What It’s Like Living in an SRO, the Cornerstone of SF’s Affordable Housing Stock

Kelsey Oliver

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For a long, intimate look at a significant part of San Francisco, a new documentary is essential viewing. Home Is a Hotel, which screened last week at the Roxie Theater, started as a 12-minute, black-and-white short, and now filmmakers Kevin D. Wong, Kar Yin Tham, and Todd Sills have expanded it to a colorized feature film.

The doc goes inside the city’s single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, the crucial form of housing for low-income residents, seniors, and people moving out of homelessness. SROs were originally mainstay housing for immigrants and are concentrated in the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and Inner Mission. Urban renewal 50 years ago destroyed many of them, and a 1981 city law has helped preserve those remaining as affordable housing.

There are nearly 20,000 rooms in 499 SROs across the city, according to the Department of Building Inspection’s 2021-22 data. They’re often in a single 8-by-10 foot room with shared toilets and showers on each floor. These units, which rented for an average of around $890 per month in 2017, were never meant to be permanent, let alone homes for multiple tenants or families. Many SRO residents, including the people profiled in Home Is a Hotel, look to housing vouchers as a permanent solution. But Section 8 housing occupancy is close to maxed out across the state, so those spots are limited.

SROs have become part of San Francisco’s push to provide permanent supportive housing (PSH) for previously homeless residents — a “cornerstone,” according to the SF Chronicle — but the newspaper’s investigation last year also revealed terrible conditions, from holes in the walls, cockroach infestations, and black mold to fatal overdoses and residents threatening to kill staff members.

Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, says that many formerly homeless residents use SROs as a stepping stone to more independent living, whereas families and others not necessarily part of supportive housing might see SROs as more permanent.

Home Is a Hotel immerses viewers in the cramped SRO life, focusing on five residents (Sylvester, Esther, Jacque, Sunbear, and Christina) as they navigate parenting, growing old, accessing social services, and much more. The Frisc spoke with Wong (director, producer and co-cinematographer) and Tham (co-director and producer) about their motivation for making the film, their process, and the state of the city’s SROs. Their film will screen again Monday, Aug. 28 at the Roxie. You can buy tickets here (SNAP/EBT cards accepted).

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

The Frisc: Can you talk about your motivation for the film? Why focus on SROs in San Francisco?

Kevin D. Wong: Todd [Sills] and I had done a short film about a woman and her daughter in an SRO in Chinatown, released in 2016. For a lot of folks, it was starting to be this shift from being hopeful coming out of the 2008 recession, into a moment where people were like, “Wow, this is getting insane in terms of the cost of living and the price of housing.”

That film did really well, won several awards, and ended up being distributed via PBS’s digital channel. We were like, “People are really responding to this story” — [through] SROs [people] are able to visualize the inequality in housing and the way people live, in a way that a book or even audio didn’t feel like it would capture.

We wanted to zoom out and visit other neighborhoods that have SROs.

Kar Yin Tham: SROs are kind of the smallest square-footage living space. At the same time, not necessarily the cheapest. So for folks living in poverty, basically, there’s no other choice.

One memorable moment in the movie is when Sunbear says roaches sometimes get in the microwave and block the digital clock display. How does this speak to the quality of living arrangements?

Tham: That’s definitely a question we’re asking in the film. I feel like there is quite a range of quality of living in SROs.

Wong: It’s a complicated question. I don’t think I’ve seen an SRO building that was not under-resourced. Are [SROs] appropriate as they currently stand? Probably not. But could they be, with an appropriate budget for maintenance and janitorial and social workers to help folks who are dealing with all of the impacts of being homeless? I feel like it’s theoretically possible.

There’s not really a pathway for folks out, unless they get lucky like some people in our film and get Section 8. You don’t really want your housing policy to be people who win the lottery.

Tham: SROs haven’t been the priority for investment. Just look at this last round of budget negotiations. One of the programs that [would have been cut] was an SRO program; it was $5 million. And the community had to really advocate to get it added back by the Board of Supervisors. The biggest increase in the budget was for SFPD; that was increased by $65 million or so. And they wanted to cut a $5 million program for SRO residents.

(Editor’s note: SF recently approved a 2023–24 budget of $14.6 billion, its largest ever, despite a deficit of $780 million due to declining tax revenues. In addition to the police increase, the budget boosted the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing by $44 million and Department of Public Health by $200 million.)

Tham: It’s not one solution that needs to happen, it’s multi-layered. There is something that we can do to improve the situation, whether it’s policy, voting, or even this idea of how we support folks in our community who are facing multiple barriers. That’s an important question that I think we really need to answer as a community, as a society and really commit to: What kind of community do we want? What kind of city do we want and how do we do that?

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What were some challenging aspects of telling this story and filming it?

Tham: Sometimes [a character’s] schedule is not their own. We [sometimes] were scheduled to film with someone, show up, and then they have to deal with a crisis. We just have to go with the flow. When we asked one participant what she would like to happen in her life in the next five years, her answer was: “I try not to plan that far, because so many things can happen in between.” In some ways the reality is that they couldn’t plan that far.

You can be on a [Section 8] waiting list for years. Is it a realistic solution? One participant in the film talks about the stigma of Section 8. What do you think she meant by that?

Wong: You see her looking for an apartment with a Section 8 voucher, and the property owner doesn’t show. OK, that’s a thing that happens, but that was just one of several instances. You can go on Craigslist and look at apartments that just say “no Section 8” flat-out in the listing. It’s prejudice against people who have that kind of voucher.

Tham: I think there is a narrative about poor people and working-class folks. From the landlord perspective, there’s often this prejudice — even if Section 8, as [film subject] Jacque says, provides some level of security because it’s a monthly payment. But on top of that, there’s also bureaucracy. There has to be an inspection of the apartment before it’s approved. So even if you have the voucher, you have to do a lot of work to actually get an apartment. On top of that, the landlord also has to do some level of work.

What do you hope audiences take away from your film?

Wong: It’s just a matter of having the will to take action and do it right. It feels like San Francisco has been unaffordable for so long, that it’s just a permanent feature of the city. Stories of the people in the film show that you can make a difference if you intervene in the right way at the right time. [We] need to scale up that level of action and resource commitment if we want to solve this problem.

Tham: We’re trying to add humanity to the situation too. When it comes to housing and community, it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about people. We cannot forget that.

Kelsey Oliver is a graduate student in the schools of journalism and public health at UC Berkeley.

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