About 300 children living in single room occupancy hotels, or SROs, received a holiday gift from Mayor London Breed, Santa Claus and other San Francisco officials last week.

The event, including food and music, was held Sunday in Chinatown at the Gordon J. Lau Elementary School at 1:30 p.m. 

A typical room in an SRO hotel is a single 100-square foot room with shared bathrooms and kitchen facilities.

According to a statement from the mayor’s office, the city’s programs have moved 100 SRO families into affordable housing. Since 2020, programs like the SRO Families Rental Subsidy Program, which is supported by $5.3 million in city funding each year, help support low-income families with rent subsidies and move them to more suitable and stable locations.

Toys, donated from local hospitals and churches, will be handed out by the mayor and District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents Chinatown, as well as Tonia Lediju, of the San Francisco Housing Authority among others. 

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.