LOS ANGELES — Homeless advocates on Friday called on city leaders to purchase the L.A. Grand Hotel, which has served as emergency shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic, to convert into permanent housing.
The hotel, on Figueroa and 3rd streets in downtown Los Angeles, is the largest of the city’s shelter sites under Project Roomkey, a federally funded program that launched in spring 2020. The program allowed cities and counties to provide emergency shelter for medically vulnerable unhoused people in the middle of the pandemic. But it eventually became interim housing for a broader range of homeless Angelenos.
With Project Roomkey coming to an end in L.A., only four sites remain. Officials plan to move everyone out of L.A. Grand, which provided 482 rooms, by Jan. 31, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
