We take a look behind the scenes at what goes into preparing the World Darts Championship at the Alexandra Palace; The World Darts Championship runs from December 15, 2023 to January 3, 2024 – live on Sky Sports Darts
By Megan Wellens at Alexandra Palace, London
Last Updated: 15/12/23 4:42pm
The World Darts Championship will take over the Alexandra Palace until January 3
The calm before the storm – the final preparations are well under way at Alexandra Palace.
The seats are all set out, the fan area has beer and food aplenty, and the stage is looking as special as ever in luminous green.
The long green carpet to the fan area leads you into a mix of games, fun, and charity.
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A chance to play darts against the best, food and drink galore, and most excitingly, your chance to recreate Wayne Mardle and Stuart Pyke’s iconic commentary from the 2023 final greet you in the space that will soon be packed out by thousands.
Come 5.30pm, when fans are all set with their pitchers of beer, they can head into the arena which is dominating in its proximity to the stage.
The rows of tables are all dutifully lined up and the flashing lights are ready to put on a show with the fans up close and personal with the players they have come to watch.
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Watch how Wayne Mardle and Stuart Pyke reacted to the sensational leg between Michael van Gerwen and Michael Smith in the World Championship final that culminated in a nine-darter for Bully Boy
Watch how Wayne Mardle and Stuart Pyke reacted to the sensational leg between Michael van Gerwen and Michael Smith in the World Championship final that culminated in a nine-darter for Bully Boy
The former winners adorn the walls in a constant reminder of how big this tournament is and the walk on area, although shorter in person, is as intimidating as ever – never mind when 1,000s of fans are watching on.
“Stand up if you love the darts” is the message that is on the walls alongside “it is the most wonderful time of the year” and for most who will visit the Ally Pally over the next six weeks, it is wonderful because of the darting show they will witness.
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We take a look inside the St Helen’s darts club that produced Michael Smith, Luke Littler and others to see how they inspire young players
We take a look inside the St Helen’s darts club that produced Michael Smith, Luke Littler and others to see how they inspire young players
Last year brought the greatest leg of darts ever seen, and now it is time to find out what from this tournament will live on in darting history…
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Eddie Jones says he doesn’t feel guilty at all about his process of joining Japan after it was rumoured he was in talks with the Japanese Rugby Football Union while coaching Australia at the World Cup.
The Los Angeles City Council will vote Wednesday on a plan to allow large-scale digital signs on the city-owned Convention Center in downtown L.A., a plan embraced by politicians eager for new revenue streams and opposed by foes of the blinking displays.
Under the ordinance, bright digital signs and other types of advertisements could rise inside and outside the Convention Center. The displays would be allowed in a 68-acre site bounded by Chick Hearn Court, Figueroa Street, Venice Boulevard and the 110 Freeway.
The vote follows the council’s approval last week of more than 70 digital billboards across L.A. as part of a revenue-sharing agreement with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The new ordinance for the Convention Center would allow animated digital signage along Figueroa Street and Chick Hearn Court, as well as digital signage with non-moving images along the back of the Convention Center facing the 110 Freeway, according to the city’s Planning Department.
Money raised by the digital signs on the Convention Center will help pay for renovations to the center, city officials said.
Doane Liu, the city’s chief tourism officer, told The Times that one estimate predicted $14.8 million in annual revenue from the signage. He didn’t provide details about when the estimate was completed or who performed it.
Councilmember Curren Price, whose district includes the Convention Center and L.A. Live, expressed support for the signs in a Dec. 5 letter to the city’s Planning and Land Use Commission.
“The new sign district will allow us to receive enough revenue to complete the future renovations and expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center prior to the 2028 Olympics,” he wrote.
Price’s letter references a separate city initiative to potentially overhaul the Convention Center in time for the 2028 Games. Costs remain an issue, however, and city leaders haven’t made a decision on whether to go forward with a renovation.
Either way, table tennis and other sports may be played at the Convention Center during the 2028 Olympics, according to city officials.
More broadly, city leaders want to make L.A. competitive with other major cities that draw big conventions and bring in more tourism dollars.
Angelina Valencia, a Price representative, said the accurate value of the digital signs at the Convention Center hasn’t been assessed yet.
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Barbara Broide, co-president of the Coalition for a Beautiful Los Angeles, called the proposed digital signs at the Convention Center a “terrible visual assault for Angelenos.”
“It is a dangerous distraction for those who need to be watching the road,” Broide said.
Historical preservation expert Kim Cooper also expressed concern over driver safety and light pollution for surrounding neighborhoods. “There’s a potential impact on mental health and sleep,” Cooper said.
Liu, the city’s chief tourism officer, said that convention customers have been clamoring for the signs. He said that digital displays on the outside of the Convention Center could be used in a variety of ways, including to advertise medical scrubs, for instance, at a nursing convention.
He also pointed to the large-scale blinking displays that some downtown developers have sought for their residential buildings. “It’s only right” that the Convention Center should also have digital billboards, he said.
When Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani joined the Angels in 2018, my cousins and I made a bet. How long until he leaves Orange County to join the Los Angeles Dodgers?
We knew it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
Not just because the Blue Crew is one of baseball’s marquee franchises, while the Halos are as respected as a soul patch. Or because Angels owner Arte Moreno makes Ebeneezer Scrooge seem as free-spending as, well, the Dodgers, who just signed Ohtani to the richest contract ever in professional sports, at $700 million for 10 years.
Nah, we knew Ohtani was fated to leave because he’s a young, talented person — and folks like him usually get the hell out of O.C. the moment they can.
We saw the best minds of my generation flee for Austin, Texas, Chicago, New York, the Inland Empire, but especially L.A. — the place our elders taught us to fear as full of crime and liberals. Our friends and relatives left to find opportunities that were impossible in staid, conservative, expensive Orange County. They rarely looked back. When their new neighbors asked where they were from, most would demur and say “Southern California” or “near Los Angeles.”
City, civic and county leaders didn’t care about this exodus, since O.C. was never meant to be cool. We were the spot where people moved after they made it. Orange County was aspirational, and if you couldn’t afford to hack it here, good riddance and don’t forget to take along other underachievers like you.
This thinking went on, unchecked, for decades. But it’s finally dawning on the lords of O.C. that losing our young to Los Angeles and elsewhere portends doom.
Fans line up to enter Angel Stadium in 2021.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Orange County has shrunk in population three out of the last four years — a once-unthinkable development in a region that has always bragged about its growth. O.C’s median age has gone from 33.3 years in the 2000 census to 39.5 years in 2022, a rate of aging that has outpaced the nation. About 17,000 people between the ages of 20 and 35 left in 2016 and 2017 alone, according to the Orange County Business Council’s most recent Workforce Housing Scorecard, which called the youthful exodus a “troubling trend” and a “drain on the county’s future workforce.”
Like Orange County, the Angels have historically preferred established and over-the-hill players and barely blinked when homegrown prospects left for better opportunities. The team rarely invests in its farm system, the way Orange County cities have never really cared about creating affordable housing, good-paying jobs or other necessities that would help to keep young people here. Ohtani, like so many of the smart people who have left O.C. in my lifetime, finally got fed up with his situation — and could you blame him?
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course — or rather, Dodgers-to-Angels. The 29-year-old Ohtani, unlike most millennials, is a once-in-an-epoch phenom with enough money to buy a series of homes from Angel Stadium to Dodger Stadium. But his departure means the Angels are now staring at years of irrelevancy if Moreno continues his youth-averse ways.
That’s where Orange County finds itself today.
It’s sad to say this about a place where I was born and raised and plan to live my entire life, because heaven knows, people outside of the power structure have tried to stop this brain drain. From the late 1990s through the 2010s, I followed and eventually wrote about those who were trying to make O.C. a cool place, one we could proudly proclaim to be as hip as L.A. Homegrown stars shined in clubs, restaurants, galleries, fashion and other culture scenes. Cities like Costa Mesa, Anaheim and Santa Ana became creative hubs that — gasp — even Angelenos would visit.
No one exemplified this creativity more than Gwen Stefani, Orange County’s most famous musician and someone whom the Board of Supervisors included this month as an inaugural member of the Orange County Hall of Fame. She and her band, No Doubt, became global stars with their breakout album “Tragic Kingdom,” a title that was a play on Disneyland’s nickname and meant to reflect how people of Stefani’s generation hated boring, old Orange County and were committed to do something about it.
When I joined The Times five years ago this month, I had spent my career almost exclusively covering Orange County. I wanted to show the rest of the world that my homeland was worthy of respect and to highlight those battling against the forces that kept driving out too many talented people.
I planned to continue focusing on O.C. in my new job. Once I began to cover Los Angeles, that changed. I quickly discovered an excitement and energy to L.A. that doesn’t exist in Orange County and can’t be replicated elsewhere, that intoxicates you and makes you wonder what took you so long to get it.
Ohtani will soon experience that for himself. That’s why I don’t blame him for leaving the Halos, as cool as it would have been to see him in Orange County for the rest of his career. He and too many others before him saw no future down here, especially once they realized there are far more welcoming places out there.
To paraphrase a famous World War I song, how ya gonna keep us down in Anaheim after we’ve seen the City of Angels?
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South Los Angeles, a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust recently bought the 1.86-acre dirt lot on Jefferson Boulevard for nearly $10 million from Sentinel Peak Resources. The nonprofit and its partners are now seeking grants and other funding sources to pay for planning, remediation and project execution.
“It’s what we hoped for,” Richard Parks, president of the South L.A. nonprofit Redeemer Community Partnership, said of the purchase. “It’s just so amazing to see our community receiving beauty for ashes. It’s overwhelming and feels like such a blessing.”
The sale marks a new chapter in a persistent and community-led fight against the oil drilling site, which residents argued for years was noisy and spewed foul odors. It also comes at a time of growing concerns about the risks and inequities of urban drilling in neighborhoods. L.A. City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky recently introduced legislation aiming to address public health and environmental threats posed by a drill site near the Pico-Robertson area.
Oil wells are known to emit carcinogens such as benzene and formaldehyde, and living near wells is associated with health problems such as respiratory issues and preterm births, studies have found.
Community leaders hope the purchase serves as a model for how to repurpose shuttered fossil fuel facilities as the city phases out existing oil and gas wells, a historic move approved last year by the L.A. City Council that also bans new oil and gas extraction.
Tori Kjer, executive director of the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, believes it is critical that these sites are transformed into uses that benefit communities historically affected by oil drilling. “It’s an environmental justice issue,” she said. It’s also imperative that planned site uses won’t displace residents through gentrification, she added.
“It’s so important, this idea of joint development, where you’re layering in affordable housing, community space and a park together,” she said. “For us, it’s really the ideal approach to equitable development in communities. … This is a rare opportunity, and an important opportunity, as we think bigger scale about future types of development in Los Angeles.”
Kjer estimates they will need three to six months and about $600,000 for remediation planning, and an additional year and $2 million to $3 million for cleanup. They are seeking state grants. The park’s budget will be about $6 million.
Lori R. Gay, president and chief executive of the Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County, said their target is to build 70 affordable housing units. They are also considering creating a community land trust to preserve the neighborhood and produce new homeowners.
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South L.A., a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
“The Jefferson site is in a homeownership community, so we wanted to maintain both the integrity and culture of the community with affordable homeownership,” she said. “It is too easy to just build affordable housing focused on tenancy and not provide the opportunity to build generational wealth. This development provides the opportunity to build wealth for generations to come.”
But the grand visions for the property won’t come without hurdles.
Finding land trust lenders will be challenging, Gay said, as will plan reviews and significant market changes that could hinder the speed of development. Having multiple partners involved in a large project could also further complicate it, Kjer added. Planning, remediation and raising and finding finances will also be tricky.
“The housing kind of funds itself, and we have some really good prospects for funding the park through different grants, but the community center I think will be a very big challenge,” Parks said. “How do we raise the several million dollars to be able to build that out for the community?”
First approved nearly 60 years ago, the South L.A. oil site on West Jefferson Boulevard and Van Buren Place was situated closer to homes than any other city drilling facility, according to the nonprofit Community Health Councils.
In 2013, environmental justice advocates with Redeemer Community Partnership began organizing after the oil company requested permits by the city of Los Angeles to drill three new wells.
Parks remembered knocking on residents’ doors and hearing concerning stories about the nearby oil facility: One woman was sprayed with oil while she watered her front lawn. The noxious smells of diesel exhaust and petroleum fumes permeated through a toddler’s room even with the windows closed. Others complained of headaches and nosebleeds, and miscarriages were commonplace, he recalled.
A report by a petroleum administrator, who was hired in 2016 to oversee oil and gas operations in the city, noted that the Jefferson Boulevard facility was classified as having hydrogen sulfide gas, which can give off a rotten-eggs odor and cause smell loss, and that chemicals such as benzene have also been emitted from the site.
A group of community members who were involved in the fight against the Jefferson Boulevard oil drilling site stand on the demolished facility.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
In 2017, after persistent demands from community activists to enclose the site, L.A. City Council members issued a set of stringent rules that oil companies must follow if they wanted to continue operating drilling sites next to homes in South L.A.
The requirements included, among other things, that drilling equipment be permanently closed off by a 45-foot-tall structure to reduce noise, odors and block glaring lights. It was a big victory for community activists, who had argued that the site exemplified the toxic outcomes of oil drilling in urban neighborhoods.
Officials at the time described the requirements as the toughest ever imposed on a drill site in L.A.
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Sentinel Peak Resources spurned the commands and filed a lawsuit. The company argued that the new mandates were “unduly oppressive” and would force it to reduce or stop its operations.
Nearly a year later, the company announced it would shutter the site for good.
While it removed all oil operating equipment and capped the 36 wells on site, the community began working on a shared vision for the site’s future.
“Because we knew if we did not do that, that the toxic violence of oil extraction would be replaced by the violence of displacement,” Parks said. “Developers are coming in, they’re tearing down homes, they’re building up student housing, they’re driving out longtime residents, and we didn’t want to see that happen.”
With help from California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), who is running for L.A. City Council District 10, they secured a $10-million state grant for those efforts.
“I’m really excited,” Jones-Sawyer said. “This will be the blueprint for how you can effectively make changes.”
When Redeemer Community Partnership contacted him about their vision for the land, “it seemed like the perfect combination of dealing with our housing crisis and dealing with our crisis with having no open space. And so when I had the opportunity to provide the $10 million … it seemed like a wonderful opportunity,” Jones-Sawyer said.
For residents such as Corissa Pacillas, who fought for years for more stringent protections from the Jefferson Boulevard site, the purchase exemplifies the power of organizing.
“It was encouraging to see that when people really intentionally organize and speak up, and are persistent … passionate and have good leadership … that change can happen,” said Pacillas, who spent years documenting the facility’s activities from the porch of her second-floor apartment. “I’m just so excited that the property … is going to go toward really benefiting the community.”
England’s Beau Greaves, 19, picks up her second consecutive WDF World Championship title, beating Dutch player Aileen de Graaf 4-1 in the final of a dominant tournament performance and success at Lakeside
Last Updated: 10/12/23 7:53pm
Beau Greaves has secured the second WDF World Championship title of her career
Beau Greaves beat Aileen de Graaf 4-1 to clinch the second WDF World Championship title of her darting career at Lakeside.
Defending world champion Greaves produced one of the highest averages in the history of the Women’s World Championship as she beat Rhian O’Sullivan 3-0 in the semi-finals on Saturday, with the 19-year-old finishing on a 90.77 average, and it was much of the same from her in the final.
Greaves’ imperious form continued to take the first set of the final, winning successive legs in 17 and 18 darts to take it 3-1.
Greaves swept the second set 3-0 to double her lead going into the break, before also winning the third set despite De Graaf breaking Greaves’ throw to get one on the board – the latter instead took it it 3-2 to move within three legs of a second World Championship title.
De Graaf then won three legs on the spin to take the fourth set – the first Greaves dropped all tournament – and force the final past the second break. Yet, Greaves showed her class to comfortably close out the match 3-0 in the fifth set.
The Vitality Roses welcome South Africa in their first home series since winning a Netball World Cup silver medal this summer; the three-match tournament concludes on Sunday December 10 at 1.45pm, live on Sky Sports Mix and YouTube
Last Updated: 10/12/23 2:24pm
Watch England take on South Africa in the third game of their three-match Vitality Netball International Series via our free live stream.
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LIVE NETBALL! England vs South Africa | Vitality International Series
LIVE NETBALL! England vs South Africa | Vitality International Series
The Vitality Roses welcome South Africa in their first home series since winning a Netball World Cup silver medal this summer. The three-match tournament started in Manchester, as England won Game 1 before South Africa sent the series to a decider by winning Game 2.
Watch the Game 3 deciding clash by clicking play on the video at the top of this page – live coverage gets under way from 1.45pm.
You can watch England take on South Africa in their home series between December 5-10, live on Sky Sports. Stream the netball and more with NOW.
For as long as people have watched tents take over sidewalks and RVs deteriorate under freeways, politicians have been making promises about solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
And for just as long, those same politicians have been breaking them.
This is undoubtedly why, back in March, as Mayor Karen Bass was approaching her first 100 days in office, only 17% of Angelenos believed her administration would make “a lot of progress” getting people off the streets, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Far more — 45% — predicted just “a little progress” would be made.
I was thinking about this deep well of public skepticism while listening to Bass, all smiles in a bright green suit on Wednesday morning, enthusiastically explain why the progress she has actually made is a reason for renewed optimism.
Flanked by members of the L.A. City Council outside a school in Hollywood, she announced that her administration had, in its first year, moved more than 21,694 people out of encampments and into interim housing. That’s an increase of 28% over the final year of former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, taking into account the work of various government programs, including Bass’ signature one, Inside Safe.
In addition, the majority of those directed to motel and hotel rooms, congregate shelters and tiny homes have decided to stay, rather than head back out onto the streets.
“We have tried to set a new tone in the city. This is an example of that new tone. Forty-one people used to sleep here, and now it’s clear,” Bass said Wednesday over the shrieks of schoolchildren. “Students and parents don’t need to walk around tents on their way to school, and the Angelenos who were living here do not need to die on our streets.”
It was a convincing message, backed up by a thick packet of numbers distributed to reporters at City Hall a few hours later.
But numbers are funny. They can be crunched in many ways and interpreted to mean many different things.
As my Times colleague David Zahniser pointed out, all of the people who now live in interim housing are still considered homeless by the federal government. And while Bass had originally thought most of them would be there for only three to six months, it’s now looking more like 18 months to two years. Permanent housing is that scarce.
So, numbers-wise, don’t expect a decline in the next annual homelessness count, which is scheduled for January. There might even be an increase, thanks to the expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections. As of the last count, there were more than 46,000 unhoused people living in the city, mostly in encampments.
But again, numbers are funny. They tend not to mean half as much as what people see and experience for themselves, just like the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and actual crime data.
So, when Bass declares at a news conference that “we have proved this year that we will make change,” and she talks about the encampment that used to be where she’s standing, and all the encampments that her administration has cleared, even if a few more tents have popped up down the street, skeptical Angelenos just might believe her.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing.
“What I see most powerfully is increased hope,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, told reporters on Wednesday. “Hope among the folks who are living in those encampments who had given up and [thought] they’ll always live in that level of despair. Hope that the community now believes that we could possibly get out of this terrible crisis.”
Kellie Waldon, 54, cries near what’s left of her encampment, left, as Skid Row West is dismantled under the 405 Freeway along Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles in October. Waldon was hoping to receive housing through the city’s Inside Safe program, like others in the encampment had. “You get your hopes up and you don’t know what to believe,” Waldon said.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hope is a thing difficult to quantify, especially among people who have been homeless for years, and have suffered so much and have been let down so often by government.
I’ve talked to some who took a chance and decided to leave their tents and RVs, and are now thrilled to be in a motel room with a door, running water and air conditioning. Others have had it with curfews and jail-like rules, and are getting tired of waiting on promised permanent housing.
I’ve also talked to those who have been booted out of interim housing for one reason or another, and are back on the streets. They are feeling hopeless, like many cash-strapped Angelenos who are on the verge of an eviction.
But peak hopelessness? That’s what we saw on the first days of December.
At a hastily called news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced that officers were searching for a man who had fatally shot three homeless people — one sleeping on a couch in an alley and another while pushing a shopping cart.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
Moore and Bass didn’t know then, but their suspect, Jerrid Joseph Powell, had already been arrested by Beverly Hills police after a traffic stop in which his $60,000 BMW was linked to a deadly follow-home robbery.
Police have yet to elaborate on Powell’s alleged motive, but Bass brought up the horrific case several times on Wednesday — and with good reason. Violence and acts of cruelty against people living on the streets are increasingly common not just locally, but nationally.
Advocates blame this trend of nastiness on the pandemic-era surge in homelessness, particularly in unsheltered homelessness, and the subsequent spike in interactions between housed and unhoused residents. Fear and frustration can lead to dehumanization and that, in turn, can lead to violence, said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
“I do really worry that it’s become normalized in public discourse to speak about people experiencing homelessness as, like, a problem for those who are not homeless — as opposed to fundamentally a massive societal failure that’s left usually older, vulnerable people terrified and totally unprotected,” she told me. “And I do think that there is a connection, like the more we dehumanize people, the less protected they are.”
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer has watched this happen in real-time as president and CEO of L.A. Family Housing. The seeming permanency of encampments, and the trash, fires and unsanitary conditions they often generate, have led to what she describes as widespread impatience.
“I don’t mean big, systemic impatience, like ‘I wish we could end homelessness faster,’” she said. “It’s the ‘I’m just sick of seeing you in front of me’ kind of impatience.”
On some level, she gets it, though. As does Kushel. As do I.
“It has to be OK to say, ‘Yeah, this sucks that I’m walking my kids to school and I’m walking over people in tents,’” Kushel told me. “But there has to be a way to hold that with being able to recognize how we got to this position and also how we’re going to get out. And to sort of restore [our] collective humanity.”
For Klasky-Gamer, this has meant focusing on what has changed since Bass became mayor.
“I know how much good is getting done,” she told me. “The frustration I may feel at seeing the tent every day I turn the corner, at least I can temper it knowing that 10 people yesterday moved into an apartment. These three people haven’t. But these 10 did.”
RVs in an encampment along West Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The mayor has told me many times that getting people off the streets isn’t just a humanitarian imperative — and, as a serial killer reminded us, a safety imperative. It’s also a demonstration to a fed up public that progress is possible.
“What distresses Angelenos the most are encampments. That’s where people were dying on the street,” Bass told reporters. “And to me, what was clear, was that we come up with a way to get people out of the tents.”
Some will dismiss that. They’ll insist that all her administration is doing is reducing visible homelessness to score easy political points. And that instead of doing the hard work of actually helping L.A.’s most vulnerable residents get back on their feet, the mayor is hiding them so that they’ll be forgotten and abandoned in interim housing.
In this city, defined by its haves and have nots, I understand the cynicism and skepticism. But that’s why what Bass does next, namely expanding and stabilizing the city’s crumbling supply of permanent housing, will matter even more than what she has done thus far.
“We’ve got to somehow make people believe again that this is solvable,” Kushel told me, “and it is solvable.”
Hope can be elusive. But Annelisa Stephan was looking for it anyway when she came to the Ballona Wetlands on a recent Saturday morning.
She and more than 100 other volunteers — many of them from the nearby neighborhoods of Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — had descended on the Westside ecological reserve to dig holes, spread soil, and put in plants and trees.
Just a few months ago, RVs had been parked here along Jefferson Boulevard, bumper to bumper in a sprawling encampment that dozens of unhoused people had come to call home.
They built a close-knit community, looking out for one another and mourning one another after deadly fires. But they also decimated the Ballona Wetlands’ freshwater marsh with everything from battery acid to trash to human waste, and scared off nearby residents who once walked the trails.
And then one day, after almost three years, the encampment was gone, replaced by concrete barricades and metal fencing. The residents were mostly sent to interim housing and the RVs were mostly towed away.
“It’s like, hard to know what to think or feel,” Stephan told me. “I’m happy that the land is being stewarded, but just sad about the suffering that so many people face.”
She lamented the “fervent, anti-homeless mania” that she has heard from some of her neighbors.
“It’s just been really a painful time,” Stephan said.
Not far away, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, whose Westside district includes the Ballona Wetlands and got elected on promises to aggressively crack down on homeless encampments, was more circumspect.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, which is to get folks off the streets and into safe settings and connected to the help that they need,” she said. “There’s a lot of different points of view about how we get there. And I think that’s where a lot of the conflict and the division lie.”
She paused, as traffic whizzed by on Jefferson Boulevard.
Thousands of pro-Palestine protestors have gathered at Aotea Square in Auckland’s city centre this afternoon calling for a ceasefire to the Israel-Hamas war.
Dozens of Palestinian flags were seen among the congregation that included Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and MP Ricardo Menéndez March.
The rally began walking down Queen Street to the US Consulate General on Customs Street shortly before 3pm today.
A large police presence is also monitoring and chaperoning the march down Queen Street which has completly closed the street.
Hundreds of protesters take their march down Auckland’s Queen Street. Photo / Alex Burton
The crowd also chanted: “Casefire. When do we want it? Now.”
A stage has been set up near the Queen Street side of Aotea Square with a “Free Palestine” banner with both the Palestine flag and the Tino Rangatiratanga flag, also known as the national Māori flag.
Dozens of digital billboards are poised to go up above Los Angeles freeways and boulevards, marking the largest expansion in the city in nearly two decades.
Despite opposition from more than a dozen neighborhood groups, the City Council backed a plan on Friday to allow 71 digital billboards to be installed on property owned by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Eleven council members approved the plan, with Traci Park, Nithya Raman and Katy Yaroslavsky voting no.
Opponents argued that the influx of new signs, which would change images every eight seconds, would make L.A. streets even deadlier by distracting drivers, while adding a new source of blight to the cityscape.
“Our shared open space should not be for sale to commercial messaging,” said Barbara Brodie, co-president of the Coalition for a Beautiful Los Angeles, an advocacy group that has opposes billboards. “They will cause unnecessary injury and death, pollute our visual environment and harm wildlife.”
The largest sign, at 1,200 square feet, will be alongside Union Station flashing at commuters along the 101 freeway as they head downtown from East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights. The stark visual changes the illuminated signs will bring to the landscape could scare Hollywood filmmakers away, actor Stacey Travis told the City Council.
“For lucrative one-hour shows and features, L.A. rarely plays itself,” said Travis, SAG-AFTRA’s chair of government and public policy in Los Angeles. “They will simply move productions elsewhere, and (the city will) lose the jobs, revenue and tourism that brings in millions of millions of dollars.”
But city and county officials say the new billboards will be a lucrative source of revenue while also offering traffic alerts. Seven out of every eight images are expected to be ads.
Holly Rockwell, a Metro executive who is overseeing the program, said the billboards will provide “real-time transportation messaging” and money that can be used for transportation projects, while also replacing “old and dilapidated static signs.”
During events like the Olympics, the billboards will be used to help direct traffic, she said.
The city and county will split the revenues, which were at one point projected to reach $300 million to $500 millionover 20 years. As many as 300 nondigital billboards throughout the city could be removed through the program.
Metro’s plan now calls for 52 freeway-facing digital billboards, which can operate nearly 24 hours a day from 5 a.m. to 3 a.m. Another 19 billboards along major boulevards will operate from 5 a.m. to midnight. Before the latter group of signs can go up, they must go through a city permitting process.
Since all are on Metro property, many are near rail stations or along large thoroughfares, for example Westchester at Century and Aviation Boulevards near Los Angeles International Airport.
The fight over digital billboards harks back more than two decades, when the city blocked the widespread use of billboards that shone into people’s homes, confining them to certain areas. The legal battle between the city and outdoor advertising companies played out in court for years. Since then, the city has restricted digital signs to special districts in commercial areas.
Most digital billboards in the city have been concentrated downtown. Friday’s vote allows them in many more neighborhoods across L.A.
Since the vote was not unanimous, the billboard plan will requires a second vote next week. Groups such as Scenic Los Angeles, which has fought the proliferation of billboards, still hope to thwart the plan.
“There has been zero transparency on the financial aspects of this. When we did our own analysis, it looks horrible for the city and Metro,” said Dustan Batton, executive director of Scenic Los Angeles. He said thousands of his members oppose the plan, and he hopes that their pressure will convince some City Council members to change their minds.
The plan originally included 93 billboards but was watered down as it wound its way through city committees, with several council members opposing billboards in their districts.
Raman, who doesn’t have any billboards in her district, said she opposed the plan because of the hours of operation and concerns that billboards could be too close to housing. She said there has not been enough research into the effects of the billboards on traffic safety.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
As part of an ongoing Metro effort to build housing and community around transportation hubs, a new mixed-use development dubbed District NoHo is coming to North Hollywood’s Metro station.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to approve the 15-acre project, greenlighting a massive development that will include 1,481 residential units as well as office, retail and restaurant space.
A quarter of the units will be rent-restricted, more than double the ratio required for the city’s density bonus.
“District NoHo will be a transformative project for this city,” City Council President Paul Krekorian said in a statement. Krekorian represents Council District 2, which includes North Hollywood.
“This is a truly transit-oriented development that will enable hundreds of Angelenos to live, work, study, shop and enjoy recreation without driving, parking or riding in anything other than zero-emission public transportation,” he said.
The project will also bring to the area 750 parking spots reserved for Metro customers, and two acres of open space for the public as well as three shopping plazas. The North Hollywood station is Metro’s third busiest.
District NoHo is one of Metro’s several joint development projects, which are real estate collaborations between Metro and private developers built on Metro land to create more housing around transit.
The project will feature improvements to North Hollywood’s Metro station, including a new entrance to the B Line subway on the west side of Lankershim Boulevard, improvements to the G Line busway terminus, and new internal streets and walkways to break up the large development site, a city report said.
Metro has made the ambitious commitment to build 10,000 housing units in Los Angeles County by 2031, “with the goal of contributing to solving Southern California’s housing crisis,” the agency said in a news release in July. Half of the units are intended to be rent-restricted for lower- to moderate-income households.
While District NoHo will include 366 rent-restricted units, some community members say the project isn’t doing enough to create affordable housing. Reimagine District NoHo, an effort driven by the nonprofit NoHo Home Alliance, has been fighting for the inclusion of more affordable units.
“The government’s obligation is to do the most good for the most people,” said Desmond Faison, with Reimagine District NoHo. “I think that it misses the mark. … We’re building a monolith to capitalism.”
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Faison said that only the most wealthy North Hollywood residents would be able to afford to live in District NoHo’s market rate units. Glenn Block, another North Hollywood resident who is involved with Reimagine District NoHo, said the 15 acres the development will be built on could be put to better use.
“This project fails on every level,” he said.
The property will have nearly 100 more rent-restricted units than the original proposal, according to Metro project manager Marie Sullivan. The number of affordable units is limited because funding for the units comes from many different sources, all of which have restricted budgets.
“There’s only so much affordable housing funding that comes from federal, state and local sources each year,” Sullivan said.
Metro is also using income from the market-rate units to fund other aspects of the project, including a park and shopping plazas, she said.
“We need the revenue from market-rate homes to fund a lot of these public benefits,” she said.
District NoHo will also boost the community by creating roughly 10,000 jobs during construction, according to a city report, and an additional 2,500 jobs through property operations. Construction is expected to generate $1 billion.
The development of the property includes the demolition of nearly 50,000 square feet of surface parking lots and industrial space.
The project, which has been in the works since 2015, “provides a model of sustainable development for the whole region,” Krekorian said. “This is a game-changer for the Valley.”
Filling in for Rachel on today’s Morally Corrupt, Callie Curry begins the episode with a discussion of the Bravo news of the week with Jodi Walker (1:47) before the two move on to recap the Bermuda bathtub drama in Season 4, Episode 13 of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (17:26). Then, Callie and Jodi break down Kyle’s wild weed dinner during The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 13, Episode 7 (46:08).
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Michael Bridge and Ben Grounds react to West Ham’s second-half comeback as a ‘wasteful’ Tottenham squanders another lead and drop further down the table.
You can sense it in the ubiquitous “Help Wanted” posters in artsy shops and restaurants, in the ranks of university students living out of their cars and in the outsize percentage of locals camping on the streets.
This seaside county known for its windswept beauty and easy living is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in home-starved California. Santa Cruz County, home to a beloved surf break and a bohemian University of California campus, also claims the state’s highest rate of homelessness and, by one measure based on local incomes, its least affordable housing.
Leaders in the city of Santa Cruz have responded to this hardship in a land of plenty — and to new state laws demanding construction of more affordable housing — with a plan to build up rather than out.
Many Santa Cruz business owners back the city’s plan for high-rise development, saying the city needs more affordable housing for servers and retail workers.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A downtown long centered on quaint sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue has boomed with new construction in recent years. Shining glass and metal apartment complexes sprout in multiple locations, across a streetscape once dominated by 20th century classics like the Art Deco-inspired Palomar Inn apartments.
And the City Council and planning department envision building even bigger and higher, with high-rise apartments of up to 12 stories in the southern section of downtown that comes closest to the city’s boardwalk and the landmark wooden roller coaster known as the Giant Dipper.
“It’s on everybody’s lips now, this talk about our housing challenge,” said Don Lane, a former mayor and an activist for homeless people. “The old resistance to development is breaking down, at least among a lot of people.”
In recent years, Santa Cruz has approved development of modern multistory housing complexes, part of a broader effort to add housing stock.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Said current Mayor Fred Keeley, a former state assemblyman: “It’s not a question of ‘no growth’ anymore. It’s a question of where are you going to do this. You can spread it all over the city, or you can make the urban core more dense.”
But not everyone in famously tolerant Santa Cruz is going along. The high-rise push has spawned a backlash, exposing sharp divisions over growth and underscoring the complexities, even in a city known for its progressive politics, of trying to keep desirable communities affordable for the teachers, waiters, firefighters and store clerks who provide the bulk of services.
A group originally called Stop the Skyscrapers — now Housing for People — protests that a proposed city “housing element” needlessly clears the way for more apartments than state housing officials demand, while providing too few truly affordable units.
City officials say the plan they hope to finalize in the coming weeks, with its greater height limits, only creates a path for new construction. The intentions of individual property owners and the vicissitudes of the market will continue to make it challenging to build the 3,736 additional units the state has mandated for the city.
“We’ve talked to a lot of people, going door to door, and the feeling is it’s just too much, too fast,” said Frank Barron, a retired county planner and Housing for People co-founder. “The six- and seven-story buildings that they’re building now are already freaking people out. When they hear what [the city is] proposing now could go twice as high, they’re completely aghast.”
Frank Barron is among the activists who say the City Council’s development plans are out of character for the laid-back beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Monheit, a former state water official and another Housing for People co-founder, calls 12-story buildings “completely out of the human scale,” adding: “It’s out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
Housing for People has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the March 2024 ballot that, if approved, would require a vote of the people for development anywhere in the city that would exceed the zoning restrictions codified in the current general plan, which include a cap of roughly seven or eight stories downtown.
The activists say that they are trying to restore the voices of everyday Santa Cruzans and that city leaders are giving in to out-of-town builders and “developer overreach laws.”
The nascent campaign has generated spirited debate. Opponents contend the slow-growth measure would slam on the brakes, just as the city is overcoming decades of construction inertia. They say Santa Cruz should be a proud outlier in a long string of wealthy coastal cities that have defied the state’s push to add housing and bring down exorbitant home prices and rental costs.
Diana Alfaro, who works for a Santa Cruz development company, said many of the complaints about high-rise construction sound like veiled NIMBYism.
“We always hear, ‘I support affordable housing, but just not next to me. Not here. Not there. Not really anywhere,’ ” said Alfaro, an activist with the national political group YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] Action. “Is that really being inclusive?”
Zav Hershfield, a renters’ rights activist, advocates rent control caps and housing developments owned by the state or cooperatives.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The dispute has divided Santa Cruz’s progressive political universe. What does it mean to be a “good liberal” on land-use issues in an era when UC Santa Cruz students commonly triple up in small rooms and Zillow reports a median rent of $3,425 that is higher than San Francisco’s?
Beginning in the 1970s, left-leaning students at the new UC campus helped power a slow-growth movement that limited construction across broad swaths of Santa Cruz County. Over the decades, the need for affordable housing was a recurring discussion. The county was a leader in requiring that builders who put up five units of housing or more set aside 15% of the units at below-market rates.
But Mayor Keeley said local officials gave only a “head nod” to the issue when it came to approving specific projects. “Well, here we are, 30 or 40 years later,” Keeley said, “and these communities are not affordable.”
Santa Cruz County, known for its windswept beauty and easy living, is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in California.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Today, with 265,000 residents, the county is substantially wealthy and white.
An annual survey this year found Santa Cruz County pushed past San Francisco to be the least affordable rental market in the country, given income levels in both places. And many observers say UC Santa Cruz students contend with the toughest housing market of any college town in the state.
State legislators have crafted dozens of laws in recent years to encourage construction of more homes, particularly apartments, across the state. While California has long required local governments to draft “housing elements” to demonstrate their commitment to affordable housing, state officials only recently passed other measures to actually push cities to put the plans into practice.
Under the new regulations, regional government associations draw up a Regional Housing Needs Assessment, designating how many housing units — including affordable ones — should be built during an eight-year cycle. The state Department of Housing and Community Development can reject plans it deems inadequate.
For years 2024 to 2031, Santa Cruz was told it should build at least 3,736 units, on top of its existing 24,036.
For decades, Santa Cruz culture has centered on quaint shops and restaurants along sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz and other cities have been motivated, at least in part, by a heavy “stick”: In cases when cities fail to produce adequate housing plans, the state’s so-called “builder’s remedy” essentially allows developers to propose building whatever they want, provided some of the housing is set aside for low- or middle-income families. In cities like Santa Monica and La Cañada-Flintridge, builders have invoked the builder’s remedy to push ahead with large housing projects, over the objections of city leaders.
The Santa Cruz City Council resolved to avoid losing control of planning decisions. A key part of their plan envisions putting up to 1,800 units in a sleepy downtown neighborhood of automobile businesses, shops and low-rise apartments south of Laurel Street. Initial concepts suggested one block could go as high as 175 feet (roughly 16 stories), but council members later proposed a 12-story height limit, substantially taller than the stately eight-story Palomar, which remains the city’s tallest building.
City planners say focusing growth in the downtown neighborhood makes sense, because bus lines converge there at a transit center and residents can walk to shops and services.
“The demand for housing is not going away,” said Lee Butler, the city’s director of planning and community development, “and this means we will have less development pressure in other areas of the city and county, where it is less sustainable to grow.”
Santa Cruz planning director Lee Butler advocates concentrating new development downtown, rather than building in areas where growth is less sustainable.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A public survey found support for a variety of other proposed improvements to make the downtown more attractive to walkers, bikers and tourists. Among other features, the plan would concentrate new restaurants and shops around the San Lorenzo River Walk; replace the fabric-topped 2,400-seat Kaiser Permanente Arena, which hosts the Santa Cruz Warriors (the G-league affiliate of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors), with a bigger entertainment and sports venue; and better connect downtown with the beach and boardwalk.
Business owners say they favor the housing plan for a couple of reasons: They hope new residents will bring new commerce, and they want some of the affordable apartments to go to their workers, who frequently commute well over an hour from places such as Gilroy and Salinas.
Restaurateur Zach Davis called the high cost of housing “the No. 1 factor” that led to the 2018 closure of Assembly, a popular farm-to-table restaurant he co-owned.
“How do we keep our community intact, if the people who make it all happen, the workers who make Santa Cruz what it is, can’t afford to live here anymore?” Davis asked.
One opponent calls the plan to add high-rises to the city’s picturesque downtown “out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s plan indicates that 859 of the units built over the next eight years will be for “very low income” families. But the term is relative, tied to a community’s median income, which in Santa Cruz is $132,800 for a family of four. Families bringing home between $58,000 and $82,000 would qualify as very low income. Tenants in that bracket would pay $1,800 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in one recently completed complex, built under the city’s requirement that 20% of units be rented for below-market rents.
The people pushing for high-rise development say expanding the housing supply will stem ever-rising rents. Opponents counter that the continued growth of UC Santa Cruz, which hopes to add 8,500 students by 2040, and a new surge of highly paid Silicon Valley “tech bros” looking to put down roots in beachy Santa Cruz would quickly gobble up whatever number of new units are built.
“They say that if you just build more housing, the prices will come down. Which is, of course, not true,” said Gary Patton, a former county supervisor and an original leader in the slow-growth movement. “So we’ll have lots more housing, with lots more traffic, less parking, more neighborhood impacts and more rich people moving into Santa Cruz.”
Leaders on Santa Cruz’s political left say new construction only touches one aspect of the housing crisis. Some of the leaders of Tenant Sanctuary, a renters’ rights group, would like to see Santa Cruz tamp down rents by creating complexes owned by the state or cooperatives and enacting a rent control law capping annual increases.
“No matter what they build, we need housing where the price is not tied to market swings and how much money can be squeezed out of a given area of land,” said Zav Hershfield, a board member for the group.
The up-zoning of downtown parcels has won the support of much of the city’s establishment, including the county Chamber of Commerce, whose chief executive said exorbitant housing prices are excluding blue-collar workers and even some well-paid professionals. “The question is, do you want a lively, vital, economically thriving community?” said Casey Beyer, CEO of the business group. “Or do you want to be a sleepy retirement community?”
The town clock is one of several landmarks in the beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Just days after the anti-high-rise measure qualified for the March ballot, the two sides began bickering over what impact it would have.
Lane, the former mayor, and two affordable housing developers wrote an op-ed for the Lookout Santa Cruz news site that said the ballot measure is crafted so broadly it would apply to all “development projects.” They contend that could trigger the need for citywide votes for projects as modest as raising a fence from 6 feet to 7 feet, adding an ADU to a residential property or building a shelter for the homeless, if the projects exceed current practices in a given neighborhood.
The authors accused ballot measure proponents of faux environmentalism. “If we don’t go up,” they wrote, “we have less housing near jobs — and more people driving longer distances to get to work.”
The ballot measure proponents countered that their critics were misrepresenting facts. They said the measure would not necessitate voter approval for mundane improvements and would come into play in relatively few circumstances, for projects that require amendments to the city’s General Plan.
While not staking out a formal position on the ballot measure, the city’s planning staff has concluded the measure could force citizen votes for relatively modest construction projects.
The two sides also can’t agree on the impact of a second provision of the ballot measure. It would increase from 20% to 25% the percentage of “inclusionary” (below-market-rate) units that developers would have to include in complexes of 30 units or more.
The ballot measure writers say such an increase signals their intent to assure that as much new housing as possible goes to the less affluent. But their opponents say that when cities try to force developers to include too many sub-market apartments, the builders end up walking away.
Santa Cruz’s housing inventory shows that the city has the potential to add as many as 8,364 units in the next eight years, when factoring in proposals such as the downtown high-rises and UC Santa Cruz’s plan to add about 1,200 units of student housing. That’s more than double the number required by the state. But the Department of Housing and Community Development requires this sort of “buffer,” because the reality is that many properties zoned for denser housing won’t get developed during the eight-year cycle.
As with many aspects of the downtown up-zoning, the two sides are at odds over whether incorporating the potential for extra development amounts to judicious planning or developer-friendly overkill.
Joyful, left, and Valerie Christy, right, jam for fun and a few dollars in downtown Santa Cruz.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s voters have rejected housing-related measures three times in recent years. In 2018, they decisively turned down a rent control proposal. Last year, they said no to taxing owners who leave homes in the community sitting empty. But they also rejected a measure that would have blocked a plan to relocate the city’s central library while also building 124 below-market-rate apartment units.
The last time locals got this worked up about their downtown may have been at the start of the new millennium, when the City Council considered cracking down on street performers. That prompted the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, another local landmark, to print T-shirts and bumper stickers entreating fellow residents to “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.”
Santa Cruzans once again are being asked to consider the look and feel of their downtown and whether its future should be left to the City Council, or voters themselves. The measure provokes myriad questions, including these: Can funky, earnest, compassionate Santa Cruz remain that way, even with high-rise apartments? And, with so little housing for students and working folks, has it already lost its charm?
Poor and unreliable data collection by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority makes it “nearly impossible” for unhoused people and the city to know how many interim beds are available and how many are being used at any given time, according to a new city audit.
Despite having a software-based reservation system for shelter bed availability, LAHSA’s system is so unreliable that the agency monitors bed availability using phone calls and daily emails, the audit found.
The homeless services agency also failed to follow up with interim housing providers on their point-in-time sheltered homeless count data, despite indications of data quality issues. Additionally, many shelters recently reported low bed use rates, which may suggest that the number of unhoused people in shelters is being undercounted and that available beds are not being used.
The new audit also found that LAHSA’s Find-a-Shelter app had inaccurate data and did not attract large participation by providers, which limited its function.
At a news conference Wednesday, Sergio Perez, chief of accountability and oversight with the city controller’s office, said the city and its homeless community need a system as reliable as ride-hailing apps that enable people to see available vehicles in real time and where they are.
“That’s what we need to meet the ongoing crisis on our streets today, to meet the real human need of our unhoused neighbors,” Perez said. “It is what we lack.”
Perez said the data system deficiencies raise concerns about L.A.’s attempts to address the homelessness crisis with urgency and calls into question the validity of the city’s efforts not to criminalize poverty.
“If we can’t track interim shelter beds in a timely manner … then we run the risk, on a day-to-day basis, of violating the Constitution, which prohibits governments like the city of Los Angeles from punishing those who live on our streets when they have no other option. It could be that this is happening in Los Angeles as we speak,” he said.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia said that LAHSA’s dysfunctional system “is not only insufficient for addressing the wide problem of L.A.’s homelessness emergency, but in fact it proved to be fully deficient last winter, when we had severe winter weather.”
According to the report, the homelessness agency contracted with 211 L.A. last winter to respond to requests through the winter shelter hotline and provide referrals to shelters. When 211 staff realized that LAHSA’s bed reservation system was inaccurate, telephone operators were forced to call shelters to verify bed occupancy before making referrals. The process increased wait times for callers and for 211 L.A. to respond to them.
Call-line staff told auditors that they received more than 160,000 shelter-related calls from people for the winter shelter program, but were only able to answer just over 50%.
In a statement released with the report, Mejia said it is crucial that the city maximize use of its “extremely limited amount of interim housing beds” and that providers know when beds are available.
In the audit, Mejia touted Mayor Karen Bass’ move last year to declare the homelessness crisis a state of emergency, but pointed to the inadequacy of some resources available to properly address it: Only 16,100 interim housing beds are available for the estimated 46,260 people in the city experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness, according to LAHSA’s 2023 homeless count.
“[T]he woefully inadequate amount of both interim and permanent housing resources, as well as the antiquated and inefficient methods of data collection and housing referral processes, significantly inhibit efforts by the city to respond to the crisis with the urgency that it requires,” he said.
In a statement to The Times, LAHSA said the audit comes as the agency is working to enhance its data practices and improve the accuracy of its bed availability information.
The new bed-availability system in the works will include detailed tracking of beds, units, sites and buildings; current occupancy rates; real-time unit and bed availability; and information for service providers about all the programs in a building, among other things. The system will be fully implemented by Dec. 31, 2024.
LAHSA added that it is developing a new client portal that will improve communication tools. People seeking services will be able to see a list of all shelters and access centers; view upcoming appointments; direct-message case managers and get alerts to help them find shelter during emergencies or severe weather events.
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“Data collection and dissemination are at the core of LAHSA’s purpose, and we are making significant improvements so we can offer the information that maximizes our interim housing system and move into permanent housing faster,” the agency said.
The city controller’s office recommended that LAHSA, in collaboration with the city, redesign a shelter bed availability system that makes it easier to facilitate referrals to its shelters. It also suggested that it craft and execute a plan to “monitor, evaluate, and enforce” requirements for shelter program operators to report bed attendance and availability data completely, accurately and in a timely manner.
Lastly, the office advised the agency to require operators participating in the annual homeless count that report bed use rates lower than 65% or more than 105% to accurately count the number of unhoused people in their shelter and explain bed use rates.
Along with the audit, the city controller’s office also launched an interim housing bed availability map. Officials said they hope it serves as an example for LAHSA if it follows their recommendations.
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