FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
A man sleeps on bench near a bus stop in Los Angeles, California on March 17, 2020.
- Following California Gov. Gavin Newsom's announcement last week that the state will secure 15,000 hotel rooms for its homeless residents, Los Angeles County set its own goal of securing 15,000 hotel rooms.
- Dubbed Project Roomkey, the hotel housing initiative is intended to flatten the curve of new coronavirus infections.
- Hotels in California have experienced unprecedented declines in occupancy due to the coronavirus outbreak and will be paid to participate in Project Roomkey through a combination of federal and state emergency funds.
- However, some hotel owners in downtown LA have been hesitant to sign contracts to house the city's homeless population due to concerns over damages to physical property and reputation, prompting the LA Times Editorial Board to call for a change in attitude.
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On April 3, California announced an initiative to secure 15,000 hotel rooms for homeless residents across the state during the coronavirus outbreak.
Following the announcement, Los Angeles set its own goal of securing 15,000 hotel rooms costing an estimated $195 million, according to the Associated Press.
"We're going big in LA," Heidi Marston, interim director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said. "We based our goal on what the need is here."
Dubbed Project Roomkey, the state-wide initiative will prioritize housing "extremely vulnerable" members of the homeless population, such as individuals over 65 and those with underlying health conditions, to help flatten the curve of new infections.
California has the largest homeless population in the United States, counting over 150,000 homeless as of January 2019. In 2019, the number of homeless residents in Los Angeles County was close to 60,000, accounting for almost half of the state's total.
Hotels, which have experienced occupancy declines worse than those seen after 9/11 and the 2008 recession combined, will be paid through a combination of federal and emergency to participate.
But some hotel owners are hesitant to house the city's homeless population
In an editorial published yesterday, the LA Times Editorial Board noted that hoteliers in downtown Los Angeles have been "particularly reluctant" to sign leasing contracts.
LA is the sixth-largest hotel market in the United States with 1,008 hotels totaling more than 98,600 hotel rooms, according to the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board. As of April 7, only 350 people had actually moved into hotel rooms in the city, the LA Times reported.
Hoteliers are concerned about damage to their properties, the LA Times' editorial board noted, despite the fact that contracts signed through the Project Roomkey initiative require LA county to return hotels in their original conditions. The board also cited Phil Ansell, director of the county's Homeless Initiative, who noted that "concern about their reputation or image" is another factor.
"That's an unacceptable stance in this crisis," the LA Times wrote. "Hotel and motel owners should see it as their civic duty to open their doors to people who, without rooms, risk dying in this pandemic. They will be paid for three months to rent out their entire establishments, and will be able to keep their employees at work helping to maintain the properties. All the hotels will have service providers working on site and health professionals looking for signs that anyone is getting ill."
"Perhaps hotel owners should look at the effect on their reputations this way: Wouldn't it be better for their image if the public knew that they'd stepped up in a crisis than if they were found to have kept their rooms empty and idled their workers?" they added.
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, warned on Tuesday that if the number of available hotel rooms doesn't increase soon, he could call upon his emergency powers to speed up the process. "If it requires a more aggressive stance, and requires some of the emergency powers I have to commandeer those rooms ... we need to get people into those thousands of rooms today," he said, per the Associated Press.
Read the full LA Times editorial here »
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