🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 8: 'They're entitled to something better'

At the end of this summer, The Economic Roundtable, a research outfit that’s helped shape policy around the issues of economic inequality, housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, quietly closed its doors after 34 years. 

During those decades, they put out 110 reports, including one authored with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor that helped provide support for raising Los Angeles’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, which LA city leaders adopted in 2015 following a big push by labor groups.

The Economic Roundtable has its roots in an era of devastating sweeping changes for Los Angeles’s workers that the group then studied the effects of for the next several decades. The group was founded in 1989 as a research unit within Los Angeles County government, amid a wave of job losses in which one blue-collar industry after another, including the auto and aerospace industries, left or disappeared from the region. The unit later spun off to become an independent research group in 1991.

Dan Flaming, executive director emeritus of the Economic Roundtable, told The LA Reporter they decided to close their doors three decades later because they had run out of money. The group officially closed on Aug. 31.

“More recently, we were looking for funding from foundations and unions and we didn't get any, so we wrapped it up,” Flaming said.

What many policy makers now understand about extreme poverty and homelessness “has come from this tiny outfit called the Economic Roundtable,” said Gary Blasi, a prominent UCLA law professor emeritus and housing lawyer who has done advocacy work for unhoused people. Blasi helps lead the Tenant Power Toolkit initiative that arms tenants with tools to defend against evictions.

Blasi attended a small farewell gathering for the group this weekend, where he told The LA Reporter that even though the group's name may not be well-known, their research findings have undergirded what many have come to understand about various important issues, especially homelessness.

The group’s work, he explained, helped dispel some misconceptions that homelessness was the result of individual failings, by using data to help more people understand that homelessness “derives from the fact that people are just extremely poor.”

The Economic Roundtable’s findings on homelessness has demonstrated that early intervention is important, and that many people cited that they became homeless because they lacked jobs and an income. Their research has also been instrumental in calling into question the reliability and accuracy of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s homeless count, and points to data indicating there are more people experiencing homelessness than the official count suggested.

The Economic Roundtable’s last reports include one in June that highlighted the consequences of cuts to Medicaid, and another in May that found that an overwhelming majority of grocery workers are on the cusp of homelessness. One of their more high-profile recent studies, which the news outlet LAist obtained from the city through a public records request, weighed in on ways to change Los Angeles city’s rent stabilization law so that it’s fairer for tenants.

Mark Masaoka, a former UAW union officer at a Van Nuys auto plant who now volunteers his time to help organize Uber and Lyft drivers and Starbucks workers, told The LA Reporter he relied on The Economic Roundtable’s research into workers in the informal economy.

The former autoworker, who was laid off from the Ford Motor Company plant in Pico Rivera when it closed in 1980 and worked at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys until that site closed in 1992 after a “bitter fight,” said he used the Economic Roundtable’s research on the informal economy during his time working at the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, which later became AAPI Equity Alliance.

Many Asian Americans hold informal jobs, Masaoka said, and the groups that are part of that organization needed to apply for grants to fund social services for low-wage workers in the Asian American community. The Economic Roundtable’s findings were useful for supporting their grant applications, he said. There weren’t many studies that were being done on the informal economy, and these were conducted in a large geographic area, where there was a “major grouping of people,” Masaoka said.

While many people “grounded in this work” already understood what The Economic Roundtable’s research has helped to demonstrate over the years, the findings were often “new information” to the people working in the government and at foundations, Masaoka said.

The Economic Roundtable’s work on homelessness has tended toward highlighting the economic inequalities faced by poor people. Flaming said that might come out of the fact that the group was formed just as the aerospace industry was “collapsing after the end of the Cold War, and so the big issue for L.A. became not hanging onto great blue-collar jobs in aerospace, but the low-skilled labor force that was moving into the county and taking the place of those jobs.”

“And so from pretty early on, our work was around the working poor, and then branched out from that into other areas,” he said.

While building or creating more affordable housing has been the solution that’s been on the forefront of recent conversations around homelessness, Flaming said the millions of dollars that are needed to build housing is “outside the scope of local government, state government and the current role of the federal government,” so his “own view is it's probably more feasible to make major inroads on the wage side and the pay side of the problem than on the housing cost side of the problem.”

Over the years, Flaming said, he’s learned that “a real value” of their work has been that it helped workers feel less alone. “People who are being cheated don't think they're one-off cases,” he said. “They hear they’re not the only person sleeping in their car, that this is happening to fellow workers. And it's not just because they don't budget well enough. It's because they can't pay rent on the wages they get.”

“So showing individuals who are getting the short shrift that they shouldn't be shamed by their circumstances, that they have fellows in the same boat, and they have common cause, and they're entitled to something better — that's something I've learned that has come out of our work, and that I value a lot,” Flaming said.

A campaign to cap rent increases under LA’s rent stabilization law at 3% has been getting a boost from the powerful workers’ group, the LA County Federation of Labor, an organization that brings together hundreds of labor groups from around the county, and counts more than 800,000 workers among their members.

This comes after advocates had been pushing for the last two years to get the issue to be taken up by the LA City Council, including as recently as this past June, but gaining little traction. That situation has turned around a bit, with council members finally scheduling the issue onto their agendas.

At the beginning of October, Robert Nothoff, chief of staff for the LA Fed, took to public comment during a Housing and Homelessness Committee to speak in support of the rent-hike-capping campaign (he also spoke against a motion that was meant to torpedo the 120-unit Venice Dell affordable housing project that’s been stalled, pointing to how that project would be constructed under a union project labor agreement if it does move forward).

LA Fed officials told The LA Reporter in an interview earlier this month that they are coming out big on this issue after it became apparent that housing insecurity and homelessness has become prevalent even among workers with a union contracts.

LA County Federation of Labor President Yvonne Wheeler said she made an intentional effort to focus on housing and homeless originated two years ago, in 2023, after a “poverty and homelessness” labor summit where they learned “that many of our members are unhoused” or housing insecure.

Wheeler pointed to The Economic Roundtable’s report from May that shared findings that workers at Kroger, where employees are part of a union, are struggling to stay housed, with many sleeping in their cars. Union workers at LAX were also struggling with housing, as are public sector workers, such as social workers whose work include helping people who are unhoused.

LA Fed officials have also been joining a coalition that’s been leading the effort to cap the rent, according to Pablo Estupiñan, deputy director of organizing and advocacy at SAJE. He said the labor officials are part of and have been “critical” at the meetings their coalition Keep LA Housed has had with City Council members, including those “who are a little bit on the fence.”

Estupiñan also said the campaign is endorsed by around 100 groups, with LA Fed one among them.

“I think we've really moved the needle amongst council members,” he said. “And you know, right now, we're really hoping that council will finally update and reform LARSO (Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance) by the end of the year.”

City Ethics Commission wants bigger penalty for Curren Price staffer who failed to disclose income on conflict of interest filings: Jose Ugarte, who is running for office in the 9th council district to succeed his boss, had agreed to a $17,500 settlement with Ethics investigators, but the City Ethics Commission that gives final sign-off on such penalties felt Ugarte needed to be fined more and sent the investigator back to get a new settlement. Ugarte had failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars of gross income from his consulting firm Ugarte and Associates on the Form 700 conflict of interest filings from 2021 until 2023. Ugarte described that failure in the LA Times as a “clerical reporting error,” a characterization that appeared to stand out to several of the commissioners, including Bob Stern, a noted governance ethics reform expert who in 1990 wrote the ethics and campaign finance laws the Ethics Commission now enforces. Stern, pointing out that Ugarte is a candidate for office, asked the investigator, “have you reviewed his campaign statements to see whether there are any more clerical errors?” The investigator responded that what’s publicly posted by Ugarte appeared to be fine.

Chinatown post office vendor needs support: LA Public Press’s Phoenix Tso reports that a post office in Chinatown that helps their customers in three Chinese dialects (Toisanese, Cantonese and Mandarin) is trying to stay afloat after getting offered a cut-rate contract by the U.S. government. Local organizers are now hoping to boost business for the post office to improve their revenue.

Westside LA council member quick to use just-signed RV scrapping bill: Two weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill sponsored by LA Mayor Karen Bass that allows Los Angeles officials to quickly scrap more RVs, the legislation already has its first customer. LA City Council member Traci Park, who represents westside neighborhoods such as Mar Vista and Venice, this week introduced a motion calling on the CAO, the City Attorney to “immediately” make use of AB 630, which allows for expedited destruction of “abandoned” RVs valued at $4,000 or less. Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, told The LA Reporter that while it is good that AB 630 was limited to two counties and would sunset in 2030, it will still allow local governments in those two counties scrap “a vast number of RVs” without “due process protections,” leading to more people who live in vehicles being “pushed onto the streets.”

Redditors caught LA Council President Harris-Dawson’s whisperings: People on the Los Angeles subreddit were abuzz this week about Harris-Dawson whispering, “you should go, you should go,” just before saying that quorum for the meeting had been lost, leading to the public comment needing to be limited. They speculated that he was trying to get a council member to leave so that quorum would be lost in order to cut short the public comment period. Many of the 51 or so comments were also praising one of the council members, Nithya Raman, for reportedly not leaving the meeting.

Business relief ballot initiative would cut into LA city revenues by $800 million: A ballot initiative sponsored by people from a downtown business group, Central City Association, and a Valley business group, Valley Industry Commerce Association, to repeal a tax on business’s gross receipts (rather than on profit) has gotten approval to start circulating its petition. The LA Times’s David Zahniser reported back in July receives about $800 million from this gross receipts tax, which has stuck around despite a previous attempt to repeal it, and that the CAO accused the measure as “an assault on public safety,” arguing that it would mean cuts to police and fire. when the paperwork was filed that the proponents need to collect 140,000 valid signatures.

LAX roadway expansion project gets Torched: Alissa Walker of Torched rips through a plan to expand a freeway by nearly 6 lane miles to connect traffic to LAX. She says that car traffic is being prioritized once again, even after what she calculates to be a $4 billion investment into making travel to and from the airport a “car-free“ experience has commenced. “The LAX-pressway must be stopped,” she writes, referring to the roadway. This is the project that is necessitating the temporary removal of the familiar LAX letters that people see while driving into the airport.

Jaime Moore picked as LA’s fire chief: LA Mayor Karen Bass announced Friday that she’s appointed Jaime Moore as the new fire chief. Moore has been with the department for more than 30 years. The department was being overseen by interim chief Ronnie Villanueva, who took over for Kristin Crowley, who had been ousted by Mayor Karen Bass in the wake of the January wildfires and criticisms Crowley made about funding for the department.

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