Save Residential Hotels
printed in San Francisco Chronicle on
December 5, 2000
Editor - Debra J. Saunders’ Nov. 29 column, "Special City's Hotel Parking Ticket," showed insensitivity to San Francisco’s low-income housing crisis and the dire need for reasonable measures, such as the Hotel Conversion Ordinance.
The California Supreme Court voted to review an appellate panel's ruling that threatened the ordinance. The city will likely win (defending the ordinance), since the lower court's ruling contradicts prior Supreme Court views.
More importantly, the city should win. Every time a moderately priced residential hotel room is converted to tourist use, the city’s low-income housing stock decreases. The Hotel Conversion Ordinance requires no changes to existing property use; it simply imposes a fee only on owners who seek greater profits by catering to tourists.
Nor does the ordinance impose (on owners of hotels being converted) all the costs of financing replacement housing. The owners of the San Remo Hotel were asked to pay 40 percent of that. They renovated the San Remo well after the ordinance went into effect.
The problem is not that San Francisco is doing too much to protect low-income housing. The reality is that much more needs to be done.
Randy Shaw
Director
Housing America/Tenderloin Housing Clinic
Doug Kendall
Executive Director
Community Rights Counsel (CRC)
(CRC represented the California League of Cities in a letter brief supporting Supreme Court review of the San Remo case)
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