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LIKE a shadowy presence, without ads or flashy signs, a hundred"private hostels" charging $10 to $15 a night have quietly emerged inAmerica's largest cities. And while their amenities are not of the level of the nation's similarly priced "budget motels" - Red Roof Inns, Econotels, Motel 6's and the like - they are not, like the latter, on the outskirts of town or along dead-end highways, but in the very center: in the heart of San Francisco or New York, in downtown Los Angeles or near the Chicago Loop, at the harbor of Seattle or a block from the Greyhound Station in Tucson.
They emerged in apparent response to the lodgings needs of cost-conscious European and Asian tourists now flooding into the United States. Sensing a profit, or simply wanting to be of aid, an unlikely mix of entrepreneurs and idealists began adopting one of three time-honored approaches toward solving a shortage of transient housing. They bought or leased bankrupt, shabby hotels, and quickly touched them up. They leased a floor or two of a standard, modest hotel, and proclaimed the space a hostel. Or they converted residential or specialized buildings - a winery, a rambling Victorian home - into public-accommodations use.
Into the rooms of each such establishment they brought multiple beds (three or four beds per room in most cases, small dormitories of double-decker cots in others), for such is the key to hostel operation and the secret of their ability to charge less. More beds are packed into a given space than in normal hotels, maintaining income while slashing rates.
When you stay at a private hostel, just as at an official youth hostel, you pay by the bed, not by the room. You stay, in the usual case, in a room with strangers of all ages (but of the same sex). If you're traveling as a couple or group, you often occupy the room with people chosen only by you, but that isn't guaranteed, and the opposite situation is often lauded...