If you’ve been following the news regarding the epidemic of homelessness in Los Angeles over the past couple of years, you may already be familiar with the Cecil Hotel. The legendary, 600-room establishment located near Skid Row was converted to become a privately funded homeless residence nearly a year ago. That development was heralded as being one of the more unique solutions to deal with the homeless population because unhoused individuals were able to request a free voucher from the city and be immediately admitted as a resident. But even after all of these months, nearly 400 of the rooms at the Cecil remain empty, despite many potential applicants being given tours on a daily basis. The Los Angeles Times investigated the situation this week to find out why.

“There aren’t necessarily other projects like this,” said Jet Doye, former chief advancement officer of the Skid Row Housing Trust, which serves as Cecil’s building manager. In addition to the all-private capital financing, she notes that it’s unusual for a landlord to be willing to accept any tenant-based voucher someone might have.

And yet, a year later, two-thirds of the Cecil remains unoccupied.

At a time when more than 40,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the city, it may seem unfathomable for 400 units to be sitting empty in a building near skid row, the epicenter of L.A.’s homelessness crisis. But even with solid funding and the best of intentions, the Cecil project has struggled to overcome a system beset with a slow-moving bureaucracy and multiple failure points, and to offer housing that serves a population with myriad needs.

Rather than simply asking the municipal government to explain the paucity of residents at the Cecil, the Times admirably went and talked to some of the homeless people who declined to take up residence there. It appears that there isn’t one easy answer to the question.

One common explanation appears to be that the rooms at the Cecil just aren’t very good. They tend to be quite small and many of them, particularly on the upper floors, don’t have a bathroom or shower. The Cecil is an old hotel that was built at a time when multiple hotel rooms would share a bathroom on the same floor. Also, the air conditioning doesn’t work in many parts of the hotel so it was described as “sweltering” over the summer. Similarly, the central heating is reportedly pretty dodgy on several floors, so many rooms can be uncomfortably cold in the winter.

There are logistical concerns as well. The voucher system being offered for potential residents has proven confusing to some homeless people. The vouchers are supposed to be available to anyone in the lower third of the city’s income range. But there are several steps to go through and not all of the homeless appear to be able to navigate the system.

Perhaps another factor is the fact that the Cecil is famous for reasons other than its hospitality. It’s widely believed to be haunted and a popular documentary about it on Netflix has spread that belief far and wide. The hotel has been the home of serial killers, the scene of grisly murders, and too many suicides to list. It was also the place where in 2013, Canadian college student Elisa Lam went missing, only to be found floating naked in the hotel’s rooftop water tank. Her mysterious death was widely believed to involve something supernatural in nature.

No matter the reason, there are still thousands of people living on the streets in Los Angeles, many of them within sight of the Cecil Hotel. (It’s actually called the Stay on Main now.) And all of those empty hotel rooms remain unused. The city’s new Mayor has a big job on her hands so she might want to look into this situation.