A R C H I T E C T U R E S O F A U G M E N T E D W E L F A R E : C O L L E C T I V E W E L F A R E B E Y O N D T H E S T A T E
5th Year Thesis
Welfare Hotels, as defined by the U.S. General Accountability Office, serve as a lens through which the limitations of state welfare become starkly visible. Originally intended as temporary shelters for unhoused and at-risk individuals and families, these hotels often embody the failures of short-term, state-administered care, marked by overcrowding, insufficient support services, and deteriorating conditions. Yet, despite their shortcomings, welfare hotels remain spatially and socially embedded within urban neighborhoods, forming an infrastructural and human groundwork often overlooked in conventional housing discourse. Their persistence amid bureaucratic abandonment reveals latent opportunities for reconfiguring housing models from within.
This thesis explores how architectural interventions might convert precarity into durability by treating welfare hotels as sites of contradiction between temporary shelter and latent permanence, neglect, and necessity. In doing so, it challenges dominant tenure norms and introduces new frameworks of shared equity and collective agency. These proposals work not through eliminating failed systems but through their strategic augmentation, embedding care and permanence in spaces designed initially for disposability. In the Tenderloin district of San Francisco alone, 24 active welfare hotels—out of over 70 citywide—embody this tension between transience and potential stability, revealing a critical opportunity to transform existing infrastructure into models of collective care and long-term housing resilience.
Program: Housing
Location: 430 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA
Size: N/A