ReportWire

Tag: los angeles times

  • High-speed rail project slated to received $20 billion in state funding

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    California’s high-speed rail project is slated to receive $1 billion a year in funding through the state’s cap-and-trade program for the next 20 years — a relief to lawmakers who had urged the Legislature to approve the request as billions of dollars in federal funding remain in jeopardy.

    State leaders called the move, which is pending a final vote from the Legislature, a necessary step to cementing investments from the private sector — an area of focus for project officials. And the project’s chief executive, Ian Choudri, said the agreement is crucial to completing the current priority — a 171-mile portion from Merced to Bakersfield — by 2033.

    “This funding agreement resolves all identified funding gaps for the Early Operating Segment in the Central Valley and opens the door for meaningful public-private engagement with the program,” Choudri said in a statement. “And we must also work toward securing the long-term funding — beyond today’s commitment — that can bring high-speed rail to California’s population centers, where ridership and revenue growth will in turn support future expansions.”

    The project was originally proposed with a 2020 completion date, but so far, no segment of the line has been completed. It’s also about $100 billion over the original $33 billion budget that was originally proposed to voters and has received considerable pushback from Republican lawmakers and some Democrats. The Trump administration recently moved to pull $4 billion in funding that was slated for construction in the Central Valley; in turn, the state sued.

    Still, advocates of the project believe it’s crucial to the state’s economy and to the nation’s innovation in transit.

    “We applaud Governor Newsom and legislative leaders for their commitment and determination to make High-Speed Rail a success,” former U.S. Secretary of Transportation and Co-Chair of U.S. High Speed Rail Ray LaHood said in a statement. “The agreement represents the most important step forward to date for this transformational project.”

    State Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose), who chairs the Senate’s Transportation Committee, said the Legislature “must act quickly to pass this plan and keep California on track to deliver America’s first true high-speed rail.”

    Construction on the project has been limited to the Central Valley. Choudri has said that the project could take decades to connect the line from Los Angeles to San Francisco and it’s unclear when construction would begin elsewhere in the state. A recent report from the authority proposed next alternatives for the project that would connect the Central Valley to Gilroy and Palmdale. In those scenarios, regional transit would fill in the gaps to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

    L.A.-area lawmakers recently requested an annual $3.3-billion investment in transit from the state’s cap-and-trade fund, acknowledging that although high-speed rail is a state priority, L.A. County should not be overlooked when it comes to increasing more immediate transit investments in the state’s most populous county. Citing equity, health and climate needs, the delegation pushed for greater investment in bus, rail and regional connectors.

    According to a recent report from the Southern California Assn. of Governments, L.A. County accounts for 82% of Southern California’s bus ridership. Although public transit use is high, lawmakers and transit leaders have said that expansion and improvements are necessary.

    “Millions of Los Angeles County residents already depend on Metro bus and rail, Metrolink, and municipal operators. Yet service has not kept pace with need: transit ridership is still 25-30% below pre-pandemic levels, even as freeway traffic has nearly fully rebounded,” the delegation’s letter stated. “Without significant investment, super commuters from the Valley, South LA, and the Inland Empire remain locked into long, expensive car trips.”

    Funding commitments for L.A. County transit were maintained from the last budget, but the delegation’s request for billions in cap-and-trade funds has yet to come through.

    “The state budget deal in June 2025 restored $1.1 billion in flexible transit funding from the GGRF, which benefits transit operations statewide, including L.A. County,” Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas’ (D-Los Angeles) office said.

    Smallwood-Cuevas said the point of the request was to ensure that transit needs of the Los Angeles region aren’t lost.

    “We recognize what it means when folks in L.A. County get out of their cars and onto public transit — that is the greatest reduction that can happen,” she said. “We fully intend to see an opportunity where we can address some of that ridership and look at ways to ensure an equitable opportunity that invests in our regional transit public transit, while we also work to build what I call the spine of our transit, a high speed rail program that will run up and down the state and connect to our regional public transit arteries.”

    State Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) said that the state’s investments toward wildfire recovery in Pacific Palisades and Altadena “does not mean that you should leave the largest segment of drivers anywhere in the world languishing in traffic forever.”

    “It’s not that there’d be nothing [for transit funding],” Stern said. “It’s just that we think there should be more.”

    The Los Angeles area isn’t facing the same state funding hurdle of the Bay Area, where lawmakers have scrambled to obtain a $750-million transit loan, warning that key services like BART could be significantly affected without the funds.

    Roughly $14 billion has been spent on the high-speed rail project so far, which has created roughly 15,000 jobs in the Central Valley. Theoretically, the train will eventually boost economies statewide.

    Eli Lipmen of MoveLA believes that the investments will help transit in the Los Angeles region by expanding access, long before there’s a direct high-speed rail connection.

    “Wer’e building an incredible transit system with LA Metro, but we need that regional system to get out to Orange County, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura County,” Lipmen said.

    “So we’re making those investments even if high-speed rail doesn’t come here right away to improve those connections for constituents. That’s a good thing.”

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    Colleen Shalby

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  • He dreamed of a midcentury haven in L.A. He found it in an iconic rental off Sunset

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    Growing up in a small town outside of Cleveland, Tyler Piña was fascinated by Los Angeles and the glamour of Hollywood.

    “My dad grew up out here, and it’s where my parents met,” says the 33-year-old screenwriter and Emmy Award-winning director of “Next Level With Lauren Goode.” “I remember looking at old Polaroids of them in the ‘80s and seeing how much fun they had.”

    In this series, we spotlight L.A. rentals with style. From perfect gallery walls to temporary decor hacks, these renters get creative, even in small spaces. And Angelenos need the inspiration: Most are renters.

    His attraction to Los Angeles, however, was more than just nostalgia. “I was mesmerized by the landscapes and architecture,” he says, noting the Santa Monica Mountains that run alongside the Pacific Ocean and glass-and-steel Case Study Houses such as the Stahl House, perched on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles.

    “I had never seen anything like it in Ohio,” he says. “It felt like another world, so far from reach. Yet it was a life I aspired to live one day.”

    Looking back, he can’t believe he realized his dream of moving to Los Angeles from San Francisco in 2018 and eventually renting a Midcentury Modern penthouse steps from the Sunset Strip.

    A wet bar with copper bar stols
    A bar window surrounded by botanical wallpaper
    Tyler Piña stands at his bar in his penthouse apartment in the Sunset Lanai Apartments

    “A Midcentury Modern penthouse on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of West Hollywood, with a bar in the living room? I mean, does it get more iconic? I am, in no way, cool enough to live here,” says Piña.

    “It’s a little bit of a fishbowl,” Piña says, standing inside his living room with views of a Netflix billboard through the unit’s floor-to-ceiling windows. (It’s an ad for “Happy Gilmore 2” that reads “When Life Gives You S— for Breakfast … Go to Your Happy Place.”)

    More than once, Piña has been caught sitting on his couch in his underwear, writing scripts on his laptop, as Hollywood tour buses stop at the traffic light outside.

    In other instances, friends have driven by his building and texted him, “‘Hey, I just drove by and saw you in your living room,’” he says, laughing.

    Tyler Pina stand by a large window in penthouse apartment in the Sunset Lanai apartments.

    Although he feels like he is living in a fishbowl at times, Piña draws energy from the city outside his windows.

    The two-story, 22-unit Sunset Lanai apartment complex, designed by acclaimed midcentury architect Edward H. Fickett and built in 1952 by developer George Alexander, is an oasis in the middle of a bustling part of the city. That is because Fickett designed the West Hollywood apartments to face inward, toward a lush courtyard and swimming pool, avoiding the activity of the Sunset Strip.

    Piña’s penthouse apartment spans almost the entire top floor and boasts many of the architectural touches that Fickett was known for including as an indoor-outdoor floor plan that connects to a lanai, vaulted ceilings, partial walls and lots of glass.

    Over the years, the apartment’s owners and the West Hollywood City Council have debated its relevance as a historic landmark that needs preservation. But talk to Piña, and he’ll tell you it’s special.

    The Sunset Lanai Apartments in West Hollywood

    The Sunset Lanai apartments were designed by noted modernist architect Edward Fickett and constructed by George Alexander in 1952.

    “I walked by the apartment every day before I moved in and was always curious what it looked like inside,” he says. “When I saw the ‘for rent’ sign, I immediately went on a tour. But the price was a little high for me, so I waited.”

    His patience paid off as the apartment stood vacant for seven months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following several price reductions, Piña, his boyfriend at that time and a friend of theirs rented the 2,850-square-foot unit for $5,200 a month in 2020.

    “Right away it felt like home,” he says of the first time he stepped inside. “This was the place I grew up dreaming about.”

    Two people stand in the lanai area of a penthouse apartment.

    Piña, right, and his boyfriend, Vittorio Manole, stand in the lanai in front of the apartment.

    A lanai area with mats, weights and washer and dryer.

    The lanai has enough room for a gym, washer and dryer and a lounge. It also has ample built-in storage.

    Inside, the apartment is a treasure trove of unique features. The expansive living room seamlessly connects to a formal dining room, which in turn leads to an updated kitchen with stainless steel appliances, all with a view of Sunset Boulevard. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms, each with more built-in storage than they can use, sit off an intersecting hallway.

    At the center of the living room, a stylish enclosed wet bar, an original design by Fickett, exudes a “Mad Men” vibe. On the wall behind the bar, Piña hung a peel-and-stick wallpaper that he found on Etsy, reminiscent of the iconic banana-leaf wallpaper at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and a yellow neon sign that reads “Lost in euphoria.”

    “There’s something really special about a Fickett building,” Piña says. “A Midcentury Modern penthouse on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of West Hollywood, with a bar in the living room? I mean, does it get more iconic? I am, in no way, cool enough to live here.”

    Artworks, plants in a penthouse apartment
    A bookshelf, plant and window overlooking a courtyard

    “In a way, I guess decorating is just another medium for me to express my creativity like I do with film and writing,” Piña says.

    “I tried my best to do this space justice,” Piña says, referring to his frantic two-week effort to decorate the apartment while working on “Comeback Coach” and “Women in Business,” two reality shows sponsored by Verizon. He has also worked on trailers for Amazon, shot and edited commercials for Google, Levi’s and Sephora, edited “Making Emilia Perez” for Netflix and wrote and directed the award-winning documentary “88 Cents.”

    “At my previous place, I slowly decorated over time,” he says. “By the time it finally felt perfect, it was time to move out. In this space, I wanted it to feel lived in right away so I could enjoy it fully for as long as possible.”

    Working until 3 in the morning, Piña sourced Midcentury-inspired furniture from the online retailer All Modern, CB2 and several local vintage shops. He also purchased a variety of furnishings, plants and accessories on Etsy and Offer Up as well as artworks by local artists, photographers and friends.

    Inspired by a print on wood by Australian photographer Sarah Bahbah in his dining room, Piña decorated the living and dining room in a similar color palette. Similarly, copper-colored bar stools he spotted in a small shop in San Francisco inspired the bar area.

    A dark and moody bedroom with large windows.

    The bedroom is dark and moody, with windows that look out over the Sunset Strip.

    Explaining his decorating process, Piña says he likes to start with a statement piece such as an artwork, rug or piece of furniture and then build a story around it. “In a way, I guess decorating is just another medium for me to express my creativity like I do with film and writing,” he says.

    Adding to the spacious floor plan is a lanai, which has enough room for weights, mats and a Peloton, as well as a lounge area, washer and dryer, sink and a huge walk-in storage space. “I have a projector and have hosted movie nights,” Piña says.

    A dining room and wet bar.

    The formal dining room connects to an updated kitchen with stainless steel appliances that faces Sunset Boulevard.

    At night, Piña says his apartment glows from the streetlights and soaks up the energy from the neighborhood. “It’s the best place to have a good cry,” he says. “Because you never feel alone. I put so much love into this apartment. And it’s given me so much back in return. And the tears I cried here, the immense struggles that I faced — a pandemic, losing work from the strikes, multiple relationships that came and went. But even in the hard moments, there was so much beauty. The architecture brings this place to life.”

    But like so many good things that come to an end, Piña recently decided to move out of the apartment after his roommate left.

    Tyler Pina sets on his sofa in his penthouse apartment.

    Piña moves on with nothing but happy memories.

    “I’m ready for the next dream,” he says.

    Last month, Piña sold and donated all of his furniture. He plans to travel to Europe and Asia and work remotely for a while. “Just me and a suitcase,” he says.

    According to the director, he enjoyed selling his furnishings on Facebook Marketplace and plans on using it as a source for his next home. “I met so many cool people from all over the city,” he says. “The whole concept of passing items down versus buying new just makes the home feel more lively in my opinion, like every item comes with its own story and a bit of love — not to mention it’s way more cost-effective.”

    He leaves Los Angeles with his Polaroids, just like his parents.

    “And all the amazing memories,” he says. “Those are coming with me.”

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    Lisa Boone

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  • World’s toymakers set up shop in El Segundo’s new toy hub to be near Barbie

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    It’s only September, but the world’s toymakers and designers are converging on El Segundo this week for an industry conference to decide on the hottest toys for next year.

    The city has long been a hub for the toy industry as companies like to set up shop in the shadow of Mattel, the maker of Barbie. This week, the industry opened a new tower of toys, an office complex featuring 65 showrooms for toy companies to showcase their products and discuss design with their wholesale customers.

    In his toy-filled suite with sprawling views of the commercial neighborhood near LAX, Italian toy maker Matteo Sarnari prepared for the coming fall onslaught of professional buyers he hopes will buy his wares in bulk.

    Sarnari is a business developer for educational toy creator Clementoni, which was established in a small Italian village in 1963 and recently established a U.S. division to move into the American market.

    “Of course, this is the most important market in the world,” Sarnari said, 41 times bigger than the Italian market where Clementoni sells educational toys. “The opportunity here is huge.”

    A glow-in-the-dark “Stranger Things” puzzle is displayed in Clementoni’s new showroom at the Toy Building.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    The company has licenses to make “Harry Potter” and “Stranger Things”-themed puzzles, joining its line of board games, science toys and musical toys for small children.

    Clementoni’s El Segundo beachhead is the new Toy Building, which was opened on Monday by the Toy Assn., a trade group for U.S. toy companies.

    While the February Toy Fair in New York is the industry’s largest annual event, the El Segundo toy showroom building is the only one in the country that operates year-round.

    Toy Assn. President Greg Ahearn at the Toy Building.

    Toy Assn. President Greg Ahearn poses for a portrait at the Toy Building.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    Los Angeles is a major hub of the U.S. toy industry, said Toy Assn. President Greg Ahearn. Many toy companies are headquartered or have a significant presence here.

    Among the big players are Chatsworth-based MGA Entertainment, the company behind Bratz and L.O.L. Surprise! dolls, Canadian toy and entertainment company Spin Master and Santa Monica’s Jakks Pacific, a maker of licensed toys such as Sonic the Hedgehog.

    The headquarters of industry giant Mattel is a short walk from the Toy Building and looms large in the views from the renovated 1970s office building in a neighborhood that used to house more aerospace companies.

    The Toy Building in El Segundo.

    The Toy Building on Wednesday in El Segundo.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    As aerospace has scaled back since the end of the Cold War, El Segundo has emerged as a hub for many creative businesses, including toys.

    The city is “incredibly convenient” to the toy industry and people who do business with them, Ahearn said, because it’s near Los Angeles International Airport and multiple large and small toy companies are located there. Among them are the U.S. office of Moose Toys, an Australian maker of collectible mini-figures.

    “El Segundo represents the greatest concentration of toy manufacturers in the U.S.,” he said.

    Toys are a huge business — the industry generated $42 billion in sales in the U.S. last year. Sales remained flat compared with the previous year.

    The opening of the Toy Building coincides with the annual fall preview of toys manufacturers hope will be on Christmas wish lists the following year, he said. “That’s how far ahead our industry works.”

    Clementoni baby toys are displayed in their new showroom at the Toy Building.

    Clementoni baby toys are displayed in their new showroom at the Toy Building.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    At the fall preview, retailers and licensors of toys such as Paramount, Universal and Disney join others in the toy business to “descend on Los Angeles to actually see product that is going to be available for holiday 2026,” Ahearn said.

    Licensed toys are a huge category, he said, as big entertainment providers serve up branded fare such as Star Wars action figures, SpongeBob SquarePants plush toys and Paw Patrol toddler tricycles.

    Even online media personalities such as MrBeast and Ms. Rachel have toy lines.

    “All of them usually have some level of toy licensing and merchandising that is available to consumers as part of their plan,” Ahearn said.

    A Clementoni brand "Pen Creator Studio" toy is displayed in a new showroom at the Toy Building.

    A Clementoni brand “Pen Creator Studio” toy is displayed in a new showroom at the Toy Building.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    The Toy Building’s four floors were designed to serve as a “mini convention center” for the industry operating year-round, said Nelson Algaze, chief executive of SAA Interiors + Architecture, which created the space.

    It has 65 showrooms and is so far home to such brands as Crayola, Funko and Hasbro. Each floor has about 20,000 square feet and most of the showrooms are between 625 and 2,500 square feet. The showrooms are nearly 70% leased.

    Although it has lounges and meeting rooms, the Toy Building also has an element of secrecy not typically associated with a convention facility as some toymakers keep their products hidden from the competition with barriers that prevent passersby from seeing inside.

    Photography is mostly forbidden.

    More directly looming over the industry is the fallout from President Trump’s tariffs on imported goods, which are expected to drive up the cost of toys.

    In April, the Toy Assn. urged the U.S. government to grant an immediate reprieve from tariffs on toys imported from China to keep them on retail shelves and available for the holiday season.

    “As we move into the critical holiday season, there is now some trepidation with what the impact of tariffs is ultimately going to be,” Ahearn said.

    Toys are displayed in Clementoni's new showroom at the Toy Building.

    Toys are displayed in Clementoni’s new showroom at the Toy Building.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Amy Coney Barrett visits SoCal a day after the Supreme Court’s immigration raid ruling

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    SIMI VALLEY — Jadyn Winsett twisted her new engagement ring around her finger, scanning the sea of navy sport coats, sailor stripes and string pearls at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for a glimpse of a Supreme Court justice.

    Across the room stood Amy Coney Barrett, the high court’s youngest member, who could hardly have picked a more dramatic moment to turn up.

    A day earlier, Barrett joined the conservative majority in a decision that cleared federal immigration agents to detain people in Southern California simply because they have brown skin or speak Spanish.

    The response across much of Los Angeles was outrage and concern that the 4th Amendment has been trampled.

    But at the Reagan Library, the mood was triumphant.

    Winsett, 23, and her fiance were among the admirers who gathered to hear Barrett speak about her new memoir, “Listening to the Law.” For the supporters who turned up, Barrett evokes values cherished by President Trump’s faith-driven acolytes: beatific motherhood, Southern charm, Christian piety and steadfast constitutional originalism.

    A Texas native, Winsett’s partner had popped the question two days before at Yosemite National Park. She said the proposal was the highlight of the couple’s California holiday. But the chance to meet Barrett at Reagan’s final resting place was a close second.

    “I sent [my fiance] so many text messages in the span of a couple minutes just being excited that this event was going on, and we had to come,” Winsett said. “I’m a really big fan of Justice Scalia … so knowing [Barrett’s] book is supposed to bit of an expansion on Justice Scalia’s ‘Reading Law,’ that’s gonna be really cool. “

    Jadyn Winsett, left, and Reese Johnson, a newly engaged couple from Texas, planned their trip to attend the justice’s book launch.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Barrett said almost nothing about her controversial rise to the court or the jurisprudence behind her most contested decisions during Tuesday’s event, instead dishing out details about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s race with the Nationals’ foam-headed Lincoln and Roosevelt mascots and how she’d brought Starbucks coffee to the Supreme Court cafeteria.

    But the previous day’s immigration raid ruling still hovered in the air.

    When asked to explain the court’s “shadow docket”, she ad-libbed a hypothetical all but identical to Monday’s real decision.

    “Let’s say that some policy of the administration has been enjoined,” Barrett said. “The administration might say, ‘While we are litigating this case, having this injunction in place is irreparably harming us in a way we can’t recover from, so in the interim, please stay this injunction.’”

    A packed room listens and watches monitors

    A packed room listens and watches monitors as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett takes questions at the launch of her new book.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Later, when asked about constitutional interpretation, she opined about the slippery text of the 4th Amendment, the same amendment implicated in Monday’s unsigned order.

    “[Look at] the protection against unreasonable search and seizures,” she invited the audience.

    “When you have a word like that, ‘unreasonable,’ there’ll be a range where everybody will say, outside of this, we all agree this is unreasonable,” Barrett explained. “Then, there’s a range right here where we all say this is reasonable. But then there’s going to be a band where there’s room for disagreement. One of the great things about the Constitution is that it leaves some of that play in the joints.”

    People line up near sundown at the Reagan Library.

    People line up to get their book signed at the Reagan Library.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Earlier in the evening, Barrett and her husband, Jesse, had paid their respects at the Reagan Memorial and briefly admired the chunk of Berlin Wall, flanked by a coterie of federal agents while protests raged outside.

    Many in the crowd said they, like the Catholic justice, were devout Christian believers and credited her with casting the decisive vote to end abortion as a constitutional right in the United States.

    “I’m a born-again Christian and I believe it was the hand of God that put her on the court … to be able to overturn Roe vs. Wade,” said Glovioell Dixon of Pasadena, who’d arrived hours before the program to beat the crowds.

    Others were taken with Barrett’s command of the law — several mentioned the fact she’d barely used notes at her confirmation hearing — and her poise under pressure.

    “She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever observed,” said Elizabeth Pierce of Newbury Park, the lone red baseball cap in a field of cognac loafers and Chanel-inspired skirt suits. “This is the chance of a lifetime.”

    A few even credited the justice for realizing their American dream.

    Sean Chen, 52, of East Los Angeles said he’d just attended his daughter’s medical school white coat ceremony and praised Barrett’s 2023 ruling to strike down race-based affirmative action in the case Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.

    “That’s directly related to the future of my kids,” Chen said. “Without the work from the Supreme Court [overturning affirmative action], maybe I wouldn’t even have that chance.”

    A Chinese immigrant, Chen called the opportunity to learn from one of the nation’s nine law-givers part of his journey to becoming “spiritually American.”

    Barrett divulged little Tuesday about her memoir, for which she was paid $425,000 in 2021, the first tranche of a reported $2-million advance, according to financial disclosures.

    “We’re gonna pray we’re gonna get our books signed!” an event coordinator encouraged those near the back of the line as the sun set over the golden hills.

    Die-hard fans were reminded not to try to snap selfies, though keepsake photos would be taken and could be purchased after the event.

    Two women smile together.

    Julia Quiroz, 23, left, and her mom, Gaby Quiroz, in line waiting to get their book signed by the Supreme Court justice.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Julia Quiroz, 23, waited with her mother to have her book signed.

    “I see her as exemplary in her vocation as a mother,” Quiroz said of Barrett.

    Her mom, Gaby, agreed — mostly.

    As a Catholic, Quiroz said she agrees with Barrett’s rulings on abortion, but despaired of realizing the family’s dream of ending the procedure from coast to coast.

    “She’s going to do the right thing for the country and the law,” Gaby Quiroz said. “I don’t know that her decisions will always align with ours.”

    Other attendees said they were in lockstep with Barrett and her rulings in support of the president’s agenda — whatever its impact on their neighbors.

    “I’m very happy,” said Kevin Rivero of Palmdale. “She is ensuring the president has the power to do what the executive branch is empowered to do. As an L.A. citizen, I’m for it.”

    Dixon, the Pasadena Christian, said she agreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling on immigration raids even though her ex-husband was once an undocumented immigrant, who could have faced deportation had they not gotten married.

    “America’s for everyone. We’re a welcoming country, you know?” Dixon said. “Bring us your poor — what was that saying on the Statue of Liberty? That line? I’m all for that. But do it in a way that honors our country.”

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    Sonja Sharp

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  • Dozens of cargo containers fall off vessel at Port of Long Beach. Investigators search for answers

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    At least 50 shipping containers slipped off a vessel at the Port of Long Beach on Tuesday morning, leaving officials scrambling to determine what happened.

    Port spokesperson Art Marroquin said the ship, the Mississippi, was berthed at Terminal G just before 9 a.m. when the containers mysteriously fell overboard into the water.

    Marroquin and other port officials did not respond to questions about the ship. They confirmed, however, that no injuries were reported and all operations have been temporarily suspended as responders work to secure the containers.

    Port officials are in the preliminary stages of investigating what caused the incident.

    An online site dedicated to tracking ships says the Mississippi flies under a Portuguese flag and was last docked in China two weeks ago.

    The incident happened only four days after the port was named the Best West Coast seaport in North America for a seventh straight year by the trade publication Asia Cargo News.

    The port handles more than 9 million 20-foot containers per year from 2,000 vessels, moving one-fourth of all containers on the West Coast.

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    Andrew J. Campa

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  • Critics fault Supreme Court for allowing immigration stops that consider race and ethnicity

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    WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that U.S. Border Patrol agents violated the Constitution when they stopped a car on a freeway near San Clemente because its occupants appeared to be “of Mexican ancestry.”

    The 4th Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches, the justices said then, and a motorist’s “Mexican appearance” does not justify stopping them to ask about their immigration status.

    But the court sounded a decidedly different note on Monday when it ruled for the Trump administration and cleared the way for stopping and questioning Latinos who may be here illegally. By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside a Los Angeles judge’s temporary restraining order that barred agents from stopping people based in part on their race or apparent ethnicity.

    “Apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. “However, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors.”

    Critics of the ruling said it had opened the door for authorizing racial and ethnic bias.

    UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham called it “shocking and appalling. I don’t know of any recent decision like this that authorized racial discrimination.”

    Arulanantham noted that Kavanaugh’s writings speak for the justice alone, and that the full court did not explain its ruling on a case that came through its emergency docket.

    By contrast, he and others pointed out that the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prohibited the use of race or ethnicity as a factor in college admissions.

    “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote for a 6-3 majority in 2023. That decision struck down the affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

    “Today, the Supreme Court took a step in a badly wrong direction,” Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor, wrote on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. “It makes no sense to conclude that racial and ethnic discrimination is generally unconstitutional, yet also that its use is ‘reasonable’ under the 4th Amendment.”

    Reports had already emerged before the decision of ICE agents confronting U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents before they have been able to prove their status, compelling many to begin carrying documentation around at all times.

    In New York on Monday, one man outside a federal court was pushed by ICE agents before being able to show them his identification. He was let go.

    Asked by The Times to respond to increasing concern among U.S. citizens they could be swept up in expanded ICE raids as a result of the ruling, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that individuals should not be worried.

    She added that immigration agents conduct targeted operations with the use of law enforcement intelligence.

    “The Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s right to stop individuals in Los Angeles to briefly question them regarding their legal status, because the law allows this, and this has been the practice of the federal government for decades,” Leavitt said. “The Immigration and Nationality Act states that immigration officers can briefly stop an individual to question them about their immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States. And reasonable suspicion is not just based on race — it’s based on a totality of the circumstances.”

    On X, the House Homeland Security Committee Democrats responded to Leavitt’s comments, writing: “ICE has jailed U.S. citizens. The Trump Admin is defending racial profiling. Nobody is safe when ‘looking Hispanic’ is treated as probable cause.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent pointed out that nearly half of the residents of Greater Los Angeles are Latino and can speak Spanish.

    “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed because of their looks, their accents, and the fact that they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

    At issue in the case was the meaning of “reasonable suspicion.”

    For decades, the court has said police and federal agents may stop and question someone if they see something specific that suggests they may be violating the law.

    But the two sides disagreed over whether agents may stop people because they appear to be Latinos and work as day laborers, at car washes or other low-wage jobs.

    President Trump’s lawyers as well as Kavanaugh said agents may make stops based on the “totality of the circumstances” and that may include where people work as well as their ethnicity. They also pointed to the data that suggests about 10% of the people in the Los Angeles area are illegally in the United States.

    Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, said that the legal standard of reasonable suspicion “has a group of factors you must take into consideration,” adding, “racial profiling is not happening at all.”

    It is a “false narrative being pushed,” Homan told MSNBC in an interview, praising the Supreme Court decision. “We don’t arrest somebody or detain somebody without reasonable suspicion.”

    Times staff writer Andrea Castillo, in Washington, contributed to this report.

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    David G. Savage, Michael Wilner

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  • Tension grows as Trump insists he wants to send U.S. troops to Chicago

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    President Trump on Monday continued to flirt with the idea of mobilizing National Guard troops to combat crime in Chicago, just a day after he had to clarify that he has no intent to “go to war” with the American city.

    The push to militarize local law enforcement operations has been an ongoing fixation for the president, who on Saturday used war imagery and a reference to the movie “Apocalypse Now” to suggest that the newly rebranded Department of War could descend upon the Democrat-run city.

    Trump clarified Sunday that his post was meant to convey he wants to “clean up” the city, and on Monday once again floated the possibility of deploying federal agents to the city — a move that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, has staunchly opposed.

    “I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us saying, please give us help,” Trump said during a speech at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. “When you have over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot, and then you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s really really crazy, but we’re bringing back law and order to our country.”

    A few hours earlier, Trump posted on social media that he wanted “to help the people of Chicago, not hurt them” — a statement that Pritzker mocked as insincere, saying that Trump had “just threatened an American city with the Department of War.”

    “Once again, this isn’t about fighting crime. That requires support and coordination — yet we’ve experienced nothing like that over the past several weeks,” Pritzker said in a post on X. “Instead of taking steps to work with us on public safety, the Trump administration’s focused on scaring Illinoisians.”

    The White House did not respond when asked whether Trump would send National Guard troops to Chicago without the request from the governor. But the Department of Homeland Security announced in a news release Monday that it was launching an immigration enforcement operation to “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago.”

    For weeks, Trump has talked about sending the military to Chicago and other cities led by Democrats — an action that governors have repeatedly opposed. Most Americans also oppose the idea, according to a recent CBS/YouGov poll, but the Republican base largely sees Trump’s push as a means to reduce crime.

    If Trump were to deploy U.S. forces to the cities, it would follow similar operations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles — moves that a federal judge last week said was illegal and that amounted to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief” but that Trump sees as victories.

    In his Monday remarks, Trump claimed that he “saved Los Angeles” and that crime is down to “virtually nothing” in Washington because he decided to send military forces to patrol the cities. Trump downplayed instances of domestic violence, saying those are “much lesser things” that should not be taken into account when trying to discern whether his crime-fighting efforts have worked in the nation’s capital.

    “Things that take place in the home, they call crime. They’ll do anything they can to find something,” Trump lamented. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime. Now, I can’t claim 100%, but we are a safe city.”

    Trump said “we can do the same thing” in other cities, like Chicago and New York City.

    “We are waiting for a call from Chicago,” Trump said. “We’ll fix Chicago.”

    As of Monday afternoon, Pritzker’s office had yet to receive any “formal communication or information from the Trump administration” about potential plans to have troops deployed into the city, said Matt Hill, a spokesperson for the Illinois governor.

    “Like the public and press, we are learning of their operations through social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show,” Hill said in an email. “If he cared about delivering real solutions for Illinois, then we would have heard from him.”

    Pritzker, in remarks posted on social media Sunday, said the Trump administration was trampling on citizens’ constitutional rights “in the fake guise of fighting crime.”

    “Once Donald Trump gets the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law — what comes next?” he said.

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    Ana Ceballos

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  • City buys Griffith Park carousel, where Disney dreamed up a theme park. It could reopen soon

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    The Griffith Park carousel — a “crown jewel” of the park, where Walt Disney first dreamed up Disneyland — is getting a new lease on life just in time for its 2026 centennial. The city of Los Angeles’ Recreation and Parks Commission inked a million-dollar deal to buy the historic amusement ride late last month.

    Beloved by Disney, who snapped up a similar historic wooden ride to serve as the King Arthur Carrousel at his Anaheim theme park, the Griffith Park merry-go-round took its last twirl in 2022.

    Its previous operator, Julio Gosdinski, died suddenly near the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the amusement in limbo just as COVID restrictions were starting to ease. It was reopened briefly in the spring of 2021 but was closed again a year later, in need of repairs and without a clear owner to make them.

    Gosdinski’s stake in the historic amusement remains tied up in Los Angeles County probate court, where Gosdinski’s mother and sister are vying with another owner for control, records show.

    After the parks commission agreement, the stable of hand-carved basswood and poplar horses will spin under city auspices, part of a broader restoration of the section of the park, which is slated to be completed ahead of the Olympic Games in 2028.

    The carousel is one of the oldest wooden merry-go-rounds in California, and one of just a handful designed by the famous Spillman Engineering Corp. and its predecessor that remain in operation in the state.

    Others are operated at the Pike in Long Beach, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Balboa Park in San Diego, and at Tilden Park in Berkeley, where Griffith Park’s original merry-go-round remains the state’s fastest wooden spinner.

    Visitors ride the Griffith Park merry-go-round, a favorite haunt of Walt Disney and his daughters, on Aug. 24, 1951.

    (USC /Corbis via Getty Images)

    The current merry-go-round was built in 1926 and relocated to Griffith Park in the depths of the Great Depression in 1937. Like others of its ilk and era, the carousel includes horses carved by the famous artist Charles Looff, creator of the Santa Monica Pier.

    “Walt Disney regularly frequented the Merry-Go-Round on Saturdays, watching his daughters ride around and daydreaming of one day creating his own theme park,” the city agreement said.

    But the amusement will require significant repairs before it can reopen, document show.

    Today, the merry-go-round cannot even be moved by hand.

    Still, L.A. could be getting the carousel for a song. It is among the dwindling number of four-across merry-go-rounds of its type still in existence, and still retains nearly all its original features, according to appraisals commissioned by the city.

    According to the department’s proposal, the sellers had higher offers but wanted the merry-go-round to keep twirling in its longtime home.

    No reopening date has been announced.

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    Sonja Sharp

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  • Top immigration court rules judges can deny bond to millions of migrants

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    A Trump administration policy to deny bond hearings to immigrants who entered the country without authorization was upheld by an immigration appellate board Friday, expanding mandatory detention to thousands of people already behind bars and potentially millions more nationwide.

    Although the policy is being challenged in federal court, the ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals is likely to send an immediate chill through immigration courts where judges for decades have released individuals on bond whom they did not deem a flight risk or danger.

    Those judges are now bound by the board’s decision. Immigration courts are not part of the judicial branch but fall under the Department of Justice.

    Immigrant rights attorneys say holding immigrants throughout their cases — a process that can sometimes take years — is intended to break the spirit of many and force them to sign their own deportation orders.

    “This is an effort to increase the number of people in detention significantly,” said Niels W. Frenzen, director of the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, who is part of a team of attorneys who have filed habeas petitions for dozens of immigrants picked up during the summer raids in Los Angeles.

    “Literally millions of people are now subject to being held without bond,” he said.

    One of those is Ana Franco Galdamez, a mother of two U.S. citizens who has been in the country for two decades. She was getting treatment for breast cancer when she was arrested in a June 19 raid in Los Angeles County, where nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants reside, according to estimates.

    She was denied bond and missed treatment, but she was eventually released after a lawyer filed a habeas case.

    “Detention conditions are horrific, and they’ve gotten even worse,” Frenzen said. “The goal of the administration is to make it difficult for people to fight their cases and to give up.”

    Federal judges have ruled in several cases that denying bond violated federal statues and constitutionally protected due process. The group is now seeking to block the no-bond policy in a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Other lawsuits are also pending.

    The Trump administration introduced the no-bond policy nationally in a memo in July — paving the way for the mandatory detention of immigrants.

    The move came after Congress authorized expanding immigration detention and enforcement amid a crackdown inside courtrooms and at immigration check-ins.

    Immigrants, most of whom had been following the rules to adjust, maintain or gain legal status, were arrested and detained.

    For months now, those inside the immigration courts system have been pressed to implement Trump Administration policies. Judges have been fired, and the Pentagon has said it is identifying military lawyers and judges to temporarily sit on the bench.

    The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, did not answer specific questions from The Times — but pointed out that the ruling was a precedent.

    “It strips judicial discretion in many cases,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It basically says, if you entered illegally, only ICE can decide if you get out of detention.”

    The Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision stems from the case of a Venezuelan immigrant who crossed the border in November 2022 near El Paso, Texas, and was later granted temporary protected status. That status expired on April 2 after the Trump administration terminated the program, a decision that is also tied up in litigation.

    The board determined that immigration judges had no authority to issue bonds because immigrants “who are present in the United States without admission … must be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings.”

    In other words, the board’s decision treats people who have been in the U.S. for years the same as newly arriving immigrants at the border, who can be quickly deported without bond.

    “We’ve had clients that are pregnant, we’ve had clients that are breastfeeding. We’ve had clients who have never been arrested, let alone commit, convicted of any crime ever, who’ve never missed an ICE check in — they’re all being told, ‘You’re subject to mandatory detention because of this new interpretation by the Trump administration,’” said Jordan Wells, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “This now solidifies that as the law of the land, unless and until [the] federal circuit court rules otherwise.”

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    Rachel Uranga

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  • In face of extreme heat, L.A. may require landlords to keep their rentals cool

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    Los Angeles landlords may soon be required to keep rental units cool — or at least make it possible for tenants to do so.

    County supervisors last month passed a law requiring landlords in unincorporated areas to provide a way to keep their rental units at 82 degrees or below. A measure introduced Wednesday in the Los Angeles City Council directs officials to draft language conforming to the same standards.

    That comes as climate change ratchets up the frequency and intensity of heat waves. Extreme heat already kills more people in the United States each year than any other weather-related event, according to the National Weather Service.

    Sustained indoor heat above 82 degrees has been linked to increased emergency-room visits, hospitalizations and deaths, according to a news release from Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield and Eunisses Hernandez, who introduced the measure along with Councilmember Adrin Nazarian.

    “It’s a health issue, first and foremost,” said Nazarian, who pointed out that the effects of extreme heat fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations like those who are chronically ill. Older residents are much more susceptible to dying from heat or related complications, he said. And poorer people are more likely to live in aging buildings without duct systems or air conditioning units. “It’s critical for us to take steps so that we’re protecting our residents.”

    The California Department of Housing and Community Development earlier this year urged lawmakers to adopt the 82-degree maximum temperature threshold statewide. State law already requires rental units to include equipment that can heat the unit to at least 70 degrees.

    “Why should cooling be any different?” asked Blumenfield, who represents the hottest part of the city — his 3rd District covers much of the southwestern San Fernando Valley. Last year Woodland Hills, where Blumenfield also lives, hit 121 degrees — the highest temperature ever recorded in Los Angeles. “We always have heat strokes go up and all sorts of health related issues happen when it gets really hot,” he said.

    The intention of the proposed measure is to hew as closely to the county regulations as possible, including provisions that provide flexibility to small landlords, Blumenfield said. For instance, the county rules allow landlords who own 10 or fewer units to meet the temperature requirement for just one room until 2032. And while the law took effect this month, it won’t be enforced until 2027.

    The measure will take some time to draft and be heard by various committees but could come up for a vote before the full council in a matter of months, Blumenfield said.

    If it passes, Los Angeles would join a growing list of cities that have adopted maximum temperature thresholds for rentals. In Phoenix, units with air conditioning must be able to maintain a temperature of 82 degrees or below. In Clark County, Nev., units must be able to stay at 85 degrees or cooler. In Palm Springs, units need to have air conditioning and be able to maintain 80 degrees. Dallas requires landlords to keep buildings at least 15 degrees cooler than the outside temperature but no higher than 85 degrees, and New Orleans requires units to be able to maintain a maximum temperature of 80 degrees in all bedrooms.

    The Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles was adamantly opposed to the measure, saying it would drive up the cost of housing and ultimately lead to higher rents.

    It’s difficult to maintain a unit at 82 degrees without using an air conditioner, which can be costly to both landlords — who may need to upgrade buildings’ electrical service — and tenants, who must pay for utility bills, according to Daniel Yukelson, the group’s chief executive and executive director.

    “Any cooling device will be ineffective if too expensive to operate because renters cannot afford the electricity,” he wrote in an email. “It’s like prescribing medication with a co-pay that is too high for a patient to refill.”

    Yukelson also questioned whether the electrical grid can accommodate the additional load, saying that customers are already subjected to blackouts and brownouts during the summer.

    Nazarian and Blumenfield both pointed out that the law does not require air conditioning, and said units could be kept cool with other interventions, including cool roof technology and window tinting. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power also offers rebates to help certain customers purchase air conditioners, Nazarian said.

    Grace Hut, assistant director of policy and advocacy for tenants’ rights group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, said her organization has spoken with many renters whose landlords have actively prohibited them from installing air conditioner units. While she understands concerns about utility prices, tenants ultimately want to be able to choose for themselves whether or not to turn on an air conditioner and shoulder the higher electricity costs, she said.

    “On extreme heat days, access to air conditioning can be a matter of life and death, and they should have the option to use it,” she said.

    The city should also dedicate resources to enforcing the temperature-threshold rules and to helping tenants afford their utility bills to lessen the burden, she added.

    “Climate change is only going to continue to exacerbate this issue so it’s really important that we take action immediately,” she said.

    Last year was the warmest on record globally, and temperatures are projected to continue to rise. In 2022, a Times investigation revealed that heat probably caused about 3,900 deaths in California over the previous decade — six times the state’s official tally — and that the undercounting has contributed to a lack of urgency in confronting the crisis.

    Times staff writer Rebecca Ellis contributed to this report

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    Alex Wigglesworth

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  • Erewhon to open an exclusive tonic bar in New York City

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    The Southern California grocery brand that has become synonymous with luxury and wellness is taking its first steps into New York City.

    Erewhon said it plans to open a tonic bar within an exclusive West Village members’ club later this fall.

    The tonic bar will serve members at Kith Ivy, a lifestyle and fitness club from Ronnie Fieg, chief executive of the popular streetwear brand Kith.

    Kith Ivy will open to an “extremely limited” number of members this fall, the Kith website said.

    The miniature Erewhon will be tucked away near cold plunge pools and a sauna at 120 Leroy Street in New York City, according to blueprints Fieg posted on Instagram.

    The members’ club, which will also feature rooftop padel courts and dining from Cafe Mogador, reportedly comes with a hefty initiation fee of $36,000 and an annual fee of $7,000.

    The price and exclusivity of Kith Ivy aligns with Erewhon’s own high-end reputation. In Los Angeles, the grocer is known for expensive specialty goods and celebrity-inspired drinks, like the $20 Hailey Bieber strawberry smoothie.

    “Erewhon is going after those really premium customers,” said Jeff Wells, lead editor of the trade publication Grocery Dive. “If you’re succeeding in Southern California, New York would be the next logical place to go.”

    Erewhon’s new tonic bar will offer a limited selection of drinks and smoothies, a company spokesperson said Wednesday. Only Kith Ivy members will be able to order in-person, but other New Yorkers within a select radius of the club can order drinks for delivery through Postmates and Uber Eats.

    Erewhon has a loyal following in the Los Angeles area, where the company operates 11 locations and plans to open three more in West Hollywood, Glendale and Thousand Oaks. The company got its start in the 1960s as a health foods store in Boston before relocating to the West Coast.

    The grocer’s foray into New York comes as other supermarket chains have cut back on costs. Kroger, the parent company of Ralphs and Food 4 Less, is in the midst of closing locations and recently laid off nearly 1,000 corporate employees.

    Unlike Ralphs, Erewhon has established itself as a luxury destination that caters largely to wealthy customers.

    “Erewhon is all about being at the cutting edge of food and beverage, for a premium price,” Wells said. “Your average middle-class shopper can’t afford to shop there.”

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    Caroline Petrow-Cohen

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  • Burglars swipe more than $100,000 in luxury items from Tracee Ellis Ross’ home

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    Burglars broke into the Los Angeles home of Tracee Ellis Ross over the weekend, stealing more than $100,000 in luxury items, according to a source close to the actor.

    The burglars broke through a glass door early Sunday and took jewelry and handbags, according to the source.

    Ross, 52, who is known for lead roles in television shows such as “Black-ish” and “Girlfriends,” was out of town at the time of the burglary.

    The Los Angeles Police Department could not immediately provide details on the break-in, but the department told NBC4 that three burglars broke into the home and that staff members reported it to the authorities.

    Police told the station they obtained footage from a home security camera, and that the investigation is ongoing.

    Ross, the daughter of Motown legend Diana Ross and Robert Ellis Silberstein, has won nine NAACP Image Awards throughout her acting career, as well as a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress: Television Series Musical or Comedy for her role on “Black-ish.”

    The break-in comes three weeks after four people were arrested in a series of burglaries that took place across Los Angeles, some of which targeted celebrities such as Brad Pitt.

    Pitt’s home in Los Feliz was broken into June 25 while the movie star was away promoting his film “F1: The Movie.” Police said three burglars scaled a fence and broke into the actor’s home through a window.

    In July, an intruder attempted to break into the home of Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto while the star pitcher was away with the team playing against the Cincinnati Reds.

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    Ruben Vives

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  • Bunker Hill tower One California Plaza goes into receivership

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    A financially troubled skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles has gone into receivership as office landlords there struggle to keep their buildings leased.

    One California Plaza — the gleaming 42-story tower on Bunker Hill that was one of the most prestigious addresses in the city when it opened in the 1980s — has dropped 74% in value from its market peak.

    Earlier this year, the owners defaulted on their $300-million debt, set to mature in November, and faced foreclosure.

    At the request of lenders, a judge appointed Trigild, a receivership service, to take control of the 1 million-square-foot property, the Real Deal reported.

    One California Plaza is appraised at $121.2 million, down from $459 million in 2013, according to a Morningstar Credit report, real estate data provider CoStar said.

    Net cash flow at the property trailed expectations by 37% last year, and the building is now 62% leased after the departure of major tenants, including law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which is set to relocate to Century City.

    Ownership of the property at 300 S. Grand Ave. includes Los Angeles landlord Rising Realty Partners, which declined to comment on the receivership. Co-owner DigitalBridge, a Boca Raton, Fla., investment company, did not respond in time for publication.

    In recent years, the downtown office market has shifted against landlords as many tenants have reduced their office footprints in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became more common for employees to work remotely.

    Elevated interest rates recently have weighed on prices by making it difficult for building owners to refinance debt, pushing them into quick sales or foreclosures.

    Some downtown L.A. office tenants have expressed concern that the streets feel less safe than they did before the pandemic and have left for other local office centers, including in Century City.

    Downtown L.A. has 54 office buildings that are at immediate risk of devaluation and could result in nearly $70 billion in lost value over the next 10 years, creating a potential loss of $353 million in property tax revenue, according to a recent report by BAE Urban Economics.

    The report suggested converting some of them to housing because they potentially could have more value as apartments or condominiums, which could help mitigate expected tax losses.

    Converting just 10 big office buildings to housing would boost their combined assessed property value over a decade by $12 billion, adding $46 million in tax revenue and creating more than 3,800 residential units, the report said.

    The Gas Company Tower on Bunker Hill sold for around $200 million to Los Angeles County last year, down 68% from a $632-million valuation just four years ago, according to CoStar. The 777 Tower at 777 S. Figueroa St. was sold last year for $120 million, a 70% drop from its 2013 sale. EY Plaza at 725 S. Figueroa St., once valued at $446 million, is now worth about $150 million, a 66% decline.

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Man steals car with three children inside, crashes in Malibu after pursuit, authorities say

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    A man was arrested after stealing a car in East Los Angeles with three children inside, then crashing it in Malibu during a police pursuit Friday evening, officials confirmed.

    The car, a light-colored sedan, was left running with three children inside at a 7-Eleven on East Olympic Boulevard, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. A stranger jumped inside the idling vehicle and took off at around 6:38 p.m.

    The California Highway Patrol began pursuing the vehicle minutes later, traveling westbound on the 10 Freeway at Maple Avenue in Los Angeles, the agency confirmed.

    The chase continued until roughly 7:34 p.m., when the sedan appeared to T-bone a light-colored SUV at the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Kanan Dume Road in Malibu.

    Following the crash, live footage broadcast from a news helicopter showed the suspect fleeing the scene barefoot and shedding layers of clothes. The man ran through a residential area into a field before being arrested.

    Four people at the scene were taken to a hospital — three by helicopter and one by ambulance, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Three were listed with minor-to-moderate injuries, but no condition was available for the fourth person.

    It is unclear how seriously injured the children were, but they were conscious and breathing after the crash as paramedics removed them from the vehicle, KTLA-TV reported.

    The suspect’s name was not immediately released.

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    Sandra McDonald

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  • Commentary: Newsom’s cops vs. Trump’s troops: A new showdown on America’s streets

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    Just how unsafe are American streets?

    To hear President Trump tell it, killers lurk in every shadow not already filled by rapists and thieves.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t nearly as dire, pointing out that crime numbers are down.

    But “numbers mean little to people,” Newsom lamented during a press gaggle in his office Thursday, where he ruthlessly trolled Trump with a flags-and-all setup that appeared to mock the president’s marathon Cabinet meeting earlier in the week.

    Yes, folks, midterm elections are coming and crime is high — in our consciousness if not in reality. Although violent crime and some property crimes have declined in most California cities (and in many major cities across the country), the perils of city living remain stubbornly stuck in our collective psyches.

    This angst has augured in another get-tough era of crime suppression, culminating with the fulfillment of Trump’s authoritarian fantasy of National Guard troops patrolling in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and potentially more cities to come.

    Newsom is now offering up what many have framed as a counterpunch to Trump’s military intervention: A surge of California Highway Patrol officers in strategic locations across the state, basically Newsom-controlled cop boots on the ground to mirror Trump’s troops.

    But looking at Newsom’s deployment of more CHP officers as no more than a reaction to Trump misses a larger debate on what really makes our communities safer. Understanding what makes cops different from soldiers — and Newsom’s move different from Trump’s — is ultimately understanding the difference between repression and public safety, force and finesse.

    Newsom has been using the CHP to supplement local police departments for years. In 2023, when the Tenderloin area of San Francisco was plagued by open drug use, making it the favorite right-wing example of a failed Democratic-run city, Newsom sent this state force in to help clean it up (though that work continues). The next year, he sent it into Oakland and Bakersfield, both places where auto theft, retail crime and side shows were rampant.

    Now, he’s expanding the CHP’s role in local policing to include Los Angeles, San Diego, the Inland Empire and some Central Valley cities including Fresno and Sacramento.

    In each of those places, mobile teams of around a dozen officers, all of whom will volunteer for the job, will target specific crimes, criminals or problem areas. These officers won’t just be patrolling or responding to calls like the local force, but hitting targets identified by data or intelligence, or making their presence known in high-crime neighborhoods.

    Here’s where Trump’s military approach has an overlap with Newsom’s — and where the two men might agree: It is true that a visible show of armed authority deters crime. Whether it’s the National Guard or the Highway Patrol, criminals, both petty and violent, tend to avoid them.

    “We go in and saturate an area with high visibility and view patrol,” said Sean Duryee, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, standing at Newsom’s side. “The people that have a problem with that are the criminal community.”

    The approach seems to be working. I can throw the numbers at you — 400 firearms seized in San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Oakland; 4,000 stolen vehicles recovered in Oakland; more than 9,000 arrests statewide.

    But numbers really don’t matter. It genuinely is how a community feels about its safety. Across California, many if not the majority of small and mid-sized law enforcement departments are understaffed. Even big departments such as Los Angeles struggle to hire and retain officers. There are simply not enough cops — or resources such as helicopters or K9 teams — to do the work in too many places, and citizens feel it.

    Using these small strike teams of CHP officers fills the gap of both manpower and expertise. And by aiming that usage precisely at troubled spots, it can make underserved communities feel safer, and crime-ridden communities actually be safer.

    Tinisch Hollins is the head of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that works to end over-incarceration and promote public safety beyond just making arrests. She is “obviously not a huge proponent of sending law enforcement into communities like that,” she said.

    But she lived in San Francisco when homicides topped 100 per year, and now lives in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, where the local police have been so understaffed and plagued by scandal that local leaders declared a state of emergency.

    She has seen how the CHP has “made an impact” in the Bay Area.

    “There are some very effective things happening,” Hollins said.

    That buy-in from community, especially skeptical community, is a massive departure from the militarization of Trump, and also hints at the deeper difference between troops and cops.

    California has been on the cutting-edge of law enforcement reform for years, though it is a conversation that has fallen from favor and headlines in the Trump era.

    In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, California outlawed controversial carotid restraints that can cut off breathing. The state put in place a method for decertifying officers found guilty of serious misconduct. It increased age and education standards for becoming a peace officer, increased transparency requirements and put more oversight on the use of military equipment by civilian forces, just to name a few reforms.

    Most significantly, Newsom is championing a new vision of incarceration and rehabilitation modeled after successful efforts in Norway and other places that centers on the simple truth that arresting people does not end crime.

    Most people who are convicted and incarcerated will return to our streets after a few years at most, and if the state does not change their outlook and opportunities, they will also likely return to crime — making us no safer than the day they were first put into cuffs.

    But for a time, it seemed to some as if these reforms with their focus away from enforcement and toward alternatives to incarceration had gone too far. Images of marauding groups of retail thieves invading stores filled the news, and reasonably caused anxiety — leading to Californians passing the still-unfunded, tough-on-crime Proposition 36 that sought to create stiffer penalties for some drug and property crimes, along with mandated treatment for addiction, but which could also take money from rehabilitation programs.

    As much as Trump, Newsom’s use of the CHP is the response to that pushback on reform, an acknowledgment that enforcement remains a key piece of the crime-stopping dilemma.

    But Hollins points out that the rehabilitation aspect, the most innovative and arguably important aspect of California’s approach to crime, is getting lost in the current political climate.

    “It’s not just arresting people that brings crime down,” she said. “The [penal] system isn’t going to deal with the drivers of the crime.”

    This is where Newsom needs to do better, both on the ground and in his explanations. It may not be popular to talk about rehabilitation, and certainly Trump will seize on it as weak, but it is what works, and what makes the California method different from the MAGA view of crime.

    For Trump, the be-all and end-all is the arrest, and the subsequent cruel glee of punishment. He has called for harsher and longer penalties for even minor crimes, and recently demanded the blanket use of the death penalty in all murder cases charged in Washington, D.C. His is the authoritarian view that fear and repression will make us safer.

    “We lost grip with reality, the idea that the military can be out there in every street corner the United States of America,” Newsom said Thursday.

    Or should be.

    Soldiers on our streets just make even law-abiding citizens less free, and ultimately does little to fix the problems of poverty and opportunity that often start the cycles of crime.

    This is the showdown happening right now on American streets, and ultimately the showdown between the Democratic view of crime prevention and Trump’s — soldiers or cops, the easy spectacle of compliance induced by the barrel of a gun or a complicated and imperfect system of community and law enforcement working together.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • Commentary: L.A. parks get low marks, but opening schoolyards could improve grades

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    As report cards go, it was one you hoped the dog would eat before anyone saw it.

    In a recent ranking of parks in the nation’s 100 most populous cities, Los Angeles surrendered its spot at No. 88.

    And dropped to No. 90.

    That’s ridiculous in a city known for its year-round get-outdoors climate.

    “It’s not a good look,” a city repairman told me while fixing a sprinkler at Griffith Park Recreation Center, where the historic swimming pool is an empty tank, out of service since 2020.

    Steve Lopez

    Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

    With the city about to host World Cup soccer matches next year, and just three years out from hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, the repairman had a thought:

    “This would be a good time to boost the parks,” he said.

    No kidding. But that would mean jumping over a set of hurdles higher than any you’ll find in an Olympic event.

    The Trust for Public Land’s annual rankings for municipal parks are based on acreage, investment, amenities, access and equity. Washington, D.C., is No. 1, Irvine No. 2 and San Francisco No. 6. Other California cities ranked higher than L.A. are San Diego (22), Sacramento (32), Fremont (38), San Jose (41), Oakland (44), Long Beach (56), Santa Clarita (63), Santa Ana (79), Stockton (80), Riverside and Anaheim (tied at 81), and Chula Vista (84).

    Jimmy Kim, general manager of Recreation and Parks department on July 9, 2024.

    Jimmy Kim, general manager of the City of Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, says staffing has plummeted from 2,400 to about 1,200.

    (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

    A synopsis by the trust, which released its latest findings in May, said Los Angeles “has one of the most challenged big-city park systems in America.” Five years ago, according to the report, the city was in the middle of the pack at 49th, only to sink steadily into a gopher hole. “The cause? A century of disinvestment.”

    Jimmy Kim, general manager of the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, told me that since he first worked in the department as a lifeguard in the ’90s, staffing has plummeted from 2,400 to about 1,200, making it harder to maintain aging, deteriorating facilities.

    Several pools were in no shape to open this summer. Outside the Griffith Park pool, which is slated to replaced in the next couple of years, the children of two families played in the sandbox. It was 90 degrees, and the parents said they’d be in the water if the pool were in operation. I stepped into the men’s bathroom, near the tennis courts, only to find yellow caution tape stretched across a toilet stall.

    “A lot of our rec centers are very old, so our pools and park resources all need some level of renovation or replacement,” said Kim, who conceded it’s a constant struggle to keep up. “We do try to stay on top of it as best we can, but it’s almost like whackamole.”

    Money is a problem. A big problem.

    The current tab for deferred maintenance?

    How about $2 billion, give or take.

    Kim said a needs assessment is under way, to prioritize projects and make the most efficient use of limited resources.

    An aerial view of a person playing basketball at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center July 29, 2020 in Eagle Rock.

    A person playing basketball at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center.

    (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

    Joe Halper, a former Recreation and Parks board member, has been flagging these challenges for me since I began talking to him in January about losing his home in the January Palisades fire. Halper, 95, has been more interested in talking about his lifelong passion — public parks — than his own losses.

    About 40% of the city’s population doesn’t live within a half-mile walk of a park or open space, Halper said. That’s a key metric in the trust’s ratings. As Halper notes, “The lack of opportunity for physical exercise has been associated with the high-level of diabetes and obesity,” especially in low-income communities of color.

    But as disappointing as the park shortage is, there’s a readily available, tragically underutilized resource that Halper has been promoting in his role as a member of the non-profit L.A. Parks Foundation.

    Open the gates of locked schools — on weekends and school breaks — and make those public assets available for recreational activities.

    This is not a new idea. I first heard former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley make that pitch on the presidential campaign trail 25 years ago, when he was talking about how it makes no sense to lock the doors to school libraries and gymnasiums at 3 p.m. every day and all day on weekends. Community School Parks exist in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Oregon, as well as the ones in L.A.

    Other cities have done it, and Los Angeles has begun its own initiative. Ten LAUSD sites are already operating as Community School Parks on weekends, and this week, there was some good news about the possibility of adding more to the mix.

    After years of negotiations to address liability and access issues, beginning with an initiative under former Mayor Eric Garcetti and a motion in 2023 by City Councilmember Nithya Raman, the L.A. Unified School District Board voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a Joint powers agreement with the city.

    Given budget constraints, Raman told me, “opening up existing resources is a much lower cost option for providing parks.”

    “Ten is great,” school board member Nick Melvoin said at Tuesday’s meeting, “but 1,000 is where we need to get to.” He said he’d like to see two or three school gates unlocked “in the next few weeks and 20 or 30 by the end of the calendar year.”

    “Any public space, in my mind, that is closed to the public, is a tragedy,” he added.

    Not that the several hundred LAUSD schools have the greatest recreational facilities. The district has its own aging infrastructure problem, with a multi-billion-dollar backlog of deferred maintenance tab, according to Melvoin. There’s also a blacktop problem, as in, too much of it, and not enough greenery and shade (although some redesign projects are in the works).

    Hikers enjoy Runyon Canyon Park near the North entrance on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood hills
    Hikers enjoy Runyon Canyon Park near the north entrance on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

    (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times; Photo illustration by Jade Cuevas / Los Angeles Times)

    Halper was concerned that the joint powers agreement appeared to prohibit use of gyms and other indoor spaces, which would limit some organized sports. But at the school board meeting, where board members Melvoin and Kelly Gonez raised the same issues, a district staffer said the doors can be opened on a school by school basis if enough resources are available.

    That’s the biggest challenge going forward. The district intends to open and lock school gates on weekends, and the city will provide staff to cover the grounds. But there’s no dedicated funding source, and Kim said the city will look to the community for help.

    “I think the key is philanthropic and partner support,” he said.

    Here’s where the city needs to leverage its hosting of the 2028 Olympics. The games will cost billions and generate billions, and L.A.’s kids shouldn’t be stuck with shabby recreational facilities while the elite athletes of the world compete at first-rate, dressed up facilities.

    Kim said there’s already been a substantial benefit, with 1 million L.A. kids having participated in city recreation and parks athletic programs through a $160 million commitment from the International Olympic Committee and LA28, the local organizing body of the Games.

    That’s a good start. Now let’s see a commitment to financial help in unlocking school gates. From the IOC and LA28, the Dodgers, the Rams, the Chargers, the Lakers, the Clippers, the Kings, the Galaxy, Angel City FC, LAFC, the Sparks.

    “For all the money being spent, the public needs to see a lasting benefit from the Olympics, and I think it can be done,” said L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, whose district includes San Pedro, where the Peck Park pool has been closed for several years.

    The county has had its own challenges with parks, and Hahn said her efforts to extend swim season have been frustrating.

    “It never made sense to me that pools closed in mid-August when some of our hottest days are in late summer and early fall,” she said.

    As for the Community School Parks, I’m going to keep score, checking on how many are opened and how long it takes. Raman said with some fanfare, neighborhood involvement and the programming of activities, she thinks the new Community School Parks can thrive.

    Melvoin said that’s an admirable strategy, but first things first.

    “Let’s open the gates,” he said.

    steve.lopez@latimes.com

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    Steve Lopez

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  • L.A. teen is moved to ICE detention center out of state without parents’ knowledge

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    Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz’s family was stunned and heartbroken when the 18-year-old was grabbed by immigration agents while walking his dog in Van Nuys just days before he was set to start his senior year at Reseda Charter High School.

    This week, his family was caught off-guard once again when they learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had transferred him to Arizona without notifying any relatives, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood), which spoke to his family and reviewed ICE detention records.

    Guerrero-Cruz was moved out of the Adelanto Detention Facility in San Bernardino County late Monday night and taken to a holding facility in Arizona in the middle of the desert, according to the congresswoman’s office.

    On Tuesday night, he was scheduled to be transferred to Louisiana, a major hub for deportation flights, but at the last minute he was taken off the plane and sent back to Adelanto, where he is currently being held.

    “Benjamin and his family deserve answers behind ICE’s inconsistent and chaotic decision-making process, including why Benjamin was initially transferred to Arizona, why he was slated to be transferred to Louisiana afterward, and why his family wasn’t notified of his whereabouts by ICE throughout this process,” Rivas said in a statement.

    On Tuesday, Rivas introduced a bill that would require ICE to notify an immediate family member of a detainee within 24 hours of a detainee’s transfer. Currently, ICE is required to notify a family member only in the case of a detainee’s death.

    “Benjamin’s story of being detained and sent across state lines without warning or notification is like many other detainees in Los Angeles and across the country,” Rivas said. “Many immigrant families in my district do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones after they are detained by ICE.”

    The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously stated that Guerrero-Cruz was awaiting deportation to Chile after overstaying his visa, which required him to depart the United States on March 15, 2023.

    Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz, shown at school, is an avid soccer player and loving older brother, according to his family.

    (Rita Silva)

    Guerrero-Cruz was arrested Aug. 8 and held in downtown L.A. for a week, during which time he was briefly taken on an unexplained trip to a detention center in Santa Ana before being transferred to Adelanto on Aug. 15, according to a former teacher who visited him in custody.

    His experience of being pingponged around different facilities is common among those being detained in what the Trump administration is billing as the largest deportation effort in American history.

    This trend is also reflected in ICE’s flight data. The agency conducted 2,022 domestic transfer flights from May through July — representing a 90% increase from the same period last year, according to a widely cited database of flights created by immigrant rights advocate Tom Cartwright.

    Cartwright posited in his July report that this uptick could be related to a “need to optimize bed space as detention numbers have ballooned from 39,152 on 29 December to 56,945 on 26 July.”

    Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A., called the Trump administration’s detention policies cruel, saying it appears that they are detaining people for as long as possible and “moving them from place to place for no reason other than because they can.”

    “The fact that these dumbfounding transfers in the middle of the night cause chaos, confusion, and minimizes access to legal representation does not seem to bother them one bit,” he said in a statement.

    Susham M. Modi, an immigration attorney based in Houston, said he had witnessed an uptick in the frequency of transfers among those recently detained by ICE.

    “[Detainees are] also being often transferred to where there’s less lawyers,” he said. “I’ve seen consults where they’ve been transferred to Oklahoma, where it is very hard to find an attorney that might do, for example, federal court litigation.”

    Although families can use ICE’s Online Detainee Locator to search for loved ones, it isn’t always up to date, and some families do not know how to use it, Modi said. When detainees are transferred, they often can’t make outgoing calls from the detention facility until someone has deposited money into their account — another hurdle for keeping family members updated on their whereabouts, he added.

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    Clara Harter

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  • Employees are back, bosses say. In California? Not so much

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    Even as bosses across the country report a jump in the number of people returning to the office, attendance in California remains less than half of what it used to be.

    A recent survey shows that managers’ push to get workers back in the office is bearing fruit, but executives would still like to see people at their desks more often. A different dataset demonstrates that much of the lag is due to California.

    Companies are stepping up enforcement of their attendance policies even as many workers try to avoid the daily routine of commuting and clocking in, real estate brokerage CBRE found in a national survey of office tenants.

    Companies made “significant” progress in the last year in moving toward their office-attendance goals and enforcing their attendance policies, moving closer to cementing their long-term work guidelines than at any time since the COVID-19 pandemic, CBRE said.

    The annual survey found that 72% of the companies surveyed have met their attendance goals, up from 61% the previous year.

    “Companies have made significant progress on establishing a new baseline for work habits and office attendance after five years of adapting to hybrid work,” said Manish Kashyap, CBRE’s global president of leasing.

    Still, a separate indicator released Tuesday shows how office visits are stuck below the national average in California.

    The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas still have some of the lowest office attendance in the country, according to the latest data from Kastle Systems, which provides key-card entry systems used by many companies and tracks patterns of workers’ card swipes.

    Business in the regions is dominated by the entertainment and tech companies, which can often be more freewheeling because much of the work is done alone and on computers that could be located anywhere.

    Bosses in Los Angeles tend to be more flexible when it comes to remote work in part because commutes can be so long there, said Mark Ein, Kastle’s executive chair. “It’s just harder to get to the office.”

    In the week that ended Aug. 20, the average office population was 48.3% of full occupancy in Los Angeles, Kastle said Tuesday. Attendance was 41.8% in San Francisco and 49% in San Jose.

    That’s well above the lows below 20% during the pandemic, but still behind places including New York and Chicago and far behind cities in Texas, which had more than 60% attendance.

    People walk by the 777 Tower on Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. In the week that ended Aug. 20, the average office population was 48.3% of full occupancy in Los Angeles, according to Kastle Systems.

    (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

    In the CBRE annual survey, the most notable change was in the level of enforcement of back-to-office policies. The share of companies monitoring attendance jumped to 69% this year from 45% last year. Those enforcing attendance policies rose to 37% from 17%.

    Bosses said they want to see even more people in the office. Surveyed companies reported that they want employees in the office an average of 3.2 days per week. Actual attendance is close to that at 2.9 days a week.

    The fact that people aren’t in the office every day creates vibe issues for some managers who are trying to recapture the buzz their workplaces had before the pandemic.

    More than half of organizations reported that a lack of office vibrancy on non-peak attendance days is a central challenge. Uneven attendance patterns create peaks and valleys throughout the week, something managers say makes it difficult for them to provide a consistent experience for employees.

    “We’ve seen Los Angeles lag behind other cities in getting people back to the office,” CBRE real estate broker Jeff Pion said. “I would hypothesize that we didn’t have as many people in the office five days a week, even pre-COVID, just because of the nature of the work that takes place in Los Angeles.”

    The data suggest that better offices are more likely to have more people. Average occupancy in what Kastle considers the best quality offices is higher than at lower quality offices.

    “If someone is paying a lot for their office space, they’re going to want people to use it,” Kastle’s Ein said. “People who spend a lot on office space are ones who value it.”

    Century City, L.A.’s hottest and most expensive office rental market, known for its elegant office towers full of financial companies and lawyers, is performing better than most, Pion said.

    The commercial real estate industry needs people to return to the office. The overall drop in attendance and related cutbacks in leased office space have been particularly hard on landlords, some of whom have lost their buildings to forced sales or foreclosure due to falling revenues.

    Downtown L.A. has 54 office buildings that are at immediate risk of devaluation and could result in nearly $70 billion in lost value over the next 10 years, a recent report by BAE Urban Economics said. That could lead to a loss of $353 million in property tax revenues.

    The report recommended converting some of them partially or completely into housing.

    Companies’ growing sense of clarity about their attendance policies offers some good news for struggling landlords as 67% of the managers CBRE surveyed said they plan to keep their offices the same or expand them within the next three years, a slight increase from last year’s survey.

    Decisions about where offices will be located and what they’ll look like are being made more often with employees’ interests in mind, CBRE said.

    “Employers are much more focused now than they were pre-pandemic on quality-of-workplace experience, the efficiency of seat sharing and the vibrancy of the districts in which they’re located,” said Julie Wheland, CBRE’s global head of research on tenant preferences.

    In some cases, making the workplace more attractive may include offering employees a low-cost concierge to perform such services as filling employees’ cars with gas, picking up their laundry or retrieving their dogs from day care, as L’Oréal does in El Segundo.

    Other inducements from companies adopting a carrot-and-stick approach to getting people back in the office include free food and drinks, comfortable furniture and communal workspaces. Some newer offices have designated library-type spaces as quiet zones, where cellphones and conversations are prohibited.

    Many companies seek to be near public transportation, he said, but would also like to be near outdoor recreational facilities, such as parks and bike paths, where employees can exercise at lunchtime.

    “They’re looking for amenity-based locations where there’s just lots and lots for people to do,” Pion said. “That is a trend that will continue.”

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Massive Home Depot crime ring pulled off more than 600 SoCal thefts, D.A. says

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    For years, a sophisticated retail crime ring plundered Home Depots across Southern California, pulling off more than 600 thefts and netting an estimated $10 million worth of merchandise without consequences — until now, authorities said.

    On Tuesday, the Ventura County district attorney’s office announced the filing of a 48-count criminal complaint against nine alleged key players in what Home Depot says is the largest targeted theft ring in the business’ history.

    The retail crime ring targeted 71 Home Depot locations in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, sometimes hitting the same stores multiple times a day, prosecutors allege.

    Goods that were stolen from Home Depot locations were allegedly fenced by David Ahl through Arya Wholesale, his Tarzana business.

    (Ventura County district attorney’s office)

    Several law enforcement agencies worked together to take down the theft crew through “Operation Kill Switch,” which arrested 14 people on Aug. 14, nine of whom have since been charged, authorities said.

    The criminal enterprise was allegedly led by David Ahl of Woodland Hills, who faces 45 felony counts, including conspiracy, organized retail theft, grand theft, receiving stolen property and money laundering, prosecutors said. If convicted as charged, he faces up to 32 years in prison.

    Ahl is accused of directing theft crews to seize high-value items at Home Depots — such as breakers, dimmers, switches and outlets — that he would then resell through his electronics storefront in Tarzana in a technique known as fencing.

    “His crews of thieves, known as boosters, stole merchandise from the Home Depot’s stores, sometimes hitting every Home Depot in Ventura County in a single day,” said Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff at Tuesday’s news conference. “Then the boosters would deliver the stolen items in trash bags or Home Depot boxes to his business or to his home, where he paid them in cash.”

    The crime ring was, in part, a family affair, prosecutors said.

    Ahl’s brother-in-law, Omid Abrishamkar of Calabasas, is accused of helping sell the stolen merchandise through EBay and faces 11 felony counts related to money laundering and reselling stolen property.

    Ahl’s ex-wife, Lorena Solis of Downey, is accused of getting in on the action by running a nearly identical fencing business in the Los Angeles area alongside her partner, Enrique Neira Moreno of Downey. They each face eight felony counts.

    Five prolific boosters in the ring were also arrested and face felony charges, authorities said.

    They include Jose Banuelos Guerrero of South Gate, Edwin Rivera of Los Angeles and Eber Bonilla Lopez of Pomona, who are accused of working together to commit thefts on a daily basis, often stealing $6,000 to $10,000 in merchandise at a time, prosecutors said.

    Piles of cable and boxes in a warehouse.

    The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said it had seized at least $3.7 million in stolen Home Depot property and more than $800,000 in suspected illicit money from suspects’ accounts.

    (Ventura County district attorney’s office)

    Surveillance camera footage released by the district attorney’s office shows Bonilla-Lopez filling his jacket pockets with electric breakers from a Home Depot and using a pole to swipe boxes full of electrical components from the top shelves.

    A second alleged boosting crew consisting of Erlin Hernandez Lopez and Denny Gomez, both of Pomona, are charged with three felony counts of conspiracy to commit retail theft.

    Home Depot estimates that the crew is collectively responsible for more than $10 million in stolen merchandise. Since the Aug. 14 arrests, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office has seized at least $3.7 million in stolen Home Depot property and more than $800,000 in suspected illicit money from accounts belonging to Ahl and Abrishamkar.

    During Tuesday’s news conference, Fryhoff praised Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks) for authoring Assembly Bill 1779, which was signed into law last year and allows retail crimes that occur across multiple counties to be consolidated into a single criminal filing.

    “Without this law, we would be prosecuting common crimes by the same defendants in multiple jurisdictions, a costly and time-consuming undertaking,” he said. “However, because of this legislation, Ventura County has consolidated the Los Angeles Home Depot theft charges into the 48-count criminal complaint.

    L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman also praised the bill and said that cracking down on retail crime is a top priority for his office.

    “This is the start of efforts to go after these large crews,” he said. “They thought they were sophisticated, they thought they could hide. Today’s announcement of these charges shows vastly differently.”

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    Clara Harter

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  • Trump orders could target ‘cashless bail’ cities from D.C. to L.A.

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump took executive action Monday threatening to cut federal aid to cities and counties that offer cashless bail to criminal defendants, a move that could place Democratic jurisdictions throughout the country under further financial strain.

    Trump’s first executive order specifically targeted the practice of cashless bail in the District of Columbia, where the president has sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets. His second action directed the Justice Department to draw up a list of jurisdictions that have “substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order” — a list that would then be subject to federal funding cuts, the White House said.

    “That was when the big crime in this country started,” Trump said. “That was when it happened. Somebody kills somebody, they go and don’t worry about it — no cash, come back in a couple of months, we’ll give you a trial. You never see the person again.”

    “They thought it was discriminatory to make people put up money because they just killed three people lying in the street,” he added. “We’re ending it.”

    Trump does not have the power to unilaterally change D.C. law. But administration officials hope the threat of significant financial pressures on the city will force local lawmakers to change it themselves.

    Similarly, his second order could ultimately result in cuts to federal grants and contracts with Los Angeles County, where courts use cash bail only in the most serious criminal cases.

    Studies have not shown a correlation between cashless bail policies and an increase in crime.

    As of October 2023, nearly everyone accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies in Los Angeles County is either cited and released or freed on certain conditions after their case is reviewed by a judge. The judge can offer other conditions for release, including electronic monitoring or home supervision by probation officials.

    “A person’s ability to pay a large sum of money should not be the determining factor in deciding whether that person, who is presumed innocent, stays in jail before trial or is released,” then-Presiding Judge Samantha Jessner said at the time.

    The county reached out to the court on how Trump’s executive order may affect the county’s bail policies and had not heard back.

    The county policy has proved controversial with some cities saying they believed the lack of cash bail would make their communities less safe. Twelve cities within the county sued unsuccessfully to block the cashless bail reform, arguing it would lead to higher crime rates and violated the court’s responsibilities to uphold public safety. Sheriff Robert Luna told the supervisors in 2023 that some communities were alarmed at the “lack of consequences for those who commit crimes.”

    The sheriff’s office and the public defender’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The county had initially begun a zero-bail system during the pandemic to prevent crowding in jails. A report to the Board of Supervisors found instances of re-arrest or failure to appear in court remained relatively stable despite the change.

    In the fall of 2022, six people sued the county and city, arguing they spent five days in custody solely because they could not afford bail, leaving them in “dismal” conditions. Demanding cash bail created a “wealth-based detention system,” the plaintiffs alleged. The suit led to a preliminary injunction barring the city and county from enforcing cash bail requirements for some people who had yet to be arraigned.

    Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill in 2018 to end cash bail across California. Voters nixed it after the bail bond industry spearheaded a campaign to send the measure to voters. The referendum was defeated in 2020 with 56% voting “no.”

    Trump also signed an executive action directing the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute individuals for burning the American flag, calling it an act of incitement, despite standing Supreme Court precedent that doing so is an expression of free speech.

    They were the latest steps in a spree of executive actions from Trump ostensibly targeting crime in the United States, following Trump’s deployment of Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles in June and his federalization of the National Guard in D.C. earlier this month.

    He has threatened to launch similar operations with federal forces to New York and Chicago, despite local officials telling the Trump administration that the deployments are not necessary.

    “They probably do want it,” Trump said. “If we didn’t go to Los Angeles, you would literally have had to call off the Olympics. It was so bad.”

    Ahead of the 2028 Olympics, to be held in Los Angeles, American cities should be “spotless,” Trump added.

    Wilner reported from Washington, Ellis from Los Angeles.

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    Michael Wilner, Rebecca Ellis

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