The city may help The Road Home buy a Holiday Inn at 999 S. Main St. and convert it into apartments for people on the edge of homelessness - including the men and women who live at the State Street Cambridge and Regis hotels, at 251 South and 253 South.

But some tenants don't want to move, and some low-income advocates also object, saying the city should renovate the dilapidated State Street buildings and let minimum-wage workers, the disabled and elderly remain.

"Every person of every income level should have the right to live downtown," said Tara Rollins, executive director of the Utah Housing Coalition. "Let people stay there, not just higher-end renters. It's definitely filling a niche in our community."

The Cambridge and Regis are some of the last single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels in the city. Such lodging is considered short-term, though many tenants stay years in the rooms where they share a bathroom and pay about $80 a week. There are no criminal background checks, utility payments or long-term leases, which is why the hotels attract some of the city's poorest residents.

"Everybody thinks [the Regis is] a drug house or a joint, but it's not," said James Sargent, a 58-year-old who has lived at the hotel for six months. "For me, it's very convenient. It's all centrally located. It's a very good place to live."

But across the nation and in Salt Lake City, SROs have become redevelopment targets. Salt Lake City's Redevelopment Agency bought the Regis, Cambridge and neighboring (now-closed) Windsor several years ago with visions of making money on the land. The RDA plans to seek developers to create a mixed-use project on the site.

"The purpose of the RDA is not just for low-income housing," said Councilman Carlton Christensen, chairman of the RDA Board, which is the City Council. "Our purpose is to increase tax increment, improve a section of the city. There's no value, from a redevelopment standpoint, to buy the property in its current condition."

Besides, he noted, the city is trying to give the renters a better home. "Our hope is we can create a better living condition than what exists currently."

The city has put little money into its hotels because it long has planned to knock them down. Mayor Rocky Anderson calls the hotels a government-owned "slum" and the living conditions "horrific." The ceilings are waterlogged, wiring is exposed in spots, bugs are common. The facades are crumbling.

Anderson said it doesn't make sense for the city to maintain substandard housing when it wants others to invest in downtown.

"There needs to be major redevelopment and renovation in that area, which has been an enormous blight in the heart of our downtown," he said. "It's not unreasonable [to expect] in that area of the city there's going to be some gentrification. That's not a bad thing so long as there are other nearby housing opportunities."

Enter Road Home, which runs the state's largest homeless shelter in downtown Salt Lake City. It was offered a $7 million matching grant from the LDS Church for a $14 million project to buy and renovate the Holiday Inn to create affordable housing for the homeless.

Hotel rooms would be converted into studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments with monthly and weekly rent rates for families and single men and women. Employees would be on hand to help tenants find jobs and social services.

Road Home is seeking $3 million from the RDA. If the city obliges, Christensen said, the inn would have to accommodate Regis and Cambridge residents.

But Regis residents aren't clamoring to leave. Some fear a more "institutionalized" setting where Road Home keeps tabs on their comings and goings. They worry rent prices would jump and that the inn would attract drug dealers who are drawn to the homeless.

"I lived in them shelters. I don't want a part of them," said Dorothy Mayfield, 60, who has lived at the Regis off and on since June. "Sign in, tell where you've been, where you're goin'. I don't like that."

And 50-year-old Rodney Fahy, who collects jobs through temporary agencies, frets about new management.

"When these temp services get slow . . . I'm out of money. [Regis managers] let me slide [on the rent]. There's that kind of relationship there" that can't be replicated, he said.

Tim Funk, housing advocate for Crossroads Urban Center, which runs the state's largest food pantry, conceded the Holiday Inn project may fill a need, but said it shouldn't replace SROs. He wants city officials to live up to promises to fulfill the need for low-income hotel housing, and he vows to make it a mayoral campaign issue this year.

"People talk the good talk and can't walk the walk. I've seen too many chickensh-- things happen in Salt Lake City to low-income people when it comes to the SRO stuff," he said. "I don't trust them [the City Council and mayor]. They don't have a plan."

While the city hasn't studied the cost of renovating the State Street hotels, the Regis' Sargent, for one, would like to see it happen. "It would give the hotel a new rap - a chance to say, 'We're not like you say we are.' ”

hmay@sltrib.com