During her first week in office three years ago, Mayor Karen Bass issued a sweeping directive to speed up affordable housing applications. Now, that plan is permanent.
The L.A. City Council unanimously voted Tuesday to adopt the Affordable Housing Streamlining Ordinance. Essentially, the ordinance takes Bass’ housing initiative, known as Executive Directive 1, and incorporates it into the L.A. Municipal Code, so the streamlined process will stick around even after Bass leaves office.
Under the ordinance, developers get fast-tracked city approval for projects that include 100% affordable housing. Reviews for such projects typically take six to nine months, but under the directive, they’re required to be approved within 60 days.
The expedited processing works by stripping away many of the discretionary review processes that typically bog down housing projects: City Council hearings, environmental reports, neighborhood outreach meetings, etc. As long as projects comply with certain criteria, including zoning and design review standards, they qualify for streamlined approval.
Bass introduced the directive to make good on her campaign’s promise to address the city’s affordability and homelessness crises. It also serves as a response to housing developers who have long complained about the city’s complex permitting process, in which projects languish for weeks or months while navigating the red tape of reviews and inspections.
Affordable housing applications have been pouring in under the directive.
As of November, 490 projects have been streamlined, accounting for more than 40,000 affordable housing units, according to the Planning Department. Of those, 437 projects have been approved, with an average application process of 22 days.
It’s unclear how many of those projects are actually being built. At a December City Council meeting, Planning Department officials said that as of July, 44 streamlined projects had been started, accounting for roughly 2,500 units. But there are no data on how many have been finished.
Maria Patiño Gutierrez, deputy director for policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), celebrated the decision to make the directive permanent, but said she hopes to see changes to the process down the road.
“We want this ordinance to work and bring affordable housing, but we also want to make sure it doesn’t displace tenants,” she said.
The directive has become increasingly watered down over the last three years as Bass carved out more and more areas from being subjected to streamlined applications. In June 2023, Bass exempted single-family zones from the directive, which accounts for 72% of land in L.A.
A year later, she exempted historic districts — including areas of Highland Park and Lincoln Heights — as well as “very high fire hazard severity zones,” which include parts of Silver Lake and Hollywood Hills.
To make sure streamlined projects weren’t displacing renters, Bass also exempted those that would replace rent-controlled apartment buildings with 12 units or more.
These exemptions will carry into the newly adopted ordinance, though they may be tweaked in the months to come. In a Dec. 2 meeting, City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado argued that the exemption to preserve rent-controlled buildings should shrink from a minimum of 12 units to five units, claiming such projects could displace tenants in neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.
Jurado said the current ordinance exempts 19% of rent-controlled buildings, but if the minimum threshold were set at five units instead of 12, it would exempt 36%.
Housing groups are pushing for amendments as well. A public comment letter published by Public Counsel and SAJE argued that maximum rents for streamlined projects should be cheaper than they’re allowed to be under current rules.
The directive defines “100% affordable housing” as 80% low-income units and 20% moderate-income units, but the nonprofits claimed that those rates, which would still let a “low-income” two-bedroom apartment be rented for as much as $2,726, are still too expensive for many Angelenos.
A unique suspect was taken into custody after showing off impressive speed on Interstate 40.On Tuesday, Nov. 11, officers were called to the area of I-40 and the Louisiana offramp in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a pig on the loose.”It was odd, but most of the time, we get stuff like that, and we get there and there’s nothing there,” said Lt. Ramon Candelaria with the Albuquerque Animal Welfare Department. “I didn’t think much of it until I was getting there and I seen the traffic start backing up.”As Candelaria showed up, ready to lasso the pig, he spotted Albuquerque police officers chasing him.”I seen the pig running and then I seen officers right behind it,” Candelaria said.After a short foot pursuit, the culprit was in custody.”Pretty soon, I seen them all start high-fiving each other,” Candelaria said. “They had the pig in the back of a unit. I give it to the APD officers. They were hustling to catch this little guy and they were moving.”APD shared this video on its social media pages.Albuquerque Animal Welfare believes the pig is about a year old and roughly 50 pounds. They suspect he’s domesticated and that he fell out of someone’s truck.”He grabbed it, handled it and put it in the back of a unit. If that would have been any kind of a wild animal, it would have definitely bit him,” Candelaria said. “Then his colors. His colors were not normal for a pig if it was wild.”Staff did scan him for a microchip, but didn’t find one. The pig is at the Westside Shelter waiting for its owners to claim him. Hearst sister station KOAT visited the shelter Thursday and learned the pig loved attention and being pet.It’s not uncommon for Albuquerque Animal Welfare to rescue animals on the interstate.”We’ve gotten porcupines on the freeway. I’ve gotten a badger on the freeway, you name it. We’re in New Mexico, so it’s expected. But I didn’t expect a pig,” Candelaria said. But Candelaria does ask drivers to slow down when flashing lights are present. Video shows the pig almost being clipped by a car driving by.”We’re out there trying to save the animal and watch out for ourselves. It gets dangerous out there, and some people just do not respect the lights,” Candelaria said.The pig is being held at the Westside Shelter. For details on adopting him, click here.
A unique suspect was taken into custody after showing off impressive speed on Interstate 40.
On Tuesday, Nov. 11, officers were called to the area of I-40 and the Louisiana offramp in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a pig on the loose.
“It was odd, but most of the time, we get stuff like that, and we get there and there’s nothing there,” said Lt. Ramon Candelaria with the Albuquerque Animal Welfare Department. “I didn’t think much of it until I was getting there and I seen the traffic start backing up.”
As Candelaria showed up, ready to lasso the pig, he spotted Albuquerque police officers chasing him.
“I seen the pig running and then I seen officers right behind it,” Candelaria said.
After a short foot pursuit, the culprit was in custody.
“Pretty soon, I seen them all start high-fiving each other,” Candelaria said. “They had the pig in the back of a unit. I give it to the APD officers. They were hustling to catch this little guy and they were moving.”
Albuquerque Animal Welfare believes the pig is about a year old and roughly 50 pounds. They suspect he’s domesticated and that he fell out of someone’s truck.
“He grabbed it, handled it and put it in the back of a unit. If that would have been any kind of a wild animal, it would have definitely bit him,” Candelaria said. “Then his colors. His colors were not normal for a pig if it was wild.”
Staff did scan him for a microchip, but didn’t find one. The pig is at the Westside Shelter waiting for its owners to claim him. Hearst sister station KOAT visited the shelter Thursday and learned the pig loved attention and being pet.
It’s not uncommon for Albuquerque Animal Welfare to rescue animals on the interstate.
“We’ve gotten porcupines on the freeway. I’ve gotten a badger on the freeway, you name it. We’re in New Mexico, so it’s expected. But I didn’t expect a pig,” Candelaria said.
But Candelaria does ask drivers to slow down when flashing lights are present. Video shows the pig almost being clipped by a car driving by.
“We’re out there trying to save the animal and watch out for ourselves. It gets dangerous out there, and some people just do not respect the lights,” Candelaria said.
The pig is being held at the Westside Shelter. For details on adopting him, click here.
Firefighters battle blaze at Orlando apartment complex; 7 residents displaced
WESH TWO NEWS STARTS NOW WITH BREAKING NEWS. GOOD MORNING EVERYONE. I’M ALAN CAMPBELL AND I’M MEREDITH MCDONOUGH. WE BEGIN WITH THAT BREAKING NEWS OF A FIRE IN ORLANDO. WESH TWO BOB HAZEN IS LIVE AT THE ROYAL ISLES APARTMENT COMPLEX NEAR SOUTH SEMORAN BOULEVARD. BOB. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED IN THE LAST 30 MINUTES? WE TALKED TO A YOUNG LADY WHO LIVES HERE, LIVES RIGHT UNDERNEATH THAT APARTMENT THAT CAUGHT ON FIRE, AND SHE SAYS SHE WAS ABLE TO GET OUT ALONG WITH HER FAMILY. AND AS FAR AS WE’VE HEARD RIGHT NOW, NO ONE HAS BEEN SERIOUSLY HURT IN THIS FIRE. I WANT TO SHOW YOU WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE HERE. THERE’S STILL SOME FIREFIGHTERS ON THE SCENE, BUT MOST OF THEM HAVE CLEARED OUT. THIS IS IN THE SECOND STORY OF THIS APARTMENT BUILDING HERE. THE ROYAL ISLES APARTMENT, AS YOU SAID, NEAR CIMARRON, RIGHT OFF OF ROBERTO CLEMENTE ROAD. AND I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOME VIDEO FROM OUR DRONE, TOO. WE’VE HAD THIS FLYING JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO TO GET A BETTER LOOK AT WHAT THIS APARTMENT COMPLEX LOOKS LIKE NOW, AFTER THIS FIRE. AGAIN, THIS WAS ON A SECOND STORY UNIT. THE FIRE BROKE OUT A LITTLE AFTER 4:00 THIS MORNING. SO THE PEOPLE WE TALKED TO HERE SAID THAT THEY WERE SLEEPING WHEN THEY HEARD EVERYTHING START GOING CRAZY IN THE FIRE BURNING ABOVE THEIR APARTMENT. WE AGAIN, DON’T HAVE ANY WORD OF ANY PEOPLE BEING INJURED. BUT I ALSO WANT TO SHOW YOU SOME VIDEO THAT WE GOT FROM THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE, WHERE YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THOSE FLAMES COMING OUT OF THE TOP OF THE BUILDING. AT THIS POINT, WE HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING FROM THE ORLANDO FIRE DEPARTMENT ABOUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE CAUSED THIS. OF COURSE, WE KNOW IT’S BEEN COLD WEATHER LATELY, SO THERE’S ALWAYS A POSSIBILITY THAT THERE WAS A SPACE HEATER OR SOME OTHER KIND OF HEATING MECHANISM USED TO TRY TO KEEP PEOPLE WARM IN THEIR APARTMENT. BUT AGAIN, NO WORD FROM ORLANDO FIRE DEPARTMENT YET ABOUT WHAT DID CAUSE THIS. WE DO KNOW THEY DO HAVE THEIR INVESTIGATORS HERE AT THE SCENE AT THIS POINT, INVESTIGATING WHAT DID SPARK THAT FIRE AT THIS APARTMENT BUILDING. BUT AGAIN, JUST ONE MORE TIME. THE GOOD NEWS IS NO WORD OF ANY SERIOUS INJURIES AFTER THIS FIRE AT THIS APARTMENT BUILDING EARLY THIS MORNING COV
Firefighters battle blaze at Orlando apartment complex; 7 residents displaced
The Orlando Fire Department battled an apartment fire on Thursday morning. The fire was reported at the Royal Isles apartment complex, located off Semoran Boulevard and Lake Underhill Road.Once crews arrived on scene, they found fire coming out of multiple second-floor windows of an apartment.A resident living under the unit that caught fire said that she was able to evacuate safely with her family. All occupants were out of the building before the OFD’s arrival.A video captured the moment the flames erupted from the apartment complex.The blaze caused significant damage to some units, but details about what prompted the fire were not revealed.Four occupants were treated for non-life-threatening medical complaints, according to OFD.Officials stated that seven occupants were displaced from two separate apartments due to the fire.
ORLANDO, Fla. —
The Orlando Fire Department battled an apartment fire on Thursday morning.
The fire was reported at the Royal Isles apartment complex, located off Semoran Boulevard and Lake Underhill Road.
Once crews arrived on scene, they found fire coming out of multiple second-floor windows of an apartment.
A resident living under the unit that caught fire said that she was able to evacuate safely with her family.
All occupants were out of the building before the OFD’s arrival.
A video captured the moment the flames erupted from the apartment complex.
The blaze caused significant damage to some units, but details about what prompted the fire were not revealed.
Four occupants were treated for non-life-threatening medical complaints, according to OFD.
Officials stated that seven occupants were displaced from two separate apartments due to the fire.
A person was pulled from a submerged vehicle in Lake Hayes on Monday night, according to the Seminole County Fire Department.The incident was reported as a water rescue at 135 Lake Hayes Road in Oviedo. Once units arrived at the scene, they confirmed there was a submerged vehicle in the lake. Officials said that a person was removed from the submerged vehicle and was being taken to a hospital.Details about the person’s condition were not disclosed. This is a developing news story and will be updated as more information is released.
OVIEDO, Fla. —
A person was pulled from a submerged vehicle in Lake Hayes on Monday night, according to the Seminole County Fire Department.
The incident was reported as a water rescue at 135 Lake Hayes Road in Oviedo.
Once units arrived at the scene, they confirmed there was a submerged vehicle in the lake.
Officials said that a person was removed from the submerged vehicle and was being taken to a hospital.
Details about the person’s condition were not disclosed.
This is a developing news story and will be updated as more information is released.
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
Gov. Gavin Newsom Thursday signed a package of bills designed to alleviate the state’s housing affordability crisis.
The new laws aim to boost the availability of housing in a variety of ways, including streamlining the approval process for certain projects and requiring that local municipalities create plans to house the most vulnerable Californians.
“The original sin in this state is affordability,” Newsom said at news conference. “That is the challenge we are trying to address.”
The bill signings Thursday follow a number of actions lawmakers have taken in recent years to make housing more affordable.
There have been big ticket items like eliminating most single-family only zones to allow duplexes and so-called accessory dwelling units, as well as more under-the-radar efforts that have boosted ADU construction and chipped away at the ability local governments have to block housing developments.
One of those lesser known laws is Assembly Bill 2011, a law from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) that streamlined the approval process for housing projects on certain types of commercial land if developers reserve some units for lower-income residents.
On Wednesday, developer Thrive Living and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass celebrated the groundbreaking of what was billed as the first AB 2011 project to move forward in the city. The Baldwin Village development will consist of 800 apartments on top of a ground-floor Costco store. Just over 180 of those units will be for low-income households.
In his news conference Thursday, Newsom said the total housing package includes 32 bills and he signed seven at the event that tweak a number of existing rules to try to spur more housing.
One measure from Wicks, AB 2243, amends the law that Thrive Living used in Los Angeles. Under the new rules, developers will be able to receive the streamlined approval in more areas than they do now, including regional malls and land closer to freeways.
Another bill, AB 3093 from Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego), requires that local municipalities plan for housing that will be available to households making up to 15% and up to 30% of the area‘s median income.
Currently, the lowest income bracket communities must plan for is less than 50% of area median income, meaning in theory that cities could fulfill those goals by building housing just for people making 49% of local income.
Officials say that by adding the new, lower income categories it will help create more housing for people who are homeless or at greatest risk of losing their homes.
Local municipalities will also face stricter penalties if they reject housing projects in ways that state law does not allow them to do.
Under Senate Bill 1037, from State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), communities will face civil penalties up to $50,000 a month for as long as a violation persists. The money will be deposited into a state fund and used to develop income-restricted housing in that community.
After months of hearings, a federal judge last month ruled that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs discriminates against homeless veterans whose disability compensation makes them ineligible for housing being constructed on its West Los Angeles campus.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had earlier found that the VA has a fiduciary duty to use the 388-acre campus primarily for housing and healthcare for disabled veterans, casting doubt on the legality of leases that have turned over portions of it for sports facilities, oil drilling and two parking lots.
Neither ruling, however, gave any indication of what remedies, if any, the VA might face. That question will be at issue in a non-jury trial starting Tuesday in downtown federal court, the culmination of more than a decade of legal battles — and half a century of grievances — over the veterans’ land.
In a brief filed last month, attorneys for the veterans asked Carter to issue an order requiring the VA to provide nearly 4,000 units of permanent supportive housing on the campus. That would be an addition of 2,740 units to the 1,215 already in planning or under construction under the terms of a prior lawsuit. They also are asking for the construction of 1,000 shelter beds.
They further ask the judge to enjoin the VA from contracting with developers whose funding sources impose restrictive income limits that bar veterans with disability compensation. If granted, such an order could have a national impact on VA housing construction that relies on third-party developers.
The brief is less specific about the leases to UCLA and the neighboring Brentwood School for athletic facilities and the oil and parking operations. It asks Carter to find the leases invalid but does not say whether they should be nullified or renegotiated to better serve veterans.
American flags decorate tents at an encampment of homeless veterans along San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, Calif., on July 4, 2020.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Justice Department lawyers representing the VA argue in an opposing brief that Carter should not order more housing or issue an injunction because the remedy sought is unnecessary and unfeasible and would place an undue burden on the VA.
The lawsuit, filed last November by 14 veterans and since made a class action, reprised an earlier lawsuit that challenged the leases and asserted an unmet need for permanent housing. In a 2015 settlement, the VA agreed to develop a master plan for the campus. A draft master plan, completed in 2016, called for 1,200 units of housing on the campus in new and rehabilitated buildings with a commitment to complete more than 770 units by the end of 2022. Only 54 of those units were completed by the deadline, and only 233 are currently open.
The new lawsuit, filed by Public Counsel, the Inner City Law Center and law firms Brown Goldstein & Levy LLP and Robins Kaplan LLP, alleges that the VA has reneged on the settlement agreement.
The plaintiff’s lead counsel, Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, said in a hearing last year that the new case was necessary because he had erred by not demanding court monitoring of the 2015 settlement.
“The phrase ‘homeless veteran’ should be an American oxymoron,” the complaint said. “But this is the cruel truth—the federal government consistently refuses to keep its word and take meaningful actions to bring the abomination of veteran homelessness to an end.”
The West Los Angeles campus, formally called the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, was established as a home for Civil War veterans on land donated in 1888 by Sen. John P. Jones and his business partner, the socialite and businesswoman Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker, scion of a landowning family going back to the mission era. After World War I, the campus “gradually evolved from institutional housing to medical care that allowed Veterans to reintegrate into civilian society,” according to a history on the VA website.
As many as 4,000 veterans lived on the property in the early 20th Century, but the transformation of the campus into a medical center continued after World War II, as advances in battlefield medical care resulted in greater survival rates with more serious injuries. By 1962, the West L.A. VA Medical Center was the largest in the country, with more than 6,000 patients and 4,500 staff.
But in the late 1960s, residential use declined. Then, following the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the Wadsworth Hospital building was judged seismically unsound and demolished. To make room for a temporary hospital during its reconstruction, the roughly 1,000 remaining residents of the Old Soldiers Home were abruptly evicted. Only about half relocated to other VA facilities, and, after the new hospital opened, the old buildings were left to deteriorate.
Carter ruled in December that the 1888 deed of 300 acres dedicated to the “establishment, construction and permanent maintenance of a branch of said National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers” created a charitable trust and that Congress, in adopting the West Los Angeles Leasing Act of 2016, assumed enforceable fiduciary duties to use the land to benefit veterans.
In May, Carter certified the case as a class action representing all homeless veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injuries who reside in Los Angeles County and a subclass of all class members whose income (including veterans’ disability benefits) exceeds 50% of the area’s median income.
Last month, Carter issued a partial summary judgment in favor of the veterans, finding that the VA discriminates against veterans whose disability compensation makes them ineligible for housing built by developers whose funding sources come with income limits.
“Those who gave the most cannot receive the least,” he wrote.
In the pretrial brief, Rosenbaum argued that the lack of adequate housing at the VA forces veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injury toward institutionalization.
“Homeless veterans with serious mental illness and traumatic brain injury who lack permanent supportive housing experience an institutional circuit of temporary housing, emergency departments, psychiatric institutions, and jails in order to receive healthcare, including mental healthcare, services,” he wrote.
To support their case for more housing, the plaintiffs intend to present testimony from three prominent Angelenos. Developer and former Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff will testify that he has identified space on the campus for an additional 4,000 units. Jonathan Sherin, former director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, and Benjamin Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, will testify on the mental health impacts of homelessness.
The government’s opposing brief argued that the 2022 update of the master plan provides for a “supportive, integrated community” with services, amenities and recreational, cultural and open spaces.
The plaintiffs’ demand would impose an undue burden, the government argued, by requiring the VA to build approximately 40 buildings, to obtain a new environmental report clearances for historic preservation and to extend utilities into new areas of the campus.
It cited several improvements the VA has made to its services and changes to the income requirements that make 97% of homeless veterans eligible for federal housing vouchers.
It also argued that housing a majority of veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injury on the campus would “segregate them from the broader community and would likely result in their stigmatization based on their disabilities.”
Carter has not yet ruled on the validity of the leases, which reserve limited time for veterans to use the athletic facilities and generate income from the oil and parking operations for VA operations.
Rosenbaum cited a 2021 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General concluding that seven of the VA’s land-use leases, including those with the Brentwood School and the oil and parking operators, failed to comply with the West Los Angeles Leasing Act and that seven and a half years after the earlier settlement, no supportive housing had yet been completed.
Lawyers representing Bridgeland Resources LLC intervened in the case and filed a brief in which they argue that the 2017 lease under which the company uses a portion of the VA property to slant drill into a West Los Angeles oil field complies with the West Los Angeles Leasing Act because it provides a 2.5% royalty to the Disabled American Veterans Los Angeles Chapter “solely for the purpose of providing transportation to Veterans on and around the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System Campus.” If that lease were invalidated, they said, earlier leases would then take effect, allowing Bridgeland to expand its operation.
Rosenbaum said those earlier leases also would be invalid.
Neither UCLA nor Brentwood School have had lawyers present or sought to intervene. Spokespeople for UCLA and the Brentwood School declined to comment.
Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this article.
Sam Andreano is currently putting the finishing touches on his split-lot property in Whittier. He’s a guinea pig for state Senate Bill 9, a housing law that allows homeowners to divvy up their properties and build two or even four units on a once-single-family lot.
Andreano, 59, was one of SB 9’s earliest adopters. He bought a single-family home for $790,000 in 2021, split the property in half and sold the existing home on half of the original lot for $777,777 in 2023 — essentially coming out with an empty lot for a little over $12,000, around what it would have cost in the 1970s.
Then, Andreano spent around $400,000 building a home onto the back half of the original lot. He estimates it’ll be worth around $850,000 when it’s finished next month.
The project was an absolute success; Andreano added density to a single-family lot and came out well financially.
Superior Court Judge Curtis Kin determined that SB 9 is unconstitutional because it doesn’t provide housing restricted for low-income residents, which he said was the law’s stated purpose. For now, it affects five cities: Redondo Beach, Carson, Torrance, Whittier and Del Mar. But the ruling clears the way for the law — one of many designed to alleviate California’s housing crisis — to be invalidated in cities across the state.
Few took advantage of the law, especially compared with other state laws created to increase density. A study from Bay Area NPR affiliate KQED-FM found that 16 California cities — including San José, San Francisco, Long Beach and Sacramento — approved just 75 split-lot applications and 112 applications for new units under SB 9 from 2022 to 2023, while approving 8,800 accessory dwelling units during the same stretch.
Andreano thinks he knows why. He said some property owners he spoke to were hesitant to build SB 9 projects because they were afraid it would be overturned, and now their fears have come true. His project is fine because the property has already been divided, but he said others still applying will surely lose money due to the ruling.
“You have to pay the architect, the engineer and others. Then the ruling comes down saying it’s overturned, and you’re out $50,000,” he said.
Andreano was able to push his project through before the court decision because he moved quickly. He bought the Whittier property in December 2021 with the intention to split it up under SB 9 and officially started his application four months later.
The process took two years, hundreds of phone calls and tens of thousands of dollars.
The law allows a single-family-zoned lot to be split into two, and owners can build either a single-family home or a duplex on each lot, for a total of up to four units. But it requires the two lots to be split somewhat evenly, with a maximum difference of 60-40, and also requires each new lot to be at least 1,200 square feet.
Under these restrictions, the ideal properties for SB 9 are big lots with small houses. So Andreano specifically bought a property that would work well under the guidelines: a 1,200-square-foot house on a 6,232-square-foot lot. Big(ish) lot, small house.
Then he brought in an architect, which cost about $20,000; a grading engineer, which cost around $15,000; a soil engineer, which cost around $8,000; and a surveyor, which cost around $5,000. The L.A. County Fire Department did three inspections, which cost around $1,500 each, and he also spent around $3,000 on application fees.
“It was a lot of back-and-forth,” he said. “I’d submit my application, and the city would ask for revisions on A, B and C. Then I’d submit the revisions, and they’d ask for revisions on D, E and F.”
He’s in the final stages of finishing the back house, bringing the timeline of the project to roughly two years. He said it’s definitely been worth it.
The property now features two single-family homes separated by a fence: a 1,200-square-foot front house with three bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms on a 3,349-square-foot lot, and an 1,100-square-foot back house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on a 2,893-square-foot lot, where he plans to live. The lot-size split is 53.65% to 46.35%, well within the 60-40 restrictions.
“People want to buy houses, and this is a way to increase density while also letting people work out the details on their own,” he said.
Andreano hired Dennis Robinson, owner of Custom ADU Builder, to build the back house. Robinson has constructed seven SB 9 projects, and he’s completing seven more.
Robinson handles both ADUs and SB 9 projects and said each type has it own perks.
“ADUs are faster and cheaper, and you save around $20,000 in the permitting process alone,” he said. “But if you want to add multiple units to your property, SB 9 is better.”
Robinson was surprised when the law was overturned. He was about to break ground on a project in Long Beach, where a family wanted to expand its garage into a 1,000-square-foot home and add a unit above, but now it’s in jeopardy.
If the ruling is appealed and upheld, it would expand to affect California’s 121 charter cities, including Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The law was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it didn’t provide housing for low-income residents, but Andreano said that if he had to sell or rent the home as low-income, he would’ve lost money.
“That affordability factor makes sense for a 100-unit condo, where a developer can set a few units aside for low income, but it doesn’t work for an individual home,” he said. “The goal for SB 9 should be to add housing in order to make the market more affordable in general.”
Alexa Castelvecchi was glad when she and her roommates found their new apartment about a year ago, in a modern building in Hollywood with a big, sleek kitchen and oversized windows. It was nothing like the aging, rent-controlled apartment she once sublet in Venice, where she often had to cook using a toaster oven.
But with the end of her lease on the three-bedroom apartment fast approaching, she has found herself worrying about how much the already high monthly rent of nearly $4,000 might increase.
Little did she know that she has some of the strongest protections available. Unbeknownst to many tenants across the city, an obscure city rule requires some newly built rental properties to be put under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance, commonly referred to as rent control.
Developers have built more than 10,000 such units since 2007, city records show, adding a new crop of rent-controlled housing across the city.
The buildings offer a counterpoint to real estate industry claims that rent control limits new construction. But they also raise a question: do their tenants even know they live in rent-controlled units?
Castelvecchi said she had no idea that she lived in a building with rent caps until a Times reporter told her recently.
“Nobody said anything,” she said.
Generally, the city’s rent control law only applies to buildings built on or before Oct. 1, 1978 — a cutoff date many landlords and at least some renters are acutely aware of. Under the rules, landlords can set the rent whenever a unit becomes vacant, but face limits on how much they can raise rent on individual tenants annually, usually between 3% and 8%, depending on inflation.
Newer buildings typically do not have those protections, but they can depending on what was there before. Under a 2007 city ordinance, newly constructed apartments, townhomes and condos must be rent controlled if an older rent controlled property was demolished on site.
The data show that developers across the city frequently pursue these projects despite their buildings being subject to rent caps the moment a lease is signed.
The apartment building at 5800 Harold Way in Los Angeles, CA is under rent control.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Leeor Maciborski, owner of ROM Residential, which currently owns Castelvecchi’s building, purchased that building after another investor built it. However, he said he’s developed five or six other properties in Los Angeles knowing they’d fall under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.
The projects made financial sense because he could set the initial rent at market rate and was allowed at least a 3% increase each year, he said.
“If I could build something … and I can count on 3% to 4% annual increases, I am happy,” the developer said.
Tenant advocates, meanwhile, say that even if some new rent-controlled apartments are being built, replacing older rent controlled units for new ones is devastating. Not only are people evicted, but new construction demands a premium when the unit is initially rented.
“The only ones who make out with this trade off is the developers and the landlords who are pulling in more and more profits and income on the backs of those people they have displaced,” said Larry Gross, executive director with the tenants advocacy group Coalition for Economic Survival.
Since mid-2007, owners have removed more than 13,000 older rent-controlled units from the market , leading to concern the demolition is worsening the city’s affordability and homelessness crisis.
Over the same time frame, housing department data show 10,252 new units have been put under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.
New buildings can be exempt from the rules if they open for rent more than five years after the old property was removed from the market, or if the developer dedicates a certain number of new units as income-restricted affordable housing — though units will revert to rent control once those income restrictions expire in coming decades, according to the housing department.
About 3,000 additional units fall into the latter, temporarily exempt category, although some are already income restricted.
In theory, newly constructed rent-controlled properties could increase the overall number of apartments with rent caps in the city, because developers often knock down a small building to build more units. For now, that hasn’t happened.
The real estate industry — as well as many housing economists — have long argued that far fewer developers would build if they are subject to rent caps, leading to even higher rents as supply shortages worsen. As a result, rent control ordinances across the country typically exempt new construction.
Until recently, state law in California outlawed rent caps on properties built after Feb. 1, 1995, and even earlier in some cities like Los Angeles, with the exemption for newly built properties that replaced older rent controlled units.
Then in 2020, a new law took effect and put statewide rent restrictions on buildings older than 15 years, though these caps are less strict than in places like Los Angeles, whose rules remain in place.
The state bill’s author, then-Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), had proposed 10 years as a cut off, but it was extended another five years to lessen opposition. At the time, the California Apartment Assn. took credit for the change, saying it would “mitigate the bill’s impact on future development of rental housing.”
Fred Sutton, a senior vice president with the California Apartment Assn., said the fact that some developers build under the L.A. rules does not mean housing construction would not decline if rent caps were placed on all new buildings. As restrictions are added, fewer projects can be expected to turn a reasonable profit — even if some go forward, he said.
“Can people still figure out a way to do it?” Sutton said. “Yes, but you’re not going to get as many people as you need.”
Two developers told The Times they didn’t know about the rules before building. One said he’d do so again, while another wouldn’t because rent control gives him less flexibility to earn a profit.
Maciborski said he’d take a different tack. He’d be willing to build another rent-controlled building, but only if the project would expect a greater return than before, to buffer him from potential actions by the Los Angeles City Council that might undercut his revenue stream.
The pandemic pushed the council to freeze rent in controlled buildings for nearly four years. Only a few months ago did officials allow landlords to raise rent.
“I’d consider it,” Maciborski said of constructing another rent-controlled property. “But now knowing what potential tools the city council … has at their disposal, it’s definitely a little scarier.”
Renters who live in any rent-controlled buildings — old or new — should know about it. The Los Angeles Housing Department requires the landlord to alert tenants by posting notice at the property. But several residents who spoke to The Times at the newer buildings said they had no idea.
After learning about her building’s status, Castelvecchi checked her lease and noticed that rent control is mentioned in a section she had previously overlooked. And she found a sign in the building outlining the rules, which she hadn’t previously noticed.
It would have been better, she said, if she had simply been told verbally about the rules when she rented the apartment.
“It’s extremely unnerving that it wasn’t communicated by anyone I met,” she said. “When you have to read the fine print, it feels difficult to trust.”
Maciborski said that if a tenant asked, a leasing agent would tell them if a building was rent controlled, but when dealing with legal issues his company relies on putting it in writing.
“It’s verifiable,” he said, adding written notices can also give more detailed information than a leasing agent may have on hand.
Gross, the tenant advocate, said it’s a constant struggle to educate tenants of their rights, with many residents of older properties not understanding they have rent control protections. He believes the problem is even worse in newer buildings, because even if people understand rent control exists they often believe all new properties are exempt.
“There’s not enough education and outreach,” Gross said.
Monique Mendoza, who pays $3,800 a month to live in a townhome in Boyle Heights, said she also had no idea that her newer unit also falls under the city’s rent control protections. It would have given her some relief just to know, she said. She is constantly worrying about the cost of rent and probably couldn’t afford a big increase.
Even without a rent hike, she said, “for us, as a family, it’s not affordable.”
Nearly a year ago, every tenant at the massive Westside apartment complex Barrington Plaza was served with an eviction notice by their landlord, who said the residents of nearly 600 units needed to move out so the company could install fire sprinklers following two major blazes.
In the months since, most of the tenants have left. But more than 100 stayed behind, vowing to fight in court for the right to stay in their rent-controlled units, suspecting that the owner’s real intent was to upgrade the complex and re-rent the units at market rate.
On Wednesday, their day in court finally came as lawyers for the tenants and the owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., presented opening arguments in a civil case that will decide whether the evictions are legal. The tenants and their advocates see the case as an important test of renter protections in a city faced with an affordable housing crisis.
“I wanted to make sure I’m represented in this fight for tenants in Los Angeles,” said Barrington tenant Chuck Martinez, who has lived in the building since 2021. “To lose this affordable housing is a step backward for L.A.”
For the owner, the case at the Santa Monica Courthouse is about landlords having the legal right to choose not to continue renting their units. “Inside the courtroom, this is a case about upholding the law,” said John Samuel Gibson, attorney for Douglas Emmett.
The company wants to evict the residents under the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict rent-stabilized tenants to remove units from the rental market — for instance, to build condos.
The heart of the case revolves around whether the company truly intended to take the units off the rental market and whether the law requires them to do so permanently.
Frances M. Campbell, the tenant’s attorney, said evidence presented during the trial would show that the company for years had plans to “transform and upgrade” the complex and to re-rent the apartments “at a new market rate.”
Campbell said the law requires owners who invoke the Ellis Act to remove the units permanently from the rental market.
“Defendants can point to no case that allows a landlord to invoke the Ellis Act to temporarily go out of the rental business while it remodels or makes repairs to its buildings. And that makes sense, because that is not the purpose of the Ellis Act,” the tenants’ lawyers wrote in a trial brief.
The lawyer pointed to an email sent by Douglas Emmett CEO Jordan Kaplan to city housing official Mercedes Márquez in May 2023, just days before the eviction notices were filed, as evidence that the company intended to re-rent the units.
“This project is likely to take many years and assuming we bring the rental units back online within 10 years (which is a very good assumption) they will still be subject to the RSO,” Kaplan wrote, referring to the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.
In his arguments on behalf of Douglas Emmett, Gibson pointed to that same email as evidence that the company wasn’t trying to evade rent control.
“I personally assure you we are not doing this to remove Barrington Plaza from the RSO,” the email said.
Installing fire sprinklers and making other safety upgrades is a multiyear project, and the apartments will be removed from the market during that time, he said.
The law allows owners to use the Ellis Act to “take the property off the rental market for a longterm period,” the company’s lawyers argued in a trial brief.
The Ellis Act does not require owners to remove the properties from the rental market forever, he said. Only that they do not “conduct a sham removal” in order to evade rent control.
“This is not one of those sham situations,” Gibson said.
A jury this week awarded $11.5 million to a former Los Angeles police K-9 handler who sued the city alleging that his supervisors retaliated and discriminated against him in part because of his Samoan ancestry.
The officer, Mark Sauvao — pronounced “su-VOW” — alleged he was unfairly punished after he reported some of his colleagues had called him names such as “cannibal” and “barefoot coconut tree-climber.” One supervisor also reportedly referred to him as being Tongan; Sauvao took the comment as an affront given the bitter early history of war and enslavement between Samoa and Tonga.
Sauvao, who is still with the department, also alleged that officers spread false rumors that he tried extorting fellow K-9 handlers by refusing to train them unless they gave him their overtime hours.
The city can still challenge the size of the jury award.
From 2005 to 2017, Sauvao was assigned to the department’s elite bomb detection K-9 unit. The 30-year LAPD veteran said his troubles began several years after his promotion to dog trainer, which came with extra pay and benefits.
After learning of the rumors about him, Sauvao said, he demanded that the unit’s commander, Lt. Raymond Garvin, intervene and launch an investigation into the officers spreading them. Neither happened, he alleged.
Another colleague testified in a deposition that Garvin relayed the overtime allegations against Sauvao to other officers at a roll call held at a nearby bagel shop. Someone in the group accused Sauvao of being the “ringleader” of a faction within the K-9 unit that called itself the “P.M.-Watch Mafia,” according to the testimony. Sauvao denies these claims.
Garvin previously filed his own lawsuit against the city alleging that a department higher-up conspired to kick him out of the unit, which led to a $700,000 settlement.
Sauvao said he eventually brought the matter up to Capt. Kathryn Meek of the Emergency Services Division, which oversees the K-9 unit and the bomb squad. Instead of investigating his reports, Sauvao said, internal affairs detectives showed up to search his locker several months later, which he believed was in retaliation for making his earlier complaints.
Sauvao said his request to contact a police union representative after the search was denied.
He was later ordered to undergo psychiatric testing and eventually transferred to a less desirable assignment that caused him to be separated from his police K-9 named Pistol, according to the lawsuit.
Sauvao’s attorney, Matthew McNicholas, said the award was the latest he has won in cases involving members of that K-9 unit. Two other cases from around 2008 led to jury awards of $3.6 million and $2.2 million, respectively, he said. That the same unit continues to have problems 15 years later suggests a lack of oversight, he said.
“It tells me that command continues to do what it wants and that unless somebody like me digs in, they get away with it,” McNicholas said. “Ninety-eight percent of the department are hard-working people that just go to work, do their jobs and go home; the unfortunate thing is that the other 2% have a lot of power.”
The city attorney’s office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment, and an LAPD spokeswoman said the department would not discuss the case.
Sauvao’s claims were similar to those of another K-9 handler who worked in the unit at the time, Alfredo Franco, who also sued the city for discrimination and retaliation he reportedly faced after standing up for Sauvao.
Several of Sauvao’s former colleagues testified on his benefit in depositions filed in the case, with one saying he had an “unblemished” reputation and another describing the respect he commanded within the niche community of police K-9 trainers nationally.
Recently released government data hammered home what we have known for at least a year: A national housing shortage, not broad-based price increases, is driving inflation.
Inflation over the past year was 3.1% — far less than in 2021 but still high enough for the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated. However, unlike the inflation we saw soon after the onset of the pandemic, the more recent bout was overwhelmingly driven by the rising cost of what the Consumer Price Index classifies as “shelter” — including rent actually paid and the estimated rent that could be charged for owner-occupied homes.
Since the start of last year, most prices have risen very slowly or not at all. The price of goods — the tangible things we buy — remained essentially the same, rising just 0.1%. Food inflation, a source of post-pandemic pain for many households, was less than 3%. And other categories of prices actually fell: Household energy prices are down 2.4%, and the price of cars has fallen just over 1%. All told, for everything other than housing, inflation was just 1.5% — low enough that if housing prices had grown at historical rates, the Fed could have declared victory.
But housing costs have not grown at historical rates: The two-year price increase came in hotter than at any point in the past four decades. This lopsided picture tells us a lot about who is most affected by inflation and how it should be addressed.
The outsize role of shelter inflation means that homeowners and renters whose leases haven’t changed are experiencing inflation very differently from those who were more exposed to rising housing costs. Indeed, rising housing costs are a double-edged sword, increasing the wealth of homeowners even as they punish many renters. Since the beginning of 2022, housing wealth has added over $2 trillion to homeowners’ balance sheets.
This trend has important implications across generations. People under 35, with a homeownership rate roughly half that of those of retirement age, are much more likely to suffer from rising housing costs while also missing out on the resulting wealth boom. Retirees, with rising housing wealth and protection from inflation through Social Security and Medicare, are more likely to fare better.
The remedy for housing-fueled inflation is also different from standard responses to broad-based price growth. One might have expected the Fed’s interest rate hikes — which caused mortgage rates to rise with unprecedented speed — to slow down housing prices. But while prospective homebuyers did pull back from the market, residential listings were in free fall during the pandemic and have yet to recover. That means would-be buyers face tight inventories and higher prices.
The only effective long-term answer is of course to build and rehabilitate more housing — a lot more. America’s housing crisis is a big problem that requires an equally big solution, with various estimates putting the nationwide shortfall between 1.5 million and 5.5 million units.
Legislation passed by the House in 2022 would have made meaningful progress by allocating around $40 billion to supply-boosting programs such as the Housing Trust Fund, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and HOME Investment Partnerships Program block grants. Unfortunately, the bill fell short in the Senate and is effectively dead until at least the next Congress.
In the absence of major legislation in Washington, state and federal policymakers have been increasingly focused on incremental responses to the shortfall. The Biden administration recently announced a series of reforms — including grants for low-income seniors and funds to help rehabilitate manufactured homes — that will add tens of thousands of new homes to the market. An array of bills passed in Sacramento in recent years will help expedite new housing in California, where the shortfall of about 1 million units is nearly three times the next-largest state housing deficit. But the data show we still need to do much more to ease and encourage building to tame shelter costs.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the Federal Open Market Committee have made it clear that they will do whatever it takes to fight inflation. That’s an admirable and responsible position. But Congress has yet to help by addressing our national housing shortfall. If it had, pandemic-era inflation might already be behind us.
Ben Harris is the vice president and director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and was a longtime economic advisor to President Biden.
Most renter protection programs launched during the pandemic in Los Angeles have expired, and tenants who couldn’t pay rent due to economic hardships brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak must pay rent again starting Thursday.
That includes back rent owed from Oct. 1, 2021, to Jan. 31, 2023. Tenant advocates say it is preposterous to expect renters to pay the full amount from that period. The end of such renter protection programs are likely to result in many struggling renters becoming homeless or leaving the city and state altogether, said Larry Gross, executive director with the tenants advocacy group Coalition for Economic Survival.
“For those who are struggling to make ends meet, this is going to place a tremendous increased burden,” Gross said. “These tenants are essentially on the track to economic catastrophe, and there’s not much being done for them.”
Rent increases can resume
Evictions for nonpayment can resume starting Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Housing Department. Anyone who receives an eviction notice from their landlord — referred to in the courts as an unlawful detainer — should file a response to the courts within five days or risk losing their case by default. The city offers assistance for tenants facing an eviction notice at stayhousedla.org.
Bianca Lopez, an outreach worker with We Are Los Angeles, signs up a tenant for an information seminar on renters’ rights on Jan. 18, 2024.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
Landlords can also increase rent over the next four months by as much as 6% annually if they pay for gas and electric in the tenant’s rental unit. This applies to rental units built before Oct. 1, 1978, and covered by the city’s Rental Stabilization Ordinance. These residents cannot be evicted without just cause, but tenants in units not protected by the RSO could see higher rent increases.
“The key thing for every tenant to know is their rights, and they need to not just react to whatever notice they get for from their landlord,” Gross said about rent increases and eviction notices.
Tenants should consider whether they face a legal or illegal eviction effort by their landlord. Renters can turn to legal aid clinics, such as the weekly Zoom meeting hosted by Coalition for Economic Survival, to determine what their options are and what resources they can use.
Landlords also cannot evict a tenant if they owe rent that is less than a certain threshold called the fair market rent of the unit. For example in 2024, the rent of a one-bedroom apartment is $2,006, and if a tenant owes less in rent, then they cannot be served notice, according to the city’s Housing Department.
The pet stays in the picture
The city enacted a tenant law during the pandemic that would not penalize renters who took in a pet, even if the pet was not allowed under their lease agreement.
The rule remains in effect for as long as the pet is alive but does not apply to pets who moved into the rental after Jan. 31, 2023, according to the ordinance. It was meant to deter people being forced to choose between keeping their pet or keeping their housing.
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said the new law is designed to address the wide-ranging effects that the pandemic had on some people’s lives.
“Many people lost their loved ones and were dealing with isolation from quarantine, which led many to get new additions to their families,” Hernandez said. “These pets have helped people get through difficult times, and tenants should not be evicted from their homes because of the pets.”
Rent relief from the city
Mayor Karen Bass’ office encourages renters to know their rights and suggests tenants who face eviction contact the Housing Department hotline at (866) 557-7368. Tenant advocates warn renters to seek advice if they receive a notice to vacate from their landlord, rather than self-evict.
“In order to confront this crisis, we must do all that we can to prevent people from falling into homelessness in the first place,” Bass said in a statement. “Together with locked arms, we will continue our work to provide resources for the people of Los Angeles.”
The city of Los Angeles operates a rental protection program, known as United to House L.A. Emergency Renters Assistance Program, but it has had problems. The program set aside $30 million for rental relief but accepted applications only for a few weeks in September and October. So far, the program has approved about 3,200 tenants to secure rental relief of up to six months of rent, but most have yet to get their payments. About a quarter of the $30 million in funding has been dispersed, and an additional 25,000 tenants who applied for the program are still waiting for an answer.
On Jan. 26, the City Council voted to protect tenants from eviction if they were approved to receive funding through the program but have not yet received any money. That protection could extend to more renters who get approval in the meantime, which should stave off an eviction notice from their landlord.
“Tenants who have already been approved for emergency rental assistance should not be evicted while they’re waiting for their checks,” Councilman Paul Krekorian said at the council meeting. “Their landlords are going to get paid, so they shouldn’t be putting tenants out just because the city took a little longer to get them the money.”
But there is uncertainty surrounding the funding and who could qualify.
“Unfortunately, many tenants in the queue haven’t been notified whether or not they’re even eligible,” Gross said. “So they’ve been holding on and waiting. Some of them waiting for letters and approval that will never come.”
“Households who reported being behind on rent were more likely to have children, to have a disability, to identify as Black or Latinx, and to have larger household sizes compared to other renter households,” the study authors wrote.
The survey said the number of tenants behind on their rent is greater than what is projected in publicly available data from local government agencies.
According to the survey, those who are newly vulnerable to eviction in Los Angeles include about 60% — or 90,000 households — who recently fell behind on rent and could be evicted for nonpayment. The remainder fell behind on their rent payments before Oct. 1, 2021, or fell behind the last several months. The most vulnerable group in danger of eviction for nonpayment are tenants who hold graduate degrees and are less likely to be in the labor force, compared with others with outstanding debt, according to the study authors.
Among Los Angeles landlords with outstanding debt due to tenants behind on their rent, about 70% reported problems paying for repairs and maintenance and about half said they are having trouble paying property taxes and other payments. Out of the landlords surveyed, fewer than half said they would move forward with filing evictions after August 2023. But landlord companies that own properties with 50 or more units said they were more likely to file for eviction.
“Our surveys show that 71% of large landlords intend to evict, compared to just 39% of small landlords (1-4 units) and 40% of medium size landlords (5-50 units),” the study authors wrote.
Last month YIMBY Law, a nonprofit, pro-housing advocacy group, sued the City of Los Angeles on behalf of a private developer seeking to construct a 360-unit apartment building in Canoga Park. These apartments would be only for renters who meet the federal definition of low to moderate incomes in L.A. The project was submitted under Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1, meant to dramatically speed up the approval and permitting process for 100% affordable housing projects. But recently the city revoked the eligibility of the Canoga Park building for this program following complaints from single-family homeowners.
This about-face is part of a trend. Last year, the mayor’s office amended ED1 to shield single-family zones from streamlined development — after eight such applications, including the Canoga Park proposal, were already submitted. Those proposals were then denied eligibility for ED1. Some of the projects have filed appeals; one denial has been overturned, but the City Council rejected an appeal for the Canoga project.
Without ED1, these projects face a discretionary approval process that may involve lengthy environmental review and other delays likely to prevent them from happening. This turn of events may cost the city more than 1,100 affordable apartments.
Bass announced ED1 as moving “City Hall away from its traditional approach that is focused on process and replacing it with a new approach focused on solutions, results and speed.” The mayor’s stated intention received a remarkable boost via the state law AB 2334, passed in 2022, allowing developer incentives for 100% affordable projects including substantial increases in height limits and allowable density (the number of housing units on a given-sized parcel of land) in “very low vehicle travel areas,” where limited residential development has kept down traffic. The idea is that these areas can more easily accommodate any extra traffic stemming from increased housing density.
Yet now this progress is in question, just as the power of these complementary city and state reforms has begun to emerge. The lawsuit concerning the Canoga Park building may result in one or more of the halted projects being built eventually, and the state has suggested that the city erred in revoking their ED1 eligibility. But even if these projects get approved, since ED1 now excludes the single-family neighborhoods that make up approximately three-quarters of residential land in L.A., they would mark an end rather than a beginning to similar development.
Some residents of these neighborhoods say that’s only fair. According to Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, for homeowners affected by new apartments, “their property value is going to get cut in half, they’re going to have a big shadow over their place.”
As it happens, I can speak personally to these concerns. I am the owner and resident of a unit in a small rowhouse condo development on the Westside located directly across the street from an ongoing project converting a single-family home into a multi-unit apartment building.
My neighbors and my family are losing a good deal of sunlight throughout the day from the new building. Our street has been a cacophonous, messy construction site for so long it’s hard to remember what it was like before.
But I know that this is what solving the housing crisis looks like: A single parcel that previously housed one family is being transformed into apartments for perhaps 15 to 25 people, with units reserved for low-income households. Like those in the contested ED1 projects, these affordable units won’t require public funding.
There is simply no way to solve our housing crisis without throwing shade in some single-family residential areas. We might have to increase traffic in some neighborhoods, too, though providing more housing in jobs-rich West L.A. could ultimately reduce traffic by allowing people to live closer to where they work. As for property values, multiple studies have shown that low-income housing does not substantially reduce them, including in high-cost neighborhoods, and often increasesthem.
Some constituencies will always oppose development. Local policymakers who are serious about solving our dual crises of housing affordability and homelessness have to take a hard look at how much political capital they are willing to spend to create effective policies in the face of such objections.
If we can’t build fully affordable projects that don’t drain government coffers even on the edges of land zoned for single-family residences, then Angelenos should prepare for a permanent housing crisis.
But if this sounds like the wrong direction for the city, Bass and the City Council should fully commit to protecting and expanding innovative policy such as the original ED1, without categorical exclusions for single-family neighborhoods, and AB 2334. Mechanisms that convince private developers to produce long-term affordable housing offer what is as close to a free lunch on this crisis as L.A. is ever likely to get.
Jason Ward is an economist at Rand Corp. and the co-director of the Rand Center on Housing and Homelessness.
In 2022, not long after a new owner bought the Highland Park rental home where Ana Lopez, 66, lives with her husband, the tenants began receiving offers to leave. At first it was about $22,000, she said. One of her neighbors took the offer and left. But Lopez, desperate to stay in the rent-controlled home where she has lived for more than two decades and pays $800 a month, repeatedly turned down the offers, even when the amount increased to $100,000.
After taxes, she felt, the money was not enough to remain long-term in her community, where the average monthly rent is more than $2,000 and the median sale price of a home is more than $1 million.
She’s felt pressured to go and has been informed that the owner plans to demolish the property. But, she says, “We’re going to keep fighting to stay in our home.”
Buyout offers — also known as “cash for keys” — have become a frequently used tool for landlords hoping to get tenants to leave rent-controlled apartments without going through a formal eviction process, which can take time, be costly and is governed by strict rules. But it has been difficult to say exactly how often renter buyouts happen across Los Angeles. Last week, data released by City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office shed some light on the subject, showing that from 2019-23 nearly 5,000 “cash for keys” agreements were filed with the city.
Neighborhoods in Koreatown, Echo Park and Mid-Wilshire topped the list for the number of agreements. Lopez’s Highland Park neighborhood was also among the top ZIP codes.
In a statement, Mejia’s office said “tenant buyouts are a tactic that landlords use to compel tenants to move out of RSO (Rent Stabilization Ordinance) units or rent-controlled units, often so landlords can re-rent these units to new tenants at market-rate prices. In many cases, buyout amounts are not enough for tenants to afford continuing to live in the City of Los Angeles long term.”
Tenant advocates say the numbers reported to the city fall short of fully capturing the extent to which cash for keys is happening across the city. They note that the data include only agreements — not the offers, which often happen informally with a person knocking on the door or making a phone call. Even the agreements themselves, advocates say, may not end up being filed with the city.
“The number of such notices filed with LAHD is likely a tiny fraction of such agreements,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at UCLA School of Law.
Landlords say the buyout agreements can be a useful tool, giving tenants an incentive to move and creating a win-win for owners, who get their units back, and renters, who leave with some money to help pay for housing going forward. The average amount of a buyout, according to the data was $24,704.
But tenant advocates say even that amount — or more — is often not enough to allow low-income families to continue living in L.A. neighborhoods where the cost of housing has soared in recent years, especially after taxes.
“When it comes as a lump sum you think, ‘That’s a lot of money’ but you also need to know what it’s going to cost you to stay housed on the open market,” Blasi said. “What looks to be like a big lump sum windfall could actually leave the tenant in a much worse situation than they are.”
Tenants and advocates also say that people who turn down the offers are often met with harassment by landlords.
“We’ve had tenants report that people come by their home every day at dinner banging on the door telling them they really should take the offer, or people who come by really late at night,” said Cynthia Strathmann, executive director for the nonprofit advocacy group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. “And there’s other kinds of harassment, persistent neglect — a landlord will refuse to fix anything in the apartment and then really insistently offer them cash for keys until the pressure of living in an apartment that’s really in terrible condition will prompt the tenant to move.”
Strathmann said communities at the top of the controller’s list, like Koreatown and Echo Park, are ones where there’s an especially big difference between the monthly rent paid by a long-term tenant in a rent-controlled unit and what a landlord could command on the current market.
Chris Gray, president of the property management company Moss & Co., said cash for keys agreements became especially important tools for landlords after the pandemic, when many tenants racked up large amounts of unpaid rent debt.
“Landlords are in a tough position and all they want to do is get someone into their unit to pay rent,” he said.
An eviction through the courts can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, Gray noted.
“When you look at a whole picture like that, a landlord would be happy to forgive past rent debt of $30,000, $40,000, or whatever it may be, to get them out and avoid the whole eviction process.”
The city began regulating buyout agreements and collecting information about them in 2017 after tenant advocates began protesting what they saw as an increasing practice of property owners displacing residents of rent-controlled units without fully informing them of their rights.
The Tenant Buyout Notification Program requires landlords to provide information to renters when making a buyout offer. They must inform tenants that they are entitled to minimum compensation, which ranges from $9,900 to $24,650, depending on various factors including how long the tenant has lived in the home and whether they are elderly or disabled. Tenants are also told that they have the right to refuse or rescind the offer and to consult with an attorney or the housing department.
Under the program, landlords are also required to file any agreements with the L.A. housing department. Those filings are the basis for the analysis that was released by the controller’s office.
According to the data, buyout filings peaked in 2019, when there were 1,209 agreements. Last year there were 789 agreements filed with the city.
The buyout ordinance allows tenants to “bring a private right of action against a landlord who violates” the rules and to recover damages and a penalty of $500. But that’s a step many low-income residents are unlikely to take, Blasi said.
“I think the city should look again at the tenant buyout notification program and look to put some teeth into it and do some serious outreach to tenants and landlords about the existence of it,” Blasi said. “That can only help everybody who is operating in good faith.”
As part of an ongoing Metro effort to build housing and community around transportation hubs, a new mixed-use development dubbed District NoHo is coming to North Hollywood’s Metro station.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to approve the 15-acre project, greenlighting a massive development that will include 1,481 residential units as well as office, retail and restaurant space.
A quarter of the units will be rent-restricted, more than double the ratio required for the city’s density bonus.
“District NoHo will be a transformative project for this city,” City Council President Paul Krekorian said in a statement. Krekorian represents Council District 2, which includes North Hollywood.
“This is a truly transit-oriented development that will enable hundreds of Angelenos to live, work, study, shop and enjoy recreation without driving, parking or riding in anything other than zero-emission public transportation,” he said.
The project will also bring to the area 750 parking spots reserved for Metro customers, and two acres of open space for the public as well as three shopping plazas. The North Hollywood station is Metro’s third busiest.
District NoHo is one of Metro’s several joint development projects, which are real estate collaborations between Metro and private developers built on Metro land to create more housing around transit.
The project will feature improvements to North Hollywood’s Metro station, including a new entrance to the B Line subway on the west side of Lankershim Boulevard, improvements to the G Line busway terminus, and new internal streets and walkways to break up the large development site, a city report said.
Metro has made the ambitious commitment to build 10,000 housing units in Los Angeles County by 2031, “with the goal of contributing to solving Southern California’s housing crisis,” the agency said in a news release in July. Half of the units are intended to be rent-restricted for lower- to moderate-income households.
While District NoHo will include 366 rent-restricted units, some community members say the project isn’t doing enough to create affordable housing. Reimagine District NoHo, an effort driven by the nonprofit NoHo Home Alliance, has been fighting for the inclusion of more affordable units.
“The government’s obligation is to do the most good for the most people,” said Desmond Faison, with Reimagine District NoHo. “I think that it misses the mark. … We’re building a monolith to capitalism.”
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Faison said that only the most wealthy North Hollywood residents would be able to afford to live in District NoHo’s market rate units. Glenn Block, another North Hollywood resident who is involved with Reimagine District NoHo, said the 15 acres the development will be built on could be put to better use.
“This project fails on every level,” he said.
The property will have nearly 100 more rent-restricted units than the original proposal, according to Metro project manager Marie Sullivan. The number of affordable units is limited because funding for the units comes from many different sources, all of which have restricted budgets.
“There’s only so much affordable housing funding that comes from federal, state and local sources each year,” Sullivan said.
Metro is also using income from the market-rate units to fund other aspects of the project, including a park and shopping plazas, she said.
“We need the revenue from market-rate homes to fund a lot of these public benefits,” she said.
District NoHo will also boost the community by creating roughly 10,000 jobs during construction, according to a city report, and an additional 2,500 jobs through property operations. Construction is expected to generate $1 billion.
The development of the property includes the demolition of nearly 50,000 square feet of surface parking lots and industrial space.
The project, which has been in the works since 2015, “provides a model of sustainable development for the whole region,” Krekorian said. “This is a game-changer for the Valley.”
Elizabeth Hirschhorn, the Brentwood tenant who did not pay rent for her luxury Airbnb rental for 570 days, moved out of the unit on Friday.
The move was exactly one month after The Times chronicled Hirschhorn’scontentious tenancy, which began with a cordial stay on Airbnb and ended with her and Sascha Jovanovic, the landlord and property owner, suing each other.
“I’m a little overwhelmed, but I finally have my home back,” Jovanovic said. “I had such a peaceful weekend once she left.”
During her stay, which began in September 2021, Hirschhorn said that the lease was extended off Airbnb and that the unit was subject to the Rent Control Ordinance, so Jovanovic would have to evict her if he wanted her to leave. She also argued that she didn’t have to pay rent since Jovanovic never obtained an occupancy license for the guesthouse.
Jovanovic, who lives on the property, was at the home on Friday being interviewed for a documentary detailing the battle between him and Hirschhorn when he saw three men, who turned out to be movers, walk into the guesthouse.
He said he asked why they were there, and they didn’t clearly say why. He suspected she could be moving out but feared it also could be a home invasion, so he called the police.
The police arrived, and once all of Hirschhorn’s belongings were packed, they escorted her off the property, Jovanovic said.
Jovanovic and his attorney, Sebastian Rucci, knocked on the door to confirm she was gone and then entered the guesthouse and found it empty. Within an hour, a locksmith arrived and changed the locks.
As of now, it’s unclear whether Hirschhorn moved out permanently, or if she’s planning to return to the property.
Jovanovic and Rucci said they hadn’t heard anything from either Hirschhorn or her legal team, so they assumed she had moved out for good. On Saturday, Rucci emailed Hirschhorn’s attorney, Amanda Seward, to figure out the next steps regarding Jovanovic’s eviction lawsuit against Hirschhorn.
“My review of the case law is that once a tenant abandons the unit, the unlawful detainer is dismissed. If you wish, I can file the dismissal, or we can file a joint dismissal,” Rucci wrote.
Seward replied that they “may have jumped the gun,” according to the email exchange reviewed by The Times.
“Ms. Hirschhorn had discussed with me concern over the constant harassment and surveillance, and also the desire to get the things repaired that needed to be repaired. Subject to my discussions with Ms. Hirschhorn, please be advised that you have no authority to change the locks or to assume abandonment of the unit,” Seward wrote. “Further, you have violated the law by entering without permission and changing the locks.”
Neither Hirschhorn nor Seward immediately responded to a request for comment.
Rucci said he’s planning to drop the unlawful detainer lawsuit, assuming Hirschhorn has moved out for good. But he’ll still pursue damages in a separate lawsuit, since he claims Hirschhorn owes roughly $58,000 in unpaid rent. Hirschhorn said she owes nothing since Jovanovic never had a license to rent the unit, and her lawsuit accuses him of multiple forms of harassment and intimidation in attempts to get her to leave the place, which Jovanovic has denied.
Hirchhorn’s tenancy became a viral story in the days and weeks after The Times chronicled the saga. News vans posted up outside the home, and paparazzi followed Hirschhorn whenever she left.
“Drones were flying above my house every day. It was crazy,” Jovanovic said.
Now, he plans to address the mold damage in the unit, which was an issue during Hirschhorn’s stay that eventually soured their relationship. He also plans to get the necessary permits from the city, which was another issue; Jovanovic never obtained a license to rent the unit, and Hirschhorn argued in court that he wasn’t allowed to charge rent on a unit he didn’t have a license for.
After that, he plans to turn the space into a recreation room for his two adolescent children.
“We need to get the bad energy out and turn it back into a happy, family space,” he said.
TACOMA, WA—Claiming the defective unit was a game changer, local man Ralph Keizer had to admit Friday that the air fryer that burned down his house did a good job on tater tots. “Aside from bursting into flames and turning my home into an inferno, I gotta say, this air fryer did an absolutely amazing job on these tots,” said Keizer, snacking on his perfectly cooked tater tots amidst the charred rubble of his former home. “They’re both perfectly crispy and fluffy. What more could you ask for, other than to still have my house? And it uses so little oil, which is good because all mine was lost in the fire.” At press time, Keizer added that his family who burned to death in the fire would have loved the tater tots.
HOUSTON — A man who has been accused of illegally having a gun at the time that rapper Takeoff was fatally shot last month following a private party at a downtown Houston bowling alley has been charged in connection with the case, authorities said Wednesday.
But during a court hearing, prosecutors said the suspect, Cameron Joshua, 22, is not believed to have fired a weapon during Takeoff’s shooting. Joshua is facing a charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon for allegedly having a handgun when the rapper was killed around 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 1 as gunfire erupted outside of 810 Billiards & Bowling following a private party.
Takeoff, whose off-stage name was Kirsnick Khari Ball, formed one-third of the Grammy Award-nominated rap trio Migos with uncle Quavo and cousin Offset from suburban Atlanta.
“We believe Cameron Joshua has been appropriately charged in this case and we’re continuing our investigation into the death of Takeoff,” Matt Gilliam, a prosecutor with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, told reporters in a brief statement after Wednesday’s hearing.
Christopher Downey, Joshua’s attorney, told reporters that he has not seen anything to suggest that his client fired a weapon or had anything to do with Takeoff’s shooting.
“The bottom line is … Cameron Joshua did not shoot Takeoff,” Downey said.
When asked if Joshua knows who shot Takeoff, Downey said, “We will discuss that with the DA’s office if we decide to. Right now, we’re charged with offenses and we’re not saying anything.”
During the hearing, a judge decided to keep Joshua in custody until a bond hearing set for next week.
Joshua is also facing a charge of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon for allegedly having a weapon when he was arrested on Nov. 22. He had already been out on bond after being charged in Harris County with having a fake ID in September 2021 and with burglary of a vehicle in April. He had also been convicted in October in Los Angeles County of grand theft.
Houston police have said that least two people discharged firearms when Takeoff was killed. Takeoff’s primary cause of death was listed as “penetrating gunshot wounds of head and torso into arm,” according to an autopsy.
Two others were hit by gunfire but had non-life-threatening wounds.
After the shooting, investigators sought to speak with the 40 people who attended the party and fled after the gunfire.
Migos first broke through with the massive hit “Versace” in 2013. They had four Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, though Takeoff was not on their multi-week No. 1 hit “Bad and Boujee,” featuring Lil Uzi Vert. They put out a trilogy of albums called “Culture,” “Culture II” and “Culture III,” with the first two hitting No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
At a memorial service earlier this month in Atlanta, fans as well as recording artists such as Justin Bieber and Drake celebrated Takeoff’s musical legacy.
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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70
JACKSON, Miss. — The Justice Department made a rare intervention Tuesday to try to bring improvements in the beleaguered water system in Mississippi’s capital city, which nearly collapsed in late summer and continues to struggle.
The department filed a proposal to appoint a third-party manager for the Jackson water system. That is meant to be an interim step while the federal government, the city of Jackson and the Mississippi State Department of Health try to negotiate a court-enforced consent decree, the department said in a news release. The goal is to achieve long-term sustainability of the system and the city’s compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act and other laws.
The city and the state health department have signed the proposal, which needs approval of a federal judge.
The Justice Department on Tuesday also filed a complaint on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency against Jackson, alleging that the city has failed to provide drinking water that is reliably compliant with the Safe Drinking Water Act. According to the agreement, that litigation will be put on hold six months while all parties try to improve the water system.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in the news release that the Justice Department is “taking action in federal court to address long-standing failures in the city of Jackson’s public drinking water system.”
“The Department of Justice takes seriously its responsibility to keep the American people safe and to protect their civil rights,” Garland said. “Together with our partners at EPA, we will continue to seek justice for the residents of Jackson, Mississippi. And we will continue to prioritize cases in the communities most burdened by environmental harm.”
In a federal complaint Sept. 27, the NAACP said Mississippi officials “all but assured” a drinking water calamity by depriving Jackson of badly needed funds to upgrade its infrastructure.
The EPA announced in late October that it was investigating whether Mississippi state agencies have discriminated against Jackson by refusing to fund water system improvements in the city of 150,000, where more than 80% of residents are Black and about a quarter of the population lives in poverty.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said Tuesday that the Jackson water problems were caused by a “crisis of incompetence” in the Democratic-led city.
“It is excellent news for anyone who cares about the people of Jackson that the mayor will no longer be overseeing the city’s water system,” Reeves said.
Like many American cities, Jackson struggles with aging infrastructure with water lines that crack or collapse. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat in the Republican-led state, said the city’s water problems come from decades of deferred maintenance.
Jackson frequently has boil-water notices because of loss of pressure or other problems that can contaminate the water. Some of the mandates are in place for only a few days, while others last weeks. Some only affect specific neighborhoods, usually because of broken pipes in the area. Others affect all customers on the water system.
Edward “Ted” Henifin was appointed Tuesday as interim third-party manager of the Jackson water system and Water Sewer Business Administration, the city’s water billing department. An online profile of Henifin says he is a registered professional engineer who served 15 years as general manager of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia. Before that, he served as director of public works for the city of Hampton, Virginia.
The proposal lists 13 projects that Henifin will in charge of implementing. The projects are meant to improve the water system’s near-term stability, according to a news release. Among the most pressing priorities is a winterization project to make the system less vulnerable. A cold snap in 2021 left tens of thousands of people in Jackson without running water after pipes froze.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who has been to Jackson four times in the past year, said the Justice Department’s action “marks a critical moment on the path to securing clean, safe water for Jackson residents,″ adding that he is grateful to Garland for acting quickly on the city’s water crisis.
In May, the Justice Department created an environmental justice division, following up on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to elevate environmental justice issues in an all-of-government approach. The Justice Department said in July that it was investigating illegal dumping in Black and Latino neighborhoods in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city.
Jackson has had water problems for decades. Most of the city lost running water for several days after heavy rainfall exacerbated problems at the city’s main water treatment plant in late August. When that happened, Jackson had already been under a boil-water advisory for a month because health inspectors had found cloudy water that could make people ill.
The boil-water advisory was lifted in mid-September, but many people remain skeptical about water quality.
Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the Justice Department announcement Tuesday is “an important and necessary move to ensure that residents of Jackson and surrounding communities have access to safe drinking water — a vital necessity for all communities to thrive.”
“Unfortunately,” Wade said, “the deplorable and unsafe condition of Jackson’s water system didn’t happen overnight but stems from decades of neglect and the intentional disinvestment of resources for the majority-Black municipality.”
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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed from Washington.
