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Same day John Jacob Ehlinger posts bail, prosecutors in St. Louis County charge him with additional assault

They say across the country the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and law enforcement has been broken for decades.

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The Los Angeles Housing Department has ordered the owners of four buildings meant to house some of the city’s poorest residents to stop renting rooms to tourists, following a review that was prompted by reporting by Capital & Main and ProPublica.

The news organizations documented how some owners of the buildings, known as residential hotels, were advertising short-term rentals online despite a 2008 law aimed at preserving the rooms as residential. Landlords who convert the buildings to other uses or demolish them must replace the units or pay into a city housing fund.

The new enforcement actions bring the number of residential hotels cited by the Housing Department for violating the residential hotel law to 21. The agency had sent violation notices to 17 residential hotels within weeks of the Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation.

In all, about 750 residential hotel rooms could be turned back into low-cost permanent housing for LA residents who have few other options — if the city’s citations are upheld in court and if the city aggressively enforces the law.

The most recent Housing Department orders to stop renting to tourists were issued earlier this month to the Hollywood Hills Hotel, which offers rooms with city views for up to $200 per night; the Motel 6 San Pedro; the Central Inn Motel near the University of Southern California; and the Royal Hawaiian Motel in Mid City. The Hollywood Hills Hotel is permitted to offer some rooms to tourists, but inspectors found more rooms were rented short-term than is allowed.

Dinesh Vora, one of the Central Inn’s owners, said he plans to appeal the Housing Department orders. “To have someone say you can only rent long-term, that wouldn’t be sufficient for us,” Vora said. Ricky Patel, the registered agent of the Royal Hawaiian, declined to comment on the enforcement or whether the hotel intended to appeal. “It’s a touchy subject,” Patel said. One of the owners of the Hollywood Hills Hotel, Cole Harris, declined to comment on Dec. 12 because, he said, he wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations. And managers didn’t return phone messages left at the hotel. The owner of the Motel 6 didn’t respond to calls or emails.

The Royal Hawaiian Motel in Los Angeles, California (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

Sixteen of 17 hotel owners who were cited for failure to comply with the residential hotel law in July appealed their notices to the Housing Department’s general manager and attended hearings conducted by phone between September and November.

A department hearing officer recently denied appeals from eight of those hotels, including the American Hotel in the Arts District and the H Hotel and Hometel Suites in Koreatown, which were highlighted in our initial story for transforming their buildings into boutique hotels. The agency postponed five other appeals involving hotels that have signed contracts to provide temporary homeless housing through the city’s Inside Safe program or that said they were considering participating in the program.

Capital & Main and ProPublica found that the mayor’s marquee homeless initiative has given funding to eight residential hotels, even though they are already meant to provide housing to low-income people. Some residential hotels were awarded contracts despite appearing to violate the residential hotel ordinance.

In evaluating the evidence in the American Hotel case, Housing Department hearing officer Andre Brown noted the city’s declared housing and homelessness emergency and wrote that the residential hotel ordinance had been passed to address “a severe shortage of decent safe and sanitary rental housing in the City resulting from the loss of single room occupancy and residential hotel units.”

None of the hotel owners disputed the city’s allegation that they offered short-term rentals, but they argued that they’d done so legally because they paid hotel taxes to the city. The hearing officers, however, said the hotel owners violated a clear ban on offering their rooms for rent on a nightly or weekly basis, known in city law as transient use.

“It is undisputed that the Residential Hotel Ordinance (RHO) prohibits transient use of units that have been determined to be Residential Units,” Brown wrote in the American case.

Frank Weiser, an attorney who represents all eight hotels, including the American, said the hotels plan to appeal the city’s decisions in federal court. On the one hand, the city has been treating them as residential hotels barred from renting to tourists, he said, but on the other, it has openly accepted tax payments from the hotels for doing just that.

“The city was collecting an enormous amount of tax,” Weiser said. “It’s totally contradictory.”

City housing inspector Jean-Claude Olivier said at the American appeal hearing that payment of hotel taxes doesn’t change the approved building use, and Brown noted in his decision that the ordinance doesn’t address such situations.

Just one hotel, the 25-room Knights Inn near Dodger Stadium, won its case. A hearing officer found the hotel wasn’t given sufficient opportunity to appeal its residential hotel designation and that there wasn’t enough evidence to show the hotel had ever been residential.

Mayor Karen Bass, who recently heralded bringing 21,000 homeless Angelenos into temporary housing in the last year, has signaled that she thinks the residential hotel law might need an overhaul.

In an executive directive in November, she said some of the hotels might not meet current building code standards and ordered the Housing Department to report on the city’s residential hotel supply, the hotels’ occupancy rates and recent enforcement so that city officials could recommend ways to update the law.

The report hadn’t been made public as of Wednesday afternoon California time.

Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research.

December 21 is the first day of winter, and the Grateful Dead is helping welcome the season by treating fans to a winter solstice playlist. The band announced the new playlist on Instagram, which is made…

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New video shows a St. Louis Police SUV running a red light moments before it smashed into Bar:PM early Sunday morning.  The video, posted to Twitter last night, shows the SUV on South Broadway headed north, past the intersection at Nagel, and blowing through a red light.

The UMass professor details a reduction in wage inequality unseen in the U.S. in half a century.

by Sergio Hernandez, Alex Mierjeski, Al Shaw and Mollie Simon

Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Until now, however, those disclosures and connections haven’t been mapped, aggregated and made searchable. Using our new database, you can now search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.

Access the full database on our website.

The $215 million deal made headlines, but the industry pay gap persists, along with new cases of sexual harassment.

The country may have a long way to go in its decarbonization goals, but these stories show signs of progress.

The Fosen wind farm was built illegally. Now the Norwegian government is paying to keep it running.

More than two dozen countries pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. But experts say the promise is “meaningless.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: In order to bring a plurality of voices to our storytelling, the Missouri Historical Society frequently asks guest writers to contribute to History Happens Here. The views and opinions expressed by guest contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missouri Historical Society, its affiliates, or …

Continue reading "The Austrian Boy Who Became Chinese"

Bill Sloan of Bethalto, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

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Here's the latest chatter inside the beltway: The Biden administration is discussing raising tariffs on some Chinese goods, including electric vehicles, in an attempt to bolster the U.S. clean-energy industry against cheaper Chinese exports, people familiar with the matter said. What's the point of this? We already have 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs, which means ...continue reading "Why do we need higher tariffs on Chinese EVs when no Chinese EVs are sold in America?"

Cardinal Ritter has around 450 students. St. Mary's has 225. That comes to a $170,000 investment, just for the students.

Five days after one of the largest nursing homes in the St. Louis area suddenly shut down, workers, residents, and their families are still searching for answers.

Christmastime is the season of giving. That often extends beyond just friends and family to those most in need.

The NHL and Diamond Sports Group, the largest owner of regional sports networks, have reached an agreement that will keep local broadcasts for 11 teams on Bally Sports through the end of this season. The agreement, which was contained in a court filing made Wednesday, is subject to court approval. Diamond Sports has been in [...]

Earlier this year we discussed a trademark fight between rapper Eminem and two stars of The Real Houswives of Potomac, Gizelle Bryant and Robyn Dixon. At issue was the trademark application for Bryant and Dixon’s podcast, which is entitled “Reasonably Shady.” Em’s legal team opposed that application, arguing essentially that all things “shady” belong to […]