Los Angeles has a land use corruption problem that has seen numerous elected officials arrested while tens of thousands sleep rough in the shadows of empty buildings. One is the Morrison Hotel, a 111-unit rent controlled SRO that slumlords boarded up about twenty years ago after kicking everybody out. They eventually flipped the Morrison for a $17 Million profit. New owners have been seeking investors to partially demolish the Morrison and build party hotel towers around it, but they defaulted on their loans and sold at a multi-million dollar loss.
Now AIDS Healthcare Foundation has announced plans to return it to its proper use as very affordable housing for Angelenos!
Here's video of Tuesday's on-site celebration, featuring Doors drummer John Densmore, "Morrison Hotel" album cover photographer Henry Diltz and some of the dedicated staff who have been bringing other empty Downtown LA residency hotels back into use, followed by my first walk through the ground floor, which was illegally gutted last year to stop efforts to make the 1914 hotel by master architects Morgan, Walls and Morgan a city landmark.
https://youtu.be/893Wxw76F6M I managed not to fall in a hole! And look forward to returning with better lighting to seek out any historic features the jerks might have missed destroying. The original building plans are at the Huntington Library, where I'm a reader (scholar), so it will be possible to replicate the patterns of the interior wall panels and room layout, while bringing the building up to modern residential codes.
More info is at
http://esotouric.com/morrisonhotel