The Brief

This story was produced by the nonprofit journalism publication Capital & Main in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.  It is co-published with permission. Read part one and part two of the investigation into L.A.’s residential hotels.

As part of Mayor Karen Bass’ signature homelessness initiative called Inside Safe, the city of Los Angeles awarded Las Palmas Hotel a contract potentially worth about $2 million to temporarily shelter people living on the streets.

But the 62-unit hotel in Hollywood was already supposed to be providing housing for people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else under a 2008 city law meant to ease a “housing emergency” that has grown more severe in the past 15 years.

Inside Safe participants now fill most of Las Palmas’ rooms at nightly rates of up to $140, according to the hotel’s contract with the city — more than double the amount Las Palmas would likely earn if long-term residents rented the rooms as that law requires.

Las Palmas is one of eight residential hotels that have received contracts over the past year to house homeless people through the new Inside Safe program, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found. Of those, five hotels including Las Palmas have collected city funding despite seemingly violating the housing ordinance by offering rooms to tourists.

L.A.’s struggle to preserve low-income housing while simultaneously trying to shelter the growing number of people living on the streets represents an increasingly common national problem as city leaders wrestle with the competing needs of different populations amid a limited housing supply.

Residential hotels, which offer basic single rooms sometimes with shared bathrooms, have long been a kind of last-resort housing for low-income, older and disabled people. The 2008 law bars landlords from turning their buildings into condos or tourist hotels unless they build new units or pay an equivalent fee to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Altogether, at least 18 residential hotels have turned into interim shelters through various homeless services programs since 2016, according to a review of the Los Angeles Housing Department’s residential hotel list, Inside Safe contracts, state awards for housing construction and a Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority database of interim housing sites.

Now, that number is set to grow as dozens more residential hotels could become temporary shelters. On Nov. 1, citing a “desperate need for interim housing,” Bass issued an executive order that allows Inside Safe or similar programs to use the city’s 16,000 residential hotel rooms in 300 buildings during the city’s declared homelessness emergency as long as the rooms are unoccupied.

Turning such permanent housing into temporary shelters only makes the city’s housing problems worse, said Barbara Schultz, director of housing justice at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

“It is inconceivable to me that the city would reduce the number of permanent units affordable to low-income people when we are in the middle of this ginormous housing crisis,” Schultz said.

Bass’ press secretary Clara Karger said in an email that the mayor’s office decided that temporary housing is a better use of the rooms given LA’s housing crisis.

“It is troubling that residential hotels were being misused for daily rates and short-term vacation rentals,” she wrote. “Now, many of those rooms are being used to urgently bring people inside and save lives, and the mayor has directed the Housing Department to address enforcement and to conduct a comprehensive review of all residential hotels.”

This summer, Capital & Main and ProPublica reported that the Housing Department had done little to enforce the residential hotel law as 21 properties openly offered rooms to tourists on travel websites. Following a request by the mayor’s office, Housing Department managers investigated and issued citations to the owners of 17 hotels, including Las Palmas.

Pankaj Naik, CEO of Shivay Hospitality, which operates the hotel, declined to comment or answer questions. Las Palmas has appealed its citation and joined other hotels in a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that residential hotel enforcement violates their constitutional protection against unreasonable searches. The owners also argue the city has given them tacit approval for short-term rentals by accepting nightly hotel tax payments. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The Housing Department told the mayor that with additional resources, the agency could “stop rogue property owners from violating the Residential Hotel Ordinance and undermining the availability of affordable housing stock.”

But now Bass’ office has removed hundreds of those same residential hotel rooms from the permanent housing market. And the Housing Department’s enforcement hasn’t stopped the city from giving the hotels hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Las Palmas’ Inside Safe contract expires in mid-November, but it provides for a six-month extension.

Patricia Harrold, an 80-year-old pianist at Miceli’s, a landmark Hollywood restaurant, has lived at Las Palmas for 29 years.

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Under Inside Safe, which Bass launched shortly after taking office in December, city staffers target tent cities under bridges or on sidewalks. Outreach workers offer motel rooms while buses stand by to ferry those who accept the offers to their temporary dwellings. Once the encampment residents are gone, sanitation workers break up the camps, toss trash and hose down sidewalks.

The pressure on city leaders to bring people inside from street encampments is “immense,” said Gregg Colburn, a University of Washington real estate professor who studies homelessness. Currently, 46,000 Angelenos live in cars, tents and makeshift shelters, and Bass promised to find housing for 17,000 of them in her first year.

“The problem with that strategy,” Colburn said, “is it doesn’t end homelessness. It recharacterizes it from unsheltered into sheltered, which is why I and many others argue we need a lot more permanent housing.”

Housing enforcement, then lucrative contracts

The Housing Department is supposed to approve any conversion of residential hotel buildings from permanent housing, but department records for 10 of the hotels obtained by Capital & Main and ProPublica didn’t show that permission was obtained to turn the hotels into temporary shelters.

The Housing Department did not provide all the hotel files that the newsrooms requested. It also didn’t respond to an interview request or answer emailed questions about whether it had cleared the hotels and what procedures they have for Inside Safe. Instead, the agency said it would handle the queries as a public records request.

Housing Department records revealed that inspectors had cited two of the Inside Safe properties for residential hotel violations in recent years. Hotel booking websites showed three others were openly renting rooms to tourists against Housing Department rules shortly before signing contracts with the city.

Las Palmas is a prime example. The hotel for years advertised its central location for travelers visiting Hollywood, capitalizing on its fame as the site of the final scene in the movie Pretty Woman.

The final scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” was filmed on Las Palmas’ fire escape.

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The Housing Department had designated Las Palmas as a residential hotel in 2011. It based its decision, in the Las Palmas case and others, on the state’s legal definition of a residential hotel: a building of six or more units that are the primary residences of their guests. During the period analyzed in 2005, hotel tax records showed that 93% of its occupants were permanent residents.

But as tenants moved away or died, the struggling actors, writers and celebrity impersonators who called Las Palmas home watched as their landlord turned more and more of the units into tourist rooms. The hotel’s website features a photo of the lobby with a mural of “Pretty Woman” stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts reuniting on the building’s fire escape. The website promises visitors a “wonderful holiday” and a “blissful stay.”

Today, only about a dozen permanent residents remain, according to residents and the latest rent registry filed with the Housing Department.

As rents have soared, Las Palmas is the only housing most can afford, said writer John Bucher, 72. He got his third-floor room at the hotel 12 years ago “when there was still a payphone in the lobby.” Bucher has driven for Uber and DoorDash to supplement his income and can count on his adult kids to help him in an emergency. But for his neighbors, the hotel “is their safety net,” he said. “They’ll die here.”

John Bucher, a 72-year-old writer, has lived at Las Palmas for 12 years. Over time, more and more rooms have been rented to tourists as residents have moved away or died.

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As Las Palmas turned into a tourist hotel, it did little to hide its marketing efforts. Outside was a large sign offering “DAILY” and “WEEKLY” rentals. A housing inspector even snapped a photo of it in 2019, potential evidence that the hotel was violating the residential hotel law. But there’s no indication the inspector asked about the sign or followed up to ensure the hotel wasn’t being rented to tourists. And Las Palmas wasn’t cited under the ordinance until this summer, a few months after receiving the Inside Safe contract.

That wasn’t the case for two other hotels that similarly landed Inside Safe agreements: the Top Hat Motel and the Central Inn in South Los Angeles. The Housing Department cited both hotels in recent years for advertising to tourists in violation of the residential hotel law.

But in both cases, the hotels’ attorney wouldn’t allow inspectors to reenter without administrative warrants. Housing Department enforcement records show no evidence that inspectors obtained warrants, and no further enforcement action was taken.

Yet even that knowledge of violations didn’t prevent the city from awarding them Inside Safe contracts.

Neither of the owners of the Top Hat or the Central Inn returned phone calls seeking comment, and the Top Hat’s owners didn’t respond to an email. One of the Top Hat’s owners, Dipakkumar Patel, said at an appeal hearing that he would lose “everything” if he were unable to continue short-term rentals at the hotel. The hotel also joined the civil rights lawsuit against the city.

The Top Hat brought in nearly a half million dollars between late March and the beginning of October through Inside Safe, while the Central Inn earned more than $200,000 from May to September, according to invoices the motels submitted to the city’s administrative officer.

Stealing permanent housing

By turning residential hotels into temporary shelters, Bass may be working against her ultimate goal of transitioning people to permanent homes, housing experts said.

While Bass reported in September that about 17,000 people had moved to motels, traditional shelters or tiny home villages since she took office, only 2,235 had found permanent homes. For Inside Safe, just 190 of the nearly 1,700 participants had landed a permanent place to live as of mid-October. The city’s administrative officer, Matt Szabo, has told the City Council that there is not enough staff to help people find housing and also a shortage of affordable housing.

Inside Safe isn’t the first time the city has allowed residential hotels to be turned into temporary shelters. It’s unclear whether prioritizing getting people off the streets over preserving permanent housing was a deliberate policy choice or simple bureaucratic oversight: the result of well-intentioned housing policies from different eras colliding.

Eight other residential buildings have been pressed into service as temporary housing since 2016 through Los Angeles County or U.S. Veterans Affairs programs for emergency shelter or mental health and drug and alcohol treatment, or as part of the COVID-19 public health response.

Additionally, the state Housing and Community Development agency granted Los Angeles County and two nonprofit groups $19.3 million in Project Homekey funds to acquire and remodel two other residential hotel buildings to use as interim housing.

Schultz, the legal aid attorney, said it is a “mind-bogglingly terrible strategy” to use residential hotels as temporary housing because the ordinance provides such strong legal protection for their preservation — at least on paper. Residential hotels are the city’s only housing that can’t legally be demolished or converted to another use unless the housing is replaced, Schultz said.

The 72-room Highland Gardens, a midcentury modern hotel in Hollywood, highlights the tension between the city’s need for temporary shelter and its equally pressing need for permanent housing. Formerly known as the Landmark Motor Hotel, it is best known as the place where singer Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose more than 50 years ago.

Highland Gardens had been designated as a residential hotel in 2009 but for years had also advertised its rooms to tourists. Then when local officials needed temporary housing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in homeless shelters, the hotel received a contract under Project Roomkey, paid for with federal pandemic relief funds.

Highland Gardens’ owner didn’t return phone messages left at the hotel.

By the time the program ended in December 2022, few participants had found permanent homes, and City Councilmember Nithya Raman pushed to keep Highland Gardens open as an interim housing site. She said she didn’t know it was a residential hotel.

“That’s part of the problem with the city is that we have such an ad hoc process for finding interim housing,” Raman said. Before Bass took office, Raman said, council offices took the lead in finding sites. “I personally would speak to the owner of this facility to tell them about the program and convince them that there would be benefits for them,” she said.

Raman’s colleagues backed her request, and now a $6 million contract, in effect until mid-2025, includes nearly $4 million to rent the hotel’s rooms and about $2 million for social services for people who had been living on the street. At just $50 per room per night, it’s a more favorable deal for the city than the Inside Safe hotels have negotiated.

Raman said she doesn’t think using the Highland Gardens for temporary housing is a mistake, given the urgent need for shelter. “It has saved lives,” she said.

Tommy Lachenmyer, 36, who moved into Las Palmas through Inside Safe after a fire ripped through a Hollywood encampment near where he slept this year, said the temporary housing has been “a blessing.” But while he’s found a job at Pizza Hut and is studying at a local film school for a career in music production, his quest for stable housing may be harder.

Lachenmyer revisits the location where he once lived in a tent on Vista Del Mar Avenue in Los Angeles.

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Lachenmyer said he filled out an application for permanent housing when he moved in about six months ago. He’s still waiting for approval before he can begin his housing search and said he holds out hope that his stay at the hotel will lead to permanent housing. As for the long wait, Lachenmyer said, “I’m OK with it. People have waited for years.”

But longtime resident Bucher said he is not as optimistic that his new Inside Safe neighbors will find permanent housing.

“All they’re doing is warehousing people,” he said. “Nobody thinks about anything but getting them off the streets.”

In the wake of the Eaton Fire, Altadena and Pasadena’s music community have really shown up to support fire survivors, especially fellow musicians who lost instruments and record collections.

That effort continues this weekend with a special donation concert at a Pasadena record store, with the aim of getting vinyl records back in the hands of survivors who lost their collections.

“You know, our name is Healing Force of the Universe, and I think that gives me a pretty clear direction… especially after the fires,” said Austin Manuel, founder of Pasadena record store, where Sunday’s show will be held.

The record donation effort is the brainchild of musician Brandon Jay, who founded the nonprofit Altadena Musicians after losing his home and almost all of his family’s instruments in the Eaton Fire. Through Altadena Musicians’s donation and registry platform, Jay said he and his partners have helped some 1,200 fire survivors get their music instruments back.

Brandon Jay.

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Now, that effort has fanned out to restoring vinyl record collections.

“All of that stuff evaporated for thousands of people,” Jay said. “Look at your own record collection and be like, ‘Wow, what if that whole thing disappeared?’”

You might know Jay from several bands over the years, including Lutefisk, a 1990s alt-rock band based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Gwendolyn Sanford, composed music for TV shows, including Orange is the New Black and Weeds.

Jay plans to play some holiday tunes at Sunday's record donation show (which LAist is the media sponsor), along with fellow musician Daniel Brummel of Sanglorians. Brummel, who was also a founding member of Pasadena’s indie-rock sensation Ozma, said he was grateful to Jay for his fire recovery work and to Manuel for making Healing Force available for shows like this.

Brummel, who came close to losing his own home in the Eaton Fire, recalled a show he played at Healing Force back in March.

Ryen Slegr (left) and Daniel Brummel perform with their band, Ozma, on the 2014 Weezer Cruise.

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“The trauma of the fires was still really fresh,” Brummel said. After playing a cover of Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town,” that night — which includes the lyrics “I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down” — Brummel said his neighbors in the audience told him the rendition hit them hard. “It felt really powerful. And without that space, it just wouldn’t have occurred.”

Details

Healing Force of the Universe Record Donation Show
Featuring: Quasar (aka Brandon Jay), Sanglorians (Daniel Brummel) and The Acrylic.
Sunday, Dec. 14; 2 to 5 p.m.
1200 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
Tickets are $15 or you can donate 5 or more records at the door. More info here.

Topline:

The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.