Books: review/commentary: The Last Resort: Scenes from a Transient Hotel

Abstract

With the Great Depression, the modest workingmen's hotels of downtown America began a decline into disrepair and disrepute. After World War II, local, state, and federal policy encouraged their elimination from the housing stock, and the old hulks began to slump in rows before the wrecking ball. But poverty and housing activists of the 1960s brought the plight of hotel residents to Congressional attention, and in 1970 the Uniform Relocation Act stipulated, among other things, that developers relocate residential hotel tenants displaced by urban renewal projects. For the first time, noted historian Paul Groth, redevelopment agencies and other federally funded groups were legally required to recognize people living in hotels as bona fide city residents.' In subsequent years, largely due to the emergence of widespread homelessness during the 1980s, the single-roomoccupancy hotel-or SRO-achieved a new respectability among planners, housers, and social workers. The wholesale demolition and office conversion of SROs abated; throughout the country a fair number of dingy and decrepit sleeping machines were rehabbed with attention to improved community space: they were given bigger lobbies, shared kitchens, tenant lounges, even rooftop gardens. Sometimes rehabilitation extended to specially designed furniture (to maximize room space), private toilets (showers were still down the hall), and vastly improved ventilation and fire safety. Tenant associations, participatory management, and social services on site greatly improved the social order of many SROs, and economic revitalization and community policing tactics made their immediate neighborhoods safer and more inviting. The elderly poor in particular, and, to a lesser extent, poor people with persistent and severe illness were the principal beneficiaries of this new dispensation, but even alcoholics and addicts have found stability in some well-run dry or damp SROs that provide both support and restraint.2 And then there are the myriad others: the Cracksmoke Hotel, the Sleaze Hotel, the Hopeless Hotel, the Derelict Hotel, the Pits Hotel-indeed, the Funky Hilton. These interchangeable names are employed by Aggie Max to designate the unreconstructed seven-story lazar house in Oakland, California, in which she finds herself, at age 50, contending with her own substantial demons as well as with the crumbling, malodorous building with its sinister blood stains, merciless management, complement of winos, crackheads and whores, and legion of mental patients with blank faces [who] sit in the lobby all day, grounded out by Thorazine, staring at the TV. Transient hotel, she observes, is the wrong name for the place, because nobody in here is going anywhere except maybe to jail, the nuthouse, or the cemetery. The Last Resort, to be sure, is neither a romance of solidarity among the dispossessed nor a paean to social engineering. Ms. Max's cutting take on herself and her fellow tenants is softened only by her sense of their common victimhood. Shouts Dudley, her boyfriend of convenience, a sometimes shipyard worker who sponges on her disability check: want me to beat you up, don't you! You want me to punch your fucking face in . . . you bitch! Don't ever call me a parasite! I work hard for my money. Not my fault that I'm laid I didn't ask to get laid off! Explains Arty, a philosophic small-time crack dealer, locally renowned for finishing off a rock even as police broke down his door: Crack is the perfect drug for people who care about hopeless things. . .Transported past caring about the hopelessness of your life, the trash heap where you've always lived, your sick and dying family, you are thankful only for the relief. Because you've tried everything you could think of, and even Jesus didn't work. Jesus worked for your grandma, who wore a feed sack dress and carried her Bible five miles to church on Sunday and always made you get down on your knees. …