.

He won’t allow his children to use the shower. To clean themselves, 8-year-old Natasha and 5-year-old Vaneeca rinse off at the sink.

“I don’t really have the money to put something on their feet (when they shower), and I’m afraid they’ll catch athlete’s foot or crabs,” said Manns, whose family lives on a welfare check.

Now step into Margaret Wellins’ home at the Baltic Inn, just a city block away at 6th and Island. Though it is small, her single room is well-painted, well-lighted and clean.

The room has a toilet and a sink. If Wellins wants to rent them from the management, she can have a refrigerator, a television or a microwave oven.

The Baltic’s hallways and bathrooms are immaculate. Six showers are available on each floor. Security cameras make Wellins feel safe. Skylights let in the sun’s glow. Some rooms have small porches. Outside, the Baltic’s logo glows in neon above its clean, modern facade.

Wellins pays $80 each week.

‘It’s Safe, Clean’

“I love it,” Wellins said. “It’s safe and it’s clean. I’ve stayed at other hotels downtown where you have to excuse yourself to the roaches. And it costs the same.”

What is perhaps most surprising about San Diego’s stock of single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs) is the range of conditions available for roughly the same price. The city offers everything from squalid flophouses to sparkling clean rooms--all within a price range that begins slightly more than $200 per month and ends about $350. Many rents are clustered from $275 to $325.

Exactly why prices do not vary more sharply is a matter of some debate. Some officials believe that because demand is high, even the rattiest hotels will fill up with people seeking shelter. But others note that SRO hotels are still advertising for customers in local newspapers.

“We are all in competition here,” said Dana Blasi, who manages the Baltic and eight other SROs. “He who has the best product gets the best tenants.”

Blasi also claims that “blight begets blight. A certain portion of tenants, and I don’t care where he’s living, feels more comfortable in a (filthy) environment. I think it has to do with self-worth and people’s personal comfort zone.”

The top of the SRO price scale is governed by the price of the city’s cheapest apartments. If the price of an SRO room extends into that range, some tenants will consider moving into those, owners and managers said. (SROs, however, maintain some competitive advantage over apartments because they do not charge large security deposits.)

Options Few for Some

In the Mannses’ case, living at the Coast is simply a matter of having few options. The day they got off the bus after their cross-country trip in June, they searched the city for an acceptable residential hotel. But few in town accept children.

“Every hotel you go to around town don’t accept kids,” Manns’ wife, Venus, said.

One that does is the Yale Hotel, 1111 F St. It currently houses 22 children, and its conditions are similar to the Coast’s.

The Yale’s wooden floors, worn smooth by footsteps, are ingrained with filth. In the lobby, residents sit on battered, ripped couches. What looks like an abandoned stove, its knobs gone, turns out to be the cooking facilities at the end of one hallway.

Rooms at the Yale cost $260 a month, $275 with a refrigerator. “Apartments,” which consist of a small bedroom and a kitchen, go for $285. There are no vacancies.

“It’s cheap,” one man said. “You get what you pay for.”

Not everyone feels the same way. George Conn, 84, a feisty Yale resident known as Popeye, is one of hundreds of city residents who are best served by SROs. Conn wants to live downtown at an affordable rate, close to public transportation and other services. His small room suits him fine, he said.

“I’m independent. I can come and go. Nobody bothers me.”

Stephen Ritz, who has managed the Yale for a year, said he has already poured thousands of dollars into the building to fix the hot water heater and boiler and to repaint every room. Ritz and building owner Seymour Reichbart agree that a major renovation is long overdue and have begun to discuss how to finance it. But for now, they don’t have the money.

“I pay a lot of money to (Reichbart),” Ritz said. “It doesn’t leave me any money to put in the building.”

Some Tenants Are Blamed

Besides, Ritz said, as soon as he makes repairs, some tenants vandalize the building. Every time he puts knobs back on the stove they are immediately stolen.

“What am I going to do--starve my family, let my house go into foreclosure, so I can put money into a hotel for people who bash it up and make it filthy in a matter of a month?” Ritz asked.

In another SRO run by Ritz, the 100-year-old Las Flores at 725 4th Ave., a tenant gathered trash cans in his room last March, set them on fire and fled. A tenant was killed, and the second floor of the 52-room building was destroyed.

Ritz has spent more than $20,000 rehabilitating Las Flores’ units, which have been repainted and recarpeted. But vandalism goes on, costing him about $500 a month, he said.

Bonnie Contreras, supervisor of the city’s housing inspection division, said: “Some of the problems are caused by the owners not doing proper maintenance, and some of them are caused by the tenants. Regardless of the cause, the city’s SROs would be at the top of a priority list for inspections, if Contreras had the staff, she said.

Because of budget cuts prompted by Proposition 13, Contreras’ department, which once did routine inspections of SROs, now checks only if complaints are lodged. The San Diego City Council has approved a measure to beef up the inspector corps, but the positions have not yet been funded, Contreras said.

Complaints Recorded

Nevertheless, records show that inspectors have been called into the Coast six to eight times since October for complaints of trash and debris in hallways, mold and mildew, and holes in walls, she said. The hotel has been referred to the county health department because of ongoing sanitation problems, Contreras added.

Asked about conditions in the hotel, Dinora Ramirez, who helps her mother run the establishment, denied that there was any dog feces in the Mannses’ room and said that the bathrooms are cleaned every day.

“We clean them, but as soon as (residents) get in there, they don’t take care of them,” Ramirez said. “They’re not very cooperative in keeping their homes clean.”

Inspectors are also making continuous visits to the Yale, Contreras said, because of complaints of mold and mildew, insects, mice, grease on the walls and damage to ceilings from mold and mildew. The last inspection was July 23. The Yale is scheduled for another inspection in early September.

Many of the residential hotels were built in the early part of this century. But the Baltic, the first San Diego SRO built in more than 70 years, is the prototype of the future, the kind housing commission officials hope will proliferate downtown.

Nicest SROs in the City

Built partially with low-cost loans from the San Diego Housing Commission, 41 of the Baltic’s 207 rooms are reserved for low-income residents. But regardless of the price they pay, tenants get to live in what are perhaps the nicest SRO rooms in the city.

“It’s comfortable. I like it. And it’s convenient,” said Nancy Contreras, who also works at the Baltic. “I was scared at first. I was afraid because of the area, what it was known for. But it’s better than I thought.”

Another example of what can be done with SROs is The Palms, 509 12th Ave., where a rehabilitation that cost more than $600,000 has restored the old Bayview Hotel. The huge 71-room Victorian hotel, which is decorated with dark wooden trim and antique-style furniture, contains some rooms that run as large as 500 square feet and feature bay windows. Prices run as high as $400 per month for a two-person room.

Because of the reconstruction costs and its current 15% to 20% vacancy rate, The Palms is still losing money, said Horst Schemme, the hotel’s manager. But the owner “does not want to run a flea-infested place,” Schemme said. “He wants people to stay in a clean, safe, sanitary” hotel.