The Brief

When we first met “Nono” last summer she was living in an encampment under the 405 Freeway, straddling the Los Angeles neighborhood of Palms and Culver City. She’d been living there for several years in a tent, relying on volunteers and people in her community for resources like food, water and harm reduction.

The group that provided these resources to Nono — and dozens of other unhoused people at the encampment — is called PUMA, or Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid. It’s not a formal nonprofit but a group of volunteers who come together every week to provide things like clean needles, antiseptic wipes and Narcan — not to mention homemade burritos.

“They save lives and that's a big deal,” Nono told us in August. “That's really hard to say in, like, homeless communities.”

The idea of harm reduction is not to encourage use. Providing these tools is proven to prevent death or infection among the users, keeping people alive until they can maybe get some more permanent help in the way of housing or substance abuse treatment.

Months after we first met Nono, the encampment where she’d been living was cleared out. As part of that October sweep, Nono was given a voucher for a motel, a key element in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. Here’s Nono in a video produced by the mayor’s office where she’s referred to as “Noelia.”

“I walked in and literally that was the first time I felt safety and peace and a sense of 'this is the beginning of the rest of my life,'” she tells the camera.

The How to LA team recently caught up with her and others near the motel, which is south of Palms on Sepulveda, to talk about life in the Inside Safe program.

Living in a motel

The Inside Safe motels are independent contractors and people's experiences can vary depending on the location. So one person's experiences won't paint a complete picture of the program, which includes dozens of motels across the city and hundreds of people living inside of them.

On the evening we spent with Nono, at this motel, PUMA volunteers are supplying people with harm reduction tools like glass pipes and needle tips in different lengths — also toothbrushes.

Ndindi Kitonga, founder of PUMA, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid

(

Noe Montes

/

LAist

)

“What brought us here is people are letting us know that they don't have adequate food, that they don't have harm reduction services,” says Ndindi Kitonga, cofounder of PUMA, “and that they are reviving each other, using the Narcan that they have.”

Nono agrees to talk to us, but she asks us to stop recording after a few minutes. She’s lost a lot of weight and says she isn’t feeling great.

“I'm under so much stress because of the security situation over here. It's just ridiculous,” she says. “They kicked my parents out.”

There’s a no visitors rule at this motel.

Nono says she hadn’t seen her parents “in ages.” “What if they’re all I had?” she asks. “Well, I don't even have them, and that was like the one time I’d seen them.”

Kitonga explains: “You cannot have visitors, even if that visitor is your motel mate, meaning someone who lives next door to you.”

Kitonga and her fellow PUMA volunteers have worked with people placed in Inside Safe motels before and says the “no visitor policy” is not always enforced. But it is at this motel.

Sign forbidding visitors to residents of a motel that's part of the Inside Safe Program.

(

Noé Montes

/

LAist

)

High hopes

Nono wants the Inside Safe program to work for her.

As you hear in the video from Mayor Bass’s office, she is optimistic about its promise. “This is finally the catapult that I've been waiting for, believing in, dreaming of and it's, it's all because, because of this project,” Nono said in that video.

So far, she says she hasn’t felt that safe.

Nono told us her doctor is concerned by her extreme weight loss, and that she got beat up on the sidewalk in front of the motel as someone stole her bike and wallet. And the “no visitors” rule makes her feel like she doesn't have any autonomy over her life anymore.

A man who says his name is Ivory Michaels joins the conversation with Nono.

“Your family can't visit. You know, you can't have people that may be your therapist,” he says. “They're not felons. These are grown people. What are you trying to do, isolate them?”

Michaels is not staying at the hotel. He lives in a tent across the street. He told us he used to be in the Inside Safe program but had his motel voucher revoked because, he says, he was labeled “defiant” after asking for clean linens and being told he could not have them.

“You're right, I am defiant,” he says. “I'm a grown man. I'm 53 years old. I shouldn't have limitations brought on me. You know? It's angersome.”

The rules being enforced at these places — from no visitors to limits on how many belongings one can bring in — have long been a sore point for some of the folks living in these interim housing programs, whether its through Inside Safe or something like a Tiny Homes project. The criticisms go at least as far back as the height of the pandemic, when unhoused people were moved into hotels and motels to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Let me say this, it's not perfect, it's not meant to be the panacea. But it's one huge, proactive, step forward for those who've been suffering greatly,” says L.A. City Councilman Kevin de León who has a Tiny Home village in his district. “There's criticism that's abundant on Tiny Homes, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.”

A motel in Culver City that's part of the Inside Safe program.

(

Noé Montes

/

LAist

)

It's the imperfect part of these programs — the lack of autonomy, the services and the feelings of isolation — that drive mutual aid volunteers like Kitonga to do what they do.

After the encampment where Nono was living in Palms was cleared out by city officials, Kitonga says, “People ended up in three motels. One is off of the 90, so still far away if you consider if you don't have a car, and then a bunch of other people were moved to South L.A.”

So, she adds: “You just have people who've just been in a limbo in motel rooms with very few services, loss of their community and what have you,” she says.

About 1 in 6 people choose to leave the Inside Safe program.

An imperfect solution

The primary goal for officials in L.A. City and L.A. County is to get unhoused people off the streets and, first, into interim housing. The idea being that those much needed services — water, food, a sense of security — will be satisfied once people can get inside.

In theory, that’s when the Band-Aids provided by mutual aid volunteers, like Kitonga, can come off.

“We had to choose between providing those services and organizing those efforts… and actually looking for housing for people,” says L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, “where they could access those services in the context of a motel or a hotel room or a shelter site of some kind.”

Inside Safe is the mayor's flagship interim housing program and, by far, the largest. It's also the city's biggest response in terms of dollars spent. About 8,000 people have obtained a voucher for a room in one of the 38 available motels or hotels in the city.

According to our analysis of data released by the city, these vouchers cost about $8,000 per unit, per month, including additional costs like insurance. Since the program began last December, Inside Safe has incurred a total of $93.8 million in expenses.

People are promised three meals per day in addition to things like hygiene services and the overdose prevention resource Narcan. But so far, these needs are not being fully met.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass acknowledges the drawbacks. “We are building the plane while we fly it,” she says. “Mistakes are made along the way. We're learning about gaps and things that are woefully inadequate.”

Lack of permanent housing

The goal of the program is to offer an alternative to the street while people wait for permanent housing.

That transition has been slow.

The mayor “seemed to really expect that there would be a lot more available [places] for people to transition from the motels and Inside Safe spots to this longer-term housing,” says Nick Gerda, who covers unhoused communities for LAist. But “she’s running into this structural issue of a lack of affordable housing options for people.”

He notes that only “a couple hundred people” have been able to move on to a permanent place to live.

That means, he says, “The motels are largely full. There's much less capacity for people to move off the streets into the motels.”

“I wish we had a much better situation,” says Mayor Bass. “I don't think that moving people into motels, number one, is financially sustainable. But I was not going to accept the idea that while we're doing this stuff that people have to die on the streets. I think a motel room is better than somebody being in the street and possibly raped or killed.”

The Band-Aid remains

The city is not the only player when it comes to housing. Los Angeles County is responsible for providing mental health services, as well as other public health resources. But they spend a lot of money and time on housing, too.

Then there's LAHSA, the Los Angeles Homelessness Authority, the joint agency that sits between L.A. City and L.A. County.

“The bulk of what LAHSA does is refunding non profit groups, that provide the bulk of the homeless services in our system, especially the outreach work,” says Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA's deputy chief external relations officer, “the work that helps people find apartments, the work that helps people stay in apartments.”

Still, there are tens of thousands of Angelenos experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Less than half of them currently have access to one of these temporary housing programs.

“I always compare us to New York City,” says Raman, who was elected to the city council in 2020 and is up for reelection next year. “There are more unhoused people in New York than the county of Los Angeles, but only a couple of thousand … are living on the streets.”

That’s due to a court-mandated effort in the 1980s to have as many available shelter beds as unhoused people in the city.

“We don't have those shelter beds,” says Raman, “and as a result we have the astounding statistic that more people succumb to extreme weather conditions on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in the city of New York.”

Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid volunteers distributing supplies to unhoused and housing insecure people.

(

Noé Montes

/

LAist

)

Medical supplies provided by Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid to unhoused and housing insecure people.

(

Noé Montes

/

LAist

)

And so — to come full circle — it's these gaps that require the mutual aid groups to step in.

That is, until a more permanent fix can be found.

“I understand that no one individual or no one program or no one approach is actually at the heart or the problem of what's going on here because the social problems really are poverty, gendered violence, structural racism, gentrification,” says PUMA’s Kitonga. “They are the big ‘isms’ so, yes, I understand how and why the mayor is overwhelmed. They underestimated the scale and undertheorized what's going on here.”

A federal appeals court has restricted access to one of the most common means of abortion in the U.S. by blocking the mailing of mifepristone.

A panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is requiring that the abortion pill be distributed only in-person at clinics.

Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, the two makers of mifepristone, have directly asked the Supreme Court to grant them emergency relief, to allow mifepristone to remain available through telemedicine as the case continues.

"The Fifth Circuit's order has unleashed regulatory chaos," reads the GenBioPro emergency application to the Supreme Court. The brief also points out that access via pharmacies is restricted by the new order. "Today, patients who planned to pick up a mifepristone prescription at their local pharmacy may no longer be able to do so, regardless of which state they live in."

Since the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed enforcement of abortion bans, prescriptions by mail has become a major way that abortions are provided — including to states where bans are in place.

"Every abortion facilitated by FDA's action cancels Louisiana's ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that 'every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,'" the ruling states.

Judges have long deferred to the Food and Drug Administration's judgments on the safety and appropriate regulation of drugs.

FDA officials under President Donald Trump have repeatedly stated the agency is conducting a new review of mifepristone's safety, at the direction of the president.

The appeals court judges noted in their ruling that FDA "could not say when that review might be complete and admitted it was still collecting data."

In a court filing, Louisiana's attorney general and a woman who says she was coerced into taking abortion pills requested that the FDA rules be rolled back to when the pills were allowed to be prescribed and dispensed only in person.

A Louisiana-based federal judge last month ruled that those allowances undermined the state's abortion ban but stopped short of undoing the regulations immediately.

"This is going to affect patients' access to abortion and miscarriage care in every state in the nation," said Julia Kaye, an ACLU lawyer. "When telemedicine is restricted, rural communities, people with low incomes, people with disabilities, survivors of intimate partner violence and communities of color suffer the most."

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 as a safe and effective way to end early pregnancies. It is typically used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol.

Misoprostol is an older medication that is also used to treat gastric ulcers. It can be used alone to induce abortion and may remain available via telemedicine. The two-drug regimen is preferred because it generally causes less cramping and bleeding for most patients.

When mifepristone was approved in 2000, the FDA initially imposed strict limits on who could prescribe and distribute the pill — only specially certified physicians and only after an in-person appointment where the person would receive the pill.

Both those requirements were dropped during the COVID-19 years. At the time, FDA officials under President Joe Biden said that after more than 20 years of monitoring mifepristone use, and reviewing dozens of studies involving thousands of women, it was clear that women could safely use the pill without direct supervision.

The conservative-majority high court overturned abortion as a nationwide right in 2022 but unanimously preserved access to mifepristone two years later.

That 2024 decision sidestepped the core issues, however, by ruling that the anti-abortion doctors behind the case didn't have legal standing to sue.

NPR staff Selena Simmons-Duffin and Diane Webber contributed to to this report.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced several significant rule changes for the 99th Oscars, including AI protections for actors and writers as well as expanded eligibility for international films.

In a statement to NPR, the Academy on Saturday said the changes are in response to listening to the global filmmaking community and addressing barriers to entry in its eligibility process.

The Academy added that its rules and eligibility standards have always evolved alongside technologies such as sound, color, and CGI, and that AI is no different. Awards rules and guidelines are reviewed and refined each year.

A blow for Tilly Norwood 

Among the most noteworthy changes, the Academy now explicitly states that only roles, "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" are eligible for Acting awards. In other words, AI creations like the much-hyped Tilly Norwood cannot hope to win a Best Actress Oscar anytime soon.

Particle6, the production company behind Norwood, did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on Saturday about its creations' ban from consideration. In March, Norwood commented, "Can't wait to go to the Oscars!" in an Instagram post announcing its newly released music video.

The Academy also requires screenplays to be "human-authored" and said it reserved the right to investigate the use of generative AI in any submission.

Meanwhile, qualifying flesh-and-blood human actors can now be nominated for multiple performances in the same category if those performances get enough votes to land in the top five. So, someone like Anne Hathaway, who has five major movies scheduled for release in 2026, could now theoretically sweep the nominations – though that outcome seems extremely unlikely.

"If an actor has an extremely prolific year, might we even see someone swallow up three of the five nominations?," wrote Deadline's awards columnist and chief film critic Pete Hammond about the changes. "Probably won't happen, but it's now possible."

Under previous rules, an actor could only receive one nomination per category. If they had two high-ranking performances in Best Actor, for example, only the one with the most votes would move forward.

International films prioritizes filmmakers over countries

While international films can still be the official selection of their countries, now they can qualify by winning the top prize at a major international festival such as the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the Golden Lion at Venice, or the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Historically, countries "owned" the nomination, and only one film per country was allowed. The new rules allow multiple films from the same country to compete if they are critically acclaimed, and it shifts the honor from a geopolitical entity to the filmmakers themselves.

Largely positive response

The changes have prompted a largely positive reaction from the film community on social media, such as on the popular The Shade Room entertainment and celebrity-focused Instagram feed, where commenters widely praised the "human-only" move to protect creative jobs.

The Academy's Awards Committee oversees the rules in tandem with branch executive committees, the International Feature Film Executive Committee and the Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee.

The rules are scheduled to go into effect next year, covering films released in 2026.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Los Angeles changes fast, and oftentimes that means some of the architectural relics of our shared past get swept up and paved over in all the "progress." (RIP Garden of Allah.)

But there are still places where you can find ruins that tell a tale, like a long-forgotten speakeasy reputedly for old Hollywood near La Crescenta.

The ruins are still there 

On a recent afternoon, author and local historian Mike Lawler led me just beyond the boundary of Crescenta Valley Park. Joggers like me might have seen an old, towering stone arch shrouded by bushes there — and wondered what lies beyond.

Turns out there was once a place called the Verdugo Lodge back there and Lawler has spent years excavating its history.

A car speeds away from the lodge onto New York Avenue. The stone archway that still stands can be seen in the background.

(

Kadletz Family Archives)

)

“It was a very high-end speakeasy for a time,” Lawler, who also helps run the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, said. “An amazing thing. And all the ruins are still here, just like this arch.”

Lawler said we don’t know exactly when the lodge was built, but we do have some of the picture starting in the late 1920s. The place was set up kind of like a timeshare where people bought 10 x 10 foot ‘tent lots’ that gave them access to on-site amenities. There was a golf course, stables, trout stream, a swimming pool — and a lodge with gambling and alcohol.

“The Crescenta Valley in the teens and '20s was a hotbed of moonshine, prostitution, all that stuff," Lawler said. "It was a quiet little community. But in all these canyons up here, stuff was going on. Illegal stuff!”

We don’t have a full guest list, but Lawler said it’s likely at least a few Hollywood types had gone up to the lodge to circumvent Prohibition era laws.

In some ways, it was kind of like the original glamping. Lawler said patrons probably weren’t doing much sleeping, though.

“They might have been unconscious!” he said with a chuckle.

Lawler led me to a road that swooped around a meadow. We passed by a massive swimming pool nestled into the hillside.

Once known as the “Crystal Pool,” it’s now empty and fenced off, with pitch black locker rooms below.

The exterior of the locker rooms for the old Crystal Pool.

(

Robert Garrova / LAist

)

We continued our journey up the hill and eventually arrived at a cascading stone stairway.

And at the top, the big show: overgrown with orange monkey flowers and goliath agaves lies the foundation of the old Verdugo Lodge, with lofty stone fireplaces the only guardians keeping the surrounding oak trees at bay.

Lawler takes out a floorplan that one of the former owners drew up for him.

“This is what it was laid out like on the inside. So a dancehall, and band stand on that side... And then upstairs was the gambling,” Lawler said.

Lawler had in hand a copy of a Los Angeles Times article from 1933 he found. The headline reads: “Revelers Flee in Lodge Raid.”

“The police that raided it were here at 3 o'clock in the morning. And there were still 500 people here. And they said it was the classiest joint they had ever raided... Anyway, people were diving out of windows and everything,” Lawler explained.

In a ruin like this, covered with moss and overgrowth, the imagination can run wild, too.

The archway that still stands outside of what's now known as Mountain Oaks.

(

Robert Garrova / LAist

)

Lawler pointed out a questionable door jam below the old dancefloor that’s been cemented over.

“That is a door. So what is behind there? So there’s a room in there that got walled in for some reason,” he said.

What we do know is that, sometime after the raid, the tawdry Verdugo Lodge and the surrounding land were purchased and then renamed Mountain Oaks by the Kadletzes — an entrepreneurial family who had run everything from a Turkish bath to a mini golf course. Over the next few decades, the family would rent the place out to local groups for recreational retreats.

The future of Mountain Oaks 

After they sold it in the ‘60s, Lawler said Mountain Oaks faced a “nightmare” of development threats. Over the years, some of the subdivided "tent lots" had been combined and sold off, Lawler said. A dozen private homes now stand on these pieces of land, next to the ruins of the Verdugo Lodge.

A map showing the Mountain Oaks public property acquired by The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA).

(

Courtesy MRCA

)

Last year, with help from the City of Glendale, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant among other funding sources, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) put up $6.1 million to acquire 33-acres of the land — not including the private lots where the homes stand — so the public can continue to roam the meadow and ruins.

Paul Edelman, MRCA's director of natural resources and planning, said his group will continue to manage the land, doing things like brush clearance, trash pickup and sign maintenance. And he said there are no current plans to remove the ruins or make any major changes to the property.

“If somebody comes up with a grand idea where they can find some funding for us to do something to enhance it, we’re always open to it,” Edelman said.

The purchase was good news for local preservationist Joanna Linkchorst.

“I grew up directly up the hill. But I always saw the sign that said ‘private property’ and didn’t really think about it until several years ago when I finally asked Mike. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, we got a resort speakeasy down the street,’” Linkchorst said standing among the oaks and overgrowth.

Linkchorst, who founded the group Friends of Rockhaven to preserve another nearby historic site, said it’s been amazing to see all of the decaying structures that were still hiding out at Mountain Oaks.

“There’s almost like these little ghosts in your head as you imagine what it was like when there was a beautiful wood floor and there was a second floor that people came jumping out of,” Linkchorst said.