Remember when county hotels were used for travelers?
Remember when county hotels were used for travelers?
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There's been a lot of discussion over housing the homeless in hotels over the past couple of years.
That discussion is needed, because there are a lot of issues to be sorted out: how to provide the services needed to keep the homeless from simply being warehoused in hotel rooms, making sure the hotel spaces are livable in the first place, making sure spaces are appropriate for women and children and ensuring that issues aren't created in the communities where hotels have contracts to house the homeless, as we have seen in Falconer and Ellicott.
Here's what's been missing from this debate.
There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when we were building hotels in Chautauqua County because there was a demand for space for travelers. Yes, that demand peaked in the summer and declined in the winter, but the demand for customers who were coming to the area was enough that you never heard much about hotel space being used to house the homeless. That speaks volumes about the increase in homelessness over the past few years. It also speaks volumes about what has happened to tourism over the past few years, namely the rise in the use of short-term rentals in communities throughout the county.
Hotel owners are signing contracts with Chautauqua County or with the state Office of Probation because it provides them with revenue that was lost as travelers moved away from older hotel buildings that don't offer the amenities that newer built or recently renovated hotels offer. We went through a hotel building boom that coincided with the rise of short-term rentals – and some hotels were taking it on the chin financially before the government housing lifeline appeared.
We can't say the tourism economy failed in Chautauqua County. Bed tax revenues and other economic indicators say otherwise. Moneyed travelers aren't forming a population mass in hotels like they used to. Instead, they're dispersed into rental homes throughout the region. That spreads visitor income into more locations in the county. It also created a vacuum in older hotel buildings that weren't as attractive to travelers. And that void made it easy for some hotels to be largely converted into de facto homeless shelters.
That should raise questions for state and local policy makers about how these older hotel properties are going to be used in the future. There is quite a public – and loud – discussion to be had whenever the topic of low-income housing is broached. The transition of older hotels from a place to stay for those with disposable income into transient low-income housing happened before anyone could ask if that path is the best one for both communities and for those staying in the hotels.
Alternatives can include scattered-site housing, with nonprofits or local agencies leasing private-market apartments from landlords and subletting them to the homeless while providing mobile support workers. We could look at repurposing other non-residential buildings in areas more conducive to social services rather than hotels located near interstates away from social services and non-profits that help the homeless. Decision-makers can also examine regulatory policies or incentives to turn long-term whole-house short-term rentals back into local housing stock.
There are options out there that we should be discussing.