The Brief

Los Angeles County health officials are investigating a localized outbreak of flea-borne typhus in Wilshire Center, a dense area that overlaps with Koreatown. Seven people have been diagnosed so far, according to officials.

Six of the seven people were hospitalized, though all have recovered, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced on Tuesday.

The incident is the second reported typhus outbreak in the county this year and comes less than two months after health officials warned of the first outbreak in Pico Union. Five people were diagnosed, hospitalized and eventually recovered, according to health officials.

While the latest outbreak is in Wilshire Center, the Department of Public Health says the risk of flea-borne typhus is countywide. The county has reported 109 cases so far this year. 

The department said, “cases occur across the county and among people with a range of housing and socioeconomic circumstances.” 

Flea-borne typhus is caused by bacteria spread by infected fleas, which can be carried by rats, free-roaming cats, opossums and other wildlife. People can become infected when flea feces enter cuts or scrapes or come into contact with the eyes. The illness does not spread from person to person.

Symptoms typically appear within one to two weeks and can include fever, headache, body aches, nausea, vomiting and a rash. The illness can be treated with antibiotics, particularly when diagnosed early.

Los Angeles County reported a record 220 cases in 2025, up from 187 in 2024. People of all ages can become infected.

The Department of Public Health is urging residents, including those in Koreatown and surrounding neighborhoods, to take steps to reduce their exposure to fleas. 

“Community members can help protect themselves and their neighbors by keeping pets on flea control year-round, rodent proofing their homes and making sure wildlife cannot live in or around their homes,” Muntu Davis, Los Angeles County Health Officer, said in a statement. 

Residents should also keep trash in tightly closed containers, avoid leaving pet food outdoors, clear debris and overgrown vegetation from yards and seal openings where animals could enter or nest.

Anyone who develops symptoms, particularly after possible exposure to fleas or animals that may carry them, should seek medical care promptly.

More information is available through the county’s flea-borne typhus prevention and information page.

The post Flea-borne typhus outbreak reported in Koreatown as cases in LA County rise appeared first on LA Local.

Insurance companies are starting to write new policies in California again after years of holding back as wildfire risk climbed higher.

The state Insurance Department says that means outgoing Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s new regulations, intended to boost insurance availability, are working. Each time a company declares its plans to sell policies again, the department touts it as a win. But the state has not released the number of new policies the companies have written so far.

Enter Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that often butts heads with the department. It released an estimate of new policy commitments: 12,189 since January 2025, when Lara’s so-called sustainable insurance strategy went into effect. The strategy allows insurers to use catastrophe modeling, which they say more adequately takes risk into account because it includes forward-looking models, and to factor in reinsurance costs when setting their rates.

Consumer Watchdog, whose numbers come from combing through insurance companies’ rate filings, says that number is low, considering insurers have requested or secured $571 million in rate increases under the new regulations.

The insurance department disagrees with the group’s analysis, saying it intends to release its own data and analysis, and discounting the group’s numbers as “incomplete and premature.”

Ben Armstrong, Consumer Watchdog’s actuary, is tracking voluminous but publicly available rate filings. He looked at insurers’ statements about the number of new policies they promise to write, and compared the new filings with each company’s previous rate filings. Armstrong told CalMatters it’s “not an exact science” because the filings mention commitments, not actual sales, and in some cases don’t include an exact timeline.

The new rules allow insurers to factor in catastrophe models and their reinsurance costs as long as they commit to increasing sales in high-risk areas. Of the 10 companies that requested rate increases under the new rules, only five have committed to selling more policies, the group’s analysis shows.

The regulations call for insurance companies to choose one of these options: Write 85% of their market share in high-risk areas; grow their policies 5% in such areas; or increase their number of policies 5% by taking customers out of the FAIR Plan. Some of the companies that have requested or secured rate increases claim they already meet the 85% threshold.

“What we’re looking at is the reality right now for Californians who have been saddled with rate hikes for the promise of more policies in the future,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.

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

Wearing shiny heels, a thrifted dress and a red rose in her hair, Deoujahne Darc belted out an original song on a small, makeshift stage in the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

“I saw the Lord in the face of a homeless man,” she sang, as the crowd swayed along.

The 26-year-old’s performance was one of many at what’s believed to be Skid Row’s first talent show on Saturday, featuring song and dance from a dozen homeless or formerly homeless performers.

The downtown LA neighborhood has one of the largest homeless encampments in the U.S., with approximately 45,000 homeless people this year. While Skid Row has become synonymous with abject poverty, the several dozen blocks of tents and debris is just a few blocks away from upscale restaurants, office skyscrapers and tourist destinations.null

Many of the performers sang or rapped songs they had written themselves. One performer read Scripture from the Bible that he was particularly moved by. Another covered a rap song to honor a friend who died from gun violence. While some passersby only stopped to grab food, others stayed to clap or sing along as the mood changed with a lively rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

At one point, a fight broke out outside — as they often do on Skid Row — but the performers inside the church didn’t seem to notice. Right outside an entrance decorated with white-and-gold balloons, mounds of trash bags and cardboard boxes piled up on the street corner. A man slept through the commotion on a pile of cushions on the ground, hiding from the heat in the shade of the building.

Ladelle Handy performs during Skid Row’s inaugural talent show in downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026.

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Performing to honor the memory of his mother

Ladelle Handy, 45, opted to sing and dance to an original song. He spun and moved around on stage wearing a leather jacket over a sleek blazer, confidence emanating as the crowd cheered. His friends grooved along to the music and gave him a hug when he finished.

Handy grew up dancing in Chicago and moved to LA to pursue a music career 10 years ago, but has been homeless since he was evicted in February.

During his time on Skid Row, he slipped into drug use and depression, he said, and he wasn’t sure if he would even perform last weekend because things weren’t going well. But he was energized by the other performers and knew he had to get on stage.

His performance Saturday was dedicated to his mother, who was killed in Chicago in 2001, he said.

“Showcasing my gift that is a God-given talent, I know I have it,” Handy said. “I just wanted to make sure that the world remembers that I have it.”

Judges Teressa Percell, from left, Rev. Gary Carr and evangelist Geraldine Hughes share a laugh while talking to a contestant during Skid Row’s inaugural talent show in downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026.

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A pastor wanted to celebrate the talent on Skid Row

The talent show was organized by Rev. Gary Carr, who holds a weekly service in the area at Lifeway Church and saw that the residents of the community had more to offer than what Skid Row has come to represent.

“People give up on the disenfranchised, thinking that they’re worthless,” Carr said. “They have value, and through the talent show today you can see — it’s a life story there, it’s a struggle.”

Carr came up with the idea to highlight people’s talents with a sister church, which helped sponsor the event. They knew another local pastor’s weekly open mic was popular among the residents, and there would be many interested in performing.

They selected winners who would continue to meet regularly to develop their talents and put together a performance for Easter.

“This is an avenue to a new beginning,” Carr said.

A contestant who goes by the nickname Lil Bit performs during Skid Row’s inaugural talent show in downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026.

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The 69-year-old said he had been homeless himself for nearly 30 years, spending time on the streets between spending time in prison. In 2009, he said he was called into the ministry.

While Carr became a pastor and worked at the Union Rescue Mission, one of the oldest shelters in the city, many of his friends remain homeless.

He reminds them, and others that come to him, that there’s still hope.

“These people really know me, they knew me when I’m at my worst,” he said. “And they know what the Lord has done in my life.”

Deoujahne Darc, center right, is congratulated by Bok Seo, a volunteer from a local Korean church, after winning first prize at Skid Row’s inaugural talent show in downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026.

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A performer hopes to touch the world with her song

For Darc, the Skid Row stage was a platform for her to share her music and inspire others who have gone through similar struggles.

She was born and raised in Los Angeles and ended up homeless in Oregon after a troubled relationship. With the help of a domestic violence shelter, she returned to California. She spent more than a year and a half on the streets and at a women’s shelter before she found stable housing.

“This is the realest I’ve seen people be, the good, the bad, the ugly,” Darc said.

Even the green dress she wore for her performance had significance — it was one of the first pieces of clothing she purchased with a friend at a Goodwill when she landed in a shelter in California. Finding housing and buying the dress felt like being a mermaid coming onto land from the ocean, she said.

“Like I just had to learn to walk again,” she said.

Darc has been singing since she was 4 years old and said she has self-produced seven albums.

She performed her original song, “Grace & Mercy,” to show others that everyone is deserving of such virtues as fellow humans, and she wants her voice to be able to heal others, she said.

“Instead of me speaking I’d rather just put it into the pen, put it into my music and give it to the world that way,” Darc said.

DeAndre Owens reacts as he watches a contestant perform during Skid Row’s inaugural talent show in downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026.

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Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, was sentenced in Manhattan to 15 years in prison Wednesday for a felony sex crime in another #MeToo reckoning.

Weinstein’s sentencing for sexually assaulting one-time TV production assistant Miriam Haley followed a legal odyssey spanning more than six years. His 2020 conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court, citing testimony from other women whose allegations weren’t part of the case. A second jury found Weinstein guilty again at a retrial last year.

Once among the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, Weinstein was an Oscar-winning producer whose hits included “Shakespeare in Love,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Chocolat.” But his downfall came quickly after sexual assault allegations in 2017 set off the #MeToo movement.

Weinstein, 74, is expected to appeal. He is now likely to remain behind bars until at least his late 80s. He has denied raping or sexually assaulting anyone. Seated in a wheelchair, he was quickly wheeled out of the courtroom after the sentencing, while some of his accusers hugged and brushed away tears.

Weinstein and his victim both spoke in court

Weinstein faced up to 25 years in prison for sexually assaulting Haley at his Manhattan apartment in 2006. He has already served more than six years as his case has cycled again and again through the criminal justice system. Haley gave her account of the assault at two trials, and addressed the court Wednesday just before Weinstein was sentenced.

“Having been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has had a devastating effect on my life and sense of security that may never go away. Making the decision to speak up will have me looking over my shoulder for years to come,” Haley said. “It’s a life sentence for me.”

“I’ve been further traumatized in exercising my right to hold him accountable. All of this traces back to his actions,” she said, adding that she thought about ending her pursuit of justice many times.

Minutes later, Weinstein apologized in court to those he may have hurt. “I do have remorse for Miriam Haley’s pain, but I have to reiterate my innocence,” he told the judge.

Judge Curtis Farber said Weinstein was once a king in the movie industry, “but recognition for these achievements will pale in comparison to what you did.”

He said Weinstein is now known as “a sexual predator, the literal face of the MeToo movement.”

Why Weinstein is being sentenced a second time

Weinstein was originally sentenced to 23 years in prison after a jury convicted him of assaulting Haley and raping an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, in 2013.

Tried for a second time last year, he was again convicted of a first-degree criminal sex act for assaulting Haley, who has also gone by the name Mimi Haleyi. In a messy split verdict, the jury acquitted him of forcibly performing oral sex on another woman, Kaja Sokola, and could not reach a verdict on a rape charge involving Mann.

“I will be proven innocent. That I promise you,” Weinstein told The Hollywood Reporter in a jailhouse interview in March.

After another retrial ended in a hung jury in May, Manhattan prosecutors dropped the rape charge rather than pursue a fourth trial after Mann said she could not bear to testify again. That decision cleared the way for Weinstein’s sentencing.

Weinstein’s health issues pushed the defense to ask for leniency

Defense lawyer Jacob Kaplan asked that Weinstein receive a sentence of three more years on top of the six years he’s already served, saying a longer sentence would make it more likely that Weinstein dies in prison.

Weinstein is in failing health and has been in the hospital six times since 2025, Kaplan said, while dealing with blood cancer, congestive heart failure, and kidney issues.

Weinstein is also awaiting resentencing in a separate rape case in Los Angeles. A California appeals court upheld the 2022 conviction but threw out his original 16-year sentence because the judge had considered his New York convictions — that were later thrown out — as an aggravating factor.

After shuffling between state prison, where he tested positive for COVID-19 early in the pandemic, and New York City’s notorious Rikers Island complex, the ailing Weinstein is now housed at a medical unit for jail inmates at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

His health issues in recent years have included chronic myeloid leukemia, diabetes and walking difficulties, his lawyers said. Two years ago, he underwent emergency surgery to remove fluid on his heart and lungs.

Haley describes the assault that led to Weinstein’s conviction

Haley, 49, is a former entertainment producer now working in advertising.

Born in Finland and raised in Sweden, she said she met Weinstein through a mutual connection and worked briefly as a production assistant on a reality competition show that he produced, “Project Runway.”

Haley said she accepted an invitation to visit Weinstein’s Manhattan apartment because it would have been odd to decline since she was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles the next day on his company’s dime to attend a film premiere.

After she and Weinstein briefly chatted on his living room sofa, he lunged to kiss her, she testified. She said she leaped up and rebuffed him, but he grabbed her, forcibly backed her into a bedroom and sexually assaulted her, ignoring her pleas to stop.

She recalled Weinstein asking, “Don’t you think we’re much closer now?” after either the alleged assault or a subsequent occasion when she says she had unwanted, but not forced, sex with him.

She also recalled telling him after the second encounter, “You know you can’t keep doing this.”

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Haley, Sokola and Mann have done.

___

Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

Tanner “The Planner" Blackman does not swing hammers or lay foundations. He does not raise funds or finesse land deals. He does not draft blueprints, write contracts, test soil conditions or calculate the varied seismic loads that a new building can sustain.

Blackman’s job is a mostly under the radar, but often indispensable, fixture of California’s urban housing market: He helps people get their building projects approved.

So-called land-use consultants and permit expediters are wayfinders of bureaucracy, sherpas of red tape. If the left hand of a city’s building safety department doesn't know what the right hand of its sanitation bureau is doing, the expediter's job is to pull them into a handshake.

Such services are not in demand everywhere in California. Wherever the path from preliminary application to permit issued is so costly, tedious and unpredictable that developers and desperate homeowners are willing to pay someone else to endure the journey on their behalf, expediters flourish. Los Angeles is one of those places. It’s also where Blackman does most of his work, even though he lives in San Diego.

And yes, he feels a little weird about all of this.

Speaking over Zoom, Blackman wears glasses, a Dodgers hat and the ironic grin of a self-described former urban planning “do-gooder.” As an example of the duties his job sometimes entails, he recounts a recent trip to Los Angeles.

Projects located in L.A.’s hillside neighborhoods require special municipal permission to have dirt taken away. The project Blackman represents is not in a hillside neighborhood, but it is on a road that passes through one, which evidently amounts to the same thing. A city board had approved an earlier dirt removal plan but with allowable hauling hours so narrow the developer estimates the dirt removal would drag on an additional six weeks. Rather than go back to the board, Blackman had to take his case to city council, arguing against this previously approved dirt plan in order to revise it.

Because of course he did.

“This whole stupid thing, we had to do this fire drill, get a bunch of extra billable hours for people like me,” he said. “In a perfect world, my job would not need to exist.”

Los Angeles, like many of California’s big cities, is far from Blackman’s perfect world. The state grapples with some of the most expensive housing in the country. For decades, many experts have pointed to the cumbersome and unpredictable pace of getting new homes approved in our desirable metros as one of, if not the, major cause of our housing affordability woes.

State lawmakers have tried to speed things up. They’ve passed dozens of bills aimed at simplifying residential development over the last decade.

But even though Blackman profits off of the regulatory wrinkles that this legislative blitz is supposed to have smoothed out, the new rules don't keep him up at night. Yes, state laws have created new pathways to speedily approve new housing. But there’s still plenty of work out there finding ways to design and coax projects to fit onto those pathways.

“This just creates a new space for us to fight around,” he said.

Meet the fixer

Blackman didn’t set out to become a project pusher.

Fresh out of graduate school, he got a job with the Los Angeles Planning Department and spent most of his five years there studying possible changes to municipal policy. It was illuminating work, but disillusioning too. “After having been inside the beast for a while, I was less convinced that I was on the side of good,” he said. “I felt like the villain in a Kafka novel.”

He landed his first consulting gig in 2015 where he found the work more compatible with his personality. “I’m better at finding the loopholes rather than being the guy who can keep the boat afloat.”

The work goes by a number of different names, which vary by location and speciality. “Land use consultant” is one you’d most like to have on your business card, conferring a degree of cerebral respectability and an expertise in zoning, environmental review and the overlapping complexities of state and local law most relevant at the early “entitlement” stage of development.

Then there’s “permit expediter,” a title that connotes the more lowly trade of assembling the right papers in the right order and pushing them from one city clerk’s window to another.

In fact, Blackman does both jobs. He’s also a registered lobbyist, as are most members of his professional tribe in Los Angeles. He describes his work as “kind of like a lawyer but cheaper” and “project manager,” though not in the corporate sort of way. Tanner Blackman will also accept merely “planner” — “it helps to have a job that rhymes with your name.”

In the plainest of English, he’s a regulatory real estate fixer. Lucky for him, there’s plenty of demand for fixers in Los Angeles. Getting a project okayed is no simple task.

Tanner Blackman works in his home office in San Diego on Sept. 21, 2026. Tanner is a land use consultant who helps clients navigate through paperwork and permits to get housing building projects approved.

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Adriana Heldiz

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First a project will often need permission, in general terms, to use a particular piece of land in a particular way — to build a house of a certain size or an apartment building of a specified height. In the City of Los Angeles, that entitlement process, overseen by the planning department, takes an average of 8.5 months, according to data collected by the state housing department. But it can take much longer than that. The project Blackman needed the haul route permit for was stuck in entitlement for nearly five years.

After the thumbs up from planning comes a gauntlet of project-specific approvals. Can the proposed building withstand an earthquake? Will it be vulnerable to fire? Does it comply with state and local energy efficiency standards? Is it accessible to those with disabilities? Do trees need to be added to the site? Removed? All of these questions require an answer and every answer comes in the form of a permit.

That’s assuming you know how to get them in the first place.

A typical project might include 25 separate reviews and clearances, said Gary Benjamin, another L.A-based consultant, who spoke to CalMatters earlier this year. “If you aren’t someone like myself who has navigated this process multiple times, you may not even know who to contact,” he said.

Putting a price on permitting

Such complexity is why the City of Los Angeles hosts a thriving market in “ready-to-issue” parcels, plots of bare land that have undergone all the regulatory prep work necessary to build something, but which are physically untouched. From the sidewalk, a vacant lot with the coveted “RTI” designation would look identical to the same one without it. On paper, the RTI plot is months, if not years further down the approval pipeline.

That makes it much more valuable.

In a recent study, two economists compared the sales prices of lots before and after they’d received the “ready-to-issue” label. Across Los Angeles County, they found, such a state of regulatory readiness adds about 50% to the raw land value.

To put that in perspective, imagine a typical $1.5 million patch of development-primed dirt. Only $1 million of that price reflects the value of the actual land, according to the study. The remaining $500,000 comes from the value of not having to wade through the local review process — and pay insurance, property tax and interest payments while you wait.

That, according to the authors, is the price tag on LA’s approval process.

Which helps explain why people like Blackman can charge tens of thousands of dollars to the developers, builders and landowners who can afford their services.

“Those jobs exist only because we’ve made the process really difficult,” said Evan Soltas, the Princeton economist who co-authored the paper with Harvard’s Jonathan Gruber. “It’s a sad statement of how hard it's become that this has become its own form of expertise.”

What’s the hold up?

Not all delays are created equal.

If one city is especially slow at turning around a set of building permits, that might reflect the fact that it’s especially tricky to build there. Doing heavy construction around existing buildings and infrastructure is going to be inherently more complicated — and may warrant a finer-tooth regulatory once-over — than building the same thing on an untouched plot of exurban farmland.

In many of California’s large cities “a lot of the work is adjusting and fixing and readapting older buildings, which is much different from building something ground up,” said Andrew Junius, a partner at the Bay Area real estate law firm Reuben, Junius & Rose. “This isn’t like making cookies. Every project is different. Every building is different.”

But a city’s permitting process can also reflect its specific policy choices. In Los Angeles most projects with 50 units or more get an extra vetting by the planning department thanks to a city ordinance from 1990. This can add months, if not years, to the development process, which may explain the high number of 49-unit apartment buildings in the city.

Sluggish approvals can also reflect no policy choice at all. In San Francisco no single entity is responsible for making sure that the various regulatory nodes of government talk to one another.

“It just evolved that way, there was no grand design at the beginning,” said Fred Brousseau, a partner with Harvey M. Rose Associates, a San Francisco consultant company that analyzed the city’s permitting process in a report this spring. Though project delays almost always get blamed on the city, even in cases when the developer is at fault, “it would be useful to have a little more birddogging of the laggard applications,” he said.

A new space for us to fight

Times are changing for California’s expediters.

Once upon a time, whether a housing project progressed or not was left almost entirely to the discretion of California’s local governments and their elected leaders. That made the insidery arts of glad-handing and trading on connections the most prized skills for land use consultants.

But greasing the skids of city government can get dangerously close to greasing palms — a point regularly made by pro-development advocates, small government conservatives and the occasional newspaper editorial board.

In 2021, Walter Wong, maybe California’s most notorious expediter, pleaded guilty in a corruption scandal that shook San Francisco city politics. Among his confessed wrong doings: Showering top permitting officials with international travel in exchange for the snappy approval of a major mixed-use development project.

Overly exuberant expediters have been prosecuted in New York and Washington D.C. In 2024, Los Angeles Councilmember José Huizar was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his perch atop the city’s powerful Planning and Land Use Management Committee to approve development projects in exchange for cash and other gifts.

Quid pro quo-ing one’s way to project approval isn’t as easy as it used to be.

Houses under construction in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2026. The area was severely burned during the Palisades Fire in early 2025.

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Jules Hotz

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The California Legislature has spent the last decade passing a torrent of housing laws designed to override local approval processes like the ones Blackman has developed an expertise in navigating. “Ministerial approval” or “by right” are the terms of statutory art — as in, the act of building an apartment tower in certain urban neighborhoods is now a right enjoyed by developers, not a privilege to be reluctantly dispensed by skeptical council members.

State lawmakers have also passed a series of laws aimed at speeding up, standardizing and outsourcing the building permitting process.

"The political skillset is less important now,” said Michael Hansen, a San Diego consultant who used to serve as the city’s planning director. Rather than attend meetings downtown trying to convince elected officials of the merits of a project, much of his current work is of a more technical nature: Figuring out if and how a given state streamlining law can be applied to a particular project.

“There’s still quite a bit of work trying to get a project to fit within the ministerial box," he said.

Blackman said he can’t remember the last time he had to convince local elected officials to allow a zoning change, which used to be his professional bread and butter. But “I still think there is abundant work in my space for folks like us,” he said.

His job — which in his heart Blackman believes should not exist — appears to be safe for now.

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