Where can people with no other housing options stay? An extended stay hotel can work:

The company’s resilience suggests the S.R.O. housing model never really disappeared. It was reinvented for the suburbs, where, since the mid-2000s, more poor people have been living than in cities, according to research by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, the authors of the 2013 book “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.” And it morphed in accord with broader economic trends — captured, above all, by two statistics: One in five adults who “wanted more work” were doing without full-time work in late 2019, according to the Federal Reserve; and 53 million people have low-wage jobs, research from the Brookings Institution shows. An expanding industry built on informal and impermanent housing is a reflection of the precariousness that increasingly defines daily life for millions of Americans.

And one company sees it as a business opportunity:

The Siegels see no end to demand and seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to expand beyond Nevada. Last July, the Siegel Group announced the purchase of two Budgetel hotels, 15 miles from downtown Birmingham, Ala.; in November, the company said it was buying a HomeTowne Studios with 130 units in Baton Rouge. The most recent purchase, announced in early May, is an Amerihome Inn & Suites in Houston, five miles north of the beltway in the city’s outer suburbs. That brought the chain to 60 sites nationwide, which now also include Toledo; Memphis; Jackson, Miss.; and Shreveport, La. As Stephen Siegel put it to me, “Our business model is great in a good and a bad economy.”

As the article notes, there are much bigger problems here masked by the opportunity or reliance on extended stay hotels: there are limited housing options for people with limited income, evictions on their record, and poor credit. Government assistance can be lacking or very slow. Landlords have their own worries. Suburban safety nets are thin or do not reach very far. Non-profits and religious groups are not as involved in housing. As sociologist Matthew Desmond showed in Evicted, the housing issue is a big one.

What suburban community would want to address this? Many suburbs want to be a higher-status community and this generally means avoiding having cheaper housing. Depending on the suburb, cheaper housing might be everything from smaller single-family homes to apartments to trailer homes. Hotels might be more acceptable because they could be used by a wide variety of people, including business visitors and potential tourists. If there are problems at such hotels, this could lead to issues.

This also connects to another issue facing suburbs and other American communities: the need for housing for single people and changing family structures. SROs offered housing for single people but were primarily located in cities. The largest number of households in the United States are people living alone and this does not work well in suburbs are usually organized around family housing with multiple bedrooms. Could extended stay hotels have different room configurations that could cater to different needs?