This is (Hopefully Not) The End, Beautiful Friend

On the second day of Christmas, Los Angeles gave to us…a very nasty fire at one long-empty, much-abused SRO building.

I worry about every chronically empty building in LA going up in flames. How can I not? MORE THAN HALF of this blog’s entries (to date, 60 out of 112) involve at least one fire.

Where you have empty buildings, you are going to get squatters, especially in a city where so many people can’t find anywhere affordable to live. And where you have squatters, you are going to have fires.

The brutal (and unpermitted) gutting of the building performed by previous owners Relevant Group very likely played a role in spreading the fire. You can’t take an interior down to the studs, rip holes in the floors while removing fixtures, remove doors, and expect fires NOT to spread.

Although LAFD reported the Morrison Hotel fire as a knockdown, it doesn’t have to be. The Morrison was solidly constructed of reinforced brick and steel, and is still standing. It is red-tagged, but let’s wait and see what a good structural engineer has to say before writing it off.

A false accusation popped up in my social media comments after the fire, so I would like to put it to rest: the current owner of the building DID NOT empty it. In 2004, the siblings who owned the Morrison at the time were criminally prosecuted for the condition of the building (which had over 100 code violations) and for their treatment of tenants. They were also ordered to assist in relocating the remaining tenants.

The Morrison saw its last tenant leave in 2008. The current owner bought the building in late 2023, with plans to return it to its longtime use as SRO housing. They could not have emptied the Morrison.

Someone is reading this and wondering why it’s still empty more than a year later. Well…have you ever dealt with the city? Or worked on a major restoration of a large building? Have you?

You can’t just go in all gung-ho and start swinging a hammer, no matter how badly you want to get it done. You need permits, which take time to get in Los Angeles (unless you’re building an ED1 project). Once you get those permits, there are a series of inspections, and then you have to get a certificate of occupancy.

All of this takes time, and it’s done on the city’s timeline. Not yours. LA is notoriously slow to get anything done (unless someone in City Hall wants to make it happen faster).

My grandmother’s house had to have some work done before it could be sold. It wasn’t especially old (1961), it wasn’t anywhere near as big as the Morrison, and it didn’t have damage from fire or squatters, but there were things that had to be brought up to code and the interior needed a lot of work. It took months. Why? Permits and inspections played a role in that.

What gets me the most is that if previous owners had taken proper care of the Morrison instead of letting it go to rack and ruin, it might never have been vacated. The Morrison could have served as SRO housing all this time - but the slumlord owners got greedy, and Relevant Group didn’t give a damn about the property’s protected RSO status. Now it’s fire-damaged, with an interior stripped to brick and joists - but it’s not gone YET.

Want to give the Morrison a fighting chance in a city that treats existing affordable housing sources (and much of its own history) like garbage? Sign and share.

1246 South Hope Street, South Park.