Read this whole thread, which is from someone who has experienced homelessness. And then I want to add a few things. https://twitter.com/clpolk/status/1354805585095520264

I am not a homelessness or housing expert. My knowledge comes heavily from having been a repeat volunteer at an event Minneapolis held 2x/year for a number of years, Project Homeless Connect, where they brought a lot of volunteers and service providers to the convention center.

I was a general volunteer, which meant that as guests arrived, I welcomed them, filled out a brief survey, and then offered to walk around with them, keep them company, and help them find stuff. Lots of people said yes to this offer.

So we'd walk around and they'd get a haircut and maybe some medical care and they'd tell me about their life and I'd listen.

There was this one guy who alternated nights between his daughter's couch and a storage unit. He didn't want to wear out his welcome in his daughter's apartment, because it was very small. His hard line in terms of shelter/housing options: a private bathroom.

He was totally fine with a shared kitchen or feeding himself with a hot plate/microwave/minifridge/whatever. That was all no big deal. But he said that shared bathrooms scared him. He felt unsafe there. A hotel room really was basically what he wanted.

One of the things I noticed was the biggest factor for a LOT of unhoused people was that their entire social network was also very poor. There was another guy who spent his days at his daughter's apartment doing day care for her kids, but slept at the shelter, because

...one of his other children was also unhoused, and slept on the couch there, and so there wasn't space for him. And he wanted his (adult) kids to have the housing, so he slept at the shelter.

Anyway. For A LOT of these people, the problem really was just, they don't have housing, because they're unemployed or not steadily employed or employed but for minimum wage, and all the apartments in the area cost way more than they could ever, ever afford.

And for most of these people, a private room with a private bathroom would have been a HUGE step up, and an opportunity to actually deal with their other issues, whatever those were.

Anyway, converting hotels into long-term transitional housing is a fantastic idea IMO, both cheaper and smarter than "let's build people tiny houses with no plumbing and re-create mobile home parks in a church parking lot," which is ENDLESSLY popular for some reason.

Converted hotel rooms (a) have a bathroom, which is really important, and (b) are much more accessible to people with disabilities than tiny houses are. To be at all functional, a lot of tiny houses loft the bed. You need to be pretty damn fit to climb into a loft bed.

Most hotels have some fully ADA-accessible rooms with roll-in showers and so on but there are a LOT of unhoused people who don't need full wheelchair accessibility but do need housing that doesn't require stairs. Hotels have elevators! It works great!

I have a friend (who is welcome to chime in, not going to tag him) who years ago worked on a project that was trying to buy a hotel and turn it into transitional housing here. One of his thoughts was, lots of hotels have a breakfast room...

...and you could keep right on serving breakfast, which means you're providing a low-stakes daily opportunity for people to come out of their rooms, and you can make information/people available, and just ... make resources available in a low-pressure way.

Here's another thing about people who've spent a long time sleeping rough: they are experts on their own lives but meet MANY MANY PEOPLE who are convinced that they need someone to tell them what to do.

Anyway. There are a whole lot of things that we need as a community, including more affordable housing in general. Converting hotels is a good start, though. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Providing people with stable, comfortable, private housing is good.