Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Wednesday that three hotels the city has been renting for vulnerable homeless people will stay open until the end of September, but stopped short of authorizing a major expansion of the hotel program, as some members of the City Council have urged.
The three hotels, which had been rented through a program known as Project Roomkey, total about 1,200 beds and had been slated to close either at the end of this month or next month.
About 900 homeless Angelenos are living in these rooms, and the city will seek to quickly fill the remaining beds with people from skid row — prioritizing women and seniors — and those living in large encampments like the one at Echo Park Lake. The mayor also said the city was looking at renting more hotels, but said it was premature to say how many.
“I always am very careful about not overestimating, but we’re looking at hundreds [of new beds] already,” Garcetti said. “I think we can get to a goal together with the … county of at least a couple thousand. I won’t turn down a single hotel that wants to do this.”
Read the full story at LATimes.com.