The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to strike down the majority of tariffs imposed by President Trump could provide some relief to L.A.’s trade-reliant economy — but only if they are not reimposed again through other means.
The court’s 6-3 ruling that Trump didn’t have the authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act rolled back levies that have upended international trade.
“We’ve seen that the tariffs have a significant impact on our supply chain, on our manufacturers and especially on our port logistics and trade sector,” said Stephen Cheung, chief executive of the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
“I think this decision will have a significant impact on the Los Angeles economy. However, it’s going to take a long time to unravel, so we’ll see specifically how everything is going to pan out,” he said.
The tariffs dealt a blow to a large swath of businesses in Southern California and across the state, including farmers, automakers, home builders, tech companies and apparel retailers.
MGA Entertainment, the Chatsworth maker of Bratz dolls, said a little more than half of its products are made in China, while hardware and lumber seller Anawalt in Malibu said the majority of its lumber comes from Canada and nearly all of its steel products are made in China.
During a news conference Friday following the decision, Trump said that under other legal authorities he would impose a 10% global tariff and pursue additional levies, including a possible 30% tariff on foreign cars. Later in the day he signed an order imposing the 10% tax, which takes effect Feb. 24.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I’m ashamed of certain members of the court — absolutely ashamed,” Trump said. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”
Friday’s high-court decision affects up to $170 billion in tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, including 10% to 50% duties and penalties on China, Canada and Mexico.
Whether importers who paid the tax can seek refunds was left to a lower court to decide. It’s estimated some $100 billion in tariffs were not affected by the decision.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — which handle nearly a third of the nation’s containerized cargo and are the primary trade gateway to Asia — saw a surge of traffic the first half of last year as importers sought to get ahead of the tariffs, largely imposed in April.
However, traffic tailed off the second half of the year, with the L.A. port expecting a single-digit decline in volume this year before Friday’s decision.
The twin facilities form the largest ports complex in North America, supporting more than 200,000 jobs and contributing $28 billion to the regional economy in 2022, according to a California Center for Jobs & the Economy report.
The uncertainty surrounding the tariffs derives from the complexity of the tariffs themselves — as well as the other legal options Trump has to impose them again.
Mike Jacob, president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn., which represents ocean carriers, marine terminal operators and others in the industry, said the tendency is to think of the tariffs as uniform.
“It was different rates for different countries. That was compounded by different rates for different commodities. And there’s a lot of changes that have occurred with specific commodities,” he said. “So it’s almost impossible to take a broad brush and say, here’s what we expect to happen — except to say that it’s still a pretty unsettled space.”
In imposing a 10% global tariff, Trump would be relying on a provision of the Trade Act of 1974, while his ability to pursue additional levies would rely on other law.
Economist Jock O’Connell, international trade advisor at L.A.’s Beacon Economics, said that Trump may have authority to impose the 10% global tariffs, but additional levies would involve trade authorities.
“That would be a cumbersome process. The tariffs have to be more specifically framed and the subject of an investigation,” he said.
Also complicating the process are trade deals the U.S. has been negotiating with foreign countries based on the tariffs. O’Connell expects they will seek to renegotiate them.
“They’re likely to come back to the table and say, ‘Well, you don’t have the authority to impose these,’” he said.
Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said importers are facing tough decisions right now, given that any ocean carrier leaving an Asian port today would not be subject to the tariffs that were struck down.
“That executive is asking: ‘Are my commodities now exempt from this tariff?’ If the answer is yes, ‘Can I buy more of that product and get it shipped while there are no tariffs?’” he said.
Those decisions would revolve around such factors as the availability of space on the vessel and local warehouses, as well as trucking services, he said.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the decision should be good news for the larger U.S. economy and businesses on the “front line” of the trade wars, such as transportation, distribution, agriculture and retail.
“If the president lets the Supreme Court decision stand and doesn’t try to replace the tariffs, that’s a plus for the economy — but that’s not what’s going to happen,” he said.
Malibu is filing suit against the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, L.A. County and additional public entities. Saying the seaside enclave’s “entire character” was changed by the Palisades fire, the city is seeking damages for the loss of property, business and city revenue.
Malibu officials confirmed Wednesday that the city had filed a civil complaint in Los Angeles County Superior Court with a list of defendants that included the California Department of Parks and Recreation, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
Malibu officials said the decision was necessary to try to recoup losses that affect “the long-term fiscal implications for Malibu and its taxpayers,” according to a news release. The complaint does not list a specific dollar amount the city is seeking in damages.
“The lawsuit seeks accountability for the extraordinary losses suffered by our community while recognizing that Malibu must continue to work collaboratively with our regional partners going forward,” Mayor Bruce Silverstein said in a statement.
The city’s “entire character changed” on Jan. 7, 2025, when the defendants’ “unlawful conduct caused the Palisades Fire to ignite,” according to the complaint.
The ensuing blaze killed 12 people, half of whom were Malibu residents, according to the city. Roughly 700 Malibu homes and dozens of businesses also were destroyed, the complaint states.
Those businesses included restaurants that were local institutions, such as Moonshadows, the Reel Inn and Rosenthal Wine Bar & Patio.
Malibu “is still reeling from the destruction” of the fire, “a hollowed out community, burned and destroyed buildings and homes, a shrinking tax base, emotionally and physically scarred citizens, and untold environmental damage,” the complaint states.
Malibu claims that the fire was “not an accident” but a “foreseeable and proximate result of unlawful conduct” by the defendants.
Each of the entities was blamed for its role in the fire, including not properly addressing the burn scar from the Lachman fire, which rekindled to become the Palisades fire; leaving “reservoirs empty for over a year”; and failing to ensure “essential firefighting infrastructure,” according to the complaint.
“This decision was not made lightly,” Silverstein said. “The city has an obligation to act in the best interests of our residents and taxpayers.”
When the Palisades and Eaton fires displaced thousands of tenants last year, landlords across L.A. jacked up rental prices while the flames were still burning. Officials were quick to respond, vowing crackdowns on price gouging.
A new report asserts that many of those threats were toothless.
Published by activist organization the Rent Brigade, the report analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It found 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings, but only 12 lawsuits filed so far.
Gov. Gavin Newsom put price-gouging rules into effect on Jan. 7, the day of the fires. They’ve been in place in L.A. County ever since, and they’re currently extended through Feb. 27, 2026. The protections prohibit landlords from raising rents by more than 10%, but many seemed undeterred by the rules.
In the week after the fires, one agent told The Times that their landlord client said they “doubt it’ll be prosecuted,” ordering the agent to raise the price more than 10%. A Beverly Grove condo jumped from $5,000 to $8,000. A property in Venice listed for 60% more. A Santa Monica home got a price bump of more than 100%.
“I was shocked by how many clear, unavoidable cases of price gouging there were,” said Philip Meyer, a volunteer with the Rent Brigade who co-authored the report. “A lot of folks didn’t seem to think there’d be any accountability, so they were breaking the law in plain view.”
Meyer helped design a tracking system that scrapes data from Zillow to detect price hikes greater than 10%. He said price gouging predictably skyrocketed in the month after the fires, but then it continued all year long as enforcement lagged.
“I’m not sure if people realized that price-gouging laws are still in effect,” he said.
Illegal listings were scattered across the Southland, but the report said that 42% were found in L.A. County’s 3rd District, which covers Pacific Palisades, as well as the surrounding communities where many fire victims tried to relocate, including Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice and Calabasas.
Last year, the Rent Brigade launched a campaign to inform tenants that they may have been victims of price gouging. Using the Zillow data, they sent out 2,000 postcards to addresses tied to suspect listings detailing their rights; Meyer said the goal was to help tenants contact authorities for enforcement.
The report claims that as much as $49 million in excess rent may have been collected over the last year, an estimate found by totaling up all the asking prices above the legal limit. However, the actual number is likely significantly lower, since the $49-million mark assumes all 18,360 illegal listings were rented at the advertised price.
It’s also likely that the 18,360 number is slightly lower, since data pulled from Zillow listings don’t provide information on actual leases signed — and don’t always provide the full picture.
For example, a Zillow listing could show a previous asking price of $1,500 for a home last year, and an asking price of $6,000 a year later, which would register as a 300% increase. However, the $1,500 asking price could’ve been for a single room in the home, not the entire home — in which case the $6,000 wouldn’t be considered price gouging.
However, it’s clear that thousands of landlords tried to take advantage of increased demand created by the fires, which is why officials at the state, county and city levels all vowed crackdowns.
There have been plenty of legislative efforts to help enforce such a crackdown. In February, L.A. County raised the price-gouging penalty from $10,000 to $50,000, and the L.A. City Council raised the maximum penalty to $30,000. In July, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors made it easier to punish landlords by allowing the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs to bypass the district attorney and directly fine price gougers.
Other laws were proposed, but fizzled out. A state law sought to raise the maximum fine for price-gouging and expand protections to hotels and other services, but it died in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Another state law sought to require listing platforms to remove listings suspected of price gouging, but it was vetoed by Newsom in October.
Spokespeople for the city, county and state offices that deal with price gouging responded to the report’s claims that they weren’t doing enough.
“As part of our department’s work to protect Californians following the fires, California DOJ formed a Disaster Relief Task Force, sent 753 warning letters to hotels and landlords who were accused of price gouging, and filed criminal charges against six defendants, including Los Angeles real estate agents and a landlord,” said California Department of Justice spokesperson Elissa Perez, who works with state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “These are cases where the provable facts supported charges.”
The report claims that L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman, who issued strong statements condemning price gouging, hasn’t prosecuted a single price-gouging case. A statement from his office acknowledged that no cases have been filed, but pointed to collaborations with the city and state, which have both filed price-gouging lawsuits.
City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office has filed seven price-gouging lawsuits — three civil, four criminal — ranging from individual landlords to housing companies such as Blueground and Airbnb. Bonta’s office has filed five, all against individual landlords. All 12 cases are currently pending or awaiting trial.
Ivor Pine, a spokesperson for Feldstein Soto’s office, called the report inaccurate; the report claimed the office investigated only 1,100 cases but it actually investigated thousands more, which were included in its lawsuits against Airbnb and Blueground. He also questioned the report’s methodology, adding that relying exclusively on Zillow listings can be misleading and suggest price gouging that’s not actually happening since it only shows advertised rents, not actual leases.
Pine added that enforcement efforts are ongoing and that all cases filed seek restitution of hundreds or thousands of dollars paid to victims.
A Brentwood couple is suing the city of Los Angeles and Mayor Karen Bass, claiming their constitutional rights were violated when city officials blocked them from demolishing the home where Marilyn Monroe died in 1962.
In a 37-page complaint that accuses the city of collusion and bias, the lawsuit filed by homeowners Brinah Milstein and Roy Bank claims L.A. “deprived Plaintiffs of their intended demolition of the house and the use and enjoyment of their Property without any actual benefit to the public.”
It’s yet another chapter in a saga surrounding the fate of the famous property, which began in 2023 when Milstein, a wealthy real estate heiress, and Bank, a reality TV producer with credits including “The Apprentice” and “Survivor,” bought the home for $8.35 million. They own the property next door and hoped to tear down Monroe’s place to expand their estate.
The pair quickly obtained demolition permits from the Department of Building and Safety, but once their plans became public, an outcry erupted. A legion of historians, Angelenos and Monroe fans claimed the 1920s haunt, where the actor died in 1962, is an indelible piece of the city’s history.
Councilmember Traci Park, who represents L.A.’s 11th Council District where the home is located, said she received hundreds of calls and emails urging her to protect it. In September 2023, she held a news conference dressed as Monroe — bright red lipstick, bobbing blond hair — urging the City Council to declare it a landmark.
The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission started the landmark application process in January 2024, barring the owners from destroying the house in the meantime. L.A. City Council unanimously voted to designate it as a historic cultural monument a few months later, officially saving it from destruction.
It’s not the first legal challenge brought by Milstein and Bank. The pair sued the city in 2024, accusing the city of “backdoor machinations” in preserving a house that doesn’t deserve to be a historic cultural monument.
An L.A. Superior Court Judge threw out the suit in September 2025, calling it “an ill-disguised motion to win so they can demolish the home.”
The latest lawsuit includes a variety of damages, claiming the property’s monument status has turned it into a tourist attraction, bringing trespassers who leap over the walls surrounding the property. In November, burglars broke into the home searching for memorabilia, the suit alleges.
The lawsuit accuses the city of taking no efforts to stop trespassers and failing to compensate the owners for their loss of use and enjoyment of the property. It also notes that the homeowners offered to pay to relocate the home, but the city ignored them.
An aerial view of the house in Brentwood where Marilyn Monroe died is seen on July 26, 2002.
(Mel Bouzad / Getty Images)
The feud has stirred up a larger conversation on what exactly is worth protecting in Southern California, a region loaded with architectural marvels and Old Hollywood haunts swirling with celebrity legend and gossip.
Fans claim the house, located on 5th Helena Drive, is too iconic to be torn down. Monroe bought it for $75,000 in 1962 and died there six months later, the only home she ever owned by herself. The phrase “Cursum Perficio” — Latin for “The journey ends here” — was adorned in tile on the front porch, adding to the property’s lore.
Milstein and Bank claim it has been remodeled so many times over the years, with 14 different owners and more than a dozen renovation permits issued over the last 60 years, that it bears no resemblance to its former self. Some Brentwood locals consider it a nuisance because fans and tour buses flock to the address for pictures, even though the only thing visible from the street is the privacy wall.
“There is not a single piece of the house that includes any physical evidence that Ms. Monroe ever spent a day at the house, not a piece of furniture, not a paint chip, not a carpet, nothing,” their previous lawsuit claimed.
With their latest lawsuit, Milstein and Bank are seeking a court order allowing them to demolish the house and compensation for the decline in property value after the city’s decision to declare it a monument.
An iconic property that has been described as possibly “the greatest house in Southern California” just hit the market for the first time ever in Pacific Palisades. Asking price: $11.5 million.
A Midcentury masterpiece, the home served as the primary residence of Ray Kappe, the late architect who co-founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He designed the place himself in 1967.
Kappe died in 2019, and his wife Shelly, who also co-founded SCI-Arc, died last year. Now, the property is being sold by their family trust.
Tucked on a hillside in the Rustic Canyon neighborhood, the house floats above a natural spring that flows through the property, resting on six concrete columns sunk 30 feet into the ground. The 4,157-square-foot floor plan is split across seven levels, featuring five bedrooms, five bathrooms and free-flowing living spaces wrapped in redwood and glass.
One critic called it “a controlled explosion of space.” An architect called it “the quintessential treehouse.” In 2008, when the L.A. Times Home section created a list of the 10 best houses in L.A., which featured creations from Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pierre Koenig, former American Institute of Architects’ L.A. chapter president Stephen Kanner said Kappe’s “may be the greatest house in Southern California.”
The 1960s home floats on a hillside lot in Rustic Canyon.
(Cameron Carothers)
It’s not a house that could be built today — for a handful of reasons. First, the hovering stairs and footbridges that navigate the property have no handrails, which are now required under current construction code.
Also, the house features a ton of glass. Too much glass, according to modern California building code. The home’s skylights, clerestories and towering windows that take in the wooded scene surrounding it make up roughly 50% of the floor plan — much higher than modern limits allow.
Outside, cantilevered decks and platforms overlook a lap pool, spa, sauna and cabana shrouded in eucalyptus, sycamore, oak and bamboo.
The 4,157-square-foot house is wrapped in concrete, redwood and glass.
(Cameron Carothers)
The end result is a striking space that feels entirely unique, even in a region as architecturally eclectic as Southern California. In 1996, it was deemed an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument.
Ian Brooks of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties holds the listing. He said calls asking to tour the property have been coming nonstop since it surfaced for sale.
“The Kappe residence will resonate with discerning buyers who value architectural provenance, impeccable design and cultural importance — a rare opportunity to own an enduring piece of architectural history,” he said.
As Los Angeles grapples with a housing shortage, it could learn from San Diego, which has proved better at convincing construction companies to build more.
The city is more welcoming to developers, industry insiders say, with fewer regulations and fees, better planning and less rent control.
“It is easier to build in San Diego over Los Angeles because of its legal structure, political culture and defined processes,” said Kevin Shannon, co-head of capital markets at real estate brokerage Newmark, which is overseeing the sale of a sprawling development site in San Diego that is zoned to have thousands of apartments.
The result: As of last quarter, the number of new apartments under construction in San Diego County rose 10% from three years earlier, CoStar data show. New apartment construction in Los Angeles County tumbled 33% over the same period, hitting an 11-year low in the three months through December. San Diego is expanding its apartment pool at nearly twice the rate of L.A. and other major city clusters in the state.
View of An apartment building is under construction in downtown San Diego on Jan. 16, 2026. The city is more welcoming to developers than Los Angeles, industry insiders say,
(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)
L.A.’s vacancy rate is among the lowest in the country and rental rates are among the highest nationwide. Still, the supply of fresh rental units, which make up the bulk of new housing in Los Angeles, is thinning out despite robust demand.
Although local lawmakers create regulations to protect renters and keep rents down, hoping to combat homelessness, developers and economists warn that the wrong regulations often can add to the cost of building and maintaining apartments, making it hard to make a profit on new and existing projects. People who already have apartments may be protected, but over the long run, fewer are built, they say.
Rent control has been at the center of the debate recently. The city of Los Angeles just tightened its rent control.
It has just lowered the cap on rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, a massive portion of the city’s housing stock that houses nearly half of the city’s residents. Although the cap doesn’t apply to units built after 1978, it still discourages developers, as it sends the wrong signal to those already worried about restrictions.
At the state level, a similar housing bill that would have halved the cap on rent increases to 5% a year died in the Assembly last week. Assemblymembers decided that too many restrictions can be counterproductive.
“That sounds nice and humanly caring and all that and warm and fuzzy, but someone has to pay,” said Assemblymember Diane Dixon (R-Newport Beach). “How far do we squeeze the property owners?”
San Diego doesn’t have traditional rent control, though it does enforce less restrictive statewide tenant protections.
In Los Angeles, Measure ULA, known as the mansion tax, is another top reason that developers decide to build elsewhere. They also point to other local regulations that make it challenging to evict tenants who don’t pay their rent.
“L.A. has been redlined by the majority of the investment community,” apartment developer Ari Kahan of California Landmark Group said in October.
It’s easier to do business in San Diego because of its real estate development policies, project approval process and overall business-friendly attitude, industry insiders said. It outlines what it wants in a general plan, and if projects line up with that, they can be approved at the city staff level.
“San Diego has a clear, enforced General Plan, and for the most part, it sticks to it,” Shannon said. “San Diego updates its Community Plan and then lets projects proceed if they comply.”
“In contrast, L.A.’s General Plan is outdated and inconsistent,” he said. “Almost everything requires discretionary approvals.”
A view of the downtown San Diego skyline Jan. 16, 2026. It’s easier to do business in San Diego because of its real estate development policies, project approval process and overall business-friendly attitude, industry insiders said.
(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)
Elected officials in L.A., including the City Council, have the discretion to decide whether a new project can be built, which can add months to its approval process as the proposal winds through City Hall and public meetings.
“The City of San Diego continues to prioritize the permitting and development of new homes to address our region’s housing needs and support a better future for all San Diegans,” said Peter Kelly, a spokesman for the city Planning Department. “Through updated community plans, streamlined permitting processes and proactive implementation of state housing laws, we are working to increase housing supply and affordability in all neighborhoods.”
The city updates its Land Development Code annually to streamline the permitting process and accelerate housing production, he said. It also adds capacity to build new homes through rezoning and updates to the city’s community plans, with a focus on placing new homes and jobs near transit, parks and services.
“If we can bring more supply, it will hopefully bring down rents,” said Kip Malo, a real estate broker in JLL’s San Diego office.
Most new apartments are being built outside of downtown San Diego, Malo said. “The city has made a concerted effort to try to clean up downtown and it has gotten better, but it’s still got a ways to go.
Of course, developers in San Diego still face the same headwinds that affect developers in other cities, such as interest rates that make construction loans more expensive than they have been in years past.
Recent policy out of Washington also hasn’t helped. Higher tariffs have driven up the prices of construction materials and equipment, while the crackdown on undocumented workers has thinned and spooked much of the international workforce on which the industry depends.
An apartment building is under construction in downtown San Diego on Jan. 16, 2026. In L.A., elected officials, including the City Council, have the discretion to decide whether a new project can be built, which can add months to its approval process as the proposal winds through City Hall and public meetings.
(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)
California’s construction industry depends on immigrant workers. Around 61% of construction workers in the state are immigrants, and 26% of those are undocumented, according to a June report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
San Diego is “still California,” Malo said, and has hurdles to get projects approved that aren’t faced by builders in Texas and other states with more lax requirements for new projects, Malo said, but “the political winds have shifted in developers’ favor.”
The early 1980s Los Angeles of my childhood always felt like a place where you could brush against greatness and not even recognize it.
Take the strange, faceless building at Melrose and Sycamore avenues, just up from the house where I grew up. It stood apart from the Melrose Avenue hodgepodge, which included an auto body shop, an old bookstore famous for selling movie scripts, and a trendy boutique that sold vintage fedoras and marked the beginning of Melrose’s turn as a fashion mecca.
In a street filled with signage screaming for your attention (“THOUSANDS OF BOOKS,” yelled the bookseller), that corner lot had nothing. Just two concrete-plastered boxes seemingly closed off to the world. The only hint of life was a tree growing from what appeared to be some kind of courtyard hidden from view. I passed by all the time — sneaking a Chunky bar at the corner liquor store, grabbing an ice cream cone from Baskin-Robbins.
I didn’t give the building a second thought until my best friend and I started a little weekly newspaper we photocopied for 3½ cents a copy from a shop a few doors away. Jack and I hit up Melrose merchants to buy ads (usually just their business card), and a few agreed to help these teenage publishing tycoons. Because of this, cracking the code of that strange little building became a brief obsession. One day, I found a door around the side and knocked. No answer. So I left a copy of our paper and returned a few days later. No luck. So I gave up. Why was I wasting my time with this piece of junk?
It took another 15 years to learn that the concrete box I so easily dismissed is one of L.A. architectural treasures. It is called the Danziger Studio and was one of architect Frank Gehry’s first L.A. commissions.
Even back in the 1960s, it was hailed as something special. Architecture critic Reyner Banham called it a brilliant elevation of the “stucco box” so ubiquitous around the city. As it turned out, the surface was not concrete but “a gray rough stucco of the type sprayed onto freeway overpasses. Gehry had to learn the decidedly unconventional technique himself,” according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.
A vintage postcard from the collection of L.A. Times staff writer Patt Morrison shows a May Co. department store and its clean lines.
In his obituary for Gehry, Christopher Hawthorne described the studio as a “spare, even self-effacing stucco box, plain outside and filled with light and surprising spatial complexity inside.” The building “looked Modern but also suggested sympathy for the postwar visual chaos of L.A. evident in the work of artists such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.”
I discovered the provenance of the hidden gem in the 1990s, when Gehry had reached “starchitect” status with his shape-shifting museum in Bilbao, Spain, and just before he gained legend status for L.A.’s Disney Hall. The Danzinger Studio shared none of those over-the-top designs. But that made me more impressed. I started driving by whenever I was in the neighborhood, slowing down in hopes of understanding what made it great. One day, I even gave it a walk-around, assuming it must look a lot better inside. (It turns out it does.)
I came to appreciate its beauty and grace — as well as something much larger about L.A. design. Suddenly, my idea of great architecture broadened beyond the ornate church, grand mansion, distinctive Spanish Colonial or gleaming glass skyscrapers like the Westin Bonaventure hotel. I gained a respect for the simplicity of design and function over style, like a cute working-class courtyard apartment, the streamlined simplicity of a May Co. department store and even the crazed efficiency of a mini-mall.
Plaza Cienega is in the Beverly Grove area of Los Angeles.
(Google street view)
I have wondered whether I would have valued the Danziger Studio had it not been designed by Gehry. But it didn’t matter, because this discovery gave me the confidence to have my own, sometimes unpopular, L.A. opinions. I am in the minority, for example, in loving the much-derided 1960s brown-box addition to the old Times Mirror Square complex just as much as the landmark Art Deco original. And sorry, the mini-mall at 3rd Street and La Cienega Boulevard is one of my favorite L.A. buildings, period.
The car wash hadn’t yet opened for the day, but its owner was already on edge.
He scanned the street for law enforcement vehicles and hit refresh on a crowdsourced map that showed recent immigration sweeps.
“They were busy in our area yesterday,” he warned his employees. “Be careful.”
But except for staying home, there were few precautions that the workers, mostly men from Mexico, could take.
The business is located along one of L.A.’s busiest thoroughfares. Workers are exposed to the street as they scrub, wax and buff the parade of vehicles that streams in between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., seven days a week.
Immigration agents descended on the business multiple times this summer as part of a broader campaign against L.A. car washes. Masked men hauled away around a dozen workers, most of whom were swiftly deported. The Times is not identifying the business, the owner or the workers.
The raids had spooked remaining employees — and many had stopped showing up to work. The replacements the owner hired were mostly other immigrants who showed him Social Security cards that he hoped were legitimate.
Still, it was an open secret that the car wash industry, which paid low wages for back-breaking labor, largely attracted people without legal status.
“Americans don’t want to do this work,” the owner said.
After the raids, he had been forced to close for stretches during the typically lucrative summer months. He was now operating normally again, but sales were down, he had maxed out his credit cards and he was unsure whether his business would survive. Clients — frightened by the raids — were staying away.
“My target is to pay the rent, pay the insurance and pay the guys,” the owner told his manager as they sipped coffee in the early morning November chill and waited for their first customer. “That’s it.”
The manager, also an immigrant from Mexico, nodded. He was juggling his boss’ concerns with personal ones. He and his team had all seen friends, relatives and co-workers vanish in immigration raids. He left home each morning wondering whether he would return in the evening.
The mood at the car wash had once been lighthearted, with employees joking as they sprayed down cars and polished windows. Now everybody, the manager included, kept one eye on the street as they worked. “We say we’re OK,” he said. “But we’re all scared.”
A few minutes before 7 a.m., a BMW sedan pulled in for a wash. The manager flipped on the vacuum and said a prayer.
“Protect me. Protect my colleagues. And protect the place I work.”
The owner was born abroad but moved to Los Angeles after winning the U.S. green card lottery.
He used his life savings to buy the car wash, which at the time seemed like a sound investment. There are some 36 million vehicles in California. And in Los Angeles, at least for most of the year, people can’t rely on rainfall to keep them clean.
His business already took a major financial hit this year during the L.A. wildfires, which filled the air with smoke and ash. Customers didn’t bother to clean cars that they knew would get dirty again.
Then came President Trump, who promised to deport record numbers of migrants.
I’m not brave. I need the work
— Car wash employee
Previous administrations had focused on expelling immigrants who had committed crimes. But federal agents, under pressure to meet arrest quotas, have vastly widened their net, targeting public-facing workplaces that pay low wages.
Car wash employees — along with street vendors, day laborers, farmworkers and gardeners — have become low-hanging fruit. At least 340 people have been detained in raids on 100 car washes across Southern California since June, according to the CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center, which advocates for workers in the industry.
The owner was shocked when agents toting rifles and dressed in bulletproof vests first stormed his business, blocking exits with their vehicles and handcuffing employees without ever showing a search warrant.
“It was a kidnapping,” he said. “It felt like we were in Afghanistan or Iraq, not in the middle of Los Angeles.”
Some of the men that the agents dragged away in that raid and subsequent ones had been living in the U.S. for decades. Many were fathers of American children.
The manager was racked with survivor’s guilt. He was from the same small town in Mexico as one of the men who was detained and later deported. Another worker taken by agents had been hired the same morning as the raid.
That’s when many employees stopped showing up. One stayed home for almost a month straight, surviving on groceries his friends and family brought to his apartment.
But eventually that employee — and his brother — returned to the car wash. “I’m not brave,” the brother said. “I need the work.”
The brother had been in the country for nearly 25 years and had three U.S.-born children, one of whom had served as a Marine.
He had toiled at car washes the whole time — crouching to scrub tires, stretching to dry roofs and returning home each night with aching heels and knots in his neck. Less punishing industries weren’t an option for somebody without valid work documents, he said, especially in the Trump era.
He had been at the car wash during one of the raids, and had avoided being detained only when the owner stepped in front of him and demanded agents speak to him first.
The man said he had made peace with the idea that his time in the U.S. might come to an end. “At least my children are grown,” he said.
The two brothers were working this brisk November day, hand-drying Audis, Mercedes and a classic Porsche. They earned a little over minimum wage, and got to keep most of their tips.
Their bosses had told them that if immigration agents returned, the workers should consider locking themselves inside the cars that they were cleaning. “Don’t run,” the manager said. “They’ll only chase.”
At the cash register, the cashier watched a website that tracked Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions around the region. So far, there was no activity nearby.
She had been present during the immigration sweeps, and was still mad at herself for not doing more to stop agents from taking her co-workers. “You think you’re gonna stand up to them, but it’s different when it happens,” she said. “I was like a deer in the headlights.”
As workers cleaned his Toyota Camry, a retired history professor waited on a bench, reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. The ICE raids had scared some clients away, but had prompted others to express their support. He said he had made a point to patronize the business because he was angry at the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“They’re not getting the worst of the worst, they’re getting the easiest,” he said.
He noted that a friend of his — a Latino born in the U.S. — now carried a copy of his birth certificate. Just in case.
“That’s not the America I grew up in,” the customer said.
The owner of the car wash, too, was trying to square the promise of the United States with the reality that he was living.
“I thought Trump was a businessman,” he said. “But he’s really terrorizing businesses.”
The owner had paid taxes on his employee’s earnings, he said. So had they. “They were pushing the economy, paying rent, paying insurance, buying things.”
“Fine, take the criminals, take the bad guys,” he continued. “But these are hard workers. Criminals aren’t working at a car wash or waiting in front of a Home Depot.”
The owner had recently obtained American citizenship. But he was disillusioned — by the raids, L.A.’s homelessness crisis, high healthcare costs. He said his wife longed to leave the U.S. and return home.
“This is not the American dream,” he said. “This is an American nightmare.”
As the sun began to sink on the horizon, the last car of the day pulled out of the car wash — a sparkling clean Tesla.
The manager turned off the vacuum, recoiled hoses and exhaled with relief. He and his staff had survived another day. Tonight — at least — they would be going home to their families.
In the architectural age of minimalism and millennial gray, a wild and whimsical antidote made of old clinker bricks and jumbled shingles sits on a quiet street at the edge of L.A. and Culver City.
Formally, the spellbinding property is named the Lawrence and Martha Joseph Residence and Apartments, named after the Disney artist and his wife who obsessively spent three decades building it. But locals call them the Hobbit Houses — fitting, since they look straight out of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel.
The complex looks comically out of place amid Culver City’s commercial corridor along Venice Boulevard. It’s surrounded by modern apartment buildings, boxy and inoffensive, built to blend in with today’s taste.
A bathroom in one of the Hobbit houses in Culver City adorned in glass tiles and ornate fixtures.
Amid that urban blur, the Hobbit Houses beg for your attention.
An electric lamppost flickers, mimicking fire. The tree in the front yard features a face, with eyes and a nose. The homes are filled with quirky leaded glass windows, uneven angles and heaps of wood shingles, resembling a thatched straw roof.
This year, the property hit the market for the first time. Offers poured in, and it sold to perhaps the most fitting possible buyer outside Bilbo Baggins himself: real estate agent Michael Libow.
At $1.88 million, Libow didn’t have the highest bid. His main qualification was that he owns and lives in one of the finest examples of Storyboook style in the region: the Witch’s House, a medieval-looking masterpiece that is more befitting a “Hansel and Gretel” adaptation than the streets of Beverly Hills.
The broker, seeing his connection to the style, promoted Libow to the seller, an out-of-state bank trust. The Hobbit Houses were his.
Michael Libow peers through a heavy wooden door of a Hobbit house that he purchased in early 2025.
“It’s like a companion piece to my own home,” Libow said. “It’s a little oasis in a city that’s been overdeveloped.”
Now that he owns both, Libow has declared himself, tongue-in-cheek, the “King of Storybook,” and said he intends to protect the property and be a spokesperson for the style.
“This is my legacy: bringing a little bit of joy to as many people as I can,” he said. “It’s about preservation, but it’s also about bringing a sense of awe and wonder to the world.”
The Hobbit Houses are one of Southern California’s finest examples of Storybook architecture, a fantasy style that fittingly emerged in L.A. in the 1920s around the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Inspired by cinema setpieces and centuries-old European cottages, architects designed playful homes with turrets and gables on the outside and nooks and crannies on the inside. When done well, the finished product looks lifted from a fairy tale.
A cat digs around on the roof of a Hobbit house in Culver City.
Disney artist Lawrence Joseph built the Hobbit Houses from 1946 to 1970. Over the years, the property developed a lore all its own. He rented out spare units to Hollywood tenants such as actor Nick Nolte and dancer Gwen Verdon, and the place also housed one of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra’s son (authorities found most of the ransom money Sinatra paid, $240,000, in one of the units).
Lawrence died in 1991, and his wife, Martha, got to work protecting the property. She obtained landmark status in 1996 and donated an easement to the Los Angeles Conservancy, ensuring that it can’t be remodeled or torn down.
The property, which includes nine units across four buildings, needed some work when he bought it, so Libow and his property manager, Ben Stine, have spent the last few months playing a developer’s version of “Minesweeper,” trying to make small improvements for the tenants — electric work, a tankless water heater — without disrupting anything protected by the L.A. Conservancy easement.
The Hobbit Houses came with a 15-page report detailing all the things protected on the property: not just the buildings themselves, but also the facade, landscape features and the interiors, including the custom furniture that Lawrence carved himself. Even the wallpaper can’t be touched.
“Protections within a structure are very unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Libow said.
Detail of the flooring inside a Hobbit house in Culver City.
That means for renters, much of the furniture is included with the rent. The latest vacant unit — a two-bed, one-bath with a den — includes bar stools and a rocking chair that Lawrence carved.
The house is wrapped in clinker brick, a term for when clay bricks are set too close to the flames when being fired in a kiln, giving them distorted shapes and colors. Such bricks were sometimes trashed in older architectural eras, but these days, they’re prized for the unique look they bring to buildings, and perfectly natural for Middle Earth architecture in Culver City.
Inside, Lawrence’s sailing background shines through with nautical-themed interiors. A ship’s wheel serves as the chandelier, hanging above vertical-grain boat-plank floors that lead to a galley-style kitchen with a curvy bar.
“The idea behind Storybook is to have something fanciful and whimsical, which involves movement rather than rectilinear rooms,” Libow said. “There’s barely a right angle on the entire property. Everything’s amorphous in shape.”
Detail inside a Hobbit house in Culver City.
There are no knobs to be found; doors open with hidden latches and levers. A built-in fold-down desk pops out in the living room. In the master bedroom, a “cat door” slides open to provide easy access for felines that hang around the property.
The nine units range from 200 square feet to 1,200 square feet. The vacant unit, which spans around 1,000 square feet, hit the market a few months ago for $4,500 per month.
It’s a high price for the neighborhood — most two-bedroom apartments nearby fall in the $3,000 range — but interested renters still swarmed.
“These aren’t your typical tenants that need four walls and a sink. We get a lot of people in the creative industry,” Libow said. “You’re renting a lifestyle here.”
Libow said like his own home, which serves as a regular stop for Hollywood tour buses, the Hobbit Houses are a regular resting point for people walking through the neighborhood.
“Construction workers will walk by on their lunch to look at the turtles in the pond. It’s a break from reality, even if just for a minute,” he said.
Michael Libow outside one of his Hobbit houses in Culver City.
Libow and his property manager spend a lot of time on the grounds, looking for projects or small improvements they’re allowed to make under the conservancy. But for Libow, who bought it as a collector’s item as much as an investment, it’s a labor of love.
“It’s not the most functional style of architecture, but it is the coolest,” he said. “It’s weird, but I’m weird myself. I connect with weird.”
There is a small chance of scattered showers before conditions clear.
The cold front will have moved away from Los Angeles, but the cold core of the low-pressure system will still be around. “This will bring enough instability to the area for a slight chance of thunderstorm development,” the National Weather Service in Oxnard said.
Snow levels were at around 7,000 feet on Monday but were expected to drop to 5,000 feet by Tuesday. Officials issued a winter weather advisory for the eastern San Gabriel Mountains and the northern Ventura County mountains that is set to last through Tuesday night. About 2 to 5 inches of snow could fall in the mountains.
“As for the Grapevine area, there is a chance of a dusting of snow Tuesday morning as the snow levels lower,” the weather service said. The Grapevine is a key travel corridor on the 5 freeway that connects L.A. and Santa Clarita with the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The highest point of the Grapevine section is the Tejon Pass, which peaks in elevation at 4,144 feet above sea level. At that location, “some non-accumulating snow is possible,” the weather service said.
Temperatures have chilled with the latest storm. While the L.A. coast and San Gabriel Valley on Monday reached the mid-60s, due to late arriving rain, most of L.A. County’s coastal areas and valleys “struggled to get out of the 50s,” the weather service said.
Wednesday
Sunny skies but cool. Highs in the high 50s.
Thursday
Thursday’s storm is expected to drop from 0.25 to 0.75 inches of precipitation. That’s on top of the 0.74 inches of rain that fell on downtown L.A. in the 24-hour period that ended at 9 p.m. Monday. Before that, the weekend storm that began Friday brought 2.68 inches of rain to downtown.
Koreatown resident Scott Lyness was well aware that the city of Los Angeles was looking to tackle its food waste problem.
While bicycling to work, he saw the growing number of green trash bins popping up on curbs. He read the notice sent to his home instructing residents to expect green bins to be delivered at some point.
Still, Lyness was not prepared for what came next: 13 green bins deposited earlier this month outside the apartment building he manages on New Hampshire Avenue.
That’s on top of the three bins that the city delivered the previous week at a smaller building he also manages next door, and the two green bins that those properties were already using.
Lyness, 69, who works as a project manager at USC, said the two buildings don’t have anywhere near the room to store so many full-size cans — and don’t generate enough organic waste to fill them. He’s tried to have his tenants contact city offices to say they don’t need them. He said he’s even thought about throwing them into the street.
“Our neighborhoods are being inundated with green waste bins,” he said.
City officials are working furiously to get Angelenos to separate more of their food waste — eggshells, coffee grounds, meat bones, unfinished vegetables, orange peels, greasy napkins — to comply with SB 1383, a state composting law passed in 2016. They’ve even implemented Professor Green, an online chatbot that can help residents decide what can and can’t go in the green bin.
SB 1383 requires that 75% of organic waste be diverted away from landfills by the end of the year and instead turned into compost. Food and other organic waste sent to landfills is a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane has a global warming potential about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
To reach that goal, crews from L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation have deposited huge numbers of 90-gallon green bins in front of some apartment buildings, including duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and larger buildings that have been grandfathered into the city’s curbside trash collection program.
Scott Lyness, 69, stands near green waste bins outside the apartment building he manages in Koreatown.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Residents are already familiar with the green bins, which were long reserved for lawn clippings and other yard waste but now are the destination for food scraps as well.
Most large apartment buildings in L.A. have been spared from the recent round of green bin deliveries, since they participate in recycLA, the city trash franchise program that relies on private waste haulers.
Sanitation officials say that Angelenos who prefer smaller, more manageable containers should fill out a form to get a 30- or 60-gallon replacement. They point out that the bins are part of a much larger effort by the city to reach its zero-waste goals and “lead on sustainability.”
Most of the green bins’ contents are taken to a facility in Bakersfield, where the resulting compost can be used by farmers, said Heather Johnson, a sanitation spokesperson.
“While some may find [the bins] inconvenient at the moment, in the short term they will result in more diverted waste and cleaner air,” Johnson said in an email.
Despite those serious intentions, Angelenos have been poking fun at the “Great Green Bin Apocalypse of 2025,” as journalist and podcaster Alissa Walker framed the situation on Bluesky. Walker recently shared a photo showing what appeared to be 20 green bins in front of one property, right next to a discarded sofa.
“This one is probably my favorite,” she wrote. “I like how they lined them all up neatly in a row and then left the couch.”
Green organic waste bins outside an apartment building in Koreatown.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
After Walker urged others to send in pictures, Silver Lake resident Tommy Newman posted a photo on Bluesky showing eight bins outside an eight-unit building, just south of Sunset Boulevard.
“Unless they are running a juice bar in there, how could they possibly create this much organic waste on a weekly basis?” wrote Newman, who works at a county housing agency.
Over on X, another observer summed up the absurdity in a different way. “LA gave every multi family unit a green bin due to a bureaucratic fever dream about composting,” the person wrote. “I have 5 personally.”
In recent months, L.A.’s sanitation agency has sent teams of “ambassadors” into neighborhoods to educate residents about the need to throw food in the green bins.
That means keeping food out of the 60-gallon black bins where residents have been accustomed to dumping most of their garbage, which ultimately winds up in landfills. Recyclable items, including glass and aluminum, will continue to go into blue bins.
The changes were also spelled out on fliers sent out by the city last summer, with a clear warning in all capital letters: “Unless we hear from you immediately, we will deliver a 90-gallon green container to your residence.”
Lyness saw those alerts and knew about the change. But he contends that most people would have missed the news or thrown the fliers away. Depositing an inordinate amount of bins around town is just not the way to encourage people to properly dispose of their organic waste, he said.
The city’s new food-waste program, which is projected to cost $66 million a year, is one reason the City Council approved a huge increase in trash fees earlier this year, in some cases doubling them. Each 90-gallon green bin costs the city $58.61, tax included, though residents are not being directly charged for the recent deliveries.
Sanitation officials say they have delivered more than 65,000 green bins across the city, with 4,000 to go. For residents waiting for them to be removed or replaced with a smaller bin, only 1,000 orders can be carried out in a regular workday, those officials said.
Around the corner on North Berendo Street, Lyness’ neighbor Lucy Alvidrez agreed that the green bins were troublesome while dragging in her black bin Thursday afternoon.
“They sure got carried away with it,” she said, pointing across the street to an apartment building with about two dozen green bins on its front curb.
Alvidrez, 69, who has lived in the neighborhood for two decades, never had an issue with trash collection until the city dropped off four green bins, one for each unit in her building. She was more fortunate than Lyness: sanitation workers took two of the bins back, upon request.
Alvidrez said she would prefer that the city “spend our money feeding the homeless” instead of purchasing bins that no one needs, she said.
A dozen green organic waste bins occupy a street in Koreatown..
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Nearby, Lyness opened a neighbor’s green bin, which was filled to the brim with trash that wasn’t compostable and should have gone in a black bin. If no one knows what to put in the green bins, nothing is going to improve, he said.
Southern California will be under a severe weather threat Saturday, with the most powerful wave of an incoming atmospheric river storm peaking over the weekend in Los Angeles County and bringing a risk of mudflows, debris flows and, possibly, a tornado.
If rain falls as forecast, this storm could result in downtown Los Angeles seeing its wettest November since 1985. Heavy rain brings the possibility of damaging flooding and landslides, with fire-scarred hillsides from the Eaton and Palisades fires at risk of fast-moving flows of mud and debris.
The severe weather threat is expected for much of Saturday, from midnight through 9 p.m. A flood watch will be in effect for a wide swath of Southern California from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday. Evacuation warnings are in effect through 11 a.m. Sunday in areas near recent burn scars due to the risk of mud and debris flows. The warnings encompass areas near the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth, Sunset and Hurst fires that burned in January.
But it remained unclear as of late Thursday which areas would be hit hardest by the storm. Peak rainfall rates Saturday of 0.75 to 1.25 inches per hour are expected along a relatively narrow band of land — about the width of a Southern California county. That’s enough rain to trigger a landslide, which can occur when rain falls at a rate of half an inch or more per hour.
Forecasters don’t yet know where that peak rain will be focused.
“The problem is, we just don’t know exactly which county” will be most affected, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. “If you look at all of our projections, some of them favor L.A., some of them favor Ventura, some of them favor Santa Barbara County. And so at this point, unfortunately, for that Saturday time period, we just can’t tell with certainty which county is kind of in the bull’s-eye.”
If the band of most intense rain lines up over L.A. County, it can expect rainfall rates of about 1 inch per hour, Kittell said. If the band is concentrated elsewhere, L.A. could still see a rate of half an inch per hour, and landslides would still remain a possibility.
The area with the most severe weather could see spinning thunderstorms that could produce damaging wind or a tornado or two, Kittell said.
“While 99% of the area will not see such conditions, any portion of our area, especially in the coastal and valley areas, could see it,” Kittell said. “Consider changing any plans that you might have for Saturday. Stay home and indoors.”
In case of lightning, he noted that it’s best to stay inside and away from windows. Those who must go out should never attempt to drive through a flooded roadway.
There’s still a chance that Saturday’s storm could be less impressive than expected. It is being powered by a “cut-off low,” which is so notoriously difficult to forecast that it’s referred to as “weatherman’s woe.” Because the low-pressure system powering the storm is not pushed along by the jet stream, “it will just spin around like a top and go where it pleases — very difficult to predict,” Kittell said.
Still, Kittell said, most of the more than 100 different computer forecast projections suggest moderate to heavy rain. In the most likely scenario, downtown L.A. will receive 2.62 inches of rain between late Thursday and Sunday, which would cause flooding on roadways and minor, shallow debris flows.
(National Weather Service)
Getting that 2.62 inches of rain through the weekend would vault this month into the category of wettest November since 1985, Kittell said. Downtown L.A. would need to exceed 2.43 inches of rain in November to break that 40-year-old record.
There’s a 30% chance of a worst-case scenario where downtown L.A. receives 4.81 inches of rain, producing mudflows and debris flows. With debris flows, the fast-moving landslides pour down hillsides and pick up not just mud but other debris that can move cars and crash into homes with deadly force. A total of 4.81 inches of rain would be one-third of downtown’s annual rainfall.
Both mudflows and debris flows can be triggered with rain falling at a rate as low as half an inch per hour. But it depends on the burn scar, Kittell said. It would take rain falling at twice that rate — an inch per hour — to trigger flows in some burn scars, he said.
The National Weather Service office in Oxnard said that on Saturday there’s about a 70% chance that the Eaton and Palisades fire burn scars will see rain fall at a rate of 0.5 inches or more per hour. There’s a 38% chance of a rainfall rate of 1 inch or more per hour in those areas.
Rain is expected to start falling by Friday morning in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. Precipitation was forecast to begin Thursday in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
The heaviest rain for Southern California is expected late Friday into Saturday.
(National Weather Service)
Although tornadoes aren’t usually associated with California, they do happen. For the most part, “they’re weak, they’re brief, and usually don’t cause a whole lot of issues,” Kittell said. “But we do get quite a few of them.” Sometimes they form on land, or they begin as waterspouts — a tornado over the ocean — and move onto land.
“They are not like the kind that you typically hear about in the Midwest that last for 15, 30 minutes, or even an hour or two, and are a mile or two wide and cause destructive damage,” Kittell said. “We just don’t have the environment for that,” yet they still pose a threat.
A tornado lasting for five minutes touched down in Santa Cruz County last December, injuring three people, downing trees and power poles, stripping trees of branches, overturning vehicles and damaging street signs.
This weekend’s atmospheric-river-powered storm created a long band of rainfall that on Thursday was stretching across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. It was set to move south and east as it headed to Southern California.
The storm downed trees in the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday and flooded low-lying streets. A tree split and fell in San Francisco’s Western Addition neighborhood, crashing onto a vehicle, local news outlets reported. A tree also fell on a fence in Santa Rosa. Rising waters inundated a section of roadway just west of the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, firefighters said.
Solo vehicle crashes were reported on Highway 1 in Santa Cruz County, the California Highway Patrol said. A pickup truck overturned along Highway 152 between Watsonville and Gilroy, and all lanes of Highway 17 connecting Santa Cruz and San Jose were shut down for some time Thursday night following a crash involving a CHP cruiser; a CHP officer sustained minor injuries.
Rainfall totals were impressive for the region, with San Francisco seeing 1.28 inches — that’s more than half the average monthly rainfall for November for the city. Napa received 1.45 inches; San Francisco International Airport, 1.5; and San Rafael, 2.3 inches.
Through Sunday, Long Beach is expected to receive 2.38 inches of rain; Redondo Beach, 2.48; Oxnard, 2.49; Thousand Oaks, 2.63; Santa Clarita, 2.77; Covina, 2.89; and Santa Barbara, 4.21.
San Diego could get 2 to 2.5 inches of rain; Riverside, San Bernardino, Escondido, and San Clemente, 2.5 to 3 inches; and Anaheim and Irvine, 3 to 4 inches, according to the weather service.
Even the deserts could tally impressive rainfall. Palm Springs may get 1 to 1.5 inches of rain, and Joshua Tree National Park could receive 1.5 to 2 inches.
This storm will not be much of a snow maker for Southern California’s mountains. Snow levels are expected to remain at around 10,000 feet for most of the storm’s duration, said Dave Munyan, a forecaster with the National Weather Service’s San Diego office. By Sunday morning, snow levels will fall to about 7,000 to 7,500 feet, but by then, there won’t be much more moisture left in the storm. Big Bear is forecast to receive around an inch of snow, and Idyllwild is expected to remain snow-free, Munyan said.
“You’re going to get your accumulating snowfall — hefty accumulating snowfall — on the highest peaks of the mountains,” Munyan said.
Winds from the southeast and east are expected to trigger delays at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday and Saturday.
Looking to next week, a storm could return to Southern California on Monday and Tuesday, with another rolling in Thursday and Friday. Both storms are likely to have minor effects. But forecasters are closely watching the second of the two storms, which could develop into something more significant, Kittell said.
A strange scene unfolded at the Adams/Vermont farmers market near USC last week.
The pomegranates, squash and apples were in season, pink guavas were so ripe you could smell their heady scent from a distance, and nutrient-packed yams were ready for the holidays.
But with federal funding in limbo for the 1.5 million people in Los Angeles County who depend on food aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or SNAP — the church parking lot hosting the market was largely devoid of customers.
Even though the market accepts payments through CalFresh, the state’s SNAP program, hardly anyone was lined up when gates opened. Vendors mostly idled alone at their produce stands.
A line of cars stretches more than a mile as people wait to receive a box of free food provided by the L.A. Food Bank in the City of Industry on Wednesday.
“So far we’re doing 50% of what we’d normally do — or less,” said Michael Bach, who works with Hunger Action, a food-relief nonprofit that partners with farmers markets across the greater L.A. area, offering “Market Match” deals to customers paying with CalFresh debit cards.
The deal allows shoppers to buy up to $30 worth of fruit produce for only $15. Skimming a ledger on her table, Bach’s colleague Estrellita Echor noted that only a handful of shoppers had taken advantage of the offer.
All week at farmers markets where workers were stationed, the absence was just as glaring, she said. “I was at Pomona on Saturday — we only had six transactions the whole day,” she said. “Zero at La Mirada.”
CalFresh customers looking to double their money on purchases were largely missing at the downtown L.A. market the next day, Echor said.
A volunteer loads up a box of free food for a family at a drive-through food distribution site in the City of Industry.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
“This program usually pulls in lots of people, but they are either holding on to what little they have left or they just don’t have anything on their cards,” she said.
The disruption in aid comes as a result of the Trump administration’s decision to deliver only partial SNAP payments to states during the ongoing federal government shutdown, skirting court order to restart funds for November. On Friday night, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily blocked the order pending a ruling on the matter by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A study published by her team last year found that 25% of residents in L.A. County — or about 832,000 people — experienced food insecurity, and that among low-income residents, the rate was even higher, 41%. The researchers also found that 29% of county residents experienced nutrition insecurity, meaning they lacked options for getting healthy, nutritious food.
Those figures marked a slight improvement compared to data from 2023, when the end of pandemic-era boosts to state, county and nonprofit aid programs — combined with rising inflation — caused hunger rates to spike just as they did at the start of the pandemic in 2020, de la Haye said.
“That was a big wake-up call — we had 1 in 3 folks in 2020 be food insecure,” de la Haye said. “We had huge lines at food pantries.”
But while the USC study shows the immediate delivery of food assistance through government programs and nonprofits quickly can cut food insecurity rates in an emergency, the researchers discovered many vulnerable Angelenos are not participating in food assistance programs.
Despite the county making strides to enroll more eligible families over the last decade, de la Haye said, only 29% of food insecure households in L.A. County were enrolled in CalFresh, and just 9% in WIC, the federal nutrition program for women, infants and children.
De la Haye said participants in her focus groups shared a mix of reasons why they didn’t enroll: Many didn’t know they qualified, while others said they felt too ashamed to apply for aid, were intimidated by the paperwork involved or feared disclosing their immigration status. Some said they didn’t apply because they earned slightly more than the cutoff amounts for eligibility.
Even many of those those receiving aid struggled: 39% of CalFresh recipients were found to lack an affordable source for food and 45% faced nutrition insecurity.
De la Haye said hunger and problems accessing healthy food have serious short- and long-term health effects — contributing to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as well greater levels of stress, anxiety and depression in adults and children. What’s more, she said, when people feel unsure about their finances, highly perishable items such as fresh, healthy food are often the first things sacrificed because they can be more expensive.
The USC study also revealed stark racial disparities: 31% of Black residents and 32% of Latinos experienced food insecurity, compared to 11% of white residents and 14% of Asians.
De la Haye said her team is analyzing data from this year they will publish in December. That analysis will look at investments L.A. County has made in food system over the last two years, including the allocation of $20 million of federal funding to 80 community organizations working on everything from urban farming to food pantries, and the recent creation of the county’s Office of Food Systems to address challenges to food availability and increase the consumption of healthy foods.
“These things that disrupt people’s ability to get food, including and especially cuts to this key program that is so essential to 1.5 million people in the county — we don’t weather those storms very well,” de la Haye said. “People are just living on the precipice.”
More than 30,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers temporarily lost power Saturday after a widespread outage affected several parts of the city, according to the utility.
The power loss occurred at about 12:55 p.m., impacting customers in Koreatown, Arlington Heights, Leimert Park, Palms and adjacent areas, an LADWP spokesperson said. LADWP began working on the issue at 1:30 p.m., and as of 4 p.m. power had been fully restored to all areas.
The cause of the power outage remains under investigation.
The revelers who packed Tuesday’s election night party in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood were roughly 2,500 miles from the concert hall where New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani celebrated his historic win.
Yet despite that sprawling distance, the crowd, heavily populated with members of the L.A. chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, had no trouble finishing the applause lines delivered by Mamdani, himself a DSA member, during his victory speech.
“New York!” Mamdani bellowed on the oversized television screens hung throughout the Greyhound Bar & Grill. “We’re going to make buses fast and — “
“Free!” the crowd inside the bar yelled back in response.
In Los Angeles, activists with the Democratic Socialists of America have already fired up their campaigns for the June election, sending out canvassing teams and scheduling postcard-writing events for their chosen candidates. But they’re also taking fresh inspiration from Mamdani’s win, pointing to his inclusive, unapologetic campaign and his relentless focus on pocketbook issues, particularly among working-class voters.
The message that propelled Mamdani to victory resonates just as much in L.A., said City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who won her seat in 2022 with logistical support from the DSA.
“What New York City is saying is that the rent is too damn high, that affordability is a huge issue not just on housing, but when it comes to grocery shopping, when it comes to daycare,” she said. “These are the things that we’re also experiencing here in Los Angeles.”
City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, appearing at a rally in Lincoln Heights last year, said New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s message will resonate in L.A.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
DSA-LA, which is a membership organization and not a political party, has elected four of its endorsed candidates to the council since 2020, ousting incumbents in each of the last three election cycles. They’ve done so in large part by knocking on doors and working to increase turnout among renters and lower-income households.
The chapter hopes to win two additional seats in June. Organizers have begun contemplating a full-on socialist City Council — possibly by the end of 2028 — with DSA members holding eight of the council’s 15 seats.
“We would like a socialist City Council majority,” said Benina Stern, co-chair of DSA’s Los Angeles chapter. “Because clearly that is the logical progression, to keep growing the bloc.”
Despite those lofty ambitions, it could take at least five years before the L.A. chapter matches this week’s breakthrough in New York City.
Mayor Karen Bass, a high-profile leader within the Democratic Party with few ties to the DSA, is now running for a second term. Her only major opponent is former schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who occupies the center of the political spectrum in L.A. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, a longtime Republican who is now a Democrat, has not disclosed his intentions but has long been at odds with DSA‘s progressive policies.
In L.A., DSA organizers have put their emphasis on identifying and campaigning for candidates in down-ballot races, not citywide contests. Part of that is due to the fact that L.A. has a weak-mayor system, particularly when compared with New York City, where the mayor has responsibility not just for city services but also public schools and even judicial appointments.
L.A. council members propose and approve legislation, rework the budgets submitted by the mayor and represent districts with more than a quarter of a million people. As a result, DSA organizers have chosen the council as their path to power at City Hall, Stern said.
“The conditions in Los Angeles and New York I think are very different,” she said.
Since 2020, DSA-LA has been highly selective about its endorsement choices. The all-volunteer organization sends applicants a lengthy questionnaire with dozens of litmus test questions: Do they support diverting funds away from law enforcement? Do they oppose L.A.’s decision to host the Olympics? Do they support a repeal of L.A.’s ban on homeless encampments near schools?
Once a candidate secures an endorsement, DSA-LA turns to its formidable pool of volunteers, sending them out to help candidates knock on doors, staff phone banks and stage fundraising events.
During Tuesday’s party, DSA-LA organizers recruited new members to assist with the reelection campaigns of Hernandez and Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former labor organizer. They distributed postcard-sized fliers with the message, “Hate Capitalism? So do we.”
Standing nearby was Estuardo Mazariegos, a tenant rights advocate now running to replace Councilmember Curren Price in a South L.A. district. Mazariegos, 40, said he first became interested in the DSA in the seventh grade, when his middle school civics teacher displayed a DSA flag in her classroom.
The crowd at the Greyhound in Highland Park reacts to results on Tuesday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Mazariegos hailed the results from New York and California, saying voters are “taking back America for the working people of America.” He sounded somewhat less excited about Bass, a former community organizer who has pursued some middle-of-the-road positions, such as hiring more police officers.
Asked if he supports Bass’ bid for a second term, Mazariegos responded: “If she’s up against a billionaire, yes.”
“If she’s up against another comrade, maybe not,” he added, laughing.
When Bass ran in November 2022, DSA-LA grudgingly recommended a vote for her in its popular voter guide, describing her as a “status quo politician.”
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who represents a Hollywood Hills district, is far more enthusiastic. Raman has worked closely with Bass on efforts to move homeless Angelenos indoors, while also seeking fixes to the larger systems that serve L.A.’s unhoused population.
“Karen Bass is the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had in L.A,” said Raman, who co-hosted the election night party with the other three DSA-aligned council members, DSA-LA and others.
Raman was the first of the DSA-backed candidates to win a council seat in L.A., running in 2020 as a reformer who would bring stronger renter protections and a network of community access centers to assist homeless residents.
Two years later, voters elected labor organizer Soto-Martínez and Hernandez. Tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado became the fourth last year, ousting Councilmember Kevin de León.
Stern, the DSA-LA co-chair, said she believes the four council members have brought a “sea change” to City Hall, working with their progressive colleagues to expand the city’s teams of unarmed responders, who are viewed as an alternative to gun-carrying police officers.
The DSA voting bloc also shaped this year’s city budget, voting to reduce the number of new recruits at the Los Angeles Police Department and preserve other city jobs, Stern said.
To be clear, the four-member bloc has pursued those efforts by working with other progressives on the council who are not affiliated with the DSA but more moderate on other issues. Beyond that, the group has plenty of detractors.
Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., said DSA-backed council members are making the city worse, by pushing for a $30 per hour hotel minimum wage and a $32.35 minimum wage for construction workers.
“No one is ever going to build a hotel in this city again, and DSA were a part of that,” he said. “Pretty soon no one will build housing, and the DSA is a part of that too.”
The union that represents LAPD officers vowed to fight the DSA’s effort to expand its reach, saying it would work to ensure that “Angelenos are not bamboozled by the socialist bait and switch.”
“Socialists want to bait Angelenos into talking about affordability, oppression and fairness, get their candidates elected, and then switch to enact their platform that states ‘Defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets … while cutting [police] budgets annually towards zero,’” the union’s board of directors said in a statement.
In New York City, Mamdani has proposed a series of measures to make the city more affordable, including free bus fares, city-run grocery stores and a four-year freeze on rent increases inside rent stabilized apartment units.
Some of those ideas have already been tried in L.A.
In 2020, weeks into the COVID-19 shutdown, Mayor Eric Garcetti placed a moratorium on rent hikes for more than 600,000 rent-stabilized apartments. The council kept that measure in place for four years.
Around the same time, L.A. County’s transit agency suspended mandatory collection of bus fares. The agency started charging bus passengers again in 2022.
City Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez celebrate at the election night party they co-hosted with Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter and two other council members.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
In recent months, the DSA-LA has pushed for new limits on rent increases inside L.A.’s rent-stabilized apartments. Raman, who chairs the council’s housing committee, is backing a yearly cap of 3% in those buildings, most of which were built before October 1978.
Hernandez, whose district stretches from working-class Westlake to rapidly gentrifying Highland Park, is a believer in shifting the Overton Window at City Hall — moving the political debate left and “putting people over profits.”
Like others at the election party, Hernandez is hoping the council will eventually have eight DSA-aligned members in the coming years, saying such a shift would be a “game changer.” With a clear majority, she said, the council would not face a huge battle to approve new tenant protections, expand the network of unarmed response teams and place “accountability measures” on corporations that are “making money off our city.”
“There’s so many things … that we could do easier for the people of the city of Los Angeles if we had a majority,” she said.
Dr. Roy Meals, a longtime hand surgeon, likes to move his feet. He has climbed mountains and he has run three marathons.
But when he shared his latest scheme with his wife a couple of years ago, she had a quick take.
“You’re nuts,” she said.
Maybe so. He was closing in on 80, and his plan was to grab his trekking poles and take a solo hike along the 342-mile perimeter of Los Angeles. His wife found the idea less insane, somewhat, after Meals agreed to hook up with hiking companions here and there.
Dr. Roy Meals with his book, “Walking the Line: Discoveries Along the Los Angeles City Limits.”
But you may be wondering the obvious:
Why would someone hike around a massive, car-choked, pedestrian-unfriendly metropolis of roughly 500 square miles?
Meals had his reasons. Curiosity and restlessness, for starters. Also, a belief that you can’t really get to know a city through a windshield, and a conviction that staying fit, physically and mentally, is the best way to stall the work of Father Time.
One more thing: Meals’ patients over the years have come from every corner of the city, and the Kansas City native considered it a personal shortcoming that he was unfamiliar with much of L.A. despite having called it home for half his life.
To plot his course, Meals unfolded an accordion style map for an overview, then went to navigatela.lacity.org to chart the precise outline of the city limits. The border frames an oddly shaped expanse that resembles a shredded kite, with San Pedro and Wilmington dangling from a string at the southern extremities.
Dr. Roy Meals takes a break from his walk to talk with Louis Lee, owner of JD Hobbies Store, along West 6th Street in downtown San Pedro.
Meals divided his trek into 10-mile segments, 34 in all, and set out to walk two segments each week for four months, traveling counterclockwise from the 5,075-foot summit of Mt. Lukens in the city’s northern reaches.
Day One began with a bang, in a manner of speaking.
Meals slipped on loose rocks near the summit of Mt. Lukens and tumbled, scuffing elbows and knees, and snapping the aluminum shaft of one of his walking sticks.
But Meals is not one to wave a white flag or call for a helicopter evacuation.
“Later, at home, I employed my orthopedic skills to repair the broken pole,” Meals writes in “Walking the Line: Discoveries Along the Los Angeles City Limits,” his just-published book about his travels.
Dr. Roy Meals walks along West 6th Street in San Pedro.
Meals, now 80 and still seeing patients once weekly at a UCLA clinic, remained upright most of the rest of the way, adhering to his self-imposed rule of venturing no farther than one mile in from the city limits. To get back to his starting point each day, he often took buses and found that although it was slow going, riders often exited with a thanks to the driver, which struck him as “wonderful grace notes of acknowledgment.”
The doctor ambled about with the two trekking poles, a cross-country skier on a vast sea of pavement. He carried a small backpack, wore a “Los Angeles” ballcap and a shirt with the city limits outline on the front, and handed out business cards with a link to his book project.
Those who clicked on the link were advised to escape their own neighborhoods and follow Meals’ prescription for life: “Venture forth on foot, and make interesting, life-enriching discoveries. Wherever you live, be neighborly, curious, fit, and engaged!”
Meals was all those things, and as his surname suggests, he was never shy about sampling L.A.’s abundant offerings.
He tried skewered pig intestines at Big Mouth Pinoy in Wilmington, went for tongue and lips offerings at the Tacos y Birria taco truck in Boyle Heights, thoroughly enjoyed a cheeseburger and peach cobbler at Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts, and ventured into Ranch Side Cafe in Sylmar, curious about the sign advertising American, Mexican and Ethiopian food.
Meals tried hang-gliding at Dockweiler Beach, fencing on the Santa Monica border, rock climbing in Chatsworth, boxing and go-kart racing in Sylmar, weightlifting at Muscle Beach in Venice.
Dr. Roy Meals stops to take in the American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial Wall of Honor while walking one of many paths he wrote about in his book.
In each sector, Meals sought out statues and plaques and explored points of history dating back to the Gabrielinos and Chumash, and to the days of Mexican and Spanish rule. He also examined the history of those peculiar twists and turns on the city perimeter, mucking through L.A.’s long-simmering stew of real estate grabs, water politics and annexation schemes.
What remains of the foundation of Campo de Cahuenga in Studio City was one of several locations that “stirred my emotions,” Meals writes in “Walking the Line.” There, in 1847, Andres Pico and John C. Frémont signed the treaty that ceded part of Mexico to the U.S., altering the shape of both countries.
In Venice, Meals was equally moved when he accidentally came upon an obelisk marking the spot where, in April 1942, more than a thousand Japanese Americans boarded buses for Manzanar.
“May this monument … remind us to be forever vigilant about defending our constitutional rights,” it read. “The powers of government must never again perpetrate an injustice against any group based solely on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race or religion.”
At firehouse museums, Meals learned of times when “Black firefighters were met with extreme hostility in the mixed-race firehouses, including being forced to eat separately. … Little did I know that visiting fire museums would be a lesson in the history of racism in Los Angeles,” he writes.
Dr. Roy Meals walks past a display of an armor-piercing projectile in San Pedro.
Although Meals visited well-known destinations such as the Watts Towers and Getty Villa, some of his most enjoyable experiences were what he called “by the way” discoveries that were not on his initial list of points of interest, such as the obelisk in Venice.
“Among those that I stumbled across,” Meals writes, “were the Platinum Prop House, Sims House of Poetry, and warehouses stuffed with spices, buttons, candy, Christmas decorations, or caskets. These proprietors, along with museum docents and those caring for disadvantaged children, bees, rescued guinea pigs, and injured marine mammals genuinely love what they do; and their level of commitment is inspiring and infectious.”
His book is infectious, too. In a city with miles of crumbling sidewalks and countless tent villages, among other obvious failings, we can all find a thousand things to complain about. But Meals put his stethoscope to the heartbeat of Los Angeles and found a thousand things to cheer.
When I asked the good doctor if he’d be willing to revisit part of his trek with me, he suggested we meet in the area to which he awarded his gold medal for its many points of interest — San Pedro and Wilmington. There, he had visited the Banning Mansion, the Drum Barracks, the Point Fermin Lighthouse, the Friendship Bell gifted to L.A. by Korea, the varied architecture of Vinegar Hill, the World War II bunker, the sunken city, the Maritime Museum, etc., etc., etc.
Meals was in his full get-up when we met at 6th and Gaffey in San Pedro. The trekking sticks, the T-shirt with the jigsaw map of L.A., the modest “Los Angeles” hat.
“Let’s go,” he said, and we headed toward the waterfront, but didn’t get far.
Dr. Roy Meals takes a break from his walk to visit with famed San Pedro resident John Papadakis, 75, former owner of the now-closed Greek Taverna in the neighborhood.
A gentleman was exiting an office and we traded rounds of “good morning.” He identified himself as John Papadakis, owner of the now-closed Greek Taverna restaurant, a longtime local institution. He invited us back into his office, a museum of photos, Greek statues and sports memorabilia (he and son Petros, the popular radio talk show host, were gridiron grinders at USC).
San Pedro “is the city’s seaside soul,” Papadakis proclaimed.
And we were on our way, eyes wide open to the wonders of a limitless city that reveals more of itself each time you turn a corner, say hello, and hear the first line of a never-ending story.
Down the street, we peeked in on renovations at the art deco Warner Grand Theater, which is approaching its 100th birthday. We checked out vintage copies of Life magazine at Louis Lee’s JD Hobbies, talked to Adrian Garcia about the “specializing in senior dogs” aspect of his “Dog Groomer” shop, and got the lowdown on 50 private schools whose uniforms come from Norman’s Clothing, circa 1937.
At the post office, we checked out the 1938 Fletcher Martin mural of mail delivery. Back outside, with a view of the port and the sunlit open sea, we met a merchant seaman, relaxing on a bench, who told us his son worked for the New York Times. I later found a moving story by that reporter on his long search for the man we’d just met.
“Traveling on foot allowed me to reflect on and grow to respect LA as never before,” Meals wrote in his book.
On our walk, while discussing what next, Meals said he’s thinking of exploring San Francisco in the same manner.
We were approaching Point Fermin, where Meals pointed out the serene magnificence of a Moreton Bay fig tree that threw an acre of shade and cooled a refreshing salt-air breeze.
Dr. Roy Meals walks along the L.A. Harbor West Path, one of many paths he wrote about in his book, in San Pedro.
“If anything,” Meals told me, “I’m quicker to look at small things. You know, stop and appreciate a flower, or even just an interesting pattern of shadows on the street.”
The message of his book, he said, is a simple one.
SAN FRANCISCO — About 24 hours after President Trump declared San Francisco such a crime-ridden “mess” that he was recommending federal forces be sent to restore order, Manit Limlamai, 43, and Kai Saetern, 32, rolled their eyes at the suggestion.
The pair — both in the software industry — were with friends Thursday in Dolores Park, a vibrant green space with sweeping views of downtown, playing volleyball under a blue sky and shining autumn sun. All around them, people sat on benches with books, flew kites, played with dogs or otherwise lounged away the afternoon on blankets in the grass.
Both Limlamai and Saetern said San Francisco of course has issues, and some rougher neighborhoods — but that’s any city.
“I’ve lived here for 10 years and I haven’t felt unsafe, and I’ve lived all over the city,” Saetern said. “Every city has its problems, and I don’t think San Francisco is any different,” but “it’s not a hellscape,” said Limlamai, who has been in the city since 2021.
Both said Trump’s suggestion that he might send in troops was more alarming than reassuring — especially, Limlamai said, on top of his recent remark that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. military forces.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate at all,” he said. “The military is not trained to do what needs to be done in these cities.”
Across San Francisco, residents, visitors and prominent local leaders expressed similar ideas — if not much sharper condemnation of any troop deployment. None shied away from the fact that San Francisco has problems, especially with homelessness. Several also mentioned a creeping urban decay, and that the city needs a bit of a polish.
But federal troops? That was a hard no.
A range of people on Market Street in downtown San Francisco on Thursday.
“It’s just more of [Trump’s] insanity,” said Peter Hill, 81, as he played chess in a slightly edgier park near City Hall. Hill said using troops domestically was a fascist power play, and “a bad thing for the entire country.”
“It’s fascism,” agreed local activist Wendy Aragon, who was hailing a cab nearby. Her Latino family has been in the country for generations, she said, but she now fears speaking Spanish on the street given that immigration agents have admitted targeting people who look or sound Latino, and troops in the city would only exacerbate those fears. “My community is under attack right now.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said troop deployments to the city were “completely unnecessary” and “typical Trump: petty, vindictive retaliation.”
“He wants to attack anyone who he perceives as an enemy, and that includes cities, and so he started with L.A. and Southern California because of its large immigrant community, and then he proceeded to cities with large Black populations like Chicago, and now he’s moving on to cities that are just perceived as very lefty like Portland and now San Francisco,” Wiener said.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defended such deployments and noted crime reductions in cities, including Washington, D.C., and Memphis, where local officials — including D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat — have embraced them.
“America’s once great cities have descended into chaos and crime as a result of Democrat policies that put criminals first and law-abiding citizens last. Making America Safe Again — especially crime-ridden cities — was a key campaign promise from the President that the American people elected him to fulfill,” Jackson said. “San Francisco Democrats should look at the tremendous results in DC and Memphis and listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Bowser and welcome the President in to clean up their city.”
A police officer shuts the door to his car after a person was allegedly caught carrying a knife near a sign promoting an AI-powered museum exhibit in downtown San Francisco.
A presidential ‘passion’
San Francisco — a bastion of liberal politics that overwhelmingly voted against Trump in the last election — has been derided by the conservative right for generations as a great American jewel lost to destructive progressive policies.
With its tech-heavy economy and downtown core hit hard by the pandemic and the nation’s shift toward remote work, the city has had a particularly rough go in recent years, which only exacerbated its image as a city in decline. That it produced some of Trump’s most prominent political opponents — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris — has only made it more of a punching bag.
In August, Trump suggested San Francisco needed federal intervention. “You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” he said in the Oval Office. “We’ll clean that one up, too.”
Then, earlier this month, to the chagrin of liberal leaders across the city, Marc Benioff, the billionaire Salesforce founder and Time magazine owner who has long been a booster of San Francisco, said in an interview with the New York Times that he supported Trump and welcomed Guard troops in the city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said, just as his company was preparing to open its annual Dreamforce convention in the city, complete with hundreds of private security officers.
The U.S. Constitution generally precludes military forces from serving in police roles in the U.S.
On Friday, Benioff reversed himself and apologized for his earlier stance. “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he wrote on X.
He also apologized for “the concern” his earlier support for troops in the city had caused, and praised San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, for bringing crime down.
Billionaire Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, also called for federal intervention in the city, writing on his X platform that downtown San Francisco is “a drug zombie apocalypse” and that federal intervention was “the only solution at this point.”
Trump made his latest remarks bashing San Francisco on Wednesday, again from the Oval Office.
Trump said it was “one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago,” but “now it’s a mess” — and that he was recommending federal forces move into the city to make it safer. “I’m gonna be strongly recommending — at the request of government officials, which is always nice — that you start looking at San Francisco,” he said to leading members of his law enforcement team.
Trump did not specify exactly what sort of deployment he meant, or which kinds of federal forces might be involved. He also didn’t say which local officials had allegedly requested help — a claim Wiener called a lie.
“Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot, and that’s exactly what our administration is working to deliver,” Trump said, before adding that sending federal forces into American cities had become “a passion” of his.
Kai Saetern, 32, was playing volleyball in Dolores Park on Thursday. Saetern said he has never felt unsafe living in neighborhoods all over the city for the last 10 years.
Crime is down citywide
The responses from San Francisco, both to Benioff and Trump, came swiftly, ranging from calm discouragement to full-blown outrage.
Lurie did not respond directly, but his office pointed reporters to his recent statements that crime is down 30% citywide, homicides are at a 70-year low, car break-ins are at a 22-year low and tent encampments are at their lowest number on record.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Lurie said. “But I trust our local law enforcement.”
San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins was much more fiery, writing online that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had turned “so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups,” and that she stood ready to prosecute federal officers if they harm city residents.
Attendees exit the Dreamforce convention downtown on Thursday in San Francisco.
“If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents … I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day,” she said.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — whose seat Wiener is reportedly going to seek — said the city “does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos” and will continue to increase public safety locally and “without the interference of a President seeking headlines.”
Newsom said the use of federal troops in American cities is a “clear violation” of federal law, and that the state was prepared to challenge any such deployment to San Francisco in court, just as it challenged such deployments in Los Angeles earlier this year.
The federal appellate court that oversees California and much of the American West has so far allowed troops to remain in L.A., but is set to continue hearing arguments in the L.A. case soon.
Trump had used anti-immigration enforcement protests in L.A. as a justification to send troops there. In San Francisco, Newsom said, he lacks any justification or “pretext” whatsoever.
“There’s no existing protest at a federal building. There’s no operation that’s being impeded. I guess it’s just a ‘training ground’ for the President of United States,” Newsom said. “It is grossly illegal, it’s immoral, it’s rather delusional.”
Nancy DeStefanis, 76, a longtime labor and environmental activist who was at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday to complain about Golden Gate Park being shut to regular visitors for paid events, was similarly derisive of troops entering the city.
“As far as I’m concerned, and I think most San Franciscans are concerned, we don’t want troops here. We don’t need them,” she said.
Passengers walk past a cracked window from the Civic Center BART station in downtown San Francisco.
‘An image I don’t want to see’
Not far away, throngs of people wearing Dreamforce lanyards streamed in and out of the Moscone Center, heading back and forth to nearby Market Street and pouring into restaurants, coffee shops and take-out joints. The city’s problems — including homelessness and associated grittiness — were apparent at the corners of the crowds, even as chipper convention ambassadors and security officers moved would-be stragglers along.
Not everyone was keen to be identified discussing Trump or safety in the city, with some citing business reasons and others a fear of Trump retaliating against them. But lots of people had opinions.
Sanjiv, a self-described “techie” in his mid-50s, said he preferred to use only his first name because, although he is a U.S. citizen now, he emigrated from India and didn’t want to stick his neck out by publicly criticizing Trump.
He called homelessness a “rampant problem” in San Francisco, but less so than in the past — and hardly something that would justify sending in military troops.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not like the city’s under siege.”
Claire Roeland, 30, from Austin, Texas, said she has visited San Francisco a handful of times in recent years and had “mixed” experiences. She has family who live in surrounding neighborhoods and find it completely safe, she said, but when she’s in town it’s “predominantly in the business district” — where it’s hard not to be disheartened by the obvious suffering of people with addiction and mental illness and the grime that has accumulated in the emptied-out core.
“There’s a lot of unfortunate urban decay happening, and that makes you feel more unsafe than you actually are,” she said, but there isn’t “any realistic need to send in federal troops.”
She said she doesn’t know what troops would do other than confront homeless people, and “that’s an image I don’t want to see.”
Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.
Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner is planning to announce a challenge to Mayor Karen Bass in the 2026 election, arguing that the city has failed to properly respond to crime, rising housing costs and the devastating Palisades fire.
Beutner, a philanthropist and former investment banker who lives in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, would become the first serious challenger to Bass, who is running for her second and final term.
Beutner said in an interview Saturday that city officials at all levels showed a “failure of leadership” on the fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead.
The inferno seriously damaged Beutner’s house, forcing him and his family to rent elsewhere in the neighborhood, and destroyed his mother-in-law’s home entirely.
“When you have broken hydrants, a reservoir that’s broken and is out of action, broken [fire] trucks that you can’t dispatch ahead of time, when you don’t pre-deploy at the adequate level, when you don’t choose to hold over the Monday firefighters to be there on Tuesday to help fight the fire — to me, it’s a failure of leadership,” Beutner said.
“At the end of the day,” he added, “the buck stops with the mayor.”
A representative for Bass’ campaign declined to comment.
Beutner’s attacks come days after federal prosecutors filed charges in the Palisades fire, accusing a 29-year-old of intentionally starting a New Year’s Day blaze that later rekindled into the deadly inferno.
With the federal investigation tied up, the Fire Department released a long-awaited after-action report Wednesday. The 70-page report found that firefighters were hampered by poor communication, inexperienced leadership, a lack of resources and an ineffective process for recalling them back to work. Bass announced a number of changes in light of the report.
Beutner, a onetime advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, could pose a serious political threat to Bass. He would come to the race with a wide range of experiences — finance, philanthropy, local government and even the struggling journalism industry.
Although seven other people have filed paperwork to run for her seat, none have the fundraising muscle or name recognition to mount a major campaign. Rick Caruso, the real estate developer whom Bass defeated in 2022, has publicly flirted with the idea of another run but has stopped short of announcing a decision.
Bass beat Caruso by a wide margin in 2022 even though the shopping mall mogul outspent her by an enormous margin. Caruso has been an outspoken critic of her mayorship, particularly on her response to the Palisades fire.
Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said he believes that Beutner would face an uphill climb in attempting to unseat Bass — even with the criticism surrounding the handling of the Palisades fire. However, his entry into the race could inspire other big names to launch their own mayoral campaigns, shattering the “wall of invincibility” that Bass has tried to create.
“If Beutner jumps in and starts to get some traction, it makes it easier for Caruso to jump in,” Guerra said. “Because all you’ve got to do is come in second in the primary [election], and then see what happens in the general.”
Earlier Saturday, The Times reported that Beutner’s longtime X account had featured — then quickly removed — the banner image “AUSTIN for LA MAYOR,” along with the words: “This account is being used for campaign purposes by Austin Beutner for LA Mayor 2026.” That logo was also added and then removed from other Beutner social media accounts.
Beutner’s announcement, which is currently planned for Monday, comes in a year of crises for the mayor and her city. She was out of the country in January, taking part in a diplomatic mission to Ghana, when the ferocious Palisades fire broke out.
Upon her return, she faced withering criticism over the city’s preparation for the high winds, as well as Fire Department operations and the overall emergency response.
In the months that followed, the city was faced with a $1-billion budget shortfall, triggered in part by pay raises for city workers that were approved by Bass. To close the gap, the City Council eliminated about 1,600 vacant positions, slowed down hiring at the Los Angeles Police Department and rejected Bass’ proposal for dozens of additional firefighters.
By June, Bass faced a different emergency: waves of masked and heavily armed federal agents apprehending immigrants at car washes, Home Depots and elsewhere, sparking furious street protests.
Bass’ standing with voters was badly damaged in the wake of the Palisades fire, with polling in March showing that fewer than 20% of L.A. residents gave her fire response high marks.
But after President Trump put the city in his cross hairs, the mayor regained her political footing, responding swiftly and sharply. She mobilized her allies against the immigration crackdown and railed against the president’s deployment of the National Guard, arguing that the soldiers were “used as props.”
Beutner — who, like Bass, is a Democrat — said he voted for Bass four years ago and had come to regret his choice.
He described Los Angeles as a city “adrift,” with unsolved property crimes, rising trash fees and housing that is unaffordable to many.
Beutner said that he supports Senate Bill 79, the law that will force the city to allow taller, denser buildings near rail stations, “in concept.”
“I just wish that we had leadership in Los Angeles that had been ahead of this, so we would have had a greater say in some of the rules,” he said. “But conceptually, yes, we’ve got to build more housing.”
Beutner is a co-founder and former president of Evercore Partners, a financial services company that advises its clients on mergers, acquisitions and other transactions. In 2008, he retired from that firm — now simply called Evercore Inc. — after he was seriously injured in a bicycling accident.
In 2010, he became Villaraigosa’s jobs czar, taking on the elevated title of first deputy mayor and receiving wide latitude to strike business deals on Villaraigosa’s behalf, just as the city was struggling to emerge from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Slightly more than a year into his job, Beutner filed paperwork to begin exploring a run for mayor. He secured the backing of former Mayor Richard Riordan and many in the business community but pulled the plug in 2012.
In 2014, Beutner became publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where he focused on digital experimentation and forging deeper ties with readers. He lasted roughly a year in that job before Tribune Publishing Co., the parent company of The Times, ousted him.
Three years later, Beutner was hired as the superintendent of L.A. Unified, which serves schoolchildren in Los Angeles and more than two dozen other cities and unincorporated areas. He quickly found himself at odds with the teachers union, which staged a six-day strike.
The union settled for a two-year package of raises totaling 6%. Beutner, for his part, signed off on a parcel tax to generate additional education funding, but voters rejected the proposal.
In 2022, after leaving the district, Beutner led the successful campaign for Proposition 28, which requires that a portion of California’s general fund go toward visual and performing arts instruction.
Earlier this year, Beutner and several others sued L.A. Unified, accusing the district of violating Proposition 28 by misusing state arts funding and failing to provide legally required arts instruction to students.
He also is immersed in philanthropy, having founded the nonprofit Vision to Learn, which provides vision screenings, eye exams and glasses to children in low-income communities.
The estimated cost of Brightline West’s high-speed rail line connecting Southern California to Las Vegas has surged to $21.5 billion, nearly doubling from its last publicly confirmed estimate of $12.4 billion in January 2025. The updated figure was disclosed in a US Department of Transportation (DOT) report released this week.
Brightline West will travel 218 miles on the median of Interstate 15 at speeds of up to 200 mph, making the trip in about two hours. (Image: Brightline West)
According to Bloomberg, the increase is primarily driven by rising labor and material costs. In response, Brightline West is seeking a $6 billion federal loan from the Trump administration to replace a previously planned $6 billion bank facility.
The company also intends to raise additional equity to cover the remaining cost escalation.
“We have had very productive conversations with USDOT and the Federal Railroad Administration over the last few months to continue to move Brightline West forward,” said Brightline CEO Mike Reininger, speaking to Bloomberg in September.
Brightline West previously secured a $3 billion federal grant under the Biden administration, structured as a reimbursement contingent on meeting minimum spending thresholds.
Will Trump Derail It?
The future of federal funding for Brightline West has come under scrutiny amid broader cuts to high-speed rail initiatives.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration canceled a $64 million planning grant for a proposed Dallas–Houston rail line. Then in August, it withdrew $4 billion in federal support for California’s Los Angeles–San Francisco high-speed rail project, whose cost has ballooned from $33 billion in 2008 to $128 billion.
Brightline West appears to remain on track, however, likely due to its mostly private financing model.
“We are excited to be the only high-speed rail project currently supported by the Trump administration,” Reininger told Bloomberg.
Slow Train Coming
Stations would be located along the route in Victor Valley, Hesperia and, eventually, the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport, not shown on this map, which is scheduled to open near Jean, Nev. between 2035-37. (Image: Brightline)
In September 2018, Brightline announced it had acquired the old XpressWest high-speed rail project, which had previously received approval to build a Vegas-to-LA high speed rail.
Two years later, construction costs were projected to be $8 billion. That amount was updated to $10 billion in mid-2023. During a bond offering in January 2025, the cost was updated again to $12.4 billion.
The last estimate, which was never officially announced, was $16 billion, according to the DOT.
In April 2024, construction on the project began following a groundbreaking ceremony, though only field investigation work and utility installation have been completed so far.
The Las Vegas terminus will be constructed by McCarthy Building Co. on Las Vegas Boulevard near Blue Diamond Road. Although that’s 2.5 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip, ride-hailing services, resort shuttles, and car rentals will be accessible at the station.
The Southern California terminus will drop passengers in Rancho Cucamonga, where light rail connections can carry them the 37 additional miles southwest to downtown LA, which for most people will take about an hour.
Brightline West has abandoned its initial hope of opening in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA, admitting that service won’t be possible until at least December 2028.
The Florida-based company previously promised to charge $119 for a one-way coach trip and $133 for VIP service. It has not said if that estimate will rise in step with the project’s construction cost.
In 1965, Robert “Rabbit” Jaramillo and his friends were on the cusp of becoming rock ‘n’ roll royalty.
Their Eastside quartet, Cannibal and the Headhunters, had a spring smash with “Land of 1,000 Dances.” The hypnotic tune with a memorable “nah na na na nah” chorus earned them appearances on TV music variety programs like “American Bandstand.” They played at concerts with chart toppers like the Temptations, the Righteous Brothers, Marvin Gaye and the Rolling Stones. The vocal group’s tightly choreographed performances impressed the Beatles, who asked them to be an opening act for their second U.S. tour that summer.
The Headhunters returned to L.A. in August with the Fab Four to play two shows at the Hollywood Bowl just weeks after the Watts riots. Jaramillo danced with such energy that his pants ripped while he and the others scooted across the stage on their behinds, drawing delighted shrieks from the hometown crowd.
“We were the act, the act!” Jaramillo told the Times in 2015. “Didn’t make no difference what color you are. We’re here, we’d perform, and we’d do our best to show ‘em a good time.”
When the Beatles run ended a few nights later, the Headhunters went back on the road through the fall with another popular British Invasion act, the Animals.
But Jaramillo and his friends never recorded another hit, and he left the group two years later.
“He wanted to keep going, but he needed to make money for his family,” said his daughter, Julie Trujillo. “He always had regret about that.”
Jaramillo died Aug. 8 of congestive heart failure in Pueblo, Colo. He was 78.
After leaving the band, he slunk into such musical obscurity that when Tom Waldman began to research what became his 1998 book “Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll from Southern California,” the word was that the former Headhunter was already dead. Instead, Waldman found him in Pueblo, where Jaramillo had moved in the late 1970s to continue his post-Headhunters career as a railroad signal maintainer.
His still-strong tenor was reserved for belting gospel songs at the Pentecostal church he attended.
The book sparked renewed interest in the Eastside’s 1960s Chicano rock scene, and Jaramillo reunited with bandmates to perform for a few more years before adoring crowds. As the last surviving Headhunter, he appeared in documentaries and radio interviews for the rest of his life to recount that magical summer of 1965 when four Mexican Americans from L.A. proved to the world they could shine next to some of the biggest rock groups of all time.
Born in the Northern California city of Colusa to Mexican immigrants, Jaramillo and his family moved to Boyle Heights when he was young. He grew up in an era when young Mexican Americans on the Eastside were absorbing genres from across Los Angeles — doo-wop from South L.A., surf rock from the coast, the tight harmonies and lovelorn lyrics of Mexican trios — to create a distinct genre later on called Chicano rock or brown-eyed soul. While attending Lincoln High, Jaramillo, his brother Joe and their friend Richard Lopez started a group called Bobby and the Classics, practicing their moves inside what used to be a chicken coop in the Jaramillos’ backyard.
With the addition of Frankie Garcia as lead singer, Bobby and the Classics renamed themselves the Headhunters after a shrunken head that Jaramillo hung on the rearview mirror of his ’49 Chevy. Their stage personas were based on their neighborhood nicknames: Cannibal for Garcia, Scar for Lopez, YoYo for Joe. Robert was Rabbit because of his large front teeth.
The teens quickly became local favorites, performing at church halls and auditoriums. A local producer recorded “Land of 1,000 Dances” with members of car clubs singing along and clapping in the studio to re-create the verve of an Eastside party. It topped out at No. 30 on the Billboard charts, which Jaramillo found out while picking peaches in Northern California with his brother and Lopez to help their family’s finances.
“We get a call — ‘You guy’s gotta come back! The record’s a hit!,” Jaramillo recounted decades later in a documentary. “‘We gotta go to this ‘Hullabaloo’ show!’ We made enough money to get our sorry butts back home.”
Eastside Chicano rock group Cannibal and The Headhunters perform on the NBC TV music show ‘Hullabaloo’ in March 1965 in New York City, New York. Robert “Rabbit” Jaramillo is second from right.
Their rollicking appearance on the nationally syndicated program was what members claimed caught the attention of Paul McCartney, who supposedly told Beatles manager Brian Epstein he wanted the “Nah Nah boys” to open for them.
“I remember asking him how big of a deal that was, and Dad said, ‘I never knew anything about the Beatles,’” Trujillo said. “To him, all he cared about was that he was singing.”
Trujillo said her father shared anecdotes over the years about the Headhunters’ short stint in the spotlight: the time he and Ringo Starr sneaked away from chaperones to get high, or when Cher sat on Jaramillo’s lap while the two took a crowded taxi somewhere.
“I do remember my dad saying that their manager screwed them a bit, that they weren’t getting any money and the guys just had to start careers,” Trujillo said. “But we didn’t see him as a famous person. We just saw him as Dad.”
The performing itch returned to Jaramillo when he retired from the Santa Fe railroad in the 1990s and moved back to Southern California. Gregory Esparza joined the Jaramillo brothers and Lopez in 1999 to take the place of Garcia, who had died three years earlier. Esparza said those Headhunters never performed much publicly because of a copyright dispute over the name, but he remembered rehearsing with the original members “hundreds” of times.
“It was about reliving what they had at such a young age — reaching the top of the mountain at faster-than-light speed,” said Esparza, who’d go on to front another legendary Eastside Chicano rock group, Thee Midniters. “Getting that recognition really meant a lot to them.”
He recalled a festival in San Bernardino where the promoter told the group that they wouldn’t get paid if they identified themselves as the Headhunters. “So Rabbit goes on stage, gets a big smile and said, ‘You all know who we are!’ and everyone cheered.”
Health issues brought Jaramillo back to Colorado in the mid-2000s, but singing never left his life. He was inducted into the Chicano Music Hall of Fame during a 2017 ceremony at Su Teatro in Denver, drawing roars from the audience when he went onstage with his cane only to toss it aside and dance to the Headhunters’ signature song. Fellow congregants at Jaramillo’s longtime church, Good Shepherd Fellowship in Pueblo, regularly asked him to perform Christian songs — a favorite was “My Tribute” by gospel pioneer Andraé Crouch. He also loved to do karaoke with his grandson Daniel Hernandez, preferring oldies like “Daddy’s Home” and “Sixteen Candles.”
“No one knew who he was, and he never said who he was,” said Hernandez, a Phoenix resident who grew up in East L.A. but spent time with Jaramillo in his later years. “But after he sang, we would always have people buying us beers and telling him, ‘Hey, you’re a great singer!’”
Jaramillo is survived by two brothers; eight children; 15 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren. Services were held at Good Shepherd Fellowship and ended with his casket being wheeled out to “Land of 1,000 Dances.”
