The Brief

The Los Angeles Community College District hosted a series of town halls this month to discuss building student housing on three campuses in the district — L.A. City College in East Hollywood, Pierce in Woodland Hills, and West L.A. in Culver City.

Community college students today won’t likely benefit from the proposed housing. According to Rod Hamilton, a regional director for the district’s construction program Build LACCD, at an expedited timeline the projects could be complete by the end of 2028. The town halls will inform the district’s request for proposals, which representatives expect to issue at the beginning of 2024. They also cautioned that much is still tentative — even the identified sites.

There is no question that the student demand for housing is high. Based in a spring 2022 survey of LACCD students, 14% of the respondents indicated they don’t have housing or their housing is insecure. As a percentage of LACCD’s fall 2023 headcount, that’d be about 17,000 students.

“This is the beginning,” said Sara Hernandez, a member of the board of trustees, speaking at L.A. City College. “I know housing, housing insecurity, homelessness is not the beginning here in Los Angeles. This has been going on for a long time, but this is the beginning of the district's efforts around housing because we now have the money.”

That money comes from last year’s voter-approved $5.3-billion bond, known as Measure L.A., which allocated $500 million to house the district’s students and workers. Up to three projects will be chosen, each to provide between 300 to 400 beds.

Housing as an expectation of community colleges

Hernandez said these events are important to hear community needs and build a coalition of support for these housing efforts.

LACCD joins a growing number of California community colleges developing housing on their campuses. Colleges in the Central Valley have a longer history of on-campus housing, but LACCD and other districts are catching up.

One of the latest in the region has been Orange Coast College, offering slightly more than 800 beds in 2020. LACCD presenters point out that what makes this district distinct from its Southern California counterpart is that the units will be affordable at $500 per month per bed.

A student walks at Pierce College.

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Brian Feinzimer

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In its May 2023 housing resolution, LACCD affirmed its commitment to address student, faculty, and staff housing needs.

Despite this formal announcement, the realm of developing housing is still an area of growth for the district.

“It's challenging because, you know, we are in the industry of educating students. We are not a housing provider. You know, this is our first foray into the world of housing development,“ Hernandez said.

“It is really, really clear that, you know, this is a societal issue that has, you know, really made living in Los Angeles really, really difficult for young people, and we need to do more," she added. "And that's why we are really excited and motivated to link arms with the mayor, to link arms with the county, and be a part of the solution to this ongoing, regional wide housing crisis and homelessness crisis.”

Offering solutions

Participants at the town halls were not short of ideas for improving housing security.

At L.A. City College, the room was so packed that a few attendees gathered outside the open door. The energy in the room was tense, with a number of participants frustrated by the wait and wary of potential waste.

One suggested partnering with the University of California and California State University systems to provide housing stability to students transferring to the four-year degree programs. At the West L.A. town hall, Rueben Smith, the vice chancellor and chief facilities executive, said that LACCD is looking to partner with universities with existing housing inventory and work with the city of L.A. and the county to increase housing inventory.

One student worker at the LACC town hall, who said that she is $20,000 in debt from rental costs, suggested raising student worker wages so that they can afford rent and stay committed to their academics.

LACC student Reginald Johnson II told LAist he was a theater major and has been unhoused since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Before the pandemic he had been staying at the Union Rescue Mission, but being in close proximity with so many other people, without partitions, he was worried about getting sick. He said it was a “very hard choice” to return to street living, where he had previously been robbed.

Reginald Johnson II who is studying to become a stage manager prepares for a theatre program rehearsal at Los Angeles City College.

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Brian Feinzimer

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Among various ideas, he offered that those in the creative industry may be willing to donate toward housing students if their needs were more publicized, particularly at a campus like LACC, where students are pursuing careers in music, cinema, and theater. Another idea he offered is acquiring neighboring vacant motels and providing jobs for students who are studying property management in their degree program.

“We need to come up with solutions now so the students don't have housing insecurities to deal with and worry about right now,” Johnson II said. As a gay man and a person of color, Johnson II told LAist, he wants to be a voice for students or those afraid to speak up.

He appreciated LACCD’s plan to build new housing, but considered it a piecemeal approach to the larger problem. “So let's just try to figure out what other solutions and avenues that we can look at to provide solutions,” he said.

Students call for immediate housing and support  

One participant, who has worked in residential real estate, said that these projects can take a decade, and recommended alternatives to building housing, such as purchasing from neighboring landowners. Hernandez noted later the risk of displacing residents.

The bureaucratic logistics caused frustration.

“Students are being robbed of their capacity to learn because they're too worried about just keeping a roof over their head,” said Jordan David, who is studying political science and is president of the organization Student Power. The organization also called for immediate housing solutions, post-graduation housing support, and student oversight in the planning process.

Reginald Johnson II sleeps on the Metro B line on his was into school at Los Angeles City College.

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Brian Feinzimer

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One student, who has been homeless while at LACC, asked if the student housing could be accompanied with supportive services. “Because a lot of the students you're going to bring in are probably experiencing homelessness, housing insecurity, trauma from their communities. Because we also have to acknowledge that a lot of homelessness is birthed in racism and prejudiced practices. And so there are specific communities that you're really going to have to support because of that,” the student said to echoes of agreement from others.

Smith, the chief facilities executive, said housing policies are still being developed and LACCD will seek further input as part of its shared governance process.

One law faculty member, Camille Goulet, whose e-mail comments were read by another, also asked for funding to be budgeted for support services, like health and wellness and security, and raised concerns about the risk of people enrolling as students for housing without sincere academic intentions.

Speaking later to LAist, trustee Hernandez said, “You can hear the frustration in the voices of students that, you know, their needs are not being served. As an educator, like, I know very well that we can't serve students, we can't help them attain their educational goals if they don't have their basic needs. And so we are doing everything that we can at the district to provide for that.”

Many students need housing, but who will get it? 

Participants at Pierce were concerned about who would be eligible for the future housing.

The presenters said that the selection criteria were still to be determined, but were planning for an initial phase:

• Single students (with plans later to account for families and workers)
• Full-time students
• Those with a minimum 2.0 GPA

Pierce participants expressed concern about the confines of this criteria — what about students with families that need housing, can this topic be revisited? Do you really need to be a full-time student? What if $500 a month is still too expensive? And what is the consequence if a student’s GPA falls below 2.0 because of a job’s demanding hours or a mental health crisis — will they just get kicked out?

When asked by LAist how to prioritize the students, one of the participants, sociology professor James McKeever, said: “We need to look at our foster youth, we need to look at our homeless students, our housing insecure students, those who come from low income backgrounds first, because we're not going to have enough housing for everybody at this cost.”

The stress of housing insecurity

Jessica McCready, a cinema and television student who has previously been unhoused, attended the LACC town hall to learn about what was going on. While she appreciated the efforts to build housing — at this town hall, an eight-year timeframe was mentioned — she said she wants to see another convening to address more immediate needs.

“We had this meeting and we're talking about what's going to happen in eight years, but now, OK, let's have another and talk about maybe what's going to happen in six months to a year," she said. "I feel like that's a really, really useful, use of time. I think that's where we need to start.”

Rachel Alberto-Gomez is a deaf studies student at the Pierce town hall, whose health professor encouraged students to attend. In that class, the students discussed the relationship between mental health and housing.

Alberto-Gomez said they talked about “the stress of housing, how it causes us to be overwhelmed, not be able to perform, and to get the necessary education that we want.”

Alberto-Gomez hopes that future housing will offer sufficient security for students. She told LAist security is important to her from her experience as a woman walking alone to her car at night or waiting for the bus in the morning, which can feel scary and unsafe.

She knows quite a few students sleeping in their cars and appreciates that Pierce College has opened up its parking lot to unhoused students. She says housing is important for these students, but also for everybody, including herself.

“Luckily, right now, I'm OK, but in the future ... I don't know what the future holds,” Alberto-Gomez said. Currently, she depends on her partner for housing and her family lives far away. “And especially with, right now, as prices are increasing, housing is also increasing. So this program would really help us.”

L.A.’s homeless services agency has not completed any internal audits in years — and one that was started two years ago is still incomplete because management is taking months to provide responses, officials said Monday.

The delayed audit has been looking into why the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, failed to spend $7 million in federal dollars it was granted to house and serve people in need. The roughly six-page audit report hasn’t been released because it’s missing LAHSA management responses that were requested over two months ago, officials said.

Internal audits are considered critically important to protecting taxpayer dollars at every level of government. L.A. County auditors, for example, issued about 100 reports in a recent fiscal year.

“ We haven’t gotten anything,” said Erum Shahnawaz, LAHSA’s chief internal auditor, referring to the lack of response from LAHSA management at a meeting of the agency’s audit committee on Monday.

“That’s the only thing that's holding us from issuing the final report,” Shahnawaz said of the underspending audit.

That audit is examining a repeat problem. A previous, external audit in January 2022 found LAHSA had left $3.5 million in federal grants on the table by not using them.

Shahnawaz flagged management’s delays to the LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa, Szlasa said. He chairs the commission’s audit committee, and has repeatedly called out LAHSA executives’ delays in providing information about taxpayer spending over the past year.

“ I've been trying to intervene and use whatever I can to try to help provide support,” said Szlasa as he described his attempts to get the auditor the answers needed to complete the report.

Szlasa was appointed to the commission by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

 “It shouldn't take us two months to receive a…management response to an internal audit,” Szlasa said at Monday’s meeting. He said the industry standard for internal audits is eight or nine weeks from start to finish. That compares to the two years — and counting — for LAHSA’s federal underspend audit.

“We haven't had a single internal audit completed here in the last couple of years, which is nuts,” Szlasa added. He called for internal audits to happen much more frequently.

Long delays to LAHSA audits also are not new. In November 2024, the county issued a widely-seen audit that included findings that LAHSA was failing to complete internal audits.

Half of LAHSA’s governing commission is appointed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and half appointed by each of the five county supervisors. Bass is also the only elected official on the commission. She served on the audit committee for several months last fall. Records show she was absent for all of the meetings during that time.

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said management’s responses to the audit on underspending haven’t been provided yet because LAHSA leadership did not have clearly defined roles for who is supposed to coordinate responses to internal audits.

“ We need to work on clarifying that role internally,” Lim said.

 “The last two months have been probably some of the most stress-filled two months that we've had at LAHSA,” said Paul Rubenstein, chief of staff to LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neil, pointing to mass layoffs.

Szlasa said there’s not that much in the audit for management to respond to.

“It's like, six pages or less,” he said.

Szlasa said  another option is to “just say we've asked management for responses and we're awaiting management response. We can publish the results.”

In response, Shahnawaz said that if management doesn't have an updated timeline for a response, then she’ll go ahead and issue the report without the response.

Once they floated that idea, Lim committed to providing the responses by next Tuesday.

LAHSA’s leadership has downsized the internal audit team — dropping from a staff of three to just one in the agency’s proposed budget up for approval Friday.

Delays in getting access to financial records

The delayed responses from management are not the only thing that’s been slowing down audits, Szlasa said at the meeting.

LAHSA policy, approved by its governing commission, says internal auditors are “ authorized to access all organizational records, personnel, and systems necessary for conducting audits,” he said.

But the auditor has faced challenges in actually getting that access, Szlasa said — including delays in being allowed to view LAHSA’s databases that show contracts and financial payments.

 ”We finally were granted access, but it wasn't, it wasn't easy, it wasn't immediate. It was slow,” Szlasa said.

Many failed outside audits

The delays on the internal audit come even after LAHSA failed multiple external audits in recent years, which have found the agency — overseen by city and county elected officials — has neglected to properly track billions of dollars in spending.

Largely in response to earlier audits, L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from LAHSA and are having the county instead oversee it directly. L.A.’s mayor and City Council have continued to have LAHSA manage the city’s homeless spending while the council delays plans to start studying a possible plan to transition away city tax dollars.

Signatures under scrutiny

LAHSA is also in the midst of a different internal audit — expected to finish in late August or early September — examining whether top officials followed requirements when signing contracts and letting others sign. It was launched in the wake of LAist reporting that found LAHSA’s then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum’s signature finalized a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer.

LAist also discovered Adams Kellum’s signature, as LAHSA’s CEO at the time, finalized a quarter-million-dollar contract between LAHSA and a longtime service provider she led up until two months earlier.

That contract was signed so soon after she left the service provider — St. Joseph Center — that the contract paperwork still listed her as one of St. Joseph Center’s points of contact and authorized signers.

She is currently under a state ethics investigation into whether her actions were an illegal conflict of interest.

When Bengara opened in Los Angeles' Arts District earlier this year, its owner and head chef had something special lined up in their kitchen arsenal.

It was genshiyaki, a rare traditional Japanese grilling method that dates back 1,500 years.

Chef and co-owner Tyler Burges had only encountered it once while traveling in Japan at a robatayaki spot in Fukuoka, a port city on the island of Kyushu.

Robatayaki, a style of slow, ember-cooked grilling rooted in Japan's rural coastal kitchens, usually centers on an open charcoal hearth. But the restaurant Burges visited had something even more noteworthy: a genshiyaki pit, a gentler, ambient method of cooking that uses radiant heat instead of direct flame.

Loving the unusually subtle, delicate flavor and texture it produced, he and head chef Phil Mireles decided to bring genshiyaki back to the U.S. and build their Arts District restaurant around it. The genshiyaki pit is a rare enough technique that Burges had to work with fabricator Phil Roxworthy for six months just to get the grill built to spec.

It's Burges' and Mireles' first L.A. project. The pair are also behind Smoke Door, their acclaimed Lake Tahoe restaurant, and Bengara brings a more casual, day-to-day take on the same fire-driven cooking.

All roads lead to the Arts District

Chef/owner Tyler Burges (left) and head chef Phil Mireles at Bengara.

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Wonho Frank Lee

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Courtesy Bengara

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Burges and Mireles both got their start at San Francisco's Saison and Angler under chef Joshua Skenes — who's now just down the street in L.A. at LYNX with fellow alum Brandyn Tepper.

Burges traces Bengara's DNA back to two mentors: Ron Siegel, who introduced him to Japanese ingredients and technique in his mid-20s, and Skenes, who taught him to cook with live fire. It was Skenes, Burges said, who showed him that fire didn't have to mean char and bravado.

"The one thing I loved about wood-fire cooking is you get this subtle, sweet barbecue flavor when you cook correctly over embers, and you don't cook directly over the fire," Burges said. "Most places, when you think about grilling something, you think of char, bold flavors, masculine flavors. But Chef Josh — it's like a master art, getting really delicate, subtle flavor using that grill method."

The uni kiritampo, Bengara's take on a traditional Akita-prefecture rice skewer, finished with scallion.

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Wono Frank Lee

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Courtesy Bengara

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What sets the food apart

Take their luscious miso cod. On a normal grill, the marinade's sugars would blacken before the fish cooked through. On the genshiyaki pit, the cod sits at a distance from the embers, cooking gently until the very end, when it's given one last pass directly over the coals — what Burges describes as a final "kiss" of heat before it hits the plate.

To fuel genshiyaki's slower, ambient style, ordinary charcoal or wood is replaced with binchotan, an ultra-dense, pure-carbon hardwood charcoal traditionally made in Japan, which burns hotter and cleaner.

The signature dish

A perfect example of how this cooking style comes together is the uni kiritampo, the Akita prefecture rice skewer, reimagined with uni and cooked via genshiyaki — born of an offhand kitchen conversation with one of the restaurant's Japanese chefs about regional dishes cooked over fire.

Once they realized genshiyaki was the dish's original, historic cooking method, the rest fell into place.

"It's like the most delicious thing," Burges said. "I don't know why it never made it over to the United States earlier."

Bengara's Arts District dining room pairs industrial bones with warm, low lighting and long communal tables.

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Wonho Frank Lee

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Courtesy Bengara

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The chewy exterior, with just a hint of smoke, gives way to a creamy inside, like a caramelized custard, that’s topped with a decadent amount of uni, providing a semi-sweet finish — one memorable bite.

Tasting menu option

Bengara recently added a daily eight-course tasting menu ($98) that doubles as a greatest-hits tour of the kitchen — Toyosu carpaccio with chili coffee oil, pork belly "tacos" wrapped in mochi crepes, miso cod, Mary's half chicken, and handmade citrus soba, with optional wagyu and uni add-ons.

The price includes a beverage pairing, with a full non-alcoholic option alongside the boozy version. Walk-ins are welcome, and reservations can be booked via OpenTable.

Topline:

Why it matters: Museum officials said you will “likely experience high demand and long wait times in the queue" and thanked people for their patience.

LAist saw estimated wait times up to 6 hours, and it took a little more than 4.5 hours for this reporter to get through. On the bright side, there were still plenty of tickets left, including for the first day. Do not refresh the page or you may lose your spot.

The details: All tickets are timed entry. Tickets are $25 for adults and $21 for those 65 and older. Children, members, active-duty military, personal aides or attendants and EBT cardholders have free entry. Museum neighbors in the LM37 program will also be free, with that pass opening in August.

But how do I buy: Each person is limited to nine tickets, and you’ll have 20 minutes to check out once they’re added to your cart, according to the museum. You can find the link here.

What's next: The grand opening is Sept. 22.

Go deeper: How to secure Lucas Museum of Narrative Art tickets ahead of the fall opening

Inglewood officials are working on a full rewrite of the city map for the first time in nearly 40 years, laying out how they want the city to grow and change for the next two decades.

Along part of Manchester Boulevard, city planners are setting up an option for developers to rebuild rows of small storefronts with a mix of homes and commercial space. On La Brea Avenue, south of Centinela Avenue, they envision the possibility of dense housing and business blocks as high as six stories.

Jerome Johnson, an Inglewood local, said he’s lived through three decades of change in the city. He recalled watching a “raggedy market” at the corner of La Brea and Centinela make way for the two-story shopping center that’s there today. He said the potential developments around the intersection could be a catch-22.

“There’s a shortage of housing,” Johnson said. “But you don’t want it to turn into New York City.”

It’s all part of the ongoing process for Inglewood’s new general plan, the foundational guide that governs things like what kind of buildings can be built where in the city and how they need to look. A draft land-use plan will go before the Inglewood City Council on Tuesday, then go into the environmental impact review process.

“This is really a historic milestone for the city,” Bernard McCrumby, Inglewood development services director, told The LA Local. 

McCrumby said planners are aiming to open up room for new housing and to revitalize some of the city’s flagging business corridors, without changing the city’s existing residential blocks or sacrificing the grocery stores, barbershops and local restaurants that make neighborhoods tick.

“The stadiums and arenas are here, they’re not going anywhere,” McCrumby said. “Now we can plan around those.”

The last time the city did a full update of its general plan was 1987, when horses were still racing at Hollywood Park and the “Showtime” Lakers were winning championships at the Forum. Edward Vincent Jr., the city’s first Black mayor, had only been in office for four years. 

The city has made intermittent updates to its planning guidelines since then — notably remapping a band of Inglewood along the Metro K line before it opened — but city documents indicate planners spent the past couple years working on a comprehensive rewrite. 

The new update to the general plan could set the city’s direction until 2050.

Planners hope to change some of the city’s commercial corridors into mixed-use zones that allow for housing and businesses alongside each other or even stacked on top of each other.

Those zones could go in place along Century Boulevard and Arbor Vitae Street as well as Manchester, Centinela and La Brea.

The rest of the update, McCrumby said, is aimed at lining the city’s zoning regulations up with state law and the city’s current reality on the ground.

City staff held several community meetings over the last year as they put together the draft and still aren’t done gathering feedback. 

The next year will see at least one more community meeting and a 45-day public review period, according to city documents. McCrumby said that, with the anchor of the land-use map in place, planners will continue to work on the rest of the general plan, targeting final City Council approval of the plan and accompanying environmental impact report next spring.

You can get all the details on the general plan at nextlevelinglewood.com and attend the City Council meeting at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to give a public comment.

We also want to know what you think of the proposed changes. Email isaiah@thelalocal.org with your questions or thoughts.