I Have Some Concerns About Inside Safe

You could truthfully say that Mayor Bass has done more for the homeless than her predecessor.

Of course, since said predecessor was Eric Garcetti, the bar is in Hell.

The Mayor's Inside Safe program has been criticized for, among other things, placing homeless Angelenos in hotels too far from where they had been living, shuffling them from one hotel to the next, long waits for any kind of help, unavailability of food, lack of sanitation or supplies, and pest-infested hotels.

And there may be an additional problem: at least one of the Inside Safe hotels is, in fact, an RSO residential hotel and not a tourist hotel. (The ZIMAS screenshot above confirms this.)

If it's happening with one RSO apartment hotel, it may very well be happening in others.

Let me be crystal clear: I am firmly in favor of helping homeless Angelenos get into safe housing. However, Inside Safe was intended to make use of the city's countless hotel rooms and NOT its shrinking supply of RSO apartments.

William Gude, aka FilmThePoliceLA, recently exposed RSO misuse at the Las Palmas Hotel. After, and only after, he did this did Mayor Bass issue an order allowing RSO hotels to be used this way.

In the linked Twitter/X thread, William points out that owners of the illegal hotels will more than double their rental income. This takes away any motivation for owners to keep regular tenants, which in turn will take EVEN MORE RSO units off the market for lower-income renters and drive up rental rates. (In case I haven't mentioned this enough yet, I used to be a property manager. William is correct.)

Thanks to him, the contracts are searchable online.

What say you, readers? Should I map out the Inside Safe hotels, see which ones are misused RSO buildings, and see which zip codes are affected the most? (That's rhetorical. I'm doing it anyway. Just give me a few days...)

Mayor Bass, if you happen to stumble upon my blog: This is NOT going to solve the problem and will ultimately make the housing market EVEN WORSE for the very same low-income renters that the rent-stabilization ordinance is meant to protect. Some of them may very well end up homeless themselves if this continues.