Hotel Apartments
Feb. 22nd, 2024 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithSmall Town Hotel Becomes a Safe Haven in an Expensive World
Feb 20, 2024-- In Little Current, Ontario, Canada, the owners of a local hotel have transformed their lodgings into affordable apartments for those struggling to make ends meet. Denise, "D" as she's lovingly called, was an employee of the Anchor Inn for over 15 years when she and her partner purchased the property in 2017.
Pay attention because this is replicable in many places. Lots of towns have more hotel or motel space than they need. A room typically includes a bed and a full bathroom. Often there is a little sitting area and sometimes a kitchenette. In other words, it's an efficiency apartment. Where two rooms are linked by a connecting door, you could leave one as a bedroom and turn the other into a kitchen-dining-living room. A business hotel will have some suites that are literally apartments, with one or more bedrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen. Usually the facility has some common amenities including a nice lobby/lounge, which sometimes has brunch eatery, some meeting rooms, a gym, and a swimming pool. Some have a lot more than that, up to a whole amenity floor. If not, you have the option of turning some of the rentable rooms into amenity rooms, such as for childcare. You could put a craft room or sport lounge on each floor for the residents to gather since private living space is tight.
This will work best in small towns, which very frequently have more hotel space than they need. If the zoning laws don't allow single-room-occupancy then you can just change them because any problem people made is a problem that people can solve. Zones only exist because people say they do. If your town has a hotel standing empty and people who need affordable housing, then use what you have.
However, if you have a city that's being proactive about affordable housing, this may work there too. It's especially helpful if you need to tear down slums and build something livable: buy a hotel, shift people from the first building there, build the replacement, move people in, and from there you can knock one, build one because you have space to put the displaced people during the build phase.
Hotels also work great for housing refugees or internally displaced persons. Over Terramagne, you can see examples of this in "A Matter of Balance" with Syrian refugees arriving and "Fresh Springs Break Out in Dry Places" when Ibrahim suggests taking in refugees from the Big One.
Feb 20, 2024-- In Little Current, Ontario, Canada, the owners of a local hotel have transformed their lodgings into affordable apartments for those struggling to make ends meet. Denise, "D" as she's lovingly called, was an employee of the Anchor Inn for over 15 years when she and her partner purchased the property in 2017.
Pay attention because this is replicable in many places. Lots of towns have more hotel or motel space than they need. A room typically includes a bed and a full bathroom. Often there is a little sitting area and sometimes a kitchenette. In other words, it's an efficiency apartment. Where two rooms are linked by a connecting door, you could leave one as a bedroom and turn the other into a kitchen-dining-living room. A business hotel will have some suites that are literally apartments, with one or more bedrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen. Usually the facility has some common amenities including a nice lobby/lounge, which sometimes has brunch eatery, some meeting rooms, a gym, and a swimming pool. Some have a lot more than that, up to a whole amenity floor. If not, you have the option of turning some of the rentable rooms into amenity rooms, such as for childcare. You could put a craft room or sport lounge on each floor for the residents to gather since private living space is tight.
This will work best in small towns, which very frequently have more hotel space than they need. If the zoning laws don't allow single-room-occupancy then you can just change them because any problem people made is a problem that people can solve. Zones only exist because people say they do. If your town has a hotel standing empty and people who need affordable housing, then use what you have.
However, if you have a city that's being proactive about affordable housing, this may work there too. It's especially helpful if you need to tear down slums and build something livable: buy a hotel, shift people from the first building there, build the replacement, move people in, and from there you can knock one, build one because you have space to put the displaced people during the build phase.
Hotels also work great for housing refugees or internally displaced persons. Over Terramagne, you can see examples of this in "A Matter of Balance" with Syrian refugees arriving and "Fresh Springs Break Out in Dry Places" when Ibrahim suggests taking in refugees from the Big One.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-03-03 10:32 pm (UTC)Speaking as someone who has lived in a motel for a year now, I think the world would be a better place if there was a revival of apartment hotels. Preferably affordable ones.
(The Wikipedia article really doesn't give a good sense of how mainstream a housing solution this was in the mid-twentieth century.)
In reality, cheap motels function as such. But would be nice if governments recognized this fact, and accepted a motel/hotel address as a permanent address.
Thoughts
Date: 2024-03-03 10:51 pm (UTC)I agree, that would help a lot.
We've enjoyed staying at long-stay business hotels, because they cater to businessmen during the week which means you can get a whole suite for a weekend cheaper than a single room at a regular hotel.
>> (The Wikipedia article really doesn't give a good sense of how mainstream a housing solution this was in the mid-twentieth century.) <<
That and boarding houses used to be the norm for single people. Then society got in a snit about it, and manufactured a massive housing crisis, then whined about all the homeless people on the streets and adult children still living with parents. 0_o
>>But would be nice if governments recognized this fact, and accepted a motel/hotel address as a permanent address.<<
I agree.
You should prompt for this, and it would be a perfect fit for Tuesday's fishbowl theme of "Brands, Products, and Services We Wish Existed." I've been thinking that in Terramagne, a small town with a housing problem could just hold a town meeting and decide to fix things standing in the way of necessary housing. Turn the old hotel into an apartment building. Reopen the boarding house. Delete all the zoning laws that prevent people from renting out a spare room, putting in a garage apartment, etc.