Controls on Rents, Razing of Skid Row Hotels Voted

A so-called “homelessness prevention” measure that would control rents and impose a six-month demolition moratorium on Los Angeles’ low-rent residential hotels won City Council approval Wednesday.

The measure is expected to be signed into law by mayor Tom Bradley. The mayor, who last week praised the proposal but said “more needs to be done” to house the poor, has called for a one-year moratorium on demolition of the hotels.

Under the ordinance, the rents would be frozen for six months while a regulatory formula is developed.

The council passed the measure--12 to 0--with such dispatch that hotel representatives were denied a chance to speak out. “I goofed,” Council President John Ferraro acknowledged later, saying he had failed to notice a written request by a hotel manager to address the council. By the time Ferraro realized his error, the would-be speaker had left the council chambers.

First introduced by Councilman Robert Farrell last month, the measure is supposed to stem the numbers of the homeless in the city, especially in the downtown Skid Row area. The single-room occupancy hotels--renting at low short-term rates--provide permanent housing for a large low-income group and temporary shelter for people who move back and forth from such hotels to the street and missions. There are about 10,000 such hotel rooms in the city, including more than 6,750 in the downtown area.

Under the ordinance, a single-room occupancy hotel is defined as a structure containing six or more guest rooms in which 30% or more of the units do not contain a private bath and toilet within the unit. Exempted from the ordinance are nonprofit agencies that have single-room occupancy accommodations for the homeless, providing that other social services are the principal activity of the agency.

The hotels are “the cheapest form of unsubsidized housing,” renting for as low as $8 a night, said Barbara Zeidman, the city’s rent stabilization director. Even so, the single-room occupancy hotels, which typically feature shared bathroom facilities, sometimes exacerbate the problem of homelessness, she said, because they exhaust the meager incomes of their tenants.

Dave Johnson, manager of the 430-room Frontier Hotel at 5th and Main streets, was the person who planned to address the council. In an interview later, Johnson said that the rent-control effort imposes an extra hardship on owners who in recent years have had to pay higher taxes and invest in improvements to meet fire and seismic codes.