The Brief

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council joined progressive policy advocates Wednesday to call on the city to allocate an additional $4.5 million for mental health crisis response services that rely less on police.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and representatives from LA Forward, a group that advocates for affordable housing among other issues, urged the city to budget $2.5 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1 to make emergency dispatches more efficient. They also said L.A. should earmark $2 million to evaluate what kinds of programs are currently paid for with city funds and how they might be streamlined.

At a morning news conference held outside City Hall, speakers called on residents to comment during a budget hearing scheduled for later in the day.

Mayor Karen Bass’ $12.8 billion budget proposal includes $50 million for community-based organizations for violence prevention and intervention, civilian crisis response and anti-recidivism services, according to a budget summary.

Hernandez said during the news conference that putting more money into better crisis responses would save the city money “by investing in prevention rather than reaction.”

“We’re asking the city to invest in building alternative crisis responses that are life-affirming, that are culturally humble and will provide our communities the care they need when they need it most, in their moments of crises,” she said.

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of LA Forward, said centralizing dispatch efforts could go a long way toward getting people the right mental health crisis response in a timely manner. He said the process is not as simple as pressing a button to call for medical assistance from the fire department.

“[Dispatchers] have to manually call different services in order to reach that service,” he said.

L.A. recently launched a pilot program that sends teams of clinicians — not police officers — to respond to incidents involving people in mental health crises. A separate program, known as the Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement, or CIRCLE, focuses on crises involving unhoused people.

A third effort partners the L.A. County Department of Mental Health with local fire stations to send teams made up of a driver, a licensed psychiatric technician and someone who has personal experience with mental illness.

Jason Enright, who has a son with autism, said he doesn’t have any good options to call for help when his child is in crisis. He said the options the city provides don’t cover his North Hollywood neighborhood and responses from the county mental health department take too long.

Enright said he worries what a police response might look like if his child is in crisis. He cited a recent LAist investigation that found nearly a third of LAPD shootings since 2017 involved someone living with a mental illness and/or experiencing a mental health crisis.

“It’s just terrifying as a parent,” he said. “You don’t want to call for help and have that lead to the death of your loved one.”

In March, L.A. partnered with three local nonprofit organizations — Exodus Recovery, Alcott Center and Penny Lane Centers — to provide two unarmed teams in each of three service areas spread across L.A. The teams are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week within the LAPD's Devonshire, Wilshire and Southeast service areas.

Tracee Porter of LA Forward, who worked as a cab driver for decades, said she’s seen many people in crisis on the streets, and she agonized over how to help them. She recalled seeing a man in Long Beach throwing lit matches at a building.

She said she thought the man was in psychological distress and called 911.

“But I was terrified with that call, what would happen if the wrong people responded. Would they just shoot him or what have you?” Porter said.

The full city council has until June 1 to adopt or modify the mayor’s proposed budget.

Long Beach resident Kelsey Wise has been asking for a speed bump on her street for months. After multiple close calls on Orange Avenue just north of Seventh Street, she spent hours building a PowerPoint to lobby her City Council member to get behind the idea. Her efforts earned her a meeting with the Long Beach Public Works Department, which manages street safety improvements. Soon, she’ll make her case to them as well.

Few people go to the lengths Wise did, but she’s far from the only person with frustrations about how difficult it is to make local streets safer.

With fatal traffic collisions at their highest point in more than a decade, that dissatisfaction bubbled over last week at a Long Beach City Council meeting, where members and residents took turns voicing their irritation.

Council members told city staff to come up with a plan to speed up safety measures, but it raised the question for us: What’s taking so long to begin with?

We put those questions to City Traffic Engineer Paul Van Dyk. Here’s what we found out.

What happens when residents ask for a new safety measure?

When the city receives a request to evaluate a street for a potential measure to influence traffic behavior, Long Beach sends out city staff to observe drivers along that section of roadway.

In general, a street must clear three specific benchmarks for the city to begin designing a measure to impact traffic behavior. More than 26% of drivers must be observed speeding on a certain stretch of roadway, that stretch must have at least one crash per year and the street must average more than 2,000 vehicles per day.

There are outliers to these rules. For example, Sixth Street between Almond and Orange avenues averages 790 cars per day on less than a tenth of a mile. Fewer than 2% of drivers speed on that stretch, but it’s seen a half dozen collisions recently. City traffic engineers are lowering the speed limit on that stretch from 25 mph to 15 mph to limit future crashes.

Asking for a change is no guarantee that something will happen quickly.

Public Works is dealing with a backlog of requests. It received 220 over the past two years and still has 40 it needs to evaluate, and new requests are rolling in, with this year already outpacing prior ones.

And of the 180 requests Public Works finished evaluating, only 17 were selected for new traffic-calming measures. Once a road is selected for a traffic-calming measure, it takes anywhere from two to four months to install, according to a Jan. 20 presentation from Public Works.

Residents can submit a request for a traffic evaluation here.

The state has strict rules on where and when a stop sign can be installed. To meet the threshold, an intersection must have five or more reported crashes in 12 months. Furthermore, it has to be clear that a stop sign would directly prevent similar crashes from occurring, and there must be a minimum vehicle and pedestrian volume through the area.

Stop Signs

Stop signs are effective when “there’s an equilibrium” in traffic flow, said Van Dyk. If someone pulls up to a four-way stop sign and there’s never anybody at any of the three other directions, it makes the driver less likely to obey the sign, he said.

“The hard part is not putting up a sign,” Van Dyk said. “It’s convincing people to actually listen to the sign. To follow what the sign says and make it make sense to them.”

Speed Bumps

Speed bumps are different than speed humps. Speed humps can include speed tables and raised crosswalks, while speed bumps are concrete mounds that require drivers to slow down to cross.

“Typically, speed bumps are most effective if we’re seeing significant amounts of people going at high speed,” Van Dyk said.

If people typically travel between 25 and 30 mph down a street, speed bumps “really aren’t going to make a noticeable difference in behavior,” he said.

They are reserved for areas where people typically travel at 35 to 40 mph, Van Dyk said. However, even if a traffic engineer deems it a viable solution to slow speeding traffic, Long Beach requires a petition signed by neighbors to install them. The approval percentage ranges from 50-75%, depending on the type of speed hump or bump the neighborhood is seeking.

New left-turn signals

From January 2023 through the end of 2025, Public Works received 133 resident requests to check the timing of existing traffic signals. When that happens, Public Works sends out a traffic engineer to “test all the different detectors around the light to make sure that they are accurately detecting when a car goes by.”

They check to make sure the magnetic sensors underground are working properly and observe traffic during rush hour to make sure the light is “flushing the left turn pocket every time,” Van Dyk said.

Van Dyk acknowledged the danger of trying to make a left turn at a green light instead of a green arrow. “All of the liability is on the driver in making sure that I’m doing this safely,” he said.

Vehicles make their way along Long Beach Boulevard as they pass a speed limit sign at Seventh Street in Long Beach on Thursday, December 1, 2022. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova. Long Beach is in the process of adding more left-turn arrow lights, but “traffic signals are probably one of the most expensive projects that the city undertakes” as far as traffic-calming measures, Van Dyk said.

Adding a signal at one intersection costs “more than half a million” dollars once you factor in the costs of building the light and making sure everything is hooked up properly underground without disturbing the existing utility lines, Van Dyk said.

“It’s a lot of steel, it’s a lot of engineering,” he said.

Low-cost fixes include changing the signal timing “to give pedestrians a head start” when crossing the street.

Crosswalks

Long Beach plans to install 39 new crosswalks throughout the city, including 25 with a button that activates rectangular rapid flashing beacons for pedestrians crossing the road.

Among those to be installed: two will go along Seventh Street, five will be installed on Anaheim Street and three will be installed on Atlantic Avenue.

Those with specialty beacons are placed on marked crosswalks that see elevated levels of speeding cars, traffic volume or crashes. They are also installed in areas that don’t have a marked crosswalk, but are on roadways where pedestrian deaths and injuries are common.

How do speed cameras and limits fit into this?

This fall, speeding drivers caught at 18 spots throughout Long Beach will begin receiving fines from automatic cameras. The program is part of a state pilot in seven cities that mandates the ticket revenue pay for new traffic-calming measures.

Proceeds from the fines “can’t be spent on enforcement, general police or fixing potholes. It’s spent on neighborhood traffic calming,” said City Manager Tom Modica.

In January, the City Council also approved lowering speed limits on 77 streets throughout the city. A majority of those reductions restored the state standard of 25 mph on streets with three or fewer lanes that had speed limits of 30 to 35 mph.

In nearly two dozen locations, speed limits were dropped to 15-20 mph to match “existing driver behavior. A dozen streets had speed limits dropped to 25 mph within 500 feet of a park playground.

Until 2021, state law limited a city’s ability to set its own speed limits. This round of speed reductions is the second the city has undertaken since the law changed. The city conducts speed surveys on its streets “on a rotating multiyear schedule” and adjusts speed limits based on that data.

To request a speed survey on your street, email goactivelb@longbeach.gov. You can also request a free yard sign saying “20 is plenty” in English or Spanish here.

As Los Angeles gears up for a surge of tourists for this year’s FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, vacation rental giant Airbnb is urging the city of Los Angeles to legalize thousands of new short-term rentals.

The company promises that the expansion will add more than $100 million in tax revenue to city coffers amid a severe budget crisis. But opponents say more short-term rentals will further strain an already limited housing supply.

In a report issued this month, Better Neighbors LA, a coalition of housing activists and labor groups that monitor short-term rentals, countered the Airbnb proposal with its own revenue generating idea: Enforce the city’s existing home sharing law, cite violators and bring in tens of millions of dollars in fines that the group says the city has simply failed to collect.

Beefed-up enforcement is a “simple fix for the city” that would “raise enormous amounts of money,” said Randy Renick, Better Neighbors LA executive director. “It’s also going to return thousands of affordable housing units to the market for long-term renters,” he said. (Disclosure: Renick’s law firm, Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai, is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Better Neighbors’ coalition includes the hotel workers union UNITE HERE Local 11, along with local organizations like Venice Community Housing and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Last year, as Airbnb rolled out its “Save Our Services” campaign for short-term rental expansion, it poured $19 million into lobbying and political contributions at the state level, according to the California Secretary of State’s online database.

Also in 2025, the company spent $360,000 on lobbying at Los Angeles City Hall and made hefty donations to charity at the request of L.A. city councilmembers, Los Angeles Ethics Commission records show. The company donated $570,000 to the nonprofit Salvadoran American Leadership and Educational Fund at the request of L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park and $25,000 to the North Valley Family YMCA at the request of Councilmember John Lee.

California law places no limits on such donations, known as behested payments, but requires them to be disclosed to help the public identify attempts to influence public officials.

Airbnb wants the city to revive an idea that city councilmembers, including former councilmember Herb Wesson, the father of current Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson, first proposed eight years ago. The proposal would have allowed property owners to list second homes on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo or booking.com. The current proposal would add up to about 31,000 units to the city’s short-term rental market. Under L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, which took effect in 2019, short-term rental hosts are allowed to list only their primary residences on vacation booking platforms. Neither Vrbo nor booking.com responded to Capital & Main’s request for comment about the proposal.

The Airbnb-backed coalition, Save Our Services, says on its website that the additional vacation rentals could generate more than $100 million for the city in “bed taxes,” a 14% levy on overnight stays paid by hotel and short-term rental guests, as well as $100 million in sales tax revenue from tourist spending.

Labor unions like the Teamsters Joint Council 42, the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council and the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, along with the Central City Association of Los Angeles and community groups like the Brotherhood Crusade and the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, back the effort.

Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson said in a statement, “By allowing a limited, regulated number of vacation rentals in the City of Los Angeles we can help stabilize funding for essential services, support neighborhood-based tourism, and prepare the city for upcoming global events in a way that benefits residents, visitors, and local businesses alike.”

Airbnb supports stronger enforcement of the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, Wesson wrote in a January 2026 letter to the L.A. City Council. The letter also urges the city to require all vacation rental platforms to share data with the city and remove illegal listings. Airbnb is the only company that currently does so voluntarily.

The Better Neighbors LA report dismisses Airbnb’s claim that expanding short-term rentals would generate more than $100 million in new hotel taxes as “fanciful” because the proposal wouldn’t necessarily bring additional tourists to the city. In 2020, as the City Council first considered an expansion of the short-term rental market, Los Angeles Director of City Planning Vince Bertoni was also skeptical that expanding vacation rentals would draw visitors to Los Angeles.

Still, the World Cup and the Olympics will bring an influx of visitors to L.A., and groups like Better Neighbors LA fear that the city will lose much needed housing to tourist rentals, especially if city officials permit additional vacation rentals.

This concern is heightened by the fact that the city has long struggled to enforce its existing Home-Sharing Ordinance.

Fully half of the Los Angeles vacation rentals listed on booking sites are illegal, according to data included in the Better Neighbors LA report. But only a tiny fraction of violators are cited; the city has collected a total of about $667,000 in fines under the 2019 home sharing law, Better Neighbors LA reports. The group estimates the city could immediately rake in $95 million in two months if it stepped up enforcement.

City Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose Hollywood-Silver Lake district has among the highest concentration of the city’s short-term rentals, support Better Neighbors’ plan to increase enforcement of the city’s current law.

“This report makes clear that the path forward is enforcing the home-sharing laws already on the books,” Soto-Martinez said in a statement. “If we fully implement the rules we passed, we can protect tenants and generate additional revenue for the city without sacrificing housing.”

L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance generally allows individuals to list only their primary residences on sites like Airbnb and Vrbo for up to four months, although the city also makes exceptions, allowing year-round “extended home sharing” in many cases. Home sharing is not permitted in dwellings covered by the city’s rent control law or in affordable housing units, including those built with public funds.

But property owners have easily evaded the existing home sharing law, even amid a severe housing and homelessness crisis. In 2024, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that tourists could rent apartments in dozens of rent controlled buildings in apparent violation of the law. Owners of some of these buildings openly listed fabricated or nonexistent city registration numbers and were never cited.

For years, residents complained about loud parties in short-term rentals, parking problems and the loss of permanent housing in their neighborhoods. Last March, the City Council finally voted to pursue reforms, including requiring short-term rental platforms to use a computer system that would automatically block illegal transactions and giving individuals the right to sue suspected short-term rental law violators. But the reform effort hasn’t moved forward.

Last year as the City Council considered stricter oversight of short-term rentals, Los Angeles Housing Department officials said they lacked the staffing and resources to effectively enforce the ordinance. This month, Sharon Sandow, a spokesperson for the housing department, which is one of several city agencies overseeing the Home-Sharing Ordinance, said in an email that all of the departments would have to assess their “resources and capacity” for a coordinated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the Airbnb proposal has caught the attention of at least one city councilmember, Heather Hutt, who represents Koreatown and Mid-City. In January, Hutt requested that the chief legislative analyst and other city department staff brief the City Council’s budget and finance and planning and land use committees on the status of the ordinance.

Support for the Airbnb plan would represent a distinct shift for most members of the City Council: Last year, councilmembers put themselves squarely on the side of limiting short-term rentals in the city, voting 12-0 to strengthen oversight of the program. Three members — John Lee, Monica Rodriguez and Bob Blumenfield — were absent.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

Iran's sports minister said Wednesday that the team will not compete in the World Cup, citing the U.S. war on Iran, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported.

Iran is scheduled to play two matches in Los Angeles in June against New Zealand and Belgium.

Iran's participation in the global tournament has been in question since the U.S. and Israel launched a bombing campaign against the country in late February.

On Wednesday, the country's sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, told state television that the country's team would not participate in the tournament in the U.S. “considering this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader,” according to the New York Times. A joint U.S.-Israeli attack killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war.

The remarks came after FIFA president Gianni Infantino said Tuesday that he had met with President Donald Trump and that Iran continued to be welcome to attend the World Cup.

"We also spoke about the current situation in Iran, and the fact that the Iranian team has qualified to participate in the FIFA World Cup 2026," Infantino said in an Instagram post. "During the discussions, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States."

Infantino has faced heavy criticism for awarding Trump the first-ever "FIFA Peace Prize" last year.

A FIFA spokesperson told LAist that Iran has not formally pulled out of the tournament. The local host committee for Los Angeles declined to comment, directing LAist to FIFA.

According to FIFA's regulations, any participating team that withdraws from the World Cup will be required to repay FIFA "preparation money as well as any other tournament‑related contribution payments."

The regulations also say FIFA has sole discretion to determine next steps if a team pulls out, including replacing the team.