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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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In a world where AirBnB is even marginally legal it wouldn't reduce their work resulting in tips, it would eliminate it entirely. Over time the average hotel aims for a 60% occupancy rate assumption, maybe it's higher in LA so call it 80%, that's a huge number of rooms going to the homeless every night. And given that it's impossible to know which rooms won't be booked or when, that means mingling in the lobby and the elevator with the homeless, it means that I'm probably getting one of those indestructible concrete rooms.

Getting a hotel room is already often a tough sell over an Airbnb cost wise, throw this ordinance in and unless they entirely ban Airbnb and any other kind of system, Airbnb will dominate. I don't hugely object to sharing public space with the homeless, but I'm going to prefer paying for private spaces where I don't when I'm traveling. No hotel nicer than a motel 6 can possibly survive this.

Yeah. If I'm a hotel owner, this is pretty bad, but I can in theory just get a perpetual income stream of "market rate" vouchers from the city. Workers are just screwed. If owners have any moral obligations at all toward their workers, they need to fight this as much as possible. Preferably with a bunch of commercials featuring rank and file workers talking about how bad it will be for them, with little to no reference about how it affects hotels as an industry.

Oh, no, it will absolutely destroy the hotel industry if any alternative exists for any hotel nicer than a roadside drunk-tank.

Why would I choose to stay in a nice hotel if I share the space with homeless derelicts? If I walk out to get ice for my drinks and have to be leered at by various vagabonds? If I have to worry about my car being vandalized in the parking lot by my fellow guests.

When I could just stay at an AirBnB that is a similar cost and doesn't have a homeless person next door? Or, if I'm a tourist, why would I travel to the town where my hotel will be part homeless shelter when I could travel to literally anywhere else?

Airbnb not necessary, you can just get a hotel room outside city limits.

Especially in LA, which has tons of other municipalities embedded within it.

I didn't even consider it from the perspective of the paying hotel guests.

If I was confronted with a hotel where 40% of the guests were homeless, then believe me I'm cutting out the middle man and pitching a tent myself, in terms of proportions, there are fewer of them on the streets.

Now consider it from the perspective of a hotel guest with a wife or even worse a child. You going to be comfortable with them going down the hall to grab some ice or a soda? You going to let them run down to the front desk to buy a snack or even turn the corner ahead of you?

What happens when in the inevitable inability to effectively empty and clean full hotel every night, with a large percentage of unruly and mentally ill guests, a cleaning woman misses something and your kid steps on a needle walking around the room barefoot or jumping onto the bed?

What happens when someone's girlfriend gets raped in a stairwell

What happens when a toddler finds some candy that fell on the floor or in a corner and puts in in thier mouth before you can stop them, but whoopsie! it's** fentanyl and now their dead!**