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Collaborative Reporting

Tourists make their way out of the H Hotel parking lot in Los Angeles, May 07, 2023 and head to the front desk. The owner of the property plans on ripping up the hotel parking lot and building a new H Hotel. Amid a state of emergency on homelessness and the worst affordable housing crisis in recent memory, the city of Los Angeles is struggling to find enough low-cost housing for Angelenos who are priced out of the city’s rental housing market. But, as some city officials scramble to make new dwelling units available, others in the city’s housing department have allowed about 700 of L.A.’s lowest-cost dwellings – in residential hotels – to be turned into tourist accommodations, despite a law that makes such conversions illegal. More than 18,000 dwelling units in 200 hotels are officially protected by a 2008 city ordinance that dubbed them an “endangered housing resource” to be preserved for people with no other housing options. But 15 years later, enforcement is so lax that residential hotels across the city – from roadside style motels in the San Fernando Valley to traditional single-room occupancy hotels downtown – remain under threat just as they were when the residential hotel law was adopted. (Barbara Davidson/special to ProPublica)
Tourists make their way out of the H Hotel parking lot in Los Angeles, May 07, 2023 and head to the front desk. The owner of the property plans on ripping up the hotel parking lot and building a new H Hotel. Amid a state of emergency on homelessness and the worst affordable housing crisis in recent memory, the city of Los Angeles is struggling to find enough low-cost housing for Angelenos who are priced out of the city’s rental housing market. But, as some city officials scramble to make new dwelling units available, others in the city’s housing department have allowed about 700 of L.A.’s lowest-cost dwellings – in residential hotels – to be turned into tourist accommodations, despite a law that makes such conversions illegal. More than 18,000 dwelling units in 200 hotels are officially protected by a 2008 city ordinance that dubbed them an “endangered housing resource” to be preserved for people with no other housing options. But 15 years later, enforcement is so lax that residential hotels across the city – from roadside style motels in the San Fernando Valley to traditional single-room occupancy hotels downtown – remain under threat just as they were when the residential hotel law was adopted. (Barbara Davidson/special to ProPublica)
03 Aug 2023

How we found what the City of L.A. didn’t: Landlords renting low-cost housing to tourists