Studies Prompt San Francisco Action for Seniors on Safer Hotels

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Brenda Washington, 64, is among San Francisco’s low-income seniors living in SRO hotels. Photo by Paul Dunn/Central City Extra

By Tom Carter, Central City Extra/New America Media

Seniors and those with disabilities are the most vulnerable people in this city’s poorest neighborhood.

But at a time when San Francisco’s corporate technology boom is boosting the fortunes of the city’s Mid-Market Street area, impoverished residents of that district’s adjacent Central City neighborhoods – the Tenderloin and South of Market – are hanging on economically by their fingernails. 

In the last five years, two studies have attempted to determine the needs of San Francisco residents living in single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels, the first and often the last refuge very poor people call home. And one of the reports, released by a consortium of community groups in 2010, is gradually pushing the city to enact changes for the safety and health of SRO residents.

The first study, published in 2009, focused on SRO senior living in the city’s downtown Tenderloin district, and paints a portrait of loneliness, poverty, fear of outsiders wandering in, mental and physical illnesses, addictions and bad diet. 

Read the complete story at New America Media. 

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