LA City Council to consider proposal that would give empty hotel rooms to homeless

Presumably this is only for upper class homeless people, like down and out families, not the scream at the moon, shit your pants type

As a lifelong liberal Democrat, I think this is a horrible idea that would have huge effects on tourism/​business travel revenue and our general economy. Local government really does seem hopelessly unable or unwilling to solve this crisis.

I really, really want to know what's in this proposal. What kind of oversight, program participation, and so on. How much will it cost? Is that cheaper in the long term than building housing? Will this be long-term housing or literally night by night?

I can see a huge benefit to some members of the homeless population to have a safe private room, a place to bathe and shave, and a real street address to receive mail at. But I can also imagine this being mismanaged, allowing in some crazy people or druggies who trash the hotel, endanger the guests and staff, and damage the reputation of the city's tourism industry.

Also, I really hope the program comes with hiring its own staff, because it simply is not fair to expect hotel employees to have to handle the homeless in addition to their actual job duties.

"Under the initiative, hotels in L.A. would be required to notify the city -- every day by 2 p.m. -- how many empty rooms they have for the night."

lol

Do you want bedbugs? Because that's how you get bedbugs.

Edit: /s since some people can't take a joke.

This sounds more expensive than just building some fucking low income housing…

Didn’t we already do this with Project Roomkey, which wasn’t very successful?

Awesome. Who doesn’t want to rent a room next to a drug addict screaming at all hours at night?

This would decimate the tourism industry. Who would book a hotel that could have homeless people in the room next store.Literally I was just in the library looking on their computer to reserve a book, a homeless guy-who didnt look too bad- came and sat right next to me…all the other stations were free. His odor was chokingly horrendous . I tried to finish what I wanted to do but could not, forget it I will waste my money and buy the book on Amazon- which I am loath to do. No way in hell would I pay money to stay anywhere near these smell bombs.

I don’t support giving them a room on taxpayers dime to continue to freely do drugs in. I support programs that get them off the poison they are on.

When your elected officials are so incompetent they turn to expropriating private property instead of doing their fucking jobs and addressing the root causes of this crisis.

lol imagine staying at a Marriot and then you walk out and see someone doing meth lol

As a Hotel Employee in Downtown I am terrified this is going to kill our business

I've seen a lot of dumb proposals in my day but this one might take the cake. Imagine paying for a room at a hotel and getting a tweaker hobo for a neighbor. If the City wants to force hotels to house hobos, the City should buy the hotels in question and convert them into shelters.

How does this solve anything? They aren't addressing the issue, this is the equivalent of shoving stuff under the bed when you're cleaning your room. It just moves the problem somewhere else.

The better long term solution is building a lot more housing. Market rate housing, affordable housing, mental health facilities, and everything in between, we need more of all it.

Unless we build more housing we're going to keep having to resort to controversial proposals like this.

Sure, make law abiding travelers room next door to shrieking lunatics and drug addicts.

I work for the City. Why they don't just let us work from home and repurpose their office buildings I don't understand. They would also be saving money on water/​energy bills for office buildings. Why lose tax revenue from hotels?

So a tourist comes to Los Angeles and gets a 250 room on a floor filled with people shooting meth in their necks. That should kill the tourist industry. If it were unhoused, non-methed, non-crazy, and non-fentanyl using people, then I don't see a problem. However, the city needs to build shelters and get off of the Housing First bullshit.

It’s a decent temporary, stopgap solution but we really need to invest more in longterm housing, not shelters, and invest even more in prevention of homelessness

Seems inefficient and difficult to keep track of. Why not lease the entire hotel so you can centralize services?

Why can’t we build a large camp outside the city?

So what I'm hearing is, the prices on Hotels Tonight will be SUUUUPER LOW so the Mondrian can avoid having crazy homeless people wandering around

We should probably stop importing in more Homeless people as well. I just learned about the rehab mills up in the valley where kids are shipped in from all over the country and basically get kicked out into the streets and add to the homeless population. Meanwhile the houses that host these kids make $$$$$$

No hotel owner in their right mind will so this, hell most hotels didn't even want to be extra wards for covid patients and those people weren't even homeless.

I feel they may be putting hotel workers in a bad situation particularly if they need to clear out a room for the next guest who reserved a room.

We need leading top scientists to figure out how to get rid of and/​or prevent that homeless smell from penetrating everything for what seems a very long time no matter how you clean it first.

Also what about cooking facilities etc. this is just stupid.

For the price of hotel room, there are cities all around America with one bedroom apartments. It would cheaper to move them there, furnish it, cover utilities and food.

If you thought your hotel room was dirty before...just wait till you find out what happened in it the night before.

Forcing private businesses to house the homeless? WTH. Why not push the volunteer model?

Give volunteer businesses tax cuts; include X social workers (etc) on site per Y number of homeless individuals; give them funding to cover increased insurance and security expenses. Make it worth the hotels' risk, and provide support to the people who need it.

This would destroy tourism to LA. I am all for housing solutions for the homeless but it’s hard to see anything positive out of this. Do tax payer dollars go to paying private businesses? Private businesses are forced to provide a service? Is this safe for guests of hotels? Hotels would 100% under report their empty rooms and it would take a lot of resources to manage the compliance and oversight of this.

Utah and other states have proven this is more cost effective than doing nothing. However, I'm sure our local government will find a way to waste lots of funds on administration for this strategy.

You need to vet out these “homeless” as most need therapy and to address addiction issues. They don’t need rooms - they need mental and physical health care ….. probably for life . Not empty hotel room.

I'm pretty sure this bill is sponsored by the Orange County hotel association

Yo can I get a room at the Ritz Carlton?? What's considered "homeless"? But seriously that's some crazy shiiiiiet.

LA City Council ... legitimately the dumbest pack of grifting shitheads imaginable.

It's truly astounding.

This is a city/​state/​federal problem. Why are we expecting hotels and their staff to take on the role of a social worker? This is bonkers and will fail