Deal struck to remove homeless hotel housing measure from L.A.’s March ballot

Unite Here Local 11, the hotel workers union, has been staging rolling strikes for several months. Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian has struck a deal with the politically powerful hotel workers’ union to remove a measure from the March election ballot that would have required hotels to participate in a city program to put homeless residents in vacant hotel rooms. In exchange, the union’s proposal for placing homeless residents in vacant hotel rooms would be explicitly listed as voluntary, a move that would cause it to resemble Inside Safe, the program created by Mayor Karen Bass to combat homelessness. Park, who serves on the council’s trade and tourism committee, said she believes the original measure would have had “catastrophic consequences” for tourism locally had it won voter approval, by mandating that hotels take in homeless residents without accompanying social services. The union is also skilled at gathering signatures for ballot measures in and around L.A. Last year, Unite Here qualified a measure for the March ballot requiring the city’s Housing Department to create a new voucher program to serve the city’s unhoused population.