At the Yug Hotel
Last night at outreach I had a wonderful surprise, a new woman joined our team. I met her several months ago as a resident of one of the SROs we go into. She was living there with her husband and two year old daughter. We don’t see a lot of kids in the hotels so we totally swooned and gave her several bag lunches.
Our outreach team is mostly funded by an organization, The Mission SRO Collaborative, whose main focus is on fighting for the rights and safety of people living in SRO hotels. Last year we were at risk for going under due to financial issues and they adopted us because they thought what we were doing was important. In a nutshell, what we do is bring food, hygiene supplies, and safer sex and drug supplies to women living in the SRO hotels in the Mission area. We also have resources such as methadone vouchers, cheaper state ID coupons, and lists of places to get food, needles, rehab, counseling, health care, and domestic abuse resources. We are primarily volunteer driven so the majority of our funding goes to the supplies we bring to the women, and they really appreciate the fact we come into the hotels. They know that once a week someone is gonna come in and check on them, and they have some folks from outside of their scene to turn to for help. We’ve shown up at just the right time in more than one dangerous situation for these women, and they remember that.
The SRO Collaborative adds another dimension to what we do, which is to give the women an extra resource when they are having problems with the hotels themselves. These problems are multifaceted: issues with rent, fees, bedbugs, broken windows, mold- the list doesn’t really end. The people who run these hotels do so as cheaply as possible and try to get as much out of their residents as they can. For most outreach workers and hotel residents this makes the owners the enemy – evil slumlords preying on the poor. I see it as a slightly more complex situation. I’m imagining that running one of these things is actually slightly worse than flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
I was talking with one woman with a list of very valid complaints, but then she went into how these people come into America and just get everything handed to them, and I realized that these immigrant owners are probably dealing with a lot of racist attacks on their validity as business people. The residents use this attack because they don’t have a lot of other power and they know it’s hurtful. Desperate people go for the jugular and are prone to lies and threats. In addition to being treated badly the owners deal with a lot of property destruction, so a reticence to make any improvements can be understood.
This isn’t to say I side with the owners. There are people living in conditions that are bad for their health, and there are rules about when residents can have visitors and they charge fees to let visitors come inside. It’s like a boarding house, and it’s illegal, but no one is willing to call the cops.
From where I’m sitting it’s a tough situation for everyone, and my goal is to keep people as safe and well treated as possible. So now you’re updated, I’ll get back to the beginning.
The other resource our benefactors bring is internships within their organization, and one of the things the interns do is come out with us, and that is how my former client became my colleague. This is exciting because it offers job training and resources that might actually help this woman move into a more comfortable situation in life. It also really helps us because she knows things that we don’t that can aid in supporting our clients. Plus, she can act as an inspiration to other women who want to make a change, but feel it’s impossible. It’s an awesome situation where everyone wins.
House Rules at the Krishna
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