🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 22: 'Long road ahead' as Chinatown's tenants march for affordable rent

LA city’s elected financial watchdog said last Friday, April 3, that his office has been auditing the city’s top financial adviser’s handling of liability costs, which has surpassed $1 billion over the last five years.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia told the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee that their office began their audit of the city’s risk management practices in September, and they’re now “wrapping up field work, and … developing our findings.” 

The audit involves reviewing the City Administrative Officer’s “risk management team,” Mejia told the committee, which was convened by the Los Angeles City Council’s budget chair Katy Yaroslavsky to recommend ways to put the city on a better fiscal path. Mejia also said their office is looking into the risk management practices of the City Attorney’s Office, but Mejia noted that it can be difficult trying to get information from an office represented by an elected official (there have been opposing views on the controller’s ability to audit other elected officials).

Mejia said the CAO’s risk management team will get the first crack at reviewing the preliminary results, before they’re released. “These audit results remain confidential until the report is final,” he said.

Their audit will look at the city’s risk management practices spanning from 2020 until 2025. During the presentation, Mejia also shared that during the past five years, the city paid out upwards of $1 billion, a figure his office had circulated on social media accounts earlier that day. The Los Angeles Police Department makes up $435 million of that amount.

Mejia also shared some statistics on the City Attorney’s trial outcomes from 2024 and 2023, during which the City Attorney’s Office lost the majority or overwhelming majority of cases.

Mejia also showed off their office’s dashboard on liability costs, which shows that the largest category of payouts the city made for claims against the LAPD were for civil rights and excessive or unlawful use of force, followed by traffic collisions.

“We're going to be reviewing laws, policies around risk management, standards and best practices,” Mejia said of their audit. “We're interviewing staff, we're doing surveys with risk managers in every department, and we're also doing benchmarking to see how the city performs in their risk management versus other cities.”

Mejia said their audit will look at how well the city’s risk management practices “identify, evaluate, respond to and monitor risks so that it can reduce potential liability payouts and also, of course, harm.”

They’re also “looking at things like … dangerous conditions on public properties, excessive use of force, traffic collisions and vehicle accidents and other harm caused by city government,” Mejia said. 

“We also want to know what governance, strategic and communication issues hamper effective citywide risk management,” he said

In response to a question from Committee member Tom Simone about corrective action plans that are created in response to lawsuit settlements, Mejia responded that part of the reason they were conducting the audit was to see if departments were following through on corrective action plans.

Notably, the CAO’s office, which Mejia is auditing, last week put out a report laying out ideas for reducing the city’s liability costs. One idea they proposed was to put more of the burden of the liability costs onto individual departments.

The city right now pays out settlement costs using general fund dollars, but the CAO and City Attorney’s joint report takes up an idea that’s long been proposed by members of the public and others — and that’s to make individual departments more accountable for the liability costs their departments incur.

The CAO and City Attorney’s report proposes that the city look into the idea, which could include a model in which each department would be allocated a budget to cover liabilities. If the departments overspend on their liabilities budgets, they would need to find a way to pay for it with funds from other parts of their departments budgeted funds, which could cut into funds for services. But if the departments end up making fewer payouts than anticipated, the remaining surplus amount in the liabilities account could turn into extra cash for services instead. 

On Friday, Mejia noted that he has long championed departmental accountability as a way to rein in the city’s liability costs, and he said that’s something that has been needed for some time, but has yet to be taken up.

“We've always recommended greater accountability on departmental spending against their budget,” Mejia said. “That's one of the things that we've advocated for. Unfortunately, we don't see that here. So if there's a way to hold departments accountable to their budget, that would be integral in order to stop … this flow of money.”

Mejia also teased the release of a report coming out this week focusing on the city’s special funds, which are often set aside in numerous accounts and often carries restrictions for how they can be used. This money often ends up not getting used, but finding a way to put that money to use has long been a difficult and still unresolved puzzle for those at City Hall.

Mejia also presented on his revenue estimate for the year during the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee meeting on Friday, again noting, as in an earlier presentation on the subject, that spending in the economy was being done by the top 20% of earners, while the bottom 80% have been struggling with the costs of things.

The Budget and Finance Advisory Committee that Mejia presented to last Friday was convened by Council member Katy Yaroslavsky, and is tasked with reporting back to the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, which Yaroslavsky chairs. This advisory committee is chaired by Mejia’s predecessor in the Controller’s Office, Ron Galperin. The other committee members are Derric J. Johnson, who is Vice President of Impact and Equity at United Way of Greater Los Angeles; Tom Simone, president of Genesis LA, a Community Development Financial Institution; Joseph Lumarda, senior vice president and investment counselor for Capital Group Private Client Services, which works with trusts, foundations and nonprofits; Gilda Haas, a co-founder of the L.A. Co-Op Lab and a founding director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and the Economic Development Unit of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

The audio for the full meeting can be found here.

High school students, teachers, medical professionals and others rallied around Chinatown’s tenants, many of them seniors in their 80s and 90s, on Saturday during a big march through the streets from Alpine Park, in Chinatown, to Los Angeles City Hall, to demand affordable rent for people living in apartments that had been billed as affordable when they were first built. 

That housing ended up not being so affordable, according Fanny, an organizer with the volunteer-run, multi-ethnic organization, Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, also known as CCEDLA, for short.

Fanny told The LA Reporter many of the tenants live at buildings that were constructed by housing developers who received tax credits, and the rents in units at those buildings can increase by as much as around 8% or more a year. Those buildings were built with people who live on an income of 30% of the area median income in mind, she said, but many of the tenants really can only afford rent geared for households earning roughly 10% of the median income.

Fanny offered up an example of a married couple in one of the buildings who needed to scrounge up an extra $20 out of thin air to pay their rent each month, because while they only receive $1,041 a month from social security, their monthly rent is $1,061.

Such units were built using tax credits that are aimed at encouraging (incentivizing) housing developers to build more affordable housing. LIHTC, which stands for Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, as an example of a popular tax credit that gets used by developers when building their affordable housing projects. These “incentive” tools are used to encourage builders, who otherwise may decide against it, to build affordable housing, potentially because doing so with such tax credits wouldn’t be worth the cost to them, or they find that it wouldn’t “pencil out” on a financial balance sheet.

Fanny also said that they anticipate there campaign will carry on for the long haul, before they see the legislation tenants need from local city, county and state officials to act. She estimated the road might even last about two years. The latest march already builds on a prior action at the recent Golden Dragon Parade in February to bring attention to the tenants’ situation.

They are also in the process of meeting individually with local officials, and they are circulating a petition to encourage those officials to take action. They also plan to hold a town hall in May to which those officials will be invited. Fanny said they’re focusing on their closest local officials, which are Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and their City Council representative Eunisses Hernandez. They hope that those officials can help them continue to build support for their campaign.

CCEDLA shared information about their march via posts on their Instagram page, with a recent post soundtracked by a song with a title that translates to “the long road ahead” and that’s sung by 1980s Cantonese pop star Paula Tsui.

Saturday’s march came out of the efforts of tenants from five buildings that were built to be affordable in Chinatown, and those tenants are taking action under the name All Chinatown Tenant Union. They stopped at two of the buildings, Yale Terrace and Metro Senior Lofts, for speaking programs during Saturday’s march. The earlier action at Golden Dragon Parade was led by seniors form the Metro Senior Lofts, which was built using the LIHTC incentive tool.

The demands listed in their petition for local officials are the following:

1) That your office finds a long term solution to protect all tenants, including: a reform of the regulations to cap rent increases for affordable units, and include provisions that limit what landlords can charge for utilities and other fees.

2) A rent freeze for all affordable housing until a long term solution is found.

3) Immediate rental assistance to cover the upcoming rent increases and keep low income tenants housed in all affordable units. 

No Bad Days published an interview on Friday — conducted by Erik Abriss, who has his own newsletter called General Strike that focuses on the “history and future of the general strike” — with a lead bargainer for the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Julie Van Winkle, that offers a look inside efforts by LAUSD employee unions to improve working conditions and wages for not only teachers but also school staff such as janitors, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and special education aides who are represented by SEIU Local 99, 90% of whom are living under the poverty line and housing insecure. The unions recently overwhelming authorized going on strike by April 14, if a deal is not reached.

Van Winkle talks to Abriss about teachers being unable to afford rent when it used to be that they couldn’t afford to buy a home, the $10 billion that LAUSD has committed to outside contracts, and the surprising hesitation from the school district’s negotiators around teachers seeking to protect themselves from getting disciplined for refusing to cooperate with a federal immigration official, such as an ICE agent. That last piece has ended up being one of the “sticking points” they’ve encountered in their talks, Van Winkle told Abriss.

Van Winkle also discusses the temperatures they’ve taken on LAUSD board members around their contract proposals, saying “there are some of them that would agree to all our demands right now and just get this done with. And while others on the board might, you know, have some sympathy for what our arguments are, they’re not willing to give us everything we want.”

Van Winkle also likens having an interim superintendent filling in for Alberto Carvalho (who was placed on leave due to a federal investigation into his dealings with a Florida-based AI contractor) to “having a substitute teacher in the classroom—you know, the substitute teacher is not necessarily walking in there and coming up with their own crazy lesson plan. They’re just kind of trying to maintain things as they are. [Acting superintendent Chait] is just waiting until the superintendent gets back. So if this contract gets resolved before we have to go on strike, it will be because the school board proactively says, ‘We need to settle this right now. We need to authorize more money.’ It’s in their hands.”

Smog and Sunshine, a book that tells the story of how LA emerged out of its smoggy past, is set to be released on Tuesday, April 7.

Golden State’s Paul Thornton did a review and an interview in late March with the book’s author, UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson. Carlson talks to Thornton about how the advent of widespread car use during the 1950s in Los Angeles killed public transit, and the way that the heaviness of the lead that came out of car tailpipes meant that lead blanketed the playgrounds, exposing children to the poisonous substance.

Thornton also asked Carlson to discuss a particularly intriguing “personality” she features in her book — a “pineapple” chemist now known as the “father of air pollution regulation,” who used his knowledge from studying pineapple flavor toward understanding what was in the pollution plaguing Los Angeles.

The book features stories about activists who resisted industries that were putting the pollution in the air, including Stamp Out Smog (SOS), a group that Carlson describes in the interview as “basically Hollywood ladies, women who are married to fancy Hollywood executives and actors” who did theatrical things like wear gas masks to political meetings, and the Mothers of East Los Angeles, a group led by Juana Gutierrez that fought against an incinerator project in their neighborhood and won, and that highlighted air pollution as a problem that “burdens some communities much more heavily than others.” Carlson also says that one of the Stamp Out Smog activists was eventually appointed to the Air Resources Board and “they became technical experts” who “could educate politicians about what needed to be done.”

Alarms are being sounded on a political group called Neighbors First, which has been burying many Los Angeles city voters in mailers, as of late. That group does not have to disclose as much information as other groups that are active during the Los Angeles city elections, according to local watchdogs. And that’s because this group is focused on issues, rather than on any specific candidates.

Some of those watchdogs are describing the group as a “dark money” player in LA city races, since many of the ads straddle the line between being issue-focused while still featuring images and references to candidates in city races, often in a negative light. But funding information and details about the mailers don’t have to be filed at all, or in a manner that’s as timely as what’s usually otherwise required with the LA City Ethics Commission.

One of the reasons these political ads are an opaque force in LA races is that they don’t have to file their ads with the city of Los Angeles in the same way candidates and other types committees do when they send out mailers and other forms of communications to voters, according to LA city politics watchdog Rob Quan, who wrote a thread last Friday about Neighbors First, under the account for the watchdog group Unrig LA.

Another way the group is opaque is that the source of funding behind the political ads won’t be disclosed as quickly as for other types of ads. “The only semblance of transparency we'll get before the June primary will come through Neighbors First qualifying as a “major filer,”’ writes Quan in one of the Unrig LA posts. “A few days before ballots go out they'll need to provide total spending over the first 3 months of the year in their form 37 [Major Filer Report] and that's about it.”

Quan also writes that the spending appears to be affecting only council district races at the moment: “Current scope of spending includes canvassers in [multiple] CDs [Council Districts], text banking, at least 11 mail pieces (5 in CD 1, 3 in CD 9, & 3 in CD 11), that door hanger shown above, as well as a bunch of additional letters & misc mailings. Please reply or DM w/ anything you've received from them.”

Quan also writes: “Big Q is if this will spill into citywide races.”

In an LA Times analysis, veteran city politics reporter David Zahniser shares stories of people who have been kicked out of Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe motel shelters, which impose numerous rules onto participants that include not allowing people to have visitors or restricting them from being away for longer than 72 hours.

The story focuses on the fact that 40% of Inside Safe participants end up exiting the program, and it also includes an analysis that finds that the average length of stay is nearly a year, something that was not the initial goal of the program, which anticipated stays to be at most six months and ideally 90 days.

But there was never enough housing options to begin with for people who were moved inside to then be quickly housed, according to Gary Blasi, a frequently cited expert on homelessness. He also said that the motels have become an unsustainable way to shelter people due to the high cost.

“Once they started having people in interim housing for nine months or a year, that should have rang some alarm bells, because that’s just not sustainable,” Blasi tells the LA Times. LAHSA shares data about outcomes in the Inside Safe program through a dashboard, which the Venice Justice Committee (a group that operates a citation clinic) shared in replies to posts sharing the LA Times story. The account for that group writes that “LAHSA Inside Safe Dashboard published March 4, 2026 with figures through February 28, 2026 has 5080 people brought inside and 2344 people returned to homelessness. So 46.14% returned to homelessness, which is very close to half.”

The stories in the LA Times piece share similarities to the experiences of numerous other participants of Inside Safe who have raised issues and concerns they have had over the years with the program. Inside Safe also came on the heels of a similar hotel shelter program, Project Roomkey, that was launched during the pandemic under a previous mayoral administration. That program had similar limitations and features that were also detailed by participants and advocates as problems.

As for Inside Safe, participants of this program had been seeking to improve living conditions at a Historic Filipinotown motel in 2024 that was included in that program. Part of what they petitioned Mayor Karen Bass for was to provide mental health services at the motel. That effort led to a statement from Bass to the press indicating they had recently just hired a “deputy mayor of homelessness and community health” to start looking into doing that. Additionally, mutual aid groups released a report, also in 2024, sharing results from a survey of participants in Inside Safe that reflected similar experiences to what is described in the Times article.

Abundant Housing LA is offering a series of policy update “office hours” on the first Mondays of each month, at 6 p.m., with the first one happening tonight. To RSVP, go here.

LA city’s unarmed crisis response teams have expanded to North Hollywood, Topanga and Rampart. The CAO’s report from March 11 includes details on the expansion, and can be found here. LA Forward celebrated the expansion to North Hollywood, writing in an Instagram post last week that LA Forward advocates started pushing for the expansion to North Hollywood three years ago. “Now, thanks to our advocacy and partners at City Hall, those North Hollywood residents have someone to call … But we’re not done yet. This programs needs to cover 100% of LA.”

A reminder that NoHo Locals is hosting LA mayoral candidates Nithya Raman and Rae Huang tonight at 7 p.m. at the North Hollywood brewery, Lawless Brewing. The RSVP link (which did not make it into the emailed version of the newsletter last Friday) can be found here.

Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].

If you like what I do and want to keep The LA Reporter in the field, you can provide financial support to me here. And if you want a sticker with my logo on it, include your email in your Ko-Fi tip message to me! Feel free to make the message private.