Hotel Review : the Phillips Hotel in San Francisco, CA

The Phillips Hotel is a pretty typical residential hotel in the South of Market area of San Francisco, at 9th Street and Folsom. Atypical are the prices, which are higher than usual - they start at $210 per week for the smallest rooms and range up to $270 for the largest (a bit higher than usual for an SRO).

The hotel's location is fairly convenient to Market Street and public transportation, as BART and MUNI stations are only several blocks up. There's a combination convenience store/Starbucks/Burger King right across the street, and a lot of inexpensive restaurants within a couple of blocks. The neighborhood is not the prettiest in the city, a bit grimy and full of continual automotive traffic, but it's a reasonably safe area. One point of note is that there is a fairly noisy bar beneath the hotel on one side, so those with rooms on the first floor may get more noise than they'd like at night. I stayed on the second floor and it was quiet and didn't have anything but some faint noise after dark.

The hotel gives you a key to the front gate, so there's no hassle of buzzing in ($10 key deposit returned upon checkout). The hotel is in decent condition, as are the rooms, but there is nothing special here. The rooms are not particularly large, nor do they really have amenities, so it baffles me why they charge so much for them - these are the same price and size of rooms you see in SROs around the city for more like $150 to $170 per week.

The room I was in had a decent-sized bed with a mattress that appeared to be fairly new. No complaints there. The room also came equipped with a sink, an old TV with no cable and no rabbit ears, and that's about it. The one amenity that the place has is a free wi-fi connection, which is surprisingly fast and consistent.

Bathrooms and showers are shared in the hall. They were kept reasonably clean at most times, but they apparently only have one (overworked) guy who maintains the place, and the residents don't seem to have much respect for shared areas, so it was definitely not spotless. I didn't see anything tremendously gross, but it wasn't uncommon to find toilet seats peed all over, lots of junk left in the shower, cigarette butts all over the bathroom, etc.

The one major downside of the place is that there seemed to be a lot of small-time drug dealing going on. Of course, I can't say for certain as people are usually cautious about not doing stuff like that in the open. However, there were certain rooms near mine that got a lot of traffic throughout all hours of the day, with all different people coming and going. Usually a good indicator of people dealing out of their rooms, though to be fair I could be wrong. That said, this is one of those places where there doesn't seem to be much sense of community and people get noisy in the hallway at all hours of the night (another usual sign of unchecked tweaking going on). My speculation (and I emphasize this is totally speculation) is that the prices are high because this is one of the few places where the management doesn't do rigorous background checks for people staying long-term and looks the other way at drug traffic coming and going. I really can't explain the high prices any other way - the rooms are very basic (there's not even a mirror in them), the grounds are not kept particularly well, outside of free wireless there's virtually no amenities, and the location isn't particularly great either.

If you just want to sit in your room and be on the internet all day, and don't mind sketchy neighbors, this place could suffice. Or if you're a crack/weed dealer, I guess. If not, there are a number of better deals at better locations around the city.