City Council: We can be first to serve the bottom


In our last meeting, a Councilor asked where huge hostels have been done.  This Councilor asked some time ago where any city has restored the rate system that for fifty years kept water and sewer rates throughout the world low and stable.  To some public servants, any new idea that has been tried somewhere else is a good idea whether it works or not, but old tried and true ideas from their own constituents cannot be good.

Huge, cheap places to sleep are not new; they are an old business that is occasionally mentioned in song and historical fiction.  They were called flophouses.  They were not comfortable, private, or safe, but their customers were out of the weather for a nickel or a dime.

Flophouses disappeared in the first half of the Twentieth Century with the advent of cheap used cars that people could sleep in.  In the eighties, states started mandatory car insurance, which kicked a lot of people out of their cars and into doorways, alleys, and bushes.  Nobody was serving the bottom of the housing market, which grew with each recession.

We can serve this part of the market in Grants Pass with two large hostels, one for adults and one for families and teens, each with a huge room with hundreds of cots six feet apart, and footlockers to keep their stuff safe.  We can include bathrooms; showers; laundry; a reading and eating room; kennels for dogs; and a parking lot for those with cars, which they can even sleep in if they wish.  They could sleep secure with cameras and three guardians: one to watch over customers as they sleep; one to take cot rents in money or vouchers, sell sundries, and watch cameras; and one to patrol inside and out.

Every idea starts with one person in one place.  I got this one in Grants Pass while protesting the drug war, from a homeless person who wanted to rent a big house with others in the same situation.   I didn’t think that would work out, what with landlords doing credit checks.  But if it was scaled up to serve the whole bottom of the market, it could pencil out.

This kind of business has a market waiting for it.  Homeless people wanted to give me money to start it.  We can sell stock to build it by asking local businesses and residents to buy it.  I need not be a non-profit, and probably should not.  We need it ASAP.

 Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 9-21-2022,

published at: Current-News-You-Can-Use-by-Rycke.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

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