The Brief

The Los Angeles city council voted Tuesday to let landlords increase rents in the city’s rent-controlled apartments up to 6% for the first time since March 2020.

The proposal will allow rent hikes of 4% beginning on Feb. 1 with additional 2% increases permitted for landlords who cover their tenants’ gas and electricity costs.

The 10-2 decision came after fierce debate among council members, caught between pleas from tenants to keep low-income residents housed by continuing the pandemic-era ban on rent hikes and demands from landlords to end a nearly four-year rent freeze that blocked increased maintenance costs from being passed on to renters.

If the council hadn’t taken action, the city’s existing rules would have allowed landlords with rent-controlled properties to increase rents by 7% to 9% starting on Feb. 1.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who voted in support of the lower limits, said, “If we increase rent, people are going to get evicted, and we’re not going to stop this eviction-to-homelessness pipeline.”

Traci Park, one of the council members who voted against lowering the rent increases allowed on Feb. 1, said, “We’ve already asked an awful lot of our mom-and-pop landlords, and I just can’t imagine how much more we’re going to continue to expect them to give.”

Councilmember John Lee joined Park in voting no. Councilmembers Paul Krekorian and Curren Price recused themselves from the vote because they are landlords. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavksy was absent from the vote.

The proposal will now move to the city attorney’s office for drafting and return to the council for another vote before it is finalized.

The backstory to L.A.’s rent freeze

By the time increases resume in February, L.A. will have banned rent hikes in most of the city’s apartments for just shy of four years, far longer than other parts of the country.

The ongoing rent freeze started when COVID-19 public health restrictions first began. City lawmakers saw the ban as a way to protect renters facing financial and personal hardships caused by the pandemic.

The policy applies to nearly 600,000 apartments covered by the city’s rent control law, which generally includes apartment buildings built before October 1978. These older buildings make up nearly three-quarters of the city’s apartment stock. Newer buildings are subject to state law, which currently allows rent increases in L.A. and Orange counties of up to 8.8% annually.

The city’s rent freeze has helped many L.A. tenants — who tend to pay rents that exceed 30% of their income — balance their household budgets during a period when inflation surged. Housing researchers say even small rent increases have been shown to increase homelessness among the lowest-income renters.

The ongoing ban on rent hikes has enraged many of the city’s landlords, who think it should have ended years ago. They’ve long said that rising utility and maintenance costs, coupled with the inability to raise rents, have created financial hardships.

How the council came to this decision 

Last month, councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez moved to extend the rent freeze until August 2024. Landlords quickly mobilized to strike down that proposal.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield instead suggested allowing rent hikes to return on Feb. 1 as planned, but at increases of 4% to 6%. His proposal cleared the council’s housing committee, but a vote scheduled last week in the full city council was delayed in his absence.

During Tuesday’s meeting, council members proposed dueling amendments to alter the rules on rent hikes moving forward.

• Councilmember Tim McOsker moved to allow small landlords with 12 units or fewer to raise rents 7% to 9%, while preserving the lower 4% to 6% limit for larger landlords. 
• Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez moved to keep the 4% limit in place for all landlords, with no additional 2% for landlords who cover utilities. 

Neither amendment received enough votes to pass.

Landlords say repairs will have to wait

Landlords were happy to see the six-month rent freeze extension rejected, but many had hoped for higher allowable increases.

Daniel Bleiberg with L.A. property management company G-B Investment Services said that by not allowing landlords to keep up with rising costs for years through modest rent increases, city leaders have worked against their own affordable housing goals.

“Rental property needs to be a viable business or it’s only going to get worse,” Bleiberg said, adding that some owners have already asked him if they’d be better off selling their property to a developer. “The more [city council members] don't make it a viable business, they're just going to lose more and more of this housing.”

Geza Tokes owns and manages 18 rent-controlled apartments in the city of L.A.

“When the rent freeze started, we had no problem with that,” Tokes said. “It was shaky times and it made sense.”

But Tokes questioned the city’s decision to keep the ban on rent hikes in place for years. He said stagnant rents make it difficult to keep up with rising maintenance costs for gardening, pest control and plumbing. Until the rent freeze lifts in February, he said larger repairs are on hold.

“I’ve got to put a roof on a property in Echo Park — it's $14,000,” Tokes said. “Last winter's rains got us. It's leaking, and we put a Band-Aid on that … I want to take the roof off and get permits and do it legit. But I can't throw $14,000 down right now.”

Tenants say they’re already living on the edge

Many tenants say they can’t afford to see L.A.’s already high rents climb even higher.

Studio City renter Cindy Sanders said, as a retiree, Social Security is her main source of income, and there isn’t much left after she pays rent. She said an increase of up to 6% could spell the difference between staying in her apartment of nearly 30 years, or having to move out.

“With Social Security raises not being high … it's going to really have an effect,” Sanders said. She said she could not afford a similarly sized apartment in L.A. if she’s forced to move.

Delia Cardona said most of her income from cleaning homes and offices goes straight to rent for the Koreatown studio apartment she shares with her two sons. With her budget already strained, she said any increase will force her to cut back on basic necessities.

“Obviously it would affect me and make it harder to buy food and pay my bills,” Cardona said through a Spanish interpreter. She has organized with the Los Angeles Tenants Union to advocate for continuing the city’s rent freeze.

What comes next 

Now, city officials will have to spread the word about the new rent increase rules. The L.A. Housing Department has already told landlords that rent increases of 7% to 9% will be allowed on Feb. 1. Officials will now have to contact them again to note the change to lower limits.

During the pandemic, tenants experienced confusion over the rent freeze, as well as a lack of compliance from some landlords. By early 2023, illegal rent increase complaints had eclipsed pre-pandemic levels. Some tenants also reported that “discount” rent clauses buried in their leases allowed landlords to pass on large rent increases.

With allowable increases of up to 6%, the city of L.A. will have some of the highest permissible rent hikes among all of the cities in Southern California that have local rent control. Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Santa Ana have all set allowable increases below 3%. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted last week to approve allowable rent increases of up to 4% in rent-controlled housing starting next year in unincorporated areas.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display