The Brief

The Los Angeles Housing Department said Tuesday that it will “immediately” investigate whether some residential hotels, which are required by city law to be reserved for low-cost housing, are instead renting rooms to tourists.

The city’s action came just one day after Capital & Main and ProPublica revealed that 21 residential hotels were advertising on travel websites and that the Housing Department had failed to stop their owners from turning housing units into hotel rooms.

Department spokesperson Sharon Sandow said in a statement that over the next six to seven weeks “the Housing Department will investigate all 21 of the hotels identified in the article and will, where warranted, issue citations and make appropriate referrals to the City Attorney's office.” The department will also review its enforcement efforts, she said.

The mayor’s office requested the Housing Department conduct the investigation, said Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. “We are asking for a report back on all 21 properties in 45 days,” Seidl said. “In addition, we are asking for a report on how this happened and recommendations for ensuring this does not happen again.” The mayor’s office did not answer questions emailed to its staff ahead of the initial story.

In L.A., residential hotels are supposed to provide housing of last resort for the city’s poorest people. The hotels consist of small basic rooms — some with shared bathrooms — and are sometimes the only housing that many older people, disabled and low-income workers can afford.

Under a 2008 law, these hotels must remain residential, unless their owners either build replacements for the housing units they take off the market or pay into a city housing fund. The city has a list of about 300 residential hotels, defined as a building of six or more units that are the primary residences of their guests.

Capital & Main and ProPublica identified 21 residential hotels, with more than 800 dwelling units, that have marketed short-term rentals on their websites and on travel sites like Expedia and Booking.com. Because the city hasn’t tracked these conversions, the news organizations combed through the ads along with Housing Department inspection and enforcement records provided under public records requests.

It’s possible that other residential hotels might be offering nightly rentals as well. Seidl said the Housing Department’s report “will tell us how they are going to address all properties and next steps.”

“I think that is excellent news that the city will finally take seriously the place for residential hotel units within the whole ecosystem of permanent housing affordable to very low income tenants,” said Barbara Schultz, director of housing justice at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Several of the hotels’ appeals to business and leisure travelers are hard to miss. The H Hotel in L.A.’s Koreatown welcomes guests with a grand piano in the lobby and offers champagne in its lounge. At the Arts District’s American Hotel — the former home of the legendary music venue Al’s Bar — guests can regularly be spotted rolling luggage to the front door. Hometel Suites’ website points to the hotel’s “luxury features and touches,” and a large banner on its facade bears the message “Book your stay today.” All three are designated as residential hotels, but none have been cited for violations of the law.

Asked about the city’s plan to investigate his hotel, Mark Verge, the owner of the American, said: “Whatever’s fair — I think that’s the key.” He noted that he’s been paying the city’s hotel tax for years and previously said he has openly advertised the American as a hotel. If his hotel is found in violation following the city’s investigation, he said, “We’ll work it out.”

Hometel’s general manager Becky Hong said in an email, “We don’t have a plan to return for residential use.” The owner of the H didn’t respond to phone messages or emails requesting comment. The H’s operations manager said last month that he didn’t know if the hotel was violating the law but noted that the hotel’s management had asked the city to remove its residential designation.

City housing inspectors have cited only four of the 21 hotels under the 2008 law. Some hotels thwarted city enforcement by barring inspectors from entering their properties without administrative warrants, yet Housing Department records show inspectors didn’t obtain such warrants.

In interviews, L.A. housing officials had attributed the lack of enforcement in part to limited staffing. However, the Housing Department said that over the next four months it “will evaluate the resources needed to continue this important inspection and monitoring work, and will review its processes to determine where more capacity is needed to effectively enforce this ordinance.”

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This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a series of measures that halt the rebuilding of the burned Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights and that steer funding toward fire recovery efforts.

In a unanimous vote, the City Council barred the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) from issuing any rebuild permits until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completes its investigation.

The council also directed the Department of City Planning, the city attorney and the LADBS to present an interim control ordinance prohibiting permits or certificates of occupancy for large cold-storage warehousing and distribution near residential neighborhoods and sensitive areas like parks, schools, day care centers and libraries in Boyle Heights. 

The ordinance, if approved, would be in effect for 45 days, with an option to extend by 10 months and 15 days. It could be extended by an additional year, or until the “appropriate land use regulatory controls have been prepared,” according to a city staff report. 

“This Lineage fire exposed the cost of systems that have concentrated industrial risk in working-class communities of color for generations,” said Councilmember Ysabel Jurado during the council meeting. 

“A facility should not be able to request a like-for-like rebuild while the fire investigation remains active and the surrounding community is still living with the consequences,” she added. 

Jurado pushed forward the measures, noting that “recovery doesn’t finish when the site is cleaned up.”

“Our responsibility is also to demand accountability and strengthen protections so residents do not experience a disaster like this again,” she said. 

Jurado said the measures will ensure Boyle Heights residents “aren’t left to navigate recovery alone or bear the financial burden of an emergency they did not create.”

The council also directed city staff to explore the feasibility of establishing a fund of up to $10 million to support the affected Lineage community. 

It also called for the reallocation of up to $940,000 in Los Angeles County Fire Assistance Grant Funds to the Boyle Heights WorkSource Center for Lineage Fire Recovery to support impacted workers and businesses. 

Additionally, council members instructed the LADBS and the city attorney to provide recommendations for increasing penalties for notices of violations “on projects that impose a significant impact to the community,” as seen in the Lineage fire. Recommendations should include a fee and fine structure that ranges from $25,000 to $1 million per fine, according to a city staff report.

This week, Los Angeles' embattled homelessness agency made a major shift when it decided to no longer conduct the region's annual homeless count and give up management of over $200 million in annual federal funds aimed at addressing homelessness starting next month.

The day after the shift, federal prosecutors announced new fraud and bribery charges over homelessness funds that flowed through the agency. They allege a nonprofit founder siphoned $1 million in taxpayer funds into a high-end nightclub and a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti, among other claims. The founder's attorney has not responded to requests for comment.

It’s the latest fallout around the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, which for years has seen outside audits and reviews find that it’s failed to adequately oversee taxpayer spending.

In response to one of those audits, L.A. County decided a year and a half ago to pull its roughly $300 million per year from LAHSA — moving it into a newly created county homelessness department.

Until this year, LAHSA was funded by three main sources: the county, the city and the federal government.

With LAHSA’s decision this week to bow out of federal funding, the city of L.A. is now left as its last remaining major funder.

The L.A City Council has debated withdrawing funds for years, but is still in the process of hiring a consultant to come up with a plan.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and her mayoral challenger, Councilmember Nithya Raman, both say they want the city to pull its funds and manage them directly. In recent weeks on the campaign trail, Raman has promised an exit within her first year as mayor if elected, while Bass this week said it would take “a couple of years.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks at a press conference before LAHSA's annual homeless count on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, in Los Angeles.

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Carlin Stiehl

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In June and July, Bass’ office said she took steps toward exiting LAHSA, saying she directed city housing staff to come up with a plan for the city to leave the agency. Those staff told LAist they’re not aware of any such directive, and Bass’ office has not responded to follow-up questions.

No decisions yet from city

Three years ago, as the L.A. City Council’s homelessness committee was expressing frustration at years of inaccurate and incomplete performance data from LAHSA, a council member said the council had failed to examine alternatives that could take over management of the funding from the agency.

“ We have to have something in place. And I think what we failed as council is to start talking [through] the questions about what that would mean,” Councilmember John Lee said at the time.

“ We need to make sure that we take a look at those options. Otherwise, every year, we're going to be coming here … having the same exact conversations.”

The next year, county auditors found that LAHSA had failed to properly track and oversee the money it managed.

The City Council then voted in March 2025 to study letting the city contract directly with homeless service providers, bypassing LAHSA.

It was about a year before council members discussed next steps at a meeting.

This April, the council's Housing and Homelessness Committee — chaired at the time by Raman — recommended shifting city-funded programs away from LAHSA over the course of the current fiscal year. They recommended a July 1 deadline for a plan to be provided. That date came and went without the full council directing that a plan be created.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks ahead of the annual homeless count on Jan. 20, 2026.

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Jordan Rynning

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The full council approved money for a consultant on Aug. 4, when it voted to allocate $450,000 to "rapidly hire" outside experts to study a transition plan.

That consultant hasn’t been hired yet. A competitive bidding process is underway, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.

"We are required to solicit bids for that work and are currently in the procurement process," Szablo said via email.

Mounting federal and legal pressure

The city's deliberations are unfolding against escalating scrutiny of LAHSA itself.

In June, the Trump administration suspended the agency from federal homelessness dollars, citing what it called a pattern of fraud, failure and flagrant mismanagement. Administration officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, pointed in part to the case of Abundant Blessings, a nonprofit whose director, Alex Soofer, was criminally charged in January with siphoning at least $10 million in homelessness funds that flowed through LAHSA.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA had approved at least $3.5 million in contracts to Soofer's nonprofit even after its own compliance team flagged the group as high-risk for failing to do its job. Soofer recently agreed to plead guilty to diverting $2 million and previously repaid LAHSA $1.25 million.

LAHSA sued to block the federal suspension of homelessness dollars, arguing HUD's evidence was thin and its process abrupt. In an August ruling, U.S. District Judge David Carter paused the suspension pending further hearings, writing that LAHSA "may be dysfunctional" but that federal officials had "abruptly" pulled funding from providers serving thousands of people.

This week, LAHSA gave up trying to continue its federal responsibilities, just before prosecutors announced the new charges against LAHSA vendors.

LAist reporter Aaron Schrank contributed reporting to this story.

“Was it like this during the Great Depression?”

It’s a question that prop house owner Pam Elyea says she’s asked herself in recent years, as the film and TV industry has weathered multiple hits — the pandemic, the dual industry strikes of 2023, the 2025 fires — and a loss of production jobs to other states and countries that began decades ago.

Elyea, along with her husband Jim, opened History for Hire, a prop house in North Hollywood, in 1985. Before the pandemic, they had a staff of 20 people, but now employ only nine full-time employees.

“As an employer and a business owner, the feeling you're always trying to overcome is that feeling of weariness,” Elyea says. “ That it was just dragging on and on, and there's really no big hope in sight.”

‘It got everybody excited’

Elyea says she was heartened by the boost to California’s film and TV tax incentive program in July of 2025 — from $330 million to $750 million: “It got everybody excited."

Elyea says she started to see positive effects sooner than she expected, about three months in, first with new TV productions that were tax credit recipients coming to History for Hire for props, and more recently feature films.

Members of the Set Decorators Society of America in Washington, D.C., lobbying for a federal film and TV tax incentive on September 16, 2026.

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She’s also now lobbying for a new federal film and TV tax incentive, which President Donald Trump recently said he’d support.

“Are we at where we were before? No,” she says. “But we certainly are so much better, and so it kind of gives you hope moving forward.”

‘Flickering back to life’

Elyea’s experience is reflective of some of the data on film and TV productions in Los Angeles over the last year.

On the LAist podcast Imperfect Paradise, entertainment journalist Dawn Chmielewski notes that Film LA, which tracks permitting for on-location shoots in and around Los Angeles, showed that when it comes to television production, there was a 51% increase in the second quarter over the first.

“Overall, the numbers are still down year over year,” Chmielewski says. “But it's showing that the industry is sort of flickering back to life.”

Another promising data point Chmielewski points out: ProdPro, which tracks productions around the world, “showed that both the number of films being shot and overall production spend are both up in California for the second quarter of this year.”

But there are also statistics that point to a less rosy picture.

Film LA research that shows the number of shoot days in Los Angeles has decreased by nearly 50 percent since 2017. And it’s estimated that since the peak of the streaming era in 2022, nearly 50 thousand production jobs have been lost in Los Angeles.

‘It feels incredibly uncertain’

Costumer Andrea Wheeler describes the current climate in the industry as one where “everybody is on eggshells,” with so many people she knows who’ve had to pivot to other careers that “you feel like you’re in a dying industry right now.”

Andrea Wheeler is a costumer who has worked on TV shows like "Lopez v. Lopez" and movies like Marvel's "Eternals."

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While Wheeler was recently able to find work on a show that moved from Vancouver to California because of the tax credit boost here, she says the pay and working conditions didn’t match up to the kind of work she was able to find in the past.

From around 2016 to 2019, she says, “if you were in a job that was really atrocious, just like really bad working conditions ... You could just leave and find another job the next day. There was a lot of security there, [but] not now.”

Chineza Ezinkwo is a production coordinator based in Los Angeles. She most recently worked on "Tyrant," a Charlize Theron film that shot in LA.

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Chineza Ezinkwo, a production coordinator who’s worked in the film and TV industry in Los Angeles since 2011, echoes Wheeler.

“ Yes, there's more work happening, but also it's hard to find,” Ezinkwo says. “You can't really plan to build a life in the way that you felt like you used to even a few years ago.”

Still, she says there is also a bit of a renewed sense of optimism in the industry right now.

“It feels incredibly uncertain, but I will say there's more hope these past two years than there was certainly [in] the past three or four years.”

Years after generative artificial intelligence software became widely accessible, the University of California system still does not have a consistent approach to how AI is used in classrooms, according to its faculty and students.

“The situation is contradictory and also extraordinarily fluid,” professor Rita Raley told the university system’s Board of Regents on Wednesday. “In one class, students are permitted to use AI, in another, they're cautioned against it, and in a third, they're told it's prohibited.”

Raley, a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, heads the breakout group that will define what AI literacy means for UC, and will make recommendations on how to cultivate AI in classrooms across the UCs. The big question the working group is grappling with, Raley said: What every student needs to know about artificial intelligence.

“If we are indeed moving toward automated education, then we have to ask what a UC degree will mean. It will have to mean more than skills because these too can be automated,” she said. “... [W]e must now give students the critical judgment to ask what this technology is, who needs to be accountable for it, how to use it, when to refuse it, and what it could be instead.”

Jayha Buhs-Jackson, UCLA’s undergraduate student body president, says she does not like AI, so she does not use it.

She agreed that the university does not have a “succinct” AI policy. Some of her professors, Buhs-Jackson said, strictly do not allow AI in the classroom; others allow it for research and coding.

She said UCLA has its own internal AI committee, which she was just appointed to.

“ I'm curious to see … how I could use my voice as president to discuss and uplift the undergraduate student voice related to AI at UCLA,” she said.

UC vs CSU approach

The UC system currently does not have a single systemwide AI product or mandatory AI protocols in place.

Instead, “eligible employees have access to frontier AI tools from a variety of vendors including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Access is intended to support activities such as analysis, research, learning, and operational efficiency,” a University of California spokesperson said.

The university system also has a Master Service Agreement in place with OpenAI, but it does not include a minimum spend commitment or prepurchased licenses. Schools under the UC umbrella can purchase OpenAI products through the agreement.

UC’s approach stands in contrast to the one California State University took.

In 2025, the nation’s largest public university system signed a nearly $17 million contract with OpenAI and made a suite of ChatGPT tools available to all its faculty and students.

At the time, CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith told LAist, the goal was for all students to have “the same access to the tools and learning opportunities that will prepare them for the future,” regardless of which campus they attend.

Still, the rollout was heavily criticized as students and faculty were left on their own to figure out how to use AI. And in a 2025 survey of CSU students, over 60% said AI has negatively affected their learning experience.

What's the best approach for schools?

The different approaches taken by California’s public university systems demonstrate that higher education is still grappling with how to confront — or embrace — this technology.

Universities across the nation have to find ways to work with AI, said Justin Reich, a professor of digital media and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT.

But we also do not have a framework for what to do or how to implement AI in higher education, he added.

 ”The right strategy is to come up with a systematic series of experiments, where you're testing hypotheses, in particular, by looking at student learning experiences and student learning outcomes,” Reich said.

The University of California’s AI steering committee overall is tasked with “developing a coordinated approach that allows UC to use its systemwide scale while recognizing the distinct needs of its campuses, medical centers, laboratories, faculty, researchers, staff, and students,” according to a University of California spokesperson.

Reich said it is great that the University of California has multiple voices involved in the steering committee.

“I  would encourage any university system to have students play a central role in directing their AI response pretty much at all levels,” he said. “Especially in a system as complex as UC, where you have so many students that have so many different kinds of expertise.”

The UC AI steering committee has one student voice on it. Stephanie Valadez, an ethnomusicology graduate student at UCLA and president of the UC graduate and professional student council, says she would like to see more. She’s concerned about the environmental impact of AI and the negative impact on “underrepresented communities that are living near these data centers,” she said.

In the classroom, she hasn’t had to use AI.

“ All of my professors say, ‘Don't use AI. Just don't use ChatGPT, don't use Claude, don't use any of that stuff,’ for multiple reasons,” she said. “Being in the music department, as an artist, we also are very conscious of having our work stolen, having what we produce then go on to train AI.”

The training a Ph.D. student is seeking, Valadez said, you would not get from AI.

“ We don't want our brains to atrophy while we're trying to get better at what we're doing,” she said.

What comes next for UC

UC San Diego and UC Irvine, Valadez said, have rolled out TritonGPT and ZotGPT, but she’s heard from other board members that students aren’t using  the AI tools as much as the university would like them to, adding that there has been “a lot of pushback from students.”

James Milliken, the University of California president, said the committee’s guiding principle is AI “for humans and for humanity” and how it “ can advance human potential, not diminish it.”

The committee had its first meeting in June, where five working groups were created to explore how to use AI in clinical research, curriculum development and “public benefit” among other things.

Come October 2027, the committee will come to Milliken with a proposal for a UC sovereign AI cloud. This means UC could have its own hardware and processing power to build, run and train AI models.