Trailblazing Low-Income SRO Housing
The city is littered with typical low-income housing projects: dark, depressing bunkers covered with khaki or pale brown stucco that are landscaped with weeds and litter.
But, in recent years, motivated by tax benefits, government financing and the need to find new work during a recession, developers and architects have built more innovative, low-income housing projects.
Leading the way downtown are 17 SROs (single-room occupancy hotels) completed since 1985. They offer people at the lower end of the wage scale a place to live for as little as $300 a month.
When it comes to SROs locally, San Diego architect Rob Quigley is the undisputed king. Since 1987, Quigley has designed four of them in San Diego, each more refined and hospitable than the last. Three were for development partners Bud Fischer, Chris Mortensen and Shawn Schraeger, including the new 202 Island Inn, which opened May 1.
Quigley’s new SRO on Island Avenue between 2nd and 3rd avenues is his best yet. Once again he proves that low-cost housing need not be lowbrow. Residents of 202 Island enjoy small (230 to 319 square feet) but comfortable rooms with bathrooms and modest kitchens, plus access to an exercise room, reading room, three outdoor decks and a soon-to-open cafe, all tied together by Quigley’s imaginative, kinetic design.
SROs pose extremely challenging design problems. To keep rental rates down and maximize profits, construction budgets are extremely modest, which precludes dressing the buildings up in expensive materials. Also, SROs are the densest type of urban housing. Typical urban apartment complexes contain about 100 units per acre, while with 198 units, 202 Island’s density computes to 350 units per acre. Under these circumstances such desirable qualities as quiet, privacy and natural light are difficult to provide.
Built of basic, affordable materials--wood frame, stucco, aluminum windows--the L-shaped three- and four-story 202 Island Inn solves such problems ingeniously.
From the outside, the building has three distinctive personalities.
Along 3rd Avenue, rounded parapet walls, tile roofs and a coppery false balcony are reminiscent of buildings in the adjacent historic Chinese district, including the circa-1925 Ying-On Merchants Building next door. Two 1,000-square-foot live-work lofts occupy the first and second floors on this end of the 202 Island Inn. Street-level display windows could attract pedestrians to small businesses inside.
The building’s symmetrical, more abstract front facade faces Island Avenue, straddling the entrance to a 91-space underground parking lot. Rounded forms echo the barrel-vaulted roofs of old warehouses in the area, but these few faintly nostalgic forms blend into a bold contemporary composition of squares and rectangles energized by sharp diagonals.
The sunken entrance to the underground garage is gracefully integrated into the building’s front facade through the use of a recessed forecourt flanked by pedestrian entrances to the building.
A steel-frame awning adds a retail-commercial flavor, and the street-level 222 Cafe is scheduled to open in July. Clear glass used at the street level lets pedestrians peer into the cafe and exercise room, solidifying the building’s relationship to the sidewalk out front.
Along 2nd Avenue, Quigley dispensed with historical references to go for a minimal, abstract effect. This side of the building is broken into three distinct sections colored tan, red and purple. Vertical window-lined recesses between these sections channel natural light into rooms. Two upper-level walls angle out from the building like giant flaps, creating strips of south-facing windows that bring in extra daylight.
The building is nearly as exciting inside. High-grade materials were reserved for public spaces, such as the slate, granite and stainless steel laminate used in the lobby.
Open-air central courtyards supply natural light to interior rooms.
Eleven of the rooms have small balconies.
New Age nature CDs are piped into the courtyards, providing ocean, wind and thunder sounds that help mask the noise of so many people living so closely.
San Diego interior designer John McCulley shopped for good-looking furnishings on a tight budget. Each room has whitewashed oak furniture. Counters are covered with durable gray laminate.
Normally drab rubber cove base molding in corridors is brightly colored accent strips at 202 Island. Walls at ends of hallways are painted different intense colors to help residents find their way around.
Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects of San Diego designed the interior courtyards. Plant and hardscape materials are arranged in simple geometric patterns that lend a sense of order to these spaces and provide pleasing views for residents who look down from their rooms.
Quigley’s first SRO, the Baltic Inn, opened on 6th Avenue in 1986. He followed with the J Street Inn, completed a block west of 202 Island in 1990, and La Pensione on India Street a few blocks north of downtown, finished last year.
“For me it’s definitely been an evolutionary process,” Quigley said. “We use the cheapest off-the-shelf fixtures, but present them in an entirely different way.”
A subtle example is the lights used in interior corridors. At 202 Island, Quigley tucked fluorescent fixtures up into ceiling recesses and dispensed with the usual plastic covers, resulting in better light at lower cost.
The 202 Island Inn is the latest in a wave of SRO construction downtown that began in 1985 following the demolition of about 1,200 SRO rooms to make way for redevelopment during the 1970s and 1980s.
As pricey new hotels, the Horton Plaza shopping center and the San Diego Convention Center opened during the mid-1980s, hundreds of new service workers needed places to live.
Since 1985, the city’s SRO program has added 2,230 rooms. By cutting requirements for on-site parking in half and relaxing Fire Code requirements, the city helped SRO developers save money and seeded an SRO boom that has made San Diego a national role model.
Although rents at many of the new SROs are higher than at the old residential hotels, keeping the lowest tier of wage earners out of the downtown housing loop, at least there are options once again for many of modest means.
Based on the initial response, 202 Island looks like a success. Last week, 136 of the 198 rooms were rented, many of them to $6- to $8-per-hour service workers such as bus drivers and restaurant employees vital to the downtown economy.
But the SRO boom is petering out. Very little financing is available. Quigley is working on a new SRO for another developer on a site at 9th Avenue and J Street downtown, but the project has not yet been funded. Meanwhile, Fischer, Mortensen & Schraeger say 202 Island is their last SRO. At least they went out with a bang.
