The city of Los Angeles could face lawsuits from hotel owners, claiming the city has trampled their constitutional property rights, if a measure passes next March that would require hotels to house homeless people in vacant rooms and be paid only through sub-market city Housing Department vouchers.
Los Angeles Initiative A, which was championed by the hospitality employees union Unite Here Local 11, would also require new hotel development projects containing 100 or more rooms to compensate for any housing losses due to demolition or conversions. This would be done by building a similar amount of affordable housing on or near the construction site.
A draft of the measure indicates that more than 41,000 Los Angeles residents experienced homelessness at any given time in 2020 and that unoccupied hotel rooms could help ease the crises.
Jim Burling, the Pacific Legal Foundation’s vice president for legal affairs, said the ballot measure may face a constitutional challenge.
| Pacific Legal Foundation
“... large numbers of hotel guest rooms across the city go unoccupied every night,” a draft of the measure states. “Vacant hotel rooms offer an underutilized opportunity to address the problem of homelessness. This ordinance creates a program under which the city’s Housing Department will identify hotels with vacant rooms, refer unhoused families and individuals to such hotels, and provide payment at a fair market rate for their lodging.”
Property-rights advocates and hotel owners’ associations see the proposal as an illegal attempt to generate more work for hospitality employees even while compromising their safety and hobbling the tourism industry.
“If you are going to require a hotel owner to have uninvited guests on their property, that could be an unconstitutional taking of hotel owners’ property,” Jim Burling, the Pacific Legal Foundation’s vice president of legal affairs, told the Southern California Record.
Hotel owners don’t have the right to discriminate based on race and other factors, but taking away their ability to turn away clients who are intoxicated or who may offer less than the going rate has implications, Burling said.
Litigation would likely result if the measure passes as hotel owners begin to feel aggrieved because their mix of guests might not be attractive for other potential lodgers, he added.
“If it were to pass, I am sure some of them would sue,” Burling said.
In addition, California’s “Housing First” approach to homelessness may lead more hotel rooms to be occupied by people with mental illness or drug-treatment issues, he said. The Housing First system contends that a homeless person must first be granted access to permanent housing – before social services to improve health issues and resolve harmful behaviors can be provided, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development.
“I don’t think this would improve (homelessness) one bit,” Burling said, indicating that lower housing costs and better treatment options are essential. “This is just a temporary Band-Aid.”
Lynn Mohrfeld, president and CEO of the California Hotel & Lodging Association, said the CHLA opposes the measure but has yet to make a decision on whether to file a lawsuit if the measure passes.
“Given that this program mixes guests and people experiencing homelessness, this program has a potential to greatly impact employee and guest safety and make hotels in the city of Los Angeles less desirable to prospective visitors,” Mohrfeld told the Record in an email. “The industry’s greatest concern is safety for our employees, and it’s unfathomable that Unite Here Local 11, the proponents of the measure, would put their union members in harm’s way with this measure.”
The union collected more than 126,000 signatures to advance the measure to the city ballot, according to the Ballotpedia website.
A survey by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) that was published in August found that 86% of city residents said Los Angeles should not make it a priority to house homeless individuals in hotels.
Sizable majorities of those surveyed believe the city will see a sharp drop in hotel tax revenues if the initiative passes, leading to cuts in city services, according to the survey results.
“Unite Here is fighting to fill all L.A.-area hotels with the same types of activities you see on Skid Row,” “AHLA President & CEO Chip Rogers said in a prepared statement. “If they succeed, they’ll jeopardize the safety of both hotel guests and workers, virtually destroy the city’s tourism industry and cause massive job losses.”
A draft of the measure, however, contends that Los Angeles is experiencing new hotel development at a rate that is the second highest in the nation. At the same time, hotel occupancy rates are returning to pre-Covid levels, and the industry is in a position to engage in “responsible business practices” that don’t exacerbate the homeless crisis, the draft says.