Over the past four years, in major cities across the country, hundreds of motels and hotels have been converted into motel shelters for people experiencing homelessness, with thousands more being planned. Rather than helping address the ever-growing homelessness crisis, these expensive projects are ill-conceived, poorly designed, minimally maintained, poorly managed, worn down, and crime-infested.
Instead of restoring, they’re adding blight to local neighborhoods.
Motels Aren’t Designed for Sheltering Homeless
To start with, architects design motel rooms with part-time light use in mind, not for near full-time heavy use. Most motel rooms are designed for an average use of eight to nine hours per day, with a daily average occupancy rate of 65 percent to 80 percent—equating to 37 to 51 hours of a 168-hour week. In contrast, rooms used by people experiencing homelessness are occupied nearly full-time.That means that the wear-and-tear rate of a motel homeless shelter project will be four to five times faster than the intended design and use, which translates to an extremely high deterioration rate and reduction of the building’s lifespan.
The rate of deterioration would be a problem even if one started with a hotel in good condition. However, the reality is that most of the motels being converted to homeless motel shelters are already in disrepair and past their operating half-life. Many motel owners are dumping their worn-out properties for quick cash—often at prices above market value, and all to be financed by taxpayers.
Embedded Clinical Services Needed
In many parts of the United States, most prominently in California, the death rate of people experiencing homelessness has doubled in less than three years. A well-documented fact in hundreds of communities across the United States is that almost all the increases in deaths can be linked to drug overdoses of those living in isolated rooms.The spike in overdose deaths in these converted motel shelters isn’t a surprise to clinicians who provide homelessness services assistance. It’s entirely predictable that if you put active drug users in isolated rooms with no treatment and no supervision, you will experience an increase in addiction and overdose deaths.
Let’s Do This Right
There’s a way to do motel conversions right by transforming them into well-managed homelessness assistance centers.First, before anyone moves into a converted motel, the facility needs to be remodeled with the anticipated heavy, long-term use levels in mind. We need to take the time and devote sufficient resources to constructing the physical plant to the appropriate, sustainable level of functionality in order to avoid creating another dilapidated Cabrini-Green project.
The Cost of Inaction
If we don’t change our approach immediately, most of the motel conversions for people experiencing homelessness will become centers of plight, crime, and drug overdose deaths. The wishful thinking of proponents has yet to address the impending financial crisis of these projects. This is truly a ticking time bomb. Chicago was forced to finally do something about Cabrini-Green—alas, they literally blew it up.Let’s address this looming problem before we have to deal with thousands of ill-conceived Cabrini-Green-like homeless motels in neighborhoods across the United States.