Baltimore, the homeless and hotels

March 26, 2008

Wednesday, the city’s spending panel discussed the authorization of $60,000 to pay the hotel bills for 41 homeless Baltimoreans who have been living in a Quality Inn and 12 more homeless families who were living in the Ramada Inn since mid-December.

They were relocated there from encampments under the JFX because the city said they were creating a fire hazard, and the city’s “Code Blue” shelter had filled up and the weather was getting increasingly cold. They were originally slated to stay only until Jan. 23. The first leg of their stay, from Dec. 14 to Jan. 23, had a price tag of $125,000, which also came from city coffers.

When we here at the Daily Record noticed this item on the Board of Estimates’ meeting agenda, it got us thinking about these two very different, but very important types of developments: homeless shelters and hotels, and we decided to take a look at the numbers.

According to officials at the city’s Homeless Services offices, there are some 60 facilities in Baltimore, most of them run by nonprofits or city social services agencies, that serve the homeless. There are no city-run facilities to serve our roughly 3,000 homeless, but the city does contribute local, state, and federal grant money to these independent facilities.

Just last week, the city hosted a community forum at the Belvedere Hotel with the residents of the city’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood, to discuss the possibility of building a city-run shelter, using $1 million in state grant money, in a municipally-owned building on the Fallsway, near Our Daily Bread, the Catholic Charities-run soup kitchen.

By contrast, there are five hotels under construction in Baltimore, including the Hilton Convention Center Hotel, for which the city is providing $200 million in foregone tax revenues. There are 28 hotels and nearly 7,000 rooms in and around downtown Baltimore. By 2012, there will be at least 10 more hotels.

If the purpose of the hotel industry is to attract more tourists and make Baltimore a more marketable place to visit, should the city invest some money in getting homeless people off of the streets and into permanent facilities, rather than spending $185,000 to house a small portion of the homeless for 2.5 months?

Is this really a cost-effective way for the city to address its homeless problem?

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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Posted by Jackie Sauter | Filed Under Baltimore, business, hotels, real estate 

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