The Brief

The city of Los Angeles launched a new rent relief program Tuesday designed to help low-income tenants pay off debts they accrued early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

What you should know

Applications opened Sept. 19 at 8 a.m. and will be accepted until 6 p.m., Oct. 2. Tenants can apply online, by phone at (888) 379-3150 or in person at locations listed on the city housing department’s website.

The city is putting $18.4 million toward the first batch of funding for the United to House Los Angeles Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The money comes from Measure ULA, the new “mansion tax” on properties selling for $5 million or more that voters approved last November.

Under the city’s COVID-19 tenant protections, the deadline to pay back early pandemic debts lapsed last month and some renters are already facing eviction. Tenant advocates have been calling on city officials to put new tax revenue toward rent relief for months.

“It is a positive step,” said Eastside LEADS coalition director Pamela Agustin-Anguiano. “I hope that we can get more money … They're going to have to open this program up for a longer period of time.”

How it works

So far, Measure ULA revenue has fallen far short of projections. The tax has raised about $55 million since taking effect on April 1, despite estimates that it could bring in as much as $1.1 billion annually. L.A. city councilmembers have approved a spending plan for the first $150 million raised by the measure, which still faces legal challenges in court.

Tenants earning up to 80% of the area’s median income are eligible, but city officials said priority will go to those with extremely low incomes (up to 30% of the area’s median). The cutoff for priority will be $26,500 for a one-person household or $37,850 for a family of four.

The city will also prioritize applicants who have unpaid rent from April 2020 through September 2021. As of Aug. 1, tenants with debts from these months are no longer protected under the city’s COVID-19 regulations and many are already facing eviction. Another deadline to pay back debts from October 2021 through January 2023 is approaching on Feb. 1, 2024.

City housing officials said they expect to assist about 3,000 tenant households, depending on how much rent relief each applicant needs. That makes the city’s program much smaller in scale compared to the state’s rent relief program, which delivered $1.4 billion to more than 100,000 L.A. households in earlier phases of the pandemic.

The city is only taking applications from renters for now, but small landlords with 12 units or less will soon be able to apply for relief through a separate application portal launching Oct. 23.

What landlords have to say

Landlord advocates said they believe the city’s program is a step in the right direction, but current funding falls short.

“We should put 99% of available resources into programs like this,” said California Apartment Association spokesperson Fred Sutton. “And frankly, this is just a small sliver of the funding that is potentially available, depending on what happens with ULA. It should be much more robust.”

Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, criticized the city for budgeting $23 million in eviction defense aid for tenants, who rarely have attorneys in eviction court.

“This $18.4 million is a mere drop in the bucket of the $150 million in total Measure ULA funds the city plans to spend,” Yukelson said.

What the limits are

Applicants can’t receive more than six months of back rent. Tenants in condos and single-family homes are eligible. And renters can apply regardless of their immigration status — those without legal authorization to live in the U.S. can still qualify for help. The program is also not first-come, first-served — so there’s no advantage to applying early.

Tenants approved for rent relief will not receive the money directly. The city will only send payments to landlords, who must provide documents proving ownership of the building and evidence of past-due rent.

Agustin-Anguiano said Eastside LEADS and other tenant groups will be monitoring how the city responds in cases where landlords refuse to participate.

“Tenants need to get buy-in from the landlord,” she said. “That's not easy, especially when the tenant owes a lot of debt. The landlord is already aggravated and wants the tenant out. Oftentimes they just want the tenant to be evicted.”

The Los Angeles Metro’s Board of Directors voted Thursday to re-approve the Dodger Stadium gondola, clearing the path for state agencies and the city of L.A. to provide necessary sign-offs before shovels hit the ground.

The decision came after protesters showed up en masse, forced officials to retreat to an earlier-than-scheduled closed session meeting, and won their demand for a dedicated period of public comment on the project before the vote.

The gondola is not a Metro project. Rather, the transportation agency was tasked with preparing environmental studies and approving the project under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Following Thursday’s vote, Zero Emissions Transit, the nonprofit developing the gondola, said the California State Parks Commission will consider amending the L.A. Historic State Park general plan and the city of L.A. will “evaluate land use permits.”

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn was the sole “no” vote on the gondola Thursday. At a Metro committee meeting in November, when the gondola was last discussed, Hahn said she wanted to “lean into” expanding, electrifying and making more efficient the Dodger Stadium Express, the existing Metro bus system that shuttles baseball fans to games.

If built, Metro projects the gondola will carry a maximum of 5,000 visitors every hour from Union Station in downtown L.A. to Dodger Stadium. The proposed route has an intermediate stop at L.A. Historic State Park.

The one-mile, one-way trip would last 7 minutes, according to Metro.

Wasn’t this already approved?

Yes. For the most part, Thursday’s vote was not materially different from last February, when the Metro Board of Directors initially approved the gondola.

Then, in May, following two separate lawsuits alleging inadequacies in Metro’s environmental documents for the gondola, the California Court of Appeal directed the countywide transportation agency to review ways the project’s construction noise could be mitigated.

The vote Thursday was to re-certify the project and its environmental documents with the added evaluation, which Metro released for public comment in September.

Developer faces an uphill battle with the city

L.A. City Council last month voted 12-1 on a resolution opposing the gondola.

“People from Solano Canyon, Chinatown [and] Lincoln Heights have asked me to step up and help preserve green space and help preserve their privacy and to not acquiesce to a billionaire,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who authored the resolution, said to LAist at the Metro meeting on Thursday. “I hope the mayor can hear us and see us.”

Mayor Karen Bass did not sign the resolution.

As a member of Metro’s Board, Bass voted in favor of moving forward with the gondola.

Red versus Blue in the Metro Board room

After Metro accepted the unsolicited proposal for the gondola in 2018, community members formed a formidable opposition campaign known as Stop the Gondola.

At Thursday’s meeting, they were dressed in red, equipped with a megaphone, banners and signs and supported by anti-gondola L.A. City Council members, including Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martinez.

Local residents and activists used the one hour-long public comment period to highlight the effects construction and operations will have on nearby neighborhoods and L.A. Historic Park. They rejected Metro and the project developer’s claims that the gondola is a viable transportation option, instead calling it a “boondoggle.”

During public comment, Phyllis Chu asked the Metro Board of Directors whether they serve a “billionaire developer” or their constituents.

The “billionaire developer" refers to Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Dodgers. McCourt still owns some parking lot real estate near the stadium, and some critics believe the aerial tram is part of McCourt’s vision to develop the area.

Zero Emissions Transit, along with its allies from organized labor and business groups, say the gondola would provide an environmentally friendly transportation option for baseball fans, local residents and park-goers.

Dodger Blue-clad supporters also showed up at Thursday’s meeting and responded to the opposition with chants of their own. They walked in a procession around the Metro Board room holding up signs with a blunt message: “Build the Gondola.”

Zero Emissions Transit said in its news release that “nearly 18,000 individuals and more than 400 businesses in Chinatown, El Pueblo, and Lincoln Heights have signed up to support the project, and a recent poll found 72% of Los Angeles County residents support the project.”

Swooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Frank Gehry made buildings we'd never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture. He died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.

Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Richard Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, "it's like finding out my big brothers love me after all."

"He was probably the only truly great artist I've ever encountered who desperately cared what people thought of him and that people loved his work," says Gehry's biographer Paul Goldberger. The architect got his share of criticism — "accusations that he made crazy shapes and paid no attention to budget."

But the praise was louder, because his striking buildings made people happy.

"I love the relationship with the clients," said architect Frank Gehry. In Bilbao, Spain, where he designed the groundbreaking building for the Guggenheim museum, "people come out and hug me," he said.

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A woman walks inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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With 12 huge glass "sails," the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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"I've always been for optimism and architecture not being sad," Gehry told NPR in 2004. "You know, a building for music and performance should be joyful. It should be a great experience and it should be fun to go to."

There was exuberance in his work. The swoops and swirls — made possible with aerospace technology — lifted the spirits of viewers used to post-war modernism — strict, boxy glass and steel buildings that looked imposing and unwelcoming.

Gehry says he found that style, cold, inhuman and lifeless. "I thought it was possible to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building," Gehry said. "But I wasn't clear about it until I started experimenting, quite accidentally, with fish forms."

He loved the shape of fish, and the way they moved. He drew them all his life, an inspiration that began in his grandmother's bathtub in Toronto.

"Every Thursday when I stayed at her house, I'd go with her to the market," he recalled. "And there would be a big bag of some kind filled with water that we would carry home with a big carp in it. We'd put it in the bathtub. I'd sit and watch it and the next day it was gone."

Those carp were turned into gefilte fish — a classic Jewish dish — but stayed in Gehry's memory long past suppertime. He translated their curves and motions into architecture. In Prague, Czechs call his elegant design for an office building "Fred and Ginger" — two cylindrical towers, one solid, the other glass, pinched in at the waist, like dancers. His Disney Hall and his Guggenheim museum swell like symphonies.

Gehry's whimsical towers in Prague have earned the nickname "Fred and Ginger."

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"He really wanted you to feel a sense of movement," Goldberger says. "A building is a static thing, but if it feels like it's moving, for him that was more exciting."

The Guggenheim — a billowing swirl of titanium in gold and sunset colors — excited viewers. After it opened in 1997, Gehry said everyone who came to him wanted a Guggeinheim. But Gehry wasn't interested.

"Like all great artists, he wanted to keep pushing himself and move forward," Goldberger says. "He did not want to copy himself. He did not want to do that building again."

The Guggeinheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and The Disney Hall in Los Angeles (it opened in 2003, a swoosh of silver stainless steel, 1/16th of an inch thick) are Gehry's signature buildings. But they're a far cry from his early work. His own 1978 residence in Santa Monica sports common materials. If clients couldn't afford fancy — marble, say — he'd use cheap.

Gehry constructed the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles out of stainless steel. "We're living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive," he said. "Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there's some resonance for it."

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Inside the Disney Concert Hall.

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"He started using plywood and chain link fence and corrugated metal," Goldberger says.

Those buildings got attention. But the later ones made him a star — and a term was coined: Starchitect. Goldberger says Gehry hated it.

"He didn't really hate fame," Goldberger explains. "But he was too smart to sacrifice everything for it."

Gehry kept faithful to his vision. He turned down jobs that didn't feel right and imagined others that got built, were widely admired, but sometimes didn't live up to his imagination.

"You know, what's in my mind's eye is always 10 times better than what I ever achieve because the dream image can leak ..." Gehry said with a laugh. "But in terms of its public acceptance it's beyond anything I ever expected. I've never been accepted before like this."

Gehry received a National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The New Yorker called Bilbao "a masterpiece of the 20th century." Architect Philip Johnson said it was "the building of the century." And the public (with some exceptions, of course) adored the work.

"He made great architecture accessible to people," Goldberger says, and that re-shaped their sense of what buildings could be.

He describes Gehry's work as "one of those extraordinary moments where the most advanced art intersects with popular taste. That only happens very rarely in the culture, in any field."

It's been said that architecture is the message a civilization sends to the future. With walls that are shaped and sculpted, and buildings that look joyous and free, Frank Gehry's is a message of humanism and hope.

The author of this obituary, Susan Stamberg, died in October 2025. The story was updated and reviewed before publication.

Shannon Rhoades edited the audio of this story. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
Copyright 2025 NPR

The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech.

The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, is focused on applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, which are frequently used by tech companies, among other sectors. The memo was first reported by Reuters; NPR also obtained a copy.

"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" for a visa, the memo says. It refers to a policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May restricting visas from being issued to "foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans."

The Trump administration has been highly critical of tech companies' efforts to police what people are allowed to post on their platforms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech industry's term for teams that focus on preventing abuse, fraud, illegal content, and other harmful behavior online.

President Trump was banned from multiple social media platforms in the aftermath of his supporters' attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the president and members of his administration frequently cite that experience as evidence for their claims that tech companies unfairly target conservatives — even as many tech leaders have eased their policies in the face of that backlash.

Tuesday's memo calls out H-1B visa applicants in particular "as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression."

It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

"I'm alarmed that trust and safety work is being conflated with 'censorship'," said Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at tech companies including OpenAI and Grindr.

"Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it," she said. "Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it's so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer."

In a statement, a State Department spokesperson who declined to give their name said the department does not comment on "allegedly leaked documents," but added: "the Administration has made clear that it defends Americans' freedom of expression against foreigners who wish to censor them. We do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans."

The statement continued: "In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people."

First Amendment experts criticized the memo's guidance as itself a potential violation of free speech rights.

"People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren't engaged in 'censorship'— they're engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional," said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement.

Even as the administration has targeted those it claims are engaged in censoring Americans, it has also tightened its own scrutiny of visa applicants' online speech.

On Wednesday, the State Department announced it would require H-1B visa applicants and their dependents to set their social media profiles to "public" so they can be reviewed by U.S. officials.

NPR's Bobby Allyn and Michele Kelemen contributed reporting.
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