California is attempting to lease 15,000 hotel rooms to house homeless people for three months, and Los Angeles has set its own goal of procuring 15,000 hotel rooms for the same purpose.
“This is the crisis that predated the most current crisis in the state of California,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said on April 4, “We’re doing everything in our power to meet it head on.”
California’s homeless population is the largest in the country, estimated at 150,000. Newsom said earlier this week that more than 7,640 rooms had been obtained statewide so far.
This initiative is called Project Roomkey. Much of the funding is coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Tuesday that more hotel rooms must be acquired, and more quickly. He warned that he has emergency powers to commandeer rooms “if it requires a more aggressive stance.”
The governor gave himself that power, too, in the open-ended declaration of emergency he signed in March.
California’s hospitality industry was devastated by the coronavirus lockdown that Newsom proudly declared as a first-in-the-nation initiative on March 19. Now it appears that there’s a plan to take advantage of the economic crisis that the government chose to create.
“We’re not just thinking short term,” Newsom said on April 4. He revealed that many of the negotiated leases for the hotels and motels include options for the state to purchase those properties.
Newsom and other public officials have often complained about the obstacles to their plans from what they call NIMBYism — “Not In My Back Yard” sentiment — from local residents. But what they call NIMBYism, local residents call protecting their homes and families.
Now, imagine you’re a public official who would like to get around all those pesky objections from all those inconvenient, taxpaying residents. Suppose you wanted to establish homeless shelters in neighborhoods throughout the state, and you didn’t want local residents to have any power to influence the location or even to find out where the shelters were going to be located until well after they were up and running.
The coronavirus lockdown is a dream come true.
Now imagine that you’re a taxpaying resident. You can ask your government which hotels are part of Project Roomkey and whether the state has negotiated an option to buy them. You won’t get an answer. The official line is, “these are not walk-up facilities, residents have to be referred to them, so we’re not revealing the addresses.”
There’s little or no transparency to the public about a plan that could have immense and long-term impact on neighborhoods. There’s no public process at all.
That’s really not acceptable. So here’s how you can find out if a hotel or motel in your neighborhood is being turned into a homeless shelter during the coronavirus lockdown.
Simply go online to any hotel reservation site and try to make a reservation in your neighborhood, or any city in California, for a date in May or June. The hotels and motels that are “sold out” on that date are likely the ones that have been taken over for Project Roomkey. It’s fairly unlikely that these properties are solidly booked with tourists on a random Tuesday in May.
After the name of an Orange County hotel surfaced in news reports, local resistance was immediate. Residents of a senior community in Laguna Woods staged protests when they found out the neighboring Ayres Hotel would be converted to a homeless shelter. Afterward, the hotel owners and the county agreed to cancel the contract.
The L.A. County Emergency Operations Center reports the latest numbers from Project Roomkey in its daily updates, although it is vague about the locations. There’s a property in West Los Angeles with 136 rooms that became operational on April 3. As of April 9 it had 110 residents.
In the South Bay, there are five hotel or motel properties in the program, including one with 60 rooms that opened on April 8. The others have 50, 100, 97 and 135 rooms, respectively.
In the San Gabriel Valley, a 49-room property opened on April 6 and three more with 80, 87 and 50 rooms have been procured.
There are two properties operating in the San Fernando Valley that opened on April 5, one with 52 rooms and one with 74. An agreement has been reached for a 263-room property.
Source: County Register
