It seems counterintuitive to scrap housing that people need in exchange for hotel rooms, especially when the SF tourism economy is struggling. But SoMa’s Mosser Hotel hoped to do just that, though the SF Planning Commission shot that idea down Thursday.
The Mosser Hotel Fourth and Jessie streets does have about three dozen standard tourist hotel units, but the vast majority of its rooms are currently designated as SRO units. So the hotel’s ownership hatched a plan to convert 72 of its current 81 SRO units into tourist hotel units.
In order to satisfy the legal requirements to do this, the Mosser Hotel offered to pay for 72 units at the Minna Street Hotel (509 Minna Street), units currently being used as supportive housing for formerly incarcerated. These Minna Street Hotel units operate under some very strict re-entry rules, like no alcohol or drugs, and men and women can’t live on the same floor.
But activists mobilized against this plan. “This move will not only take away housing units that low-income residents desperately need, but would cannibalize demand from other hotels that are already struggling to fill rooms,” the South of Market Community Action Network argued in the Instagram post above.
And on Thursday, the SF Planning Commission agreed with the activists. The commission rejected the conversion request 5-2 in a late Thursday afternoon vote.
Mosser Hotel ownership argued that the SRO tenants would be far better off at the Minna Street Hotel. That facility has individual bathrooms in each room, and a shared kitchen. The Mosser Hotel has common bathrooms, and no kitchens, not even a shared one.
“The residential rooms are not marketed or occupied” at the Mosser, the owners' attorney Attorney John Kevlin told the commission. “It’s a tourist hotel, not an apartment building, and it’s operated as such.”
But critics have argued that the rooms aren’t occupied because the Mosser has been intentionally keeping the rooms empty in hopes of getting their tourist hotel conversion.
The city’s rules say that an SRO-to-tourist-hotel conversion requires a one-to-one replacement of the number of rooms being converted. So they’re offering to pay for 72 rooms at the Minna.
But those Minna rooms may not even be legally recognized as housing units. They’re operated under a contract with the city’s Adult Probation Department; the tenants do not have conventional leases, it’s part of a re-entry program. The commission argued at length whether those re-entry program rooms even count as part of the housing market, or rather, whether the Mosser paying for those units really even counted as “replacing” units.
“There are no units being brought back into the housing market,” SOMA Pilipinas land use analyst David Woo told the commission. “509 Minna is currently being operated as supportive housing, and has been continuously operating as supportive housing since 2021. The units at 509 Minna are therefore already being operated as available supportive housing and not ‘off the market,’ and are not potential units to even be brought back into the market.”
But Commissioner Sean McGarry, who voted in favor of the conversion, argued this would actually help the city’s housing stock. “At Minna Street we have the opportunity here to actually make 72 units in perpetuity SRO, and subject to rent control ordinance. Where we don’t have that now.”
He added that at the Minna Street Hotel, “The facilities there are a lot better.”
But ultimately, the commission did not warm to this idea. “This proposal here does lack comparability,” Commissioner Derek Braun said before the vote. “This does not fulfill the requirement of one of our Planning Department policies of conserving and protecting housing.”
And after all, SF City Hall is trying to get more people to live downtown. So maybe it doesn’t make sense to squeeze out potential downtown residents, when hotels are distinctly financially screwed at the moment.
Related: SF Finally Getting Somewhat Better at Filling Long-Vacant Supportive Housing Units [SFist]
Image: Google Street View
