Shortly after I moved into an SRO, I spoke with a homeless guy in a wheelchair. He told tales of planting trees and other forestry work. I got the impression he lost his leg in a logging accident.
He may have had some kind of pension or monthly disability payment. The manager of the building I was in knew the guy's name and told me the guy wanted to rent a room from him but he couldn't because the hundred-year-old building wasn't ADA compliant: There were stairs but no elevators and all residential units were on the second or third floor, not the ground floor.
One of the things that will make concierge services work if someone is, say, temporarily hurt or something is that modern buildings will have elevators. If you can take the elevator down, it lets out just next to the office and you aren't walking all that far, it will be manageable in many cases where, say, going out to a restaurant isn't.
The kitchenettes will also need to be ADA compliant and my knowledge of such is limited, but I am envisioning a countertop with a deep sink, two electrical outlets and a small fridge beneath. No cabinets below so a wheelchair can fit beneath, probably shelving above with a built-in dish rack directly above the sink so you can stick wet dishes in it and don't need countertop space for such.
With adequate countertop space and electrical outlets for two appliances to be in use at the same time, most people in a one-to-three person household absolutely will not miss having a full-service kitchen. Most Americans seem to cook a lot less these days anyway.
Over the years, I've read a lot of shelter magazines. One single woman building a house joked that she didn't even want a kitchen, just a phone to order takeout.
A series in one magazine profiled the home kitchens of professional chefs. Most professional chefs have shockingly small home kitchens (with awesome, high quality equipment) fit to make breakfast for themselves and their mother. One chef explicitly explained that if he was hosting a gathering of more than four people, he simply threw the party at his restaurant.
In America, we tend to default to hosting parties at home, but in Europe and Japan it's much more common to arrange to meet somewhere. Americans seem to think you can only have a social life if you have a large home to hold a lot of friends. This is not a universal assumption across all cultures and there's no reason we can't adapt and decide that getting reservations at a restaurant (or some other public venue) for the occasional big party makes more sense than living in a huge home that is empty most of the time.
I sincerely believe that there is too much emphasis on having full-service kitchens in rental homes in the US as if we still have large nuclear families and a full-time homemaker cooking from scratch constantly. When I got divorced and my husband moved out, dropping my household size from four people to three, I had to start storing sodas in the full-sized fridge so the milk wouldn't spoil.
I cooked a LOT when my kids were little, yet I almost never used all four burners on top of the range. I made a meal big enough to need four burners at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Otherwise, I only ever used three burners at most while cooking so much that men who worked at the grocery store where I shopped would joke that I needed to come talk to their wife and convince her to cook more.
I really think a well-designed kitchenette and sufficient access to local eateries will make many people very happy. I don't believe this will be seen as a sacrifice they have to make. It will be a feature, not a bug, that there is less to clean, among other things.
And having a well-designed but somewhat minimalistic kitchenette where management supplies the fridge and residents supply any other countertop appliances they want will help keep costs down. A full-service kitchen with full-sized appliances and lots of cabinetry is a huge building expense.
It's also expensive to maintain.
Years ago, someone I knew on welfare told me that they were considering moving out of their mother's place and into their own rental and the rental they were considering had no appliances in the kitchen because residents kept tearing them up. The landlord couldn't afford to keep replacing them, so had moved to a tenant agreement where you had to supply your own fridge and range.
Not only does a kitchenette help keep costs low so rent can be kept reasonable, it also lets residents customize their unit to some degree as they see fit. Lack of control and choice concerning details of the space is one of the top complaints people have about rental spaces and it is sometimes cited as a reason to prefer home ownership to renting.
People using their unit as a secondary or vacation home may only want a coffee pot and toaster. They may have no desire to really cook while there on weekends and may treat it somewhat like a hotel room and set up the kitchenette accordingly.
Residents who live there full time but aren't big on cooking may only want a microwave. Residents who want to actually cook have a wide variety of countertop appliances from which to choose these days, many of which did not exist when I was a child, much less a hundred years ago when America was still building SROs as normal rental housing.
Should some of the well-heeled vacationers retire and decide to make their pied-a-terre their primary residence, they can readily swap out the coffee pot and toaster for more serious cooking gear. Or they can simply buy more appliances and store some on the kitchenette shelves when not currently in use.
He may have had some kind of pension or monthly disability payment. The manager of the building I was in knew the guy's name and told me the guy wanted to rent a room from him but he couldn't because the hundred-year-old building wasn't ADA compliant: There were stairs but no elevators and all residential units were on the second or third floor, not the ground floor.
One of the things that will make concierge services work if someone is, say, temporarily hurt or something is that modern buildings will have elevators. If you can take the elevator down, it lets out just next to the office and you aren't walking all that far, it will be manageable in many cases where, say, going out to a restaurant isn't.
The kitchenettes will also need to be ADA compliant and my knowledge of such is limited, but I am envisioning a countertop with a deep sink, two electrical outlets and a small fridge beneath. No cabinets below so a wheelchair can fit beneath, probably shelving above with a built-in dish rack directly above the sink so you can stick wet dishes in it and don't need countertop space for such.
With adequate countertop space and electrical outlets for two appliances to be in use at the same time, most people in a one-to-three person household absolutely will not miss having a full-service kitchen. Most Americans seem to cook a lot less these days anyway.
Over the years, I've read a lot of shelter magazines. One single woman building a house joked that she didn't even want a kitchen, just a phone to order takeout.
A series in one magazine profiled the home kitchens of professional chefs. Most professional chefs have shockingly small home kitchens (with awesome, high quality equipment) fit to make breakfast for themselves and their mother. One chef explicitly explained that if he was hosting a gathering of more than four people, he simply threw the party at his restaurant.
In America, we tend to default to hosting parties at home, but in Europe and Japan it's much more common to arrange to meet somewhere. Americans seem to think you can only have a social life if you have a large home to hold a lot of friends. This is not a universal assumption across all cultures and there's no reason we can't adapt and decide that getting reservations at a restaurant (or some other public venue) for the occasional big party makes more sense than living in a huge home that is empty most of the time.
I sincerely believe that there is too much emphasis on having full-service kitchens in rental homes in the US as if we still have large nuclear families and a full-time homemaker cooking from scratch constantly. When I got divorced and my husband moved out, dropping my household size from four people to three, I had to start storing sodas in the full-sized fridge so the milk wouldn't spoil.
I cooked a LOT when my kids were little, yet I almost never used all four burners on top of the range. I made a meal big enough to need four burners at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Otherwise, I only ever used three burners at most while cooking so much that men who worked at the grocery store where I shopped would joke that I needed to come talk to their wife and convince her to cook more.
I really think a well-designed kitchenette and sufficient access to local eateries will make many people very happy. I don't believe this will be seen as a sacrifice they have to make. It will be a feature, not a bug, that there is less to clean, among other things.
And having a well-designed but somewhat minimalistic kitchenette where management supplies the fridge and residents supply any other countertop appliances they want will help keep costs down. A full-service kitchen with full-sized appliances and lots of cabinetry is a huge building expense.
It's also expensive to maintain.
Years ago, someone I knew on welfare told me that they were considering moving out of their mother's place and into their own rental and the rental they were considering had no appliances in the kitchen because residents kept tearing them up. The landlord couldn't afford to keep replacing them, so had moved to a tenant agreement where you had to supply your own fridge and range.
Not only does a kitchenette help keep costs low so rent can be kept reasonable, it also lets residents customize their unit to some degree as they see fit. Lack of control and choice concerning details of the space is one of the top complaints people have about rental spaces and it is sometimes cited as a reason to prefer home ownership to renting.
People using their unit as a secondary or vacation home may only want a coffee pot and toaster. They may have no desire to really cook while there on weekends and may treat it somewhat like a hotel room and set up the kitchenette accordingly.
Residents who live there full time but aren't big on cooking may only want a microwave. Residents who want to actually cook have a wide variety of countertop appliances from which to choose these days, many of which did not exist when I was a child, much less a hundred years ago when America was still building SROs as normal rental housing.
Should some of the well-heeled vacationers retire and decide to make their pied-a-terre their primary residence, they can readily swap out the coffee pot and toaster for more serious cooking gear. Or they can simply buy more appliances and store some on the kitchenette shelves when not currently in use.