Hotel Rooms Can Save Lives. Will L.A. 'Commandeer' Them?
"There is a path to getting a lot of folks indoors that has weirdly fallen in our laps, and I hope we can take advantage of it."
I met Jack Allen on Alvarado Street in Echo Park, not far from the freeway. He says he’s been homeless for about two years after a painful hernia above his right leg made it impossible for him to continue his career as a professional builder.
“I could do a sit-down job. But I don't have any experience doing a sit-down job,” he said. “The things that I know how to do are, you know, more like on the labor side.”
Without a safety net or reliable health care, he plunged downward through increasingly precarious living situations. Today he lives off Alvarado, on a vacant lot behind an auto shop. His income is about $400 a month from general relief and CalFresh.
At 62-years-old, medically vulnerable, and still recovering from a stabbing that sent him to the hospital for five days last year (he says he was robbed), Allen is an easy candidate for an emergency hotel room through Project Roomkey. But when I asked him if he’d ever been offered a room, he said he had not.
“I've never been approached for that. Otherwise, I'd be there, you know?” he said. “I was at somewhere where there was a TV — that's very rare for me — and I was watching this program showing these homeless people getting into hotels. But I don't know where that was or how to go about it. Or you know, even what the program was, or anything.”
Getting into a hotel room for even just a few weeks would mean he could finally address the hernia, which he says requires surgery and a weeks-long recovery period.
“It's getting worse and worse. It's protruding out. But I can't get surgery because I'm going to need to be laid up somewhere for like five or six weeks. If I was in a hotel, I could get the surgery done. And then I could probably go back to work after the I have surgery. I've had this hernia for like six years now.”
Five to six weeks recovery in a tent is impossible. Allen recalls a difficult, painful period last fall when he recovered from the stabbing by himself in a tent in MacArthur Park.
“Like it was bleeding through my clothes, and I had to change the bandages. It was so difficult. I mean, it was just unbelievable,” he said.
Recovering from surgery to correct the hernia would be worse. So, as long as he lacks a safe, sanitary, and consistent place to live, he puts off the surgery that could let him work again.1
A hotel room, even with the rules and early curfew that are law at most Project Roomkey sites, would be an opportunity for Allen to gain some momentum forward.
Nearly a year ago, in April of 2020, Los Angeles County officials announced they wanted to shelter up to 15,000 people in hotel rooms made vacant by the global pandemic. At the time, the federal government had offered to pick up 75% of the cost of leasing and preparing the rooms to provide “non-congregate shelter” for people who were homeless and medically vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. It was a federal offer born of fear that the coronavirus would sweep through America’s unsheltered homeless population, and overwhelm the entire medical system.
That fear never manifested. Nor did L.A.’s goal of sheltering 15,000 people in hotel rooms. At the peak, towards the end of August 2020, L.A. County was sheltering about 4,300 clients in hotel rooms. Officials explained the gulf between the goal and reality by (accurately) pointing out the logistical difficulty of engineering a system to provide basic necessities for thousands of people in hotel rooms with limited resources during an unprecedented pandemic.
But as fall approached, officials began speaking about winding down Project Roomkey in L.A. As a pivot, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) began circulating its “Covid-19 Recovery Plan,” which proposed using money from the CARES Act to subsidize rental costs of housing units leased off the private market for the oldest and most medically vulnerable people experiencing homelessness.
This was the operating procedure through L.A’s devastating winter surge, during which hotels that had been used to shelter people were taken offline, and people who had access to electricity, water, and their own bathroom were transferred elsewhere. Some even opted to return to the street, a more palatable option than a bed in a shelter with a specious promise of housing eventually.
But the math changed when a new administration moved into the White House in January. One of the Biden Administration’s first executive actions was to offer 100% reimbursement to local governments for costs involved with sheltering the most vulnerable homeless people in hotel rooms, up from 75% before. Moreover, that reimbursement would be retroactive, good all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic, theoretically negating any cost local governments incurred out of their own pocket.
L.A. City Councilmember Mike Bonin called it “manna from heaven.” The Los Angeles Business Council called for renewed efforts to meet the original 15,000 person goal. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles issued a survey to gauge participation interest on the part of hotel owners. And advocates for the homeless began dialing up the political pressure on Mayor Eric Garcetti and the L.A. City Council to take advantage of “free money” from the federal government.
Since the Biden Administration announced the policy change, two pairs of L.A. City Councilmembers have asked city departments for detailed, technical reports on the situation: Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin, and Nury Martinez and Paul Krekorian.
The Raman-Bonin motion pays special attention to gathering feedback from people who are currently unhoused, and asks for the L.A. City Attorney to articulate a legal procedure for how the city could “commandeer” hotels. The Martinez-Krekorian motion seeks clarity on how and when FEMA reimburses the city, and asks the City Attorney to report back on “whether requiring involuntary hotel participation in Project Roomkey could endanger the availability of FEMA reimbursement.”
In a report filed to the council last month, City Attorney Mike Feuer articulated that the city’s Mayor can commandeer private property in an emergency situation, but is also bound to compensate property owners for its use.2
Even in ideal circumstances3, a local government’s request for FEMA reimbursement could take several months to more than a year to churn through federal bureaucracy. Money coming down the federal tube a year from now doesn’t help pay for supplies or payroll today; or for that matter, quickly compensate owners for commandeered property.
Meanwhile, city’s financial books are in an “irresponsible” state, to quote someone familiar with the situation. Which leaves elected officials needing to find other sources of money to pay for operating costs right now, like an advance from FEMA or a loan from the state.
It’s not yet clear whether the City (or County) will take advantage of the situation. Administrative foot-dragging points to a general lack-of-urgency on the part of “some in the city.” But the fact remains, in the words of Nan Roman, President of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there remains a “pathway” towards using federal money.
“It's convoluted. It would be better if it was simpler and more straightforward. But there is a path to getting a lot of those folks indoors that has weirdly fallen in our laps at this moment, and I hope we can take advantage of it,” said Roman.
Roman says many jurisdictions around the country are passing on the 100% offer because the reporting requirements set by FEMA are arduous, and the local governments are in a perilous financial situation, much like the City of L.A.
But she underscores how even a relatively short stay in a hotel room can literally save somebody’s life. By targeting older adults and those with underlying conditions, Project Roomkey is intended to reach the most medically frail who are outside. These are typically people who, besides being homeless, are coping with complicated, severe medical needs and disease.
“They're much more likely to have diseases of major organs, heart, lungs, and kidneys,” said Roman. “They should be inside!”
In a near-future story, I’m going to publish more thorough reporting on unsheltered deaths in Los Angeles County. But for the time being, I want to leave you with a few of findings drawn from a data set that tracks homeless deaths, made available to me by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner.
In 2020, at least4 357 people age 60 or older died while experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County. 78 of those people were age 70 or older. These cases are overwhelmingly tagged as “natural” deaths by the Medical Examiner-Coroner.
In 2020, at least 61 people aged 60-years-old died outside, more than any other single age-year, according to the Medical Examiner-Coroner’s data set.
Unhoused people age 60 or older died more frequently at the end of 2020 than at the beginning.
These are people who, for the most part, died outside while Project Roomkey existed in Southern California. It’s impossible to say with certainty that every person who died last year would be alive today if they had the opportunity to move into a hotel room last May. But many would be.
Meanwhile, the window for action is closing. The Biden Administration’s rule change extends reimbursement only through the end of September. And there remain several issues that were never fully resolved in the original iteration of Project Roomkey.
As I wrote about two weeks ago, the biggest bottleneck in L.A.’s “system” is a dearth of low-rent housing stock that can serve as “permanent housing.” On a per bed basis, Project Roomkey is more expensive than A Bridge Home sites. But a hotel room offers an indisputably higher standard of living than a 48-square-foot cube.
A rented room in a hotel can save a life, but it is not a permanent place to live (at least while it’s a rented room). And it’s difficult to evaluate the long-term good if those who move into hotel rooms just return to the street after a few months indoors.5
This was a point Councilmember Nithya Raman articulated at a committee meeting earlier February:
“September gives us eight months of runway. Every week we wait to expand this program is a week we take away from those eight months. And that's a week that we take away from being able to make sure we structure this program such that every person who moves into a Project Roomkey room is able to then move afterwards into permanent housing”
For Jack Allen, the man who lives off Alvarado, a few months in a hotel room would likely give him enough time to schedule and recover from surgery to correct the hernia that keeps him from working.
Like many others in similar circumstances, he uses the word “stuck” to describe his situation. Without being able to access the health care he needs, he faces steep odds as an unsheltered, 62-year-old single male on the streets of the City of Los Angeles.
Moreover, Allen’s situation was recently complicated when his shelter burned down in a fire that he believes was intentionally lit. The blaze incinerated his state ID, his benefits and Medi-Cal cards, and other important documents. Without a fixed address, it’s nearly impossible for him to complete the bureaucratic acrobatics required to get a new I.D. Besides being a place to recuperate from surgery, a room in a hotel is also a mailing address.
No reports or motions make reference to a certain Central District of California Judge who is interested in 1) what kind of power “emergency” authority gives elected officials to act to preserve human life, and 2) the extent to which a federal court can intervene in municipal spending.
In fact, this last Wednesday, the L.A. Times published a story describing how our situation is far from ideal because the City of L.A. hasn’t yet submitted reimbursement requests to FEMA for hotels opened, by now, nearly a year ago. The stated reason, according to the City Administrative Officer Richard Llewellyn, is how “essentially, our billing department needs more assistance to get the money back.”
I say “at least” because the coroner’s office has emphasized to me in the past how their records are not necessarily 100% comprehensive.
Quality-of-life in PRK sites can widely vary. Some clients are very satisfied with their experiences at some sites. But others complain about tyrannical operators who enter rooms without warning, treat clients poorly, and are otherwise deeply unprofessional. Most sites also have a 7 p.m. curfew. While some clients agree to that, many others find this point highly disagreeable, creating a needless point for conflict between clients and operators.