Nick Gerda
is an accountability reporter who has covered local government in Southern California for more than a decade.
Published September 18, 2023 6:07 PM
One of the two newly restored historic buildings at the West L.A. Veterans Affairs campus that was converted into housing, seen here at their May 2, 2023 grand opening event.
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Nick Gerda / LAist
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LAist
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Topline:
At a hearing Monday, a federal judge challenged Veterans Affairs officials’ efforts to toss out a lawsuit seeking to fast track housing construction for unhoused veterans at the sprawling West L.A. VA campus.
Lawsuit will likely proceed: At the hearing – which ran for several hours Monday – U.S. District Judge David O. Carter distributed a draft ruling in which he would let much of the lawsuit proceed – largely rejecting the government’s requests for him to dismiss it.
Why it matters: Across L.A. County, about 3,900 veterans experience homelessness, according to the latest count. The VA is years behind schedule on its promise to help bring down that number by building 1,200 units of housing on its West L.A. campus.
What’s next: If the parties don’t settle the case, Carter said he probably would schedule a trial for April or May.
At a hearing Monday, a federal judge challenged Veterans Affairs officials’ efforts to toss out a lawsuit seeking to fast track housing construction for unhoused veterans at the sprawling West L.A. VA campus.
At the hearing — which ran for several hours — U.S. District Judge David O. Carter distributed a draft ruling in which he would let much of the lawsuit proceed, largely rejecting the government’s requests for him to dismiss it.
In a tense back and forth, Carter repeatedly questioned VA lawyers’ position that it has no legal duty to put veterans first — and at one point had the government’s lawyers call the VA’s housing hotline in open court to ask about outreach efforts to veterans experiencing homelessness.
“We’ve got a judge who feels it, who’s concerned, who wants to do the right thing,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the lead attorney for the veterans suing the VA in the case. “He gets it.”
Attorneys for the VA told LAist they were unable to comment on the tentative ruling.
Carter said he would finalize the ruling in the coming weeks, cautioning that his thinking could change. If it proceeds, Carter said he would likely schedule a trial for the spring.
During the hearing at First Street U.S. Courthouse in Downtown L.A., Carter expressed frustration at the complicated web of agencies involved in the housing efforts – saying the VA ultimately is “absolutely responsible."
And he disputed the VA’s claims that it has no legal obligation – or “fiduciary duty” – to act in the best interest of veterans.
“I think you do have a duty,” Carter told lawyers for the VA.
Carter called the finger-pointing by various government agencies, while veterans suffer on the streets, tragic.
“It’s a magical mystery tour of how these bureaucracies interact,” Carter said. “It’s quite a journey for the court, trying to look through this spaghetti of bureaucracies.”
Federal lawyers argued that federal district court judges — like Carter — don’t have any jurisdiction to decide veteran benefits. But lawyers representing veterans who are the plaintiffs in the case strongly disagreed, arguing that the VA has a legal duty to ensure housing for veterans so they can access healthcare.
Their lawsuit is asking Carter to force the VA to:
Speed up the building of 1,200 units at the campus so that they’re all built within 5 years, rather than the VA’s current plan of 2030 (which isn’t legally binding).
Create at least 2,500 new housing options within five miles of the campus, providing permanent supportive housing for veterans with severe mental illness.
End leases on the campus for non-veteran purposes (such as those with private school athletic facilities) and not enter into any other leases that don’t primarily benefit veterans.
The backstory
In a previous case about veteran homelessness — settled in 2015 — a federal judge found the VA had been illegally renting out the West L.A. campus land for private purposes like athletic facilities for an expensive private school.
As a result of that settlement, the VA promised to build 1,200 units of housing on its campus. But it’s years behind schedule, prompting this latest lawsuit, filed in November. And as the delays linger on, the latest point-in-time count conducted in January shows about 3,900 veterans experience homelessness in L.A. County.
“We wouldn’t be here if that agreement had been honored,” Carter said, expressing frustration with what he said was failures to implement a series of past L.A.-area homelessness court settlements.
The resolution of this lawsuit will need strong court oversight and accountability, Carter told lawyers on Monday, saying the whole system is lacking accountability.
Bureaucracies are “bumping into each other,” he said.
The land was originally gifted to the federal government in 1888 with a deed restriction requiring that it be used as a home for former soldiers. A century ago, about 4,000 veterans lived on the land, but the government started removing the housing after the Korean War.
Promised housing running years behind
At Monday’s hearing, Carter pressed the VA’s attorneys to share how many people are currently living in the newly built housing. There were four attorneys representing the VA at the hearing. But initially none of them had answers when Carter asked in the morning portion of the hearing.
So it fell on the attorney for the veterans suing the federal government — Rosenbaum — to provide a number.
Despite the VA’s promises to build 770 units at the campus by last year, only 185 veterans are housed there, Rosenbaum told the judge.
A few hours later in the hearing, the government attorneys said they heard back with the latest number — 198 people housed currently, out of 233 units that have been built.
Rosenbaum questioned how the VA could still have 35 vacancies, months after those apartments were finished.
“You mean to tell me [in Los Angeles] you can’t find 35 homeless vets?” he said.
The VA’s lawyers said all units have been matched to people, but that they’re just waiting for paperwork to be sorted out.
The problems follow issues first reported by LAist in July. At the time, two thirds of the most recently remodeled apartments on the West L.A. VA campus were still sitting empty two months after after a high-profile ribbon cutting event last spring that declared them move-in ready.
A possible trial next spring
If the parties don’t settle the case, Carter said he probably would schedule a trial for April or May.
He encouraged both sides to “try to get together” to work out a deal that helps veterans and gives the court oversight.
Flooding in Seal Beach Saturday afternoon. Heavy rains began Sunday.
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Courtesy Rhea Presiado
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Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 at the 5 Freeway, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County today. Tomorrow, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today (Sunday, Sept. 6) across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 Freeway at the 5, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Advisories and closures:
An ocean water quality rain advisory has been issued for all L.A. County beaches until Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. That means to avoid ocean water contact for at least 72 hours after the rain.
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County throughout Sunday. On Monday, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published September 6, 2026 7:08 AM
Firefighters assess the remains of the Lineage warehouse that burned for a week and sent smoke into nearby communities.
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Andrew Lopez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
Final cleanup of the burned Boyle Heights warehouse was completed Saturday, according to Lineage Logistics and air quality officials.
Why it matters: On Aug. 29, Lineage removed an estimated 88 million pounds of rotting food waste from the site. It then faced a seven-day deadline to complete the final phase of cleanup, including debris removal, power washing and disinfecting of required areas.
What the company says: Lineage said workers have spent 210,000 hours on cleaning up the 491,000 square-foot site, which burned for about a week after igniting on July 7. The cost of cleanup, the company said, is more than $100 million.
Odor issues: Air quality officials from South Coast AQMD said odor complaints have fallen to fewer than 5 per day since food waste removal — instead of several hundred per day in July.
What's next: Lineage must continue to comply with an odor abatement order from South Coast AQMD, including sealing wastewater from the cleanup in a tank.
Lineage is also required to continue air monitoring around the warehouse.
Keep up with LAist.
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The Bee Museum is inside the vintage store, Hive & Hanger, in Burbank.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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Topline:
Hive & Hanger in Burbank sells vintage clothes and antique jewelry. Inside, you'll also find a pop-up Bee Museum.
What? The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
The backstory: When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. The museum was opened almost a year ago after Diazzz became fascinated with the honeybee.
A sign on the front door says “Beekeeper owned,” and inside the Hive & Hanger store in Burbank, the layout is a mix of vintage clothes, antique jewelry and something rather unexpected: a pop-up Bee Museum.
The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. “I was not looking to change careers,” she said, but after taking a two-hour beekeeping experience course, she was hooked.
Hive & Hangar in Burbank doubles as a bee museum.
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James Bartlett
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“I don’t like dirt, and I don't like bugs. I'm a heels and lipstick, nails, kind of person,” she said. “There's just something magical about the honeybee. The more you know, the more you want to know.”
That prompted her to pursue a bee master certification at UC Davis. She collaborated with Elina Niño at the university’s Bee Lab to curate information and research to bring her pop-up Bee Museum to life almost a year ago.
A crash course in bees
The Burbank Bee Museum.
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James Bartlett
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There’s a Bee 101 explainer by the front door, which shows the differences between bees and wasps, and fun touches like pop songs containing the word “Honey,” and a list of Noteworthy Beekeepers including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Jolie and Sherlock Holmes.
One long-standing myth is that honeybees are stingers. “People always ask me how often I get stung, but I don’t wear gloves, and I don’t use smoke, and it very rarely happens. And honeybees die after they sting, as opposed to wasps, who can sting repeatedly,” she said.
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James Bartlett
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Most arresting is a floor-to-ceiling collage series of framed model fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, all of which the honeybee has a role in pollinating. Beside that is an exhibit on pesticides, one of the insect's biggest threats. Pieces of dried honeycomb are everywhere.
Diazzz has also been hosting school trips for the Boys & Girls Clubs. “I might be the only beekeeper they will ever meet,” she noted. The point is to give bees the respect they deserve. “Did you know that it takes 12 honeybees their entire lives to make one teaspoon of honey?”
Rescuing hives across Southern California
The Bee Museum serves up not just honey, but bee knowledge.
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James Bartlett
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There are no live bees in the store, but Diazzz has her own hives in Burbank.
“They are from rescues: I cut the hive out from a wall,” she explained. She takes care of hives from San Diego to Bel Air, with many in the San Fernando Valley, and a couple with a view of the Hollywood Sign. Her caretaking quests have taken her on skyscraper roofs, at apartment buildings and in parking lots.
Almost a year ago, she began her studies as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society in Connecticut, where she learned about the science and experience of honey. Her future includes going off to Bologna, Italy, the world honey hub, for the final round of studies and tests at the Albo Nazionale degli Esperti in Analisi Sensoriale del Miele or the National Register of Experts in Sensory Analysis of Honey.
Carrie Diazzz, owner of the store and the museum, sells small jars of honey sourced locally and from her own hives.
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James Bartlett
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“Nectar and honey are not the same thing,” she explained. “Nectar is the liquid sticky substance that bees collect from flowering plants and take back to the hive. They transform it into honey by dehydrating the moisture out of the nectar, and capping it over with wax.”
Diazzz recently held her first informal tasting experience at The Bee Museum, and has small batches of various local honeys for sale: cactus, sage, and honey from her own hives. “I usually leave the honey alone, and only take any extra they have made to sell,” she said, because bees use the honey as sustenance. Her favorite? “A toss-up between dandelion and sunflower. Orange blossom is delicious too, but very sweet.”
NPR's Linda Holmes is a daily puzzle devotee. She recommends games that will test your knowledge of geography, history, and even the most obscure corners of Wikipedia.
Keep reading and dive right into her list of recommendations.
Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.
But maybe you're looking for something else.
So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days — ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee.)
There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax, the word game Smush, the vexing Anthropeum, the movie games Framed and Cinematrix. Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.
Any idea where Regina is? Do your best in MapTap's daily geography game.
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MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.
This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.
Look carefully: What's your best guess for where and when this photo was taken? TimeGuessr makes you a detective.
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Screenshot by NPR
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In the same family as MapTap is TimeGuessr, where each day's challenge is made up of five puzzles that each start with a photo. Your task is to choose, on a timeline, what year the photo was taken, and to choose, on a map of the world, where it was taken. Sometimes, the photos are of historically meaningful events, like the aftermath of a battle or a natural disaster. Sometimes, they are photographs of ordinary people going about their lives.
The trick with TimeGuessr is detective work. Some hints are straightforward: a sign in the window of a store that might tip off the location (if you can figure out what language it's written in), a license plate, something along those lines. But sometimes, the clues are more subtle. What are the people in the photo wearing? What do the cars look like? How is everybody wearing their hair? It's a fascinating exercise in putting together clues, and again, you can actually increase your knowledge of the world while you play.
Everything is connected (somehow) in The Loop, which is a perfect first-thing-when-you-wake-up game.
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Screenshot by NPR
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The Loop is my favorite early-morning game, perfect for when I'm only partially awake. It offers you 12 simple illustrations that you have to arrange in a circle so that each illustration connects in some way to the ones on either side of it.
So, for instance, in one round I played, a square-root symbol connected on one side to a carpenter's square (because square/square), which then connected to a picture of a toolbox (because a carpenter's square is a tool). On the other side, the square-root symbol connected to a carrot (because it's a root vegetable), and then the carrot to an icicle (because they're the same shape). It can be fun to crack all the different ways that the images connect to each other, but the game design also offers so many chances to get it right that there's a huge amount of grace for making mistakes. That, of course, is why it's perfect for being half-awake.
It's up to you to figure out who's innocent and who's guilty in Clues by Sam.
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Screenshot by NPR
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Clues by Sam is a logic puzzle. It presents you with a grid — four across and five down — of people, each represented by a name, an emoji and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals. (There is no set number; there could be lots of criminals or only a couple.) Your opening clue might say, "Michael is one of three criminals in row 2." Then you click on Michael and mark him as a criminal, and when you're right, that gets you another clue, and so on.
Like most of these games, this one is enjoyable largely because it's simple, but its diabolical twist is that you can't guess. If you try to label Jane innocent, for instance, and she eventually will be, but the game hasn't given you enough information yet to actually know that, then that answer is wrong and is rejected. You are only allowed to deduce from the clues you have, because it is genuinely the journey and not the destination. Note that Clues by Sam gets harder each day from Monday through Sunday, so if you're a beginner, give it a whirl early in the week to get the hang of it.
Catfishing asks you to figure out the title of a Wikipedia page from its categories — which is harder than it sounds.
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Screenshot by NPR
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Without a doubt, the hardest game I play regularly. In this game, you get a list of at least some of the categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to, and you have to try to figure out what page it is. There are ten questions; my average score is about four, and the highest I've ever gotten is eight.
For example, if you know a page is filed under "20th century musicians," and "21st century musicians," and "American folk musicians," and "people born in Minnesota," you might start to zero in on Bob Dylan. But be warned: Many of the answers are far more obscure than that, and it's very common for me to give up and reveal the answer, only to learn that I never stood a chance, because I've never heard of the person (or event, or phenomenon) at all. It doesn't matter how many ways you classify certain medieval rulers or political conflicts of 19th century Iowa; I may never get there.
This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.
