The Brief

Los Angeles leaders could soon make changes to the city’s embattled “mansion tax.” But some housing advocates, who blame the tax for a slowdown in apartment development, say the new attempts at reform don’t go far enough.

The city’s Housing Department released a report last week recommending the City Council make four changes to voter-approved Measure ULA, a tax on real estate sales of $5.3 million or more.

The changes, described by the Housing Department as “narrowly focused,” mainly deal with the financing and regulation of affordable housing projects funded by Measure ULA. The department recommended the City Council approve those changes by early fall so loans for new affordable housing projects can close later this year.

Mott Smith, an adjunct professor of real estate at USC and a critic of the tax, said the reforms proposed in the report could fix overly restrictive spending rules. But he said they don’t address the tax’s broader impact on housing development across the city.

“This is really a form of admission that ULA is not working as designed,” Smith said. “It's frankly about time that the city admits this because we're never going to fix it if they can't admit there's a problem.”

The report’s conclusions were reviewed and endorsed by the citizen oversight committee tasked with monitoring Measure ULA’s outcomes. Joe Donlin, director of the United to House L.A. coalition, said supporters are in favor of the proposed changes.

“ULA was written with flexibility to make these exact kinds of amendments,” Donlin said. “We always knew that there would need to be adjustments along the way, and we continue to support efforts to optimize Measure ULA in any way possible.”

How the tax has worked so far

Since taking effect, Measure ULA has raised more than $1 billion for tenant aid programs and affordable housing construction. Before voters approved the tax in 2022, proponents said it could produce 26,000 homes in its first decade. So far, the tax has funded the construction of about 800 homes, according to supporters.

Tax proponents say thousands of new homes are entering the development pipeline. Last year, the city began taking applications for $387 million in funds for housing development and preservation. But according to the Housing Department report, affordable housing lenders have told the city that Measure ULA requirements can discourage them from funding projects.

Based on those concerns, the report recommends changes that would:

• Exempt projects built by affordable housing developers from paying the tax
• Ensure terms for other sources of public funding don’t conflict with terms for Measure ULA funding 
• Allow foreclosed projects to be sold to other developers
• Let building owners increase rents if they lose rental subsidies

Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing L.A., said those changes would help unlock Measure ULA funding but wouldn’t do much to convince market-rate developers to return to L.A.

“The biggest thing that we don't see in this report is around addressing the impact measure ULA is having on multi-family housing production across the income spectrum,” Khanmalek said.

Several economic studies have concluded that because the so-called “mansion tax” applies to new apartment buildings — not just mansions — development has slowed in L.A. more than in nearby cities.

Tax supporters dispute those findings, blaming high interest rates and other macroeconomic factors for slower building in L.A.

‘Mansion tax’ fight headed for the ballot

The proposed changes come at a time when Measure ULA has come under fire, with multiple efforts to reform the tax — or invalidate it — likely to appear on the November ballot.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has turned in signatures for a ballot measure to overturn such taxes statewide.

Meanwhile, the L.A. City Council has set up a committee to develop potential reforms for the November ballot that would alter but not eliminate the tax. The new report from the housing department has been referred to that committee, but it has not yet been scheduled for a vote.

Miguel Santana, president of the California Community Foundation, said he and other business leaders, academics and affordable housing developers recently formed a new coalition — called Mend It, Don’t End It — to support proposals such as a 15-year tax exemption for new apartment buildings.

“ULA has created circumstances where investors are deciding not to invest in Los Angeles and are investing in surrounding communities,” Santana said. “We know that at the crux of the affordable housing crisis is supply and to be able to respond to that issue.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Koreatown-raised entertainer Dumbfoundead tells it straight: “I don’t think I’m just Korean or Korean American. I’m more Koreatown than both of those labels.”

The Korean American rapper, born Jonathan Park, moved to Koreatown at 3 and has lived there ever since. He’s often called the “mayor of Koreatown,” a title he proudly embraces.

The neighborhood sits at the center of his memoir, SPIT: A Life in Battles, which he promoted at a book launch in early April hosted by the Los Angeles Korean Festival Foundation.

Set to be released Tuesday from Third State Books and co-written with Donnie Kwak, SPIT traces Park’s childhood through his late 20s. He chronicles coming up in the music scene while dealing with racist stereotypes, problems at home and addiction.

“This is the culture I grew up in, in the neighborhood, and that’s what made me who I am. If I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood that proudly had Korean letters on menus and signs and I could be unapologetically Korean, I would not be able to battle rap in confidence and be able to have thick skin to fight opponents verbally,” he said.

Rapper and actor Dumbfoundead (Jonathan Park) at Love Hour in Koreatown on March 26.

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Brian Feinzimer

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Park, 40, was born in Argentina to Korean parents. He and his younger sister later crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their mother, eventually landing in Koreatown. The neighborhood didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene but provided the young Park a space to find his voice.

Enter the hip-hop scene of nearby Leimert Park. Old, grainy YouTube videos show him performing at Project Blowed, where rappers gathered for open mic sessions that could run late into the night. He would skateboard there as a teenager, then head back home late. With his immigrant parents working long hours to support the family, the lax supervision allowed him to roam the city freely and build his street cred.

Seth Eklund, executive director of the Koreatown community and resource center Bresee Foundation, remembers the teenage Park from those early years.

“I do consider him like a son, one of my many sons from over the years,” Eklund said. “I started at Bresee in 1996, he started coming in 1998 when we were still up on the third floor of the church.”

In his memoir, Park describes the Bresee Foundation as transformative for his childhood. He started going there when the center served mostly Black and Latino youth. Park, his sister Natalie and their Korean friends Andy and Mimi “stuck out like sore thumbs,” Eklund said, but they quickly became regulars, spending most afternoons at the center.

Eklund remembers Park getting into music and media production. He even went to Leimert Park to watch Park freestyle.

“You had guys out there that were gangsters from all over L.A.,” Eklund said. “It was a really cool cultural scene. And there were really angry battle rappers, gangster rappers, all sorts of people, and he was always the funniest of everyone that would pick you apart with laughter as opposed to angst.”

Sociology professor Oliver Wang from Cal State Long Beach has researched Asian Americans in hip-hop and said the kinds of community spaces Park was part of were critical to him being able to “take off.”

Wang also points to how closely Park has tied himself to Koreatown. He said hip-hop, from its earliest days, has always been rooted in a sense of place, but especially with someone like Park, grounding himself in Koreatown helps listeners understand he is coming from a particular place and, therefore, a particular perspective.

“I think for Asian American listeners, the fact that he comes out of Koreatown, an Asian American ethnic enclave, that completely matters,” Wang said, “because it’s tied into a larger sense of Asian American-hood when you’re naming your Asian American hood, no pun intended.”

Even after growing up and leaving the Bresee Center, Park stayed connected to them, something Eklund says he really appreciates. Park returned to the center for a few summers to run workshops for younger kids, teaching writing and music production. He would also bring his artist friends to teach DJing and graffiti art.

“For a couple summers, our center was just flooded with not just kids from this neighborhood but kids from all over L.A. to learn from him and participate,” Eklund said.

“SPIT: A Life in Battles”

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“He’s a multicultural artist. He’s an L.A. artist. This is what L.A. is, it’s a melting pot of people of different traditions coming together, and that’s why I think people resonate with him,” he added.

Paul Kim, Park’s longtime friend and founder of Kollaboration, a nonprofit that helps grow Asian American talent, remembers seeing Park performing as a teenager.

“You could tell he was just different,” Kim said. “So witty, so funny.”

Kim notes that Park always stayed true to his roots.

“He’s performed at almost every Koreatown nonprofit gala, he’s supported so many different organizations, he’s performed at all the student associations, the cultural performances,” he said. “He was always rapping about real-life situations. He’s just very raw and authentic.”

That authenticity is what drew 23-year-old Johnny Nguyen, originally from the Bay Area, to become a fan of Dumbfoundead.

“I was 13 and I was looking for Asian American rappers because I wanted to support the community and stories that weren’t represented,” he said.

“He is a regular guy living in Koreatown trying to live life like everyone else in the neighborhood,” Nguyen added. “He’s not living in a mansion far away.”

Park agrees that’s all part of his approach to making art.

“I think hip-hop is just authenticity,” Park said. “When I was growing up, I had a lot of songs that were super nerdy. … The other Asian rappers were pretty gangster, and then they saw this dude named Dumbfoundead. He looks scraggly, he skateboards, and he’s rapping about not getting girls while everyone else is rapping about getting girls. Hip-hop is about being unique and standing out.”

Park says his book is about “capturing Koreatown’s legacy, Asian American history and entertainment, all just told through my lens.”

Touring made him more aware of how specific his experience was — and how lucky he was for it. In other parts of the country, he said, he would meet Korean American fans who did not grow up around a large Korean community.

After one show in Wisconsin, he said a young Korean fan came up to him and begged him: take me with you.

“To us it doesn’t mean anything because we can get great Korean food and we just gotta choose between 10 options,” he said about growing up in Los Angeles. “I think we take it for granted a little bit that this is a place where you can have confidence and be unapologetically Korean.”

Park has never left much doubt about how he feels about Koreatown.

“I really do thank the neighborhood in that way,” he said. “I think that that played a big part.”

Park is scheduled to appear in conversation with chef Roy Choi at Barnes & Noble at The Grove on April 16 and at the LA Times Festival of Books on April 19.

A new and returning slate of TV shows and straight-to-streaming movies are heading your way this spring, with a good number of them set here in Los Angeles (and one in Orange County).

From (yet another!) comedy about the entertainment industry — this one starring Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz and Jonah Hill — to one set (and filmed in) Fullerton — starring Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer, and based on the popular novel of the same name.

Outcome (April 10, Apple TV)

Keanu Reeves and Martin Scorsese in "Outcome," premiering April 10, 2026 on Apple TV.

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Apple TV

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This dark comedy was co-written and directed by Jonah Hill, who also plays Hollywood mega star Reef Hawk’s (Keanu Reeves) crisis lawyer in the film. After Hawk finds himself blackmailed with the release of a video that could destroy his career, he sets off on an apology tour in the hopes of stopping the extortion plot.

Matt Bomer and Cameron Diaz play Hawk’s friends, alongside a star-studded cast including Susan Lucci, Martin Scorsese, Drew Barrymore, Laverne Cox and comedians Roy Wood Jr., Atsuko Okatsuka and David Spade.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles (April 15, Apple TV)

Nicole Kidman in "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

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Apple TV

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Based on the hit 2024 novel of the same name, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is about a 19-year-old aspiring writer and single mom (Elle Fanning) who lives in Fullerton and turns to OnlyFans to make ends meet.

Margo’s mom, an ex-Hooters waitress, is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and her dad, a former pro wrestler, is played by Nick Offerman (with Nicole Kidman playing an old wrestling buddy of his).

The show was filmed in Los Angeles, downtown Fullerton and on the Fullerton College campus, with over $50,000 of the proceeds reportedly going to a scholarship fund.

Funny AF (April 20, Netflix)

Kevin Hart in Funny AF.

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The reality competition show Funny AF is only partially filmed/set in Los Angeles (with auditions also in New York and Chicago), but we’re including it on this list because the finale is set to take place in Los Angeles at the Netflix is a Joke Festival.

Comedian Kevin Hart hosts this search for “the next stand-up superstar,” with help from guest judges including Kumail Nanjiani, Chelsea Handler and Keegan-Michael Key.

The winner, ultimately chosen from a list of finalists by audience votes, will get their own Netflix stand-up special.

Jerry West: The Logo (April 16, Prime Video)

Head coach Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers looks on from the bench during an NBA basketball game circa 1977 at The Forum in Inglewood, California. West coached the Lakers from 1976-79.

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Getty Images North America

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Another slight outlier, we’re calling this documentary L.A.-based because of the Lakers connection. Jerry West: The Logo is about the All-Star Los Angeles Lakers player and executive whose silhouette was the basis for the NBA logo.

Directed by Kenya Barris (black-ish, BlackAF), the film features the final interviews West participated in before his passing in 2024. Other interviewees include Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Shaquille O’Neill, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant.

Returning shows, also with SoCal locations

Hacks (April 9, HBO Max)

The fifth and final season of Hacks (HBO Max) premieres this week. The season was partially filmed in L.A., along with Las Vegas, New York and Paris. A side note on the show’s L.A. filming locations: the Altadena home that was featured as the “side mansion” of lead character Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) burned down in the 2025 Eaton Fire.

Euphoria (April 12, HBO Max)

The show, returning for a third season (which may be its last) is set in the fictional city of East Highland but is largely shot in and around Los Angeles. Zendaya returns to her Emmy-winning role of Rue, along with supporting cast members Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi.

Beef (April 16, Netflix)

Much of the first season of the Netflix series, starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as strangers who meet through a road rage incident, filmed on location in the San Fernando Valley and Koreatown. Season 2 involves an entirely new story and cast, including Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac, and was filmed at least partially in downtown Ojai.

Running Point (April 23, Netflix)

The series where Kate Hudson plays a woman who’s unexpectedly put in charge of her family’s professional basketball team (inspired in part by the real-life Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss) films in L.A. and is also set here.

The Comeback (March 22, HBO Max)

The Comeback has already come back (in this latest iteration — its third and final season — last month), but new episodes of the Hollywood satire starring Lisa Kudrow are still coming out on Sundays.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using “coercive” and threatening language to convince unaccompanied immigrant children to agree to deportation, court documents show.

The judge said earlier this week that by using threats of prosecution and coercive language, the U.S. government violated a 40-year-old court order that bans immigration agents from attempting to coerce unaccompanied children to voluntarily leave the country after being detained.

In a separate order, the court also denied government lawyers’ request to end those same longstanding protections.

The two decisions were issued Monday by Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald, who wrote in the orders that the government’s threat of prolonged detention for immigrant children who choose not to self-deport “disturbingly mirrors the testimony” of Jose Antonio Perez-Funez, whose trial in 1985 led the court to first order the protections for children the following year. Perez-Funez and others in that class action case testified that they were not informed of their rights to apply for bail or asylum, leading them to involuntarily waive their rights while they were detained by immigration agents as children.

Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel has been representing immigrant children who were detained by the government for decades and helped win the 1986 court order in the Perez-Funez case.

He said the case has now shown new evidence that the Trump administration has no intention of respecting the rule of law.

The administration’s goal, as Rosenbaum sees it, “is to amp up [deportation] statistics of children who represent no threat to the national interest, who are among the least culpable individuals on the planet.”

LAist reached out to DHS for comment but has not heard back.

The language that has been banned

Last October, LAist reported that DHS had begun targeting unaccompanied children with a “voluntary option” to return them to their countries of origin. Through court documents in the current case, more has been confirmed about how this so-called “voluntary option” was actually presented to children.

Unaccompanied children who are detained for suspected immigration violations are first held by DHS, before generally being turned over to Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. At ORR, children are required by federal law to be provided a confidential legal consultation within 10 days, along with other support.

Court documents show DHS was presenting children with the option to self-deport, along with threats of prosecution and prolonged detainment if they refused, before they were transferred to ORR and guaranteed the chance to speak with an attorney.

Fitzgerald wrote that presenting this ultimatum to children violated the 1986 court order.

“It is difficult to imagine a scenario more coercive than the one faced by [unaccompanied immigrant children] in the 72 hours before they are transferred into ORR custody,” Fitzgerald wrote in court documents, “particularly for noncitizen children who likely do not know whether they possess any rights at all.”

According to evidence presented in court, children were told that if they did not accept voluntary deportation, they would be detained “for a prolonged period of time” and if they turned 18 years old while in custody they would “be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal.”

They were also told they may be “barred from legally applying for a visa” and that their sponsor in the U.S. “may be subject to criminal prosecution” if they didn’t agree to voluntary deportation.

This information was read to children or presented to them in a document DHS called the “UAC Pathway Processing Advisal”, but Rosenbaum told LAist he sees even the document’s name as misleading.

 ”It wasn't an advisal, it was a coercive document,” Rosenbaum said. The government has admitted it used the document since September 2025, according to the court order that now bans its use.

How did it come to this?

Rosenbaum said that after the 1986 court order, which also requires unaccompanied children to be allowed telephone access to relatives or legal support, organizations like Public Counsel and  the National Immigration Law Center monitored the government’s compliance with the order.

Other than a few exceptions, he said, the injunction had been followed until recent years.

“  When the Trump administration began its immigration activities in the second term of the president,  that all changed,” Rosenbaum said, “and it changed in a hurry.”

Court records show that DHS notified the court last November that they would be asking for the 1986 court ordered protections for children in the department’s custody to be ended. When organizations monitoring compliance with the order saw this, Rosenbaum said they investigated and found that in nearly all circumstances, children were no longer allowed to talk to lawyers and were being coerced to take voluntary departures from the country.

Despite the court order, Rosenbaum said, children were “separated from family, separated from their communities and separated from their constitutional rights.”

Peter McGraw, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, told LAist that the court order was issued to specifically protect children’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

He said that when unaccompanied children arrive in the U.S., they don’t have an adult there with them to help them understand their decisions about whether to pursue a number of protections that may keep them from being deported.

“ What due process requires is that the government provide children with notice of their ability to apply for asylum or for other protections — withholding from removal or protection from removal under the convention against torture — to ensure that they are not sent back to countries where they would be in danger,” McGraw said.

The Aquarium of the Pacific is putting out a call for donations to raise $50,000 for a surgery to save the front flipper of its newest green sea turtle, Meatloaf.

The 240-pound turtle was taken to the aquarium in January after being found entangled in fishing line and rope in the San Gabriel River.

For two months, she has undergone rehabilitation and several surgeries to nurse her front-right flipper back to health. Dr. Lance Adams, the aquarium’s director of veterinary services, said the plan is to keep Meatloaf for at least another six months as they redress her wounds.

Dr. Lance Adams watches Meatloaf, a green sea turtle, swim in a rehabilitation tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Wednesday. The turtle was rescued from the San Gabriel River after she got tangled in fishing line and rope.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Wide as a manhole cover and several times the size of the facility’s former tenant, Porkchop, Meatloaf is the latest ward at the aquarium’s newly expanded turtle rehabilitation center — one of two able to care for them in Southern California.

Right now, Meatloaf’s swollen flipper is more than twice the size it should be. Adams said aquarium staff repeatedly have cleaned out the wound and used a number of methods to drain it. Past surgeries were done to remove scar tissue that had built up.

But Meatloaf’s fluid buildup, called edema, persists and likely will require reconstructive surgery. It’s hard to tell, Adams said, as turtles are slow to heal.

Turtles tended to at the aquarium include loggerheads, leatherbacks, ridleys and green sea turtles, which arrive on the coast and warmer waters each summer to mate, nest and battle natural and human-made threats: speedboats, water skiers, baited hooks, urban runoff, tons of garbage and harassment.

Green sea turtles like Meatloaf can grow up to five feet long and weigh 500 pounds. They typically have tropical haunts — sandy beaches along the Mexican coast where they lay eggs.

But in recent decades, the chunky oddballs have continued to wander upstream, usually in search of food, toward the San Gabriel River’s mouth in Long Beach. Aquarium officials say there can be a dozen to nearly 100 turtles in the river at a time.

They eat almost anything they can clamp their mouths on, including snails, eel grass and — to the ire of scientists — rotting garbage along the waterway floor.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance that volunteers with the aquarium’s Southern California Sea Turtle Monitoring community science program see on a weekly basis.

But it’s not all bad. Adams said workers have seen their most recent graduate, Porkchop, at least three times since the three-flipped turtle left their waters and ventured out on her own.

Each time, they’re sure to say hello.