SF has shelled out more than $30,000 a day for empty hotel rooms

By Trisha Thadani : sfchronicle – excerpt

For weeks, San Francisco has been bleeding tens of thousands of dollars a day on empty hotel rooms intended for frontline health care workers, whom the city expected to need to house during a surge of COVID-19 patients. So far, the city has avoided a huge influx of cases in its hospitals.

Now, city officials are expanding access to the hotels, in hopes of filling up the empty rooms and allowing other vulnerable populations that need a safe place to isolate during the coronavirus pandemic to move in.

The city originally leased 936 hotel rooms for frontline workers. But, officials said they overestimated the need, with about 80% of the rooms regularly sitting vacant for the past several weeks — costing the city more than $30,000 a day.

According to a new contract finalized Thursday, other at-risk populations will also be allowed to move into the rooms. Trent Rhorer, director of the Human Services Agency, said the city will focus on areas like the Mission, where preliminary results from a UCSF study revealedlow-wage workers who haven’t had the option of working from home and their families are particularly vulnerable to contracting the virus.

San Francisco decided to lease nearly 1,000 rooms for frontline workers after seeing how understaffed New York was when its surge hit, Rhorer said. Originally, officials thought they might have to fly in first responders to San Francisco from other areas in the state and country to help meet the demand. But, because San Francisco’s hospitals have yet to be overwhelmed by an influx of cases, Rhorer said the city did not end up needing as many rooms for frontline workers as initially anticipated.

It has been a costly overestimation: Each room costs about $76 a day. On Friday, for example, there were 751 unoccupied rooms, 445 of which the city pays for based on its contract, Rhorer said. That equates to $33,820 spent in one day — about $237,000 in a week — on empty rooms. Meanwhile, the city is bracing for at least a $1.7 billion budget shortfall due to the pandemic.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the Mission, said it is “fantastic” more hotel rooms will be going to people in need in her district. But she is infuriated at how much money has been wasted over the past month. She said she has also heard from frontline workers that they didn’t know the hotel rooms were available to them.

“It is the epitome of poor management,” she said. “Every empty hotel room could save a life.”…

The hotel rooms have been a point of contention among the city departments, Board of Supervisors and homeless advocates since the pandemic began. Mayor London Breed and the Human Services Agency say they are moving as fast as possible to place homeless people in hotels… (more)