The Brief

Restaurant owner Sonia Contreras is on a first name basis with countless SpaceX employees who frequently dine at the Fabulous Grill in Hawthorne. Her business is located just a block from the company’s headquarters near Crenshaw and El Segundo Boulevard.

But Contreras said she was shocked last week to learn that billionaire Elon Musk is planning to move SpaceX headquarters to Texas. Business has been slow since the pandemic, but her relationship with its employees has helped keep the lights on in recent years. Her staff occasionally wears SpaceX shirts that were gifted to them by a loyal customer from the company.

“It’s scary because I have a lot of business with them,” she said. “If they leave, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

Musk announced last Tuesday that he plans to move SpaceX from Hawthorne to the company’s rocket launch site called Starbase in Texas, a move that could have big implications for small businesses that have come to rely on the thousands of people who work at the site.

How we got here

The Tesla founder said his decision to move comes after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change, calling it the “final straw.”

But the governor’s office says Musk was already planning to leave San Francisco before Newsom announced he was signing the law. His company, Tesla, recently expanded in California, moving its research and development back to the state and opening a second HQ in Palo Alto.

Newsom responded to Musk’s plans to leave the state with a post on X, saying “You bent the knee,” along with a screenshot of a social media post from former President Donald Trump that includes a photo of the two posing together in the Oval Office.

Sonia Contreras, owner of Fabulous Grill in Hawthorne, said customers from SpaceX come in to eat almost every day.

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Courtesy Sonia Contreras

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How Hawthorne became home

Musk started SpaceX in 2002, which has since grown to roughly 13,000 employees. It relocated from several offices in El Segundo and Los Angeles to one giant warehouse near Hawthorne Municipal Airport in 2008, according to the Daily Breeze.

Hawthorne Mayor Alex Vargas highlights the city’s relationship with SpaceX in his official bio, saying “businesses are constantly looking to relocate to Hawthorne, with SpaceX and the Hawthorne Airport corridor as the key point of synergy.”

When reached by phone, a representative of the mayor’s office said the city had no immediate comment on Musk’s decision.

In 2017, SpaceX made a deal to stay in Hawthorne through 2022 as long as the city reduced certain taxes on the business. The agreement included a $260,000 cap on annual business license fees. That allowed the company to maintain a flat tax rate as it grew larger.

According to the Daily Breeze, the Hawthorne deal also included a “corporate citizenship” clause that allowed the city to use the SpaceX logo for its own branding, and encouraged the company to engage with schools and community events.

As of June, SpaceX was valued at $210 billion, making it the world's second most valuable startup. The news broke one day after the company secured a nearly $1 billion NASA contract to decommission and de-orbit the International Space Station in 2030.

What to expect

SpaceX's footprint in Hawthorne and Southern California is huge, experts said, so moving to Texas will be complicated and not overnight.

“You don’t just shutter and walk away from a major aerospace facility without thinking super seriously," said Peter Westwick, who teaches history at University of Southern California.

He described the region as the “global epicenter of aviation and aerospace for the last hundred years.” Now, supply shops for equipment are readily available for companies like SpaceX, and employees have become accustomed to certain lifestyles in Southern California that they may not want to leave.

That's what people like Jasmine Chang, a manager at Vicky’s Donuts in Hawthorne, is hoping for. She described SpaceX employees as “regulars,” who can be easily identified by the company T-shirts they wear to work. The donut shop is located about a mile away from its headquarters.

“If they’re (SpaceX) here, it’s a lot better for us," Chang said.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
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Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.