A highly disputed Los Angeles ballot initiative to force hotels to house homeless people is likely to be replaced by a city ordinance in a move that hotels say will protect their employees and save millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. 

The so-called Responsible Hotel Ordinance was an initiative set to be on the ballot in March 2024. It would have forced hotels to use vacant rooms to shelter homeless individuals alongside paying guests. The ballot measure had stirred widespread concern that using empty hotel rooms as shelter for the “unhoused” would endanger guests and employees. 

Now, under a compromise with a union group that was pushing for the ballot measure, Unite Here Local 11, the city council is proposing to replace the initiative. The city council will hold a hearing next week and will work out final details of a compromise ordinance by the end of the month. The union will have until December 8 to withdraw the ballot measure, which it has indicated it is likely to do.

Avoiding the ballot measure could bring relief to business owners and the city’s tourism industry, as a Morning Consult poll showed more than 70 percent of tourists said they would be deterred from booking a hotel if the initiative went through. It would also have ramifications for the city’s nearly 50,000 homeless people.

As it stands, the new ordinance would ensure that hotel developers are responsible for replacing any housing that is displaced due to the construction of new hotels, which California law largely already requires, a spokesman for the California Hotel and Lodging Association tells the Sun.

“What it does from the hotel perspective is it takes away what would have been an injurious proposition,” the spokesman says of the new ordinance. “The voucher system that Unite Here was advocating for would have no oversight as to which unsheltered individuals walked into any hotel, and the effect of that is making housekeepers or hotel employees the first line of care. And that is not a way to solve the homeless issue or the housing issue in LA.”

The original ballot measure was an effort by Unite Here, which aimed to create a city-managed system that would require hotels to report vacant hotel rooms each afternoon. The city would then give homeless individuals vouchers to stay in the rooms at market rate.

In addition to the administrative system’s costs to taxpayers, “without any curation of who is going to be in the hotels on that night, security services are going to go up,” the spokesman says, which would “be a drain on an already stretched LAPD.”

Although Unite Here Local 11 claims to represent hospitality and hotel employees, polling data of hotel employees showed nearly 90 percent of respondents did not support requiring hotels to house homeless people.

“This was an onerous ballot measure by which Unite Here, in our view, was playing politics with people’s lives,” the spokesman adds. “Putting up essentially temporary homeless shelters without the necessary social safety net for those individuals was reckless behavior on behalf of Unite Here.” 

Unite Here Local 11 declined to comment beyond its public statement, which praised the city council’s new ordinance and said it still achieved the union’s goals.

“We have said all along that our contract campaign has been about two things: housing for our members where they work and a living wage,” the group’s co-president, Kurt Petersen, said. “With this ordinance, we have done more to protect housing than any single contract demand would have done. The fight for a living wage continues.”

Los Angeles council members said the new ordinance will protect hotel employees and paying hotel guests from the safety risks posed by the ballot initiative. “The thought of putting individuals, many of whom have very serious mental health and substance abuse issues, [in hotel rooms] without on-site services is a recipe for disaster,” a council member, Traci Park, said in support of the new ordinance.