A Los Angeles ballot measure was set for a vote in March that would require all hotels to make rooms available to the homeless. It was genuinely nutty.
- Hotels would be required to share their availability with the city at 2 p.m. each day
- The city would rent the rooms. Homeless would be moved from hotel to hotel daily (evening check-in, morning check-out, unclear what happens in-between).
- No services would be provided to the homeless – some may simply lack housing, but that’s not most.
- Hotels would no doubt play games with their inventory – booking up rooms and no showing or cancelling last minute – because Four Seasons-caliber properties would see their businesses decimated placing homeless in rooms next to full rate guests.
This wasn’t a serious proposal. The union representing hotel housekeepers got enough signatures that the City Council had to either pass it or put it up for a vote. So they deferred.
And the union retained control over whether the measure required a vote. So the city started negotiating to keep it off the ballot, seeing what they could give to the union – out of fear that voters might pass it.
- The union would get a whole lot of housekeeping work at hotels occupied daily by the homeless
- While potentially putting some of their own members in jeopardy.
This turned out to be a bargaining chip, rather than a proposal the union wanted to see go into effect. A deal has been reached to modify the proposal to make it voluntary for hotels.
Under the agreement, the City Council would approve a new package of regulations on the development of new hotels, forcing such projects to go through a more extensive approval process. Hotel developers also would be required to replace any housing that is demolished to make way for their projects, by building new residential units or buying and renovating existing ones.
The union will make it more expensive to build hotels – a “more extensive approval process” (where they might exercise leverage, such as requiring a union shop) and “replac[ing] any housing that is demolished.”
This new process will require a determination of whether there is “sufficient market demand” for a new hotel (that’s the developer’s job!) and also go through a review process to determine a project’s “impact on demand for housing, childcare and other services.”
They say this is about affordable housing so that their members can live in LA. In fact it’s about leverage over new hotels, and it’s about limiting the number of hotels. You might be surprised to see a union representing hotel staff wanting to limit the number of hotels, since that limits jobs and union membership. But it keeps the hotels where they’re working highly profitable, which means both an incentive to settle labor agreements (strikes are costly) and the resources with which to do so. Each hotel will have more revenue and margin for workers to bargain over.
(HT: Chris T)
Corruption in Los Angeles once again.
@ Gary — Your headline is ridiculous.
Los Angeles is wildly corrupt. And worse than corrupt it is a deliberately high-cost city where so much of that cost is just wasted with these types of crony capitalism moves. The value of every hotel just went up and frankly the quality just went down. The largest problem is the initiative process in California which has done more harm to the state than any other attribute I can think of.
As usual, LA and California in general shows itself to be a corrupt hellscape. I hear it used to be a very nice place.
Nothing to worry about, hotels know how to hide inventory when it comes to upgrades. This will be a walk in the park for them.
the homeless stayed at a hotel in my town during the lockdown. The place was trashed. No respect.