State officials have revived a popular grant program to help lower-income California homeowners build accessory dwelling units by covering some of the upfront costs. But funding is limited, so demand for aid may soon outstrip the supply of dollars.
The California Housing Finance Agency’s ADU Grant Program offers up to $40,000 to qualified homeowners to cover pre-construction costs of an ADU, including planning and permit fees for the structure. The program exhausted its initial $100 million months ago, causing the agency to stop taking applications; now, $25 million more is available for homeowners seeking help.
Obtaining a grant is not as simple as filling out a form online, however. For starters, applicants have to meet the program’s new income limits. Household income must be less than 80% of the area median income, which translates in Los Angeles County to $84,160. That’s down from 150% of the area median income in the initial round of grants.
Typically, homeowners must obtain a construction loan for an ADU from a participating lender before seeking an ADU grant. The loan will cover the costs that the grants will reimburse, including architectural designs, permits, soil tests, impact fees, property surveys, energy reports and utility hookups, the agency says. These expenses can make up a sizable portion of the cost of a new ADU, especially one built by converting a garage or other existing structure.
If you haven’t started work on an ADU yet, let alone obtained a loan, you can still get in line for a state grant. Neighborhood Housing Services, which provides construction loans for ADUs, says it will try to reserve a potential grant for anyone who emails it two pieces of information: a current mortgage statement and one month’s worth of pay stubs or other proof of income. The information, which should be sent to admin@nhslacounty.org, should also include the person’s legal name, address and Social Security number.
A homeowner who meets the income limits but can build an ADU without a loan can still apply for a grant through NHSLA. But the agency’s construction team would have to manage the project and the grant funds, said Iris Cruz of Neighborhood Housing Services.
Grant applicants will have to sign and submit an affidavit to CalHFA attesting to several things about themselves and their plans, including that they are a U.S. citizen or legal resident; they own and have their primary residence on the property where the ADU is being built; they will use the ADU for permanent housing or long-term rentals; and the ADU will conform to local building and zoning codes. If any of those statements prove to be false, the applicant could face a prison term and a fine of up to $10,000.
The lender, meanwhile, will have to attest that the grant applicant meets the program’s income limits.
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South Los Angeles, a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust recently bought the 1.86-acre dirt lot on Jefferson Boulevard for nearly $10 million from Sentinel Peak Resources. The nonprofit and its partners are now seeking grants and other funding sources to pay for planning, remediation and project execution.
“It’s what we hoped for,” Richard Parks, president of the South L.A. nonprofit Redeemer Community Partnership, said of the purchase. “It’s just so amazing to see our community receiving beauty for ashes. It’s overwhelming and feels like such a blessing.”
The sale marks a new chapter in a persistent and community-led fight against the oil drilling site, which residents argued for years was noisy and spewed foul odors. It also comes at a time of growing concerns about the risks and inequities of urban drilling in neighborhoods. L.A. City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky recently introduced legislation aiming to address public health and environmental threats posed by a drill site near the Pico-Robertson area.
Oil wells are known to emit carcinogens such as benzene and formaldehyde, and living near wells is associated with health problems such as respiratory issues and preterm births, studies have found.
Community leaders hope the purchase serves as a model for how to repurpose shuttered fossil fuel facilities as the city phases out existing oil and gas wells, a historic move approved last year by the L.A. City Council that also bans new oil and gas extraction.
Tori Kjer, executive director of the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, believes it is critical that these sites are transformed into uses that benefit communities historically affected by oil drilling. “It’s an environmental justice issue,” she said. It’s also imperative that planned site uses won’t displace residents through gentrification, she added.
“It’s so important, this idea of joint development, where you’re layering in affordable housing, community space and a park together,” she said. “For us, it’s really the ideal approach to equitable development in communities. … This is a rare opportunity, and an important opportunity, as we think bigger scale about future types of development in Los Angeles.”
Kjer estimates they will need three to six months and about $600,000 for remediation planning, and an additional year and $2 million to $3 million for cleanup. They are seeking state grants. The park’s budget will be about $6 million.
Lori R. Gay, president and chief executive of the Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County, said their target is to build 70 affordable housing units. They are also considering creating a community land trust to preserve the neighborhood and produce new homeowners.
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South L.A., a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
“The Jefferson site is in a homeownership community, so we wanted to maintain both the integrity and culture of the community with affordable homeownership,” she said. “It is too easy to just build affordable housing focused on tenancy and not provide the opportunity to build generational wealth. This development provides the opportunity to build wealth for generations to come.”
But the grand visions for the property won’t come without hurdles.
Finding land trust lenders will be challenging, Gay said, as will plan reviews and significant market changes that could hinder the speed of development. Having multiple partners involved in a large project could also further complicate it, Kjer added. Planning, remediation and raising and finding finances will also be tricky.
“The housing kind of funds itself, and we have some really good prospects for funding the park through different grants, but the community center I think will be a very big challenge,” Parks said. “How do we raise the several million dollars to be able to build that out for the community?”
First approved nearly 60 years ago, the South L.A. oil site on West Jefferson Boulevard and Van Buren Place was situated closer to homes than any other city drilling facility, according to the nonprofit Community Health Councils.
In 2013, environmental justice advocates with Redeemer Community Partnership began organizing after the oil company requested permits by the city of Los Angeles to drill three new wells.
Parks remembered knocking on residents’ doors and hearing concerning stories about the nearby oil facility: One woman was sprayed with oil while she watered her front lawn. The noxious smells of diesel exhaust and petroleum fumes permeated through a toddler’s room even with the windows closed. Others complained of headaches and nosebleeds, and miscarriages were commonplace, he recalled.
A report by a petroleum administrator, who was hired in 2016 to oversee oil and gas operations in the city, noted that the Jefferson Boulevard facility was classified as having hydrogen sulfide gas, which can give off a rotten-eggs odor and cause smell loss, and that chemicals such as benzene have also been emitted from the site.
A group of community members who were involved in the fight against the Jefferson Boulevard oil drilling site stand on the demolished facility.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
In 2017, after persistent demands from community activists to enclose the site, L.A. City Council members issued a set of stringent rules that oil companies must follow if they wanted to continue operating drilling sites next to homes in South L.A.
The requirements included, among other things, that drilling equipment be permanently closed off by a 45-foot-tall structure to reduce noise, odors and block glaring lights. It was a big victory for community activists, who had argued that the site exemplified the toxic outcomes of oil drilling in urban neighborhoods.
Officials at the time described the requirements as the toughest ever imposed on a drill site in L.A.
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Sentinel Peak Resources spurned the commands and filed a lawsuit. The company argued that the new mandates were “unduly oppressive” and would force it to reduce or stop its operations.
Nearly a year later, the company announced it would shutter the site for good.
While it removed all oil operating equipment and capped the 36 wells on site, the community began working on a shared vision for the site’s future.
“Because we knew if we did not do that, that the toxic violence of oil extraction would be replaced by the violence of displacement,” Parks said. “Developers are coming in, they’re tearing down homes, they’re building up student housing, they’re driving out longtime residents, and we didn’t want to see that happen.”
With help from California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), who is running for L.A. City Council District 10, they secured a $10-million state grant for those efforts.
“I’m really excited,” Jones-Sawyer said. “This will be the blueprint for how you can effectively make changes.”
When Redeemer Community Partnership contacted him about their vision for the land, “it seemed like the perfect combination of dealing with our housing crisis and dealing with our crisis with having no open space. And so when I had the opportunity to provide the $10 million … it seemed like a wonderful opportunity,” Jones-Sawyer said.
For residents such as Corissa Pacillas, who fought for years for more stringent protections from the Jefferson Boulevard site, the purchase exemplifies the power of organizing.
“It was encouraging to see that when people really intentionally organize and speak up, and are persistent … passionate and have good leadership … that change can happen,” said Pacillas, who spent years documenting the facility’s activities from the porch of her second-floor apartment. “I’m just so excited that the property … is going to go toward really benefiting the community.”
Raphael Nissel and his wife were walking to their Beverly Hills synagogue on Saturday morning when a man struck Nissel’s head from behind with a belt buckle.
Nissel, who wore a yarmulke, was left dazed and bloodied by the attack.
“My wife told me, ‘Watch out!’” Nissel, 75, told The Times on Sunday. “All of a sudden, something hard hit my forehead.”
The assailant turned to Nissel’s wife, Rivka and allegedly said, “Jew, give me your jewelry” but fled after Nissel gave chase.
Officers responded to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon that morning at North Rexford Drive and North Santa Monica Boulevard, near the Beverly Hills Police Department. They took over the pursuit of the suspect.
Nissel suffered a deep cut to his head, which he said required four “staples,” and was treated at the scene.
Scheduled to give a reading that day from the Torah at Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, an orthodox synagogue, Nissel didn’t allow the attack to deter him.
“My wife had to run to the house to bring me a new shirt,” he said. “I walked to the synagogue and was able to perform.”
Based on a description of the suspect, police later found and arrested Jarris Jay Silagi.
In a Sunday afternoon news release, Beverly Hills Police Chief Mark Stainbrook said his officers acted swiftly in taking Silagi into custody.
“This despicable act of hate against a member of our community will not be tolerated,” Stainbrook said.
Silagi, 44, of Los Angeles was booked on the suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, attempted robbery, elder abuse and a hate crime. A prior conviction for an attempted second-degree robbery in 2012 also occurred in Beverly Hills.
Silagi is being held at Los Angeles County Jail on $100,000 bail.
He is due at the Los Angeles Airport Courthouse on Tuesday as Beverly Hills police continue their investigation.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the attack a “vile act” in a Sunday afternoon post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
A hate crimes report released last month by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission found that anti-Jewish offenses skyrocketed by 59% last year and accounted for an overwhelming majority of religiously motivated hate crimes.
Officials have also noted a sharp rise in anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate crimes since the Israel-Hamas war began Oct. 7 which were not included in the 2022 report.
Bass pledged that the city would continue to work with its partners to “actively combat antisemitism.”
Nissel appreciated the mayor’s comments.
“I’m doing well,” Nissel said. “The most important part are the incidents we have to prevent in the future.”
Huntington Park police responding to a call of a road rage incident Saturday afternoon shot at the suspected driver involved, who then rammed their vehicles following a pursuit, authorities said.
The 51-year-old man, who was not identified, was treated at a nearby hospital for an apparent gunshot wound to his upper body and was in critical but stable condition, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating, said in a news release Sunday.
The department said the shooting occurred Saturday after police officers responded to a report about 3 p.m. of a road rage incident in Huntington Park in southeast Los Angeles County.
After police attempted to pull over the suspect’s vehicle, the driver fled to Hacienda Heights, where he rammed multiple Huntington Park police vehicles, causing police to open fire, according to the Sheriff’s Department.
The driver was believed to be under the influence, authorities said. A Huntington Park police officer sustained a minor injury.
For as long as people have watched tents take over sidewalks and RVs deteriorate under freeways, politicians have been making promises about solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
And for just as long, those same politicians have been breaking them.
This is undoubtedly why, back in March, as Mayor Karen Bass was approaching her first 100 days in office, only 17% of Angelenos believed her administration would make “a lot of progress” getting people off the streets, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Far more — 45% — predicted just “a little progress” would be made.
I was thinking about this deep well of public skepticism while listening to Bass, all smiles in a bright green suit on Wednesday morning, enthusiastically explain why the progress she has actually made is a reason for renewed optimism.
Flanked by members of the L.A. City Council outside a school in Hollywood, she announced that her administration had, in its first year, moved more than 21,694 people out of encampments and into interim housing. That’s an increase of 28% over the final year of former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, taking into account the work of various government programs, including Bass’ signature one, Inside Safe.
In addition, the majority of those directed to motel and hotel rooms, congregate shelters and tiny homes have decided to stay, rather than head back out onto the streets.
“We have tried to set a new tone in the city. This is an example of that new tone. Forty-one people used to sleep here, and now it’s clear,” Bass said Wednesday over the shrieks of schoolchildren. “Students and parents don’t need to walk around tents on their way to school, and the Angelenos who were living here do not need to die on our streets.”
It was a convincing message, backed up by a thick packet of numbers distributed to reporters at City Hall a few hours later.
But numbers are funny. They can be crunched in many ways and interpreted to mean many different things.
As my Times colleague David Zahniser pointed out, all of the people who now live in interim housing are still considered homeless by the federal government. And while Bass had originally thought most of them would be there for only three to six months, it’s now looking more like 18 months to two years. Permanent housing is that scarce.
So, numbers-wise, don’t expect a decline in the next annual homelessness count, which is scheduled for January. There might even be an increase, thanks to the expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections. As of the last count, there were more than 46,000 unhoused people living in the city, mostly in encampments.
But again, numbers are funny. They tend not to mean half as much as what people see and experience for themselves, just like the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and actual crime data.
So, when Bass declares at a news conference that “we have proved this year that we will make change,” and she talks about the encampment that used to be where she’s standing, and all the encampments that her administration has cleared, even if a few more tents have popped up down the street, skeptical Angelenos just might believe her.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing.
“What I see most powerfully is increased hope,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, told reporters on Wednesday. “Hope among the folks who are living in those encampments who had given up and [thought] they’ll always live in that level of despair. Hope that the community now believes that we could possibly get out of this terrible crisis.”
Kellie Waldon, 54, cries near what’s left of her encampment, left, as Skid Row West is dismantled under the 405 Freeway along Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles in October. Waldon was hoping to receive housing through the city’s Inside Safe program, like others in the encampment had. “You get your hopes up and you don’t know what to believe,” Waldon said.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hope is a thing difficult to quantify, especially among people who have been homeless for years, and have suffered so much and have been let down so often by government.
I’ve talked to some who took a chance and decided to leave their tents and RVs, and are now thrilled to be in a motel room with a door, running water and air conditioning. Others have had it with curfews and jail-like rules, and are getting tired of waiting on promised permanent housing.
I’ve also talked to those who have been booted out of interim housing for one reason or another, and are back on the streets. They are feeling hopeless, like many cash-strapped Angelenos who are on the verge of an eviction.
But peak hopelessness? That’s what we saw on the first days of December.
At a hastily called news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced that officers were searching for a man who had fatally shot three homeless people — one sleeping on a couch in an alley and another while pushing a shopping cart.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
Moore and Bass didn’t know then, but their suspect, Jerrid Joseph Powell, had already been arrested by Beverly Hills police after a traffic stop in which his $60,000 BMW was linked to a deadly follow-home robbery.
Police have yet to elaborate on Powell’s alleged motive, but Bass brought up the horrific case several times on Wednesday — and with good reason. Violence and acts of cruelty against people living on the streets are increasingly common not just locally, but nationally.
Advocates blame this trend of nastiness on the pandemic-era surge in homelessness, particularly in unsheltered homelessness, and the subsequent spike in interactions between housed and unhoused residents. Fear and frustration can lead to dehumanization and that, in turn, can lead to violence, said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
“I do really worry that it’s become normalized in public discourse to speak about people experiencing homelessness as, like, a problem for those who are not homeless — as opposed to fundamentally a massive societal failure that’s left usually older, vulnerable people terrified and totally unprotected,” she told me. “And I do think that there is a connection, like the more we dehumanize people, the less protected they are.”
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer has watched this happen in real-time as president and CEO of L.A. Family Housing. The seeming permanency of encampments, and the trash, fires and unsanitary conditions they often generate, have led to what she describes as widespread impatience.
“I don’t mean big, systemic impatience, like ‘I wish we could end homelessness faster,’” she said. “It’s the ‘I’m just sick of seeing you in front of me’ kind of impatience.”
On some level, she gets it, though. As does Kushel. As do I.
“It has to be OK to say, ‘Yeah, this sucks that I’m walking my kids to school and I’m walking over people in tents,’” Kushel told me. “But there has to be a way to hold that with being able to recognize how we got to this position and also how we’re going to get out. And to sort of restore [our] collective humanity.”
For Klasky-Gamer, this has meant focusing on what has changed since Bass became mayor.
“I know how much good is getting done,” she told me. “The frustration I may feel at seeing the tent every day I turn the corner, at least I can temper it knowing that 10 people yesterday moved into an apartment. These three people haven’t. But these 10 did.”
RVs in an encampment along West Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The mayor has told me many times that getting people off the streets isn’t just a humanitarian imperative — and, as a serial killer reminded us, a safety imperative. It’s also a demonstration to a fed up public that progress is possible.
“What distresses Angelenos the most are encampments. That’s where people were dying on the street,” Bass told reporters. “And to me, what was clear, was that we come up with a way to get people out of the tents.”
Some will dismiss that. They’ll insist that all her administration is doing is reducing visible homelessness to score easy political points. And that instead of doing the hard work of actually helping L.A.’s most vulnerable residents get back on their feet, the mayor is hiding them so that they’ll be forgotten and abandoned in interim housing.
In this city, defined by its haves and have nots, I understand the cynicism and skepticism. But that’s why what Bass does next, namely expanding and stabilizing the city’s crumbling supply of permanent housing, will matter even more than what she has done thus far.
“We’ve got to somehow make people believe again that this is solvable,” Kushel told me, “and it is solvable.”
Hope can be elusive. But Annelisa Stephan was looking for it anyway when she came to the Ballona Wetlands on a recent Saturday morning.
She and more than 100 other volunteers — many of them from the nearby neighborhoods of Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — had descended on the Westside ecological reserve to dig holes, spread soil, and put in plants and trees.
Just a few months ago, RVs had been parked here along Jefferson Boulevard, bumper to bumper in a sprawling encampment that dozens of unhoused people had come to call home.
They built a close-knit community, looking out for one another and mourning one another after deadly fires. But they also decimated the Ballona Wetlands’ freshwater marsh with everything from battery acid to trash to human waste, and scared off nearby residents who once walked the trails.
And then one day, after almost three years, the encampment was gone, replaced by concrete barricades and metal fencing. The residents were mostly sent to interim housing and the RVs were mostly towed away.
“It’s like, hard to know what to think or feel,” Stephan told me. “I’m happy that the land is being stewarded, but just sad about the suffering that so many people face.”
She lamented the “fervent, anti-homeless mania” that she has heard from some of her neighbors.
“It’s just been really a painful time,” Stephan said.
Not far away, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, whose Westside district includes the Ballona Wetlands and got elected on promises to aggressively crack down on homeless encampments, was more circumspect.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, which is to get folks off the streets and into safe settings and connected to the help that they need,” she said. “There’s a lot of different points of view about how we get there. And I think that’s where a lot of the conflict and the division lie.”
She paused, as traffic whizzed by on Jefferson Boulevard.
Almost every day for the last two years, Vincent “VDogg” Hubbard has stood outside the Louisiana Fried Chicken at Manchester and Normandie avenues with a suitcase full of cocoa butter and a traveling chess set.
Slight in stature, with a gap-tooth smile and a blunt tucked into his beanie, the 44-year-old is South L.A.’s preeminent purveyor of everything from African black soap to charcoal toothpaste to bundles of sage. But if you’re a chess enthusiast, you’re more likely to stop by for an over-the-board “a— whooping,” where he’ll snap up your pieces with a side of smack talk before “leaving ’em with two pieces to go.”
“Just without the chicken,” he chuckled, while scanning the dinner rush for potential customers or competitors. “And I usually have ’em before their order’s up.”
As part of the tight-knit street chess community below the I-10, Hubbard is one of many formerly incarcerated gang members who used to play in prison to barter for contraband items or commissary goods. While others may drop the game upon release, chess continues to play a huge part in his life as a viable source of income in a job market that turns its back on people who’ve done time.
Vincent Hubbard poses for a portrait outside his friend’s party bus in South L.A. Hubbard perfected his chess game serving a 10-year prison sentence and now is trying to turn his skill into a career. He’s found it hard to find a job that will hire the formerly incarcerated.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hubbard packs up his chess board and belongings after spending the afternoon playing chess outside of the Louisiana Fried Chicken.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hubbard usually measures his wins in $20 bills, earned from speed games against a curious onlooker or a cocky passerby. Unlike the regulars, they don’t know his losses are in the single digits, only that he looks like “a real thug from the ’hood” until he begins to attack, quickly picking off pieces and relentlessly checking his opponent.
“I’m on your head like hair,” Hubbard said, recalling a recent game against a flustered opponent.
“I’m coming out with missiles and whatever. I’m coming out strong,” Hubbard said, playfully boxing the air. And with his unfettered confidence, natural talent and unconventional play style, Hubbard wants to make it known that “nobody could f— with me.” In his mind, not even five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.
After all, he’s already squared off against titled players and is a two-time champion of South L.A.’s Make a Move, but there’s a big difference between winning an amateur tournament like that one and being recognized as a professional player in the highly competitive chess world.
Hubbard is already a pro in the eyes of the United States Chess Federation, but if his ultimate goal is to be one of the very few to make chess a full-time job, he’ll need to receive a certified rating. Culled from the results of several tournaments, his rating will determine how much he can charge for lessons and whether he’ll be able to compete in certain competitions, where the prize money can be in the millions.
Hubbard — a self-taught player — started that path in October by competing in his first rated tournament against established professionals from the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club. It’s a small classical tournament, where one game can last upwards of six excruciating hours. The competition is fierce, mostly motivated by ego and ratings rather than the $200 prize. That’s less than a weekly grandmaster lesson or the entry fee for the upcoming North American Chess Open. For Hubbard, though, that money could be food or more merchandise to sell. It could be rent for the house he shares with several other people waiting for Section 8 vouchers. It could even be the bus fare for the two-hour ride from South L.A. or the $25 entry fee for the club’s next tournament, which he needs for experience if he wants to keep moving up in the chess world.
Vincent Hubbard sets up outside of the Louisiana Fried Chicken for $20 speed games. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Vincent Hubbard says he learned chess on his own so doesn’t play like others who were taught specific maneuvers. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Chess offered escapism in prison
Born and raised in the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts, Hubbard spent his childhood bouncing between foster care, older relatives and juvenile hall. Initiated into the Grape Street Crips the first day of junior high, he spent his young-adult years in and out of L.A. County Jail, where he realized chess was not only “a good way to pass the time” but a way to obtain some of his favorite snacks, whether they be noodles or Little Debbie’s oatmeal pies.
However, things took a turn when he was arrested in Oklahoma on drug-trafficking charges in 2000, just three days shy of his 21st birthday. Sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary, Hubbard perfected his game over the next decade, studying Aron Nimzowitsch’s “My System” and playing correspondence chess with other inmates.
“In maximum security, we’d draw a board and then shape tissue with water into the pieces.”
— Vincent Hubbard
“In maximum security, we’d draw a board and then shape tissue with water into the pieces,” he said, explaining that he’d send messages containing his moves via old chewing tobacco cans, thrown “24 cells down from the dude I’m trying to play.” And with not much else to do, Hubbard used chess as his “PlayStation,” a mental escape from prison life where he could focus on a singular goal — checkmating his opponent — by finding innovative ways to adapt to unexpected situations or setbacks.
“Chess is an outlet, and it’s a way for me to use my brain,” he said, adding that he eventually became known as the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s “Evil Emperor.” With his ability to conquer the chessboard, Hubbard would immerse himself in the game, spending countless hours in his cell, treating his makeshift pieces like “those little feudal societies where the king’s gonna take over other kingdoms.”
He snickered, “I’m out there in the South, and I’m like, ‘Come through. Who thou plays me thou peasants?’”
In addition to playing $20 street chess, Vincent Hubbard also sells goods like cocoa butter, which he carries along with his chess set.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Between these little quips and his winning streak, Hubbard is a beloved and well-respected figure within the street chess community, said Make a Move tournament founder Jerimiah Payne.
“Everyone loves V’s charisma, and it’s really good to see somebody like that in these kinds of spaces,” said the West Adams-raised player, who began the roving event as a more “comfortable” alternative to other L.A. chess events, which can feel unwelcoming to outsiders.
“[It’s for people] from the neighborhood that would probably never compete at one of those other chess tournaments, like the … rated ones,” he said. Because, contrary to stereotypes, Payne explained that chess is a “great unifier,” before adding that Make a Move was partially inspired by seeing Bloods and Crips play together when he went to jail for burglary.
At its core, Make a Move is a love letter to the street chess community, cultivating an environment that mirrors the players’ welcoming attitudes and willingness to help one another grow. Yet despite its increasing popularity within the L.A. chess scene, Hubbard said the warmth has rarely been reciprocated when he walks into an “established” chess event. Rather, he feels a palpable chill in the air. “People be clutching their purses or their wallets when they go by. You see their body language, freezing up,” he said. To him, the message is clear: You shouldn’t be here.
Vincent Hubbard competes at a tournament hosted by the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club at St. Andrews Lutheran Church.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Breaking in as ‘the black sheep’
“When you think chess, you think of class and prestige … respect and nobility,” Hubbard said, alluding to how he’s constantly underestimated by more affluent players.
The microaggressions happen irrespective of setting. At casual meetups in bars and cafes, they’ll inch closer together, avoiding direct eye contact in favor of pointed whispers and sideways glances. At the tournament, the room goes silent and everyone stares when they think he’s not looking, especially the helicopter moms waiting for their chess prodigies. Everyone seems both curious and afraid of what could be inside his suitcase.
“[I’m] the black sheep,” Hubbard shrugged. “But I’m used to being the bad guy in the movie anyway.”
It’s “TenTrey Day” — the biggest holiday for Grape Street Crips — and Hubbard is completely “graped out” to represent his roots at the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club tournament. Dressed in head-to-toe purple, he’s easy to spot inside the beige meeting room of a small Sawtelle church, with his bright bandanna and matching camo pants and T-shirt. This time, everyone seems too scared to look at him, even when his back is turned.
For this game, it’s his turn to play black pieces, which move second and, theoretically speaking, lose more often than white. The obvious symbolism doesn’t escape Hubbard while he’s outside taking a mid-game smoke, watching his opponent ponder their next move. Coincidentally, his competition is also in a purple shirt, which Hubbard finds almost as funny as the old man who tosses a barely smoked cigarette into the gutter to avoid him.
He makes a teasing comment about the other man’s eagerness to run back inside. It’s like the way he used to speed-walk to the other side of Watts, just to learn basic chess moves on a church computer. The only difference, he laughed, is that he was getting chased through rival gang territory.
“I had to figure out all the other s— for myself, honestly,” Hubbard said. He sounds tired, his voice missing its usual bravado as he admits to having a rough start to the tournament. He’s won one game and drawn another and, after a particularly disheartening defeat, he even skipped a round to save the last of his cash, opting to play on the street instead, “because why show up if I’m gonna lose anyway?”
“A lot of these dudes, all they do is study lines. They read books. Some of them got photographic memories,” Hubbard said while nodding toward the tournament hall.
“Whereas on the street, or in the ’hood, or whatever, the average player just plays,” he explained. “They don’t understand the intricacies or the fundamentals of chess,” Hubbard sighed. “Chess is so simple but complicated. It’s easier said than done.”
While in prison, Vincent Hubbard crafted chess pieces out of paper towels and water. Now he hopes to turn chess into a career by competing in competitions and teaching others.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Evolving from a pawn
However, fellow street player and Hubbard’s longtime family friend, William “Chill” Somerville, used a more apt allegory to describe their intertwined chess journeys, explaining that everyone forgets a pawn’s innate potential — the power it has once it crosses the board.
“If you make the right moves in the right steps, it can become a rook, it can become a queen, it can become a bishop,” he said. “And life is like that.
“So if you make the right moves and steps, then you can be bigger than a pawn. Even if they looking at you as one.”
— William Somerville
“So if you make the right moves and steps, then you can be bigger than a pawn. Even if they looking at you as one,” he continued, before explaining that this is why the two decided to create Prolific Chess, a new organization that aims to make the game accessible to everyone from schoolkids to people living on Skid Row.
With a gentle demeanor and a sprinkle of gray in his beard, Somerville similarly fell in love with chess in L.A. County Jail. While he was being held on two charges of attempted murder prior to his acquittal, chess became a way to “relax,” to create and think outside of the box, which ultimately helped him realize, “You’re bigger than what you’re looking at.
“You’re bigger than what the people say you are,” he said, almost like a mantra. “You’ll become what you want.”
Since then, he’s become a Watts community ambassador and mental health advocate who wants to help people gain confidence from chess. So after years of playing against Hubbard in a shipping container on the empty lot next to his house, Somerville refurbished a party bus with a stripper pole and alligator skin upholstery into a suave mobile chess center. He brings chess tournaments, workshops and seminars to every corner of South L.A. through Prolific Chess.
Vincent Hubbard takes a smoke break during the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club tournament. After this one, he’ll have to keep competing to solidify his official rankings with the U.S. Chess Federation.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
For both men, chess was a lifeline during hard times that turned into a lifelong passion. And now, Hubbard hopes to break further into the professional chess community so that he can build a career that extends beyond the streets. He has a provisional rating with the U.S. Chess Federation that puts him in the 80th percentile of members, but he must keep competing for that rating to become official.
“I represent a lot of [the] misfortunate, or underprivileged, or have-nots,” he said. “Regular people out here that might not have opportunities.
“So when I’m playing chess, I’m representing everybody in my neighborhood. Everybody in my city … Wattsangeles.”
Hubbard smiles down at his phone, looking up which bus will take him back to South L.A. “Because how many people there get to say that they play chess, and that they’re now a professional?”
A pedestrian died after he was hit by an LAPD patrol car in Los Angeles on Friday evening, authorities said.
The crash was reported shortly after 5 p.m. at Century Boulevard and McKinley Avenue, Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Tony Im said. An ambulance was requested for the pedestrian, who was not conscious or breathing, he said.
The man died at the scene, Im said.
An ambulance also was requested for a 30-year-old officer, who suffered pain to her body and was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Im said.
Additional details about the crash were not available.
The incident remained under investigation, Im said.
Firefighters on Saturday knocked down a fire that broke out at a one-story building on the south side of Los Angeles International Airport, officials said.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Fire Department said 38 firefighters knocked down the attic fire in 40 minutes. They responded to the scene just after 11 a.m. No injuries were reported.
It’s unclear what the building was used for, but officials said there were no passengers inside and all employees had exited before the Fire Department arrived.
Video on social media showed smoke billowing from the building. Fire officials reported no impact on airport traffic and safety.
With flu season in full swing, Riverside County public health officials are urging residents to get their vaccines and to take other precautions against respiratory viruses after reporting the county’s first two flu-related deaths this winter.
The deaths include a 73-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman from mid- and western Riverside County, respectively. Both had underlying health issues and died at local hospitals, according to county officials. No further information was immediately provided.
Last month, Los Angeles County confirmed its first flu death of the season. The deceased was an elderly resident with multiple underlying conditions and had no record of influenza vaccination this season, according to county health officials.
According to Riverside County’s weekly influenza surveillance report, current influenza-like illnesses activity levels are moderate in the area. The county typically logs people aged 65 and older as the bulk of pneumonia and influenza deaths in the county with few occurring among those 24 and younger. Data collected between Nov. 19-25 show pneumonia contributed to the bulk of deaths, which were largely affected by other diseases such as COVID-19.
“These tragedies remind us that influenza can be serious, especially for those who have health issues or weakened immune systems,” Dr. Geoffrey Leung, public health officer for Riverside County, said in a statement. “There are simple steps that can be taken to protect ourselves. Most important of these is to get vaccinated. We recommend that everyone over 6 months of age receive the flu vaccine.”
Respiratory viruses such as the flu and COVID-19 spread year-round but are more common in the United States between October and March. The virus is spread through coughing and sneezing. Anyone is prone to catch the virus but elderly people, children and those with weakened immune systems are more at risk.
Health officials urge people to stay up-to-date on vaccines, remain at home if sick, consider wearing a face mask, cover a cough or sneeze and wash hands throughout the day.
LOS ANGELES — Project Angel Food saw a remarkable gathering of celebrities and 200 dedicated volunteers coming together to prepare and deliver 2,000 traditional turkey meals to critically ill clients on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023. The initiative culminated in a total of more than 5,000 meals prepared and delivered throughout Thanksgiving week.
Thanksgiving Day at Project Angel Food was not just about distributing meals but also about the spirit of giving back while cherishing moments with family and friends.
Melissa Rivers attends Thanksgiving at Project Angel Food on November 23, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Project Angel Food)
Melissa Rivers, who recently got engaged to lawyer Steve Mitchel on Oct. 13, made a notable appearance — showcasing her stunning 5.6 carat, emerald-cut engagement ring as she volunteered alongside adult son Cooper Endicott. She shared, “Sometime maybe in 2025. It would be my second marriage and his second marriage so if anything, we’ll have a party, and a ceremony might break out. But nobody’s in any rush.”
Amanda Kloots, host of “The Talk”, expressed her deep affection for Project Angel Food, stating that she fell in love with the cause while filming a segment for the hit CBS talk show. She returned with Zach Braff and her four-year-old son Elvis, emphasizing, “I think it is so important to show our kids how blessed we are and how we can help one another.”
Harry Hamlin attends Thanksgiving at Project Angel Food on November 23, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Project Angel Food)
Joining the ranks, Lisa Rinna and her husband Harry Hamlin continued their annual tradition of giving back at Project Angel Food on Thanksgiving. Harry offered, “It goes without saying the people of L.A. need to be fed, and we’re here to do it, especially on Thanksgiving.” Lisa added, “It makes you feel good to give back, always, and we need to do it more.”
Actor and model Sam Asghari, marking his first Thanksgiving after his divorce from Britney Spears, refrained from discussing the split but reflected “I think it is important when you have a platform and a voice, and you have the ability to help others it is important to do.”
Sam Asghari attends Thanksgiving at Project Angel Food on November 23, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Project Angel Food)
Unlikely friends Charo and Kat Von D were among the initial celebrity arrivals. Von D explained their unique bond, stating, “We’re Yin and Yang and complement each other. Since she had heard of Project Angel Food through Charo, she wanted to join.” Charo expressed her enthusiasm for volunteering, exclaiming, “I love people. This is my passion!”
The event saw the participation of other notable celebrity volunteers, including Amy Yasbeck, singer Em Beihold, Eve Mauro, Jai Rodriguez, Supervisor Kathryn Barger, Laura Pierson, Lauren Tom, Lawrence Zarian, Lisa Foxx, Loni Love, Mary-Margaret Humes, Michael Hitchcock, Peter Porte, Rachel Lindsay, Sandra Lee, Tamara Brown, and Tim Bagley.
Project Angel Food CEO Richard Ayoub expressed heartfelt gratitude stating, “Every day is like Thanksgiving at Project Angel Food. But on this day, we are especially grateful to our celebrity friends and hundreds of volunteers committed to bringing a little light to the thousands of critically ill men, women and children we serve.”
The meals were provided through “drive-by” pick-up for volunteers who then delivered them to Project Angel Food clients. The traditional Thanksgiving dinners included roasted turkey, root vegetables, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and a slice of pumpkin cheesecake. Additionally, vegetarian meals were also provided. The Thanksgiving Day meals were sponsored by The Stanley & Joyce Black Family Foundation, with additional support from Joybird, which furnished the Joybird VIP Love Lounge, allowing volunteers to take a break during the morning of service.
Lisa Rinna, Harry Hamlin, Richard Ayoub, Lawrence Zarien and Melissa Rivers attend Thanksgiving at Project Angel Food on November 23, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Project Angel Food)
Beyond serving meals to 2,000 critically ill individuals, Project Angel Food extended its support by providing Thanksgiving Day meals for 500 people at PATH. PATH works tirelessly to end homelessness by building affordable housing and offering supportive services. Furthermore, actress and director Joely Fisher sponsored Project Angel Food meals, hosting a SAG/AFTRA “Friendsgiving” at Hollywood United Methodist Church for 200+ union members affected by the 118-day SAG/AFTRA strike on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023.
Project Angel Food remains dedicated to providing daily meals to 2,500 critically ill individuals and delivering more than 1.5 million medically tailored meals annually across Los Angeles. Their clients often grapple with serious illnesses compounded by challenges such as poverty, aging, and isolation. Established in 1989 by Marianne Williamson, the organization has prepared and delivered more than 17 million meals in its 34-year history.
Related:
Project Angel Food serves up Thanksgiving meals for Angelenos:
As part of an ongoing Metro effort to build housing and community around transportation hubs, a new mixed-use development dubbed District NoHo is coming to North Hollywood’s Metro station.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to approve the 15-acre project, greenlighting a massive development that will include 1,481 residential units as well as office, retail and restaurant space.
A quarter of the units will be rent-restricted, more than double the ratio required for the city’s density bonus.
“District NoHo will be a transformative project for this city,” City Council President Paul Krekorian said in a statement. Krekorian represents Council District 2, which includes North Hollywood.
“This is a truly transit-oriented development that will enable hundreds of Angelenos to live, work, study, shop and enjoy recreation without driving, parking or riding in anything other than zero-emission public transportation,” he said.
The project will also bring to the area 750 parking spots reserved for Metro customers, and two acres of open space for the public as well as three shopping plazas. The North Hollywood station is Metro’s third busiest.
District NoHo is one of Metro’s several joint development projects, which are real estate collaborations between Metro and private developers built on Metro land to create more housing around transit.
The project will feature improvements to North Hollywood’s Metro station, including a new entrance to the B Line subway on the west side of Lankershim Boulevard, improvements to the G Line busway terminus, and new internal streets and walkways to break up the large development site, a city report said.
Metro has made the ambitious commitment to build 10,000 housing units in Los Angeles County by 2031, “with the goal of contributing to solving Southern California’s housing crisis,” the agency said in a news release in July. Half of the units are intended to be rent-restricted for lower- to moderate-income households.
While District NoHo will include 366 rent-restricted units, some community members say the project isn’t doing enough to create affordable housing. Reimagine District NoHo, an effort driven by the nonprofit NoHo Home Alliance, has been fighting for the inclusion of more affordable units.
“The government’s obligation is to do the most good for the most people,” said Desmond Faison, with Reimagine District NoHo. “I think that it misses the mark. … We’re building a monolith to capitalism.”
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Faison said that only the most wealthy North Hollywood residents would be able to afford to live in District NoHo’s market rate units. Glenn Block, another North Hollywood resident who is involved with Reimagine District NoHo, said the 15 acres the development will be built on could be put to better use.
“This project fails on every level,” he said.
The property will have nearly 100 more rent-restricted units than the original proposal, according to Metro project manager Marie Sullivan. The number of affordable units is limited because funding for the units comes from many different sources, all of which have restricted budgets.
“There’s only so much affordable housing funding that comes from federal, state and local sources each year,” Sullivan said.
Metro is also using income from the market-rate units to fund other aspects of the project, including a park and shopping plazas, she said.
“We need the revenue from market-rate homes to fund a lot of these public benefits,” she said.
District NoHo will also boost the community by creating roughly 10,000 jobs during construction, according to a city report, and an additional 2,500 jobs through property operations. Construction is expected to generate $1 billion.
The development of the property includes the demolition of nearly 50,000 square feet of surface parking lots and industrial space.
The project, which has been in the works since 2015, “provides a model of sustainable development for the whole region,” Krekorian said. “This is a game-changer for the Valley.”
Unite Here Local 11, the union representing hotel workers in Southern California who have been striking on and off for more than five months, said it has reached a tentative contract agreement with the Beverly Hilton that covers more than 500 unionized workers.
The Beverly Hills hotel, longtime host of the annual Golden Globe Awards, is the sixth property to reach a deal with the union. It was among some 60 hotel sites in Los Angeles and Orange counties hit by a series of short rolling strikes after contracts covering more than 15,000 housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, servers, and front desk workers expired June 30.
The union has declined to give specifics on wages and other economic details of the agreements it has reached thus far, and the contracts have not yet been put to a vote by workers. Union spokesperson Maria Hernandez has said that the contracts — once ratified by workers at the various hotels — will raise wages, strengthen pensions and increase investments in healthcare.
The Beverly Hilton announcement comes at the start of Hollywood’s awards season, with Golden Globe nominations expected to be announced Monday morning at the hotel.
“The hotel and union are pleased to announce their deal just before what promises to be an especially celebratory awards season on the heels of the actors’ and writers’ own labor disputes,” the union said in an emailed statement Friday.
Unite Here Local 11 co-President Kurt Petersen praised the hotel as “a leader in Beverly Hills” and urged the city’s other hotels targeted by the strike — the Fairmont Century Plaza and the Beverly Wilshire — to “quickly follow suit.”
“Hotel workers at the Beverly Hilton are eager to kick off the awards season now that Hollywood is back in full swing because they have a contract with a living wage,” Petersen said in the statement.
Peter Hillan, a spokesperson for the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles, said the trade group couldn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Keith Grossman, an attorney representing a group of more than 40 Southern California hotel owners and operators in talks with the union, did not respond to a request for comment. The Beverly Hilton initially was part of that negotiating group but subsequently left the group, a union spokesperson said.
The heated labor dispute has persisted for months. Noisy early morning picket lines, with hotel workers in red union shirts banging drums and blowing horns, have become a familiar scene at many L.A.-area hotels.
Local trade associations representing hotels have criticized the strike as damaging to the regional tourism economy. Workers say they can’t afford to live near their jobs anymore in Southern California’s overheated housing market.
This week marked an escalation in hotel worker protests. Housekeepers, cooks and other workers, as well as staff organizers with Unite Here Local 11, set up camp outside two hotels on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport early Wednesday morning.
Dozens of tents line the sidewalk outside the Sheraton Gateway and Four Points Sheraton LAX; over the tents dangle string lights and clotheslines festooned with laundry, including lacy lingerie and baby onesies. In front of the Sheraton Gateway hangs a large yellow banner reading “Occupy.”
Workers protest in shifts, with some sleeping there overnight. The union hauled in portable toilets for protesting workers, and at night when the temperature drops, union staffers help shivering and bundled-up workers light heat lamps.
Housekeepers interviewed Thursday night said they are frustrated by months of tense negotiations and years of what they describe as heavier workloads for wages that are unlivable.
Sheraton Gateway housekeepers said they make a $19.80 hourly wage. Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Teresa Kamel said that of the hotels in talks with the union, workers near LAX tend to have some of the most depressed wages.
When the L.A. Al Fresco dining program was established in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Christy Vega said it saved her 67-year-old family-owned restaurant.
For Vega’s Sherman Oaks restaurant, Casa Vega, this meant converting two parking lots into outdoor dining space, a change that made it possible for Vega to continue to serve customers and pay her employees.
“It was wildly vital to our survival,” she said.
The city is now moving to make the program’s relaxed regulations permanent, allowing restaurants to continue operating outdoor space without pre-pandemic zoning restrictions. The Los Angeles City Council signified its commitment to al fresco dining with a vote Friday requesting the city attorney draft an ordinance to make the program permanent.
It’s a victory for the restaurant industry and for communities accustomed to eating outside, but some business owners and residents say the city’s new version of the program isn’t perfect.
A last-minute amendment to the ordinance mandates that restaurants include one parking spot for disabled people on their property, a requirement that would effectively eliminate outdoor dining space for smaller businesses, Vega said.
“It’ll kill al fresco for anybody that doesn’t have a giant parking lot,” she said.
Vega said she would have to take down her patio and lose $1 million in revenue if she had to make space for a disabled parking spot that also includes room for a vehicle to back out and turn around. To avoid that, she said, she’s spent $60,000 trying to obtain a conditional use permit to keep her patio permanently.
In an effort to protect small businesses, the City Council on Friday added an exception to the parking space requirement for restaurants with 3,000 square feet of indoor space or 1,000 square feet of parking space or less.
Vega said she is grateful for the exemption, but other owners say it’s not enough.
“Square footage has nothing to do with the size of the business,” said Brittney Valles, who sits on the board of the Independent Hospitality Coalition and owns Guerrilla Tacos in downtown Los Angeles. “It shouldn’t be a requirement at all.”
Valles, who has enough outdoor space for dining and a disabled parking spot, said the rule could be devastating for many restaurants who don’t.
“I think that there are a lot of restaurants that would have to rethink whether their business is feasible without outdoor dining,” she said.
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who introduced the exception to the parking requirement, said at Wednesday’s council meeting that he was trying to strike a balance between supporting al fresco dining for small businesses and ensuring accessibility for disabled customers.
Implementing a permanent al fresco program has been a long road for the City Council and the restaurant community. City officials first drafted an ordinance in November 2022 and have spent more than a year receiving public comment.
The initial ordinance required restaurant owners to navigate a complicated process to get their outdoor dining approved, Valles said.
“It was going to be this overbearing process that costs restaurants a lot of money and made it very complicated to do basically what we’re already doing,” she said.
To reach a compromise, Valles and her fellow restaurant owners agreed to a ban on outdoor ambient music, which is prohibited by the temporary program. Live music is also prohibited.
Venice resident David Feige said the current ban on ambient music is not enforced in his neighborhood, and the new version of the al fresco ordinance doesn’t do enough to create enforcement mechanisms.
Casa Vega owner Christy Vega talks to customers Kendra Dousette, left, and Scarlett Pettyjohn on Thursday.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
There are several unpermitted outdoor speakers at restaurants on his block near Washington Boulevard that are disruptively loud, he said.
“If we close all the windows, turn on the noise machine and we can still hear the music in our bedroom, that’s a problem,” he said.
Although the ordinance includes the establishment of a hotline for complaints and says the public can contact the Department of Building and Safety to report a violation, Feige said those measures will be ineffective.
“The minute they see the cops coming, they turn it down,” he said of the restaurants with speakers, “and 10 minutes later, they turn it back up. There is no meaningful ability for redress here.”
Feige spoke at Tuesday’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee meeting and said he was representing more than a dozen of his neighbors. He called for a complaint-based system, in which a restaurant gets cited or shut down if it receives too many complaints.
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Vega also said enforcement is an important issue. Only a handful of restaurants play disruptive music, but she doesn’t want them to ruin the reputation of the al fresco program.
But Vega said she is most worried about the parking space measure and the restaurants that may have to lay off employees after shutting down outdoor space.
“Restaurant workers have not had any financial security or job security since the pandemic,” she said. “The No. 1 gift of this program was that we were able to get our employees back to work.”
Restaurant owners say they hope the new version of L.A. Al Fresco will run just as smoothly as the first. The original program during the pandemic was “the absolute easiest thing” to take advantage of, Valles said.
“This was such a beautiful, simple win for restaurants when it launched in 2020,” she said. “We just want to keep it that way.”
A statue of a USC founder — whose connection to groups that carried out extralegal lynchings raised questions about the statue’s placement — was removed last month for routine maintenance, university officials said.
Judge Robert Widney was one of USC’s founders, and since 2014 an 8-foot bronze statue of him had stood outside the Widney Alumni House.
In an Instagram post, the Daily Trojan reported that Widney’s statue and the plaque were taken down Nov. 28.
In an emailed statement, the university said the statue was removed for “maintenance and cleaning” but did not answer a question on whether it would be returned.
Like many institutions, USC was met with reinvigorated calls to purge its namesake sites tied to racist figures — which included university founders, presidents and athletics coaches — after a police officer murdered George Floyd on camera in 2020. The fury and protests over the killing strengthened a nationwide movement to remove symbols or names associated with racism in public spaces and on school campuses. Monuments, statues and buildings were toppled, dismantled or renamed as organizations, schools and cities reckoned with their pasts.
In June 2020, after years of demands for the university to take action, USC removed the Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs, which was named after Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the university’s fifth president.He was also a leading figure in California’s eugenics movement. A bust of Von KleinSmid was also removed from campus after a unanimous vote from the board of trustees’ executive committee.
In 2021, the building was renamed in honor of Joseph Medicine Crow, a Native American alumnus who wrote influential works about Indigenous history and culture.
Over the summer, the university renamed the field at the Trojans’ track stadium in honor of athlete and alumna Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympics history. The space had previously been named after Dean Cromwell, a former USC track coach who was criticized for anti-Black views and antisemitic actions.
But Widney was also tied to the Home Guard Vigilance Committee in the late 1800s. At the time, vigilante groups in Los Angeles often targeted Native Americans and people of color, according to multiple historians.
A professor and historian at UC Merced told The Times in 2020 that Robert Widney was “most certainly” supportive of extralegal lynchings. Widney’s statue came under sharper scrutiny after the university stripped Von KleinSmid’s name from the landmark building.
Widney’s brother, Joseph Widney, was USC’s second president. He expressed racist views in his writing, including that Black and white people “cannot live together as equals.” Historian Torres-Rouff described the racial beliefs Joseph Widney espoused in his book as “repugnant,” citing them in a 2018 article asking universities “to confront their past, not omit it.”
Times staff writer Tomás Mier contributed to this report.
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.
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was indicted Thursday in Los Angeles on several federal tax charges, marking the start of a second criminal case that will proceed during his father’s reelection campaign.
Biden, who resides in Malibu, was accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, filing false and fraudulent tax returns in 2018, and tax evasion, according to the 56-page indictment.
The charges in the nine-count indictment span a period when Biden was addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine, which he documented in graphic detail in a memoir that dwells on the death of his brother, Beau, along with the grief and depression that consumed him and his family.
Biden has since become sober, paid his taxes, along with penalties and interest, and his lawyers are expected to point to his well-publicized addiction to explain his chaotic financial affairs.
But prosecutors contend that he “willfully” failed to file and pay his taxes on time, and that rather than pay the IRS, he plunked down cash for a bacchanalia across L.A. featuring “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature.”
Further, prosecutors allege that when preparing tax returns in 2020, in the early months of his sobriety, Biden misclassified a litany of personal expenses from 2018 as business expenses to reduce his tax burden. Those expenses include tuition for his daughter and a Venmo payment to an exotic dancer, according to the indictment.
If convicted of all charges — six misdemeanors and three felonies — Biden would face a maximum penalty of 17 years in prison, although federal guidelines would call for a far lower sentence.
The case was unsealed on the eve of President Biden’s arrival in Southern California for his first in-person fundraising trip here since Hollywood strikes put a pause on campaign events.
The charges come months after Hunter Biden was set to enter a plea deal for tax and firearms violations. The deal would have avoided time behind bars and included immunity from additional federal charges, but it collapsed under questioning by a federal judge in Delaware. Shortly after, Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, as special counsel.
Weiss has since brought a fresh indictment in Delaware against Biden for the firearms violations, accusing him of lying about his drug use in 2018 when purchasing a gun that he briefly owned. Biden has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are rarely filed as a standalone case.
The special counsel also brought the tax charges against Biden in California, asserting in a statement that the president’s son “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.”
Biden’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, emphasized that his client had long ago paid his tax debts and accused Weiss of bowing to Republican pressure by filing “unprecedented and unconstitutional gun charges.”
“Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said, an apparent nod to millions of people who annually fail to pay their taxes on time.
“Now, after five years of investigating with no new evidence — and two years after Hunter paid his taxes in full — the U.S. attorney has piled on nine new charges when he had agreed just months ago to resolve this matter with a pair of misdemeanors.”
Lowell noted that he had written to the special counsel’s office this week, seeking a “customary meeting” to discuss the tax inquiry. “The response was media leaks today that these charges were being filed,” Lowell said.
The indictment offers the most detailed window into the Department of Justice’s long-running inquiry into Biden.
In his memoir and in several interviews, Biden has been open about the depths of his addiction and unsavory lifestyle in L.A., when he lived out of the Chateau Marmont, Hollywood Roosevelt and other luxury hotels in a haze of sex and crack-induced euphoria. “I never slept. There was no clock. Day bled into night and night into day,” Biden wrote in “Beautiful Things,” in which he recounts his journey to sobriety.
Still, the grand jury indictment outlines how such sordid travails were fiscally carried out — with $7 million in income from 2016 to 2020 from various business dealings — and uses Biden’s own words to claim discrepancies in his tax returns.
The most serious charges stem from 2018, the height of Biden’s addiction. Prosecutors allege the filing of that year’s tax returns for both Biden and his business, Owasco PC, was fraudulent and evasive.
Those returns were prepared in early 2020 by an accounting team in L.A. Prosecutors describe a three-hour meeting that Biden had with the accountants that year where he reviewed records to confirm their accuracy and used a yellow highlighter to indicate outlays that should not be deducted as business expenses.
According to the indictment, Biden failed to identify several personal expenses, including the Venmo payment to an exotic dancer; $2,312.50 to a test prep service for one of his daughters; and a $30,000 law school tuition payment for his daughter.
The indictment makes no mention of Biden’s father, nor does it specify the amount that Biden allegedly under-reported his taxes or how that would ultimately impact his tax bill.
Although prosecutors claim that Biden in 2020 “never told” his accountants about his extensive drug and alcohol use, “which might have prompted greater scrutiny of his claims of hundreds of thousands of dollars in business expenses,” he had already begun discussing his alcohol and drug addiction in public.
Times staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.
You can sense it in the ubiquitous “Help Wanted” posters in artsy shops and restaurants, in the ranks of university students living out of their cars and in the outsize percentage of locals camping on the streets.
This seaside county known for its windswept beauty and easy living is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in home-starved California. Santa Cruz County, home to a beloved surf break and a bohemian University of California campus, also claims the state’s highest rate of homelessness and, by one measure based on local incomes, its least affordable housing.
Leaders in the city of Santa Cruz have responded to this hardship in a land of plenty — and to new state laws demanding construction of more affordable housing — with a plan to build up rather than out.
Many Santa Cruz business owners back the city’s plan for high-rise development, saying the city needs more affordable housing for servers and retail workers.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A downtown long centered on quaint sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue has boomed with new construction in recent years. Shining glass and metal apartment complexes sprout in multiple locations, across a streetscape once dominated by 20th century classics like the Art Deco-inspired Palomar Inn apartments.
And the City Council and planning department envision building even bigger and higher, with high-rise apartments of up to 12 stories in the southern section of downtown that comes closest to the city’s boardwalk and the landmark wooden roller coaster known as the Giant Dipper.
“It’s on everybody’s lips now, this talk about our housing challenge,” said Don Lane, a former mayor and an activist for homeless people. “The old resistance to development is breaking down, at least among a lot of people.”
In recent years, Santa Cruz has approved development of modern multistory housing complexes, part of a broader effort to add housing stock.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Said current Mayor Fred Keeley, a former state assemblyman: “It’s not a question of ‘no growth’ anymore. It’s a question of where are you going to do this. You can spread it all over the city, or you can make the urban core more dense.”
But not everyone in famously tolerant Santa Cruz is going along. The high-rise push has spawned a backlash, exposing sharp divisions over growth and underscoring the complexities, even in a city known for its progressive politics, of trying to keep desirable communities affordable for the teachers, waiters, firefighters and store clerks who provide the bulk of services.
A group originally called Stop the Skyscrapers — now Housing for People — protests that a proposed city “housing element” needlessly clears the way for more apartments than state housing officials demand, while providing too few truly affordable units.
City officials say the plan they hope to finalize in the coming weeks, with its greater height limits, only creates a path for new construction. The intentions of individual property owners and the vicissitudes of the market will continue to make it challenging to build the 3,736 additional units the state has mandated for the city.
“We’ve talked to a lot of people, going door to door, and the feeling is it’s just too much, too fast,” said Frank Barron, a retired county planner and Housing for People co-founder. “The six- and seven-story buildings that they’re building now are already freaking people out. When they hear what [the city is] proposing now could go twice as high, they’re completely aghast.”
Frank Barron is among the activists who say the City Council’s development plans are out of character for the laid-back beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Monheit, a former state water official and another Housing for People co-founder, calls 12-story buildings “completely out of the human scale,” adding: “It’s out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
Housing for People has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the March 2024 ballot that, if approved, would require a vote of the people for development anywhere in the city that would exceed the zoning restrictions codified in the current general plan, which include a cap of roughly seven or eight stories downtown.
The activists say that they are trying to restore the voices of everyday Santa Cruzans and that city leaders are giving in to out-of-town builders and “developer overreach laws.”
The nascent campaign has generated spirited debate. Opponents contend the slow-growth measure would slam on the brakes, just as the city is overcoming decades of construction inertia. They say Santa Cruz should be a proud outlier in a long string of wealthy coastal cities that have defied the state’s push to add housing and bring down exorbitant home prices and rental costs.
Diana Alfaro, who works for a Santa Cruz development company, said many of the complaints about high-rise construction sound like veiled NIMBYism.
“We always hear, ‘I support affordable housing, but just not next to me. Not here. Not there. Not really anywhere,’ ” said Alfaro, an activist with the national political group YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] Action. “Is that really being inclusive?”
Zav Hershfield, a renters’ rights activist, advocates rent control caps and housing developments owned by the state or cooperatives.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The dispute has divided Santa Cruz’s progressive political universe. What does it mean to be a “good liberal” on land-use issues in an era when UC Santa Cruz students commonly triple up in small rooms and Zillow reports a median rent of $3,425 that is higher than San Francisco’s?
Beginning in the 1970s, left-leaning students at the new UC campus helped power a slow-growth movement that limited construction across broad swaths of Santa Cruz County. Over the decades, the need for affordable housing was a recurring discussion. The county was a leader in requiring that builders who put up five units of housing or more set aside 15% of the units at below-market rates.
But Mayor Keeley said local officials gave only a “head nod” to the issue when it came to approving specific projects. “Well, here we are, 30 or 40 years later,” Keeley said, “and these communities are not affordable.”
Santa Cruz County, known for its windswept beauty and easy living, is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in California.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Today, with 265,000 residents, the county is substantially wealthy and white.
An annual survey this year found Santa Cruz County pushed past San Francisco to be the least affordable rental market in the country, given income levels in both places. And many observers say UC Santa Cruz students contend with the toughest housing market of any college town in the state.
State legislators have crafted dozens of laws in recent years to encourage construction of more homes, particularly apartments, across the state. While California has long required local governments to draft “housing elements” to demonstrate their commitment to affordable housing, state officials only recently passed other measures to actually push cities to put the plans into practice.
Under the new regulations, regional government associations draw up a Regional Housing Needs Assessment, designating how many housing units — including affordable ones — should be built during an eight-year cycle. The state Department of Housing and Community Development can reject plans it deems inadequate.
For years 2024 to 2031, Santa Cruz was told it should build at least 3,736 units, on top of its existing 24,036.
For decades, Santa Cruz culture has centered on quaint shops and restaurants along sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz and other cities have been motivated, at least in part, by a heavy “stick”: In cases when cities fail to produce adequate housing plans, the state’s so-called “builder’s remedy” essentially allows developers to propose building whatever they want, provided some of the housing is set aside for low- or middle-income families. In cities like Santa Monica and La Cañada-Flintridge, builders have invoked the builder’s remedy to push ahead with large housing projects, over the objections of city leaders.
The Santa Cruz City Council resolved to avoid losing control of planning decisions. A key part of their plan envisions putting up to 1,800 units in a sleepy downtown neighborhood of automobile businesses, shops and low-rise apartments south of Laurel Street. Initial concepts suggested one block could go as high as 175 feet (roughly 16 stories), but council members later proposed a 12-story height limit, substantially taller than the stately eight-story Palomar, which remains the city’s tallest building.
City planners say focusing growth in the downtown neighborhood makes sense, because bus lines converge there at a transit center and residents can walk to shops and services.
“The demand for housing is not going away,” said Lee Butler, the city’s director of planning and community development, “and this means we will have less development pressure in other areas of the city and county, where it is less sustainable to grow.”
Santa Cruz planning director Lee Butler advocates concentrating new development downtown, rather than building in areas where growth is less sustainable.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A public survey found support for a variety of other proposed improvements to make the downtown more attractive to walkers, bikers and tourists. Among other features, the plan would concentrate new restaurants and shops around the San Lorenzo River Walk; replace the fabric-topped 2,400-seat Kaiser Permanente Arena, which hosts the Santa Cruz Warriors (the G-league affiliate of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors), with a bigger entertainment and sports venue; and better connect downtown with the beach and boardwalk.
Business owners say they favor the housing plan for a couple of reasons: They hope new residents will bring new commerce, and they want some of the affordable apartments to go to their workers, who frequently commute well over an hour from places such as Gilroy and Salinas.
Restaurateur Zach Davis called the high cost of housing “the No. 1 factor” that led to the 2018 closure of Assembly, a popular farm-to-table restaurant he co-owned.
“How do we keep our community intact, if the people who make it all happen, the workers who make Santa Cruz what it is, can’t afford to live here anymore?” Davis asked.
One opponent calls the plan to add high-rises to the city’s picturesque downtown “out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s plan indicates that 859 of the units built over the next eight years will be for “very low income” families. But the term is relative, tied to a community’s median income, which in Santa Cruz is $132,800 for a family of four. Families bringing home between $58,000 and $82,000 would qualify as very low income. Tenants in that bracket would pay $1,800 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in one recently completed complex, built under the city’s requirement that 20% of units be rented for below-market rents.
The people pushing for high-rise development say expanding the housing supply will stem ever-rising rents. Opponents counter that the continued growth of UC Santa Cruz, which hopes to add 8,500 students by 2040, and a new surge of highly paid Silicon Valley “tech bros” looking to put down roots in beachy Santa Cruz would quickly gobble up whatever number of new units are built.
“They say that if you just build more housing, the prices will come down. Which is, of course, not true,” said Gary Patton, a former county supervisor and an original leader in the slow-growth movement. “So we’ll have lots more housing, with lots more traffic, less parking, more neighborhood impacts and more rich people moving into Santa Cruz.”
Leaders on Santa Cruz’s political left say new construction only touches one aspect of the housing crisis. Some of the leaders of Tenant Sanctuary, a renters’ rights group, would like to see Santa Cruz tamp down rents by creating complexes owned by the state or cooperatives and enacting a rent control law capping annual increases.
“No matter what they build, we need housing where the price is not tied to market swings and how much money can be squeezed out of a given area of land,” said Zav Hershfield, a board member for the group.
The up-zoning of downtown parcels has won the support of much of the city’s establishment, including the county Chamber of Commerce, whose chief executive said exorbitant housing prices are excluding blue-collar workers and even some well-paid professionals. “The question is, do you want a lively, vital, economically thriving community?” said Casey Beyer, CEO of the business group. “Or do you want to be a sleepy retirement community?”
The town clock is one of several landmarks in the beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Just days after the anti-high-rise measure qualified for the March ballot, the two sides began bickering over what impact it would have.
Lane, the former mayor, and two affordable housing developers wrote an op-ed for the Lookout Santa Cruz news site that said the ballot measure is crafted so broadly it would apply to all “development projects.” They contend that could trigger the need for citywide votes for projects as modest as raising a fence from 6 feet to 7 feet, adding an ADU to a residential property or building a shelter for the homeless, if the projects exceed current practices in a given neighborhood.
The authors accused ballot measure proponents of faux environmentalism. “If we don’t go up,” they wrote, “we have less housing near jobs — and more people driving longer distances to get to work.”
The ballot measure proponents countered that their critics were misrepresenting facts. They said the measure would not necessitate voter approval for mundane improvements and would come into play in relatively few circumstances, for projects that require amendments to the city’s General Plan.
While not staking out a formal position on the ballot measure, the city’s planning staff has concluded the measure could force citizen votes for relatively modest construction projects.
The two sides also can’t agree on the impact of a second provision of the ballot measure. It would increase from 20% to 25% the percentage of “inclusionary” (below-market-rate) units that developers would have to include in complexes of 30 units or more.
The ballot measure writers say such an increase signals their intent to assure that as much new housing as possible goes to the less affluent. But their opponents say that when cities try to force developers to include too many sub-market apartments, the builders end up walking away.
Santa Cruz’s housing inventory shows that the city has the potential to add as many as 8,364 units in the next eight years, when factoring in proposals such as the downtown high-rises and UC Santa Cruz’s plan to add about 1,200 units of student housing. That’s more than double the number required by the state. But the Department of Housing and Community Development requires this sort of “buffer,” because the reality is that many properties zoned for denser housing won’t get developed during the eight-year cycle.
As with many aspects of the downtown up-zoning, the two sides are at odds over whether incorporating the potential for extra development amounts to judicious planning or developer-friendly overkill.
Joyful, left, and Valerie Christy, right, jam for fun and a few dollars in downtown Santa Cruz.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s voters have rejected housing-related measures three times in recent years. In 2018, they decisively turned down a rent control proposal. Last year, they said no to taxing owners who leave homes in the community sitting empty. But they also rejected a measure that would have blocked a plan to relocate the city’s central library while also building 124 below-market-rate apartment units.
The last time locals got this worked up about their downtown may have been at the start of the new millennium, when the City Council considered cracking down on street performers. That prompted the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, another local landmark, to print T-shirts and bumper stickers entreating fellow residents to “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.”
Santa Cruzans once again are being asked to consider the look and feel of their downtown and whether its future should be left to the City Council, or voters themselves. The measure provokes myriad questions, including these: Can funky, earnest, compassionate Santa Cruz remain that way, even with high-rise apartments? And, with so little housing for students and working folks, has it already lost its charm?
A shift in demographics. Affordable apartments transformed into luxury condos. A coffee shop called something like “Brew Slut.”
The signs of gentrification take many forms. A newly opened art gallery can serve both as a communal space and a harbinger of the displacement to come. Remodeled homes might boost a street’s curb appeal but then drive up rents in the ensuing months and years.
There are plenty of ways to tell when gentrification is coming to a community; rising home prices and an influx of trendy shops are classic omens. But in the modern market, developers are flipping houses at the highest rate since 2000, and the houses they churn out are often homogeneous: boxy, black and white, minimalist. They’re adorned with trendy house number fonts and chic drought-tolerant gardens, and they can be an obvious sign of gentrification on the way.
Take a stroll through your neighborhood and keep an eye out for these trends. If you spot a few, gentrification may be on the way. If you spot a bunch, it might be well underway.
The gentrification font
If Neutraface starts speckling the homes and fences around your neighborhood, your rent might soar soon.
The sleek typeface and its many knock-offs have become so commonplace that they’ve become a meme, and the Guardian even declared it “the gentrification font.” It crowns countless brand-new builds across L.A., and like certain wines and cheeses, it pairs well with cheaply done fixer-uppers or the aforementioned box houses.
House numbers are presented in a chic font.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
“The Shake Shack font has invaded,” said Steven Sanders, a Highland Park resident who has lived in the rapidly changing neighborhood since 2015. When Sanders moved there, the median single-family home value was around $463,000, according to Zillow. Today, it’s $1.002 million.
There’s nothing specifically wrong with the font; it’s clean, modern and easy to read. Ironically, it’s named after Richard Neutra, an iconic architect who often stressed affordability in his work.
If a for-sale house has a Neutraface house number, the listing price will probably be anything but affordable.
Gentrification bonus point: if the font is also brass or gold.
Black-and-white paint jobs
This two-story home features a black-and-white exterior.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
Gentrification, in terms of housing, has become a monochromatic movement. Gone are the green-colored Craftsmans or the pink-hued bungalows of old; today, newly built homes are overwhelmingly white, black or a brutal combination of the two.
“Taste aside, a black house in an era of climate change is ridiculous,” said Adam Greenfield, a transportation and land-use advocate.
Gentrification bonus point: if a black-and-white exterior comes with an accent door — a splash of bright blue, yellow or turquoise to showcase that the property isn’t completely devoid of character. Just mostly devoid of character.
Excess security cameras
Multiple cameras are posted outside an Eagle Rock home.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
If you’re taking a stroll down your street and feel watched — not by anyone specific, but by a small army of Ring doorbells, Nest cameras and other electronic eyes making sure you don’t pick a Meyer lemon or that your dog doesn’t defecate on the decomposed granite — brace for a new brand of neighbor.
Surveillance systems and the context behind them, in which owners view their neighbors and passersby as potential package-stealers, are all too common in gentrifying communities. For if it were truly a high-crime place, there would still be chain link and barred windows.
There’s plenty of evidence that smart doorbells lead to racial profiling, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with security systems, they generally detract from the community feel instead of adding to it.
“It’s the degradation of the social fabric that for so long we all took for granted,” Greenfield said. “It’s legitimate to walk up to a neighbor’s door to ask for or offer something, and security cameras and warning systems discourage that. We can’t let fear win in our society.”
Gentrification bonus point: if they come with a speaker with a disembodied voice that barks at passersby in a condescending tone: “Hi! You are currently being recorded.”
Privacy fences
Sometimes, surveillance systems aren’t enough. Many modern homeowners moving into new neighborhoods don’t even want to be seen by neighbors, so they install privacy fences or towering hedges to shield themselves from anyone walking by.
Greenfield calls them “f— you fences.”
“Many people were raised in the suburban sprawl, where they don’t have as much access to other people. Then they move to denser areas and import those suburban norms of separation and privacy,” Greenfield said.
Lola Rodriguez, a Lincoln Heights resident who grew up in the area, said if a home in the neighborhood is ever hidden from view, it’s usually someone who just moved in.
Gentrification bonus point: if the privacy fence is chic and stylish, like the horizontal trend that has taken over in some areas.
Box houses
This modern five-bedroom home listed by Avo Atnalian in the hills of Highland Park is on the market for $2.498 million.
(Avo Atnalian)
One of the more uninspired architectural trends of the last century, modern box houses forgo attempts at character or ornamentation, instead serving as shrines to simplicity. They worship at the altar of minimalism, squeezing out as much square footage as zoning laws will allow.
They’re clean, they’re simple, and they’re a likely sign that a new demographic is moving into a neighborhood.
“It’s jarring seeing a bright white box house jammed between older houses with more character,” Rodriguez said. She prefers the neighborhood’s stock of century-old bungalows over the new homes being built.
The polarizing style isn’t for everyone, but it’s a hit for deep-pocketed buyers eyeing extra space. And box houses are quicker and cheaper to build for profit-minded developers, who will keep cranking out supply as long as there’s demand.
Gentrification bonus point: if the box house includes a glass garage door.
This modern home features a glass garage door.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
Drought-tolerant gardens
To be clear, the ecological benefits of drought-tolerant landscaping make it a net positive for Southern California. Limited water usage is absolutely a good thing.
But such gardens aren’t always cheap, and if they start popping up in neighborhoods where most residents can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, on their yard, it could be a sign of gentrification.
Most carry the same look: a handful of shrubs, succulents and cacti surrounded by gravel or decomposed granite, giving it a sandy, desert-like quality.
Drought-tolerant plants outside an Eagle Rock home.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
Kerry Kimble and Steven Galido, two real estate agents with the Agency, said they’ve noticed an increase in drought-tolerant gardens in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Highland Park and Silver Lake, where displacement has already been happening for years.
The majority of Kimble’s listings are in northeast L.A., and she said she’s noticed a surplus of succulents.
Galido said some developers add drought-tolerant gardens to attract potential buyers.
“Developers remodel homes for the taste of the gentrifier,” he said.
The pair are currently listing a 106-year-old duplex in Angelino Heights, a neighborhood protected by a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, which preserves a community’s architectural feel by limiting new building designs and renovations. But not every neighborhood enjoys such protection.
Firestick plants fill the gardens of many homes in gentrified neighborhoods.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
Gentrification bonus point: if the garden is riddled with Firestick plants — the trendy, orange-tipped succulents that seem to anchor every lawn in those “up-and-coming” neighborhoods.
Little Free Libraries
Listen, these are lovely. Unlike surveillance systems and privacy fences, little libraries actually evoke a sense of community, bringing neighbors together over a shared love of literature (even though most generally seem to be stocked exclusively with James Patterson novels and unreadable how-to books).
A Little Free Library is posted outside a home.
(Jack Flemming / Los Angeles Times)
The charming, birdhouse-like structures certainly don’t cause gentrification, despite what a handful of critics have claimed over the years. But they definitely seem to be a product of gentrification, usually popping up in areas where home prices are rising and well-to-do residents are moving in.
Gentrification bonus point: if a smart doorbell camera watches over the library, making sure nobody takes more than their fair share of books.
Pointed listing language
Sometimes, the clearest sign of gentrification is hearing how people are talking about a neighborhood and the homes within it. There’s a wealth of such examples posted daily on Zillow, Redfin and other listing sites as real estate agents take on certain tones to market properties to potential buyers.
For example, if a listing brags about the home being some kind of port in a storm, a refuge from the area around it, a ship of gentrifiers might be sailing in. One listing in Boyle Heights is touted as an “urban oasis.” Another in South L.A. promises to add “a touch of serenity to urban living.”
Also pay attention to whether a listing is marketed as an actual place to live or simply an investment opportunity. This listing near Leimert Park asks potential buyers to “come see your future investment today.” An Elysian Heights listing touts its use as an Airbnb.
Gentrification bonus point: if the language sounds like an extra flowery wellness ad, such as this listing in East L.A.: “Imagine stepping into a world where every corner whispers tales of renewal.”
The arrests of two students bringing loaded weapons to Redondo Union High School on consecutive days were not believed to be tied to a planned school shooting or gang-related, Redondo Beach police said Wednesday.
Police provided the update at a virtual safety meeting they hosted along with the Redondo Unified School District in response to the lockdown of the school on two consecutive days. Parents and community members submitted over 350 questions at the one-hour virtual event held via YouTube at 8:30 a.m.
Redondo Beach Police Lt. Cory King said one of the popular questions asked revolved around the intent of the two students.
King said an investigation was ongoing, but “what we do know is that there was no evidence of a planned school shooting, or specific hit list or act of violence threatening a specific individual.”
He also said police have no confirmation that “the students that we’ve arrested or spoken to have been documented as gang members.”
Despite the unknown motive, Redondo Beach Unified administrators said they’ll move to expel the students.
“Just to remind everyone, the law dictates that bringing firearms to campus like in this situation … is an expellable offense,” Principal Anthony Bridi said at the meeting. “And we intend to exercise those legal rights.”
The safety meeting came in response to incidents on Monday and Tuesday when two 15-year-old sophomores were each arrested on consecutive days for carrying guns and high-capacity magazines onto campus. Verbal tips to police led to the arrests. No one was harmed and no rounds were fired despite early and incorrect reports Tuesday of a school shooting.
The district canceled Redondo Union High classes Wednesday as police conducted a weapons and explosives sweep with dogs. The school is set to reopen Thursday.
Families hugged kids after signing them out to take home from Redondo Union High School after the school was locked down after a report of a student with a gun on campus in Redondo Beach on Tuesday.
(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)
District Supt. Nicole Wesley praised school safety procedures that led to the arrests without any injuries and encouraged students, faculty and staff to immediately report suspicious activity.
“Please continue to speak up,” she said. “This week has proved that ‘see something, hear something, say something’ is not just a slogan, it is a powerful safety tool.”
When students return to campus Thursday, they’ll find officers stationed at school all day and access will be limited to three entry and exit points. Wesley also said the district would be installing metal detectors at the school.
Redondo Union parent Beau Bowden, 43, said he felt like school leadership “was very on top of communicating with parents on both incidents.”
His 16-year-old daughter, Belle, missed class Tuesday due to a sinus infection, but he said he received timely updates all day.
While his daughter “felt apprehensive” about what happened, she told him she wanted to go back to class Thursday.
Bowden pinned blame on the parents of the two armed students. He suggested that the parents should be arrested and charged, as was the case in a Michigan school shooting by a 15-year-old boy in 2021.
“I grew up in West Virginia, so I’m not anti-gun, but I’m for responsibility,” he said. “These types of gun instances are happening too commonly, and we have to do something to stop them.”
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.
