Historic LA hotel devolves into housing projects, repairs cost taxpayers more than $11.5 million

Built in 1926, The Mayfair Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was a historical treasure, a unique marriage between the glamor of Old Hollywood and the elan of the Roaring Twenties… and then California Democrats got ahold of it. The Mayfair once hosted the first ever Academy Awards after-party, but now it houses Skid Row.

Under former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti’s now-concluded “Project Roomkey” program, the city turned the Mayfair into “temporary” housing for the homeless, and since 2020, the hotel has deteriorated into lawless, leftist, chaos. From the Daily Caller:

The Mayfair suffered millions of dollars in damages over the course of two years, and staff and security assigned to the hotel routinely dealt with violent behavior, drug overdoses and property damage.

(How could anyone think inviting drug-addled derelicts into a luxury hotel wouldn’t end up this way?)

Like stereotypical crazy bums, the transients housed at the Mayfair “punched through walls,” trashed appliances and bathrooms, smashed windows to throw objects onto the street below, and left fentanyl-covered tinfoil sheets strewn about. And, in predictable fashion, the idiotic decisions of the left aren’t limited to only affecting leftists, and the havoc spilled out onto the street. Also from the Daily Caller:

Outside the hotel, residents and business owners reported similar behaviors of crime and violence from homeless residents at the Mayfair, according to the L.A. Times. One woman who worked as a cashier near the hotel said people regularly robbed her shop; another person said his car windshield was shattered with a crowbar.

As London’s far-left mayor Sadiq Khan would say, it’s all “part and parcel of life in a big city.”

All in all, the invoice for the damages came in at an upwards of $11.5 million, a bill the city quietly settled using taxpayer money. Thankfully the program is dead though… right?

Well, wrong, because Los Angeles voted in another far-left Democrat, and she’s looking to revive the project, albeit permanently. As The Real Deal reported yesterday:

Mayor Karen Bass wants the city to buy the 15-story hotel and convert it into homeless housing as part of her ‘Inside Safe’ program....

The City Council is slated to vote on the purchase Friday, paving the way for the city to spend more than $83 million on acquisition, renovation and upgrades to the Mayfair, not including the money paid for damages.

The kind of leftism embraced by politicians like Garcetti, Bass, and the Los Angeles city council members who would dare vote so foolishly, is the worst kind: it’s all elitism, but none of the altruism. Is there anything more destructive to a society than a philosophy like that?

Image: The Erica Chang, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.

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