Home is a Hotel

As of 2023, there is no American city or county in which a renter working full time and earning minimum wage can afford a market-rate one-bedroom apartment. In recent decades, as public housing has been systematically defunded and dismantled, Single Room Occupancy hotels have played a private, stop-gap role in providing shelter for those on society's margins. In San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, 20,000 residents, including families, call SROs home. 

Home is a Hotel is the story of a newly single mom in Chinatown, a blind songwriter fighting harassment and eviction, a former couple in recovery living together to co-parent a six-year-old son, a graffiti artist painting murals for the tech companies gentrifying his neighborhood, and a determined mother searching for her runaway daughter. Each of them is trying to craft a brighter future within the four walls of their 80 square foot rooms, which, despite their meager offerings, can still cost above $900 a month. Facing infestations, shared bathrooms, and hostile landlords, life inside SROs often prove to offer additional obstacles, rather than alleviating them. Through a deep and long-lasting immersion in these stories, a composite portrait materializes, not only of life for those living in SROs, but also of the current state of the American dream for an ever-growing segment of the population. 

Filmed over six years, this character-driven verité documentary immerses viewers in what it means to call a single room home, and demonstrates how the conditions of poverty are all too often cyclical and inherited by younger generations. Home is a Hotel is an expansive journey through cramped spaces against crushing odds in the heart of one of the world's wealthiest cities.