San Francisco to Pay Hotel Whitcomb $19.5M in Property Damage | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco to Pay Hotel Whitcomb $19.5M in Property Damage

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34 pointsBender13 comments

I’ve heard some pretty legendary stories about street people and the Hotel Whitcomb - worked for a place that stopped housing consultants there because of all the chaos of those stories. (They’re not apocryphal, either - real talk.)

Interesting result. Will we see other companies sue cities for the results of disastrous social policies in the future? It's certainly a target-rich environment.

Or is this a unique situation unlikely to be repeated? Was this settled to avoid a legal precedent that could be used by other victims of half-baked social experimentation?

Very few details about the damage sustained. Like somebody smashed the mirror or burned the mattress or what?

Show me before and after damage billing pics of every room or it didn't happen.

This walks and talks like an enrichment opportunity for the welfare of rich landlords trying to monetize disaster capitalism.

I have many experience of working in hotels, and I have no problem believing the extent of the damages. Filtering your clientele is key if you want to maintain your property.

A single hoarder / drug addict / mentally ill person / pets can cause tens of thousands in damage in a single night. And surely they are proportionally more represented in the homeless population.

There is no cleaning certain smells and fixing certain damages to finished and furniture, you have to remove it and install new. I have had multiple years of experience where the cost to fix a single animal urinating or defecating in a room wiped out all the pet fees and more collected in a year.

This isn't unusual at all. It costs around $10k/month to house a street case in a hotel because you need to renovate a lot. And that's just an average, there are plenty of much more extreme hard cases to balance out the costs of more benign ones.

Tiny homes are seen as a better solution because they are relatively more disposable than hotel rooms.

18 overdose deaths recorded at the property, those beds all had to be removed, fumigation etc . Over 1000 uses of Narcan administered by staff in 2 years.

Is this an insurable sort of situation? Surely it is foreseeable.

Why would any insurance company insure against an inevitability?

Whole life, and health insurance in general, have no problem with that.

Property insurance is definitely different. I get that.

Whole life is a scam (just get term life and drop the rest in an index fund and skip the middleman), and health insurance is heavily subsidized.

Health insurance also stops at age 65 and becomes a taxpayer funded program (Medicare).

Stops??? Who told you that? I know plenty of elderly people who supplement Medicare with private insurance. There's no reason to stop that. Medicare is a social safety net.

It is still not “pure” health insurance. The taxpayers pick up much of the cost, emergency and hospital healthcare, part A of Medicare.

Not comparable to property and casualty or term life insurance, where an unlikely event is insured. I would say those are closer to insurance rather than cost sharing / taxpayer subsidy agreement like health insurance is. And whole life is an investment / tax savings product.

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