The Brief

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday approved an ordinance requiring hotels and short term rentals like those offered through AirBnb to obtain a police permit in order to operate.

Under the new ordinance, short term rental owners will have to submit information such as business and tax details and building and safety information to Los Angeles police to obtain a permit. Owners will also have to divulge any previous criminal history.

Proponents say the requirement will help the city better manage short term rentals and address public safety concerns over rental party houses, human trafficking, drug sales and prostitution. But opponents, including the Los Angeles Police Commission, small businesses and some hotel owners, say the permits will be too onerous.

To that end, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson requested a report within 45 days from the city attorney, housing and planning departments on an alternative to the police permit.

Issues with the police permit process

According to a report by the police commission, the new law is expected to push the current annual batch of about 5,000 permits to 14,000.

“Current staffing is insufficient to handle this additional burden,” the report states.

Ray Patel of the Northeast Los Angeles Hotel Owners also called the language regarding the requirements “vague.”

“The police department or the police commission can make those requirements up as time goes along,” he said. The ordinance, he added, puts the onus on the hotel owner for violations by a guest.

“What does the city do with a big building or even a limited service small building sitting in the middle of the town that is empty that can no longer operate as a hotel?” Patel said. “And from the owner's perspective, you know, if they had a loan on their mortgage, well, how are they going to pay that loan down now?”

Ed Colman, a 71-year-old who’s been an Airbnb short term rental host for nine years, said the police permitting process is unfair and would add “a whole other layer of bureaucracy.”

“I'm not open to the public. I'm not a hotel. I'm not like a hotel,” Colman said. “No one can walk off the street and rent the room in my home. It's by invitation only. These are our private residences by law. That's what the Home Sharing Ordinance states.”

Under the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, hosts have to submit a federal or state issued ID plus two forms of documentation showing that the home they want to rent out is their primary residence. Some of the criteria to get a permit also include no pending citations from law enforcement or city agencies. The permitting process also states that “hosts must not engage in any commercial uses for purposes of a party or an event.”

Colman said adding a police permit requirement to the list will just squeeze him even more.

“I've been living in this home for 40 years and I depend on the income from my guest room to allow me to remain in my home,” he said.

Heather Carson, co-founder of the Homeshare Alliance Los Angeles, said the city is already behind in issuing permits under Home Sharing Ordinance.

“The idea of adding an additional permit makes absolutely no sense when they can't even process the current permits properly,” she added.

The city council voted unanimously earlier in the week to move the proposal forward with the addendum, even though some members expressed concerns.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said during a hearing on Tuesday that police permits work for some businesses that serve hundreds of people on a daily basis, but those aren’t the same as something like an Airbnb, “where someone would sleep for a couple of nights.”

And Councilmember John Lee, who echoed the concerns of the Asian American Hotel Association, said he thought the process of developing the ordinance had moved too quickly.

“Stakeholders have not been aware of this proposed expansion of the police permitting process until a few weeks ago,” he said.

How the police permit came about

The new ordinance was part of a deal that the city council struck with the local union, Unite Here Local 11, last month. Under the proposal, new hotel developers would be required to replace any housing that is demolished during construction, either by buying new housing or constructing new projects. Also included in the deal were provisions “to address nuisance hotels and prevent the use of short-term rentals as ‘party houses,’” according to council president Paul Krekorian’s office.

“We need hotels to welcome the thousands of visitors we receive, but new hotel construction cannot come at the cost of our current housing stock,” Krekorian said. “Irresponsible hotel and short-term rental operators cannot be allowed to endanger the public safety or impair the quality of life in our neighborhoods.”

The new deal between the council and the union is meant to replace a March 2024 ballot measure that would have required hotels to have vacant rooms made available for unhoused people.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said the ballot measure was born out of members’ “inability to pay rent.”

“This replacement ordinance will replace that housing one for one at the same affordability levels, which means that no more housing will be displaced by luxury hotel developments,” he said. “And that's a major gain, not just for our members, obviously, but for all Angelenos.”

The police permit requirement for short term rentals and hotel owners, Petersen said, was included “to curb the abuse of Airbnb and others in taking housing that's meant to be for residents and illegally converting it into hotels.”

Airbnb did not immediately comment on the ordinance.

The Los Angeles Angels have settled with the family of pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died of an overdose in 2019, as first reported by The Athletic. The terms of the settlement have not been made public.

The 27 year-old pitcher was found dead in a suburban Dallas hotel room shortly before a road game against the Texas Rangers. A toxicology report found a mix of alcohol, fentanyl and oxycodone in his system.

The illegal drugs that led to Skaggs' death were provided by former Angels communications director Eric Kay. Kay has been sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for his role in the death. His trial included testimony from five other Major League Baseball players who said Kay supplied them with oxycodone.

The case playing out in Santa Ana was a civil, wrongful death lawsuit brought by Skaggs’ widow and parents. They argued that the Angels should have known Kay was providing drugs to Skaggs and other players on the team. The family said the franchise should be held responsible because drug dealing was essentially part of Kay’s job, which included acting as a so-called “gopher” for the players and otherwise keeping them happy.

Skaggs' family is seeking close to $100 million in lost earnings, along with compensation for pain and suffering, and punitive damages against the Angels.

In the wake of Skaggs’ death, Major League Baseball began testing players for opioid use and guiding players to treatment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will now have a new name — the "Trump-Kennedy Center." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the news on social media Thursday, saying that the board of the center voted unanimously for the change, "Because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building."

The website for the center has already been updated to reflect the change, and new signage on the building went up on Friday.

Shortly after the announcement on Thursday, Ohio Democrat Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member of the board, refuted the claim that it was a unanimous vote. "Each time I tried to speak, I was muted," she said in a video posted to social media. "Participants were not allowed to voice their concern."

When asked about the call, Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations at the Kennedy Center, sent a statement reiterating the vote was unanimous: "The new Trump Kennedy Center reflects the unequivocal bipartisan support for America's cultural center for generations to come."

Other Democrats in Congress who are ex-officio members of the Kennedy Center Board, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement stating that the president is renaming the institution "without legal authority."

"Federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action," the statement reads.

Earlier this year, Trump installed himself as the chairman of the center, firing former president Deborah Rutter and ousting the previous board chair David Rubenstein, along with board members appointed by President Biden. He then appointed a new board, including second lady Usha Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and more.

Trump hinted at the name change earlier this month, when he took questions before becoming the first president to host the Kennedy Center Honors. He deferred to the board when asked directly about changing the name but said "we are saving the Kennedy Center."

The president was mostly hands off with the Kennedy Center during his first term, as most presidents have been. But he's taking a special interest in it in his second term, touring the center and promising to weed out programming he doesn't approve of. His "One Big Beautiful Bill" included $257 million for the building's repairs and maintenance.

Originally, it was called The National Cultural Center. In 1964, two months after President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation authorizing funds to build what would become the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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It’s the benchmark of success, a milestone of responsible adulthood, a time-tested way to amass wealth for you and your progeny. Homeownership, we’re told again and again, is a status that every right-thinking person should aspire to — the white-picket-fence-fronted embodiment of the American Dream.

But what if it’s also a little overrated?

For generations it has been taken as a near article of faith across the country that ownership is both the financially and socially superior way to inhabit a home and that public policy makers should always promote it. California legislators and housing advocates spent this past year enacting sweeping policies aimed at making it easier to build housing of all kinds. This coming year, many of them indicate that they plan to focus specifically on providing more plentiful paths to homeownership.

They’ll have their work cut out for them.

The state’s homeownership rate of roughly 55% is second lowest in the nation, above New York, and a full 10 percentage points beneath the national average. Most of that gap, both common sense and researchers at UC Berkeley tell us, isn’t the result of an atypical fondness for the freedoms of renting but comes down to the price tag. The median price of a detached single-family home across in the United States is $426,800. In California, it’s $852,680. In San Francisco it’s well over $1 million.

With borrowing rates still hovering above 6%, those prices translate to estimated monthly mortgage costs between $4,000 to $6,000 or more. Even in all but the toniest neighborhoods of coastal California, that’s far above the cost of renting a typical apartment.

In Orange County, the estimated all-in monthly costs on a home (including taxes, insurance, maintenance and any association fees) is four times the average rent, according to a recent analysis by the commercial real estate firm CBRE. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the “buying premium” is three times greater than renting. Nationally, it’s twice as much.

Is the extra cost worth it?

Economists and housing finance experts are careful to note that it depends — on a person’s financial circumstances, the particulars of their preferences and the market in which they want to live, how long they plan to occupy a home and, most challenging of all, what the future holds.

But across the country, the gap between renting and owning is “way out of line” with the historic norm, said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning thinktank in Washington D.C.

In 2018, Goodman co-authored a paper on homeownership in the United States, which came to the fairly unambiguous conclusion that most people most of the time would be better off buying a home (assuming they can afford the monthly payments) compared to renting.

“Homeownership is not the universal panacea, but the financial returns on homeownership have been more beneficial than renting for most homeowners and will likely remain so if current patterns continue,” Goodman wrote in a corresponding blog post at the time.

Current patterns did not continue: Today we see dizzying prices and interest rates and flat rents in most places. Homeownership isn’t nearly the financial slam dunk it once was, she said.

Take a market like San Francisco. The average price of an admittedly rare single-family home in the city is $1.38 million, according to Zillow. Depending on the size of a buyer’s downpayment, that would work out to a monthly loan payment of roughly $6,500. The average rent for one is $4,350.

In order for all those extra monthly payments to eventually pay off, the value of the house will need to soar vertiginously into the indefinite future. Or rents, which determine how much a person can save by not buying, will need to shoot up as well. Or the stock market or other possible places a well-heeled renter could park all the extra money they aren’t spending on a mortgage, will need to flatline.

Or a combination of all of the above.

A person buying into that market is assuming a very specific and by no means certain version of the financial future, said Goodman.

Either that, or they’re just “desperate to own in San Francisco because they’re just desperate to own in San Francisco,” she said. “For whatever reason.”

The case for renting forever

For many Californians, this isn’t actually a decision. The number of renters who can buy locally and get away with spending anything less than 40% of their income on monthly homeownership costs are in the single digit percentages in Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, Sacramento, San Jose and Ventura, according to the CBRE report. Being a tenant in California is hard enough. More than half of California renters are spending more than 30% of their income on rent as it is.

But for those lucky enough to rent by choice, it’s not necessarily a bad choice to make.

Remember that yawning “buying premium” between the monthly cost of owning and renting? A wealthy tenant is in a position to save and invest the difference. Though homeownership is often touted as the best way to build wealth, it’s not the only way. It might not even be the best way: On average and over long stretches of time, the stock market regularly outperforms median home prices — albeit, without quite so many tax benefits and other boosts that federal and state governments shower upon homeowners.

Rather than pouring every last dollar in disposable income (and then some) into a single depreciating asset that threatens to leak when it rains, parking that money elsewhere also allows a renter the option to diversify.

“I think more people are starting to be interested in renting and saving at the same time, because they've been priced out of owning a home, but they still want to achieve their financial goals and they're looking into those alternatives and getting more savvy about it,” said Redfin economist Daryl Fairweather.

Running the numbers on whether renting and saving is, in fact, the better financial call gets very “murky,” she said. Much of it depends on the future of home prices, local rents, stock prices, interest rates and how long a person plans to stay put. It’s a hugely complex and individual choice and it’s not risk-free. Fairweather touted an online rent-vs-buy calculator produced by the New York Times.

But California’s specific conditions — high prices relative to rents, high maintenance and insurance costs, the relatively large number of tenants protected by rent control policies of one kind or another — the financial argument for renting may be about as good as it's ever been.

The perks of owning property

Even if renting is a better deal on paper, there are plenty of reasons someone might want to buy that have nothing to do with money.

Space is one: For a host of regulatory and financial reasons, the vast majority of rental units are apartments while detached single-family houses are predominantly reserved for owners. Especially for growing families, the option is often either to cram your spouse and kids into an urban apartment or drive out of the city (and possibly out of the state) until you can afford to buy.

Education is another. Rentals are also more likely than owner-occupied units to be in neighborhoods with poorly performing public schools and elevated crime rates.

For some, homeownership also comes with an entirely non-monetary warm and fuzzy factor, whether it’s independence — deciding when and what color to paint your walls, for instance — or a sense of security.

Finally, just because someone can save and invest the extra hundreds or thousands of dollars a month that would have gone to a mortgage payment, that doesn’t mean they will. No one likes making a mortgage payment, but by converting part of your paycheck each month into home equity, it acts as a kind of forced savings plan. It's perpetually tempting not to save.

“It takes more discipline to go against the social trend,” said Fairweather.

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

President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump's direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.

"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.

Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.

The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.

Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.

Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.

Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem's announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump's administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.

While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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