As reported by Doug Smeath in yesterday's Deseret Morning News, two neighboring hotels in downtown Salt Lake, the Regis and the Cambridge, are expected to soon meet their demise.

The city's RDA (redevelopment agency) has big plans for the prime State Street land these hotels stand on, plans that do not include hallways filled with tobacco smoke grandfathered in long before no-smoking laws.

Although their occupancy rates are highest in the city — 100 percent with a waiting list — the Regis and the Cambridge are way too yesterday, way too unhip, way too unconnected to exert any clout that might avert their impending doom.

The buildings reflect, in many respects, the profile of their clientele who pay their $80-a-week rent with one enduring hope: that they'll be able to do it again next week.

The thought of the hotels' collapse — both could be history within the year — brings with it a chilling question:

When the places that catch people falling through the cracks fall through the cracks, what then?

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Government advocates for the lower class have neat bureaucratic answers to what will become of the approximately 130 people who currently occupy the 113 rooms in the Regis and the Cambridge. They will all be considered for relocation to new digs at motel property the city has acquired and is developing seven blocks farther south.

But having the government as a landlord may not appeal to many of those who call the Regis and Cambridge home.

More than half are day laborers who survive on feast or famine wages and are used to being "carried" on their rent when times are lean.

Another group is comprised of people with a checkered past who got their one-room studios without background checks — something a government-aided facility would never allow.

And then there are those on the edges, some suffering from mental disorders, some not, who look at government subsidized housing, with its attendant rules and strings attached, and run the other way.

It's a nice thought that everyone at the Regis and Cambridge will be taken care of once the walls come tumbling down.

It's just not reality.

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Frank Richards, resident manager at the Regis for the past nine years, reflects fondly on the days when Dan and Mary Ann Olsen owned the hotel buildings until Dan died unexpectedly six years ago of a heart attack at the age of 62.

Mary Ann Olsen then sold the buildings to the RDA, which has retained Dan's son Darrick and son-in-law Andy Sipple to manage the property until redevelopment happens.

The Olsens, Richards says, understand doing business on the fringes. They know their customers. They know what they require (and it isn't mints on the pillow). They haven't attempted to turn the Regis and the Cambridge — or the now-defunct Windsor, a third hotel in the property that has closed since the RDA took over — into the Ritz but have allowed them to be what they are.