Unite Here Local 11 seeks to reduce the problem of homeless people by housing them in hotels next to paying guests

THE PEOPLE OF THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES

DO ORDAIN AS FOLLOWS:

LOS ANGELES RESPONSIBLE HOTEL ORDINANCE

Section 1. Purpose and Intent

The City of Los Angeles is experiencing a dramatic increase in hotel development, ranking second in the nation in the number of new hotel rooms in its pipeline and seeing occupancy rates return to their pre-pandemic levels. While hotels can bring good jobs and add to the City’s economic base, many hotels burden City

social services and exacerbate the City’s housing crisis. The Los Angeles Responsible Hotel Ordinance (the “Ordinance”) will help ensure that new hotels do not contribute to the City’s lack of affordable housing, burden the City’s social services, or result in undue transportation and traffic impacts. New and already existing hotels will be required to adhere to responsible business practices, including making guest rooms available to unhoused Angelenos on a non-discriminatory basis, and be subject to City oversight.

The Ordinance requires that when the City Planning Commission, or the City Council on appeal, reviews a conditional use permit for a major hotel development, they consider whether there is sufficient demand for the hotel, whether the hotel would unduly burden the demand for affordable housing and social services in the City, including as a result of the hotel’s employment practices; whether the hotel has a plan to reduce vehicle trips and vehicle miles, including by hiring local residents; and whether the hotel will displace community-serving small businesses. The Ordinance also requires new hotels that displace housing to create guest rooms for City visitors replace that housing on a one-for-one basis.

One consequence of the City’s lack of affordable housing is its unprecedented

homelessness crisis. At least 41,290 people experienced homelessness at any given time during 2020 in the City according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

While the 2021 count was cancelled due to COVID, the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased by double-digit percentages in recent years, a trend that can be expected to continue through the COVID pandemic. While tens of thousands of unhoused Angelenos can be found each night sleeping on the streets or in parks, vehicles, or structures not fit for human habitation, large numbers of hotel guest rooms across the City go unoccupied every night. 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.

The Ordinance prohibits hotels from discriminating against unhoused people for their participation in this program, or the fact or perception, that they are unhoused. It requires hotels to report the number of vacant hotel rooms and other information to the Housing Department on a regular basis.

The Ordinance creates a more rigorous permitting regime to ensure that hotels

are operated in a responsible manner. While the City has adopted special police permit requirements for dealers of a variety of types of merchandise, businesses that provide amusements and exhibitions, and numerous trades and occupations, there currently exist no special police permit requirements for hotels. However, as sites where the traveling public congregates in large numbers, hotels have a unique and important role to play in ensuring public health and safety and in mitigating harmful and illegal conduct such as trafficking of persons and the spread of communicable diseases.

Wage theft and other violations of state and local employment laws are a large and growing problem in Los Angeles, with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Wage Theft Task Force estimating that some 30% of workers in the County are paid less than the legal minimum wage and that wage theft deprives workers of over $26 million per week in Los Angeles. Hotels employ large numbers of lower- wage workers, whom unscrupulous employers especially target for wage theft and other employment-law violations, making review of employment-law violations as part of the hotel licensure process critical.

This Ordinance adds to the City’s existing police permit regime a requirement that hotel owners and operators obtain a permit from the Board of Police Commissioners and sets out standards, the violation of which, may result in the denial of a permit or disciplinary action against hotel owners or operators.

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