The proposal would increase hourly wages each year to reach $30 by 2028.
Amid an affordable housing crisis, dozens of rent-controlled buildings are listed on short-term rental websites. A 2018 law was supposed to stop that, but the city is struggling to enforce it.
In the face of weak labor laws, hospitality workers brought their fight for better wages and working conditions to the court of public opinion.
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.
A 2008 city law intended hotels used as primary residences to be preserved as safety-net housing. But with little enforcement, some landlords had turned their buildings into tourist hotels.
Amid the city’s homelessness crisis, some landlords have turned buildings meant for low-cost housing into tourist hotels.
Hotel ads, booking sites and guest reviews. Tourists staying in rooms meant for low-cost housing. Yet the city’s Housing Department has cited few landlords for violating the residential hotel law.
When the American Hotel converted into a tourist hotel, its long-term residents lost not just their affordable housing but the creative community that long thrived in the iconic building.
Following a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation, which found that buildings meant for housing are instead being rented to tourists, the mayor’s office asked for a review.
Despite recent wins, union members still can’t afford to live anywhere near where they work.
Fifteen years ago, Los Angeles passed a law to preserve residential hotels as housing of last resort. Now, amid the homelessness crisis, some hotels may be violating that law by offering rooms to tourists.
Making developers who stoke the housing crisis repair the damage they’ve done.
Major hotel chains are considering making daily room cleaning an exception rather than the norm.
She has heard no plan for a federal relief package that might somehow lessen her burden. And, hotel worker Liliana Hernandez says, the whole notion of a vaccine getting the country back on track might be way too late for her and her colleagues. In a state of inequity, relief remains elusive.