Build single room occupancy hotels.

My odd suggestion for social reform is "Bring Back the Flea Bag Hotels." The main goal is to get homeless people off the streets. But there are a few places where cheap, pensione-like hotels are even promoting the class-mixing this magazine values. In the nicest ones, the fleas are gone, and open-air cafes are serving alfalfa sprouts.

The technical term here is "s.r.o.'s," for single room occupancy hotels. They sprang up in most downtowns during the early part of the century to house railroad workers and other transient laborers. Over time, many of them deteriorated into slum housing for drifters, drinkers, and the mentally ill. Then came developers, who, enticed by cheap land, razed the skid rows and replaced them with gallerias and office towers. Over the past several decades, as many as a million cheap hotel rooms have been destroyed.

The destruction of the s.r.o.'s, of course, isn't the only reason that street people are a fixture on the urban landscape. The other villains include the emptying of the mental hospitals, the rise of housing prices, the decline in wages, and the spread of drugs. A solution to homelessness requires not only more housing but also more forcible commitments of the mentally ill, like Yetta Adams, the woman who died from exposure in December on the doorstep of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Still, few people understood the value of the old hotels until it was mostly too late.

The hotels are slowly coming back, in an altered, flea-free form. The new models aren't run by slumlords but by nonprofit groups which keep social workers on hand to make sure schizophrenics take their medication and addicts avoid relapses. A number of the groups have shown they can run a fight ship. One of the most impressive is the S.R.O. Housing Corporation in Los Angeles, run by Andy Raubeson, an ex-poet who grew up in a New Haven orphanage where he acquired the kind of street smarts essential to operating what is now a 1,200-room empire for the down-and-out. A visit to Raubeson's corner of skid row was refreshing, since he wasn't dispensing any boilerplate talk of turning the downtrodden into architects or lawyers. He was just getting them off the streets.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development now spends $350 million a year to help nonprofit groups build and operate s.r.o.'s, up from $76 million just a year ago. The federal money is often crucial, and ought to be increased. Most of the hotels couldn't break even without it since the rest of their money comes from the few hundred dollars a month that most street people can afford from welfare or disability checks.

But local governments can also help by (here's another good Monthly cause) ditching useless regulations. Building and zoning codes often drive up construction costs more than is necessary. This is partly the result of lobbying by the construction industry--to require more expensive pipes, doors and wires than safety actually demands.

The place where there has been the most noteworthy effort to change the codes is San Diego. By 1985, redevelopment had devoured a quarter of the city's 4,600 s.r.o. units. To encourage their replacement, the city approved a package of changes two years later. The changes allowed developers to use thinner fire doors, for instance, as long as they kept sprinklers in the ceiling. They could put toilets closer to kitchen sinks than codes usually allowed. And recognizing that few s.r.o. residents drive cars, the city waived expensive requirements to build new parking lots. A building boom followed, giving the city about 2,700 cheap new hotel rooms.

Cheap, but not necessarily drab. A few of the new hotels are extraordinary in their color and design. Walking through them, I couldn't get over how much the little details (the color of a baseboard, the shape of a tile) seemed to matter. And not just to me. The lack of trash on the floor or holes in the wall suggested that residents appreciated, perhaps even subconsciously, the architect's care. My suggestion for the Monthly's next crusade: redistribute not just money, but beauty, too.

Much of the visual credit goes to Rob Wellington Quigley, an artsy San Diego architect accustomed to designing multimillion-dollar homes. He cut his fee and took on a few s.r.o. projects, intrigued, he said, by the challenge of giving inexpensive buildings "emotional content." He gave me a tour earlier this year, talking about the buildings' "architectural vocabulary," but what people experience is simply a nice place to be. Economy requires long halls, but he broke the monotony with alternating plastic baseboards: turquoise, navy blue, maroon. Economy requires the building to be boxlike, but Quigley arranged a striking, two-tone, painted "V" that slashed across the facade. He got better with experience, finding a design that throws natural light into hallways, adding a small fountain for white noise in the lobby. The unlikeliest touch of all was the addition of an open-air cafe, where workers from nearby offices will sit for a sprout sandwich at lunch.

Not all of the San Diego hotels are for the homeless. Many operate without subsidies and charge as much as $400 a month, meaning they cater to service workers in downtown hotels rather than street people. At the upper end, rents top $500 a month, and a few have a European feel, where foreign sailors sip espresso and students thumb novels.

Some of the cheaper hotels did turn into instant slums. Downtown businessmen worried that they were attracting too many vagrants, and San Diego eventually abolished the parking waiver, effectively forbidding the construction of any new s.r.o.'s. But the experiment offers some important lessons about where homeless people might go and how to help them get there.