Leno’s Flawed Homeless Plan

Posted March 20, 2018 by Randy Shaw

Promotes Unavailable SRO Vacancies Over Real Solutions Since I head an organization that contracts with the city to house homeless single adults, I planned to not critique the mayoral candidates’ homeless plans. But Mark Leno’s homeless plan promoted a false
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Randy Shaw
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Is the Tenderloin “Slowly Gentrifying”?

Posted March 6, 2018 by Randy Shaw

In her otherwise solid story on a San Francisco start-up attracting working people to live in SROs, New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles stated that the Tenderloin is “slowly gentrifying.” Curiously, she made that statement while interviewing someone on a
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Filed under: Mid-Market / Tenderloin by Randy Shaw
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Supes Consider Landmark SRO Reform (Updated)

Posted January 23, 2017 by Randy Shaw

On January 23, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee (Supervisors Cohen, Sheehy and Peskin) approved housing legislation likely to have the biggest impact in 2017: a reform to the city’s Residential Hotel Unit Conversion and Demolition Ordinance
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Randy Shaw
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SRO’s Shift to Housing Foreign Students

Posted December 3, 2015 by Randy Shaw and Rio Scharf

If you wondered whether San Francisco’s housing crisis was impacting its SRO housing stock, the answer is yes. Today there are fewer opportunities for working people to gain access to permanent SRO housing than at any time since the city’s
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Beyond Chron
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SF Business Times Attacks the Poor

Posted March 13, 2015 by Randy Shaw

According to the March 6 SF Business Times, San Francisco’s SRO hotels are “typically old buildings of questionable safety, usually in poor repair, sometimes vermin-infested, often willing enablers for the urban pathologies that accompany extreme poverty.” Its lead editorial asks
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Randy Shaw
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Erik Schapiro, Fought for SF’s Tenderloin, Dies at 56

Posted December 18, 2014 by Randy Shaw

Erik Schapiro, who played a key role in the 1985 rezoning of the Tenderloin and the passage in 1990 of a powerful law protecting its SROs, died this week after a long bout with cancer. I met Schapiro in the
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Filed under: Bay Area / California by Randy Shaw
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New Plugs Bring SRO Tenants into 21st Century

Posted October 1, 2014 by Karin Drucker

In San Francisco, trend-setter of wearable Apple products, doyen of social media, ambassador of the iPhone 6, thousands of people still struggle to turn on their lights. As a community organizer, I work with SRO hotel tenants in both private
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Karin Drucker
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Who Transformed “Horror Show” SRO?

Posted September 25, 2014 by Randy Shaw

In his September 23, 2014 story on the opening of a renovated SRO, “‘Horror show’ hotel transformed into home for veterans,” SF Chronicle reporter John Cote fails to clearly credit who is responsible for this transformation. That’s no accident. In
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Filed under: San Francisco News by Randy Shaw
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