The Brief

To cap off her first week in office last December, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass gathered reporters at a dusty patch of dirt in Boyle Heights. From a podium, she explained that construction of affordable housing on that site had taken 16 years to break ground.

Bass said she would no longer tolerate such delays. She was there to sign Executive Directive One (ED1), an order for city staff to approve applications for 100% affordable housing developments within 60 days, and to issue building permits within five days.

“Affordable housing projects are only being built in certain locations and not others,” Bass said at the news conference. “This is at a time when we need housing all across Los Angeles.”

Six months later, with less fanfare, Bass updated the rules to say that projects in single-family neighborhoods would be ineligible.

Since that change in June, an LAist review found the city has placed nine affordable housing projects near single-family homes in limbo, creating an uncertain future for 1,443 potential units of low-income housing.

“[Developers] were hoping and relying and expecting on the benefit of ED1 — and then the rules changed,” said land use attorney Dave Rand, who is now representing a number of developers trying to appeal the city’s ED1 denials.

“The end result will be a lot of lost housing units that could have been built in these areas,” Rand added. “Some people may celebrate that and think that's a fantastic thing. I think it's the loss of a good number of much-needed affordable homes.”

L.A. needs more affordable housing, fast

The minutiae behind the processing of applications for development projects may sound tedious, but the stakes are high for Angelenos increasingly struggling to pay their rent.

Between 2010 and 2019, as rents climbed, L.A. lost about 111,000 homes considered affordable to low-income families by government standards. At the same time, the city only built about 13,000 new affordable homes. Plus, affordable housing covenants that restricted rents on buildings constructed in the 1980s and 90s have been expiring, in some cases leading to mass evictions.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass stands at a construction site in Boyle Heights to announce her executive order fast-tracking affordable housing approval in the city.

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David Wagner/LAist

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ED1 was designed to confront these problems by getting new affordable housing projects ready to break ground faster than any other time in L.A.’s recent history.

Bass’s directive has found success outside of single-family neighborhoods. L.A. planning officials told LAist the department has already approved applications for 59 projects representing more than 4,620 new affordable apartments.

But Rand said city officials should expand on that success by processing applications based on the rules in place when they were filed. By retroactively changing the rules, he said, L.A. could lose many desperately needed low-income homes.

“It could be the difference between deciding to do the project or not at all,” Rand said.

Some developers have withdrawn their applications, acknowledging that their projects no longer make financial sense without ED1 fast-tracking. Others may decide to re-file their applications, but this time including more expensive market-rate apartments.

California officials weigh in 

State housing officials have sided with the developers. California Department of Housing and Community Development officials have sent letters urging the city to quote “apply the law consistently.”

Applicants who submitted paperwork “may proceed under the ED1 regulations that were in effect at the time the preliminary application was complete,” wrote Shannan West with the state’s Housing Accountability Unit in October.

A mayor’s office spokesperson told LAist in an email that ED1 has accelerated thousands of units of affordable housing.

“The city has seen an 85% increase in the number of affordable housing units proposed,” said Bass press secretary Clara Karger.

While not eligible for ED1, projects near single-family homes can still go through the normal approval process, Karger said. That process can involve years of environmental review and contentious public hearings with L.A.’s Planning Commission.

“The mayor believes that any policy implemented should be evaluated to ensure there are no unintended consequences on communities, especially the very ones we are trying to help,” Karger said.

The mayor’s office did not agree to requests to interview Bass directly.

A car drives past an elementary school in Winnetka. The school is across the street from a project site that had its ED1 application denied following the mayor’s June update.

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The politics of building in single-family zones

If the city doesn’t reverse course, pro-housing activists say they’ll sue. Sonja Trauss with YIMBY Law, a group that takes legal action against cities it believes are flouting state housing law, told LAist that her organization plans to file a lawsuit soon.

“It's not the right way for the city to treat people who are creating affordable housing,” Trauss said. “Hopefully the mayor gets the message that backpedaling wasn't as politically necessary or beneficial as she thought.”

Most of L.A.’s residential land — 74% to be exact — is zoned for single-family homes. Building large apartment developments in those areas has long been seen as politically risky, because it tends to enrage homeowners opposed to neighborhood change.

UCLA urban planning professor Paavo Monkkonen said leaving suburban areas untouched brings its own risks. The city of L.A. has some big housing goals to meet under state law. The city must plan for 185,000 new low-income homes by 2029.

State law also requires the city to reverse long-standing patterns of segregation by putting many new affordable homes in wealthier areas, such as single-family neighborhoods.

“Once you take them off the table, it's really hard to live up to the fair housing mandate,” Monkkonen said.

In Winnetka, an uncertain future for a shuttered school

Without a guaranteed path forward, it’s unclear what’ll happen to project sites where plans for low-income apartments were already in the works.

Along a busy thoroughfare in the San Fernando Valley, cars going 40 mph zoom past a padlocked fence surrounding a boarded-up private school in Winnetka. Weeds poke through the cracked asphalt outside a building covered in graffiti.

A developer wants to turn this site into 360 low-income apartments. Standing outside the defunct elementary school, Winnetka Neighborhood Council president Mihran Kalaydjian said the community is against it.

“It needs to be away from residential,” he said, explaining that he believes affordable housing developments shouldn’t create difficulties for local businesses, shouldn’t affect homeowners’ property values, and shouldn’t be located near schools.

Winnetka Neighborhood Council president Mihran Kalaydjian stands outside the derelict property where a developer has proposed hundreds of new low-income apartments.

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The site is across the street from a public elementary school. It’s also next to a gas station and across the street from a Mercedes-Benz service center. But Kalaydjian said the single family homes down the street make this the wrong place to build.

“There are many other locations they need to take into consideration,” he said.

The area’s councilmember, Bob Blumenfield, is also against fast-tracking this project and others in his district.

“ED1 basically removes the community input from the process,” Blumenfield said in an interview.

That kind of streamlining is acceptable in parts of the city that already have large apartment buildings, he said. But in low-density areas, “removing the public input is not appropriate at this point.”

The view from South L.A. 

Tenant advocates say that by cutting single-family neighborhoods out of ED1, the Bass administration has increased development pressure on poorer parts of the city.

“The majority of the affordable housing is happening in South L.A. or in areas that are not high resource,” said Maria Patiño Gutierrez with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.

In some cases, Gutierrez said working class tenants are seeing their old, rent-controlled buildings demolished to make way for development of new ED1 projects.

Under state law, low-income renters have a right to move into new affordable housing built in place of their demolished homes. But Gutierrez said tenants often find the process confusing and unmanageable.

“Though there are state protections and local laws, we don't think that all the community members know they have the right to return,” Gutierrez said.

Graffiti covers a building on a site that no longer has a guaranteed pathway to becoming affordable housing under ED1.

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David Wagner/LAist

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When housing fights in single-family neighborhoods get ugly

City councilmember Nithya Raman believes L.A. should keep ED1 projects proposed near single-family homes in the fast lane. She has voted to advance an ED1 project in her district, and has cast lone votes supporting projects in other districts.

“We should be following the law,” Raman said in an interview. “We should be pushing towards a system where many more of our planning decisions are not discretionary votes that are coming in front of an individual council office, or to the council at all.”

Raman and her staff have faced harsh pushback from some constituents over her support of an ED1 project aiming to build 200 units of affordable housing in a seven-story structure on Ethel Avenue in Sherman Oaks.

A number of Raman’s district staff, including two who identify as Muslim, attended the Sherman Oaks Street Fair in October. They say protesters opposed to the Ethel project surrounded their booth, waved signs and distributed flyers about saving single-family neighborhoods, and called Raman and her staffers “terrorists.”

A video taken that day shows the protesters following staffers while they packed up to leave the street fair. At first, the protesters tell the staffers they never used the word “terrorist.” Then, one of them says, “Well, if you’re inflicting terror on us, then I guess you’re terrorists.”

Raman condemned the use of the word “terrorist” by protesters.

At the same time, Raman said she also understands concerns about large developments coming to residential areas. If it were up to her to design affordable housing projects for the area, she said, she wouldn’t make them seven stories tall.

But saying no to developers who complied with the city’s guidelines could scare others away from proposing more affordable housing, Raman said.

“If we create a system where, even if you follow the rules, your project will not move forward, I think we make it much harder for us to generate the kind of construction that we do need,” Raman said. “That's an existential threat for the city.”

All you have to do is grab a drink with a friend, eavesdrop at a coffee shop, or open your eyes to see that entertainment professionals in L.A. are hurting these days. Last year there was a 16% decline in filming in the region, according to Film LA, and between 2022 and 2024, L.A. County is estimated to have lost more than 42,000 motion picture-related jobs.

I know this pain, personally. I was a TV writer for years, but my last writer’s room job was in 2021. Luckily, I was able to pivot to copywriting as I continue to work on my own projects, but I do wonder what the rest of my colleagues are up to. Where have the thousands of highly skilled entertainment professionals gone?

Turns out, school.

Specifically, to become therapists.

I first noticed this trend over a decade ago in 2013. I had just moved back to L.A. from New York and I started seeing a new therapist. Over the course of our sessions, she revealed to me that she used to be an actor — and quite a successful one. She was a co-star on a hit sitcom for nine seasons.

But despite the consistent work, she wasn’t fulfilled. She said acting was mostly sitting around in a trailer waiting and she craved more intellectual stimulation. So she went back to school and became a therapist, the irony being that she never fully escaped Hollywood. Today, as an L.A. based therapist, she spends most of her days listening to frustrated actors and writers complain about the biz. Ahh, the circle of life!

Not only was my therapist a former actor, I started to notice more and more of my peers and friends making the switch. I met Alan, 40, who prefers to be anonymous because he doesn’t want his patients knowing about his private life, at a co-working space. We both belonged to a charming apartment-turned-writer’s haven in Silver Lake.

At the time, Alan was a busy film producer, plugging away at his own feature script on the side. But despite having a shiny career working with hip actors and directors, he wasn’t happy.

He remembers going to schmoozy parties where everyone would name drop and brag about what they were working on.

“I had all those fancy things to drop, too, but it meant nothing, it didn’t make me feel any better about myself,” he said. “If I can’t even talk about what I’m up to without feeling sad, that’s kind of a problem.”

Alan started to realize maybe producing wasn’t his destiny. He was going through the motions. Things started to fall into place when he started therapy.

“Therapy made me feel more like myself. I just felt a little bit more enlivened… the rest of the week kind of deadened me,” he said.

He loved how real and deep the conversations were and became intrigued by the idea of becoming a therapist himself. He started taking a few psychology classes and was instantly hooked. Now, he has a thriving private practice and hasn’t looked back.

Primal emotions

Julie Mond is a therapist and an actor. Unlike Alan, Mond still loves acting, it’s not something she grew out of. She just needed a more stable career as she continued to pursue her passion. Becoming a therapist has actually liberated her to focus on the kind of acting she actually wants to do. Because she’s financially stable she can now pick and choose the kinds of projects that feel worth her time.

When I ask Mond why so many entertainment professionals become therapists she reflects on a couple of things. She said performers and directors crave “connecting authentically, being present moment-to-moment, being real and honest. We’re digging for these primal emotions.” All things you have to do as a therapist.

She also has another theory: “A lot of artists go to therapy. Many of us who become therapists have been in therapy and it's changed our lives. I think people in L.A. have been on a healing journey and want to give back.”

Charley Lang, who teaches at Antioch University.

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Jaymes Mihaliak

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Courtesy Charley Lang

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Even though I'm personally meeting more people who are becoming therapists, I wondered if it was an actual trend or just a coincidence.

So I talked with psychology professor Charley Lang at Antioch University to get his take. Lang, who's been teaching psychology for 30 years, said that in his graduate classes, at least 50% of the students come from entertainment careers.

When I asked why they make the switch, he’s blunt: stability.

That’s why Lang himself became a therapist decades ago.

Lang was an actor on Broadway, but eventually hit a wall.

“I had a nice career as an actor, I essentially got to do everything I wanted to do," he said. "But then I was in my late 30s and I was like, ‘Do I always want to be praying for another guest spot on a sitcom in order to feel secure and OK?’”

Does he have any regrets or miss acting? On the contrary, he tells a story:

“I had become a therapist and stopped acting and a friend of mine was directing a play at the Ahmanson and he was like, ‘Please do this play.’ And I was able to figure it out and I was just dipping my toe back in to see what it was like and it was a six-week run of the play. And at the end of the first week I remember standing in the wings waiting to make my entrance and thinking, ‘Oh my god haven’t we already told this freaking story?’ It was like Groundhog Day. It was the same story over and over.”

As a therapist, he said he loves that every day is different.

The point isn’t that working in entertainment is bad and therapy is perfect. To me, the takeaway is that it’s never too late to make a change. That just because something used to work for you doesn’t mean you’re committed to doing it forever.

Or in Mond's case, maybe there is a way to continue doing what you love, but more sustainably.

In today’s fragile and volatile job market, it’s nice to know that you can always begin again. Just because a job or career ends, doesn’t mean your life is over.

If, in the future, I’m too fried, burnt out, or tired of the rollercoaster of being a writer, maybe I’ll embark on a second career.

But until then, I’m still riding the dragon.

Folks, we’ve reached peak art-weird. There’s a group show opening Sunday in an abandoned Sizzler. I am not making this up. Get your fill at the art fairs around town — Frieze, The Other Art Fair, Butter and Felix, for starters — or explore some of the neighborhoods with galleries, like Melrose Hill, West Hollywood and the Arts District. You’re sure to see a lot. It’s almost like we live in a city where you could just wander around and randomly come across things.

If music is more your thing, Licorice Pizza has your go-tos. On Friday, German singer-songwriter and producer Monolink’s "The Beauty Of It All Tour" stops at The Wiltern, Brandi Carlile is with The Head And The Heart at the Forum and the Fiery Furnaces are at the Masonic Lodge. At the Peacock Theater, there’s an epic “Legends Of Hip Hop” bill with Big Daddy Kane, Kurtis Blow, Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel & Scorpio from The Furious Five, Doug E. Fresh, KRS‐One and more. Saturday, experimental hip-hop group Clipping is at the Fonda, and the artist formerly known as June Marieezy — (((O))) — is at a cool new Chinatown venue called Pacific Electric. Or you can spend the whole weekend at Ace Mission Studios in Boyle Heights, immersed in Factory 93’s two-day underground techno festival, Skyline L.A.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can visit the community hub East L.A. Film Shop, dance like it’s the 70s at the immersive theater experience Brassroots District: L.A. ’74 and head to the new Studio Ghibli exhibit at the Academy Museum with superfan Makenna Sievertson.

Events

Amadeus

Through Sunday, March 15
Pasadena Playhouse
39 S. El Molino, Pasadena
COST: FROM $48; MORE INFO

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Jeff Lorch

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Pasadena Playhouse

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Our friends at the L.A. Times called the new production of Amadeus at Pasadena Playhouse a “marvel to behold,” and I don’t think you can get a bigger rave than that. Tony winner Jefferson Mays plays Salieri in director Darko Tresnjak’s (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) take on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play about the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart in 19th-century Vienna.

Spooky Stories After Dark

Saturday, February 28, 7 p.m.
The Wolves
519 S. Spring St., Downtown L.A. 
COST: FREE, TWO DRINK MINIMUM; MORE INFO

One of my favorite L.A. Instagram follows is Spooky Foodie, aka Ansley Layne, who goes to restaurants in L.A. and tells all about the ghosts haunting your favorite haunts. She’s bringing her ghost stories and encouraging you to tell your own at Spooky Stories After Dark, a Moth-inspired storytelling competition night at The Wolves downtown. After each story, the speaker will be interviewed by Spooky Foodie and co-host Your Cousin Trev. You can also expect some surprise celebrity guests.

Sleep, a film by Andy Warhol featuring John Giorno

Friday, February 27, 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Marciano Art Foundation
4357 Wilshire Blvd., Mid-Wilshire
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

Film stills of John Giorno in Andy Warhol's Sleep. New York, NY, United States, 1963. Photo credit: Andy Warhol. 8 x 10 inches, b/w, photographic print.

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Studio Rondinone/Courtesy of the John Giorno Collection, John Giorno Archives. Studio Rondinone, New York, NY.

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Andy Warhol

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It’s not every day you can screen Sleep, the 1964 groundbreaking avant-garde film by Andy Warhol, so take advantage and grab a ticket for this evening at the Marciano Art Foundation. Coinciding with their John Giorno: No Nostalgia show, the film is five hours and 21 minutes of artist and poet (and Warhol’s then-lover) John Giorno sleeping, so needless to say, you probably don’t need to be there the whole time. The galleries will be open throughout the entire screening, so it’s also a fun chance to see some late-night art!

Black History Greens Festival

Saturday, February 28, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. 
Virginia Ave. Park 
2200 Virginia Ave., Santa Monica
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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Courtesy City of Santa Monica

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Check out three greens-cooking demonstrations with local chefs at the Black History Greens Festival in Santa Monica. The day also features family activities, including book readings and giveaways, plus performances. KJLH radio’s Arron “BOBO” Arnell returns for a second year as the master of ceremonies, and DJ Dense will be spinning throughout the event.

48th L.A. Chinatown Firecracker-Lunar New Year Celebration

Saturday, February 28 to Sunday, March 1
943 Broadway (starting line), Chinatown 
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Firecracker 10K

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Usher in the Year of the Fire Horse with the annual run/walk in Chinatown, plus a celebration with lion dances, music, a dog contest and more. Saturday features the long 20-mile run and century bike ride, while Sunday is a festival atmosphere with the 5K and 10K races, fun runs, kids' activities and more.

Opera Noir at L.A. Opera’s Akhnaten 

Saturday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A. 
COST: Opening night from $134, other performances from $44; MORE INFO

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Craig T. Mathew

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L.A. Opera

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L.A. Opera welcomes back Philip Glass’ opera about ancient Egypt, Akhnaten, featuring John Holiday as the title king and mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as his queen, Nefertiti. The opera is on at the Dorothy Chandler through March 22, but opening night is also Opera Noir, an event with the San Fernando Valley Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, which brings Black artistry and community together with opera. No matter which night you go, get there early for a pre-performance talk with Dr. Tiffany Kuo in Stern Grand Hall one hour before every performance.

Art Fairs

You have your pick of art fairs and related art events all weekend long. From the big Frieze Art Fair, which has been the jewel of L.A. Art Week since its launch here in 2019; to Felix, which makes a very cool use of space at the Hollywood Roosevelt; to The Other Art Fair in a new Culver City location (with art you might actually be able to afford for your wall); to the Black-artist focus of Butter in Inglewood, there’s really no shortage of places to see the newest artists’ work as well as old favorites.

Frieze L.A.

Through Sunday, March 1
Barker Hangar
3021 Airport Ave., Santa Monica
COST: FROM $79; MORE INFO 

Butter

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Courtesy Butter

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Through Sunday, March 1
Hollywood Park
1011 Stadium Drive, Inglewood 
COST: $60; MORE INFO

Felix Art Fair

Through Sunday, March 1
Hollywood Roosevelt 
7000 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
COST: $75; MORE INFO

The Other Art Fair

Through Sunday, March 1
3Labs
8461 Warner Drive, Culver City
FROM $30; MORE INFO

Post-Fair

Through Saturday, February 28 
128 Fifth St., Santa Monica
COST: $12; MORE INFO

We're in for another warm and sunny day in SoCal.

Daytime highs for the beaches will reach the mid-70s and up to the low 80s more inland. Downtown L.A. will see temperatures up to 83 degrees.

Temperatures for the valley communities and the Inland Empire will reach the mid-80s. The western San Fernando Valley will see temps in the upper 80s, up to 89 degrees for Woodland Hills.

In Coachella Valley, expect another day with highs in the 90s, up to 96 degrees.

Friday is expected to be the warmest day of the week.

Newly released data from the city show that Los Angeles police officers use minor traffic stops as a way to investigate Black and Latino people on suspicion of committing a more serious crime at a higher rate than their share of the citywide population.

The LAPD adopted a policy about so-called pretextual stops and began tracking the practice in 2022.

In a report released at the end of January, the city’s chief legislative analyst found that Black people were involved in nearly 31% of pretextual stops conducted by LAPD officers between spring 2022 and fall 2025. According to 2023 Census estimates, Black people make up 8% of the city’s population.

According to the report, "Hispanic/Latino" people, who make up just less than half the city’s population, were the subjects of 56% of pretextual stops.

That analysis, along with a separate report by LAPD, found that of the more than 760,000 people involved in traffic stops between spring of 2022 and fall of 2025, 9% to 10% of them were stopped pretextually.

Chauncee Smith, an associate director of the racial justice-focused nonprofit Catalyst California, said LAPD’s data is “under inclusive” since it relies on officers subjectively deciding when a stop is pretextual.

He said an analysis of data from Catalyst California, published in February, demonstrates that pretextual stops don’t result in evidence discovery enough to make up for the negative impacts of the practice.

“It's affecting the lives of many Black and Latinx Angelenos on an everyday basis,” Smith said, adding that pretextual stops often result in harassment, dehumanization and excessive ticketing or fining of communities of color.

Pretextual stops 

Police sometimes use violations of the vehicle code to stop drivers and investigate them for a more serious crime unrelated to the traffic stop, such as possessing drugs or firearms, according to Deepak Premkumar, a research fellow for the Public Policy Institute of California.

 ”Law enforcement officers see tons of violations, and we give them a lot of discretion to determine who they should stop and when,” Premkumar told LAist.

A plausible example of what a pretextual stop could look like is if police see a car matching the description of one that was involved in a crime in the area, then pull that car over for a broken taillight, Premkumar said.

The policy the LAPD adopted in 2022 outlines that officers:

• Can only conduct pretextual stops as long as they are “acting upon articulable information” that the person is close to a serious crime that’s worth investigating. 
• Should minimize stops for minor equipment violations, such as broken taillights, unless the violation “interferes with public safety.”
• State the reason for the stop, whether pretextual or not, while their body-worn cameras are filming.

Despite the adoption of the policy, Catalyst California’s analysis found that the proportion of all officer-initiated stops that are for minor traffic violations has “remained relatively constant since 2019.”

Racial disparities

The analysis from the city’s chief legislative analyst included a comparison of pretextual stop rates for different ethnic and racial groups in L.A. compared to their share of the citywide population.

The analysis found that "Hispanic/Latino" and Black people were overrepresented in data on pretextual stops compared to their share of the population.

L.A. Police Capt. Shannon White drafted the department’s report of the same data, which did not include an ethnic or racial breakdown of those involved in pretextual stops.

At a Los Angeles Police Commission Meeting in February, when she presented the department’s analysis, White said Census estimates for the city don’t necessarily align with “the actual breakdown of our suspects of crime,” who, theoretically, are the subjects of pretextual stops.

“When you look at the actual breakdown of our suspects of crime…what you will find is that they skew towards communities of color for various societal reasons,” White said.

According to the LAPD’s analysis, people in Central and South L.A. were subjects of pretextual at higher rates than in the Valley and West L.A.

Some commissioners at the meeting questioned that disparity.

“Something just doesn't add up,” Commission President Teresa Sánchez-Gordon said. “Is it racial profiling? Is that bias? Implicit, explicit bias that's in the report?”

Discovery rates

The police’s analysis found that searches during pretextual stops yielded contraband, such as firearms and other weapons or drugs, in about every 3 in 10 cases. “Narco-related” evidence is what’s most commonly found in the searches.

Catalyst California’s report looked more specifically at different kinds of searches and how likely they are to lead to evidence discovery.

The nonprofit found that since 2022, when officers used consent-only searches during stops for minor traffic violations, they discovered evidence 3% to 10% of the time. The rate was similarly low when the person stopped was on parole or probation.

According to Catalyst California’s analysis, the type of search most likely to lead to discovery of evidence is when there’s an existing search or arrest warrant for the person stopped.

“This was likely because they occurred in situations when there was a higher likelihood of a significant violation, beyond mere pretext,” the nonprofit's researchers wrote.