From within the walls of their 80 sqft SRO hotel rooms, a diverse group of San Franciscans strive against systemic forces and a housing crisis with hope and humor in their search for a place to call home.
Across America, cities are struggling with homelessness and housing affordability. How does one decades old solution – cramped Single Room Occupancy units – impact the lives of those who live in them? Home Is a Hotel takes you inside San Francisco’s SRO housing through intimate portraits of their residents filmed over five years. This character-driven, verité documentary immerses viewers in what it means to call a single room home in the heart of one of America’s richest cities. It’s the story of an immigrant single mom in Chinatown, a blind Latina librettist fighting harassment and eviction, a divorced couple in recovery co-parenting a six-year-old son, a graffiti artist who paints murals for the tech companies gentrifying his neighborhood, and a determined mother on a quest to find her runaway daughter all of them trying to better their lives within the four walls of rentals as tiny as 80 square feet.