By the time the Mayfair Hotel closed its doors last year, the building had gone through a rough, tumultuous period.

Windows of the 294-room boutique hotel, in LA’s Westlake neighborhood, were shattered. Bathrooms were destroyed. Carpet was torn from the floor in places.

“Participant in 1516 Threatened personnel, security, destroyed property. Screamed. Screamed cursed. Everything went wrong with her. Inside and outside the building,” an employee of Helpline Youth Counseling Inc., a service provider assigned to the hotel, wrote early 2022.

Those and other incidents were described in emails sent to the City of Los Angeles during the last six months of Mayfair’s participation in Project Roomkey, a federally funded initiative that turned hotels across LA into temporary shelters for the homeless. . The emails, copies of which The Times has obtained, show a staff of security guards, nurses, hotel managers and others struggling with drug overdoses, property damage and what they characterized as aggressive and even violent behavior.

“Around 10 a.m., a man in 1526 attacked another resident in room 726,” a security guard wrote in March 2022. “The situation was quickly broken up and 1526 was escorted out by police.”

The city quietly paid the hotel’s owner $11.5 million in recent months to resolve damages claims filed over Project Roomkey.

Mayor Karen Bass now wants the city to buy the Mayfair and turn it into homeless housing again. But this time, residents, merchants and property owners are pushing back, saying they don’t want a return to the conditions they encountered when the Mayfair took in displaced residents from Echo Park, Koreatown and other areas.

“The neighborhood is still reeling from Project Roomkey,” says Ruben Lares, who lives opposite the hotel. “The purchase of the Mayfair would once again completely devastate the community.”

Bass and her team have tried to reassure neighbors by promising that the Mayfair will be “completely different” from Project Roomkey once it’s owned by the city. Project Roomkey, she said, was created in response to COVID-19 and provides rooms for unhoused Angelenos to shelter in place, but lacks critical social services.

“We’re going to put in the time and effort so that the residents in the area understand that this is going to be a different program,” Bass said in an interview.

The City Council will vote on the purchase Friday, paving the way for the city to spend more than $83 million on acquisition, renovation and upgrades of the Mayfair, an amount in addition to money paid in damages.

In the 48 hours leading up to the vote, the Mayfair proposal will be presented to three council committees, one devoted to homelessness, another devoted to government operations and a third focused on the city budget. Councilman Eunisses Hernandez, who represents the area, declined

so far

to take a stand on the project, saying she is still evaluating it and gathering input.

“Her priority remains to advance housing solutions that provide sustainable, dignified solutions to our homelessness crisis,” said Hernandez spokesperson Chelsea Lucktenberg.

Bass plans to use the Mayfair as part of Inside Safe, its initiative to move displaced residents to hotels and then permanent housing. Buying the Mayfair, she said, would significantly reduce the program’s room rental costs.

Under the proposal, unhoused residents would be moved from Skid Row and other areas to the Mayfair, where they would receive on-site case management and comprehensive social services. The hotel would provide mental health specialists, addiction counselors, nurses, activities and rules that teach residents “how to be a good neighbor,” said Mercedes Marquez, the mayor’s homelessness czar.

The “focus is on transforming people, stabilizing people so they can continue to live in permanent homes,” she said. “To do that, residents have to learn how to control themselves, how to control themselves.”

Whether those arguments will convince the neighbors is far from clear.

Residents and entrepreneurs come on Saturday

at a town hall meeting

aired for more than an hour about ailments they said were present during Project Roomkey, a program created during the administration of former mayor Eric Garcetti that ended in July 2022 at the hotel. They described scenes of open-air drug use, discarded hypodermic needles, antisocial behavior and criminal activity.

A woman who worked nearby as a cashier said during the pandemic

customers

people regularly grabbed merchandise and ran out of her shop. Another person said his windshield was smashed with a crowbar.

Darlene Adderison, who lives near the Mayfair, said hotel residents repeatedly played music outside her building that boomed so loud it drowned out her television. She said she told them to turn it down only to be scolded.

“I don’t want them back in this neighborhood,” she said. “I want my peace. I am 66 years old and I want my peace.”

For some neighbours, the promise of rules on the Mayfair offers little solace.

Businessman Angat Gaada said rules banning drugs from the hotel during Project Roomkey urged Mayfair residents to consume them on nearby sidewalks instead. Hotel residents regularly snuck into his family’s apartment building and used drugs in the stairwell and parking garage, setting off the fire alarms, Gaada said.

“The rules were only enforced within the Mayfair. They were not enforced outside the Mayfair,” he said.

It was also difficult in the hotel, according to e-mails sent to the city. Workers regularly encountered damage to the building, which had been the subject of extensive renovation several years earlier.

In room 406, hotel managers found two broken windows, a broken television, and a broken granite counter top. In room 504, they found that a resident had spray-painted the shower curtain, written on a bathroom mirror, and stained the carpet with spray paint. In room 801, someone smeared feces around a doorway.

“Room should be biologically cleaned,” Anthony Hernandez, a hotel manager, wrote after that incident.

According to the correspondence, a Mayfair resident punched a hole in a wall in the lobby. Another left a “hidden” candle burning in their room, starting a blaze that prompted a response from firefighters.

Mayfair employees tried to monitor the substance use, while nurses administered Narcan and guards tried to prevent contraband from entering the building. While some Project Roomkey participants expressed anger at those rules, others ignored them.

hernandez

the hotel manager,

reported that an occupant of room 508 acted violently and yelled in a housekeeper’s face. “Participant was angry because he claimed that the housekeeper took marijuana from his room even though the housekeepers had not entered the room,” his post read.

At another point, a nursing staff member expressed concern about “sheets of aluminum foil” used to consume fentanyl spread across one of the rooms. “This is like this every day,” he said.

As the Project Roomkey program entered its final months, program staff faced yet another problem: objects being flung from windows. In May 2022, an employee warned that a piece of glass above the lobby had shattered and “could shatter completely at any moment”. Residents had “constantly thrown stuff out of their windows over the glass window in the lobby,” the employee wrote.

“We hope that all windows in the hotel can be locked again so that this problem does not continue,” the employee said in the email. A month later, a security guard reported that a vase had been thrown from a window on the 10th floor. After he swept up the glass, another vase fell to the floor, according to his report.

Jeff Farber, executive director of Helpline Youth Counseling, who was assigned to the Mayfair for about a year, defended

the

Project Roomkey

program

saying it provided critical services.

Project Roomkey

It provided emergency shelter for people who hadn’t been housed for years, some with severe mental health or substance use problems, and worked to prevent them from contracting COVID-19, or help them recover if they did, Farber said.

Many had serious health problems, he said.

“You have to look at the fact that we kept people alive,” Farber said. “If they had lived on the street [during the pandemic]chances are they won’t be walking around today.”

Farber said his group worked to connect Mayfair residents with the Department of Mental Health and other provincial agencies. He also expects services on the Mayfair to be much more extensive under Bass’ program.