The Brief

Within about 2 square miles in Koreatown, L.A. diners can find more than 700 restaurants offering everything from Oaxacan cuisine to French fine dining, from the kind of sundubu-jjigae tofu stew championed by Anthony Bourdain to an array of Korean barbecue joints.

L.A.’s culinary scene is already diverse, and this neighborhood provides a huge variety of densely-packed dining options. But when it comes to housing, Koreatown restaurant workers are provided with few choices.

That’s according to a new study published Tuesday by researchers with the UCLA Labor Center and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA).

“Koreatown is fueled by an immigrant workforce who are largely low-wage,” said study co-author Saba Waheed, research director at the UCLA Labor Center.

Too much rent — or too many roommates

Relying on U.S. Census Bureau statistics, restaurant industry data and previous academic studies — as well as worker surveys and interviews — the researchers found:

• 72% of Koreatown restaurant workers earn low wages (about $17 per hour or less), defined as less than two-thirds of the area’s median wage.
• 74% were born outside the U.S., primarily in Mexico, Central America or South Korea
• 98% are renters, and only 2% are homeowners
• 59% live in overcrowded or severely overcrowded housing based on federal standards
• 46% spend more than 30% of their income on rent, a level considered “rent burdened” under federal guidelines.

Housing costs have been a main concern in recent strikes by L.A. hotel workers and Hollywood actors and writers. High rents have also been painful for the restaurant workers surveyed in the study.

Waheed said workers included in the study feel like low-wages and expensive housing are forcing them to pick one of two bad options: pay more than they can really afford for an apartment with enough space, or cram into crowded apartments to split costs with others.

“The wages issue is crucial there if folks still feel like they have to live in overcrowded housing,” she said.

Public health experts have blamed cramped housing conditions for fueling the rapid spread of COVID-19 in certain parts of L.A. during earlier phases of the pandemic.

Workers say wage and tip theft is common

The study follows recent reports of wage theft in Koreatown.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a nearly $67,000 fine against Oo-Kook, a Korean barbecue restaurant, for allowing a manager to keep more than $28,000 in workers’ tips. Similar investigations have found wage theft happening in other Koreatown restaurants.

In interviews for the study, workers told the researchers that their managers frequently withhold tips. One employee said new staffers in their workplace are put “on probation” and do not receive tips during this period. Others described a “half tip” policy designed to punish workers for perceived infractions by withholding 50% of their weekly tips.

Brady Collins, KIWA’s director of research and policy, thinks practices like this require solutions that go beyond simply hiking the minimum wage. He suggested policies such as setting up industry councils where workers and business owners create and enforce workplace standards.

“We've got to think about how we are crafting something that is actually going to improve working conditions and empower workers,” Collins said.

Restaurant industry representatives have said existing law already governs wage and tip theft. LAist reached out to the California Restaurant Association, which declined to comment on the study.

Previous research on L.A. restaurants has found other workers also struggling to keep a roof over their head. The L.A. nonprofit research organization Economic Roundtable recently estimated that L.A. County is home to nearly 3,600 unhoused fast food workers.

Many Koreatown restaurant employees work in full-service establishments, but they say they’re facing the same housing struggles.

Balancing workers’ needs with small business survival

Sunny Choi has worked as a server in a Koreatown Asian fusion noodle restaurant for about five years. She earns the city of L.A.’s minimum wage of $16.78 per hour plus tips. She said customers shifted to take-out during the pandemic, and with fewer people dining in, her tips have dropped to about $10 per hour.

Choi says unlike other restaurant employees working multiple jobs to pay rent, she and her husband can afford the $1,500 monthly mortgage on a Harbor City condo they bought 20 years ago. But she said her commute is draining, and living in Koreatown isn’t a financial option.

“It’s good to work [in Koreatown],” Choi said in Korean, speaking through an interpreter. But a similarly sized apartment closer to her job would be “expensive, very expensive.”

While workers struggle with housing costs, small business owners also face pressure to keep prices low. At a time when inflation is eating into expendable income — and some businesses are coming under fire for adding confusing surcharges to customers’ bills — diners crave deals.

UCLA’s Saba Waheed said policy makers seeking to help workers should think creatively about responding to concerns from small, immigrant entrepreneurs.

“We want to conserve the mom and pops in the neighborhood while we're getting these bigger businesses coming in,” Waheed said. “How can we make sure that the workers are feeling sustained, that they're protected, and that they can continue to live there?”

The study points to Koreatown as a microcosm of a much larger problem. The neighborhood is home to nearly 10,000 restaurant workers. But across L.A. County, there are more than 300,000 people working in restaurants.

When you sit down to fill out your mail-in ballot for the June 2 primary election (we have a guide for that, have you heard?), you may notice something curious on your ballot envelope.

There are holes in it. Two small holes next to the signature line, and one on the other side.

What’s the deal?

This is a question an LAist reader asked our Voter Game Plan team:

It turns out the envelope holes have two functions. For one, the holes next to the signature line are supposed to help visually impaired people find the signature line so that they can sign their ballot in private before submitting it.

And two: When election workers start processing the ballots to be counted, the holes help them confirm that the envelopes don’t still have ballots left inside.

These holes have been part of the envelope design for many election cycles now — according to the L.A. County registrar’s office, they were included based on a recommendation from the nonprofit Center for Civic Design.

Rest assured, they are not meant for anybody to be able to see your votes inside. Even if you try to make your vote visible, the holes just don’t line up.

Don’t forget to check out our Voter Game Plan guides while you’re filling out your ballot.

General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.

The settlement, announced Friday, is the largest ever for violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that requires companies to tell consumers about how their data is shared and to respect requests to stop the sharing.

It stemmed from an investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, several county district attorneys, and the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces the privacy act. They said General Motors misled drivers who paid for the emergency roadside and navigation service OnStar and made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information, Bonta said, which went to the data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics.

“This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians,” Bonta said in a press release.

The settlement also requires GM to stop selling data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years and submit privacy assessments to the state, among other provisions. It followed a similar agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and GM earlier this year and California settlements with Honda and Ford over the past 14 months for their own violations of the privacy act.

California’s investigation of GM began after a 2024 New York Times investigation found GM collected data about millions of drivers nationwide and sold it to insurance companies in order to charge the drivers higher premiums. Californians were not impacted by those premium hikes because a state law prohibits insurers from using driving data to set insurance rates, Bonta said.

Bonta told CalMatters at a press conference Friday that it’s unclear if location data collected by General Motors was used by other companies to make predictions about the prices people are willing to pay for goods. That practice is better known as surveillance pricing and can leverage location data. Target paid $5 million to settle a suit from San Diego County’s district attorney over its alleged use of location for the technique. Bonta’s office began an investigation into the surveillance pricing practices of businesses in January.

“I understand that there could be some overlap and maybe we'll discover something in our investigation in surveillance pricing, but that wasn't the focus of this case,” he said.

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the case started with one person finding location data in a report they requested about the data collected on them. That discovery, he added, led to investigations by journalists, prosecutors, and regulators.

“This case shows more than anything that one consumer can make a huge difference,” he said.

Though the settlement isn’t much compared to the $2.7 billion in net income that General Motors made last year, Hochman called it an indication that companies should expect higher penalties in the future. California reached a privacy law violation settlement with Disney in February for $2.75 million, previously the largest of its kind.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, General Motors spokesperson Charlotte McCoy said, “This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we discontinued in 2024, and reinforces steps we’ve taken to strengthen our privacy practices. Vehicle connectivity is central to a modern and safe driving experience, which is why we’re committed to being clear and transparent with our customers about our practices and the choices and control they have over their information.”

Californians will soon have a new protection against companies that use their data without their consent. Starting August 1, the more than 500 data brokers registered with the state must comply with requests California residents can make using an online tool known as the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP. The privacy protection agency introduced the tool earlier this year.

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

For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It’s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.

Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel — has fallen into disrepair.

The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space, but only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.

That’s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.

“I remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,” said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. “I was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.”

There has been little information relayed to the community about why.

“We have a number of our members who live right around there and so there’s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,” said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s unhoused community. “This went basically unnoticed.”

Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the school and the district are discussing using the park again, including for classes and student activities. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.

Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.

Koreatown lacks parks

For years, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.

Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.

“RAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,” said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.

For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there’s nowhere else like it.

“There are no parks around where I live,” Aikens said. “Now I just walk straight down the street.”

In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.

“There definitely isn’t enough green space here,” said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. “I’m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.”

People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.

“I’ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,” said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Why not? It’s good for everyone.”

Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.

“But every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That’s just the reality,” she said.

The fence goes up

Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park’s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.

Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.

“It’s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,” said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.

Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.

“At its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,” he said. “Some of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.”

Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.

“We regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,” she said. “They respected and treated the park well.”

Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.

“If anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,” she said.

Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.

“A lot of the time they’re limited by transportation. Some services don’t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver’s license, which they don’t have because they don’t have an address,” she said.

In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the “planning phase” and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.

“If the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn’t provide you any use,” Yoseffy said. “There are a number of people that can’t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read — none of those things can happen there anymore because it’s completely closed off.”

Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park — which had been open to the public for years — would be closed and no longer accessible.

“I think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,” Jeon said. “That’s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That’s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won’t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.”

LA Local reporter Marina Peña contributed to this report.