The Brief

This story was produced by the nonprofit journalism publication Capital & Main in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.  It is co-published with permission. Read part one and part two of the investigation into L.A.’s residential hotels.

As part of Mayor Karen Bass’ signature homelessness initiative called Inside Safe, the city of Los Angeles awarded Las Palmas Hotel a contract potentially worth about $2 million to temporarily shelter people living on the streets.

But the 62-unit hotel in Hollywood was already supposed to be providing housing for people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else under a 2008 city law meant to ease a “housing emergency” that has grown more severe in the past 15 years.

Inside Safe participants now fill most of Las Palmas’ rooms at nightly rates of up to $140, according to the hotel’s contract with the city — more than double the amount Las Palmas would likely earn if long-term residents rented the rooms as that law requires.

Las Palmas is one of eight residential hotels that have received contracts over the past year to house homeless people through the new Inside Safe program, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found. Of those, five hotels including Las Palmas have collected city funding despite seemingly violating the housing ordinance by offering rooms to tourists.

L.A.’s struggle to preserve low-income housing while simultaneously trying to shelter the growing number of people living on the streets represents an increasingly common national problem as city leaders wrestle with the competing needs of different populations amid a limited housing supply.

Residential hotels, which offer basic single rooms sometimes with shared bathrooms, have long been a kind of last-resort housing for low-income, older and disabled people. The 2008 law bars landlords from turning their buildings into condos or tourist hotels unless they build new units or pay an equivalent fee to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Altogether, at least 18 residential hotels have turned into interim shelters through various homeless services programs since 2016, according to a review of the Los Angeles Housing Department’s residential hotel list, Inside Safe contracts, state awards for housing construction and a Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority database of interim housing sites.

Now, that number is set to grow as dozens more residential hotels could become temporary shelters. On Nov. 1, citing a “desperate need for interim housing,” Bass issued an executive order that allows Inside Safe or similar programs to use the city’s 16,000 residential hotel rooms in 300 buildings during the city’s declared homelessness emergency as long as the rooms are unoccupied.

Turning such permanent housing into temporary shelters only makes the city’s housing problems worse, said Barbara Schultz, director of housing justice at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

“It is inconceivable to me that the city would reduce the number of permanent units affordable to low-income people when we are in the middle of this ginormous housing crisis,” Schultz said.

Bass’ press secretary Clara Karger said in an email that the mayor’s office decided that temporary housing is a better use of the rooms given LA’s housing crisis.

“It is troubling that residential hotels were being misused for daily rates and short-term vacation rentals,” she wrote. “Now, many of those rooms are being used to urgently bring people inside and save lives, and the mayor has directed the Housing Department to address enforcement and to conduct a comprehensive review of all residential hotels.”

This summer, Capital & Main and ProPublica reported that the Housing Department had done little to enforce the residential hotel law as 21 properties openly offered rooms to tourists on travel websites. Following a request by the mayor’s office, Housing Department managers investigated and issued citations to the owners of 17 hotels, including Las Palmas.

Pankaj Naik, CEO of Shivay Hospitality, which operates the hotel, declined to comment or answer questions. Las Palmas has appealed its citation and joined other hotels in a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that residential hotel enforcement violates their constitutional protection against unreasonable searches. The owners also argue the city has given them tacit approval for short-term rentals by accepting nightly hotel tax payments. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The Housing Department told the mayor that with additional resources, the agency could “stop rogue property owners from violating the Residential Hotel Ordinance and undermining the availability of affordable housing stock.”

But now Bass’ office has removed hundreds of those same residential hotel rooms from the permanent housing market. And the Housing Department’s enforcement hasn’t stopped the city from giving the hotels hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Las Palmas’ Inside Safe contract expires in mid-November, but it provides for a six-month extension.

Patricia Harrold, an 80-year-old pianist at Miceli’s, a landmark Hollywood restaurant, has lived at Las Palmas for 29 years.

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Under Inside Safe, which Bass launched shortly after taking office in December, city staffers target tent cities under bridges or on sidewalks. Outreach workers offer motel rooms while buses stand by to ferry those who accept the offers to their temporary dwellings. Once the encampment residents are gone, sanitation workers break up the camps, toss trash and hose down sidewalks.

The pressure on city leaders to bring people inside from street encampments is “immense,” said Gregg Colburn, a University of Washington real estate professor who studies homelessness. Currently, 46,000 Angelenos live in cars, tents and makeshift shelters, and Bass promised to find housing for 17,000 of them in her first year.

“The problem with that strategy,” Colburn said, “is it doesn’t end homelessness. It recharacterizes it from unsheltered into sheltered, which is why I and many others argue we need a lot more permanent housing.”

Housing enforcement, then lucrative contracts

The Housing Department is supposed to approve any conversion of residential hotel buildings from permanent housing, but department records for 10 of the hotels obtained by Capital & Main and ProPublica didn’t show that permission was obtained to turn the hotels into temporary shelters.

The Housing Department did not provide all the hotel files that the newsrooms requested. It also didn’t respond to an interview request or answer emailed questions about whether it had cleared the hotels and what procedures they have for Inside Safe. Instead, the agency said it would handle the queries as a public records request.

Housing Department records revealed that inspectors had cited two of the Inside Safe properties for residential hotel violations in recent years. Hotel booking websites showed three others were openly renting rooms to tourists against Housing Department rules shortly before signing contracts with the city.

Las Palmas is a prime example. The hotel for years advertised its central location for travelers visiting Hollywood, capitalizing on its fame as the site of the final scene in the movie Pretty Woman.

The final scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” was filmed on Las Palmas’ fire escape.

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The Housing Department had designated Las Palmas as a residential hotel in 2011. It based its decision, in the Las Palmas case and others, on the state’s legal definition of a residential hotel: a building of six or more units that are the primary residences of their guests. During the period analyzed in 2005, hotel tax records showed that 93% of its occupants were permanent residents.

But as tenants moved away or died, the struggling actors, writers and celebrity impersonators who called Las Palmas home watched as their landlord turned more and more of the units into tourist rooms. The hotel’s website features a photo of the lobby with a mural of “Pretty Woman” stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts reuniting on the building’s fire escape. The website promises visitors a “wonderful holiday” and a “blissful stay.”

Today, only about a dozen permanent residents remain, according to residents and the latest rent registry filed with the Housing Department.

As rents have soared, Las Palmas is the only housing most can afford, said writer John Bucher, 72. He got his third-floor room at the hotel 12 years ago “when there was still a payphone in the lobby.” Bucher has driven for Uber and DoorDash to supplement his income and can count on his adult kids to help him in an emergency. But for his neighbors, the hotel “is their safety net,” he said. “They’ll die here.”

John Bucher, a 72-year-old writer, has lived at Las Palmas for 12 years. Over time, more and more rooms have been rented to tourists as residents have moved away or died.

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As Las Palmas turned into a tourist hotel, it did little to hide its marketing efforts. Outside was a large sign offering “DAILY” and “WEEKLY” rentals. A housing inspector even snapped a photo of it in 2019, potential evidence that the hotel was violating the residential hotel law. But there’s no indication the inspector asked about the sign or followed up to ensure the hotel wasn’t being rented to tourists. And Las Palmas wasn’t cited under the ordinance until this summer, a few months after receiving the Inside Safe contract.

That wasn’t the case for two other hotels that similarly landed Inside Safe agreements: the Top Hat Motel and the Central Inn in South Los Angeles. The Housing Department cited both hotels in recent years for advertising to tourists in violation of the residential hotel law.

But in both cases, the hotels’ attorney wouldn’t allow inspectors to reenter without administrative warrants. Housing Department enforcement records show no evidence that inspectors obtained warrants, and no further enforcement action was taken.

Yet even that knowledge of violations didn’t prevent the city from awarding them Inside Safe contracts.

Neither of the owners of the Top Hat or the Central Inn returned phone calls seeking comment, and the Top Hat’s owners didn’t respond to an email. One of the Top Hat’s owners, Dipakkumar Patel, said at an appeal hearing that he would lose “everything” if he were unable to continue short-term rentals at the hotel. The hotel also joined the civil rights lawsuit against the city.

The Top Hat brought in nearly a half million dollars between late March and the beginning of October through Inside Safe, while the Central Inn earned more than $200,000 from May to September, according to invoices the motels submitted to the city’s administrative officer.

Stealing permanent housing

By turning residential hotels into temporary shelters, Bass may be working against her ultimate goal of transitioning people to permanent homes, housing experts said.

While Bass reported in September that about 17,000 people had moved to motels, traditional shelters or tiny home villages since she took office, only 2,235 had found permanent homes. For Inside Safe, just 190 of the nearly 1,700 participants had landed a permanent place to live as of mid-October. The city’s administrative officer, Matt Szabo, has told the City Council that there is not enough staff to help people find housing and also a shortage of affordable housing.

Inside Safe isn’t the first time the city has allowed residential hotels to be turned into temporary shelters. It’s unclear whether prioritizing getting people off the streets over preserving permanent housing was a deliberate policy choice or simple bureaucratic oversight: the result of well-intentioned housing policies from different eras colliding.

Eight other residential buildings have been pressed into service as temporary housing since 2016 through Los Angeles County or U.S. Veterans Affairs programs for emergency shelter or mental health and drug and alcohol treatment, or as part of the COVID-19 public health response.

Additionally, the state Housing and Community Development agency granted Los Angeles County and two nonprofit groups $19.3 million in Project Homekey funds to acquire and remodel two other residential hotel buildings to use as interim housing.

Schultz, the legal aid attorney, said it is a “mind-bogglingly terrible strategy” to use residential hotels as temporary housing because the ordinance provides such strong legal protection for their preservation — at least on paper. Residential hotels are the city’s only housing that can’t legally be demolished or converted to another use unless the housing is replaced, Schultz said.

The 72-room Highland Gardens, a midcentury modern hotel in Hollywood, highlights the tension between the city’s need for temporary shelter and its equally pressing need for permanent housing. Formerly known as the Landmark Motor Hotel, it is best known as the place where singer Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose more than 50 years ago.

Highland Gardens had been designated as a residential hotel in 2009 but for years had also advertised its rooms to tourists. Then when local officials needed temporary housing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in homeless shelters, the hotel received a contract under Project Roomkey, paid for with federal pandemic relief funds.

Highland Gardens’ owner didn’t return phone messages left at the hotel.

By the time the program ended in December 2022, few participants had found permanent homes, and City Councilmember Nithya Raman pushed to keep Highland Gardens open as an interim housing site. She said she didn’t know it was a residential hotel.

“That’s part of the problem with the city is that we have such an ad hoc process for finding interim housing,” Raman said. Before Bass took office, Raman said, council offices took the lead in finding sites. “I personally would speak to the owner of this facility to tell them about the program and convince them that there would be benefits for them,” she said.

Raman’s colleagues backed her request, and now a $6 million contract, in effect until mid-2025, includes nearly $4 million to rent the hotel’s rooms and about $2 million for social services for people who had been living on the street. At just $50 per room per night, it’s a more favorable deal for the city than the Inside Safe hotels have negotiated.

Raman said she doesn’t think using the Highland Gardens for temporary housing is a mistake, given the urgent need for shelter. “It has saved lives,” she said.

Tommy Lachenmyer, 36, who moved into Las Palmas through Inside Safe after a fire ripped through a Hollywood encampment near where he slept this year, said the temporary housing has been “a blessing.” But while he’s found a job at Pizza Hut and is studying at a local film school for a career in music production, his quest for stable housing may be harder.

Lachenmyer revisits the location where he once lived in a tent on Vista Del Mar Avenue in Los Angeles.

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Lachenmyer said he filled out an application for permanent housing when he moved in about six months ago. He’s still waiting for approval before he can begin his housing search and said he holds out hope that his stay at the hotel will lead to permanent housing. As for the long wait, Lachenmyer said, “I’m OK with it. People have waited for years.”

But longtime resident Bucher said he is not as optimistic that his new Inside Safe neighbors will find permanent housing.

“All they’re doing is warehousing people,” he said. “Nobody thinks about anything but getting them off the streets.”

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display