Officials Study Hotels-for-Homeless Plan : Housing: A county panel will explore the idea of developing single-room-occupancy hotels as a source of housing for burgeoning numbers of elderly, homeless and working poor residents.

Mike and Luann Mitchell pulled into Orange County six months ago and immediately knew they had a problem.

Newly arrived from Michigan, Mike, without a job, and Luann, four months pregnant, had bright hopes of building a new future but they had nowhere to go.

After a week of sleeping in their cramped car, the Mitchells moved into a seedy Anaheim motel, joining thousands of other low-income residents who either remain homeless or are forced to live in poorly maintained, ill-equipped motels because they cannot afford the area’s high rents.

Residents like the Mitchells, however, may soon be offered a significant new housing option if a plan being forged by Orange County officials is adopted.

Those officials want to build single-room-occupancy hotels, called SROs, a once-maligned type of low-income housing that is enjoying a renaissance around the country.

Sixty or 70 years ago, they were a home to traveling salesmen or other wayfarers, gradually decaying into the dirty, paint-chipped, torn-furniture refuge of people with little hope of anything better.

Until recently, they were the first target of the redeveloper’s bulldozer. But now, in an ironic turnabout, many communities see them as an attractive, cheap source of housing for burgeoning numbers of elderly, homeless and working poor residents.

In Los Angeles, city officials have placed moratoriums on demolition of existing residential hotels. And the city of San Diego has established a model SRO program, with 2,500 new units built or under construction.

Orange County officials last week announced plans to form a task force that will explore the idea of developing SRO hotels based on the San Diego model.

“If done with care and quality, we can put low-income housing in a community like Orange County where the cost of land is very expensive,” said Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young.

Young and Orange County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton have been the key backers of the SRO concept in Orange County, visiting and talking with San Diego housing officials and trying to persuade colleagues that SROs are feasible--even in traditionally conservative Orange County.

But SROs are not without controversy. Orange County homeless advocates who favor SRO development point to numerous recent instances of social service groups being locked out of communities by neighbors who fear increased crime and other disruptions.

Many officials are likely to be reluctant to embrace the idea of building what are essentially hotels for homeless people.

“A lot of cities will want to participate, maybe even provide funds, but the crux will be finding places for them to be built,” said Susan Oakson, coordinator of homeless programs for the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force.

Young said he hopes to get support from all 29 cities in the county to build at least one 200-unit SRO in each city. But he acknowledged that many communities will initially be wary.

“It will take a lot of education,” he said. “But one of the secrets of the success is that these hotels will be located along commercial boulevards and not in residential neighborhoods. They will be as compatible with a community’s profile as possible.”

Indeed, many housing officials are now realizing that they must convince the public that low-income housing offers advantages to a community.

If a city is faced with large numbers of homeless people who have nowhere to sleep but the local park, residents risk loosing that resource, said Joe Carreras, a senior housing planner with the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “If a community doesn’t address that problem, it won’t go away,” he added.

Many developers and business owners have expressed interest in the concept of SROs for the same reason, said Bart Hansen, a partner in Shawntana Development and a board member of the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County.

Substandard Housing

Spurred by increasing numbers of immigrants, the stock of substandard housing has risen. At the same time, the county has developed virtually no subsidized low-income housing and is not likely to do so in the future, Hansen said.

“I think SROs would hit the need where the need is,” Hansen said. “This kind of concept goes hand in hand with business development.”

Young said successful development of SROs in Orange County is predicated on their being privately owned and funded. Many of the projects would probably be built by for-profit developers, he added.

But many housing advocates and SRO experts say private ownership is fraught with the potential for problems.

Some private owners have failed to maintain their buildings and have provided inadequate management, they say. And SROs built by for-profit developers tend to be priced too high for the tenants who really need them.

“The benefit of nonprofit ownership is that it is set up for a social purpose to eliminate a social problem,” Carreras said.

SRO Corp.

“A for-profit developer will get whatever the market bears,” said Andy Raubeson, executive director of the Single Room Occupancy Housing Corp. of Los Angeles. “If the rents average $420 a month and general relief is $220, then the person who must depend on general relief is not going to be able to live in SROs.”

The corporation is a nonprofit agency funded by Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency and is one of the largest single owners of SROs. The group owns 12 residential hotels--the oldest dates back to 1889 and most were built just after the turn of the century--which have been renovated to meet the needs of the elderly, mentally ill and recovering alcoholics as well as other low-income tenants. The group also is involved in building new units.

Raubeson said rents average $175 to $200. The SROs have been effective in both taking people off the streets and providing a safety net for those precariously perched on the edge of homelessness, he said.

“They are people for whom one crisis, like losing a job or a serious illness, would mean the difference,” he said.

Young said that development of SROs would also benefit a broad range of Orange County’s neediest residents and that participation of nonprofit organizations would be encouraged.

“We are looking at a whole variety of ways of financing, owning and operating the projects,” he said. “In Santa Ana, for example, we would hope to be able to work with the YWCA, which now operates a shelter for homeless women, and convert that into an SRO, a transitional facility.”

And Young noted that the San Diego SRO program, on which the Orange County project would be based, has had great success.

The San Diego effort grew out of a desire to preserve existing SROs, but sponsors quickly realized that the problem was not one of preservation but of inadequate supply, said Judith Lenthall, director of the city’s SRO program.

Since 1987, about 2,500 privately owned SRO units have been developed in the city. Rents average about $275 a month. Occupancy rates have remained at or near capacity, said Lenthall.

Each room is furnished and contains a built-in wall unit with a toilet and sink, a closet, refrigerator and television.

In most of the hotels, tenants share shower facilities located on each floor.

A survey of San Diego’s hotel residents revealed that about 33% were elderly and on some sort of fixed income, another third were working poor and about 20% were disabled and dependent on disability income.

“We didn’t solve homelessness, but people in the hotels would surely otherwise be out on the streets,” she said.

While there have been stigmas attached to SROs in the past, evidenced by such terms as “flophouses” or “fleabag hotels,” Lenthall said most residents are grateful for--and proud of--their new quarters.

‘No Stigma’

“There is nothing negative about this,” she said. “It’s not low-income housing that they are forced to live in by some government program. There’s no stigma involved.”

Lenthall, who presented details of the San Diego project to members of the Orange County chapter of the League of Cities last week, said she is likely to become more intimately involved in local SRO development when she assumes duties as president of the organization Builders for People next week.

The group, a nonprofit arm of the Building Industry Assn., will sponsor development of emergency housing, including SROs, in Southern California.