of Florida's watermelon harvest season. Shocking investigation is revealing that after the city of L.A. shelled out $800 million to house the homeless, hundreds of apartments and motel rooms acquired with that money are sitting empty right now. Joining us now is reporter Jamie Page, whose team at the West Side Current has this exclusive reporting, which you can read online right now. Jamie, thank you for this important reporting . Can you give us sort of the bottom line version for people that may not have read it? Yeah. The high view is that the city spent $800 million on properties that go anywhere from motels. And hotels to high end luxury buildings that still remain empty. We started reporting on this a year ago. My partner, Chris Graw, decided to drive to a $50 million apartment building just out of curiosity to see what our taxpayer money was was buying. And when he went there, it was empty. So him and I started driving around the city to go and look at other buildings. And subsequently we found that, hundreds of rooms remain empty again, some in high end luxury buildings that, are that nobody is living in to this day. And I do want to say an important part of this research is we went during the day, during the week, just to see what kind of construction or activity was taking place. And only one location that we went to did we come across some construction workers. So at all locations, we all drive by homeless people every single day . We also have talked to so many officials who say if only we had a place to put them, there's no place to put them, which is why we have to leave them on the street. So how is this possible? It's what we are asking ourselves and what I ask myself. I live in Venice and when I see all the time the crisis that happens in our street firsthand, it's why we started the West Side Current five people a day die on our streets, and we drove to luxury buildings, to hotel rooms that remain empty, vacant. So. And you also found that the city was way overpaid for some of these properties to. Yes, in some cases millions of dollars. And it's in our reporting and I think people if you can go to West Side current.com and look at this because we give you plenty of examples of where properties we paid millions of dollars in some cases, the developers bragged about setting records in the zip codes that they had sold. The properties to Hacla. So we know that this project, Homekey, was sort of an extension of the pandemic. It's something that Governor Newsom talked about often at different events. What is the city saying about this? What is the governor's office saying about this, what are they going to do next? They're all finger pointing, which is what we typically see as journalists. Right? It's this person's problem. It's this other person's problem. I do want to say that the location that you see in those images that you show, there was a ribbon cutting with the governor on the top of that building, the Pico Building. So the governor himself has been to this building that is part of our investigation. Again, a lot of finger pointing going on. Hacla says they buy the buildings. It's the city department that is supposed to be filling them. The city is saying that there's they're stalling because there's construction projects that need to be done again in some of these brand new buildings, we're scratching our head asking ourselves what construction needs to be done. It has a certificate of occupancy. So yeah, a lot of questions that we're still looking to answer. This is the first of a three part series, but we know that there's many stories to come that this location that we just saw where the hazmat, signs are still up, that building's been empty for years, the other location that you saw, that 121 room, motel remains empty a two years after the city acquired it. Yeah, that Pico location I was at that ribbon cutting as well. And towards some of the property. And these are nice places, right? That are just as nice as, you know, many luxury apartments that are very expensive in places like the West Side. And yet it's crazy to think that these people sitting on the streets, dying on the streets when that place is empty and we spent so much money on it . Well, I want to be clear that the Pico place actually does have some residents in it. And it's interesting because the Pico location, I was actually advised when I walked in there by one of the residents not to go in because it wasn't safe for me as a woman to go in there. And so he escorted me around and, I saw a lot of destruction in that building and a lot of people talking about exiting it as well, too. So there are some buildings that are occupied, but many remain empty. Well, this is important. Reporting by Jamie Page, reporter for the West Side Current. Again, you can read that article at West Side Courant.com. And they have two more parts coming out where they're going to dig deeper into this. An
