US Hotel Turns Into Affordable Housing
A former Days Inn in Branson, Missouri is now an affordable housing. The Los Angeles-based development company that completed the conversion thinks that this type of adaptive reuse could help quickly begin to address the housing shortage. The project (now called Plato’s Cave) combined hotel rooms to create studio and one-bedroom apartments with rent starting at $495, designed to target renters who might be struggling to afford an apartment in the area but aren’t necessarily in the lowest-income tier—typically those making between 60% to 120% of the area median income. “We’re talking about folks that might not be poor enough to get subsidized housing,” says Richard Rubin, founder of Repvblik, the company that converted the property. Branson, like many American cities, has a severe shortage of affordable housing. Because the city’s economy revolves around tourism, many residents also lost work because of the pandemic. As many large commercial spaces close because of economic impacts of the virus—and others, like malls, were struggling even before COVID-19 existed—Rubin argues that some of the buildings could find a second life as housing (though hotels are obviously easier and cheaper than other commercial spaces to repurpose into housing). For several years, the company struggled to find investors for its unique model, but that’s beginning to change. The company is now working on around 10 adaptive reuse projects. Rubin believes the same approach could be used to build supportive housing for people who are homeless, and that cities may be more open to the idea now than they were in the past.
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