The renovation of the former “horror show hotel,” above the Rickhouse bar at 250 Kearny Street, is nearly complete and the first of 130 formerly homeless veterans who will be renting rooms in the 136-room building on the edge of the Financial District are slated to start moving in within the next couple of weeks.
Residents will be expected to pay 30 percent of their adjusted income in rent for the rooms, each of which has a private bath and microwave. A large communal kitchen and on-site supportive services, including social workers and counselors, will be available to residents 24 hours a day.
The City is leasing the building for 10 years with a base rent of $1.9 million per year plus up to $200k in annual maintenance costs, with 74 percent of the rent covered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The rent will escalate at 2 percent per year and the city has an option to extend the lease for an additional five years.
Based on a survey in 2013, there were over 6,000 people living on the streets and in shelters in San Francisco, of which around 700 were veterans.
I don’t understand the SFGate story. They have many, many photos of “before”, but only one “after.” Is it not finished yet? (By the way, the “before” pictures are really disgusting with shots of dead rats. Be warned.)
[Editor’s Note: The “horror story hotel” piece to which we link was published in September. As reported above, the renovation is nearing completion and the first veterans should be moving in within the next couple of weeks.]
I’m confused. This post has been up at least an hour, but no one’s yet weighed in on the immorality of accommodating poor people in a high value place like SF, where high value people want to live. Capitalism doesn’t sleep just because it’s Veteran’s Day, surely?
Don it’s because the Government is subsidizing the bill and annual rent increase is more than 60% of CPI. Any building owner would love those terms.
Oh no. They’re super high value to the local progressive establishment. Whether the vets themselves are better off in Subsidized housing in the city or in the Nevada desert or whether this is the best way to help the most people is besides the point. They’re now pawns in the left-right SF pissing match, as you’ve well illustrated.
Precisely
Don’t have to relocate them out-of-state to Nevada. Manzanar has plenty of space.
This is great, hope it all works out and this helps these people get back on their feet.
Maybe they could kill 2 birds with one stone & train some of them to work at Rickhouse, since that place is perpetually understaffed.
Rickhouse fka gingers trois.
Are you kidding?
How can housing homeless vets in the second most expensive real estate market in the country be cost effective?
What about Fresno, Modesto, Bakersfield? Don’t they have “supportive services” there? At a fraction of the cost?
This project, like almost all of the homeless housing projects in this city are not about “care” but about politics and keeping the money flowing from the government (i.e. taxpayers) to NPOs and NGOs that run these shelters.
Are you kidding me? Why not put them in Telegraph hill? Pyschopaths. There are so many people who commute into SF working in the Financial District who would move into these units if they were renovated as one bedroom/two bedrooms apts. Who owned the Horrow Show Hotel before? What happened there?
Not really sure my first snark was universally recognized as such, but later comments certainly didn’t disappoint. I see one of you didn’t even wait until Veterans Day was over before proposing relocation to Stockton or Bakersfield on grounds of cost-effectiveness. Maybe the government should look into shipping our society’s inconveniences abroad for even greater savings; there are empty containers heading for China every day.
Myself, I would suggest some form of…Final Solution.
Manzanar might be a good place for a “Takers Processing Facility”
Since he is not doing anything more than making obsecenely rich people richer, pillaging companies by piling on debt, and scamming “management” fees, might I suggest Mitt “The Dog Whisperer” Romney as Kommandant?
Since when is Bakersfield the equivalent of China or the holocaust?
Competence, efficiency and frugality should be on the minds of our officials every time they make a housing decision using taxpayer funds for the homeless.
For the cost of putting up 130 homeless vets on Kearny in the financial district, I’ll bet all 700 current SF homeless vets could have been provided with shelter in the valley.
Have you been to Bakersfield recently? It’s not far off.
jamejr: We already foist our state prisons and federal facilities off on poor, rural counties and cities. I am so very certain that the citizens of Bakersfield would be tickled pink by a proposal to ship off all the homeless vets to their fair city! That’s the ticket. That will work very, very well!
may be difficult to sort the irony from the chutzpah in this suggestion, since SF is currently suing Nevada for “dumping” indigent people here.
Well, where I’m from (born and raised in West Hyperbole) Bakersfield has always been the equivalent of Satan’s taint. I believe the broader point is that some of us still think it’s a little … umm… Entitled? Antisocial? Undemocratic? To “solve” your endemic social inconveniences by shipping them somewhere you don’t happen to want to be yourself.
On the other hand think of how many tech douches you could house in Fresno. Much more cost-effectively, really.
Hey, you don’t know me but you don’t like me
Say you careless how I feel
‘Cause how many of you that sit and judge me
Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield
Spent some time in San Francisco
I spent a night there in the can
They threw this drunk man in my jail cell
I took fifteen dollars from that man
Left him my watch and my old house key
Don’t want folks thinkin’ that I’d steal
Then I thanked him as he was leaving
And I headed out for Bakersfield