The Mayfair Hotel in Los Angeles was built in 1926. It underwent a four-year-long renovation and reopened in 2018. And then the pandemic hit about 16 months later. That was when LA announced a new program called Project Roomkey designed to stop the spread of COVID among the homeless by moving them off the streets and into hotel rooms the city would pay for. The Mayfair became one of the hotels used for this purpose.

How would you expect the idea of moving drug addicts living on Skid Row into a recently refurbished hotel to go? If you guessed not very smoothly, you’re correct. The LA Times got hold of email from some of the security people who worked the site:

“Participant in 1516 Threatened staff, Security, destroyed property. Screamed. Yelled cursed. Everything went wrong with her. Inside and outside the building,” wrote a worker with Helpline Youth Counseling Inc., a service provider assigned to the hotel, in early 2022…

“Around 10 am a male in 1526 assaulted another resident in Room 726,” a security guard wrote in March 2022. “The situation was quickly broken up and 1526 was escorted out by police.”

In Room 406, hotel managers found two broken windows, a broken television and a broken granite countertop. In Room 504, they found that a resident had spray-painted the shower curtain, written on a bathroom mirror and stained the carpet with spray paint. In Room 801, someone smeared feces around a doorway.

The city of LA has since paid the hotel $11.5 million to cover the damages, that’s over and above the millions spent housing people. There are only 294 rooms in the Mayfair so $11.5 million in damage works out to nearly $40,000 per room. I’m not sure the Who’s Keith Moon in his heyday could have done that much damage to a single room short of setting it on fire. Actually, at least one homeless resident did just that:

One Mayfair resident punched a hole in a wall in the lobby, according to the correspondence. Another left a “hidden” candle burning in their room, igniting a fire that triggered a response from firefighters.

Project Roomkey ended last year and in its final months staff at the hotel dealt with a new problem. The residents began throwing items out of their windows.

This project has been presented as a big success by city leaders, so much so that Mayor Karen Bass is looking to buy the Mayfair Hotel in order to continue the program under a new name: Inside Safe. People who live nearby aren’t thrilled about it. In fact, they gave city officials an earful over the weekend.

One woman who worked nearby as a cashier during the pandemic said people regularly grabbed merchandise and ran out of her shop. Another person said his windshield was smashed with a crowbar.

Darlene Adderison, who lives near the Mayfair, said hotel residents repeatedly played music outside her building that boomed so loud it drowned out her television. She said she told them to turn it down, only to be cursed at.

“I don’t want them back in this neighborhood,” she said. “I want my peace. I am 66 years old and I want my peace.”

Officially, the drug addicts living in the Mayfair during Project Roomkey weren’t allowed to use drugs on the premises. Many of them observed the rules by doing drugs on the sidewalks outside or by breaking into other nearby properties to do drugs there. In essence, the rules applied inside the hotel, not outside.

The projected cost to buy and renovate the property (again) is $83 million. A vote will be taken later this week whether to approve the deal or not. If it goes through, expect to be hearing terrible stories about things happening at the Mayfair Hotel for many years to come.