During the pandemic, the city and county of Los Angeles rented thousands of hotel rooms for homeless people at risk of contracting the coronavirus.
This massive effort was made possible in part by the Willingness to reimburse local governments for every dollar they spent renting the rooms and converting hotels to temporary accommodation.
The reimbursement of costs for the accommodation of people in individual rooms by the Federal Emergency Management (BA) should run until the end of the year.
President Biden announced Earlier this week that his government would keep paying these bills until the end of March 2022.
The city and county still rented nearly 1,400 rooms in nine hotels for the homeless earlier this month, according to the Los Angeles Homelessness Service.
The county operates two of the hotels and is considering the FEMA expansion and how it could affect their plans to continue using the 284-bed locations.
The rooms were a lifeline for thousands of people either on the street or in large bunk-style accommodations Breeding grounds of communal transmission throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Although some homeless people resented the rules about opening hours and what they were allowed to bring into the hotels, many preferred them to the larger communal accommodations.
The hotels were also used as temporary accommodation for people who had stayed in parks and places such as the Venice promenade where officials were elected tried Clear warehouse. In Venice, Echo Park and MacArthur Park, providers of homeless services have been trying hard for months to get people into hotels and thus enable large camps to be cleared.
Since its inception, the hotel sheltering program known as Project Roomkey has been in place touched about 9,000 people in LA County in private rooms. More than 2,000 of them moved to permanent homes. However, with a peak of just over 4,200 rooms, it never got anywhere near an ambitious goal of securing rooms for all an estimated 15,000 eligible homeless who were either over 65 or had an illness that made them vulnerable to the coronavirus. This subgroup of people made up about a quarter of all the homeless in the county.
Initially, when the pandemic started, the county rented most of the rooms. That pendulum swung this spring and now it’s the city that rents almost all of them. In March, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a $ 75 million transfer from the Department of Building and Safety’s Enterprise Fund to rent hotels.
The money helped increase the number of rooms it rented, although the city was slow Submit applications for reimbursement. In the past few months, city officials have drawn up a plan to begin closing the sites. They want to extend the process to several months to allow the homeless service providers to find permanent housing for the people who leave the hotels.
According to the current plan, put in place before the FEMA announcement, two hotels would close in December, one in January, three in February and the last one in late March. The city calculated that it would receive “up to $ 28 million in government funding from Los Angeles County to partially fund the non-FEMA-reimbursed costs of the Roomkey project.” according to city documents.
It is not clear how the changes to the reimbursement system will change that schedule. City officials did not immediately comment on their plans for the program – although they did have said they want to go on as long as it is financially feasible.
“The city will make the most of this opportunity to house as many uninhabited Angelenos as possible and prepare them for a successful transition to permanent housing,” Councilor Kevin de León said in a written statement.
He replaced Alderman Mark Ridley-Thomas as chairman of the council’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee after Ridley-Thomas was charged with federal bribery and exposed from his colleagues.
