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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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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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.”

Data center builders don’t tell the public how much water they use, according to a new report — and the industry is encroaching into water-stressed and vulnerable communities.

The report, by the think tank Next10 and researchers at Santa Clara University, finds that planned data centers — the ganglia of artificial intelligence — are spreading to regions reliant on overtapped groundwater and strained surface water, with potentially major effects in the Central and Imperial Valleys.

But, reinforcing previous studies, the researchers found that a patchwork of state, federal and local policies allows data center operators to avoid publicly disclosing their actual water use.

California lawmakers tried to address this last year, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the measure. Now, the legislature is trying again, with bills mandating disclosures about water use and planning.

“We have this huge build out, and we have very little data,” said Irina Raicu, who directs the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

Paired with California’s precarious water supplies, Raicu said, “It’s just not a good combination.”

Shaolei Ren, an expert on the environmental impacts of AI at UC Riverside who was not involved in the study, said the findings point to a much broader problem.

“Limited publicly available information about data center water use makes it difficult for communities, water providers and researchers to have meaningful public discussions and responsibly assess power-water trade-offs,” Ren said in an email.

Murky water use 

Few environmental impact reports for California’s data centers were publicly available online, the researchers found.

Raicu and co-author Iris Stewart-Frey, a professor of environmental science, went looking for the reports, meant to assess and disclose a project’s impacts for both nature and people under the landmark California Environmental Quality Act.

They found almost none. The ones they did find were largely for facilities in the city of Santa Clara.

Through interviews with planning officials, they discovered that projects can slip through with little environmental review if they fall under certain size or water use thresholds, or if they meet a city or county’s criteria for other approval pathways. These include something called ministerial approval, which requires planning agencies to approve a project that meets local zoning and other standards.

Even for data centers that undergo more stringent environmental scrutiny, the researchers found that documentation is rarely available to the public.

In the few cases the planning documents were posted publicly, the information — on the data center’s owner or operator, size, type of cooling system, the amount of water used, whether it’s recycled or potable — was often “missing, contradictory, or vague,” the report said.

The researchers said they contacted water providers in areas where data centers cluster, seeking usage data. None responded.

A shift to vulnerable regions

California’s data centers mostly cluster in the south San Francisco Bay Area and the city of Los Angeles, with smaller concentrations in Sacramento and San Diego.

But the report noted large, planned projects in rural and less affluent regions — like in Santa Clara County’s Gilroy, as well as in the heavily agricultural Imperial Valley.

“They need a bunch of cheap land,” Raicu. “If we’re not careful, they will end up being pitched, very convincingly, to communities that have real needs — without enough attention being paid to the water part.”

Khara Boender, director of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, which has opposed bills mandating more granular water-use reporting, said in an email the industry is “committed to being a good neighbor.”

Boender argues that data centers collectively “used significantly less water than other essential industries in 2025, including the agriculture, power, food and beverage, and semiconductor sectors,” but the coalition offers no data to back that up.

Collective use matters less than local impacts in a state where each community has its own mix of water supplies and strains, according to a previous study published by a team at UC Berkeley.

Whether data centers use a lot or a little water relative to agriculture or other industries, “what matters most is the scale of new local use compared to available local supply,” the Berkeley team concluded earlier this year. “Unfortunately, this picture is clouded by data deficiencies.”

In this week’s report, the Santa Clara University team drilled into those local supplies and community vulnerabilities to anticipated expansion.

“We’re at the brink of this happening in California,” Stewart-Frey, the environmental scientist, said. Her report, she added, isn’t advocating against data centers. But “communities should know what they’re getting themselves into.”

Debates over proposed data centers are erupting in a Kern County desert community with dwindling groundwater and in the hot Imperial Valley, which draws from the strained Colorado River. 

Monterey Park residents in the San Gabriel Valley successfully opposed one data center project over environmental concerns and inadequate information and secured an upcoming vote on a citywide ban.

In a letter to city officials, a representative for the developer dismissed opponents as “rage-baiting an uninformed mob to pressure your decisionmaking.”

Raicu pushed back. “If those communities are uninformed about the issue — whose fault is that? Who should be informing the people so that you don’t have this kind of pushback, if there is no need for it?”

New laws v. Big Tech

Last year, Assemblymember Diane Papan, a Democrat from San Mateo, authored a bill requiring data center operators to report estimated or actual water use to their water supplier when seeking or renewing a business license or permit.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the measure amid industry pressure, saying he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.”

Now, Papan is trying again with two bills. One largely reprises last year’s measure, with additional reporting required to the city and county. The other would bar local governments from approving new or expanded data centers unless the developer discloses information about their water use and plans.

It would also set other requirements — like prohibiting development in overdrafted groundwater basins in places like the San Joaquin Valley, unless state water managers OK it.

“You cannot manage what you have not and cannot measure,” Papan said. “The public likes transparency, and they should.”

Both bills cleared a key legislative chokepoint this week but face staunch opposition from the tech industry and business groups.

“If they run out of water, guess what happens? And they can’t cool their systems — are they going to succeed?” Papan said. “To which I say, help us help you.”

Nestled between Historic Filipinotown and Echo Park is a bookstore turned artisan craft space turned food market, all within 900 square feet. Every Sunday, A Good Used Book on Glendale Boulevard transforms from a retail bookstore into what they call “Sunday Funday Market.”

Founders Jenny Yang and Chris Capizzi spent seven years operating as a pop-up without a brick-and-mortar location. Opening their doors to local vendors pays homage to their own roots selling at Los Angeles markets, from the Melrose Trading Post to the Pasadena Rose Bowl Flea Market.

“Mega giant online sellers have the scale and the resources and the patience and the reach to capture most people,” Capizzi said. “Whereas for us, I think we have to be really creative — we have to band together.”

Nestled between Historic Filipinotown and Echo Park is a bookstore turned artisan craft space turned food market, all within 900 square feet. Every Sunday, A Good Used Book on Glendale Boulevard transforms from a retail bookstore into what they call “Sunday Funday Market.”

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Yang and Capizzi’s long history of vending at markets taught them how isolating running a small business can be. At their market, they aim to build connections with each vendor and strategize the best timing and layout so everyone can succeed.

“[Amazon and Barnes & Noble] are Goliath, and we’re not even David — we’re just the ant underneath David’s foot,” Capizzi said. “I think we can do what we do and try to get as many people, at our level or even smaller, to get together.”

Weekly markets at A Good Used Book have captivated the neighborhood since its opening in October 2023, with charming names like “Sunday Funday,” “Saturday School” and “Hi-Fi Friday Night,” plus hand-drawn flyers by well-known artist Noah Harmon. Now, it’s become a weekly occurrence where LA pop-ups can display their own crafts, allowing local readers to indulge in a little more than a pocket paperback.

Each week holds a Pandora’s box of niche snacks, crafts or trinkets you didn’t know you needed, ranging from Southeast Asian-inspired trail mix to natural incense sticks to vintage Japanese audio equipment. One week you might be enticed to adopt a kitten from a rescue booth outside, another week you might impulsively get a stick-and-poke tattoo in the back of the store.

Nestled between Historic Filipinotown and Echo Park is a bookstore turned artisan craft space turned food market, all within 900 square feet. Every Sunday, A Good Used Book on Glendale Boulevard transforms from a retail bookstore into what they call “Sunday Funday Market.”

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Nick Ducassi

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The LA Local

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On one sunny Sunday afternoon, Brandon Stanciell hand-tossed fresh pizza dough on the sidewalk outside the bookstore. His 2-year-old pop-up, Pizza Ananda, which he named after his daughter, is an homage to her and to Italian cooking, a hobby he started during paternity leave. An hour before the market closed, Stanciell had already sold out and garnished his last pepperoni-and-hot-honey pie for one lucky customer.

“I love that places like this allow us all to meet at once to share what we have and give it to the community around us,” Stanciell said.

Nestled between Historic Filipinotown and Echo Park is a bookstore turned artisan craft space turned food market, all within 900 square feet. Every Sunday, A Good Used Book on Glendale Boulevard transforms from a retail bookstore into what they call “Sunday Funday Market.”

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Nick Ducassi

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The LA Local

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For the owners, building a community market is about deepening relationships with the people who walk through their doors. In an increasingly digital landscape, it is also a reciprocal partnership among local businesses.

“A lot of people talk about community building nowadays as a marketing strategy,” Capizzi said. “But I think the actual community building comes from talking to each vendor and each customer and being a consistent presence in the neighborhood.”

Nestled between Historic Filipinotown and Echo Park is a bookstore turned artisan craft space turned food market, all within 900 square feet. Every Sunday, A Good Used Book on Glendale Boulevard transforms from a retail bookstore into what they call “Sunday Funday Market.”

(

Nick Ducassi

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The LA Local

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While customers browsed for unique titles, Gerin del Carmen worked her booth of ceramic dishware, oyster-shaped trinket holders and vases resembling miniature boxes. As a ceramicist, del Carmen draws from her Filipino heritage, including the Balikbayan boxes that represent immigrants sending gifts to family in the Philippines.

“Sharing the community and your space is such a big deal. This is not a huge, gigantic Barnes & Noble store,” del Carmen said. “It has so much foot traffic, and the fact that [the owners] are setting up and sharing the space once or twice a week with other vendors and other artists is huge.”

Yang and Capizzi may think of themselves as an “ant underneath David’s foot,” but A Good Used Book is building a colony of vendors, rooted in community.

Whether you and your friends are looking for a brunch spot to cater to everyone's palates, or taking a trip to the historic Grand Central Market, food halls make for an easy, affordable place to satisfy cravings — especially in SoCal, where diverse selections of dishes reign supreme.

But these spaces fill a void much deeper than our appetites. They bring new life to old storefronts, factories or even airfields (see list below), and can offer a way to keep dollars within the community by becoming a hub for local businesses.

With that said, here's a short list of food halls where you'll get more than just a killer meal.

For good vibes

BLVD MRKT food hall on the corner of 6th Street and Whittier Boulevard in downtown Montebello.

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BLVD MRKT is an open-air food hall in downtown Montebello that feels like a party. The 8,500-square-foot space currently has five eateries, or "concepts" as they're known in the restaurant industry, and hosts live DJs every Friday night and Sunday during brunch. They also host Open Vinyl Night on the second and forth Tuesday of every month, where patrons get $2 off beers and margaritas from Alchemy Craft if they bring a vinyl record to be played in the BLVD courtyard.

The space is pet-friendly and has growing concepts like Los Taquero Mucho, which offers classic al pastor, grilled chicken and slow-cooked carnitas tacos, as well as specialty flavors like vegan tacos with whiskil sautéed in coconut milk, and Pork Belly Cochinita Pibil Tacos, perfect for those who crave crispy, slow-roasted pork with a hint of sweetness.

Los Taquero Mucho participates in BLVD's incubator program, run by co-founders Barney and Evelyn Santos. The program offers mentorship to local entrepreneurs until they can set up shop permanently.

Pork Belly Cochinita Pibil Tacos with salsa from Los Taquero Mucho at BLVD MRKT in Montebello.

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BLVD MRKT is part of the couple's commercial real estate development firm, Gentefy. Its mission is to invest in retail and hospitality projects that ignite economic development and revitalization in Black and brown neighborhoods.

"Blvd Mrkt is our first project," Barney Santos wrote in a text message. "It was our social proof to prove to banks, investors and cities that a socially conscious business model could exist in a traditionally overlooked area."

VCHOS Pupuseria Moderna also has a spot in the BLVD courtyard, offering handmade pupusas with filling choices such as shrimp with spinach and cheese, and tender beef birria with a side of consommé, onions and cilantro. Coffee lovers can get an Oaxacan Mocha at Cafe Santo, or stop by Cold Pizza for a wood-fired slice.

For eclectic tastes

Rodeo 39 Public Market in Stanton.

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An O.C. favorite, Rodeo 39 Public Market lives on Highway 39, also known as Beach Boulevard, in Stanton. This 40,000-square-foot space is an eclectic mix of more than 20 food and drink concepts and retailers. There are three outdoor patios and five murals, plus an arcade, tattoo shop and photo booth. Food options cover everything from Lil' Breezy's adobo breakfast burritos to Cajun crab fries at The Crawfish Hut.

Mural by artist David Flores outside of Joystix arcade at Rodeo 39 Public Market.

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Rodeo's menu choices make it well-suited for a casual weekend brunch. At its entrance sits Here & There, where you can grab a coffee or matcha latte, or try one of their signature drinks like the Iced Vienna, a combination of milk with caramelly demerara sugar and your choice of matcha or espresso, topped with sweet cream and garnished with sea salt. The result is a drink that's smooth and not too sweet.

Eggyo bulgogi egg sandwich with spicy mayo at Rodeo 39 Public Market.

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Eggyo, a recent addition to Rodeo, offers Korean corn dogs and fluffy egg sandwiches on crispy, house-baked milk bread. Try the bulgogi option with spicy mayo for a savory kick. If you crave a cocktail, venture over to CAPO, which also serves craft beer. Or just sit on one of their sun-filled patios while you decide what to try.

For a page from history

The Hangar in Long Beach.

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The Hangar is a 17,000-square-foot food hall that pays homage to Long Beach's aviation history. It sits on former Boeing Co. land where military and commercial aircraft were built. Today, it serves as a dining destination at the Long Beach Exchange Shopping Center, or LBX, neighboring the city's international airport.

This space currently has a mix of 14 food concepts and two retail shops. Patrons can enjoy local favorites outside their flagship locations, like the Joe's Special bagel sandwich from Cassidy's Corner Cafe, with bacon, egg and the star of the show — tangy jalapeño cream cheese. Fans of spice can try Jay Bird's Nashville Hot Chicken, which offers chicken sandwiches and tenders, and Blazin' Fries, all with six levels of heat.

Historic aviation photos are displayed above food concepts at The Hangar food hall at LBX in Long Beach

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Inside, there are vintage pictures of aircraft that were built at the site, and a wall of clocks showing the time in cities named Long Beach across the country.

A Pan Am Hawaii travel poster (left) and a TWA Spain travel poster (right) at the patio of The Hangar food hall.

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Outside, you'll find patio seating with umbrellas where you can sit and watch the occasional plane fly overhead. Or sit and enjoy the adjacent display of towering Pan Am and TWA posters promoting travel to Hawaii, Spain and Paris.

For fun and work

Mercado La Paloma on Grand Avenue in South L.A.

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Open since 2001, the approximately 34,000-square-foot Mercado La Paloma sits in the Figueroa corridor of South L.A., and is known for its focus on community, art and culture. From rotating art exhibits to colorful tiled tabletops, this space feels like it was made to nurture creativity.

Interior of Mercado La Paloma.

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There are meeting rooms to rent starting at $25 an hour. It's a space where locals can bring their laptop to work or study, or have a long conversation with a friend, with bites from six acclaimed restaurants.

Holbox's Erizo dish at Mercado La Paloma.

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At the Mercado, visit Holbox for Michelin-starred seafood dishes like Erizo — velvety sea urchin laid atop a bed of tender scallop ceviche. The combination is fresh, flavorful and oceanic. Tip: If you can swing it, come on a weekday to avoid a long line, or order ahead.

For something sweet, walk over to Oaxacacalifornia Cafe & Juice Bar for a Spicy Pineapple Juice with a gingery kick, or go for the classic pairing of Hot Oaxacan Chocolate, made with your choice of water or milk, and light-as-air conchas crowned with a solid layer of vanilla or chocolate streusel.