There's a complicated and painful story here. According to other news sources, the Merkle Hotel was built in 1913 and was last operated as 40 single room occupa

There's a complicated and painful story here. According to other news sources, the Merkle Hotel was built in 1913 and was last operated as 40 single room occupancy units. The building was ill-maintained: it had rats, bedbugs, noise problems, and broken windows covered with plyboard. But it also cost less than $400 per month with no background checks or security deposits required. KNKX wrote another article that explains why Seattle lost so much of this type of housing: https://www.knkx.org/south-sound/2021-12-10/in-the-loss-of-the-merkle-hotel-echoes-of-the-history-of-residential-hotels-and-the-rise-of-homelessness https://www.knkx.org/south-sound/2021-12-10/in-the-loss-of-t... The key reason: following a deadly fire in a hotel like this in the 1970s, family members of victims sued the city. The city passed new safety ordinances. The safety ordinances brought higher safety and higher prices. I see a lot of questions in this story but no easy answers. It's not safe to build more buildings like this one. It wasn't even sanitary or comfortable to live in the old one; someone could be fairly described as a "slumlord" for renting properties like the Merkle Hotel circa 2017. But forcing people on the edge out of a slumlord property is even worse for them. Building new properties is part of the solution, but it takes a long time for the 46 new micro-apartment units redeveloped on the site ("Tacoma Flats") to fall in price enough for people at these low income levels to afford them.