The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to purchase a 294-room boutique hotel and use it as a major asset in Mayor Karen Bass’ fight against homelessness, despite council members’ concerns about safety, long-term costs and plans to to run the building.

By 12 to 2, the council backed the mayor’s plan to acquire the Mayfair Hotel for $60 million and spend an additional $23 million on renovations and upgrades to the building, which closed last summer after two years of operation. temporary housing for the homeless. of the pandemic.

Bass previously said the hotel, located in LA’s Westlake neighborhood, will help the city lower the cost of its Inside Safe program, which currently has about 1,000 displaced residents in hotels and motels. By fully owning the building, she said, the city will

have the ability to

reduce the number of rooms it rents out each night.

Councilman Eunisses Hernandez, representing Westlake, voted in favor of the project, but only after listing a list of concerns about how it was presented to the community, how it will be managed and who it will serve.

Hernandez said Bass’s team showed “a real lack of community involvement” when they proposed the hotel purchase. And she pointed out that for the next two years, the city will only make rooms on the Mayfair available to residents of Skid Row, not to the dozens of people who live directly around the hotel, which is located in a high-rise part of the city. Concentration of Hispanic working-class immigrants.

“What my community is being told is that the city has more than $80 million to spend on purchasing and renovating a hotel in their backyard to provide 300 rooms for temporary housing,” she said. “And yet none of those rooms will be available to the people who live exposed within a stone’s throw of the entrance.”

Hernandez said she and the community would have appreciated Bass showing up at a neighborhood meeting to discuss Mayfair’s proposal. A few weeks ago, Bass attended a Westside town hall devoted to a proposal by Councilman Katy Yaroslavsky for a 30-bed temporary housing facility on Pico Boulevard, a project that would be a fraction of the size of the Mayfair.

bass

did not directly respond to Hernandez’s claims.

Instead, she released a statement thanking her and several other council members

members

for working together to “bring people in and save lives through a city-wide approach.”

Together, with actions like these, we can maintain our momentum to face the homelessness crisis, she said.

Friday’s vote gave Bass a policy victory, which declared a state of homelessness on the day she took office in December. At the same time, her proposal was not particularly warmly received. During the deliberations, the proposal received skeptical and sometimes caustic comments, even from those who voted for it.

Council member Traci Park, who voted yes, said she had “deep concerns about the fiscal prudence and long-term viability” of the hotel project. Councilor Bob Blumenfield, another Mayfair supporter, said the process of considering the purchase was “very rushed”.

The mayor’s team plans to use a two-year, $60 million state grant to help displaced Skid Row residents, many of whom currently live at the LA Grand Hotel in downtown LA, a facility that is moving to expected to close in January. Those out-of-home residents would move to Mayfair in February and gain access to addiction counselors, mental health specialists, and

a lot of

other social services.

That approach has received support from a number of community groups, particularly those serving Skid Row. David Prentice, president and chief executive of the Midnight Mission, told the council that he often lacks beds for people living on the sidewalks outside his facility.

“We’re going to advocate for whatever needs to be built to get the displaced off the streets and into a safe and clean environment,”

he said

.

said Prentice, testing in favor of the purchase.

“It’s a lifetime we’re talking about here.”

The proposal also received praise from Councilman Kevin de Len, whose borough includes Skid Row. De Len said he was glad to see Bass making the effort to “decompress” the homeless population in that area.

opponents of the project

most of whom live or work near the Mayfair,

said the city mismanaged the hotel when it was part of Project Roomkey, which turned LA hotels into homeless housing during the pandemic. When the Mayfair joined that program, the neighborhood experienced an increase in crime, outdoor drug use and antisocial behavior, those detractors said.

“It was horrible. It turned the block into a nightmare,” says Nami Oh, who has a gallery not far away.

The Times reported Wednesday that the city received extensive reports of damage on the Mayfair during Project Roomkey, with program participants breaking windows, smashing bathrooms and, in one instance, punching a hole in a wall in the lobby.

Hotel workers also responded to overdoses, threatening behavior and violent actions, according to emails obtained by The Times.

Bass said the Mayfair will have a much greater level of on-site services this time around, including “housing navigators,” social workers assigned to help non-housing residents find apartments.

“This is not going to be Project Roomkey,” Deputy Mayor Jenna Hornstock said earlier this week.

Despite those commitments, two council members Monica Rodriguez and Tim McOsker voted against the purchase. Rodriguez described the transaction as a bad deal, pointing out that the city recently spent $11.5 million to settle damage claims that occurred on the Mayfair during Project Roomkey. None of that money goes to repairs.

Rodriguez also said she was not given an adequate explanation of what will happen when the state subsidy for the hotel’s operations runs out. “I cannot in good conscience support this project and this acquisition,” she said.

Hernandez, the council member representing Westlake, won the approval of several amendments to the project, securing $400,000 in sanitation around the hotel and creating a community advisory group to oversee the hotel’s operations.

Moments before the vote, she promised her voters she would hold city officials, including the mayor’s office, accountable for their management of the Mayfair. “We’re not playing,” she added. “I do not play.”