The Brief

When a judge ruled recently that a controversial state housing law did not apply to a handful of southern California cities, Julie Testa saw it as an invitation.

The late April opinion from Los Angeles County Judge Curtis Kin held that a 2021 state law letting homeowners split up their houses into as many as four separate units regardless of local zoning restrictions had no effect in Redondo Beach, Carson, Torrance, Whittier or Del Mar. The reason: The five SoCal jurisdictions are “charter cities” — jurisdictions with their own municipal constitutions that grant them extra independence from state law.

Testa, the vice mayor of Pleasanton, wanted what Redondo Beach was having. She wanted to turn her bedroom community east of San Francisco Bay into a charter city.

“The state Legislature has declared war on our cities,” said Testa. “We think that this is a turning of that tide.”

Since first winning local office in 2020, Testa has spent much of her short political career chafing against the spate of new state housing laws that force local governments to automatically approve apartment buildings, duplexes and backyard cottages. She cobbled together a loose group of like-minded politicians under the banner of the California Alliance of Local Electeds. A few days after Kin’s ruling, the group’s weekly Zoom meeting saw near record turnout, she said.

Now Pleasanton is one of at least three California cities, all San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, that have taken the first step toward adopting a charter since the April ruling. Testa and three of her four city council colleagues instructed city staff to look into making the transition in mid-May. City councils in nearby Brentwood and the hyper-affluent Silicon Valley suburb of Atherton followed suit this month.

Becoming a charter city — as roughly 120 of California’s 482 cities have done over the course of the state’s history — requires local voter approval. Before that, city officials have to actually write a charter, a comprehensive, technical governing document that covers everything from local election procedure to the dos and don’ts of municipal debt management. The three cities are probably kicking off that lengthy process too late for this November’s election, meaning that voters in the three cities won’t weigh in until at least 2026 — if at all.

“We will see a lot of irreversible consequences in that period of time, so I am disappointed, but I do believe that we must do what we can do to defend our constitutional right to local control,” said Testa.

Jovita Mendoza, the Brentwood council member who is pushing the charter effort in her city, said housing policy isn’t her sole motivation. Charter cities have more flexibility over contracting and purchasing policies, election procedures and taxation. But the recent ruling out of Los Angeles “definitely helped” provide fresh inspiration.

Brentwood’s council voted unanimously to begin the process last Tuesday. At a late evening hearing on the subject, Planning Commissioner Rod Flohr endorsed the idea.

“Most of the public is still kind of unaware of how restricted we’ve become, almost to the point where it feels sometimes like the planning commission and city council can’t really do anything anymore,” he said. “This may be our only avenue to…keep working to make Brentwood the jewel of east county.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has ordered local governments to plan for an additional 2.5 million new homes through the end of the decade in an effort to bring down prices and rents. That’s part of a broader political shift in Sacramento as the governor, the attorney general and the Legislature have more aggressively promoted more housing, even over the objections of local elected officials and residents.

Mendoza in Brentwood was one of the chief proponents of a proposed statewide ballot initiative that would have allowed local governments to override state land use laws. The measure failed to gather enough signatures for this year’s election.

The April ruling opened up a new potential strategy. “If the charter cities win on appeal, I think you’re going to see it happening more and more,” she said.

On housing, the tie often goes to the state

Many legal experts are skeptical that the ruling will hold — and if it does, whether that would be the death blow to state land use authority that many local control advocates hope it will be.

“If I were looking to become a charter city in order to avoid (the state’s duplex law), I would not waste my time,” said UC Davis law professor Darien Shanske. “This decision will be overturned.”

Since the 1880s, California cities have come in two distinct flavors: “General law” cities, which have to govern themselves under rules set forth by the state Legislature, and charter cities, which the state constitution grants autonomy when it comes to “municipal affairs.”

Unhelpfully, the constitution doesn’t actually specify what those “municipal affairs” are. That makes the precise scope of a charter city’s political autonomy from the state an uncertain and moving target that courts have had to address on a case-by-case basis.

New homes under construction in Pleasanton on June 16, 2024. The city of Pleasanton has voted to explore the possibility of becoming a charter city.

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Loren Elliott

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CalMatters

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As state lawmakers have unleashed a raft of pro-construction bills over the last decade, the courts have typically allowed them to apply to charter and general law cities alike.

“The courts generally have not been very receptive to charter city arguments given the housing crisis,” said Barbara Kautz, a land use attorney who regularly represents cities and counties.

Kautz’s law firm, Goldfarb & Lipman, has represented Pleasanton, Brentwood and Atherton, but is not doing so in their current quests to become charter cities.

The April ruling is a notable exception to the trend. But it’s also an exceedingly narrow one and not something on which to hang a legal revolution in land use policy, said Kautz. “As a long term strategy to avoid (state housing law), I just don’t know if it would have any effect,” she said.

What the ruling does — and doesn’t — say

California courts have generally let the Legislature steamroll local authorities, even in charter cities, if state lawmakers can prove that they are addressing a matter of “statewide concern” and that the bill they’re passing is narrowly tailored to address that concern.

The 2021 law itself specifies that the “statewide concern” in question is to ensure “access to affordable housing.”

Unfortunately for the state, “affordable housing” has multiple definitions. Affordable housing might refer to units that are legally required to be reserved for people making under a certain income with regulated rents or prices, sometimes called “deed-restricted affordable housing.” Or the term can simply refer to housing that’s cheap.

In his ruling, Kin concluded that the Legislature, in laying out its “statewide concern,” must have meant “affordable” in the first, deed-restricted sense. Because letting homeowners split their houses into duplexes “has, at best, an attenuated connection to affordable housing,” he wrote, the law wasn’t written narrowly enough to advance its stated goal and therefore doesn’t have the authority to trample over the rights of charter cities.

In short, the ruling dings the state duplex law because it didn’t justify its intent with the right term. UC Davis’ Shanske referred to the ruling jokingly as a “Simon didn’t say” legal test.

Kin has yet to submit a final judgment, which will clarify whether the ruling applies to just the five cities that sued or to every one of the more than 100 charter cities across California.

What the ruling doesn’t say is that charter cities are exempt from the duplex law because the state fundamentally lacks the authority to regulate how homes can be divided up. Nor does it say that charter cities are exempt from state housing requirements in general, which would have been at odds with a slew of recent court rulings.

Chris Elmendorf, one of Shanske’s colleagues at UC Davis School of Law who regularly opines on housing policy on social media, called Kin’s conclusion “a weird, narrow decision that turns on a lawyerly sleight of hand.”

A residential street in Pleasanton on June 16, 2024. The city of Pleasanton has voted to explore the possibility of becoming a charter city.

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Loren Elliott

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CalMatters

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Even some of those who welcomed the ruling as a victory for local control were tempered in their enthusiasm, if only because the ruling seems to invite the Legislature to simply fix its wording with another bill. San Diego Democratic Sen. Toni Atkins, who authored the four-unit housing law, is working on a bill this year, Senate Bill 450, which aims to make it harder for local governments to obstruct the earlier duplex law by delaying approvals or imposing costly or unworkable size, design and setback requirements. An analysis last year by the UC Berkeley Terner Center found that the duplex law had resulted in precious little new housing, partially as a result of such restrictions.

Asked whether Atkins plans to respond to Kin’s ruling with a legislative fix, the senator’s spokesperson, Meredith McNamee, said in a statement that the senator believes “some legislative clean-up” would improve the implementation of the law she wrote.

The California Justice Department, which represented the state in the Redondo Beach case, has already filed a notice of appeal.

Jennifer Cacicio didn’t set out to move across the country.

Like thousands of others who fled the L.A. fires a year ago this week, Cacicio and her family left their Altadena home thinking they would be gone a night, maybe two.

But in the year since the Eaton Fire erased their house and neighborhood overnight, home has become somewhere entirely new.

Cacicio, a television writer, and her husband and 8-year-old daughter now live nearly 3,000 miles from L.A. — in Cold Spring, a village in New York’s Hudson Valley they’d never visited until this year.

Starting over somewhere completely new, Cacicio said, felt easier than rebuilding their lives in high-cost L.A. with the foothills of Altadena casting a long shadow.

“What we had in Altadena was so wonderful that anywhere else but Altadena feels like you're settling for less,” Cacicio said.

Jennifer Cacicio poses for a photo with her husband Matt Shallenberger and their daughter, Bruna.

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Matt Shallenberger

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Cacicio is part of a growing fire diaspora — Altadenans scattered across the country and the world, searching for versions of the natural beauty and close-knit and artistic community they enjoyed in the San Gabriels.

Cacicio said she knows of three other Altadena families who’ve relocated to the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods still edge up against the wilderness, but wooded slopes and river cliffs now define the landscape for them where canyons and ridgelines once did.

I also spoke with two other Altadena households who left post-fire, one for the Netherlands and the other for Asheville, North Carolina. Each family described decisions shaped by financial realities and the wrenching calculus of raising young children after a fire.

From Altadena to the Netherlands

The Sporcks left the Netherlands for L.A. over seven years ago, setting off on their American adventure.

Joep, a film composer, saw career opportunities in L.A, and his wife Sarah, was eager to try life in a new country.

Friends in Altadena introduced them to the San Gabriels, and eventually they found their own house in the west part of Altadena near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joep composed film scores and trailer music in a converted garage and Sarah commuted to her job as an education specialist at a school in Lincoln Heights. Three years ago, they welcomed their first child.

In the back yard, they planted fruit trees and raised chickens, and hiked along trails to favorite spots like Millard Falls.

“We loved it, and we never meant to leave,” Joep said.

This time last year, Sarah was pregnant with their second son and had just finished her first trimester when on Jan. 7 the couple saw flames shooting from the foothills.

The fire came within several blocks, but their house was ultimately spared.

In the month after the fire, Joep worked to remediate their home alongside professional crews, as Sarah looked after their toddler, whose daycare, Altadena Children’s Center, had burned down.

“With Sarah pregnant, it was really scary, even afterwards,” Joep said.

Added Sarah: “And with a toddler that wants to play outside.”

As they prepared for their second child, the fire forced questions: How long would it take for Altadena to recover and what would that look like?

“I'm sure there will be a new Altadena in a couple of years,” Joep said. “But it felt like it wasn't going to be the same ever again.”

Once-vague thoughts moved to the foreground. In the Netherlands, they would have more family support and a stronger social safety net, like lower-cost childcare.

And Joep had reached a point in his career that he could work remotely.

This past summer, after their baby was born, a listing landed in Joep’s inbox for a three-story brick villa in the southern part of the Netherlands where Joep is from — hilly just like Altadena. The couple made an offer for the house in Epen without seeing it in person.

The Sporcks have moved back to the Netherlands, to the village of Epen in the southern part of the country.

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Gerlach Delissen

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“We made some lists like pros and cons of staying or leaving, and it was just we couldn't deny it anymore,” Joep said.

They put their house on the market — and after some price cuts — sold it to another Altadena family that had lost their home in the fire.

In November, the Sporcks moved to their Epen home, where they are still unpacking — and grieving.

“I’m really sad to be leaving America and Los Angeles,” Joep said. “It feels a little bit like giving up this dream.”

But he said the ties to the area are strong. Their children are dual-citizens. Joep will return to L.A. regularly for work.

“Part of us is now like American, Altadenan forever, I guess,” Joep said.

It's something, he said, that will always set them apart from their friends and family in the Netherlands.

From Eaton Canyon to the Blue Ridge Mountains

Altadena wasn’t their first stop in Southern California. There was Sherman Oaks and Highland Park.

But for Carson Dougherty and Chris Gower, their Altadena cottage rental within walking distance of Eaton Canyon was the first place that felt like home in L.A.

Pushing their daughters in strollers to Altadena Beverage and Market and Prime Pizza, they would stop to speak with neighbors along the way.

“I would walk around and just be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we live here,'" Carson said. “I've just never loved a place more or felt more welcome.”

Carson, a spiritual coach, had moved from New York to L.A. about nine years ago when she was an actor, accompanied by Chris who works in tech sales.

Carson is originally from northern Virginia, while Chris grew up in Surrey, England. The call of family always beckoned, but the allure of life in Altadena kept it at bay.

Carson Dougherty and her family moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

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Courtesy Carson Dougherty

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They had months earlier re-upped their lease for another two years, when the Eaton Fire happened.

The next day, they returned to find their rental standing — but coated in soot.

With no clear remediation plan being offered by the landlord and worried about their children’s health, the couple broke their lease and forfeited their full deposit.

As they planned their next move, Carson and Chris began rethinking what it meant to raise a family in California — from pre-school to housing.

“Life here is very hard,” Carson said. “We're obsessed with it, but it's not easy.”

Carson flew with the girls out to Virginia, and stayed with her parents. When Chris rejoined them, they discussed where they could live.

Using A.I., they researched cities within 500 miles of Carson’s parents that met their criteria for schools and property taxes. Starting with more than 50 places, Carson winnowed down the list by watching online walking tours of cities and asking for advice on social media.

Asheville, North Carolina — where she had once attended a wedding — kept coming up.

“But we were like, ‘We're not going to move to a place that just had a hurricane,” Carson said, recalling the devastation of Hurricane Helene in 2024.

After taking road trips to Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey and feeling nothing was clicking, the couple traveled to Asheville. They were drawn to the Blue Ridge Mountains that ring the city and the artistic community that reminded them of Altadena’s.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is it,’” Carson said. “I don't know. It was just a feeling.”

Two months into living in their current spot in Asheville, they’re still adjusting.

“I can see this was the right move for us,” Carson said. “But it doesn't feel like home yet.”

“It still feels like a consolation prize,” Chris said. “Whereas Altadena was the one that we were like ‘Holy crap, we found it.'"

Giving her daughter home

In Cold Spring, New York, Jennifer Cacicio is also going through a range of emotions.

“I love Altadena so much, and there's so much grief in letting go of it,” she said.

She mourns her street of identical mid-century homes designed by the architect Gregory Ain. When neighborhood kids visited each other, they knew the exact layout of each others’ homes.

Jennifer estimates of the 28 houses in the neighborhood, about three-quarters are gone.

After struggling with the cost of renting or buying in L.A., she and her husband — a landscape photographer — began thinking about moving East, where she’s from.

During their daughter’s spring break, the family flew out for an expedition.

“We tried to frame it with my daughter, like, ‘You know what this terrible thing happened, and we're going to try to turn it into a family adventure and live closer to cousins and explore a new part of the world,'" Jennifer said.

Jennifer Cacicio's 8-year-old daughter surveys her new environs in Cold Spring, N.Y.

They looked at towns within an hour or so of New York City, located in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut. In New York’s Hudson Valley, they visited an open house for a school that their daughter instantly took a shine to.

“We were like, ‘Great, let's just build it around that — like one thing felt right,’” Cacicio said.

Another sign came when Jennifer, who was the showrunner for this year’s Paramount+ drama Happy Face, got an offer to work on a show based in New York.

“It kind of felt like the universe confirming the decision in a way,” Jennifer said.

In September, they moved into their new home in Cold Spring. Cacicio puts aside her sadness when she thinks about her daughter.

After an event as traumatic as a fire, she wants her childhood to feel stable again. Altadena will recover over the next decade, Cacicio said, but later than she would hope for her daughter.

Being in a new place has brought unknowns, but also a sense of excitement.

"That was kind of what it came down to," Cacicio said. "It didn't feel like settling. It just felt different."

Los Angeles lost a piece of history when the Hollywood Center Motel burned down earlier this week.

The vacant property on Sunset Boulevard had a reputation as a sleazy, dilapidated inn, but the Hollywood Center Motel actually had multiple previous lives.

The building, one of the oldest in the neighborhood, was from a time before urbanization. It was also nominated for historic protection, in part because of its first era as a house.

A symbol of early Hollywood

Before the fire, the Hollywood Center Motel had seven buildings, a kidney-shaped pool, and a mid-century modern breeze block wall with a neon sign.

But the motel property actually started out as a three-story, Shingle-style home built in 1905, which is an American take on Victorian design known for broad gables.

That was built when Hollywood was an independent city, before it joined the city of L.A. Brian Curran, who co-chairs Hollywood Heritage’s preservation committee, says that during this period, Hollywood was known as a place for retirees to settle down.

“ [It was] marketed as a dry town,” he said. “So it was like, come in, retire among the orange groves and just enjoy life in sunny California.”

The Hollywood Center Motel in 1985.

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Ed Ruscha

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Hollywood was also changing from agricultural to real estate haven. If you were very well off, you’d live in a lavish Hollywood Hills estate, like Wattles Mansion. If you were more moderate, you’d live in the flat areas to the south, in upper-middle class homes just like the Shingle home.

Changing with the times

The home was first owned by William and Sarah Avery, according to Hollywood Heritage’s nomination petition, who called the home “El Nido” (the nest). They didn’t live there long, but the couple’s luncheon made it into the local paper.

The home changed hands multiple times. When Edmund Schultz, a retired drugstore owner, and his family bought the property in 1921, they decided to turn it into an old English bungalow court with over a dozen units around the main home. This was part of a shift in Hollywood to create low-scale apartments as people flocked to Southern California, according to city records.

“It physically evolved with the evolution of Hollywood,” Curran said, “but also tells a story about the economic and cultural evolution of Hollywood.”

The motel conversion didn’t happen until the mid-1950s, when a different owner enclosed the front porch and divided rooms. It was put up for auction as a 23-unit motel, with a full apartment and family-style spaces.

The Hollywood Center Motel opened shortly after in 1956. As TV’s popularity grew, it quickly became a backdrop for crime dramas. It’s been a filming location for Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, T.J. Hooker and L.A. Confidential. As the decades passed, its run-down appearance worked even better for those who wanted a seedy setting.

A still of the motel in the TV cop drama "T.J. Hooker." The episode, titled "Sweet Sixteen...and Dead," aired in February 1983.

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Screenshot via Tubi

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The damaged neon sign in 2024.

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Darya Sannikova

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Pexels

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The music industry also got a piece of it. In the 70s, musician Neil Young stayed there because he wanted to sleep in the “sleaziest motel” on Sunset Boulevard.

This was the Hollywood Center Motel’s life for decades — a little bit of stardom while it slowly deteriorated. In 2015, the breeze block was damaged in a car crash and not repaired, according to the nomination petition. The motel stopped operating three years later.

What the fire means for historic status

Only a handful of buildings in Hollywood have this kind of history, which is why Curran says they began fighting for it to be protected once it became vacant last year.

The site was eligible for local and state historic status. The city of L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission had just voted a few weeks ago to consider that.

But they couldn’t stay ahead of issues. The home was vandalized. A small blaze broke out on the second floor in September. Another fire damaged one of the bungalows the following month.

The home was demolished in the process of stopping the flames.

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Curran says losing the home in this last fire— the most significant element of the complex — makes the nomination process more challenging, but they’re still pushing for it. He wants protections for the neon sign and breeze block wall. Moving forward, Curran says Hollywood Heritage  will be talking with policymakers about preventing other important sites from the same fate.

“ We know from experience that when you don’t use a building, when there aren’t people inside, they are vulnerable and then they burn,” Curran said. “ We need to do something because this continues to happen.”

Sorry, folks. The bluefin tuna that's worth the price of a decent Hollywood Hills home is now sold out in L.A.

What, you say?

It all started with an age-old tradition

Every Jan. 5, the world's largest wholesale seafood market in Tokyo holds a special auction to ring in the new year.

This week, a 535-pound bluefin tuna was sold at Toyosu Fish Market for a record-setting 510.3 million yen — or around $3.2 million in U.S. dollars. That's about $6,000 a pound.

The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura — the country's titular "Tuna King" who operates the Sushi Zanmai chain of restaurants in Japan that’s known for its quality but affordable sushi.

So what does it have to do with L.A.

After the auction, about 30 pounds of that hunk of a tuna was flown to the chain's only stateside outpost at Chapman Plaza in Koreatown.

"One of the staff from headquarters brought it by plane," said Tiger Nakawake, the general manager of Sushi Zanmai LA. He added that the fish was kept fresh with temperature control packaging and ice.

Nakawake said that the L.A. location always gets their bluefin from its Tokyo mothership. The other fish they get from companies in Japan and locally.

For him, there's a lot of pride that this New Year symbol of good fortune and tradition has come to this neck of the woods.

"All the staff were super happy, because we're the only restaurant in the United States who has 'World Record Blue Fin Tuna,'” Nakawake said in an email.

The giant bluefin that's worth $3.2 million.

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Courtesy Tiger Nakawake

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What makes bluefin special is its "sweetness and acidity" that is both "refined and perfectly balanced," he added.

But the 535-pound giant is next league.

"Truly the most elegant and delicious tuna I have ever tasted in the last 50 years," he said.

While supply lasts

Nakawake estimated their share yielded about 1,000 sushi slices, which the restaurant started serving Thursday. In keeping with the chain's mission to offer good sushi without breaking the bank, Zanmai L.A. is keeping prices low — from $4 to $7 a piece, depending on the cut.

"This tuna is a New Year gift and appreciation to all the people in L.A. from Tuna King," Nakawake said.

The limit was one piece per person. Late last night, Nakawake updated LAist to say that the fish was, "unfortunately, all sold out."

But not to worry, this isn't the Tuna King's first rodeo at going big at the annual new year's auction. According to the BBC, Kimura also submitted historic winning bids in 2012, 2013, and 2019.

So yes, there's always next year.