Residential hotels once filled a crucial niche for low-income workers and immigrants, a bridge between affordable housing and a shelter.
These Single Room Occupancy hotels, or SROs, used to dominate the streetscape in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Now they’re nearly extinct.
It’s a story that caught the attention of Marie Wong, an Associate Professor at Seattle University. It appealed to her background in urban planning, but also to her background as a Chinese American growing up in the Midwest.
