Of course, it was strongly opposed by essentially all groups with any actual experience in helping homeless people, and of course, because the idea sounds good until you think about it for a few minutes, the ballot proposition passed.
We spend so much on housing criminals in essentially adult daycare to "rehabilitate" them, so why can't we come up with similar elaborate institutions to care for the homeless that have problems functioning in the society we've built around them?
They have much lower recidivism rates than the US (unlike the US prison system, which is optimized to punish and profit, those systems are optimized to reduce crime).
However the hotel rooms have really strict rules. For example there's a curfew for a dumb reason[1], and people who get back to the hotel too late have to wait until the next day to return to their rooms. There's also limitations on how much stuff they can bring with them into the hotels (no more than 2 suitcases or shopping carts full of stuff) which if you've seen many encampments you know will be a dealbreaker for some.
[1]: The city has designated COVID screeners during the day, but when they go home it's just security guards at the hotels. However the COVID screening is just a thermometer check so they could totally just teach the security guards how to use thermometers.
I know a lot of people, myself included, who were fully employed and have rented rooms or even apartments where 2 shopping carts full of stuff would not have fitted.
People are homeless for different reasons. If someone just happens to be down on their luck or having financial trouble after fleeing an abusive family situation, housing seems to work fairly well. However for people with untreated mental illness and addiction, there can be problems. Especially since many of those people would actually turn down a free place to stay (as we saw recently in Echo Park). Maybe we can make more inclusive housing for the homeless that allows large pets and drug use, but the rent you see on those empty apartments is predicated on assumptions on a tenant's risk. Employees people who care about their credit score are going to have a much different risk profile than the homeless.
[1]: Called The Streets Within, part 1 here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-15/the-stre...