The Brief

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. 

The first complaint about illegal vacation rentals at 1940 Carmen Ave., a rent-controlled apartment building just blocks from Hollywood Boulevard, arrived at the Los Angeles Housing Department nearly a decade ago.

“This place is crazy,” a tenant reported in 2015, according to an inspector’s note, “luggage up and down, different people always in and out. Not safe.”

Inspectors cited the owner for changing the building’s use without a permit. They warned him again the next year. But after that, housing inspectors appeared to drop the matter, even as they ordered the owner to correct other building code violations. A few years later, in 2020, a tenant complained that 14 of the 21 units were listed on Airbnb.

L.A. zoning laws vs. reality

L.A.’s zoning laws have long prohibited turning apartments into hotel rooms, with a few exceptions. But in 2018, the City Council handed inspectors a new enforcement tool, an ordinance that specifically outlawed using rent-controlled dwellings for short-term rentals.

The Housing Department opened a case against 1940 Carmen but referred it to the planning department — even though the planning department doesn’t have the ability to fine or otherwise penalize violators. No citations were issued.

In all, residents and neighbors have made nearly two dozen complaints. The building even found international fame after the singer Mon Laferte told Rolling Stone she named her 2021 album “1940 Carmen” for the Airbnb where she stayed in L.A. — and was nominated for a Grammy for it.

Yet the city has failed to enforce the law. Booking.com recently listed one-bedroom units in the building for about $160 a night. Asked about short-term rentals, 1940 Carmen owner Alexander Stein said, “I would rather not discuss it. Thank you for calling, though,” before hanging up.

What happened at 1940 Carmen has played out in dozens of other buildings across Los Angeles. Landlords are using rent-controlled apartments as vacation rentals in apparent violation of the law, an investigation by Capital & Main and ProPublica has found. In some cases, entire apartment buildings with more than 30 units are listed as boutique hotels on sites like Hotels.com and Booking.com.

By analyzing city databases and combing through online listings, the news organizations found 63 rent-controlled buildings where a tourist could book a room this spring. The number is likely far higher because many vacation rental websites like Airbnb don’t list exact addresses.

The findings are “shocking but not surprising,” said City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is spearheading efforts to tighten home-sharing enforcement. “The enforcement system we have set up in the city of Los Angeles fails to meet the spirit of the ordinance.”

Tourists return bicycles inside the lobby of the Venice V.

(

Barbara Davidson for ProPublica

)

Last year, Capital & Main and ProPublica found similar issues with a smaller category of affordable housing, called residential hotels, which are supposed to be preserved for the poorest Angelenos. But the new reporting on rent-controlled apartments shows the bureaucratic dysfunction in the city’s housing and planning departments runs far deeper.

A system riddled with inefficiencies and shortcomings

As with residential hotels, inspection records and complaints obtained under the California Public Records Act revealed that the city’s enforcement system is riddled with inefficiencies and shortcomings.

The enforcement crisis threatens LA’s ability to preserve affordable housing as the city faces a soaring housing market and near-record homelessness. Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on housing on her first day in office in 2022. About 650,000 units, 70% of the city’s rental inventory, are rent-controlled, meaning building owners can’t raise rents by more than roughly 4% each year until the tenant moves out.

Housing Department spokesperson Sharon Sandow didn’t answer specific questions about enforcement problems and noted that multiple agencies oversee short-term rentals. She said, “We will continue to work with our colleagues to ensure enforcement.” The planning department didn’t respond to questions about the city’s home-sharing enforcement policies and procedures, referring them to the Housing Department.

An Airbnb spokesperson said by email, “there is no place on Airbnb for Hosts who circumvent the City’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, and we will continue to work closely with the City staff to address Hosts who try to evade the rules.” Expedia Group, which owns Hotels.com, said it “evaluates our listings on a regular basis and works with our partners in Los Angeles” to ensure compliance. Booking.com didn’t respond to emails requesting comment.

The buildings range from the small 1920s-style Rosemary Speakeasy, featuring a $288-a-night tower apartment with a winding staircase and a jacuzzi-style tub, to the the Venice V Hotel on the famous beach boardwalk, which for $600 a night offers panoramic views from penthouse suites named for silent-film stars, like Charlie Chaplin, who once lived in the building, then known as the Venice Waldorf. Guests, the hotel’s website says, can even see the ocean from the shower.

PHOTO

Venice V owner Carl Lambert said he’s done nothing wrong by converting the building. “Everyone has been treated fairly,” Lambert said. “I comply with the law.” The Rosemary owner Izzy Kerian said his is a commercial building and denied knowledge of its rent-controlled status. “Too many questions, ma’am,” Kerian said. “I don’t understand anything. I’m just the business owner.”

The unchecked conversions come as “home sharing,” in which residents rent out their houses, spare bedrooms and apartments as hotel rooms, has boomed across the world over the past decade. That has left cities from Dallas to Vienna to Tokyo struggling to craft regulations to keep the $100 billion industry from devouring the local housing supply. Severalacademic studies have found short-term rentals drive up rents for residents, fueling the push for stronger regulation.

Elected officials in L.A. are considering how to strengthen its rules. The timing is important, housing activists say, as the city prepares to host the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — each of which is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city.

A tangled enforcement system

Since the home-sharing ordinance passed, the Housing Department has heralded it as a powerful tool that would stop rogue hotel operators from eating up rental units. The law prohibits unregistered properties from advertising, and owners can be fined $586 per violation and up to $5,869 for repeat violations. Vacation rental websites can also be fined for listings that violate the ordinance.

Recent enforcement has persuaded some property owners to return their buildings to residential use, Sandow said. In 2022, the city settled a lawsuit against Vrbo, accusing it of processing thousands of illegal bookings, for $150,000. A spokesperson for Vrbo’s owner, Expedia, said the company is working “to help drive a high rate of compliance with local laws.”

But the L.A. planning department told the City Council last year that administrative citations won’t deter apartment owners who turn entire buildings into de facto hotels. Instead, it argued, legal action must be taken against property owners or managers who do so.

The city “is either unable or unwilling to actually enforce” the ordinance, said Nancy Hanna, an attorney for Better Neighbors LA, a home-sharing watchdog group. (Hanna works for a law firm that is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

The planning department has an automated system that crawls the internet, scanning listings to flag potentially ineligible properties when their owners apply for permission to post their homes on Airbnb or other websites.

Granicus, the contractor that runs the system, will have received $6.3 million over six years when its current contract expires in 2025. The company has sent out more than 18,400 warning letters to potential violators for listing rentals without registration. But the planning department said that’s too many cases for city staff to handle, so it rarely follows up.

Instead, agency officials told a City Council committee that they rely only on constituent or council complaints to detect violators.

Indeed, many of the buildings found by Capital & Main and ProPublica had received computer-generated warning letters, meaning the city had a chance to stop their short-term rentals. But few were cited.

The city is also missing another opportunity to catch potential violators. The L.A. Office of Finance maintains a list of hotel businesses in the city so that it can collect its 14% bed tax. Using this list, Capital & Main and ProPublica found more than 100 additional rent-controlled buildings where owners or residents had registered to operate hotel rooms.

Those buildings have thousands of apartments, but there doesn’t appear to be a system to flag rent-controlled properties on this list. Not all are actively operating as short-term rentals, according to interviews with people on the list. It’s unclear how many do so, as the agency wouldn’t disclose which businesses had recently paid hotel taxes, and because many vacation rental websites mask their listings’ locations.

What the city says

Meg Wynne, a finance office spokesperson, said her agency is “not a regulatory authority” and doesn’t have the power to determine whether people applying for hotel tax certificates “are legally allowed to perform that activity.”

Even when the housing and planning departments have heard repeated complaints about the same property, like 1940 Carmen, owners escaped enforcement, thanks in part to a convoluted system in which cases must pass through multiple departments.

One record provided by Better Neighbors LA shows that even city employees are sometimes confused. The planning department’s complaint line registered a 2020 call from a woman who identified herself as a Housing Department employee. “She would like to know how the process works so she can inform tenants as well,” a call log reads.

Inspection records show that in several cases, the Housing Department found online ads or in-person evidence of short-term rentals but didn’t enforce the ordinance. In other cases, inspectors failed to cite building owners who told them outright that they were running hotels.

Even when inspectors do cite building owners, enforcing the law is slow. One reason it takes so long is that there haven’t been enough hearing officers to handle appeals.

At a housing and homelessness committee hearing last fall, city planner Lance Sierra told the group that once a citation has been issued, it “takes between two to three years to complete.”

The chairperson, Raman, was incredulous. “Two to three years …?” she asked.

Some owners have used the long delays and bureaucratic confusion to their advantage. Many have ignored the city’s letters warning them to stop short-term rentals. Others advertise tourist rooms while their appeals are pending, or even after paying fines, with no repercussions.

The fight over the Venice V

Nowhere is the home-sharing problem more acute than Venice Beach, once an ethnically and economically diverse haven for bohemians and struggling artists where rents were cheap. Now, part of LA’s Silicon Beach — Snapchat was based there in the 2010s — Venice has more home-sharing registrations than any other community in the city, and housing costs have skyrocketed.

James Adams, who grew up there, blamed short-stay rentals for his family’s housing issues.

“We live on top of each other,” he said, opening the door to a bright one-bedroom apartment a block from the ocean that he shares with his wife and their two daughters, 3 and 7.

PHOTO

The living situation works for now because the kids are little enough to share beds with their parents, Adams said. The couple, both teachers, can barely afford the $3,000 monthly rent, but he said he wants to stay in Venice as long as he can.

That’s become increasingly difficult because of the conversion of buildings like the Venice V.

When its owner, Lambert, purchased the Venice Waldorf in 2015, it was among a handful of rent-controlled beachfront apartments still affordable to students, retirees and middle-income workers. But over a few years, he bought out nearly all of the former tenants, transforming it into a hotel.

When the renovated Venice V opened, in 2021, Condé Nast Traveler gushed about how guests can “relax in a plush king size bed and watch the sailboats breeze by outside the window, and stargaze through the vintage style standing telescope at night.”

Local activists were less enthusiastic. “Owner is a serial violator of illegal conversion of rent stabilized apartments to illegal hotels in Venice,” read a 2021 complaint to the Housing Department — one of 18 against the Venice V since 2014 related to short-term rentals or construction without permits, housing files show. Lambert had been cited by the city for other conversions in Venice, but in two cases a city agency or court ruled in his favor.

Before the home-sharing ordinance, some short-term rentals had been allowed at the building. But by 2020, when Lambert’s construction supervisor told an inspector that all but two rooms would be turned into hotel accommodations, they were not.

PHOTO

Lambert has become the target of residents’ ire over the community’s dwindling housing supply. “I’m the whipping boy,” he said. “All the vim and vinegar from a small group is leveled against me.” Lambert wouldn’t answer specific questions about his properties, saying, “I don’t want to be the subject of a witch hunt.”

In 2021, the Housing Department fined Lambert $4,000 for eight violations of the home-sharing ordinance at the Venice V. Lambert appealed, and two years later, his attorney demanded the city rescind the fines, arguing the home-sharing ordinance didn’t apply and contending the city had unfairly singled Lambert out for enforcement.

Lambert’s appeal has still not been heard. But last year, the fines were “withdrawn pending further investigation,” according to a Housing Department email obtained through a public records request. Sandow, citing the probe, wouldn’t say why the citations were withdrawn or what was being investigated.

Still, in a separate case, Lambert won city approval last year to expand the hotel with a restaurant and theater space. In a lengthy decision, a zoning administrator concluded that the building’s short-term rentals were illegal. But he tossed the issue out as irrelevant, saying that his job was to focus only on whether the restaurant and theater were appropriate uses.

PHOTO

At an appeal hearing in March, Lambert predicted that he’d not only win but that the city would eventually come down on his side on the short-term rentals.

“It’s L.A.,” Lambert said. “And they have wrong opinions at times. Finally, as it goes up the chain, you get an affirmative answer.”

After five hours of testimony and deliberation, he got the answer he wanted on the restaurant and theater.

The City Council is expected to vote on recommendations to tighten the home-sharing ordinance later this year. The ideas include allowing individuals to sue violators, creating a home-sharing enforcement team made up of staff from different city departments and offering residents rewards for reporting neighbors who violate the ordinance.

“I think you have to make it so that if you violate the law, you are very likely to get a penalty,” Raman said. “Unless we do that, we are going to see continued flouting of the laws — because flouting of the laws is very, very lucrative.”

Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research.

SAN DIEGO — Josiane Valsaint has lived and worked legally in the U.S. since 2010. But she and hundreds of thousands of other Haitian nationals are set to lose their legal status as soon as Monday, opening the door for federal immigration agents to round them up for deportation.

The question that sends tears streaming down Valsaint's face is: If that happens, what will happen to her 10- and 12-year-old children, born in San Diego, who attend public school here?

"Who's going to take care of my kiddos?" she asked. "They're not adults yet. They were born here." Taking them to Haiti, much of which is now controlled by heavily armed gangs, is not an option, she said.

The Supreme Court last month allowed the Trump administration to kick 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians out of the Temporary Protected Status program that has allowed them to live and work in the U.S. because of unsafe conditions in their countries. There are many uncertainties now agonizing these communities, including how aggressively immigration agents — who have their addresses — will seek to detain them, and what will happen to their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

Guerline Jozef is executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a San Diego-based nonprofit that supports Haitian immigrants. She said if the government begins rounding up Haitians whose Temporary Protected Status has been revoked, family separations are likely because most parents can't fathom taking their children back to a country largely controlled by armed gangs.

(

Adrian Florido

/

NPR

)

By one Princeton researcher's estimate, there are 50,000 children who've been born in the U.S. to Haitian parents with TPS. The loss of those protections means a large new population of mixed-status families are vulnerable to being split apart by the Trump administration's mass deportation drive.

In deciding to strip Haitians of their temporary legal status, the Trump administration has said it's no longer justified because "conditions in Haiti have improved sufficiently to support the return of Haitian nationals' safely. It's also said allowing Haitian migrants to remain is "contrary to the U.S. national interest."

Haitian migrants and advocacy groups have disputed those conclusions. In fact, they say, Haiti is more dangerous now than when the Obama administration first granted TPS to Haitians after the 2010 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Haiti's president was assassinated in 2021. Today, armed gangs control vast swaths of the island nation's territory, infrastructure and economy, and restrict the movement of citizens.

Almost invariably, Haitian TPS holders say taking their children there is unfathomable.

"They cannot take those children back to Haiti," said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the San Diego-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, which advocates for Haitian immigrants. "Not because Haiti is not beautiful. Not because there's no hope. But because right now, in July 2026, it is impossible for them to be safe there."

In late June, Haitians in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status attended an information session at the Haitian Bridge Alliance, in San Diego, about what the loss of their legal status could mean for them and their families — and how to prepare.

(

Adrian Florido

/

NPR

)

Many Haitian TPS holders, Jozef said, are just beginning to consider the impossible decisions they'll soon face. Leave their children in someone else's care? Take them back to Haiti? Try fleeing to another country?

"I think family separation is more likely," Jozef said. "To take them back with them is not even a choice."

Valsaint, whose 10 and 12-year-olds speak perfect English and sing in a church choir in San Diego, said about her plans only that, "families stick together." And then, her voice catching, she added: "We can't go back to Haiti." She said she's hoping for a miracle.

Sandra, a Haitian woman with TPS who asked NPR to use only her first name because she fears deportation, said her teen son came to her after the Supreme Court ruling and expressed suicidal thoughts over the prospect of being sent to Haiti, a country he's never been to but whose troubles he's kept up with online.

"I cried," said Sandra, who works as an in-home caretaker in San Diego. "I'm supposed to protect them, and I feel like I'm failing."

It's not clear how aggressively Immigration and Customs Enforcement will move to detain and deport Haitians newly stripped of TPS protections, or how much capacity Haiti has to receive deportation flights. Haiti's top migration official told local reporters that based on a conversation with the U.S. embassy in Haiti, he expects about a thousand deportees to arrive on flights from the U.S. each month.

NPR asked the Department of Homeland Security how it plans to handle the U.S.-born children of Haitians it seeks to detain. In an emailed statement, an unnamed spokesperson wrote, "ICE does not separate families. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates. This is consistent with past administration's (sic) immigration enforcement."

Haitian flags at the offices of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a San Diego nonprofit.

(

Adrian Florido

/

NPR

)

The statement stressed the administration's longstanding position that Temporary Protected Status was always meant to be temporary.

"For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program," the statement said. "The Trump administration is restoring integrity to the immigration system by ensuring that individuals who no longer qualify for TPS either pursue another lawful immigration status, voluntarily depart using the Department's available return assistance, or face removal in accordance with federal law."

In some states with large Haitian communities, such as Massachusetts, officials have published guides to help parents who want to designate temporary guardians for their U.S. citizen children. Jozef, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said advocates are scaling up other support systems to help Haitians make plans to protect themselves and their children in the weeks and months ahead.

On Monday, a lower federal court in D.C. is expected to implement the Supreme Court's ruling allowing TPS for Haitians to end. That would allow immigration agents to begin arrests. Advocates are exploring other legal options and urging Congress to pass a bill that would extend TPS protections for Haitians. It passed the House with support from some Republicans in April, but was blocked by Senate Republicans this week.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9 8 8 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Copyright 2026 NPR

For the past nine years, if you’re the kind of person who nerds out on Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones, or any nerd franchise that exists in the galaxy, you’ll have found your community at Scum and Villainy Cantina in Hollywood.

While the exterior looks like just another unassuming business on the often bustling street, walking in reveals a highly curated space honoring every facet of nerd culture down to the last detail. The design honors the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Custom cocktails allude to different fandoms with names like “Sauron Sour” and “Harley Quinn.”

Scum & Villainy Cantina's bar may look familiar.

(

Jim Donnelly

/

Courtesy Scum & Villainy

)

Most importantly, the people enjoying the space are openly expressing their love for these stories and universes, whether that be through intricate costumes or lively debate. It’s a scene one might find after (or before) a sci-fi convention, which is exactly what J.C. Reifenberg, co-owner of Scum and Villainy, intended.

“We wanted to create the post-convention bar experience every night of the week,” Reifenberg said.

As a veteran of such conventions, he’s seen Mark Hamill (who played Luke Skywalker) speak numerous times, but he doesn’t remember any of the speeches. He does remember the people he met at the bar when the long day was over.

Revel in nerd culture (costumes encouraged) at Scum & Villainy.

"The best part about fandom is the community. That’s what people crave,” Reifenberg said. “This geek world has grown up with the kids that fell in love with it and continues to offer comfort, companionship, friendship and opportunity.”

Scum & Villainy Cantina in Hollywood.

(

Harry Levin

/

LAist

)

Reifenberg is now taking that concept and doubling down, hoping to create not just another gathering place, but a community hub for makers and creators to learn the craft.

Expanding to Burbank

For the past eight months, he and his wife, Jen Smith, who designed the interior of both establishments, have been crowdsourcing to raise $1 million for Scum and Villainy: Rendezvous, which they hope to open in Burbank, steps below the AMC 16. It’s certainly attracting interest; so far the pair have raised more than $600,000 toward the goal.

Scum & Villainy, open to people of all galaxies.

(

Jim Donnelly

/

Courtesy Scum & Villainy

)

Reifenberg said he can’t confirm an official launch date because they’re waiting on their permits from the Department of Planning in Burbank. But they are shooting to open by the time Avengers: Doomsday comes out on Dec. 18.

“My goal is for people to watch Avengers and walk down the steps to Rendezvous with everybody in the movie theater,” Reifenberg said. “We’ll have ‘No spoilers’ signs up until the last showing of the night is over.”

The new space is 5,200 square feet over two floors. The bottom floor is for the post-convention hangs, similar to the current Scum and Villainy. Upstairs, there will be private dining and a professional podcast and livestreaming studio. Reel Rejects, the movie and television commentary channel on YouTube, is partnering with Rendezvous for live events and recording.

There’s also a multi-purpose room hosting classes taught by entertainment professionals, for which they’ll be tapping some industry heavy hitters. After running Scum and Villainy and working in film and television, including many projects with fellow super nerd Kevin Smith, Reifenberg and Smith have come to know Marc Bernardin (who wrote episodes of Batman: Caped Crusader and Eyes of Wakanda), Fon Davis (who worked at George Lucas’s visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic), and many more professionals behind geek franchises.

“I’m connected to all these wonderful makers, and these people love to share what they learned,” Reifenberg said, noting that when he grew up in Chicago, not only was there not nearly as much of an industry for this kind of work, but any time he would share his big ideas, his peers would shoot them down as impossible. Not here in Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles is a city of dreamers,” Reifenberg said. “I remember how magical and untouchable these things were. What can I do to help inspire the next kid to do an impossible thing?”

Fundraising for it

The first five investors of $5,000 in the WeFunder campaign for Rendezvous will get to shoot their short films there, and there are plenty of bigger perks as well. Individual tiers go as high as $100,000, offering everything from lifetime discounts to being in a commercial for the space directed by Kevin Smith. (Smith invested $10,000, and has hosted numerous episodes of his podcast Fatman Beyond at the original Scum and Villainy). Then, if the total goes over $750,000 or reaches the total goal of $1 million, everyone who contributed gets extra benefits, such as 20% off merch.

The $1 million amount may seem ambitious, but in 2017, the original Scum and Villainy was just a weekend pop-up instead of a year-round establishment. After announcing it, they sold more than $1 million in tickets from April to July 2017, and they realized they needed to keep it open for the community.

The pair told me so many stories about how Scum and Villainy has changed people’s lives. Some are about couples meeting there on May 4 (yes, May the Fourth, the internationally recognized Star Wars holiday) who then proposed on a later May 4. Others are about people who came to every weekend of the pop-up in costume because it was the first place in their entire lives they felt truly safe to express who they are.

“I have worked in bars and restaurants for 20 years, and I have seen restaurateurs who don’t believe in their concept. They’re not willing to put the time and effort into massaging it to appease the community,” Smith said. “This whole place exists because the community is like ‘Please don’t close.’”

Reifenberg added: “If we build it, they will come.”

A bloodless bullfight is taking place in Artesia today, part of a centuries-old religious tradition known as the Festa do Espírito Santo — or Festival of the Holy Spirit.

The performance features matadors and horsemen using Velcro-tipped darts to try to stick them onto a Velcro pad worn by the bull.

"It's Velcro on Velcro. It, most of the time, sticks. Sometimes it doesn't," said Paul De Medeiros, one of the organizers. "We don't want to injure the animals."

The show's taking place at Artesia D.E.S. (Divino Espírito Santo, or Holy Spirit) — a community hall built in 1927 by Portuguese immigrants who landed in the area.

"In Artesia, it used to be called Dairy Valley," said De Medeiros, who's president of Artesia D.E.S. "A lot of them were involved in either agriculture or dairy business. They built churches, but they also built social halls."

The diaspora also settled in Chino and San Diego, both with their own cultural event venues.

The community hall in Artesia has something special — its own bullfighting arena built in 1976.

"Both of my grandfathers — they have passed — they were actually the ones that built the bull arena, along with a couple of gentlemen," said Joey Martins, a longtime coordinator of the event. "Today [that] would probably never fly, and it's been grandfathered in."

Born and raised in Artesia, Martins grew up watching this style of bullfighting. Before the arena, he remembered the shows taking place at a local park.

The bullfight typically lasts around two hours, and De Medeiros described it as "a full-on professional show" with spectators coming from around L.A. and as far as away as Bakersfield and San Diego to pack the 1,000-seat arena.

"We have a matador coming from Mexico. And then we have the horse riders — what they call the cavaleiros — and there's one from Portugal that has arrived here last week," Martins said.

There are also the forcados, De Medeiros explained,  who will attempt to catch the bull toward the end.

And the bulls — they will arrive a couple of hours before showtime, with their owners or handlers in tow.

"They don't want to leave a bull in a foreign, unfamiliar area, because the bulls, they have routines," De Medeiros said.

Right below Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar, the second-oldest cemetery in the San Fernando Valley has sat since the 1870s on a plot of land that’s gone from forgotten and overgrown to a cherished place where the living commune with the dead.

Now, the San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery has become not only a place to remember the deceased, but also a favorite spot for locals who like to celebrate Summerween with a classic film screening.

That tradition continues Saturday night with an annual screening of Ed Wood’s 1957 classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space, which has a special relationship to this place.

From trampled to cherished 

I walked beyond the cemetery gates to meet up with Stefanie Garcia, the chairperson of the San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. She explained that while this might be a peaceful place and an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument now, it wasn’t always so revered.

Members of the surrounding neighborhood, a longtime horse community, would even ride onto the grounds.

“Back in the day, they would trample through here,” Garcia said. “We’ve heard stories of people using the headstones to learn how to lasso and then they would rip them off their foundations.”

Garcia said this place took a turn for the better thanks to the San Fernando chapter of a nonprofit group called Native Daughters of the Golden West. The all-women organization worked to preserve the history of the cemetery beginning in the late 1950s.

Now Garcia keeps that effort going.

With the help of a ground-penetrating radar study done in 2010 and death certificates found over the years, Garcia said, the group learned that there were at least 500 people buried here at some point, including five Civil War veterans.

“We found the most concentrated amount of people are in that back corner where we have our movie night,” Garcia said.

Speaking of movie night, parts of Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space were shot here. The film is beloved both for its so-bad-it’s good-charm and for being Bela Lugosi’s last on-screen film appearance.

“It’s not scary or creepy, it’s a vibrant celebratory event,” actor and comedian Ben Jacob said, adding that he may come sporting a vampire's cape for the screening. "We love being here when the community is here.”

Jacob will emcee tonight’s screening along with Monique Ramirez, his co-host on the podcast, “Who’s Dead From Your Favorite Movie?”

Unmarked graves

“There’s a lot of Latino culture here,” Ramirez explained. “And there’s a lot of, specifically, Mexicans — I’m Mexican — that are buried here that are unmarked. And I feel like that’s an important and honorable part of our history here.”

One of the curious things about the cemetery is that there aren’t that many gravestones and markers. And most of the ones that do remain are to remember wealthier locals.

That’s because, as Garcia tells it, the cemetery became the final resting place for many of the region’s poorest residents.

“The majority of the people that are buried here are actually Hispanic. About 70 percent,” Garcia, who also runs local tours under the name SFV ROCKS, said.

Ticket sales from the Saturday night movie will go toward Garcia and her colleagues' biggest project: working to identify who is here so they can place markers and properly honor people.

“It tells a bigger story of what was going on in that time,” Garcia said, tearing up. “It makes me emotional... because of the fact that the poor were so underrepresented here... that the Hispanic community was so underrepresented here.”

“So, we’re here to tell their story. And that’s my favorite part of it,” she said.