Will Los Angeles hotels have to make their empty rooms available to the city’s many homeless people? The city council, in any case, decided this summer to let the voters decide. Behind this initiative is a hotel union: Unite Here Local 11, which has gathered enough signatures to submit the measure to voters in March 2024.”At no time do we think it can solve the housing crisis, but of course hotels have a role to play“said Kurt Petersen, the co-chairman of the union, clearly.
Knowing that every night, more than 60,000 people sleep on the streets of Los Angeles and that 20,000 hotel rooms are empty. If the voters vote for this measure, each hotel – from motels to four stars – will have to inform the services of the town hall at 2 p.m. of the number of empty rooms and accept the homeless who present themselves with a coupon from the city, at the price market normally.
By next year, the city council will also have to work on the financing of the program. Poor housing is a major problem in Los Angeles, a central concern for residents too, who see tents all over the streets. However, the city spends 800 million dollars a year on it but fails to resolve the crisis, which has worsened since 2020.
This is inspired by a California state program created during the Covid-19 pandemic: the “RoomKey” project. Launched by the governor, this initiative mandated that hotels remain closed to the public for months, in order to house homeless people and financially support hotels, which unlike the Los Angeles measure, voluntarily participated in the program.
While 10,000 people have been affected, and a quarter of them have since moved into permanent housing, not everyone necessarily views “Roomkey” as a success. A hotel owner in East LA faced $4,000 in labor because of a mentally unstable guest who ransacked the bathroom, ripped out the TV, burned the curtains and wrote on the walls. The local channel KTLA Talk about “disaster” with regular fights and drug use. Even a homeless person who has benefited from the program tells CNN that the measure is, according to him, a bad idea because of the mental problems of many homeless people. A 2020 study estimates that 15,000 homeless people suffer from this type of problem or addiction.
Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Business and Industry Association, north of Los Angeles, speaks bluntly about ‘madness“. The idea of mixing regular paying customers with homeless people does not work according to him: the tourists would be afraid. Another element put forward: the employees are not social workers, they are not trained to take care of this type of risky clientele and insurers risk refusing to insure the establishments concerned. He also accuses the union behind the measure of using it as a means of pressure to obtain what he wants hotels, since he can withdraw his proposal at any time.
On the side of the union, it is retorted that the safety of the employees did not disturb the hoteliers much when it was necessary to work during the pandemic and above all, that it is necessary to get out of the cliché of the homeless drugged and uncontrollable. The measure would help seniors, students, poor workers to find accommodation in a city where rents are too often inaccessible.