LA's latest homeless plan could turn hotels into squatter dens: expert
A proposal in Los Angeles intended to address the city’s rampant homelessness issues could turn hotels into squatter dens, according to the CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA).
"You will have squatters. Imagine if you give someone who's experiencing homelessness a voucher, and they go to a hotel and they don't want to leave. What are you going to do?" Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. "And, by the way, you don't have their credit card or their identification because they don't have it. So, then you're going to have to call law enforcement, and in law enforcement, they don't want to be responding to things like this."
Unite Here, a hotel, food service and casino labor union, proposed a hotel ordinance that would force hotels to inform the city when they have unoccupied rooms and give out vouchers to homeless people. The proposal would give homeless people rooms alongside paying customers. Los Angeles voters will determine the fate of the proposal via ballot measure in March 2024, unless the union pulls the proposal before December.
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Rogers said his top concern with the initiative is the safety of hotel staff in Los Angeles, followed by other concerns such as a crippled economy.
"Safety is the most important concern, which I think will quickly lead to total destruction of the L.A. city hotel market," he said. "We polled consumers who travel. Of those who intended to go to L.A., 72% of them said they won't go if this happens. And then those who've already been to Los Angeles before they were planning to go back, over 80% of those travelers say, 'I'm not going to go if this passes,'" he said.
The city previously established "Project Homekey" to place homeless people in hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new proposal is separate from the coronavirus initiative, but it would take the same idea and set it in stone as law. Rogers said the union’s reasoning is confusing and nonsensical to him.
"I don't know what they're doing. I can't find any rational thought process that would lead you to promote this policy," he said. "And so again, I really wish people would question the union leadership and say, ‘Why would you ever propose something that would put your own members in physical danger?’ And so, they haven't answered that question, they don't seem to answer this question to the underlying policy at all. So, it's hard for me to understand what they're trying to accomplish."
The Unite Here Local 11 union did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The union has argued that hotels have contributed to high housing prices by crowding out development and that hotels should play a role in alleviating the homelessness crisis.
"Los Angeles has seen a massive increase in new hotel development in recent years at the same time as the number of people experiencing homelessness has skyrocketed and the City’s affordable housing crisis has grown," the union wrote on its website. "Hotels are frequently proposed for land that is equally suitable for housing development and thus crowd out sites that could be used to help alleviate the City’s need for affordable housing."
Rogers said the plan could turn hotels into homeless shelters, but he also said he didn’t want to "jump the gun" on that hypothesis.
"The destruction of those properties is pretty significant and well documented. We would imagine the same behavior patterns would occur here. That remains to be seen. I don't want to jump the gun on that yet. I just think that the immediate reaction to this is going to be a significant downturn in occupancy. It's going to cause immediate job loss and hotels to go under rather quickly," Rogers said.
The AHLA CEO said the hotel union has until December to pull the initiative from the ballot, and he said he hopes they do so in order to protect hotel staff safety as well as the economy.
"Stop playing around with the safety of your own members," Rogers told Fox News Digital when asked about his message to Unite Here and L.A. voters. "Hotel workers deserve to be protected. We who represent [the] hotel industry believe they deserve to be protected. Unite Here, it needs to join us in protecting the physical safety of their own members."
"The second message to Los Angeles voters, if this remains on the ballot, if Unite Here doesn't do the right thing, we have to resoundingly defeat this. It will hurt the local economy. It will cost jobs. It will not help the homeless and L.A. will again be in a position where they're going to have to defend something that is indefensible."
Fox News’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.