Like in many children's bedrooms, a model of the solar system hangs on the wall, and backpacks and stuffed animals lie on the shelves. The tech-fueled economic boom has hit 16th and Mission streets in a big way, bringing with it Google buses, expensive condos and high-priced restaurants and boutiques. [...] just a few properties down from the famed intersection is the dubiously named Grand Southern Hotel, a single room occupancy hotel with 60 units. There are hundreds of SRO hotels, in which residents live in a room and share communal bathrooms and kitchens, in San Francisco, mostly concentrated in the Mission, South of Market, Tenderloin and Chinatown. There has been no formal census of SRO residents since then, but those who work in the field believe the number of children living in the small spaces has risen as the city's increasingly exorbitant rents mean that the scraps of the rental market are all that's left for some working-class families. Since many families living in SROs have multiple children, the number of kids in the residential hotels is likely higher than the 1,200 found four years ago. 'Terrible decisions'Bevan Dufty, the mayor's point man on homelessness, said many families have no choice, adding that once parents have jobs and kids are enrolled in school, it's not so easy to pack up and leave for a far-flung and less expensive locale. "Families are really faced with terrible decisions to live in vehicles or couch surf or just try and nest in a single room," he said. Phillips said babies living in those tiny quarters sometimes lag developmentally with no space to learn to walk or crawl, and children can suffer educationally with no quiet place to study and their nutrition can be poor, with their parents having to cook in one kitchen alongside many others. At the Grand Southern Hotel, children are confronted at the entrance with a large poster listing the "house rules," including no prostitution, no drugs and no urinating on the bathroom walls. Out front on a recent afternoon, a homeless man slept on a ratty mattress on the sidewalk, and a giant Budweiser truck sat idling.
Reported by SFGate 2 hours ago.
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