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Tucked beneath the shadows of San Francisco's financial district, the Tenderloin is home to most of the city's 518 single room occupancy hotels. Their eight by ten foot rooms are filled with all types; mostly society's marginalized: African American men, the mentally ill, HIV patients, transsexuals and drug addicts. In the third richest city in the country, single room occupancy (SRO) hotels house 30,000 people in third-world conditions. SRO residents complain of their squalid conditions, but will defend them relentlessly when developers threaten to tear them down. Without the hotels, they would have nowhere else to go. While the prices hardly beat other rental situations - new arrivals pay $600 to $1000 a month for a room with no toilet or shower - they are the last option for people who can't find work or regular housing because of widespread employment discrimination and high move-in housing costs. Most of the people I photographed struggle to make it, daily. Their circumstances are widely different, but what ties them together is the shared pain of having been forced into their situations by a cutthroat society, eager to make a penny, but quick to throw them to the wayside. What seemed to motivate most people to let me into their lives was one lingering question: "Are these photos going to help us?"

Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist that aims to expose social, political, and economic issues around the world. A fluent speaker of Arabic, his work has largely focused on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has spent much of the past five years. His writing and photography has been published in the US, UK, Middle East, and Canada including outlets such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, The Nation, Aljazeera.net, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, E: The Environmental Magazine, and Black Entertainment Television. He is currently finishing a film about rebels in Darfur entitled "Songs to Enemies and Deserts." A short version of the project has been distributed by Wholphin DVD Magazine. In 2008, "Hotel Poverty" received 1st place for independent audio slideshow features in the NPPA's Best of Photojournalism contest. He was a national finalist for feature photography for the Society of Professional Journalists' 2007 Mark of Excellence Awards. He also received the Lyon Prize in photography in 2007. He was born in Minnesota, graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, and worked as a welder before becoming a journalist.