Andrew Meieran is about to reopen the doors of one of L.A.’s legendary restaurants in a bid to once again make it an offbeat dining and entertainment destination.
Meieran is the proprietor of Clifton’s Republic, the kitschy, forest-themed restaurant on Broadway in downtown’s Historic Core that for nearly a century served up comfort food such as pot roast, mashed potatoes and Jell-O. The five-story restaurant and bar complex has been closed for the last year after a burst water pipe caused a flood that destroyed the kitchen and collapsed the ceilings on three floors.
Clifton’s is scheduled to reopen next month after extensive repairs and renovations. Among the changes patrons will find is a basement venue several years in the making that Meieran said is “dedicated to innovation and the magic of experiences” with “entertainment, cocktails and culinary offerings.”
Meieran is keeping details under wraps for now, but he has demonstrated a knack for creating provocative entertainment and dining venues through an obsessive attention to offbeat details, as well as a willingness to spend more money than most real estate developers to realize his vision and preserve the historic integrity of his projects.
A Bay Area transplant with a background in real estate development and filmmaking, Meieran emerged on the L.A. scene in 2007 when he opened the Edison, a subterranean nightclub he created in a former power plant deep under a century-old building on 2nd Street.
In 2010 he took over Clifton’s from the family that had operated it since the 1930s, when founder Clifford Clinton purchased the lease of the former Boos Bros. cafeteria on Broadway and set out to create a space that would evoke the coastal redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Clinton spent summers growing up. After taking over, Meieran closed the restaurant for nearly four years for renovations and upgrades and again during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Times spoke with Meieran to discuss his plans for reviving Clifton’s after the current shutdown, as well as his thoughts about the evolving nature of the bar and restaurant business during a time of change downtown. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Since the pandemic began, the restaurant business has been battered and put through changes that have made it hard for owners to operate profitably. How do you intend to make a go of it?
People need, and I emphasize “NEED” in capital letters, to be able to disengage from their devices and balance their life with physical and social interaction with people who are there and present around them. We are catering to people who are looking for a much more interactive lifestyle and are craving physical experiences to balance the ubiquitous online presence.
A view of the interior of Clifton’s Republic.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Clifton’s exists in L.A.’s collective memory as a vast cafeteria in a whimsical woodland setting, but we don’t see cafeterias much anymore. Why is that? Will we get back Clifton’s as we remember it?
Cafeterias used to be the dominant form of food delivery and food service and now, with very few exceptions, it’s not. There are clear reasons for that that are understandable and reasonable — you need tons of people in a captive audience to make a cafeteria work. You need volume and you need stable, reasonable food prices that you can pass on to your guests. That’s completely absent in this era.
So what will Clifton’s include when it reopens?
It will be fully operating as a restaurant, lounge and nightlife destination that will include the Brookdale historic dining hall people remember as Forest Glen, Walt Disney’s original inspiration for Disneyland. We’ll also reopen the Monarch Bar on the second floor and the Pacific Seas “adventure bar” on the third floor. The basement will open in midsummer.
Obviously downtown has changed a lot from Clifton’s heyday in the 20th century when Broadway was L.A.’s premier shopping and entertainment district. Occupancy in office buildings, which used to provide a steady source of lunchtime customers, has dwindled substantially since the COVID-19 lockdown. What are the prospects for downtown businesses like Clifton’s?
It’s obviously a very different environment from what it was before the pandemic. People have altered their habits and patterns and businesses have responded accordingly, with some closing and others shifting their focuses. It’s a tectonic level shift, something that hasn’t happened in generations, and it’s happening very rapidly now. It was triggered initially by the pandemic but followed up by technological shifts that have altered the dining experience such as app-based ordering, touchscreens and the potentially revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence.
It’s hard for people to really recognize what’s coming next and where this is all going. Obviously that makes it difficult for a business to respond and for other people to make investments and to determine where we’re going to be in 18 months, three years or five years down the road, which is what you need in business.
Downtown, because of the level of the impact and its density, is slower to respond to change than some other, more nimble communities. It’s like turning a tanker ship that doesn’t turn on a dime. It’s taking a lot more effort and and concerted focus to shift its direction.
What are the odds that the Historic Core can mount a comeback?
Broadway, in particular, has all of the ingredients that make for extraordinary projects and extraordinary communities sitting here waiting for the right catalyst. It has density, historic infrastructure and buildings that have an intrinsic beauty and an intrinsic connection to guests, residents,and visitors. And it’s got the location in terms of accessibility with plenty of parking and service by transit.
In January, fans and conservationists celebrated when the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission recommended landmark status for Marilyn Monroe’s home, a crucial step in saving the residence from being demolished.
The new owners of the Brentwood property were less ecstatic. They sued the city of L.A. on Monday for the right to demolish it, claiming that city officials acted unconstitutionally in their efforts to designate the home as a landmark and accusing them of “backdoor machinations” in trying to preserve a house that doesn’t meet the criteria for status as a historic cultural monument.
The lawsuit comes from heiress Brinah Milstein and her husband, reality TV producer Roy Bank, who bought the Spanish Colonial-style home last summer for $8.35 million and immediately laid out plans to raze it. They owned the house next door and hoped to combine the two properties to expand their place, according to the lawsuit.
Monroe bought the house in 1962 for $75,000 and died there six months later after an apparent overdose at the age of 36. The phrase “Cursum Perficio” — Latin for “The journey ends here” — was adorned in tile on the front porch, though its origin is a mystery.
An aerial view of the house where Marilyn Monroe died is seen on July 26, 2002, in Brentwood.
(Mel Bouzad / Getty Images)
Fans and conservationists claim the residence is a part of Hollywood history and a physical reminder of Monroe’s legacy.
Milstein and Bank disagree. Their lawsuit claims that the home has had 14 owners since Monroe’s death and has been substantially altered, with over a dozen permits issued for various remodels over the last 60 years.
“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,” the lawsuit says.
The house isn’t visible from the street, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a tourist hot spot. Fans and tour buses flock to the property to snap pictures of the privacy wall, which the lawsuit claims is a nuisance to the neighborhood.
The battle over the home has been brewing since September 2023, when the city issued a demolition permit to Milstein and Bank on Sept. 7. The public outcry was swift, and L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park said she received hundreds of emails and phone calls urging her office to initiate the process of declaring the home a historic cultural monument in order to save it.
Park held a news conference titled “Marilyn Monroe Home Preservation” the next day, delivering an impassioned speech while wearing red lipstick and short blond hair in a nod to Monroe.
After the speech, the City Council voted to begin the landmark consideration process, nullifying the demolition permits. The council will vote to officially on whether to declare the house a historic cultural monument this summer.
The goal of the lawsuit is to cancel that vote and restore the right to demolish the property.
While addressing the Cultural Heritage Commission in January, Milstein suggested relocating the home rather than designating it a landmark. It’s unclear whether that option is still possible.
“In the eight years that we have lived next door, we have seen the property change owners two times,” Milstein said while addressing the commission. “We have watched it go unmaintained and unkept. We purchased the property because it is within feet of ours. And it is not a historic cultural monument.”
The process of protecting potentially historic homes has been a hot topic in recent weeks. It most recently surfaced when Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger demolished the Zimmerman House, a beloved Midcentury home designed by Craig Ellwood, to build a modern mansion in its place.
The demolition sparked an outcry among locals and architecture enthusiasts, who questioned why the city allowed the Midcentury “time capsule” to be torn down.
South Los Angeles resident Channing Martinez recalls the days years ago when he couldn’t find enough change for the bus and was forced to hop on his bicycle.
Martinez, 36, co-director of the Labor Community Strategy Center, a think tank and advocacy organization for working-class families, rode roughly seven miles to El Camino College in Torrance from his home near Florence Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard. He then transferred to Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester, which was a nine-mile trek.
“It was a heck of a ride that I’ve never forgotten,” Martinez said. “But in those days, I had no choice. I had to get to school.”
Today, Martinez’s community organization is one of several groups behind a plan to bring transportation access to South Los Angeles in the form of e-bikes.
People posed with some of the 250 e-bikes.
(Courtesy of Colin Sweeney)
The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator and L.A.’s Department of Transportation, aided by nearly $3 million in funding from the California Air Resources Board, debuted their e-bike “lending library” Tuesday at Leimert Park’s Ride On! Bike Co-Op.
The library was christened the “South Central Power Up” and was bolstered by the delivery of 250 e-bikes that are immediately available to the public.
“We are very excited to launch this pilot, which will meet an essential need for the community, making checking out a clean, reliable e-bike as simple as getting a book at the library,”the incubator’s president and chief executive, Matt Petersen, said in a statement.
The bikes will be placed at seven locations throughout South Los Angeles and will be available for rental for up to one month. Michelle Kinman, the incubator’s senior vice president of market transportation, said the 250-unit fleet comprises 215 commuter bikes, 29 cargo bikes and six adaptive bikes, including tricycles.
The service will be free for the next six months. The incubator and community partners, including People for Mobility Justice and Mercado La Paloma, are developing a fee for the future. The bikes, however, are expected to remain free for lower-income riders.
“E-bikes can support a wide range of personal transportation needs while reducing car trips, pollution, and overall congestion on streets,” Laura Rubio-Cornejo, general manager of the Department of Transportation, said in a statement. “The e-bike lending library will make this option affordable and accessible to residents of South L.A.”
The library is part of a two-year pilot program funded by $2.7 million from the Air Resources Board. The money covered the purchase of the e-bikes and insurance along with maintenance and repairs, obligatory and complementary training for all participants, and additional support.
Kinman noted one advantage of e-bikes over non-motorized bicycles is the less-strenuous, lower-impact physical activity. They are equipped with a motor to enhance and ease pedaling.
Tricycles are also available for those uncomfortable with two wheels, Kinman said.
After the initial two years of funding end, grants will be provided by the state’s Strategic Growth Council under its Transformative Climate Communities Program.
For Martinez, the e-bikes not only address mobility issues, but also enable people of color, particularly the Black community, to circumvent the historical ills of the bus and metro system.
Martinez, a longtime Bus Riders Union member, said his group found that 50% of all arrests and citations made in Los Angeles transit over the last decade or so were against Black people.
“This is an opportunity to break away from those systems of criminalization and dehumanization,” said Martinez, a member of the Garifuna people and the queer community.
Martinez also appreciated the forward-thinking aspect of e-bikes. He believes that as more people grow comfortable using the vehicles and potentially getting away from cars, such a movement will force the city to implement more bike-accessibility projects.
“The infrastructure is not there yet in Los Angeles,” he said. “But if we continue to grow, things will have to change.”
The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to temporarily stop issuing new dog breeding licenses because of overcrowding at city-run animal shelters.
The city’s six shelters have 737 kennels, but more than 1,500 dogs were living at the shelters in February, according to the most recent available data. The shelters are more than 200% over capacity, which has led to dogs tripled up in kennels or being housed in crates in hallways for months on end.
Euthanizations of dogs by the city are up 22% so far this year compared with the same period last year.
The Times has chronicled poor conditions at shelters, including a lack of dogwalking and inadequate food supplies for small animals.
“It is unacceptable for the city to continue issuing breeding permits while thousands of animals are suffering from overcrowded conditions in our shelters,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who chairs the committee that oversees the city’s Animal Services Department, said Tuesday.
The American Kennel Club, which bills itself as the world’s largest not-for-profit all-breed registry, opposes the ban. It said in a statement this week that “blaming registered, responsible breeders” for the shelter crisis won’t improve conditions for those dogs.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the majority of people who purchase licenses from the city aren’t breeding their dogs, said Staycee Dains, the Animal Services Department’s general manager, at a hearing last year.
Rather, many dog owners buy a city breeder permit, which costs $235, so they don’t have to spay or neuter their pets as required under city law.
The city doesn’t regulate breeders, and unlicensed backyard breeders remain a problem.
Dains said at last year’s hearing that she is seeing more and more purebred dogs coming into the shelters.
The ban applies only to new dog breeding permits. It will lift when the three-month average of the daily inventory count of dogs at the city-run animal shelters is “equal to or less than 75 percent of the department’s total dog kennel capacity.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Senior Vice President Lisa Lange praised council members for the vote Tuesday but said in a statement that more needs to be done, including enforcing the existing spay and neuter law.
Hernandez said the ban is “far from the only action” needed by the city. She said she hopes to discuss “current conditions in the shelters during our budget conversations” in the coming months.
During my five years as a doctor in Los Angeles County’s jail system, I personally saw hundreds of patients with hepatitis C who were not being treated for the potentially deadly but curable disease. While hepatitis C treatment improved incrementally during my tenure, the system continues to fall woefully short of the sort of concerted effort that could dramatically reduce the toll of the infection within and beyond the jails.
Hepatitis C, a viral, blood-borne liver disease, is very common in the jails. More than a third of inmates tested are positive. That suggests the number of people living with the virus in the nation’s largest jail system is likely in the thousands.
Hepatitis C is new enough to medical science that until the 1980s, it had yet to be formally identified and was known only as “non-A, non-B hepatitis.” Thanks to the marvels of modern molecular biology, it’s now well described, and the available medicines cure almost every patient who takes them.
Untreated hepatitis C nevertheless continues to claim the lives of about 14,000 Americans every year, a higher toll than that of HIV. Because these deaths are preventable, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal screening of adults for the infection.
In this context, one might expect medical providers in jail to test for the disease broadly and treat it promptly. Monitoring and managing contagion is important in any correctional medical system, and it’s routine in ours for other diseases, such as tuberculosis and COVID-19.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t what I encountered in practice. All those taken into custody at the jail undergo a medical screening. But it’s usually cursory and doesn’t include an offer to screen for hepatitis C.
When I started treating inmates in 2018, doctors rarely screened for the disease partly because known cases were almost never treated. The protocol was to consider treating patients only if their disease had progressed to a state of advanced liver fibrosis.
What’s more, getting medication for a patient meant arranging a special police escort for an appointment at the county hospital and then waiting several more weeks for the antiviral pills to be delivered. The entire process took many months and generally discouraged treatment.
I believe the deeper reason for the reluctance to treat hepatitis C in the jails has to do with inertia and finances. The medicines are under patent and expensive.
Nonetheless, the cost has come down rapidly, and poorer states and countries such as Louisiana and Egypt have found it in their budgets to procure the drugs and use them widely. What’s more, treating the disease is cost-effective given the resulting reduction in cirrhosis, liver cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, arthritis and diabetes. In the long run, decreasing the spread of infection will save both dollars and lives.
The county jail system has made some significant strides in recent years. Patients now can qualify for hepatitis C treatment without liver fibrosis. One of the two medications needed to treat the disease has been added to the system’s list of approved drugs, eliminating the need for an outside medical appointment.
Even with these improvements, however, I saw the number of patients being treated increase from close to none to dozens as of last year in a system where hepatitis C cases probably number in the thousands. Screening remains haphazard, and most of the clinicians on staff still are not allowed to initiate treatment even though the drugs are easy to use.
Meanwhile, illicit intravenous drug use and unsterile tattooing remain ubiquitous among inmates, helping the virus readily find new hosts. These conditions mean that the hepatitis C virus continues to thrive behind bars, more likely to spread in L.A.’s jails than be cured there — a shameful state of affairs in 2024.
Once in a generation, a major pathogen finds itself on history’s chopping block. My parents remember the polio scares of the 1940s and ’50s. Smallpox plagued humankind for millennia before it was eradicated in the 1970s. Now it should be hepatitis C’s turn.
Any campaign to eliminate hepatitis C from Los Angeles would be wise to concentrate on our jails. A strategic, coordinated plan of testing and treatment would lower infection levels rapidly in months, reducing disease inside and outside the jails. The continuing failure to undertake such an effort is deadly and unconscionable.
Mark Bunin Benor is a family physician who worked in the Los Angeles County jail system from 2018 to 2023.
One year ago, Los Angeles’ “mansion tax” took effect. It has either been a godsend or an absolute disaster, depending on who you ask.
The transfer tax, formally known as Measure ULA, levies a 4% charge on all property sales above $5 million and a 5.5% charge on sales above $10 million, with proceeds funding affordable housing and homelessness initiatives.
When L.A. voters approved the measure in November 2022, it quickly became the dominating storyline in L.A. real estate.
Proponents say the tax generates crucial funding to address L.A.’s housing crisis, and they’re right. In its first year, Measure ULA has raised roughly $215 million, according to the L.A. Housing Department.
The L.A. City Council passed a $150-million spending plan for ULA funds in August, and the money has been flowing into six programs: short-term emergency rental assistance, eviction defense, tenant outreach and education, direct cash assistance for low-income seniors and people with disabilities, tenant protections and affordable housing production.
Critics, including many L.A. real estate professionals, claim the tax has hampered the market — not just luxury home sales, but also multifamily developments and commercial properties, since the tax applies to all property sales above $5 million.
They’re also right.
When the tax first took effect on April 1, 2023, it all but froze L.A.’s luxury real estate market, with many sellers pulling their homes off the market at the prospect of paying an extra few hundred thousand in taxes if they sold.
A year later, the market is still just as icy.
The striking slowdown is partly due to chilled buying across Southern California, as soaring interest rates keep many prospective buyers out of the house hunt altogether. But in L.A. — the only city affected by the tax — home sales above $5 million have plummeted at twice the rate of other affluent cities, as buyers opt for homes in neighboring areas that aren’t subject to the tax.
From April 2022 to March 2023, the year before Measure ULA hit, L.A. had 366 single-family home sales of $5 million or more. In the 12 months since, there were just 166 — a drop of roughly 68%.
Luxury sales in nearby cities have slowed, but not nearly at the same rate, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service.
In Beverly Hills, single-family sales dropped 24%.
In Santa Monica, single-family sales dropped 29%.
In Malibu, single-family sales dropped 28%.
“My clients are leaving L.A.,” said Jason Oppenheim, a luxury real estate agent who stars in the real estate reality show “Selling Sunset.” “We can’t keep pushing the wealthy out of our city.”
Oppenheim and his team spent much of the seventh season of the show speaking out against the tax, which they claim pushes prospective buyers out of L.A. and into other affluent areas.
“This tax has not had the effect that was promised, and it’s time for everyone to put aside their egos and realize this was a mistake,” Oppenheim said.
The drop-off comes from a few different factors. Many luxury homeowners moved to sell their properties last spring before the tax took effect, including celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg and Brad Pitt.
Others explored loopholes to avoid paying the tax, such as splitting properties into multiple parts and selling them separately to stay under the $5-million mark.
As a result, Measure ULA hasn’t raised nearly as much as originally projected.
Early proponents of Measure ULA estimated the tax would raise roughly $900 million per year. Last March, a report from the City Administrative Office lowered that number to $672 million.
At $215 million, the total is well short of initial projections, but Greg Good, a senior advisor on policy and external affairs for the L.A. Housing Department, said he expects it to be much higher going forward.
In the first three months of Measure ULA, the tax raised $15 million, only $5 million per month. But from July 2023 to February 2024, the tax raised roughly $200 million, or $25 million per month. Projections for the city’s fiscal year, which starts on July 1 and ends on June 30, would be around $300 million.
“Despite litigation, despite the chilled market, despite the wealth defense industry designed to help the rich protect their money from taxes, that’s $300 million for housing and homelessness initiatives,” Good said.
So far, the city has spent around $28 million in aid to distressed tenants and landlords, $23 million on eviction protection and tenant outreach and $56.8 million on loans to accelerate the development of affordable multifamily housing projects.
“None of that happens without ULA,” Good said.
L.A.’s real estate community has fought the tax tooth-and-nail, campaigning against the measure when it was on the ballot in November 2022 and trying to find ways to overturn it after it was passed.
The latest challenge — a lawsuit claiming the tax was unconstitutional — was shut down in October, when an L.A. County judge dismissed the case, but the plaintiffs are in the process of appealing the decision.
The next hurdle the measure will face comes in November, when Californians will vote on a statewide ballot initiative called the “Taxpayer Protection Act.” If passed, the act would require special taxes to be approved by two-thirds of the vote instead of a simple majority, applying to all measures adopted after Jan. 1, 2022. Since Measure ULA was adopted in 2023 and only received 57% approval, it could require another vote or potentially be repealed.
Gov. Gavin Newsom filed an emergency petition to remove the initiative from the ballot, but the status of the petition is unclear.
“This is a David-vs.-Goliath story. Moneyed interests are trying to stop Angelenos from addressing this existential crisis, but I believe voters will flip the script at the polls and beat it back,” Good said. “We’re going to attack the housing crisis with vigor and zeal for as long as it takes.”
You might call them political progressives. Or maybe super progressives, given how much they want to reshape politics in Los Angeles.
Whatever the label, candidates on the left end of the political spectrum made crucial advances in the March 5 primary election for City Council, setting the stage for some hard-fought runoff campaigns and potentially, an expansion of their power by the end of the year.
Progressive activists and advocacy groups helped reelect City Councilmember Nithya Raman, while sending two other left-of-center candidates — tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado and small business owner Jillian Burgos — into runoffs against more moderate rivals.
“I think the results showed consistently across the board that when we show up, we win,” said Bill Przylucki, executive director of Ground Game LA, a nonprofit advocacy group that has spent several years pushing the council to the left.
If Burgos and Jurado prevail in November, the number of council members with deeply progressive backgrounds will grow from three to five, making up a third of the 15-member council. Four of the five have campaigned alongside Democratic Socialists of America-Los Angeles. Burgos, the fifth, drew support from other big names in leftist political circles, including City Controller Kenneth Mejia and former mayoral candidate Gina Viola.
A five-member super-progressive voting bloc would have significant influence over homelessness, subsidized housing, tenant protections, public transit, the installation of bike lanes and the size of the Los Angeles Police Department.
The bloc would need only three more votes to pass legislation on a council where several members, including Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Katy Yaroslavsky, are left-of-center swing votes. Super progressives also would occupy additional seats on the council’s committees, allowing them to shape policies from their inception, Przylucki said.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks to the crowd on election night. She secured the majority vote needed to avoid a Nov. 5 runoff, winning a second term.
(Myung Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Some players in L.A. politics say the effect of the left in the primary is overstated. They point out that Councilmember John Lee, one of the council’s centrist members, easily won his reelection bid in the northwest Valley. Another incumbent, Councilmember Imelda Padilla, coasted to reelection after securing support from public safety unions, construction trade unions, Valley business groups and others.
Raman won 50.7% of the vote, securing the majority she needed to win outright. But that victory simply preserved the existing political makeup of the council, said Tom Saggau, spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which waged an expensive but unsuccessful campaign against Raman.
“At the end of the day, there’s been no net gain for any ideology on the council,” he said. “There’s still three socialists on the council. That was before the election, that was after the election.”
Saggau said the police union has not yet decided how it will spend its resourcesin the upcoming runoffs.
L.A.’s progressive groups remain hopeful that Jurado and Burgos will win and shift the status quo.
Julio Marcial, senior vice president of the nonprofit Liberty Hill Foundation, said that expanding the council’s super-progressive bloc would ensure that City Hall has a “real, honest conversation” about strategies for community safety. For Marcial, that means shifting money out of the LAPD and into affordable housing, expanded mental health services, job training and other programs.
City Council candidate Ysabel Jurado cuts a cake at an event in Little Tokyo celebrating her campaign’s success in the March 5 primary election.
(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)
“We can no longer follow the same playbook around budgeting, where we fully fund law enforcement and not the things that are proven to be effective in creating community safety,” he said.
Burgos, who is running to represent an east San Fernando Valley district, said she’s hoping that if she and Jurado win, other council members will be inclined to embrace more progressive policies.
“Right now, some people are afraid to make those choices,” said Burgos, an optician who lives in North Hollywood and part owner of an interactive murder mystery theater company.
Burgos, 45, and Jurado, 34, have a long list of shared policy goals. Both want to repeal Municipal Code 41.18, which prohibits homeless encampments next to schools, daycare centers and “sensitive” locations such as senior centers and freeway overpasses. Both want to create “social housing,” assigning city agencies to buy, fix and manage low-cost apartment complexes.
The two candidates want to shift traffic enforcement out of the LAPD. And they’re hoping to make bus and train fares free — a more complicated goal, since the decision rests not with the council but Metro’s 13-member board.
“We have a real opportunity to usher in a progressive era” at the City Council, “instead of just chipping away at some the solutions that we care about,” said Jurado, who finished first in an eight-way race for the Eastside seat now held by Councilmember Kevin de León.
Burgos, who describes herself as a leftist, finished second in the race to replace Council President Paul Krekorian, who is stepping down at the end of the year. In first place is former State Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, a onetime Krekorian aide who describes himself as a “pragmatic progressive.”
Los Angeles City Council Candidate Adrin Nazarian, grabbing campaign signs in North Hollywood earlier this year, is touting his own progressive credentials.
(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)
Nazarian secured 37% of the vote in the primary, compared with 22% for Burgos. In an interview, he said that he, too, has pushed for progressive policies, such as expanded public transit, increased funding to help students pay for college and the creation of a single-payer healthcare system. In 2016 and again in 2020, Nazarian endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president in the Democratic primary.
“Judge me by my record. Judge me by my work ethic. There’s a reason why, in a crowded field of seven people, that I was able to garner almost 40% of the vote,” he said.
Nazarian, unlike Burgos, supports the continued use of 41.18. He also spoke in favor of Mayor Karen Bass’ push to hire more police and raise their pay.
Burgos, asked about those two issues, called for more alternatives to police, saying in a statement that “data has shown that there is no correlation between the number of sworn officers or the police budget and crime.”
De León, who came in second behind Jurado, also defended his progressive credentials, pointing to his work on immigrant rights, climate change and laws to prevent the displacement of renters in downtown, Boyle Heights and elsewhere.
“My record of taking on the toughest fights — Sanctuary State, 100% clean renewable energy, tenant protections — and winning for my constituents shows I know how to actually accomplish progressive change,” said De León, a former president of the state Senate who is seeking a second term.
De León faces a tough second round. He is still dealing with the fallout from a scandal over his participation in a secretly recorded conversation that featured racist and derogatory remarks.
Like Nazarian, he supports the LAPD raises, the hiring of more police and the use of 41.18.
L.A.’s leftists made their first serious inroads at City Hall four years ago, helping to elect Raman, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, to the council. Labor unions and advocacy groups replicated that success in 2022, working to elect two more Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates — activist Eunisses Hernandez and labor organizer Hugo Soto-Martínez — and ousting two incumbents.
Of the three, Raman has proved to be the most moderate. Like Nazarian, she sometimes refers to herself as a “pragmatic progressive.” At one point in the primary campaign, she declined to say whether the city needs more police officers. At another, she relied on former Councilmember Paul Koretz — who has drawn the ire of L.A.’s leftists — to vouch for her with the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.
Attorney Edgar Khalatian,who represents real estate developers at City Hall, said he considers Raman to be pro-business. Raman, whose district straddles the Hollywood Hills, has shown “a strong backbone” on the city’s efforts to build more housing, while also working to address the homelessness crisis, he said.
“The reason housing prices are as astronomical as they are is decades of elected officials not supporting the development of more housing,” said Khalatian, who chairs the board of the Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group. “She supports housing, and will take the political heat from people in her district when she supports that housing.”
Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de León, at his Eagle Rock office in September, is touting his work on climate change, immigrant rights and measures to prevent the displacement of renters.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Raman won despite more than $1.3 million in outside spending by the firefighters union, the police officers union, landlords and others for one of her opponents, Deputy City Atty. Ethan Weaver. Those groups waged a similar effort in the northwest Valley, spending a combined $1.1 million to help Lee turn back a challenge from nonprofit leader Serena Oberstein.
In South L.A.’s 10th Council District, law enforcement groups spent a combined $103,000 on ads portraying Reggie Jones-Sawyer, one of the five candidates, as soft on crime. Jones-Sawyer, a state assemblymember, came in fifth.
“For the rank-and-file of the league, we had a few goals” in this year’s city election,said Saggau, the police union spokesperson. “One of them was to ensure that Reggie Jones-Sawyer did not bring his brand of criminal justice reform, or ideas, to the city of L.A., and we succeeded on that.”
The 10th District will instead see a runoff between Councilmember Heather Hutt and attorney Grace Yoo, who share the same views on some of the city’s more contentious issues. Both support the city’s package of police raises and 41.18.
A spokesperson for the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter said it’s unlikely her organization will get involved in that contest, in part because neither candidate is a DSA member. Given that they both favor the police raises, it would be “remarkably difficult” for either to win the DSA’s endorsement, said the spokesperson, who declined to give her full name.
Los Angeles city and county leaders launched a legal service program Thursday that helps unhoused people resolve legal problems that could limit their access to housing and social services.
The Community Outreach Court, the first of its kind in the city, aims to streamline the criminal court process for homeless people and those at-risk of homelessness. It provides various legal aid services, such as resolving outstanding fines and fees and misdemeanors, expunging convictions and clearing bench warrants, while connecting participants to other much-needed services and job opportunities.
Established six months ago as a pilot program, the Community Outreach Court has helped about 190 people, including those at risk of losing their homes, officials said. The official launch marked the end of the program’s pilot status.
“When unhoused individuals are summoned to court, they are often reluctant to appear in court sometimes because they have no place to store their belongings or are afraid of losing them,” said L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, whose office is spearheading the program. “This is our effort to bring our courts directly into the community to help solve these challenges.”
The Community Outreach Court is a collaborative effort that includes the L.A. County Superior Court, L.A. mayor’s office, county public defender’s office and county alternate public defender’s office.
Some acquaintances from Ireland were in town, and we were having lunch in their 20th-floor downtown hotel suite. I was being an armchair tour guide — out the windows, there’s L.A. Live, and back behind those skyscrapers, City Hall, by fiat once our tallest building.
One of them pointed and said, “What’s THAT?”
I didn’t even have to look.
“THAT” is Oceanwide Plaza, the Chinese-owned skyscraper project, dead in the water and half-finished for five years, its floors like unfrosted cake layers, inviting trespass and vandalism and all that vivid graffiti frosting. Any nimble-bodied person with sturdy legs and maybe a bail bondsman’s phone number could make the climb to join in turning the building into L.A.’s largest, brashest outdoor look-at-me canvas — like that Norman Mailer book title says, “Advertisements for Myself.”
Hard to make all of that make sense to the Irish visitors. But it’s L.A. in a nutshell.
Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.
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This city, supposedly the mural capital of the world, flaunts the title, fears it, is worthy and unworthy of it. And now we find ourselves wrangling again: Is art outside always outsider art? Or art at all?
One camp believes nothing can be art if it doesn’t have a nice frame around it and a price tag on it. Another camp believes that almost any spray-can concerto is art, and the sprayer an embryo Rembrandt. And there’s everyone else, somewhere in the middle.
At the beginning of this century, the city had a 10-year mural moratorium to sort out the chessboard mess of interests and counter-interests: how to keep murals thriving while keeping them from intruding illicitly into neighborhoods, how to keep businesses from simply ginning up wall-sized ads and calling them art, how to distinguish legal from illegal handiwork, and, frankly, good from bad. It’s a seesaw we’re still riding.
In two years, the world comes knocking at our door for the World Cup; then in another two, it’s the Olympics. Can we really not get our act together and dazzle them with something else world-class?
Next, I was thrilled by “Old Woman of the Freeway,” enormous and brilliant on a highway-facing wall, the presiding saint of the 101, painted by the master muralist Kent Twitchell. If traffic was moving well, she was the reason; if it wasn’t, she shared your stationary misery.
She was partly obscured by construction, then whitewashed for advertising space, restored by decree and killed off again by ugly graffiti. She was to have been revived in Sherman Oaks, but a property owner wouldn’t give Twitchell access — and one random local wildly claimed to see something “evil and satanic” in her blue eyes. She’s been restored to grandeur and safety on a wall at L.A. Valley College, her crocheted afghan flying like a kite.
Until the Whittier earthquake and a landlord put an end to it in 1987, the south wall of an 1880s building on Fair Oaks in Pasadena used to read: “ ‘My people are the people of the dessert,’ said T.E. Lawrence, picking up his fork.”
T.E. Lawrence was “Lawrence of Arabia,” the British officer and writer who took a vital role among the Arabs in World War I. So dessert/desert. A happenstance glance at it always made me laugh, and even now, I see the building and smile at its ghost.
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1.The Pink Lady of Malibu was controversial in her day. This photo appeared in the Nov. 1, 1966, Los Angeles Times.(George Fry / Los Angeles Times)2.Lynne Westmore Bloom poses with a sketch she used as a model for the Pink Lady. This photo appeared in the Oct. 27, 1991, Los Angeles Times.(George Wilhelm / Los Angeles Times )
The one I wish I had seen was there and gone before I lived here: the Pink Lady of Malibu, exuberant, whimsical, utterly joyous. Hers is a tale of pink paint, bluenoses and brown coverup. She stood 60 feet tall above the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road, and for nine months in the happening year of 1966, the Northridge artist Lynne Westmore Bloom slung on nylon ropes and climbed the rockface by full moonlight to erase the old graffiti, then to sketch and paint the lady. She was magnificent, pink-fleshed and naked, holding a nosegay of flowers, dark hair streaming as she strode across the cliff.
The bluenoses of L.A. County harrumphed. A traffic hazard! The earlier graffiti hadn’t seemed to bother them overmuch, but this? It took six days and 14 gallons of brown paint to obliterate the Pink Lady. Westmore got fired from her job, got death threats, got marriage proposals, and, along with her painted lady, got a permanent place in L.A. lore.
First California and then the federal government passed laws protecting murals and muralists, with complicated exceptions and requirements. California’s Art Preservation Act, in 1979, mandates “recognized quality,” a case-by-case judgment of experts. The federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 has its own regulations. Kent Twitchell invoked both of these laws in a lawsuit after his mural of fellow artist Ed Ruscha was painted over in 2006. The matter was settled for $11 million.
Even these protections do nothing if the people who should be enforcing them don’t, or don’t even know about them. In 1999, an Eastside mural, “The Wall That Cracked Open,” was almost completely covered over in flat gray, evidently by a county anti-graffiti program. Artist Willie Herron had painted it on the wall of his uncle’s building in 1972 to memorialize his murdered little brother, John.
Multiply that incident by the hundreds. The supervisor of the county’s graffiti abatement program told The Times back then that she was unaware that the mural protection laws even existed. The city of L.A.’s anti-graffiti program chief said that her people have “very clear instructions not to paint over any murals. We find the artist and then we have the mural restored,” and often coated with a protective concoction so graffiti can be wiped off. Gang graffiti, it turns out, is as much a danger to mural art as overzealous, underinformed civic enforcers.
The credit as L.A.’s first known muralist goes to Einar Petersen, who ornamented mostly inside walls with historic, storytelling murals ordered up and paid for. He painted hundreds, murals of a jungle and of the Garden of Gethsemane at the old Clifton’s cafeteria, five panels of L.A. history at the Rosslyn Hotel — now, predictably, covered up, damaged, destroyed.
A conservator for the Getty Conservation Institute works on David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “América Tropical” at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument in 2017. Painted in 1932, the mural was quickly whitewashed for depicting a dead Indigenous peasant tied to a cross.
(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)
The present-day mural wars arguably began in 1932, over “América Tropical,” on Olvera Street, a work commissioned for L.A.’s Olympic year and painted by the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Once the sponsors got an eyeful, they ordered the mural painted over. Its message was in its subtitle, and it was not subtle: “Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism,” a panorama not of contented campesinos but of tortured and tormented Latinos and Native Americans laboring under the policing eye of the U.S.
For decades after, the whitewashed wall carried its own kind of power, and Siqueiros knew it; it’s said that when its restoration was suggested in the 1960s, he was against it, because the force of censorship was maybe even more potent than the mural itself. It was at last conserved and displayed in 2012.
“América Tropical’s” spiritual child is Noni Olabisi’s relentless mural “To Protect and Serve.” The prolific Black muralist, who died a couple of years ago, painted the Jefferson Park work in 1997 and filled space with Black Panthers and celebrated Black radicals, helmeted police and hooded Klansmen. Its funding sidestepped public coffers to keep clear of the kind of censorship that had blotted out “América Tropical.”
SPARC helped to pay for Olabisi’s mural and is working to keep it spruced. The Social and Public Art Resource Center has spent almost five decades battering down the barricades between street art and what Siqueiros called “easel art,” standing up for “activist and socially relevant artwork.”
One of its co-founders is Judith Baca, whose monumental horizontal mural along the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley changed many Angelenos’ POV about graffiti art. Over more than a half-mile, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” shows the histories of Californians whose stories are rarely told, and scores of young people turn out to join professionals to keep the 1978 mural perpetually refreshed.
Not far from there, around Pacoima’s city hall, you’ll find Mural Mile, block after block of artworks done with color, ingenuity, humor, passion and meaning, and changing all the time.
A fellow named Banksy changed some minds about graffiti art too. The anonymous British artist chooses public spaces for his guerrilla work, and inadvertently created a paradox: His works can sell for millions, and people have been caught trying to get them off public walls to take to auction houses.
Banksy’s L.A. mural, 2010’s “Swing Girl,” is downtown, visible only from a deep alley between buildings — which is the point it makes about overbuilt places. The word painted on the wall is PARKING. Banksy almost whitewashed out the last three letters, and hanging from the first part, PARK, he painted a swing with a little girl perched on it.
It’s arguably graffiti, but not the kind that generates a gut-punch reaction among some Angelenos. For them, graffiti is a synonym for defacement and vandalism — and gangs marking out turf and messaging their enemies with menacing scribbles. Who wants to see those sinister scrawls creep into their neighborhoods?
Two incidents, both in the 1990s, caught the tone of Angelenos’ sentiments. One was the 1991 arrest of “Chaka,” who had written that name over and over, literally 10,000 times, on freeway bridges and signposts from Orange County to San Francisco. Then, 24 hours after he was let out of jail, he was caught in the downtown courthouse. He’d written CHAKA on an elevator door — on his way to see his probation officer. In 1996, after college scholarship and work offers, finding God and taking a job painting church buses for a Christian camp, he was arrested for tagging again.
A year later, a Woodland Hills teenager who’d been tagging above the San Diego Freeway fell 100 feet, fracturing his spine, both ankles and his left arm. Not everyone felt sorry for him. One Times letter writer summed up the sentiments of no small number of people: “I do not see the artistic expression involved in scrawling your street name across a piece of concrete like an animal marking its territory.”
This Skid Row mural was completed in 2014. Its message was urgent then, and is no less so 10 years later.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The best graffiti has something to teach, something to say, and that something is more than “my tagging crew is bad-assier than yours.” On Julian Street in Skid Row is the phenomenal Skid Row mural, paid for and painted by locals.
It is poignant and pointed.
It’s a mock-official, green and white sign, bearing the city seal, the words “SKID ROW CITY LIMIT” and at the bottom, “POP Too Many.”
A man — a writer named Charles Bukowski — who used to work up the road from Skid Row, sorting mail at the Terminal Annex, once wrote something that suits that image quite aptly. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
Last October, the Los Angeles City Planning Department ditched some of the region’s most ambitious actions to tackle racial and economic segregation and confront the ongoing affordability crisis. Two housing initiatives — an Affordable Housing Overlay and expansions to the Transit Oriented Communities program — would have made it possible to build affordable and mixed-income housing in areas traditionally off-limits to multifamily homes.
But core components of these proposals have been withdrawn to shield single-family neighborhoods from development. This move puts L.A. at risk of running afoul of California’s fair housing law, falling short on housing production goals, and increasing displacement in its most vulnerable communities. Revised proposals are expected to be made public this winter or spring, with public outreach to follow. City leadership can and should reverse this harmful decision.
The original proposals were a response to state mandates meant to accelerate housing construction to meet demand. Under these mandates, Los Angeles has made plans to add more than 450,000 new housing units through 2029, including amending its zoning rules by February 2025 to accommodate about 250,000 more homes.
California law requires that development programs “affirmatively further fair housing,” meaning that they should “overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities” and “address significant disparities in housing needs and access to opportunity.” In certifying L.A.’s housing plan, the state made clear that “rezoning for multifamily housing in higher opportunity and low-density neighborhoods” was crucial.
The initial Transit Oriented Communities expansion and Affordable Housing Overlay did just that. In their original form, the two initiatives combined could have added almost 200,000 new units citywide, with a focus on higher-income, transit-accessible neighborhoods. Many of these communities are dominated by single-family detached houses, including Rancho Park, Westwood and Encino, among others.
The change is significant, and unjust. Our review of the city’s data shows that L.A.’s current capacity for development — places where denser housing is already allowed, ignoring the rezoning proposals — is disproportionately concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The data indicate that half of this capacity is in the poorest quarter of Los Angeles, while the wealthiest 10% of the city furnishes less than 1%.
We also found that the change to exclude single-family neighborhoods from rezoning slashes the two programs’ capacity by up to 82%, with the greatest reversals in the city’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods. Among the census tracts where the proposed zoning changes were cut by 75% or more, the median household income is $111,000. In neighborhoods where the original proposals are still being considered, it is $67,500. The racial and ethnic disparities are also stark, with tracts in the former group having more than twice the share of white residents as those in the latter (57% to 23%, respectively).
From a fair housing perspective, the Transit Oriented Communities expansion and Affordable Housing Overlay in single-family neighborhoods were L.A.’s strongest proposals. None of the alternatives come close to their potential to produce new mixed-income housing in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, where exclusionary policies have limited opportunities for lower- and middle-income households and people of color.
With less capacity to build in higher-income neighborhoods where developers most want to invest, it’s likely that fewer apartments and condos will be constructed citywide in the years to come. As the housing supply falls further behind growing demand, affordability will decline. Meanwhile, more homes will be built in lower-income, renter-dominated neighborhoods, where residents are at greater risk of displacement as older apartments make way for larger multifamily buildings.
Angelenos, and Californians, shouldn’t accept the decision to exempt L.A.’s richest neighborhoods from helping to solve our housing crisis, insulating them from changes the city needs. The outcry of a vocal minority is no excuse to renege on the city’s commitments to fair housing.
The proposed changes are disheartening, but Los Angeles still has time to adopt a progressive housing affordability strategy, adding homes where they’re needed most. The city can start by restoring the rezoning plan to its original form, or by implementing similar strategies that direct most of the city’s new housing to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Until L.A. takes those steps, very little about this housing plan can be called fair.
Aaron Barrall is a housing data analyst for the UCLA Lewis Center Housing Initiative, which Shane Phillips manages.
Living in Inglewood these days is living in tension about change. Like many other places in and around L.A., its core is being transformed by development that’s become a spectacle, something I have been watching unfold with a mix of apprehension and disbelief.
SoFi Stadium is not just a stadium, it’s become shorthand for everything else in the built world of Hollywood Park: condos, retail and the soon-to-be-completed Intuit Dome, the new home of the Clippers, which rises at the corner of Prairie Avenue and Century Boulevard like a giant, space-age basketball.
All that glitters presses up against the neighborhoods in the last solidly Black city in the county, and while the outside world touts SoFi, etc., as progress, in Inglewood it feels very much like the reconfiguring is being done without the local population in mind.
But not entirely.
Gentrification in Inglewood has always worn a face of Black uplift, which is part of what causes the tension. Admittedly, that face can be gratifying. During Black History Month, SoFi featured a world-class Black art and historical-artifact exhibit, courtesy of the renowned collectors and philanthropists Bernard and Shirley Kinsey. This is an updated, enhanced version of the Kinsey exhibit that debuted in February 2023.
Next door to SoFi, in the walkway of a new retail development that includes a luxury movie theater, there are works by the celebrated Black sculptor Alison Saar. Last year that walkway was the site of a lively weekend festival for Black-owned businesses. On the side of a building is a striking mural of a Black woman floating in water by local artist Calida Rawles. And on other walls, ads depict Black residents enjoying the amenities of a chic, prosperous new city that attracts people of all colors from all over L.A., from all over the world, as the banners along Prairie declaring “A Global Stage” suggest.
It’s a heady vision of the future, one I would love to believe in. Every time I hurry through that walkway on my way to a movie, I marvel at museum-quality art here in the neighborhood, out in the open. It’s an upgrade I can’t argue with.
And yet the bigger picture is not all pretty. Part of the SoFi development deal with Inglewood was a commitment to commissioning public art in and around the stadium. It’s actually required of big developments like this. The city was supposed to oversee the process, but it more or less ceded that power to the developer, just as it ceded other kinds of oversight when it fast-tracked the stadium back in 2015.
City Hall has all along been willing to trade away almost anything for development, especially sports venues. Why? Because for way too long the city languished as what I call the South-Central of South Bay — struggling to attract even modest national chain stores because its Black and brown demographics automatically made it an undesirable market. The recession of the early 1990s compounded the problem, along with the chronic inability or unwillingness of elected officials to plan for serious change.
SoFi was thus sold to and by City Hall as our great change agent, the thing that would finally take Inglewood from moribund to modern.
The stadium’s engendering change all right, but the cost feels too high, destabilizing. Art is wonderful and welcome, but what Black people really need to secure their futures are affordable housing and decent schools. SoFi and all the rest secure neither. To the degree that the stadium and associated development have taken up public land in this large small city, it is actually making more affordable housing less attainable.
It’s not all bad, of course. Notable Black business and creative spaces have been popping up in the new Inglewood, including galleries, restaurants and coffee hangs. Hilltop Café, for instance, on La Brea Avenue is co-owned by local-girl-made-good Issa Rae.
These are the kinds of small but significant businesses that Inglewood has always had, but just not in a critical mass. Together they express the true character and promise of the city, make it a destination — in real estate marketing speak, make it “desirable.”
Hopefully, the new desirability won’t be synonymous, as it so often is, with “white.”
Rick Garzon, whose downtown gallery Residency recently moved to the Hollywood Park retail district close to SoFi, told me he’s confident that Inglewood will beat back the usual displacement narrative of gentrification and create a new one of real Black progress. It has the goods, he says, starting with a solid base of homeowners committed to the city who aren’t going anywhere. Development may be pressing down on us, but we won’t crumble, he says. We are changing the game.
I would love to believe that too. I would love the corporate campaign painting Inglewood as Black and prospering on its own terms — an equal partner in this breakneck development — to be true.
But history is against it. So is math — the economics of gentrification, intricately tied to have/have-not realities, including the racial wealth gap, virtually guarantee that new homeowners won’t be Black. The same is true of renters, who are actually the majority of Inglewood residents. The median price of a home in some Inglewood neighborhoods is nudging up to $900,000 now. That’s downright modest in L.A.’s overheated market but out of reach for the Black working-to-middle class that is the city’s foundation.
Inglewood is a mosaic, but also one community with common needs. That fact is what makes us truly unique, a work of art — in progress. The physical art — and the art to come — accurately conveys Black power and depth. We just have to live up to the image.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing writer to Opinion and a columnist at Truthdig.
The Chevy Camaro muscle car sitting abandoned at a South L.A. intersection looked suspicious enough.
But then LAPD gang detail investigators spotted two teenagers running from the scene near Slauson Avenue and Broadway and were able to stop them.
One of the youths was carrying an electronic device that police said provides a window into why thefts of the popular Camaros have shot up by more than 1000% in L.A. this year, with 90 vehicles stolen since the beginning of the year. Police said the spike comes at a time when there are increasing numbers of the high-powered vehicles turning up at street takeovers.
The device is essentially a hand-held computer that enables the user to create a replacement smart key — using a new key fob — that can unlock Camaros and other vehicles, bypassing the vehicle’s existing security system, investigators said. Once the user punches in the make, model and year of the vehicle into the computer, it is then able to reprogram the car’s ignition system and generate a new or universal car key.
LAPD investigators believe a 16-year-old suspect used the device to create cloned ignition keys to steal muscle cars. A new Camaro can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“This young person was stealing the Camaros and taking them to street takeovers and then selling them for $2,000 or $3,000 on social media,” Newton Division Capt. Keith Green said. “A 16-year-old was capable of stealing high-end cars.”
LAPD’s Newton Division, which covers the northernmost section of South L.A., saw the number of Camaro thefts jump from 2 to 10 in the first two months of the year, while citywide they jumped from 7 to 90, Green said. Investigators, he said, now may have the answer to why thefts are soaring.
The technology to clone key fobs is commercially available, and with a little bit of tech wizardry even a high school youth can become a skilled thief of technology-dependent cars, Green said. Investigators say that thieves can generate replacement keys in less than three minutes with the right program and hardware.
Vehicles used in street racing and burnouts — the practice of keeping a car stationary while the wheels are spinning, causing the tires to smoke — suffer so much wear and tear that participants often prefer to use stolen vehicles, police said. This is why thieves often target prized muscle cars.
The LAPD did not indicate the exact method the teenager might have used in the South L.A. incident. But in several cases documented by other jurisdictions, people used a similar device to connect with the vehicle directly or used a wireless system to download all of the car’s information to create a duplicate electronic key fob.
Green said it was too early to say exactly how many thefts are tied to the youth, who was turned over to his parents after his arrest on Feb. 25. Detectives will refer the case to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to pursue charges.
The best way to stop thieves is to employ extra security measures such as fuel cut-offs, steering wheel locks and keeping the vehicle in a more secure place, Green said. Also, detectives advise drivers never to keep key fobs inside a vehicle. Security cases are available on the market that may be utilized to prevent key fob signals from being transmitted. Improvised strategies such as wrapping fobs in aluminum foil or placing fobs inside tin cans have proved effective.
Nationwide, American muscle cars have become the target of some large theft rings. In 2022, dealers in Michigan reported a series of thefts that investigators later tied to key fob cloning.
Renting in Los Angeles is about to become more difficult for many people.
The last of Los Angeles’ pandemic-era renter protections expired Feb. 1. For the first time since April 2020, owners of rent-stabilized apartments — 70% of rental units in the city — are allowed to increase rents. And the last chunk of any unpaid back rent is due.
Don’t expect a soft landing. Depending on how the city responds, it could find itself escalating a lose-lose conflict with local landlords, and the pain would be widely felt: More than half of Angelenos live in rental units.
Already the city is bracing for a spike in evictions and homelessness. An estimated 90,000 households have outstanding rent debt from the period when pandemic protections were in place, and roughly 60% may be unable to pay it.
The city’s fledgling renter assistance program has distributed only a fraction of its $30-million budget; it has 30,000 applicants requesting a total $473 million to cover back rent. A small minority of applicants have been approved but have not yet received money; they have been given a 120-day grace period to avoid eviction. But most applicants still have no idea whether they’ll be approved.
The dominoes started falling last year. Eviction filings doubled from 5,000 in February to 10,000 in April and May after tenants were once again required to pay full monthly rent (separate from unpaid back rent) to avoid eviction. Ever since, evictions have remained 20% to 25% higher than the old baseline.
After the uncertainty of recent years, many landlords are likely to be looking for more revenue and stability. The pandemic was a scarring experience for smaller landlords, many of whom found themselves squeezed as their nonpaying tenants were protected by the city and as rents remained frozen amid historic inflation. Of course, landlords are not entitled to perpetual positive returns. Housing, like any asset, has downside risk. Some landlords — especially those who aggressively scooped up new rental units anticipating a surefire payday — lost that bet during the pandemic.
At the same time, landlords are within their rights to evict tenants who don’t pay. They would also be justified in more carefully vetting potential tenants within the bounds of the Fair Housing Act. Rather than rent units quickly, they may let units sit empty as they wait to find more financially established tenants. This could make it even harder to secure affordable housing in L.A. — especially for those with unsteady incomes (gig workers, contractors, artists) as well as those with potential red flags that background checks will inevitably uncover (such as justice-involved individuals and renters with poor credit histories or past evictions).
The city has launched a tenants’ rights awareness campaign, which could deter some overzealous landlords. The city also aims to aggressively expand the availability of legal counsel for those facing eviction.
Legal representation is a core part of the judicial process — and it’s crucial that tenants be protected from unlawful evictions. However, paying a fleet of public defenders to contest and delay every attempt at eviction might add fuel to the fire while draining the resources of the city and landlords alike.
While universal right-to-counsel programs boast high success rates of keeping people housed, it’s unclear what percentage of these successes involve averting an illegal eviction versus a landlord giving up and eating the cost of lost rent. Ninety-six percent of evictions in L.A. in 2023 came from nonpayment of rent, which should mostly be cut-and-dried cases. There are also other, less costly ways to prevent illegal eviction filings from reaching court. In some cities, tenants with complaints about living conditions can protect themselves from landlord retaliation by legally withholding rent and depositing it in a third-party escrow account.
It’s expected that providing counsel will cost the city $68 million each year — and recall that the city dredged up only $30 million for its rental assistance program. These resources could be focused on rehousing displaced families as quickly as possible. Instead the city is pursuing a policy that further antagonizes landlords and sends tenants the message that they might be able to get away with not paying rent if they fight hard enough.
Los Angeles doesn’t have to go straight to the most costly and adversarial policy to reduce evictions and prevent homelessness. In Philadelphia, lawmakers made permanent an eviction diversion program at a cost of $15 million. Landlords seeking an eviction are required to participate in a 30-day mediation period with a single goal: settling disagreements out of court and without an eviction. Under this program, more than 70% of disputes have successfully come to an agreement outside of court. Hawaii did similarly, with 87% of cases resulting in settlement.
Los Angeles can ill afford a drawn-out power struggle with landlords. That risks creating a “survival of the fittest” landscape where only property owners able to weather and adapt to renter protections stay in the market. Corporations already own more than 40% of the city’s rental units, a figure that could grow if smaller landlords make good on their threats to exit the market, either selling out to corporate owners or taking units off the market. That’s potentially a huge problem for this rental market, which is already among the worst in the nation when it comes to housing production.
On a more promising note, the economy has been roaring with job creation and higher wages for those at the lower end of the income distribution. Many have been back at work after a tumultuous year of strikes. That bodes well for tenants facing their first rent hikes in four years.
But the fact remains that Los Angeles is one of the least affordable places to live in the country. That’s the root cause of the impending eviction crisis and why renters needed so much protection in the first place. If the city prefers to keep strengthening renter protections while simultaneously blocking developers from constructing affordable housing, brace for a new status quo: a stricter, even pricier rental market under the growing watch of aggravated landlords and faceless corporations.
George Zuo is an associate economist at Rand and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee Rand Graduate School.
While rents in Los Angeles and many other parts of the U.S. have dropped or stabilized in recent years, Orange County tenants have seen no such relief, with rents that have either spiked or held firm since the start of the pandemic.
The changes reflect a national trend, according to experts. Demand for housing in urban centers including Los Angeles dropped as people flocked to suburbs such as Orange County’s after the pandemic struck because many office staffers were allowed to work remotely.
Los Angeles County cities including Burbank, Long Beach, L.A., Santa Monica and West Hollywood have recorded median rent prices that are 3% to 5% lower than they were this time last year, according to data from the rental site ApartmentList.com.
But prices are moving in the opposite direction in Orange County. Overall rents in L.A. County are down 2.6% over last year, while Orange County prices are up 2.2%, according to Apartment List.
As rents in the U.S. are down 1% overall from last year, “denser urban areas have seen much slower rent growth,” and rentals in outlying and suburban areas have “sustained a pretty strong upwelling of demand” since the COVID-19 pandemic began, said Rob Warnock, a researcher at Apartment List.
But since the pandemic started, rents have fluctuated in L.A. County, dropping 7% in 2020 only to rebound 15% in 2021, and then rising modestly in 2022 before dropping in 2023.
In Orange County, prices never dropped — not even in 2020, though they remained flat. In 2021, they skyrocketed 22% before leveling out in 2022 and increasing modestly in 2023, according to Apartment List.
María Alejandra Barboza, a community tenant counselor in Anaheim and Santa Ana, said that her friends and neighbors are being squeezed by the increases.
Barboza, 56, sees rents continuing to dominate people’s budgets as salaries fail to keep up.
In Anaheim, the median rent for a one-bedroom unit was nearly $2,000 in February, according to data from Apartment List. That was up 1.2% from the same month last year.
In Santa Ana, rents were comparable, and up 1.6% over a year ago.
When Barboza recently visited a friend’s home, she was impressed by new kitchen cabinets. Her friend explained that the cabinets were part of a renovation triggered by the sale of her building.
The new owner made the family move out for a month while continuing to pay rent, according to Barboza.
“They were not given any compensation,” she said. Upon returning after a month away, the family found their rent had increased from $1,460 to $3,200 — more than doubling.
She heard similar stories from others who had already been forced out of the building by higher rents.
“We continually see the displacement of entire families,” Barboza said, adding that stories of housing loss are a constant in her community.
California has always had high demand for housing in major cities, said Hanna Grichanik, a financial advisor in Los Angeles.
Her clients are seeing rent increases slow down, though not disappear entirely, she said.
“L.A.’s always been a very inflated market, and it could be that other places are catching up” as density increases elsewhere, she theorized.
Santa Clarita is a notable outlier in Los Angeles County, with the median one-bedroom apartment renting for just over $2,000 and prices up almost 4% over last February.
Grichanik tells her clients that there is “room to negotiate with your landlords,” who “don’t want to have turnover — that’s costly for them.”
She acknowledges that the typical goal of allocating 30% of income to rent “probably works in Nebraska, New Mexico, but it’s very hard for people in California.”
Back in Orange County, advocates seek to protect tenants however they can as prices go up.
David Levy, a housing specialist at the Fair Housing Council of Orange County, praised California’s Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which requires just cause to terminate a rental agreement. Causes include failure to pay, breach of terms, nuisances and criminal activities. The law also caps rent increases for certain tenants at 10%, or at 5% above the annual change in cost of living, whichever is lower.
But Levy believes lawmakers can do more to protect tenants.
Santa Ana is the only city in Orange County with its own rent-control law, he said, so most cities rely on the statewide rules.
Since the end of August, landlords in Los Angeles and Orange counties have been capped at 8.8% rent increases annually in applicable units.
While he appreciates the cap, “even an 8.8% increase is a hard hit for some people,” Levy said.
Barboza, the community tenant counselor, continues to press legislators for a solution and to help those around her.
“Many people in the community do not know what their rights are and how to defend them, in the face of frequent abuse,” she said.
Barboza has heard countless stories of lives disrupted by the lack of affordable housing in Orange County.
When rent gets too high for them, she said, people are not only forced to leave their homes, but “children have to leave their schools” and “parents are separated from their source of income.”
In Barboza’s community, she said, “the greed of a few negatively impacts the lives of many.”
From a parking lot on the corner of 12th and Figueroa streets, Michael Lopez carefully commandeered his drone through the skyline around LA Live.
A video screen showed the drone’s slow ascent. Up and up it went, until it framed a shot almost straight out of Ansel Adams. The cloud-covered San Gabriel Mountains. Green foothills glimmering from recent rains. And an abandoned, half-finished skyscraper plastered in bright, bubbly graffiti.
Two other towers were similarly hit, virtually every floor of each 20-plus-story building featuring graffiti on the corners.
The unfinished Oceanwide Plaza in downtown L.A. is marked with graffiti after being tagged this week.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The audacity and visibility of the taggers’ feat — you can see it from the 10 Freeway and as far away as the Sixth Street Bridge — and the fact that the Grammys will be held on Sunday across the street at Crypto.com Arena has attracted worldwide attention.
It’s also become L.A.’s latest Rorschach test.
For civic leaders and professional L.A. haters, it’s the latest proof that the city is spiraling down in a doom cycle, another nightmare to add to our dumpster fire of street takeovers, homeless encampments and mass break-ins. The $1 billion behemoth, called Oceanwide Plaza, was once one of the biggest real estate projects in the city, but construction was halted five years ago when its Chinese developer ran out of money.
For Lopez, however, the graffed-up buildings, which were supposed to feature hotel and retail space as well as luxury condominiums and apartments, are the latest thing to love about his hometown.
“It’s beautiful. It’s amazing,” he said. He held his drone shot and waved over a friend who goes by Juan G. The two had driven up from South L.A. to take in the scene.
“I know it’s getting mixed reviews,” Juan deadpanned, before adding, “I’m sure the people who live in the lofts across the street didn’t like getting peeped at!”
He continued to crane his neck upward. I rattled off some tags visible from the lower floors — Axion. Inkz. Cuts. XN28.
“You’re never going to see something like this again,” Juan continued. “The rules are going to change. The security is gonna come in here hard. But to have been a part of that? To see this up close? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment.”
I’m no fan of graffiti, but I couldn’t help but admire what the taggers had accomplished. Before us was a monument to the Los Angeles of the moment, highlighting so many issues, consciously or not. Rampant overdevelopment downtown. Civic corruption. Out-of-control graffiti.
A place with so much potential, yet so much desmadre.
If someone tried this at Art Basel, it would sell for millions. If Banksy pulled off a project of this scope, he’d be hailed as a genius. Since it’s a bunch of mostly anonymous people (two have been arrested and released), polite L.A. is in an uproar. Even Kevin de León, the city council member who represents downtown, emerged from his hiding hole on Groundhog Day to tell KTLA Channel 5 that Los Angeles should not be an “open canvas [for] budding artists.”
It’s easy to portray the taggers as vandals intent on destroying L.A. But the towers have rotted while L.A.’s bureaucracy has done little to address the situation.
Oceanwide Plaza has sat empty and mostly forgotten, until a group of taggers spray-painted graffiti on the towers.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Instead, the taggers took it upon themselves to transform something ugly into something far more vibrant. Isn’t that L.A. at its finest?
That they used the medium of street art makes their work that much more Angeleno.
The city has felt under siege from graffiti for decades. I used to estimate my drive time on the 10 by tracking the exit ramps on the freeway signs. Now, I can do it based on which giant tag on which huge warehouse I just passed.
Graffiti at its worst does nothing to beautify neighborhoods. But what happened at Oceanwide Plaza wasn’t some spur of the moment scribble. The ingenuity in methodically bombing every corner with dozens of names, exemplifies the teamwork we should all aspire to. The failure here was from a company that has no money to afford security guards and a city government that should never have approved the pie-in-the-sky venture in the first place.
Besides, graffiti has been a part of working-class Southern California for decades. Even I, a nerdy teen, scratched “Pharaoh” on windows and wooden desks in eighth grade until security guards at my Anaheim school took away my etching tool. There was something liberating — validating even — to see an art form long demonized as vandalism, at the same time that large corporations have appropriated it, take over such a visible part of downtown.
“All of this doesn’t just belong to the developers,” Lopez said. “It belongs to all of us.”
Above the parking lot where he and Juan stood loomed a two-story mural featuring Clippers superstar Kawhi Leonard, street-art style. He was surrounded by bromides such as “Never Never Give Up” and “Follow Your Dreams” in scrawls that tried to mimic graffiti but were as cool as mom jeans.
“They call this art,” Juan said before waving back toward the skyscrapers, “and not that?”
I left them and walked to the front of the Crypto.com Arena. There, I found Zack Woodard taking photos of the tagged-up high rises before asking a friend to capture him with the buildings as a backdrop. High above him, a tattered, pockmarked white banner that read “Oceanwide Plaza” hung from an unfinished structure.
“When I Ubered to here on Wednesday, it was only half-done,” said Woodard, who’s in town for the Grammys as program director for the Grammy Museum Mississippi. “It’s really impressive to see how quickly they finished it.”
Another friend, Rachel Patterson, continued to look upward. “I couldn’t imagine going all the way up there!”
“People say it makes the skyline look bad,” Woodard said. “But it’s not going to be there forever. It’s done nice. Besides, street art is a part of L.A. history.”
He asked me what the buildings were supposed to have been. When I told him residential and retail, Woodard scoffed — “Just like everything else in L.A.”
As I drove off, I passed by the parking lot where I had met Lopez and Juan. More people surrounded them, all looking up, all with big smiles on their faces.
I smiled, too. There are a lot of things wrong with Los Angeles, but tagged-up ruins that bring happiness to locals and tourists alike are the least of them.
Last month YIMBY Law, a nonprofit, pro-housing advocacy group, sued the City of Los Angeles on behalf of a private developer seeking to construct a 360-unit apartment building in Canoga Park. These apartments would be only for renters who meet the federal definition of low to moderate incomes in L.A. The project was submitted under Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1, meant to dramatically speed up the approval and permitting process for 100% affordable housing projects. But recently the city revoked the eligibility of the Canoga Park building for this program following complaints from single-family homeowners.
This about-face is part of a trend. Last year, the mayor’s office amended ED1 to shield single-family zones from streamlined development — after eight such applications, including the Canoga Park proposal, were already submitted. Those proposals were then denied eligibility for ED1. Some of the projects have filed appeals; one denial has been overturned, but the City Council rejected an appeal for the Canoga project.
Without ED1, these projects face a discretionary approval process that may involve lengthy environmental review and other delays likely to prevent them from happening. This turn of events may cost the city more than 1,100 affordable apartments.
Bass announced ED1 as moving “City Hall away from its traditional approach that is focused on process and replacing it with a new approach focused on solutions, results and speed.” The mayor’s stated intention received a remarkable boost via the state law AB 2334, passed in 2022, allowing developer incentives for 100% affordable projects including substantial increases in height limits and allowable density (the number of housing units on a given-sized parcel of land) in “very low vehicle travel areas,” where limited residential development has kept down traffic. The idea is that these areas can more easily accommodate any extra traffic stemming from increased housing density.
Yet now this progress is in question, just as the power of these complementary city and state reforms has begun to emerge. The lawsuit concerning the Canoga Park building may result in one or more of the halted projects being built eventually, and the state has suggested that the city erred in revoking their ED1 eligibility. But even if these projects get approved, since ED1 now excludes the single-family neighborhoods that make up approximately three-quarters of residential land in L.A., they would mark an end rather than a beginning to similar development.
Some residents of these neighborhoods say that’s only fair. According to Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, for homeowners affected by new apartments, “their property value is going to get cut in half, they’re going to have a big shadow over their place.”
As it happens, I can speak personally to these concerns. I am the owner and resident of a unit in a small rowhouse condo development on the Westside located directly across the street from an ongoing project converting a single-family home into a multi-unit apartment building.
My neighbors and my family are losing a good deal of sunlight throughout the day from the new building. Our street has been a cacophonous, messy construction site for so long it’s hard to remember what it was like before.
But I know that this is what solving the housing crisis looks like: A single parcel that previously housed one family is being transformed into apartments for perhaps 15 to 25 people, with units reserved for low-income households. Like those in the contested ED1 projects, these affordable units won’t require public funding.
There is simply no way to solve our housing crisis without throwing shade in some single-family residential areas. We might have to increase traffic in some neighborhoods, too, though providing more housing in jobs-rich West L.A. could ultimately reduce traffic by allowing people to live closer to where they work. As for property values, multiple studies have shown that low-income housing does not substantially reduce them, including in high-cost neighborhoods, and often increasesthem.
Some constituencies will always oppose development. Local policymakers who are serious about solving our dual crises of housing affordability and homelessness have to take a hard look at how much political capital they are willing to spend to create effective policies in the face of such objections.
If we can’t build fully affordable projects that don’t drain government coffers even on the edges of land zoned for single-family residences, then Angelenos should prepare for a permanent housing crisis.
But if this sounds like the wrong direction for the city, Bass and the City Council should fully commit to protecting and expanding innovative policy such as the original ED1, without categorical exclusions for single-family neighborhoods, and AB 2334. Mechanisms that convince private developers to produce long-term affordable housing offer what is as close to a free lunch on this crisis as L.A. is ever likely to get.
Jason Ward is an economist at Rand Corp. and the co-director of the Rand Center on Housing and Homelessness.
The first in a series of Pacific storms moved across Southern California on Saturday, bringing rainfall and showers and prompting a high surf advisory along west-facing beaches.
Another weaker system was expected to move through Saturday night and Sunday morning, to be followed by a stronger storm Monday, according to the National Weather Service. The storms will not be as powerful as the systems that drenched Southern California in late December and resulted in huge waves pounding area beaches.
About a quarter-inch of rain was expected Saturday across the Los Angeles region, the weather service said. Some areas in San Luis Obispo County reported more than an inch.
Because the storms originated in warmer parts of the Pacific and not off the Alaskan coast, snow was expected only at the highest elevations in local mountains, according to Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the weather service in Oxnard.
The weather service is predicting an inch to 2 inches of snow between 6,500 and 7,500 feet and 6 to 12 inches above that altitude. The three storms were expected to drop an inch to 3 inches of rain in coastal areas of Southern California and up to 5 inches in the mountains.
Since Oct. 1, Los Angeles has experienced rainfall levels significantly below normal, said meteorologist Joe Sirard with the weather service’s Oxnard office.
For the period, Sirard said, the climate station in downtown Los Angeles has recorded 3.4 inches, compared with the average of 5.9 inches.
However, so far over the water year, which began July 1, L.A. has received 6.4 inches of rain— above the normal of 6.1 inches, Sirard said. This includes rain from Tropical Storm Hilary that battered areas of Southern California in August.
These figures do not include the rain from Saturday’s storm.
High surf through Sunday was expected along beaches on the Central Coast and in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, with the possibility of minor flooding in some areas during periods of high tides in the early morning, according to the weather service.
Wofford said swells would be far smaller than the waves in late December — some of those as high as 20 feet—which led to flooding and forced officials to shut down beaches and piers in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
In Northern California, the weather service issued a winter storm warning through Monday for parts of the Sierra Nevada and said that 2 inches to 6 inches of snow could fall above 6,500 feet. Wind gusts up to 30 mph were also possible, forecasters said.
In Southern California, drier weather is expected for much of next week.
When Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani joined the Angels in 2018, my cousins and I made a bet. How long until he leaves Orange County to join the Los Angeles Dodgers?
We knew it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
Not just because the Blue Crew is one of baseball’s marquee franchises, while the Halos are as respected as a soul patch. Or because Angels owner Arte Moreno makes Ebeneezer Scrooge seem as free-spending as, well, the Dodgers, who just signed Ohtani to the richest contract ever in professional sports, at $700 million for 10 years.
Nah, we knew Ohtani was fated to leave because he’s a young, talented person — and folks like him usually get the hell out of O.C. the moment they can.
We saw the best minds of my generation flee for Austin, Texas, Chicago, New York, the Inland Empire, but especially L.A. — the place our elders taught us to fear as full of crime and liberals. Our friends and relatives left to find opportunities that were impossible in staid, conservative, expensive Orange County. They rarely looked back. When their new neighbors asked where they were from, most would demur and say “Southern California” or “near Los Angeles.”
City, civic and county leaders didn’t care about this exodus, since O.C. was never meant to be cool. We were the spot where people moved after they made it. Orange County was aspirational, and if you couldn’t afford to hack it here, good riddance and don’t forget to take along other underachievers like you.
This thinking went on, unchecked, for decades. But it’s finally dawning on the lords of O.C. that losing our young to Los Angeles and elsewhere portends doom.
Fans line up to enter Angel Stadium in 2021.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Orange County has shrunk in population three out of the last four years — a once-unthinkable development in a region that has always bragged about its growth. O.C’s median age has gone from 33.3 years in the 2000 census to 39.5 years in 2022, a rate of aging that has outpaced the nation. About 17,000 people between the ages of 20 and 35 left in 2016 and 2017 alone, according to the Orange County Business Council’s most recent Workforce Housing Scorecard, which called the youthful exodus a “troubling trend” and a “drain on the county’s future workforce.”
Like Orange County, the Angels have historically preferred established and over-the-hill players and barely blinked when homegrown prospects left for better opportunities. The team rarely invests in its farm system, the way Orange County cities have never really cared about creating affordable housing, good-paying jobs or other necessities that would help to keep young people here. Ohtani, like so many of the smart people who have left O.C. in my lifetime, finally got fed up with his situation — and could you blame him?
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course — or rather, Dodgers-to-Angels. The 29-year-old Ohtani, unlike most millennials, is a once-in-an-epoch phenom with enough money to buy a series of homes from Angel Stadium to Dodger Stadium. But his departure means the Angels are now staring at years of irrelevancy if Moreno continues his youth-averse ways.
That’s where Orange County finds itself today.
It’s sad to say this about a place where I was born and raised and plan to live my entire life, because heaven knows, people outside of the power structure have tried to stop this brain drain. From the late 1990s through the 2010s, I followed and eventually wrote about those who were trying to make O.C. a cool place, one we could proudly proclaim to be as hip as L.A. Homegrown stars shined in clubs, restaurants, galleries, fashion and other culture scenes. Cities like Costa Mesa, Anaheim and Santa Ana became creative hubs that — gasp — even Angelenos would visit.
No one exemplified this creativity more than Gwen Stefani, Orange County’s most famous musician and someone whom the Board of Supervisors included this month as an inaugural member of the Orange County Hall of Fame. She and her band, No Doubt, became global stars with their breakout album “Tragic Kingdom,” a title that was a play on Disneyland’s nickname and meant to reflect how people of Stefani’s generation hated boring, old Orange County and were committed to do something about it.
When I joined The Times five years ago this month, I had spent my career almost exclusively covering Orange County. I wanted to show the rest of the world that my homeland was worthy of respect and to highlight those battling against the forces that kept driving out too many talented people.
I planned to continue focusing on O.C. in my new job. Once I began to cover Los Angeles, that changed. I quickly discovered an excitement and energy to L.A. that doesn’t exist in Orange County and can’t be replicated elsewhere, that intoxicates you and makes you wonder what took you so long to get it.
Ohtani will soon experience that for himself. That’s why I don’t blame him for leaving the Halos, as cool as it would have been to see him in Orange County for the rest of his career. He and too many others before him saw no future down here, especially once they realized there are far more welcoming places out there.
To paraphrase a famous World War I song, how ya gonna keep us down in Anaheim after we’ve seen the City of Angels?
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden plan this weekend to attend a fundraiser hosted by Hollywood elites that is likely to make L.A.’s notoriously bad traffic even worse — but authorities have yet to offer advanced warning to help motorists avoid the expected road closures.
The First Couple plans to address prominent donors supporting Biden’s reelection bid for 2024 at an undisclosed location on Friday. Notable hosts for the event include directors Steven Spielberg and Rob Reiner.
Biden is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles via Los Angeles International Airport on Friday for a two-day visit, departing on Sunday at an undisclosed time.
“For security reasons, there is no advance announcement to the public regarding ramp closures related to a visit by a U.S. president or vice president,” said Caltrans spokesperson Marc Bischoff. “The LAPD or other enforcement personnel make rolling closures at ramps along a motorcade route, with no advance announcement to the public.”
Bischoff recommends that motorists check traffic information, including the Caltrans website, prior to leaving for their destination.
In June, Los Angeles hosted Biden and leaders from the Western Hemisphere for the ninth Summit of the Americas, an event that also created traffic headaches for motorists for six days in downtown L.A. and near Los Angeles International Airport.
Airport officials have confirmed that Van Nuys and Burbank airports will remain open during the president’s visit but will implement temporary flight restrictions. A representative from Burbank noted that flight restrictions would be in effect Saturday and Sunday.
Although officials did not confirm whether these restrictions were in response to the president’s visit, the precautions align with his scheduled time in Los Angeles.
Poor and unreliable data collection by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority makes it “nearly impossible” for unhoused people and the city to know how many interim beds are available and how many are being used at any given time, according to a new city audit.
Despite having a software-based reservation system for shelter bed availability, LAHSA’s system is so unreliable that the agency monitors bed availability using phone calls and daily emails, the audit found.
The homeless services agency also failed to follow up with interim housing providers on their point-in-time sheltered homeless count data, despite indications of data quality issues. Additionally, many shelters recently reported low bed use rates, which may suggest that the number of unhoused people in shelters is being undercounted and that available beds are not being used.
The new audit also found that LAHSA’s Find-a-Shelter app had inaccurate data and did not attract large participation by providers, which limited its function.
At a news conference Wednesday, Sergio Perez, chief of accountability and oversight with the city controller’s office, said the city and its homeless community need a system as reliable as ride-hailing apps that enable people to see available vehicles in real time and where they are.
“That’s what we need to meet the ongoing crisis on our streets today, to meet the real human need of our unhoused neighbors,” Perez said. “It is what we lack.”
Perez said the data system deficiencies raise concerns about L.A.’s attempts to address the homelessness crisis with urgency and calls into question the validity of the city’s efforts not to criminalize poverty.
“If we can’t track interim shelter beds in a timely manner … then we run the risk, on a day-to-day basis, of violating the Constitution, which prohibits governments like the city of Los Angeles from punishing those who live on our streets when they have no other option. It could be that this is happening in Los Angeles as we speak,” he said.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia said that LAHSA’s dysfunctional system “is not only insufficient for addressing the wide problem of L.A.’s homelessness emergency, but in fact it proved to be fully deficient last winter, when we had severe winter weather.”
According to the report, the homelessness agency contracted with 211 L.A. last winter to respond to requests through the winter shelter hotline and provide referrals to shelters. When 211 staff realized that LAHSA’s bed reservation system was inaccurate, telephone operators were forced to call shelters to verify bed occupancy before making referrals. The process increased wait times for callers and for 211 L.A. to respond to them.
Call-line staff told auditors that they received more than 160,000 shelter-related calls from people for the winter shelter program, but were only able to answer just over 50%.
In a statement released with the report, Mejia said it is crucial that the city maximize use of its “extremely limited amount of interim housing beds” and that providers know when beds are available.
In the audit, Mejia touted Mayor Karen Bass’ move last year to declare the homelessness crisis a state of emergency, but pointed to the inadequacy of some resources available to properly address it: Only 16,100 interim housing beds are available for the estimated 46,260 people in the city experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness, according to LAHSA’s 2023 homeless count.
“[T]he woefully inadequate amount of both interim and permanent housing resources, as well as the antiquated and inefficient methods of data collection and housing referral processes, significantly inhibit efforts by the city to respond to the crisis with the urgency that it requires,” he said.
In a statement to The Times, LAHSA said the audit comes as the agency is working to enhance its data practices and improve the accuracy of its bed availability information.
The new bed-availability system in the works will include detailed tracking of beds, units, sites and buildings; current occupancy rates; real-time unit and bed availability; and information for service providers about all the programs in a building, among other things. The system will be fully implemented by Dec. 31, 2024.
LAHSA added that it is developing a new client portal that will improve communication tools. People seeking services will be able to see a list of all shelters and access centers; view upcoming appointments; direct-message case managers and get alerts to help them find shelter during emergencies or severe weather events.
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“Data collection and dissemination are at the core of LAHSA’s purpose, and we are making significant improvements so we can offer the information that maximizes our interim housing system and move into permanent housing faster,” the agency said.
The city controller’s office recommended that LAHSA, in collaboration with the city, redesign a shelter bed availability system that makes it easier to facilitate referrals to its shelters. It also suggested that it craft and execute a plan to “monitor, evaluate, and enforce” requirements for shelter program operators to report bed attendance and availability data completely, accurately and in a timely manner.
Lastly, the office advised the agency to require operators participating in the annual homeless count that report bed use rates lower than 65% or more than 105% to accurately count the number of unhoused people in their shelter and explain bed use rates.
Along with the audit, the city controller’s office also launched an interim housing bed availability map. Officials said they hope it serves as an example for LAHSA if it follows their recommendations.
