The Brief

If you feel like there’s been more coyotes around your neighborhood, acting more aggressively, you may be right.

Coyotes have wrapped up their infamous mating season — and now it’s time to cue the cute factor: Coyote pup season is in full swing. And that means some behavioral changes.

What you should know about the season

Coyotes have three biological seasons, said Niamh Quinn, a human-wildlife interactions advisor with the University of California’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

There’s breeding season, pup season, and then what she calls the dispersal season, where the young coyotes go off on their own. But during pup season, the coyotes are focused on raising and caring for the babies.

“They're starting to den down, and it’s been shown in certain areas that coyotes can be very aggressive around the den itself at that time,” Quinn said.

In California, coyotes breed primarily between January and March, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Their litters, which can be about five to six pups each, are born between March and May. Some packs may start earlier in the year, she said. For example, her team saw dens being dug out as early as December in Orange County.

But what most coyotes are doing now is beginning to raise those babies. That typically lasts until September.

During this time, the adult coyotes have more mouths to feed.

Understanding coyote behavior

Coyotes are cooperative breeders, meaning that the pack gets involved to help raise the young. That creates a lot of activity around the dens.

“The thing about a coyote den is that you could be stood right on top of one and not even know it's there,” Quinn said. “Like they're quite small openings.”

All a coyote needs is to be able to go in, turn around and come back out. They’re often found in the open spaces around us, like nature reserves, nurseries, railway lines and on Southern California Edison’s easement land.

But they can show up around parks and even under homes. So while you may not see ones for months, they are almost always nearby in L.A. County. While these animals aren’t strictly nocturnal, they’re most active between dusk and dawn.

Coyote behavior does change in L.A. County’s pup season, Quinn said, but not always. Members of the pack leave the den, but data is mixed on whether it’s a true increase in activity compared to other seasons.

“I would say that probably in L.A., you get a lot of encounters during the pup rearing season,” Quinn said. “Then you probably get like a small peak as well during dispersal when the juveniles are starting to move on.”

While many Southern Californians get rightfully concerned about seeing coyotes — they can and do attack animals and people — others feel we need to learn to co-exist.

Tujunga resident Jason Holmes grew up in the country, which he says gave him a perspective on nature that he’s trying to pass on to his very young daughter.

“We grew up around coyotes, mountain lions … I just think it's really important that people get out in nature. We have a lot of fear where fear doesn’t have to necessarily be,” Holmes said. “[But] now that I have a child, yeah, they’re more of my concern.”

Meanwhile Jerome Agee says the different seasons of their life cycle reminds him of how close L.A. is to the wild. He sees coyotes as just like any other animal.

“We're in their neighborhood. This is their home,” Agee said. “So we got to learn how to get along. Cause you know, they got the right to survive just like we.”

A coyote in Elysian Park.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Ways to stay safe

There are steps you can take to keep you, your small children and your animals safe.

Coyote encounters can just be a sighting, or an animal or human attack. But it’s less common for coyotes to bite humans — usually they go after small animals, like cats and dogs.

“If you don't want your cat eaten by a coyote, you don’t let your cat outside,” Quinn said.

Dogs are a little different because they can be attacked on leashes too. It’s a smart idea to minimize the length of your leash, and of course, don’t take your dog off the leash in public.

If you do encounter a coyote, one option is to scare them off with a loud noise. Some well-used dog walking areas have home-made shakers on hand, like this one in East Pasadena.

A home-made shaker to warn away coyotes

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Ashley Alvarado/LAist

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You can learn more in our guide to living safely with our coyote neighbors.

See where coyotes are near you

If you’re curious where coyotes have been reported near you, check out locations below, updated with the University of California’s Coyote Cacher data as of April 24.

A few caveats to keep in mind: Reports don’t represent the total amount of coyote sightings this year. The service relies on people submitting individual reports, which can only be done in English.

People can always elect to report coyotes to other places, like a county service, or not report them at all. So an empty spot on the map does not necessarily mean there are no coyotes near you.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles is making a new push to turn empty and underused offices into housing.

One developer is holding a large portfolio of somewhat underutilized or vacant office buildings in Koreatown and Westlake, giving them a chance to respond to the city’s housing crisis.

Jamison, Koreatown’s largest commercial landlord, has owned office buildings along the Wilshire Boulevard corridor for decades and two more of its proposed conversions are near Lafayette Park in Westlake.

At least 15 Jamison office buildings in the two neighborhoods have been converted into housing, are under construction or under proposal for conversion into apartments, according to a review of city records and company documents.

Together, the projects could account for 3,652 apartments, though more than 900 of those units are still only proposals.

The landlord is primed for the moment as the city eased its restrictions earlier this year to convert older offices and other commercial buildings into housing.

The expansion of the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance makes it easier to turn old offices, hotels and other commercial buildings into homes. The ordinance previously only allowed conversions within or near downtown, but now those rules apply across the entire city.

City officials estimate this could open up more than 43,000 new homes across the city. 

“These projects represent the kind of innovation we are applying to break away from the status quo that has stunted LA’s housing production and driven up rents for decades,” Mayor Karen Bass said in April. “Work from home and other shifts mean there is a large supply of office space that we can use for housing, but for too long, outdated city regulations stood in the way.”

Jaime Lee, Jamison’s former CEO, said in a March interview with the Los Angeles Times that the firm has stopped pursuing new ground-up construction as financing and other challenges have made it harder to build. 

“We ourselves as a firm have been pencils down on ground-up construction for two years now,” Lee said. “What we’re really, really focused on is how can we make more units out of nothing, which is converting office buildings into multifamily.”

Here’s where those 15 projects stand. A spokesperson for Jamison acknowledged a request for comment, but the company did not immediately provide comment for this story. 

Eight of the projects were completed between 2013 and 2025, and two more recently opened.

Completed projects

Westmore, 3075 Wilshire Blvd.

The Westmore brought 127 apartments and ground-floor retail to a former office building in November 2013.

The nine-story building is on the eastern side of Koreatown, a few blocks east of Vermont Avenue and near the Wilshire/Vermont Metro station.

Westmore is the earliest completed Jamison office conversion identified in Koreatown and Westlake.

Crosby, 3350 Wilshire Blvd.

The 216-unit Crosby occupies a 1957 office tower that once served as Texaco’s West Coast headquarters. Designed by prominent Los Angeles architect Welton Becket, the building sits across from the historic Gaylord Apartments and near Immanuel Presbyterian Church.

The office conversion was completed in 2020 and the developer also built additional apartments on top of the adjoining parking garage, but those are excluded from this count because they weren’t created from office space.

Atlas House, 2500 Wilshire Blvd.

One block west of MacArthur Park, the 13-story Atlas House opened in 2022 with 248 apartments inside what had been a roughly 240,000-square-foot office building. 

About 12,500 square feet of commercial space was kept on the ground floor.

Five other Jamison office conversions are already finished along the Wilshire corridor and total more than 860 apartments. 

Recently opened and in the works

Grayson, 695 S. Vermont Ave.

Grayson is now open and leasing, with 255 apartments inside the former office tower.

The 19-story building dates to 1971 and was originally built as an expansion of Pacific Indemnity Co.’s headquarters, which also occupied the neighboring tower at 3200 Wilshire Blvd.

The conversion kept the existing tower and parking garage.

The building is a short walk from the Wilshire/Vermont Metro station.

Mason, at 3325 Wilshire Blvd. in Koreatown, is now open and leasing. The former 13-story office building was converted into 236 apartments.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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Mason, 3325 Wilshire Blvd.

Mason is also now open and leasing, with 236 apartments inside a former 13-story office building.

The roughly 233,000-square-foot building is at Wilshire and Berendo, on the same block as Immanuel Presbyterian Church. About 15,000 square feet of retail space is on the ground floor, and the parking garage has 450 spaces.

Work on the conversion began in 2024. Jamison called Mason its 10th adaptive-reuse project, and the project was financed in part with $60 million in taxable multifamily housing revenue bonds, according to Urbanize LA. 

Walker, 3550 Wilshire Blvd.

Construction is still underway at Walker, where a 20-story office tower is being turned into 507 apartments, making it the largest Jamison office-to-housing project identified in Koreatown and Westlake.

While the city originally approved 495 apartments, Jamison later added another 12 units on the 20th floor. 

The building is a few blocks east of the Wilshire/Normandie Metro station.

3424 Wilshire Blvd.

Work is underway at 3424 Wilshire Blvd., where the former Los Angeles-area headquarters of IBM is being turned into 260 apartments.

The 13-story building dates to 1958 and has roughly 250,000 square feet of space. IBM originally occupied the property, and it later became the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The conversion will turn the former office floors into apartments while keeping about 13,000 square feet of existing retail space. Plans also include racquetball courts, a fitness center, game and karaoke rooms and an outdoor deck, according to Urbanize LA. 

Proposed projects

Jamison has filed plans for three more office conversions, but none could be confirmed as under construction based on city records.

Wilshire Park Place is one of several buildings in Koreatown that Jamison Properties wants to convert into housing.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The LA Local

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Wilshire Park Place, 3700 Wilshire Blvd.

Plans call for turning the 11-story Wilshire Park Place office tower into 370 apartments. 

The building sits behind the large lawn commonly known as Liberty Park, one of the few green spaces in dense, park-poor Koreatown. Liberty Park is a privately owned green space that has been used for community gatherings, including World Cup watch parties. The park and office building were designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2018 after a neighborhood campaign to preserve the site.

According to the proposal, some space inside the existing parking structure would be converted into amenities for residents.

520 S. La Fayette Park Place

Another proposed conversion sits near Lafayette Park, where a six-story office building could become 141 apartments.

Plans filed in 2023 call for turning the roughly 95,000-square-foot building at 520 S. La Fayette Park Place into a mix of studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. The building sits on top of parking for nearly 200 vehicles.

The former Los Angeles Superior Court office building at 600 S. Commonwealth Ave. in Westlake. Jamison Properties has proposed converting the 19-story building into 428 apartments.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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600 S. Commonwealth Ave.

On the other side of Lafayette Park in Westlake, Jamison has proposed a much larger conversion where a 19-story office tower could become 428 apartments.

The nearly 350,000-square-foot building has long housed Los Angeles Superior Court offices. The proposal would turn the office space into 428 apartments, while keeping most of the building’s existing parking and converting some of it into storage and other spaces for residents.

At 428 apartments, it would be Jamison’s second-largest office conversion identified in Koreatown and Westlake, behind the 507-unit Walker project.

Come back here for more updates.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is rolling back a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, including more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest lands in California.

The change could open some of California's most remote backcountry to new roads and development — even as U.S. Forest Service research shows that roads are a major source of wildfire ignitions in the state's national forests.

People start most of California’s wildfires, including on federal land — and it’s not just sparks from faulty power lines. Fires can start in many ways: A hiker might burn toilet paper in the backcountry, a hot tub might be miswired, or someone might drag a tow chain or pull a hot car onto dry grass.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who first announced the plan last year, said Tuesday that federal officials filed a proposal and environmental impact statement to rescind the rule in order to reduce barriers to managing fuels on public lands.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said in a statement.

But in California, the U.S. Forest Service’s own research points to a complication: Roads and the people who travel on them are known conduits for fire.

Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service mapped 26 years of fire ignitions along roughly 850 miles of roads in the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests. All of them, according to a Forest Service map, also contain roadless reaches.

The mapping effort revealed that nearly two-thirds of the fires people caused in these forests sparked along roadsides — places where people, the sparks they create and fuel in the form of flammable, invasive grasses often converge.

California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said that the roadless rule has not hindered California’s forest management and prescribed fire efforts.

“In fact, more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California have undergone vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire risk and protect nearby communities,” Crowfoot said in a letter to Rollins last September. He cited an example in the Caples Creek roadless area south of Lake Tahoe, which he said helped shield communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire.

Crowfoot warned that opening these areas to construction, timber harvests and mining “may put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs of California.”

A national pattern

It’s not just California. A recent peer-reviewed study by scientists with the Wilderness Society reported earlier this year that wildfire ignitions in national forests across the country are four times more likely near roads. From 1992 to 2024, wildfire ignition densities were lowest in designated wilderness areas, followed by roadless areas. They were highest within 50 meters of roads.

“Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development and therefore more ignitions is also not a wildfire solution and never will be,” said Josh Hicks, the Wilderness Society’s director of conservation campaigns.

The Trump administration said rescinding the rule doesn’t automatically mandate timber harvests or building roads. Instead, it would leave decisions to local national forest managers.

“Future land management decisions would be based on natural resource conditions and needs and informed by states, tribes and communities,” the Agriculture Department’s announcement said Tuesday.

Why more roads?

Environmental advocates are skeptical, especially in light of the Trump administration's executive order last year calling for an “immediate expansion of American timber production.”

The roadless rule also already allows for roads to be constructed or rebuilt to protect health and safety from the threat of wildfire.

Retired U.S. Forest Service chiefs, including one who served during the first Trump administration, said in an opinion piece last year that repealing the rule threatens key watersheds and wildlife.

“Why build more roads when the agency, strapped for resources, can’t even maintain the ones that already exist?” they asked. “Let’s not forget the reasons these backcountry areas do not have roads. The easily accessible high-value timber from national forests has been harvested. What little that remains in these roadless backcountry areas is difficult and costly to access.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, blasted the Trump administration for moving forward on rescinding the rule during a catastrophic fire season following the Trump administration’s slashing of the U.S. Forest Service. He vowed to fight it in Congress.

“The Trump administration is at again, selling out our public lands to corporate polluters, ignoring the overwhelming objections of the American people,” Huffman said in a statement. He added: “It’s reckless.”

The public has until midnight on Sept. 21 to comment.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Two months after the Lineage warehouse fire, Maria Mendez is still having trouble sleeping. The 68-year-old Boyle Heights resident has dealt with nausea, respiratory and eye problems, as well as anxiety attacks, since the June 17 blaze.

And she’s not alone. A new report from St. John’s Community Health found that nearly 36% of 1,306 patients seen at its mobile clinics between June 17 and July 31 had serious health problems the organization attributed to exposure to smoke and toxic chemicals.

The findings come weeks after Mayor Karen Bass faced criticism for saying the air was “not dangerous” in the early days of the fire. Bass later apologized for the confusion, saying “all smoke under all circumstances is harmful.”

The report offers an early look at the physical and mental health toll of the fire on residents of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. 

The health problems identified included acute upper respiratory infections, eye disorders and conjunctivitis, persistent cough and asthma exacerbation.

Maria Mendez of Boyle Heights talks about the symptoms she has experienced since the Lineage fire at a press conference outside InnerCity Struggle on Tuesday, Aug. 18.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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“Our community, my friends, my neighbors have suffered in the past two months,” Mendez said, detailing the putrid odors and rat and fly infestation they’ve encountered as Lineage works to clean the food waste left behind by the fire. 

Jim Mangia, president and CEO of St. John’s Community Health, outlined the results at a press conference Tuesday at InnerCity Struggle in Boyle Heights. Among those there were residents, including Mendez, and community leaders Henry Perez, executive director of InnerCity Struggle, and Rudy Espinoza, executive director of Inclusive Action for the City.

Patients were largely Latino (91.7%), female (64.4%) and 50 or older (63.5%). The report found that 26.6% were diagnosed with toxic smoke exposure and 24.5% received hazardous substance diagnoses. 

Dozens of patients were prescribed anxiety and/or sleep medication to treat acute stress after the fire, which, according to St. John’s, was related to the following: environmental exposure, sleep disruption and insomnia, housing instability, lease termination requests, relocation concerns, ongoing uncertainty regarding environmental safety, and psychosocial distress associated with displacement and recovery. 

“What we’re seeing now are the acute impacts, but what we’re not seeing yet are the long term impacts, and that’s where you’re going to see the most damage,” Mangia said. 

“You’re going to see a significant increase in asthma rates in Boyle Heights. You’re going to see an increase in cardiac issues. You’re going to see an increase in mental health issues,” he added.

Cristian Morales walks from his nearby home to watch the fire with his five-year-old son Cristian Morales Jr. He’s lived in the neighborhood for five years.

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Steve Saldivar

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The LA Local

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In the report, St. John’s noted that in one case, a patient with asthma arrived at a mobile clinic with “worsening shortness of breath.” Providers administered an urgent breathing treatment onsite and supplied inhaler medications to help manage ongoing symptoms, according to the report. 

Providers documented providing hydroxyzine therapy and discussing coping strategies with a patient experiencing anxiety, sleep disruption and environmental stress related to ongoing fire exposure concerns. 

Mangia also pushed back against South Coast AQMD and Lineage for stating that measured ammonia levels do not exceed the state threshold requiring action to protect public health.

“That’s a direct contradiction with what we’re seeing on the ground by serving and providing health care. We’re seeing the health impacts of this fire,” he said. “To claim that it’s not at toxic levels, it’s not at emergency levels, that’s all doublespeak.”

Mangia said they are seeing eye infections “that we can’t get rid of” and asthma attacks in children.

“We always track the health conditions of the people we serve. We tracked it before the fire, and we saw a complete difference in the health conditions from before and now. So, that’s public proof,” Mangia said.