just as a minor jab, I don’t believe that providing wifi is a major cost. I mean I really don’t…
I agree that this thread got a bit jumbled up. As you may notice, I started by asking for marginal costs in a homeless shelter. Nobody volunteered anything specific, so the discussion veered off to hostels. Which is an interesting topic in and of itself.
I don’t find your statements about labor intensiveness, mature industry and calculating something or other to be particularly informative. I know it’s a mature industry, thank you. Nevertheless, I want to fight the ignorance (my own, first and foremost) and learn more about what is the logic of that industry. E.g. if even_sven claims that the hostels charge all that market will bear, I ask, why not more hostels. Now, do you disagree with even_sven? Good, so why don’t you fight his ignorance here and now then? Or explain how both your positions can be reconciled?
As far as labor intensiveness goes, you know, I just don’t believe that. Normal people can live in housing, whether 2 per room or 5 per room, without destroying it. Basic floor washing and similar can be done by minimum wage employees and not too frequently either. I do understand that housing needs some amount of maintenance (boiler, toilet etc), but then so does the typical suburban house. If you take that suburban house and cram 12 people into it, the cost of boiler repair will not scale linearly, if at all. Indeed, it may well be that there are companies selling boilers specifically targeted to more intensive use.
She’s talking about weekly rent hotels that cater to locals, not about hostels. I agree with her analysis of the problems.
They can, but your problem is the ones who don’t. The old 80-20 rule. 80% of the problems come from 20% of your clients.
I bet local code says that you are now in violation and can be shut down.
You have to provide everything. More toilets and sinks and bathtubs. More beds. A constant stream of clean bedding and towels. Elevators. Scaled up boilers and HVAC systems, all to city code. Cleaners, bellmen, front desk, security, food preparation, laundry. Utilities, water, taxes, mortgage. And then capital program needs for repair and replacement and upkeep. And that assumes that the 20% won’t steal your stuff and skip out without paying and sneak others in and trash the joint and steal from other tenants or assault them or set fires to cook in their rooms or put your towels on eBay. Are you going to have wi-fi? Cable? Televisions? Irons an ironing boards? Hair dryers? Coffee makers? What do you eliminate?
Have you ever done a budget for a real working business? I’d recommend it. It’s eye-opening.
Like I said, some of them seem to charge exactly what public assistance allows for rent- which is somewhere around $120/month. (they probably have at least 4 people to a room) And if you are talking about people who have jobs, there are people who rent out extra rooms in their apartments or houses for about $500/month, as well as agencies running what are basically SROs with added services. Plus, there are landlords who use a variation of what **Wesley Clark ** mentioned- take a 2 bedroom apartment, put bunk beds in the bedroom and a bed in the living room, and charge 5 people $150/month each instead of the $500 they could get renting the entire apartment But none of these models are set up to shelter someone who is homeless right now and has nowhere to sleep tonight , nor are they set up for people who need a place to stay tonight when it’s raining, but will sleep in the park for free when it is dry.
There are affordable,somewhat permanent living situations available for single adults, but what’s uncommon is the sort of flophouse where you can rent a cheap room on a nightly basis. I expect it would be difficult to make money with one of those. First off, you won’t attract many people looking for a somewhat permanent situation- they are better off entering the shelter system temporarily for a number of reasons. Shelters here provide a variety of services in addition to temporary housing, and sometimes shelter residents get priority for low-cost housing. You’ll only attract people who either have a very temporary need ( the one guy in a thousand who has a roommate situation set up , but can’t move in for two weeks ) or the people who whose desire for shelter depends on the weather - which means there are likely to be a lot of empty rooms.
I don’t work in the homeless-services business, but I have been working on a project that centers on homelessness and it’s been an eye-opening experience.
First of all, you’re conflating church-basement emergency shelters for people who need a bed for the night with longer-term shelters where people can get their lives together. The former may be staffed by church members who volunteer their time. But, as kopek points out, emergency shelters still have expenses in the form of maintenance and liability insurance. A few in my hometown also have to hire a security guard to keep the peace.
Second, the longer-term shelters often require their residents to do the housework in exchange for their bed space; the shelter does not employ a housekeeper for wages. However, they may employ a social worker who helps residents transition to a life outside the shelter; for example, they may help residents apply for welfare benefits or hook them up with drug and alcohol or mental health services. There is also an administrative staff to run the place, since someone has to raise money and sign checks.
Finally, others have given reasons why flophouses aren’t a more viable option, but I’ll throw one more out there. Many homeless have problems that preclude them from living in a social environment, which may be why they’re homeless in the first place. Many have drug and alcohol problems, or are mentally ill, or have other problems. Most privately-owned hostels don’t want to deal with someone who is drunk, high or crazy. A shelter may provide more suitable lodgings, as well as the services I mentioned above.
One more point: Homeless services are one of those things that we’ve decided belongs in the non-profit sector. It may well be possible to make money at it, and costs may be reduced, but shelters aren’t really meant for that. What do you cut out of the budget?
I can just barely understand this question. As a business owner you have enough money to invest in a piece of property. You can rent out spaces fo $20 a night to people who are drunks, crazies, druggies and parolees. They don’t have credit cards so will have to pay in cash every day and getting them out of your place will be difficult if they can not pay. OR, you can open up a botique hotel for $100+ a night to people who actually have some money and have credit cards and probably won’t break the plumbing, or get in fights, or steal other patron’s things. Is it a hard question?
Ever try to talk a mentally ill and/or homeless person onto a bus? Or see the reaction of the other riders to his/her being there? We’ve tried to keep a lot of what we do either downtown or in walking distance for that reason. I know some cities have had buses and daily pick-up points and times but --------- remember the clientele you are gearing this to.
I’m not the congregational treasurer and we don’t own the facilities; we just pool our talents and money with some other congregations and do what we can. In other words, hard numbers I ain’t got.
But I will say that we go a few steps beyond what you envision and that could be adding to the cost. Job training, clothing as needed, counseling, some very basic medical attention and the like. Not all wish to use these services but we do need to keep them available just in case.
Think of it this way ------ the one congregation that also works with us in this project is fairly large and affluent. And their members are of diverse talents and quite active in all this. In theory, they could operate a facility on their own. But they (like us) team up with and volunteer to the true professionals in this field. That may give you some idea what you are up against.
how about setup a flophouse and use credit report score and other similar tools to discriminate against the drunk, high and crazy? Notice that especially in today’s economy many people who may want to save on rent are very normal people. Many might also have decent credit reports. Conversely, in today’s economy many people who are drunk, high and crazy might have too little money to afford even a flophouse.
I do understand that this business model would require pricing below the typical roommate rent and also effective advertisement to convince people to switch to this alternative.
Re what DanBlather is saying, flophouses are better than boutique hotels for the same reason that McDonald’s are better than boutique organic restaurants. Bigger customer base, recession proof, easier to expand. There are relatively few idiots willing to waste money on boutiques, but plenty of people who want a value for their money.
Of course, anyone who is homeless due to foreclosure is going to have an utterly crap credit report even if they’re sober as Mormons and sane as can be. So you’ll be excluding a whole bunch of people who could really, really use cheap housing and aren’t drunk, high, or crazy, just utterly destitute.
It’s hard to think of “value for their money” in this plan. You have competition from existing shelters that are already providing your service and more (in most cases) for free to the client. You also have people who have already developed their own alternative; a sort of modern “hobo village”. I know of two of those near me where people are living basically free with few interventions from the police. I am also starting to see some of what we had in the Carter years; families using their cars as temporary housing.
I’m not saying don’t try. I am saying be realistic going in. Even McDonalds accepts failure and closes locations.
Probably because credit score doesn’t correlate with drunkenness or craziness. Many homeless have no delinquencies on their credit because they have no credit, period; they function outside the traditional credit-based economy. This is a major reason why some of them have problems re-joining society. They have no credit, so they can’t get a bank account or get an apartment.
In any event, discrimination on the basis of alcoholism/drug abuse or mental illness is highly illegal, at least in the United States. Unless you want to spend your profits defending yourself against government lawsuits, it’s probably best if you don’t discriminate.
This quesiton re-enforces what a misconception we have about the homeless problem.
Homeless people don’t simply lack a place to live, there is a reason WHY they are homeless.
You have to solve that before you can go on.
A homeless person has no support system, if he did, he wouldn’t be homeless. Someone would’ve taken him in.
We love to think of the mother and child walking the streets and lacking a place to live and from time to time this happens, but it is rare.
Homeless groups put this face on it, because who wants to hear about alcoholics, junkies and people with mental/emotional issues.
You can put a homeless person with an addiction into a nice home, and so what. Most likely in two months he will be out of it again, having used any money on this habit. But what if we pay the rent? Fine, but the junkie needs money to support his habit. He’ll simply rent out his space to someone for some quick cash, or use it to store illegal things. Gangs are well known to befriend homeless people and set them up as fall guys.
So you give a homeless guy a place to live and the next thing you know he’s storing illegal goods in it. Or having meth parties and charging admission.
This is not to say homeless people are bad, or criminals, but what I’m saying is homelessness isn’t about not having a roof over your head, it’s about being in a situation in your life, where no one will take you in, regardless whether it’s your fault or you deserve it.
Also, section 8 government rental assistance helps keep flophouses from forming. Once approved you only pay a percentage of the rent. So the money youd spend at a flophouse now gets you a small apartment.
You know, you might prefer a flophouse to a boutique hotel when traveling, or prefer a flophouse to sharing an apartment with a roommate. That doesn’t mean most people share your preference. You can’t assume that a flophouse has a bigger customer base that a boutique hotel or a chain hotel. (BTW boutique hotels are not necessarily more expensive than chain hotels). First of all, large groups of people wouldn’t even consider a flophouse when traveling- families or couples traveling on vacation won’t consider a flophouse, and neither will those traveling on business who are reimbursed for expenses. Young, single, backpackers will prefer to stay in the existing hostels, since the need to book in advance will not be a problem for them. Homeless people looking for a more permanent situation will use a shelter. The new flophouse clientele will not even include the much of the traditional flophouse clientele - hobos are not common any more, migrant workers frequently have housing provided. You’re basically left with single people who want an extremely cheap room , who are not concerned about the most basic amenities ( such as clean sheets), for a short period of time, most of whom will not have credit histories to check and many of whom will only want shelter in bad weather.
Last question, definitely not. Homeless shelters in Spain are almost-exclusively manned by volunteers and no, they don’t expand magically when there’s a sudden influx of migrants (the ones I’m familiar with, “exclusively” manned by volunteers, but there may be some which aren’t).
The costs of keeping up a shelter for, say, 1000 people in a location which needs that many beds one week a year but 10 beds the other 51 would be completely prohibitive. Pamplona’s town-operated “special Sanfermines hostels” open for two weeks, normally there’s a Caritas hostel that’s got room for 1/100 the Sanfermines amount.
Markxxx, YES!!! We NEED to bring back mental hoisptials. Many of the mentally ill folks out there can’t take care of themselves. Yes…it’s great that a lot of people don’t need mental insistutions…but not everyone has the abilty or resources to live outside a mental inistution
I do think that there are mentally ill folks out there who could be helped by the newer meds.
You keep saying this (or some variation thereof), but I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of upstanding, responsible, sane people who are willing to live in a dormitory in order to save rent.
Let’s ignore for a moment the problem of the homeless, since that doesn’t appear to be the market you’re aiming for. And let’s assume that you’ll figure out some way of filtering out drunk/high/insane/criminal applicants that doesn’t run afoul of anti-discrimination laws and is cheap and effective (one reasonable way to do this would be with a substantial deposit, which is basically what most landlords already do. Of course, that would require that the sober/sane/upstanding people who need to save money have the forethought to make this sort of move before they’re broke). Now, are there enough such people that you could reasonably sustain such a business?
Consider the options that several people have already mentioned, of renting a room (or half a room) in an apartment or house somewhere. The price can pretty reasonably be around $10/day. The benefits over a flophouse are increased security (you have your own personal space, you’re only sharing the residence with 4-10 people, and they don’t change nearly as often as they would in a flophouse), you have a kitchen where you can store and prepare food, you can actually keep possessions that won’t fit in a storage locker, you know and can form lasting relationships with your flatmates, etc.
The downsides are that you have to take turns doing chores, you need to own things like sheets and towels and a bed/mattress, you need to get the approval of the current residents, and you need to pay by the month. But note that your target market, the fine upstanding frugal, probably is well-acquainted with chores and already has sheets, towels, and a mattress, and is financially disciplined enough to store up a month’s rent.
You probably can’t reasonably compete on price, and for anyone who has more stuff than they can carry in a backpack, you’re almost certainly going to lose out on security. Who’s going to go for this? I think the only people who are likely to do so are people who are in transit. They had to move out of one place, haven’t yet found another. Because there are lots of options that are much better long-term.