Los Angeles city leaders have decided that they haven’t ruined enough businesses in the city yet. So now, they want to use its hotels as homeless shelters.
The Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to place an ordinance on the 2024 ballot that would force hotels to place homeless residents in vacant rooms. Hotels in the city would be required to report their vacant rooms every day by 2 p.m., before many guests even check in, so that the city can place homeless people in those rooms for the night.
This will naturally bring several safety and sanitary concerns for both hotel workers and hotel guests because homeless people with mental problems and drug histories will be placed in rooms right next to tourists. If the measure passes in March 2024, it will loom large over various sporting events, including future Rose Bowl games and the 2028 Olympics, which Los Angeles is set to host.
This comes after Los Angeles voted to spend nearly $1 billion on homelessness in its 2021 budget. Also, earlier this year, the city added another $3 billion over the next five years. California has spent $13 billion on homelessness over the last three years, and it has only gotten worse. Los Angeles County has shelter capacity and permanent housing options for over 58,000 people, yet just 17,000 people were counted in shelters in 2021, roughly the same as in 2020.
For all of those billions, you would think the city could come up with a better solution than dragooning hotels while its own shelters still have plenty of room. But you would be wrong. Instead, the city wants to impose on the hotel workers and guests, jeopardizing the city’s tourist industry in the process.
This would, at best, be a temporary minor stopgap for a growing problem to which Los Angeles leaders have no answers. They aren’t even treating it as an urgent issue, given that they pushed the measure back to 2024. As with the city’s crime and affordability issues, no number of billion-dollar plans will change the fact that city leaders are clueless.
