The Brief

If you’re lucky, an L.A. Christmas means you’re unwrapping some incredible tamales.

And if you’re really savvy, you probably have your go-to tamal lady.

If you’re both, you probably already know about Yesenia Trujillo Carranza.

“December is tamales season,” Carranza tells The LA Local. “It’s much busier for me, but I love it. I love anyone who really gets joy from my tamales.”

Carranza has been feeding the Boyle Heights community hot tamales, champurrado and café de olla for 20 years.

“I have a lot of enthusiasm for feeding the community,” she said from her tamales cart, located across the road from Roosevelt High School at the intersection of South Fickett and Fourth streets.

Carranza makes her Guerrero-style corn-husk tamales fresh each day — preparing about 50 pounds of masa and offering sweet tamales, classic chicken, pork and queso con rajas.

The stand-out is definitely the tamales de pollo served with a vibrant green salsa that has just the perfect hit of spice to make you shout, “It’s a wonderful life!” this Christmas.

But Carranza isn’t alone on these streets.

Some of the best chefs and eateries in Los Angeles are elevating the portable masa meal to Michelin levels.

Don’t get us wrong, tamales like the ones Carranza and your favorite tamales lady sell do not need the glow up.

But these tamal makers offer a unique and adventurous take on the ancient masa masterpiece.

Komal

3655 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, Historic South Central

A tamal rojo from Komal.

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Marina Peña

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The LA Local

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Komal opened in September 2024 at Mercado La Paloma and immediately made headlines for being LA’s first craft molino, which basically means it makes some of the best masa this side of the border.

That masa excellence is on full display in their pretty and plump chuchito tamal, a staple on the menu. The chuchito is a ball of masa stuffed with pork and topped with roasted peppers, tomato sauce, and pickled vegetables.

“The chuchito is from Guatemala, and it represents my team. Most of the people who work with me in the kitchen are from Guatemala, so this dish is a way to represent them,” says Komal’s chef and co-owner, Fátima Juárez. “Without them, we truly wouldn’t be what we are today.”

The flavors feel like a heartfelt nod to traditional dishes found in Mexico City and Oaxaca. The tamales are made with Indigenous corn sourced directly from farmers in Mexico and nixtamalized on site.

“In general, the masa and its consistency make the tamal very light. It melts in your mouth, almost as if you were eating a savory or sweet cake. It’s not very dense; it’s juicy and has a lot of flavor,” Juarez says. “A big part of that has to do with how the masa is made, we don’t use lard; we use olive oil and grape-seed oil.”

For the holidays, Juárez has added some beautiful seasonal tamales. There’s a rojo that’s bursting at the seams with sweet corn and calabacitas, topped with a spicy red sauce. Komal also features a tamal verde with chicken and tomatillo sauce, along with a sweet tamal de leche made with oranges and strawberry jam.

Guelaguetza

3014 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, Koreatown

A mole tamal from Guelaguetza.

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Courtesy Guelaguetza

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Guelaguetza’s tamales are simply stunning to look at. Opening one is as close to unwrapping a Christmas present as it gets.

Founded by husband and wife Fernando Lopez and Maria Monterrubio in 1994, this ode to Oaxacan cuisine has become one of the most lauded restaurants in the country, thanks in large part to the late Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold, who once called Guelaguetza “the most accomplished Oaxacan restaurant in the United States.”

The tamales come carefully wrapped in a large banana leaf so that there is just enough of an opening to decorate the masa with the Lopez family’s legendary black mole. Inside, you will find a treasure of juicy chicken breast meat.

Lugya’h by Poncho’s Tlayudas

4301 W. Jefferson Blvd., Los Angeles, West Adams

Lugya’h by Poncho’s Tlayudas features a savory amarillo sauce.

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Erick Galindo

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The LA Local

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When the humble culinary genius Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez sunsetted his weekend pop-up Poncho’s Tlayudas for a six-day-a-week brick and mortar shop called Lugya’h inside the swanky Maydan Market, LA’s street food lovers both rejoiced and shed a tear. There was nothing like Friday nights feasting on Poncho’s tlayudas. But now we can get them all week long, and there are some added benefits like access to his beautiful Zapotec-inspired tamales.

“In the hills of Oaxaca, we wrap tamales with whatever kind of leaves we can find,” he tells The LA Local.

Lugya’h’s tamales are quite beautiful to look at, but they are also quite lovely to devour. They are turkey tamales wrapped in banana leaves and feature Poncho’s savory amarillo sauce, a blend of hot peppers, tomatoes and turkey broth.

A Tí

1498 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Echo Park

A Tí serves a sweet dessert tamal.

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Erick Galindo

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The LA Local

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Chef Andrew Ponce says he opened his fine dining-style Mexican restaurant A Tí as a tribute to his father. “My father worked his whole life and still had time to make it to my little league games,” he explained. “So this is for him.”

Ponce admits he was never great at baseball, but he hit it out of the park with his dessert tamal. Ponce uses blue masa quebrada — a crumbly, more coarse masa from Kernel of Truth Organics — whipped butter and a blend of seasonal squash from the farmers market.

“It can be from kabocha green and red squash or red curry squash and honey nut squash,” Ponce tells The LA Local. “And I season it with piloncillo and warm spices.”

The sweet tamal is topped with soft whipped cream and a pecan crumble.

Tamales La Güera

Southeast corner of Broadway and West Vernon Avenue in Historic South Central

The guajolota by Tamales La Güera.

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Kevin Martinez

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The LA Local

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LA Local community engagement director Kevin Martinez swears by Elisa Chaparro Garcia’s guajolota — a hot tamal stuffed inside a bolillo, creating a thick tamal torta — because it’s the closest thing to a Mexico City tamal experience you can find in Los Angeles.

The combination creates a perfect balance between the melty ephemerality of the tamal and the sweet stickiness of the bread. The tamales are served with pork, chicken, queso con rajas, strawberry, pineapple or mole.

“The bolillo allows the tamal to linger a little longer in the mouth,” Martinez explains. “It’s not too soggy, not too dry, creating the perfect bite.”

Tamales La Güera has been serving her Mexico City-style tamales in South Central for more than 20 years and has become so popular that she opened a second stand across the street.

La Flor de Yucatán

1800 Hoover St., Los Angeles, Pico Union

The colado from La Flor de Yucatán.

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Marina Peña

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The LA Local

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This family-owned fixture in Pico Union specializes in Mayan-style, banana leaf tamales.

“Our tamales come from a family recipe from the Yucatán because that’s where our specialty is. We chose bits and pieces from aunts and uncles and made it our own,” says Annie Burgos, co-owner of the bakery.

La Flor de Yucatán has been in the neighborhood for more than 50 years, serving homestyle baked goods like hojaldra — a flaky, sugar-topped pastry with ham and cheese — and regional tamales.

Her parents, Antonio and Rosa Burgos, started the business after baking in their home kitchen in Pasadena in the late 1960s, with Antonio selling the goods door to door and from his vehicle.

“Yucatán is so far down in Mexico, so our tamales have more in common with those from Central America and the Caribbean,” Burgos says. “The consistency of the dough is different, the flavoring is different because you get some of the flavoring from the banana leaf itself, and the tamales tend to be moist.”

Today, they offer three classic Yucatecan tamales wrapped in banana leaves: the colado, a moist, fluffy tamal filled with chicken and pork; the tortiado, a hand-patted tamal with chicken and pork; and the dzotobichay, a chaya leaf tamal often filled with pepper jack cheese.

“My favorite would be the tortiado, but in all the pop-ups that we do, everywhere that we go, the one that reigns supreme is the colado,” Burgos says. “You can scoop into the colado, the other tamales you have to cut into.”

The Newport Beach City Council is considering demolishing part of its quirky, beloved sculpture garden in Civic Center Park to make way for a new police station.

The city has been trying to figure out how to replace its aging police headquarters for years. It bought a property in 2022 with that intent. But an ad hoc City Council committee decided, controversially, it might be better to instead build a new station on the parkland next to city hall.

What’s so great about the sculpture garden?

The sculpture garden is a “museum without walls” treasured by art and nature lovers alike. It houses the quirky and once-controversial “Bunnyhenge,” included on the popular Atlas Obscura travel guide. Opponents of putting a new police headquarters on park grounds say it would compromise the environment, and decimate the sculpture garden.

What do supporters of the new station idea say?

Supporters say the current police station, built in 1973, is long overdue for an upgrade, and that the police force needs more space for things like servers to store digital evidence. The council ad hoc committee that studied the issue says the Civic Center parkland makes the most sense for a new building because the city already owns the land, and it would consolidate the city’s main services in one place.

Is it a done deal?

Far from it. The City Council is holding a study session Tuesday to present the plan publicly and gather input. If the council decides to go forward, the next step would be to hire a consultant to design the building and get started on an environmental impact report.

Here’s how to learn more and weigh in:

A new exhibit in L.A. — Vehicles of Expression: The Craft of the Skateboard — arrives this weekend, highlighting the cultural impact, history and artistry of handmade skateboards.

It’s the latest exhibit at Craft in America Center, a museum and library that highlights handcrafted artwork.

Todd Huber, skateboard historian and founder of the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, said before 1962, it wasn’t possible to buy a skateboard in a store.

“Skateboarding started as a craft,” Huber said on AirTalk, LAst 89.3’s daily news program. “Somewhere in the 50s until 1962, if you wanted to sidewalk surf, as they called it, you had to make your own out of roller skates.”

What to expect

Emily Zaiden, the director and lead curator of the Craft in America Center based in Los Angeles, told LAist’s AirTalk the exhibit was tricky to curate.

“What we wanted to do was focus on both the history and then expand into how this has been an object that people have interpreted in so many different ways since the very beginning,” Zaiden said.

Artists who craft skateboards not only think of design, but also of the features that give riders the ability to do tricks, such as wheelies and kickflips.

“The ways that people have constructed boards, engineered boards, design boards … people are really renegade, which I think is really the spirit of skateboarding overall,” Zaiden said. “This very independent, out-of-the-box approach and making boards that allow them to do all kinds of wacky tricks and do all kinds of things that no one imagined possible physically with their body, but through the object of the board.”

Know before you go

The exhibit at Craft in America Center opens to the public on Saturday. Admission is free. The museum is open from noon to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year. The lanes are slated to open in spring 2027, just in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics. 

The project would reconfigure about 3.4 miles of Pico between Crenshaw Boulevard and Figueroa Street, adding protected bike lanes, new crosswalks and other street improvements along a major east-west corridor through central Los Angeles.

Drivers and pedestrian would notice some important changes to the street when the project is complete. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s changes will allow cyclists to ride in lanes separated from traffic by barriers or curbs. LADOT will also install new traffic signals at Manhattan Place and New Hampshire Avenue, while also shortening the distance pedestrians need to travel to cross Pico Boulevard.

Additionally, sidewalks and curb ramps that are in poor condition will undergo repairs.

City officials say the changes are aimed at improving safety along the corridor.

Between 2014 and 2023, authorities reported 75 crashes on Pico Boulevard that resulted in severe injuries or deaths, according to city data. Pedestrians were involved in 52 of those crashes, and all 11 fatalities along the corridor during that period were pedestrians.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year.

About 12% of injury crashes involved cyclists, according to the latest data.

The bicycle lane proposal would also bring changes to parking along the corridor.

About 270 of the roughly 480 existing street parking spaces along Pico Boulevard would be removed to make room for the protected bike lanes, most of them on the north side of the street. LADOT officials plan to add some parking on nearby side streets where possible and extend parking hours for about 95 existing spaces along the street.

Drivers could see slightly longer travel times, according to officials. LADOT spokesperson Colin Sweeney said the new configuration could add roughly one to two minutes of travel time per mile during peak traffic periods. 

“The department does not expect significant spill-over as a result of these changes but will evaluate the corridor following the project and can respond to such activity with signal timing adjustments and turn restrictions to prevent cut through activity,” he said in a statement.

The transportation department conducted outreach last year with an online survey that received more than 1,100 responses. According to the department, 74% of respondents said they preferred a protected bike lane over a standard painted lane.

The department said an updated project fact sheet and a feedback form in English, Spanish and Korean will be posted on its website later this month. 

The post A dangerous stretch of Pico Boulevard is getting a major redesign appeared first on LA Local.

The apartment building planned on East Morris Avenue in Modesto is exactly the kind of thing that California’s political leaders want to see a whole lot more of: The project promises 44 units of affordable housing — half reserved for people without homes. It’s received zoning approval, weathered public feedback, earned the support of local elected officials and sits beside a busy bus line. Once built, the project promises on-site mental health services, job training and Zumba classes.

What the project lacks is money.

Having quilted together a financial patchwork of local government and corporate grants, private debt, and a plot of land donated by a foundation, it remains just shy of the total needed to break ground.

Six years and 13 funding applications after it was first proposed, the Morris Village project sits ready, but waiting.

An estimated 39,880 affordable units across California are stuck in financial purgatory, according to a new report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that funds, consults and advocates for affordable housing. That’s 461 “shovel-ready developments” that, like the one on East Morris, are fully designed, legally green-lit and backed with a significant — but still insufficient — amount of money.

Many have “been sitting for a year or two waiting for funding,” said Justine Marcus, policy director for Enterprise’s Northern California office and one of the report’s co-authors. “There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”

For many developers and affordable housing advocates, that bottleneck represents an especially frustrating inconsistency of California public policy. Lawmakers are desperate to see the state build more homes — of all kinds, but especially for people with the least ability to pay the state’s exorbitant rents. State housing regulators have ordered local governments to plan for the construction of an additional 2.5 million units by the end of the decade. One million of those are supposed to be for people making less than 80% of each region’s median income.

As a general rule, that’s a population of hard-up renters that the private market has been unable to profitably serve at scale. To fill that gap, non-profit low-income housing developers typically turn to taxpayer-funded support. At the moment, according to the report, there isn’t enough of that to go around.

Enterprise took publicly available but hard-to-parse applicant lists from seven subsidy programs administered by various wings of California’s state government going back three years. With a combination of number crunching and a little inference, the report estimates that clearing the current backlog would require an extra $4.1 billion, split between state administered grants, low-cost loans and tax write-offs.

Once awarded, this final layer of state subsidy has to be spent in relatively short order. That means this list of 39,880 units comprise a group of affordable housing projects that are all but ready to go, said Marcus. “They kinda have to have their (stuff) together.”

Case in point: Two-thirds of the projects on the list have already received support from at least one other state program. Those dollars aren't awarded to just any developer, said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, one of two non-profits behind Morris Village.

“These are all projects that are close to amenities,” she said. “These are all projects providing resident services. These are all projects that are financially feasible...They are all meeting the bar for what we want to see as a state out of our affordable housing community.”

In February, McGovern-Garcia and her colleagues applied for a final round of financial support from the state “to close the gap” and finally start construction.

“We are optimistic this might be our round,” she said in an interview, her fingers crossed.

A moving bottleneck

California has seen gridlock in affordable housing production before, but the precise location of the traffic jam has changed over time.

When Nevada Merriman was leading a team of affordable developers in Silicon Valley a decade ago, she said local approval was the major hold-up. Getting the legal okay to build low-income housing on a particular site in a particular town required developers to run a gauntlet of planning department and city council meetings, win over hostile neighbors with costly concessions, community meetings and design revisions and to fend off the ever-present possibility of litigation. Because relatively few projects survived that ordeal, the competition for funding on the other side wasn’t especially stiff, said Merriman, who is now policy advocate for MidPen Housing, an affordable developer in San Mateo County.

That began to change earlier this decade. California lawmakers began passing laws overriding these local impediments — especially for affordable projects. All of a sudden more projects were clearing those early regulatory hurdles and competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal government’s signature affordable housing construction subsidy. The bottleneck moved further up the road.

But then that too began to change late last year. Buried in President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill from 2025 was a significant boost to the tax credit program. (Specifically, the law increased the total supply of one type of credit while allowing another kind to be spread out over twice as many projects).

Which brings us to the latest bottleneck.

Now projects can get through local approval. They can more easily acquire the final and most important layer of federal financing. But project sponsors typically can’t apply for that until all other financial holes are plugged.

“We’re looking for state sources to fill that gap,” said Merriman. “We want to make sure we don’t leave those federal sources on the table.”

MidPen currently has 1,198 units spread across seven developments waiting for that last bit of funding, she said. “Should there be a source…there’s a pipeline that is ready to go.”

“There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”Justine Marcus, Northern California policy director, Enterprise Community PartnersCalifornia’s last major infusion of public affordable housing dollars came in the form of a voter-approved bond in 2018. That well has run dry. A hodgepodge of funding streams remain.

Adding together funding that has already been approved by legislators but not yet spent and a variety of other state and federal sources, California’s Housing and Community Development department says at least $1.8 billion should be available for affordable developer applicants this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year doesn’t include any new discretionary spending beyond that.

Boosters of more funding have reasons to be optimistic. Newsom has taken such an austere posture in early budget negotiations before only to have the Legislature successfully pour hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing subsidies back into the final budget agreement.

California lawmakers are also considering a record-breaking $10 billion affordable housing bond for the 2026 ballot. If a majority of voters go for that, “we’d be off to the races,” said Merriman.

Cutting costs

One way to get more affordable housing built is by spending more money. The other is trying to make the existing money go further by cutting costs.

The cost of affordable housing construction is notoriously high in California: A 2025 study estimated that tax credit-financed projects here cost two- to four-times the amount of comparable projects in Colorado and Texas. There is no single reason for this disparity. Land costs in California are significantly higher. So too, often, is the cost of labor. Regulatory barriers like restrictive zoning, slow permitting and stiff impact fees are frequently named as culprits. Sometimes old-fashioned construction methods and materials get blamed.

But there’s also the cost of just waiting around.

A typical affordable development in California will have two or three public funding sources, with some drawing on six or more. Many of these sources are awarded on their own timelines. Each has its own program-specific requirements that can take time to meet. Some are conditional on the receipt of another. As time goes by, developers still have to make payroll, pay interest on pre-construction loans and watch as inflation drives construction costs up further. As delays compound, funding sources that have already been secured might expire, setting things back further.

Each additional funding source delays the start of construction on a project by an average of four months, adding an extra $20,460 per unit, according to an analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

The Newsom administration is currently tinkering under the hood of California’s affordable housing finance system in an effort to speed things up.

Last year, the governor proposed the creation of the state’s first ever cabinet-level housing agency. The California Housing and Homelessness Agency is scheduled to take over the state’s disparate housing loan and grant programs. The governor’s office also proposed legislative language that would force the new agency and the Treasurer’s Office to operate in tandem, giving affordable housing developers a single place to apply for the state’s various funding programs — and to cut out some of the time they spend stuck in line.

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