For a long, intimate look at a significant part of San Francisco, a new documentary is essential viewing. Home Is a Hotel, which screened last week at the Roxie Theater, started as a 12-minute, black-and-white short, and now filmmakers Kevin D. Wong, Kar Yin Tham, and Todd Sills have expanded it to a colorized feature film.
The doc goes inside the city’s single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, the crucial form of housing for low-income residents, seniors, and people moving out of homelessness. SROs were originally mainstay housing for immigrants and are concentrated in the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and Inner Mission. Urban renewal 50 years ago destroyed many of them, and a 1981 city law has helped preserve those remaining as affordable housing.