Analysis: If the Czech state buys residential hotels, only the traffickers in poverty will win

Deputy Ombud Stanislav Křeček believes that the Czech state should start running residential hotels because they represent an immoral business that no one else can fix. That sounds logical, overall – we do have this problem here, and the state should see to its solution.   

What preceded this problem? In 2007, the Czech Regional Development Ministry (MMR) was tasked with designing a law on social housing and never fulfilled that task.

In 2008, under the leadership of Regional Development Minister Jiří Čunek, a concept was proposed for dividing the inhabitants of socially excluded localities into three groups, a proposal completely in accordance with the intentions of the 1950s’ divisions of people into "civilized", "partially civilized" and "uncivilized". Members of the first group were to be offered the opportunity to living outside the socially excluded locality, members of the second group (who merely have "occasional deviations in behavior and morality") were to be offered social work, and the members of the third group were to be shut up in residential hotels, where they would be re-educated.   

However, a serious problem appeared for this plan:  Only a 1950s social worker would be willing to divide up clients into such categories. It is not possible, after all, to determine in advance who will have problems or when, and therefore it is not possible to classify people this way – according to research conducted abroad, even social workers themselves don’t know how to do this.

That concept, therefore, was dismissed out of hand. The only part of it that was ever really worked on, however, was the development of those residential hotels, and since 2008, due to a lack of social housing provided by the MMR and the housing benefits system being poorly designed by the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry (MPSV), such facilities have developed into what we see in the country today.

At the start of last year, the MMR published a tendentious "study" which purported to show that there was an untruthful media "fog" being generated around the residential hotels, and that in reality such facilities are appropriate for the long-term housing of the impoverished. MMR staff, together with staffers from the Institute for Spatial Development, went into "the field" and asked six owners and operators (sic!) of residential hotels how people were being accommodated there and whether their rights were being upheld. 

What they learned from the owners was then presented as objective findings, along with a proposal for what accommodation at a residential hotel should look like, including CCTV surveillance and a quasi-prison regime for tenants. This research was rejected by many academics, as well as by both Czech and international organizations.  

The MMR only ever gave one response to this criticism, namely, that the effort had not been research, but was merely a "survey". The MMR staff tasked with the state’s housing policy, led by former Deputy Minister Miroslav Kalous, then decided to change their rhetoric.

Instead of saying that "residential hotels are appropriate as long-term social housing for families with children", they said the following:  "Since there are so many people already living in residential hotels, we must reconcile ourselves to this fact and start supporting these facilities." They have somehow glossed over the fact that people are being forced to live in residential hotels precisely because the ministry has long been inactive about social housing.

The owners of residential hotels understood the government plans to mean their business would decline sooner or later, and the idea then surfaced that the state should buy their properties from them. This idea has now been expressed by the Deputy Ombud.

What has completely vanished from discussion are the needs of people without housing, and we are circuitously returning to the 1950s, or rather, to the notions embodied by former Regional Development Minister Čunek’s concept. Today people without housing are not being labeled "uncivilized" by social workers (as that concept planned to do), they are being labeled so by "the market" – or rather, by the state’s antisocial housing policy.

For Mr Křeček and the housing planners at the MMR, the problem is solved – people already live in the residential hotels, so now the state must buy and run them itself. The Platform for Social Housing, however, is proposing moving from the 1950s into 2014.

For the same amount of money, we know how to 1) keep people from falling to the bottom of the barrel, or if they are already there, we know how to 2) lift them up into normal housing and normal life. The elementary principle involved is housing that is affordable, high-quality, and not segregated.

Members of the Platform for Social Housing are managing more than 170 such properties throughout the entire Czech Republic, but this is far from sufficient. The state must indeed address this situation – but buying residential hotels will only benefit those who traffic in poverty once more.

First published in the daily Lidové noviny. Republished with the consent of the author.