Both customers indicated they had positive experiences with the staff, but their critical comments about the hotel’s location echoed many of the property’s other online reviews. And those opinions appear to be making it hard for the hotel to stay afloat. Sam Patel, who co-owns the 45-room Best Western at Eddy and Polk streets, said his revenue is down about 12% year over year and the rooms, which typically rent for at least $100 or more per night, are only about half full each month.
“It’s not like the olden days, where people just saw the name and they would come in,” Patel said while standing in front of the hotel on a recent rainy afternoon. “Nowadays, everybody reads the reviews before they tend to book anything. And a lot of them are like, ‘Well, why do we want to book here?’ ”
Sam Patel in one of the rooms at the Best Western Hotel he co-owns in San Francisco. Patel co-owns a hotel at one of the Tenderloin's roughest intersections. He regrets buying it and spending millions on renovations. Now he has an idea: What if City Hall bought it and turned into homeless housing?
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle
But given the hotel’s sluggish business, and the persistent complaints about homelessness, public drug scenes and filth on the streets nearby, Patel is now reconsidering his options. He’s even floated an ambitious idea: What if San Francisco bought his hotel and turned it into housing for formerly homeless people? He said he’d also be willing to enter into a long-term lease with the city, which could contract with a nonprofit to operate the hotel as homeless housing.
“There’s a need for it. We’d be more than happy to,” Patel said. He also owns some single-room occupancy hotels that house formerly homeless people in the Tenderloin and elsewhere. One of his properties is 250 Kearny St., a Financial District residential hotel that the city leases to provide housing for formerly homeless veterans.
The hotel recently faced some blowback after it installed sprinklers on the side of its building that faces Willow Street, an alley where homeless people commonly set up encampments. While the manager said the sprinklers were intended to clean the sidewalk of human waste and any unhoused people camping below them were warned to move before they were turned on, the hotel nonetheless agreed to take the sprinklers down after a visit by city building inspectors.
The hotel has tried other ways of responding to its customers’ concerns about the streets around the property. Staff reassure guests that their belongings will be safe at the hotel and remind them that the property has a secure lot where they can park their cars. Customers who want to venture around San Francisco by foot are encouraged to walk south down Polk Street toward Market Street rather than venturing east into the Tenderloin.
Still, the negative comments from customers keep coming, causing Patel to reevaluate the hotel’s future.
But his idea to convert the hotel into housing for people who currently live on the streets might be dead on arrival at City Hall.
Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said in an email that San Francisco “does not have more housing acquisition funds for adult housing at this time.” Funds available to purchase such buildings using revenue from Proposition C, a business tax that funds homeless services, have already been accounted for, and the city doesn’t expect the state government to do another round of its Homekey program for the foreseeable future. The program provided additional funds to buy properties for homeless housing.
Another limiting factor is the $800 million two-year deficit that Mayor London Breed and city supervisors will need to close when they adopt the next city budget in 2024.
