Twenty-one hotels have been cited so far. If the citations are enforced and upheld in court, hundreds of rooms could be turned back into low-cost permanent housing for the city’s poorest residents.
The Los Angeles Housing Department has ordered the owners of four buildings meant to house some of the city’s poorest residents to stop renting rooms to tourists, following a review that was prompted by reporting by Capital & Main and ProPublica.
The news organizations documented how some owners of the buildings, known as residential hotels, were advertising short-term rentals online despite a 2008 law aimed at preserving the rooms as residential. Landlords who convert the buildings to other uses or demolish them must replace the units or pay into a city housing fund.
The new enforcement actions bring the number of residential hotels cited by the Housing Department for violating the residential hotel law to 21. The agency had sent violation notices to 17 residential hotels within weeks of the Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation.
In all, about 750 residential hotel rooms could be turned back into low-cost permanent housing for LA residents who have few other options — if the city’s citations are upheld in court and if the city aggressively enforces the law.
The housing crisis is mostly due to not enough supply of housing.
Legislating short term rentals like airBnB helps some, but the real fix is just building a lot more housing. Letting neighborhoods densify from single family homes to row houses or small condominiums. Building more missing middle housing like duplexes and triplexes. Building 5 over 1s.
If prices haven’t fallen, you haven’t built enough units yet.
Because the stuff you hear about there being a ton of vacant housing is mostly due to the technical governmental definition of vacant housing not lining up with the colloquial.