The Brief

In May, residents of 577 apartments in Barrington Plaza, an imposing complex of three towers near the UCLA campus, received eviction notices. It would be the largest eviction from rent-controlled housing in Los Angeles in at least four decades.

When the evictions were announced, Barrington Plaza’s owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., said in a news release that was part of a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that residents needed to move out in order for it to make fire safety upgrades required by the city of Los Angeles. There have been two fires at the complex, in 2013 and 2020. After the 2020 fire, the city declared eight of the floors of one of the towers unfit for occupancy.

The owner said the city made its approval of a permit to restore the fire-damaged floors contingent “upon the installation of sprinklers and other life safety equipment.” The safety improvements, including installing sprinklers, “cannot be accomplished without vacating all three towers,” the company news release said. The work “can take several years at a cost of over $300 million,” the news release added.

The company continued to cite the city requirements as the reason for the evictions to the City Council and its investors, and news stories reported it as a fact.

But a city spokesperson said there are no such requirements. When contacted by Capital & Main, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety said it has not mandated the work the building owner said was required. “No enhancements were requested or required by LADBS,” Department of Building and Safety spokesperson Gail Gaddi said in an email response to questions.

The city requires the installation of fire sprinklers in residential towers built after 1974, but Barrington Plaza was completed in 1961, well before then. “The building’s age pre-dates required sprinkler installation,” Gaddi said.

If the fire safety renovations are not in fact required, the company has misinformed the public about the reason for the mass eviction. Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, an organization supporting the tenants in a lawsuit to block the evictions, said the revelation that the city disputes the company’s claims “will hopefully give more of our elected officials, city council and city attorney the courage to speak out and denounce Douglas Emmett for these clearly unjust evictions.”

The company maintains that its costly fire safety upgrades are required by the city. “We stand by all previous comments and all filings with the SEC,” spokesperson Eric Rose told Capital & Main in an email.

When asked directly about the city’s statement that no fire safety work is required because of the age of the building, Rose declined to provide evidence of those requirements, citing pending litigation.

Barrington Plaza’s owner filed a lawsuit against its insurers in early October in which it argued that the L.A. Department of Building and Safety issued “a directive that Barrington include a code-compliant sprinkler system in all three towers at Barrington Plaza.” The lawsuit also noted that the Los Angeles Fire Department “advised Barrington that it must install fire sprinklers at Barrington Plaza.” Fire department officials did not respond to requests for comment.

In the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Barrington Pacific LLC, the Douglas Emmett subsidiary that owns the complex, claimed that more than a dozen of its insurance companies pressured the city to drop safety requirements for the repair work in order to avoid a substantial payout. The suit claims the insurance companies contacted fire and building officials “on multiple occasions in recent months in an effort to convince them to retract or soften their directives relating to the installation of a sprinkler system at Barrington Plaza.”

Tenants and their advocates said the evictions are part of a strategy to pave the way for a high-end apartment complex that can command significantly higher rents.

“This is going to be premiere property on the Westside, three state of the art high-rises with all the amenities,” said Robert Lawrence, a Barrington Plaza tenant who faces a May 2024 move-out date. “They’re going to charge, you know, double or triple the rents.” Lawrence currently pays $2,400 per month for his one-bedroom apartment.

The planning department approved the exterior remodeling plans with little fanfare on May 11, a few days after the eviction notices were served to the tenants.

Those plans include new amenities such as balconies, lush landscaped gardens, glazed windows, a state-of-the-art gym, updated storefronts and a refurbished pool area complete with cabanas. The proposed new name, “Landmark Plaza,” aligns Barrington Plaza with its more luxurious neighbor, a Douglas Emmett tower called “The Landmark.” That 34-story apartment building leases 607-square-foot studio apartments for monthly rents ranging between $3,800 and $5,000.

More than 50 people protested outside the corporate office of their landlord, Douglas Emmett Inc., in Santa Monica on Thursday, Aug. 10.

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In May, Douglas Emmett invoked the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants if their apartments will no longer be used as rental housing. Owners can in the future return those units to the rental market, under certain conditions and sometimes penalties.

The company said on its Ellis Act application that it is undecided as to the property’s future use. “At this time, the owners of Barrington Plaza are removing the units from the market and have options as to how those units will change, be rehabilitated through new life safety measures or become something different,” Rose said in an email. He would not say what those options were. Most tenants left in September, but 170 tenants who are at least 62 years old or have a disability have until May 8, 2024, to depart.

Tenants filed a lawsuit against Douglas Emmett in Los Angeles County Superior Court in May to block the initial evictions, which began in early September. The judge denied a request for a preliminary injunction as the lawsuit makes its way through the court. The dispute with tenants centers on conflicting interpretations of the Ellis Act. The tenants argue that the 1985 state law is designed for landlords who intend to permanently remove apartments from the rental market. Douglas Emmett, meanwhile, asserts that the Ellis Act does not address the landlord’s intentions, and that the years-long building renovation justifies its use. There has been little attention paid to Douglas Emmett’s widely publicized claim that city mandates prompted the landlord to invoke the law in the first place.

In fact, the insurance companies’ intervention in the Barrington Plaza’s permitting process is long-standing. Back in August 2020, an engineering firm acting on their behalf submitted a report to building officials arguing that the three towers should not fall under the city’s fire sprinkler law, according to a Capital & Main review of the Department of Building and Safety’s internal emails.

In June 2022, Joe Vo, a structural engineering assistant at the department, concurred with their conclusions, writing to an engineer at the firm, “under my permit review, I will not be asking for fire sprinklers” unless the building will be used as a gathering place for large numbers of people.

Fire safety experts supported installing fire sprinklers in the towers. In the 2020 fire, the second in seven years, 13 people were injured, and a college foreign exchange student died.

But some said that adding fire sprinklers to the buildings can be done at a lower cost and with less disruption than the approach planned for Barrington Plaza. “I’ve just never heard of such a thing that they have to evacuate all three buildings,” said Todd Golden, business manager for Sprinkler Fitters U.A. Local Union 709. “It’s not part of what we do,” he added. Even if the job is more disruptive, occupants can temporarily be housed in hotels or in a building’s empty apartments, said Golden, who is an experienced sprinkler installer and was invited by a tenant to tour the complex last summer.

Golden estimated the cost of installing fire sprinklers at $10 million for each tower, for a total of $30 million.

Golden’s cost estimate is in line with that of Adel Salah-Eddine, now assistant chief in the Building and Safety Department’s Permit and Engineering Bureau. Eddine sought an estimate from an engineering firm for adding sprinklers and other fire safety upgrades to one of the three towers in 2021. The cost ranged from $3.5 million to $7.5 million, according to an internal department email.

But Emmett spokesperson Rose stressed that the fire safety job the company is undertaking at Barrington Plaza goes well beyond the installation of fire sprinklers, which is what is required under the city ordinance for newer buildings. Ceilings and stairwells will be rebuilt, walls demolished and replaced and utilities will be upgraded, he said. Smoke barriers will be installed around elevators, and the company will replace windows with fire-rated glass, he added.

Randy Roxson, a lawyer who serves as a consultant to the Sprinkler Fitters U.A. Local Union 709, has been advocating for a city ordinance that would require all pre-1974 high-rise apartment buildings to install sprinklers, a campaign that gained steam after the second Barrington Plaza fire. A former firefighter, Roxson applauds Douglas Emmett for undertaking the fire safety project. But he fears the widely publicized price tag and the prospect of mass evictions during a housing crisis could make city leaders shy about requiring sprinkler retrofits in older high-rise housing, he said.

Damage from a fire at the Barrington Plaza apartments is seen on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. A fire broke out on the sixth floor, injuring 8 people.

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Fran Campbell, an attorney who represents the Barrington Plaza Tenants Association, said tenants should be protected from eviction regardless of the scope of the fire safety work. She said that tenants covered by rent control should be housed under what’s known as a “tenant habitability plan,” which provides them temporary relocation during a disruptive renovation. “They’ve got to move people out and move them back in,” she said.

Housing advocates, meanwhile, worry that hundreds more units could be lost if landlords use the Barrington Plaza mass eviction as a playbook for how to empty rent-stabilized high-rise buildings to bring in higher-paying tenants. There are “similarly situated rent-controlled buildings that could be affected as this tactic is allowed to persist,” said Marissa Roy, a civil rights attorney who has been consulting with tenant advocates. In 2021, there were 55 high-rise residential buildings built before 1974 that still lack sprinklers because the city does not mandate them, according to the 2021 city report.

Tenants said they would be glad to live in a safer building, but they are not convinced that they should have to lose their homes as a result. About a dozen gathered around the pool on a recent day in October for coffee and pastries. The sun was bright, but many of the deck chairs were empty. Avy Jozay, who rents a one bedroom apartment for $1,800, has not found anything on the Westside to match what he has at Barrington Plaza on the Westside, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,053, according to Apartments.com. A phone repair technician, he’s currently unemployed. “I’m scared. I’m nervous,” he said.

More than 29,000 people sleep outside in L.A^., according to official estimates — a nearly 8% increase over last year.

Two candidates for mayor are promising to change that, but they have different ideas about how.

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman appeared separately at homelessness forums hosted this week by Hope The Mission, a large homeless shelter operator.

The events were held amid a national spotlight on L.A.’s homelessness crisis.

This week, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on allegations of fraud and mismanagement of homelessness funds — a hearing in which Bass declined to appear. The next day, federal authorities announced charges against three employees at L.A. homelessness nonprofits in a widening federal investigation of homeless services fraud.

Bass cited L.A.’s homelessness crisis as the reason she sought the city’s top job in 2022.

“I ran because I am always compelled to go toward a crisis,” she said Thursday.

She has made clearing homeless encampments and moving people indoors a top priority as mayor, but fell far short of her pledge to end street homelessness by 2026.

Raman has said founding a local homelessness nonprofit inspired her 2020 L.A. City Council run. For years, Raman was chair of the council committee focused on city homelessness policy.

Both candidates have played major roles in shaping L.A.’s homelessness response in recent years, and they told forum moderators this week that the city’s approach has been dysfunctional.

L.A.’s next mayor will face a barrage of challenges related to homelessness.

Here’s how the candidates said they would handle some of the big ones:

How will they deal with the Trump administration?

The Trump administration has been cracking down on the L.A. region’s administration of homeless services to root out potential financial mismanagement, but also to challenge the local policy approach to homelessness and impose policies it prefers.

Federal officials argue that approaches known as “housing first” and “harm reduction” are failing. They favor treatment and enforcement instead.

Bass, a Democrat, skipped a House subcommittee hearing on federal homelessness spending Tuesday, dismissing it as politically motivated.

“ I'm the mayor of the second-largest city in the country, and I don't have time for foolishness,” Bass said Thursday. “And remember, I know these people. It's a dog and pony show to see who's gonna get on Fox that night. I was not going to subject myself to that, and I was not going to subject our city to that.”

Bass said her office is cooperating fully by supplying thousands of pages of documents.

Raman said L.A. should be using the courts much more aggressively to challenge federal overreach and protect funding.

“ We've done that less than I would've liked here in Los Angeles, but other cities have done that and actually kept their federal dollars in place despite the best efforts of the Trump administration.”

She said the city also has to make sure that funding is spent effectively, arguing L.A. currently has no single person tracking every dollar coming in from the federal government, state government and other sources.

“That is wrong,” Raman said at a forum on Wednesday. “If I am mayor — when I am mayor — I will ensure that every single dollar that is being given to us is being used to get as many people indoors into safety and to keep them there as effectively as possible.”

What to do about LAHSA?

Both candidates have said they support the city eventually breaking away from LAHSA, the joint city-county homelessness authority.

"The county filed for divorce. Now we file, too," Bass said on Thursday.

Last year, L.A. County officials voted to remove more than $300 million in annual homelessness funding from LAHSA’s control and to manage those funds itself with a new county department. Bass is now proposing the city create its own, independent “continuum of care,” a process she said could take “a couple of years.”

Bass, who appointed herself to serve on LAHSA’s governing board before stepping down this month, said she’s learned in recent years “how profoundly dysfunctional” the regional homeless services system is.

She argued that because L.A. represents 40% of the county's population and is the epicenter of the crisis, the city must have more control over the system.

“You might remember that expression I started with: locked arms,” Bass said. “And we locked arms as long as we could.”

Raman, in her mayoral platform, also called for the city to prepare to move hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness contracts away from LAHSA, which she described as "plagued with scandal." But she said the city has to build the capacity to take on the job first.

At Thursday's forum, Raman didn't mention LAHSA by name, instead describing coordination failures between agencies — citing permanent supportive housing units that sat empty for more than a year because departments weren't talking to each other.

As chair of the council's Homelessness Committee, Raman said she created the city's Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to track spending and outcomes, but accused Bass of failing to staff it promptly.

“The mayor did not hire people to staff up that oversight body quickly enough,” Raman said.

LAHSA has served as the lead agency managing homelessness services for the region since 1993, including conducting a yearly homeless count, preparing regional applications for federal funds and managing key databases.

This week, the agency announced it would soon forfeit those roles and allow other agencies or organizations to apply for them instead — including other county or city of L.A. agencies.

What about encampments?

The candidates are also somewhat split on their approach to homelessness encampments. Bass has criticized Raman for voting several times since 2022 against expanding the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which restricts camping in certain public spaces including schools and day cares.

Raman has defended her votes. She argued the law, at best, “would have moved an encampment from one block to the next block.”

“To me, that is not good enough," Raman said. "My imagination for how we address homelessness in L.A. goes beyond just thinking about which block an encampment should be on. It is about how we actually get encampments indoors."

Asked about enforcement approaches, Bass pointed to physical barriers — like cement planters that replaced a major encampment on San Vicente Boulevard — as a more effective deterrent than ticketing or arrests.

“ So sometimes using physical barriers work, but what we have not done is just gone in and arrested homeless people,” Bass said. “That has never happened.”

The sharpest divide between the candidates centers on Bass’ signature program, Inside Safe, which moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing.

Raman said she agreed with the underlying concept — going out to encampments and offering shelter — but that the program is too costly and hasn't evolved since Bass launched it in 2022.

“Her program has not changed or learned or adapted from the lessons that they should have had in place, and to me, that is a major, major issue,” Raman said.

Raman put the cost at roughly $100,000 per person, per year — "not a fiscally sustainable approach to a crisis that is growing in our city," she said — and favors time-limited subsidies, short-term rental vouchers that cost a third as much.

Bass called that framing "fundamentally dishonest," arguing the county reimburses the city for some of the up-front cost.

Bass said she wants to bring costs down by building permanent structures on public land instead of renting motel rooms.

She said she favors moving groups of unhoused people together and bringing services to them, which she said is harder to do with the housing vouchers Raman wants to rely on.

"I would house 30 people at a time, not one by one,” Bass said. "I see it from a people's point of view. She sees it from a numbers point of view. Both are needed."

The general election is Nov. 3.

Just off the 405 freeway at the border of Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, a block down from IKEA and a couple of business parks over, you'll find Darkroom.

It's the kind of address where you'd expect to find a dentist's office or a logistics company — instead, it's home to some of the most inventive food in Orange County, and arguably beyond, anchored by a formidable wine program featuring small producers.

The location is a deliberate choice by Zach Scherer, Darkroom’s chef-owner, that has turned the restaurant into a growing word-of-mouth destination. For Scherer, hiding in plain sight was never a compromise. It was the plan.

Inside Darkroom

The interior of the restaurant is a completely different story. Its decor matches that of an angsty teenager who shops at Hot Topic, with an affinity for industrial and goth music, and a bit of new wave mixed in.

Darkroom's interior leans into its irreverent, gallery-meets-Hot Topic aesthetic.

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Your eyes might take a minute to adjust to the low light before a friendly server wearing a tattered band T-shirt greets you and escorts you to your table.

Scherer wears his nonconformist attitude with pride — and intention. "If you're a little too serious, Orange County won't love it," he said, and it shows: the room is built to feel like the opposite of a hushed tasting menu.

Chef Zach Scherer (right) and Drew Adams work the pass together — the same partnership they describe as "like a band."

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Scherer runs the kitchen with longtime partner Drew Adams — a lifelong Orange County resident — who also oversees the pastry program. The two think of Darkroom's identity "like a band," Scherer said: a shared core sound, no matter who's guesting on a given dish. (Their tasting-menu concept, Chrysalis, runs out of the same kitchen some nights — a five-course tasting menu happening in parallel.)

The menu

Start off with the Scotch olives, fried Castelvetrano olives with anchovy and lamb merguez, served over spiced sumac yogurt. Meanwhile, a couple of slices of their zucchini bread with koji butter, topped with silky jamón serrano, provide some comforting bites.

Grilled and marinated Jimmy Nardello peppers — a short-season ingredient the kitchen deliberately doesn't overwork.

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From there, seasonal produce takes center stage, with grilled, marinated Jimmy Nardello peppers served with fennel-pollen labneh and sprinkled with walnut dukkah, hitting equal notes of sweet, spicy, nutty, and fresh. Followed by honeynut squash from Weiser Farms — poached in a light broth known as nage, made with bits of country ham and horseradish, topped with rainbow chard, a dish that reads Southern-meets-European.

The Darkroom burger, cut in two — only 10 are made a night.

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Cap things off with The Darkroom burger, cut in half, made with dry-aged beef, molten Comté cheese, and gooey caramelized onions, served between soft, glossy brioche-style buns, swimming in a light au poivre bath. It's a dish that, like the others, exhibits strong technique but still wears its fun on its sleeve — all the makings of a truly memorable meal.

The philosophy

Scherer's goal is to make the Orange County food scene nationally competitive with San Francisco, New York, and Chicago — and the seasonal fluency on display that night, from summer's last Jimmy Nardellos to fall's first honeynut squash, is the technical proof behind that claim.

The fried Scotch olives — Castelvetranos stuffed with anchovy and lamb merguez, set over sumac yogurt.

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The menu's dynamic approach — its ability to oscillate between cuisines — reflects that same nonconformist identity, reinforcing the idea that the food doesn't take itself too seriously, just like the space around it.

Scherer's ambitions don't stop at Darkroom's walls; he's also developing Three Eyed Tiger, a cocktail-forward concept nearby.

"The food we're making now is the food that I'm the most proud of, because it really shows our identity," said Scherer.

A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge on Tuesday rejected Chino Valley Unified School District’s request to dissolve an injunction blocking its policy requiring employees to notify parents when students identify as transgender or use different names or pronouns at school.

Judge Michael Sachs upheld his 2024 injunction blocking Chino Valley Unified from enforcing a policy the school board adopted in 2023. The policy required district employees to notify parents within three days if their student asked to go by a name or pronoun different from official school records or join a sex-segregated program, such as athletics, that did not correspond to those records.

The school district had asked Sachs to overturn a permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency docket ruling in a separate case, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The district argued that the ruling affirmed parents’ constitutional right to be informed about information critical to their children’s health and well-being.

Sachs rejected the request, saying his injunction does not conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling. During Tuesday’s hearing, he distinguished between the two cases, saying the school policy at issue in the Mirabelli case required school employees to withhold information from parents when asked.

“The school’s policy essentially mandated that staff lie to the parent about their child, and the court did not accept that,” Sachs said of Mirabelli v. Bonta.

The Chino case involves a different question: whether school employees can be required to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents.

“There is no mandatory duty for the school district to voluntarily release information about the student,” Sachs said in court.

Chino Valley Unified was disappointed by the ruling, said Emily Rae, the district’s attorney and president of the California Justice Center, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on protecting individual liberty.

“The main problem is that it puts the burden on parents to know whether they’re having a secret kept from them,” Rae said.

Rae said Sachs’ ruling misinterpreted the Mirabelli opinion, which she said made clear that schools should not withhold information from parents. She said it was too soon to say whether the district would appeal the ruling or make changes to any of its policies.

Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, also criticized the ruling. In an interview with EdSource, she called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” that has caused “so much confusion.”

Shaw said she planned to ask the superintendent whether the district could ask all parents to check a box: “Do you want secrets to be held from you?”

“They shouldn’t have to do that,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s insane we have to go through all these hoops to uphold a parent’s right to know.”

Christine Parker, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the ruling was consistent with the Supreme Court’s order in Mirabelli v. Bonta and other applicable law.

“The court got it right: Blanket policies like Chino Valley USD’s, in which school employees must — in all circumstances — disclose a student’s gender identity to their parents, remain unlawful in California,” Parker said in a statement to EdSource.

Another pending case referenced in Tuesday’s proceedings was the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, which hinged on a dispute over AB 1955, known as the SAFETY Act. The law, signed by Newsom in 2024, bars school districts from requiring staff to disclose a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity to parents. It went into effect before the injunction in the Chino Valley Unified case.

In the wake of the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction for parents in the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom who sued to block enforcement of the SAFETY Act.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.