We spent the last year trying to track Mayor Karen Bass’ progress addressing homelessness. But for most of the year, we couldn’t get an accurate overall picture — partially because there were errors in the data, and partially because of the way homelessness data is recorded.
Why it matters: The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.
Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem.
What exactly was wrong with the data: Sometimes there were errors and missing information. The Bass administration said that only 65% of the data on Inside Safe in March was accurate, for example. There are also duplicate records, although we’re not sure how many, because data is collected program by program, and a person can be counted in more than one program.
Where things stand now
Here are some recent stories on the state of the homelessness crisis in L.A.
If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:
How many unhoused people is the city moving into housing?
How many of those people are staying housed?
How has this changed from the number of people housed last year?
For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.
For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.
We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.
Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:
The data collection process for some housing programs left room for many errors and missing information, and there wasn’t a system in place to ensure accuracy.
Data on people entering housing was collected separately by program, so it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was among people moving between programs or cycling in and out.
Homelessness in LA
Mayor Bass promised to house 17,000 Angelenos during her first year in office. How’s she doing so far? Our Promise Tracker is keeping tabs on Bass' progress tackling homelessness in L.A.
Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.
We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.
The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.
Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.
L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”
How LA Houses Unhoused People
The city of L.A. has several distinct programs that house people, but they can be broken up into a few broad categories:
Temporary housing: Whatever you think of as a “homeless shelter” would be included here. This is kind of housing isn’t meant to be long term – whether it’s group shelters, tiny home villages, or repurposed hotels and motels. The goal of these programs is for people to stay until they can find permanent housing.
Permanent housing: This is housing you can stay in long term, like an apartment with a renewable yearlong lease. The government provides permanent housing for unhoused people in two main ways:
Tenant-based vouchers: Think of these sort of as housing coupons that make privately owned units affordable for people with low incomes.
New permanent housing units: These are either newly constructed with government money (like Proposition HHH) or existing units that local governments acquire for housing.
Tracking programs, not people's overall path
There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.
The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.
Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.
At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.
The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.
Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.
Program-oriented data answers questions like:
How many times did people enter a particular housing program?
How many times did people leave?
What do numbers look like at specific shelters?
This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.
But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:
How many people moved into housing across all programs this year?
How many moved from one program to another?
How many returned to encampments?
How many left for other housing alternatives not provided by the government?
Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.
“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”
For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.
The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.
Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.
According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.
When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.
Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.
Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”
Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.
The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown, one of the sites used as temporary housing for Inside Safe.
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Brian Feinzimer
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LAist
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LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.
For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.
That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.
The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.
It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.
We're finally getting some clarity
Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.
Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.
They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.
As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.
They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.
But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.
There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.
However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.
What we know today
Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:
How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?
At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.
How many of those people are staying housed?
A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.
How has this changed from 2022?
The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:
21,694 people moved into temporary housing in 2023, up from 16,931 the year before
7,717 people moved into housing using vouchers in 2023, up from 5,223 the year before
3,551 people moved into new permanent housing units in 2023, up from approximately 1,361 the year before
This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.
Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:
How many people are being moved from temporary housing into permanent housing, especially in Inside Safe?
What is the retention rate and how does it compare to retention for 2023?
Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.
The Food and Drug Administration intends to get tougher on vaccine approvals, as top officials raised concerns about the risk of COVID vaccines for children.
Why now: Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency would no longer "rubber-stamp new products that don't work," claiming it made a "mockery of science."
Background: Makary's comments came the day after FDA's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, told his team the agency would change its annual flu vaccine framework, update vaccine labels to be "honest," and make other changes to how it reviews vaccines, according to contents of an internal email reviewed by NPR and reported on first by a PBS News Hour correspondent and later byThe Washington Post.
The Food and Drug Administration intends to get tougher on vaccine approvals, as top officials raised concerns about the risk of COVID vaccines for children.
Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency would no longer "rubber-stamp new products that don't work," claiming it made a "mockery of science."
Makary's comments came the day after FDA's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, told his team the agency would change its annual flu vaccine framework, update vaccine labels to be "honest," and make other changes to how it reviews vaccines, according to contents of an internal email reviewed by NPR and reported on first by a PBS News Hour correspondent and later byThe Washington Post.
Prasad wrote that the FDA would also no longer authorize vaccines for pregnant women without stricter requirements. And for pneumonia vaccines, manufacturers will have to prove they reduce disease rather than show they generate antibodies. He also raised questions about giving multiple vaccines at the same time, which is standard practice.
The changes could make it much more difficult and expensive for vaccines to get approved, further limiting the availability of vaccines, which are considered among the safest and most effective tools for protecting people against infectious diseases.
While all vaccines carry some risks, most public health experts argue the current process for vetting vaccines before marketing has long assured that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks. Studies required after vaccines are approved and surveillance systems, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), also flag potential safety issues once vaccines are in use.
FDA says an analysis links COVID shots to some deaths
Makary said on Fox News that 10 children had died from the COVID shot during the Biden administration, but did not offer specifics about how the FDA came to that conclusion. Millions of children have received the vaccine.
Officials with the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the COVID analysis and changes to vaccine review standards.
According to the FDA email from Prasad, he told the agency's biostatistics and pharmacovigilance team to analyze 96 reported deaths from 2021 to 2024, and they determined 10 children died "after and because of" the COVID vaccine. But Prasad said the true number was likely higher.
"Because he doesn't provide any evidence, he is asking us to trust him on an important issue," Office said. "All this will do is scare people unnecessarily. At the very least, he should provide all the evidence he has so that experts in the field can review it and decide whether he has enough data to prove his point."
Dr. Jesse Goodman, a professor at Georgetown University who held Prasad's job at FDA from 2003 until 2009, said in an email that the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccine approval, has been "recognized globally as a gold standard regulator." Goodman defended "immunologic endpoints like antibody levels" for the accelerated approval of pneumonia and influenza vaccines. He said science supports their use and they are confirmed with studies after approval: "These approaches have helped provide children and adults with timely access to safe and effective vaccines, saving many lives."
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, reviewed the email from Prasad and challenged his statement that "COVID-19 was never highly lethal for children." Osterholm also questioned the FDA's latest analysis of adverse event reports attributing the 10 deaths to COVID vaccines.
"Prasad's email is filled with factual mistakes and misrepresents both the severity of COVID in children (1597 deaths in 2020-2022) and how the US responded to the first signals of possible vaccine-associated pediatric deaths in May 2021," Osterholm wrote in an email to NPR.
"While Prasad's email notes 10 such deaths, these cases have never been presented for review by the medical and public health communities or published in the medical literature," Osterholm continued. "Given the record of this Administration to misrepresent scientific data regarding vaccines, until these cases have been reviewed by an expert third party, like the National Academy of Science[s], we can not accept the fact they are vaccine-associated deaths."
Surveillance system collects vaccines reports
The FDA makes public data from the VAERS surveillance system co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the FDA cautions, "it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause and effect relationship has been established." In his email, Prasad wrote that "with case reports, causality is typically assessed on a subjective scale. In this scale ranging from certain to unlikely — certain, possible/likely, and probable are broadly considered as related to the product."
Makary said on Fox News that when the COVID shot was first rolled out, it was "amazing" for people at high risk of coming down with severe disease, but things have changed.
"Back in 2020, we saw a reduction in the severity of illness and lives saved, but now recommending that a 6-year-old girl get another 70 million COVID shots — one each year for the rest of her life — is not based on science. And so we're not going to just rubber stamp approvals without seeing some scientific evidence."
The claim is the latest move by Trump administration health officials questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and how the government has regulated them. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned vaccines.
The FDA restricted eligibility for the updated COVID vaccines in August after announcing the agency planned to require more evidence about the shots' safety and effectiveness going forward.
CDC committee will meet to review vaccine policies
The FDA email on vaccine policy comes just before the CDC convenes a crucial two-day meeting of that agency's influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Dec. 4-5. The committee is in the process of conducting a major review of how children are inoculated against dangerous infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.
Many public health experts are concerned the committee will upend the childhood vaccination schedule. It could move to delay the timing of some inoculations, space out vaccinations and call for the reformulation of some vaccines. Taken together, the moves could result in fewer children getting protected and the resurgence of once-vanquished diseases.
Asked about Makary and Prasad's claims that the COVID vaccine caused deaths among 10 children, Moderna, whose COVID vaccine is approved for children as young as 6 months old, pointed to a statement it made in September. The company says that multiple published, peer-reviewed studies from a variety of sources show its shot is safe and that it is "not aware of any deaths in the last year or pertinent new information from prior years."
Moderna says it monitors its vaccine's safety along with regulators in more than 90 countries. "With more than one billion doses distributed globally, these systems — including in national health systems across Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the U.S. — have not reported any new or undisclosed safety concerns in children or in pregnant women."
Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Copyright 2025 NPR
Josie Huang
is a reporter and Weekend Edition host who spotlights the people and places at the heart of our region.
Published November 30, 2025 7:22 AM
Afghan evacuees at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany in 2021.
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Armando Babani
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
The Trump administration’s sudden freeze on all visa and asylum decisions for Afghan immigrants has left many of them in Orange County — one of the country's largest hubs for Afghans — in limbo. Local groups are preparing to support the immigrants even as they await clarification from federal authorities.
Why it matters: California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Afghan immigrants, many of them now grappling with the Trump administration’s abrupt visa and asylum freeze.
Read on ... to learn more about the Afghan population in Orange County and guidance from one O.C. immigration official on what could come next.
California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Afghan immigrants, many of them now grappling with the Trump administration’s abrupt visa and asylum freeze.
Friday’s announcement by the White House followed the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington, D.C. a couple days earlier by a suspect who had immigrated from Afghanistan.
In Orange County, where many Afghans have settled as their immigration applications pend, local officials are gearing up to help them navigate the change, even as guidance is scant from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Jose Serrano, director of Orange County's Office of Refugee and Immigrant Services, said the goal is to provide the “most up-to-date information so they can continue on towards their pathway towards citizenship here in the United States.”
“The Afghan population in Southern California, specifically in Orange County, is one that is really important to the DNA of who we are,” Serrano said. “Let's continue to stay together and strong and reimagine a place for belonging for everyone.”
As they await more information, Serrano advised visa and asylum seekers to:
stay on top of updates from USCIS and the Department of Homeland Security
contact their local office of immigrant and refugee affairs
connect with organizations that work closely with immigrant and refugee populations, such as resettlement agencies and legal aid groups
Hundreds of Afghan households have settled in Orange County, Serrano said, making it one of the state’s hubs for Afghan immigrants alongside San Diego and Sacramento.
Serrano said a big draw for immigrants to Orange County is Little Arabia in Anaheim, a regional destination for Middle Eastern food, culture and community life.
Serrano, who spent more than a decade working with immigrants at World Relief Southern California and the state's refugee programs bureau, said entering Afghan homes means being offered large meals. One family had prepared a whole feast for a Time Warner cable worker, he recalled.
“They didn't understand why that person couldn’t stay to dine with them,” he said. “That’s the type of people that are here in Orange County, folks who are so committed to being a part of civic engagement, to connecting alongside other communities.”
Visa applications in limbo
Serrano said many of the Afghans who resettled in the county are Special Immigrant Visa holders, a program created for Afghan nationals who helped the U.S. government during the war in their home country.
That program has now been frozen by the State Department.
Serrano said immigrants who entered the U.S. as refugees and have since become green card holders could see their cases reopened.
For Serrano, the current screening process is rigorous and involves multiple organizations aside from USCIS, such as the U.S. Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and counterterrorist organizations.
Applicants undergo health screenings and multiple fingerprinting appointments, he said.
“They're constantly doing an assessment to verify that you are a good-standing citizen,” Serrano said. “One of the things that I think we should be very proud of within the United States is that there is an in-depth screening process for anyone who is seeking a protection.”
Four people were killed and 10 wounded in a shooting during a family gathering at a banquet hall in Stockton, sheriff's officials said Saturday.
Details: The victims included both children and adults, said Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County sheriff's office.
What's next: Early indications "suggest this may have been a targeted incident," Brent said during a news conference at the scene. Local officials said the suspected shooter has not been caught and pleaded with the public for help. Detectives were still working to identify a possible motive.
STOCKTON, Calif. — Four people were killed and 10 wounded in a shooting during a family gathering at a banquet hall in Stockton, sheriff's officials said Saturday.
The victims included both children and adults, said Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County sheriff's office. Early indications "suggest this may have been a targeted incident," Brent said during a news conference at the scene.
Local officials said the suspected shooter has not been caught and pleaded with the public for help. Detectives were still working to identify a possible motive.
"If you have any information as to this individual, reach out immediately. If you are this individual, turn yourself in immediately," San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said during a news conference.
The shooting occurred just before 6 p.m. inside the banquet hall, which shares a parking lot with other businesses. Stockton is a city of 320,000 about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Sacramento.
"Families should be together instead of at the hospital, standing next to their loved one, praying that they survive," Mayor Christina Fugazzi said.
Authorities did not immediately provide additional information about the conditions of the victims. Officials said earlier that several were taken to hospitals.
The Stahl House, otherwise known as Case Study House #22, is on the market for the first time in its 65-year history.
Why it matters: The midcentury modern home in the Hollywood Hills has come to embody the postwar Los Angeles good life. It is also one of the most recognizable examples of West Coast modernism.
Why now: The house has been with the same family since its completion. But after caring for it for more than 6 decades, the Stahl children are looking for the house's next steward.
Read on... For the fascinating history of the Stahl House. Find out why its original moniker is Case Study House #22, and see the photographs that have made the hilltop home a revered landmark.
A quintessential piece of Los Angeles history — a jaw-dropping midcentury modern house of glass, steel and seemingly all skies soaring high above the Hollywood Hills — is up for sale.
Asking price: $25 million.
The Stahl House, designed and built by Pierre Koenig, photographed by Julius Shulman.
The Stahl House, otherwise known as Case Study House #22, has stayed with the same family since it was built in 1960.
"After 65 years, our family has made the heartfelt and very difficult decision to place the Stahl House on the market," wrote the Stahl children, Bruce Stahl and Shari Stahl Gronwald.
The 2,200-square-foot home at 1635 Woods Drive has been preserved meticulously, funded in part by proceeds from open-house tours of the space.
"This home has been the center of our lives for decades, but as we’ve gotten older, it has become increasingly challenging to care for it with the attention and energy it so richly deserves," the Stahl children continued.
And they are not just looking for a buyer — but a steward.
The kitchen of the Stahl House, photographed by Julius Shulman.
"It is a passing of responsibility," the listing for the house reads. "A search for the next custodian who will honor the house's history, respect its architectural purity, and ensure its preservation for generations to come."
Post-war housing shortage
The Stahl House, or Case Study House #22, was designed and built by Pierre Koenig in the Hollywood Hills.
The futuristic house, with its stunning panorama and a swimming pool perched at the edge of nothingness, has become one of the most recognizable and prized expressions of midcentury modern architecture in L.A. How it came to be built was fueled by a similar spirit of experimentation and audacity.
In 1945, the cutting-edge Arts & Architecture magazine launched the "Case Study House" program to commission the era's biggest and most boundary-pushing architects — Richard Neutra, Charles Eames and the like — to design and build affordable, scalable homes for an exploding middle class after World War II.
"Each house must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an 'individual' performance," editor John Entenza wrote in the announcement-slash-manifesto.
By its terminus in 1966, the program gave rise to 36 designs, of which 25 prototypes were built — mostly in and around the city — forging L.A. into an epicenter of West Coast modernism.
Case Study Home #22
One of them was Case Study Home #22 by Pierre Koenig, who, as an architecture student at USC in the early 1950s, was already making a name for himself, particularly for his use of steel.
His student work caught the attention of Entenza, who later invited him to join the Case Study House program.
Architect Pierre Koenig was hired by former football player Buck Stahl and his wife Carlotta to build the Stahl House.
The Hollywood Hills home would be Koenig's second Case Study house — and his most well-known.
The story began with Hughes Aircraft purchasing agent and former football player Buck Stahl and his wife, Carlotta, who bought a small hillside lot overlooking the city for $13,500.
The couple spent weekends putting up a wall around the property using broken concrete sourced from construction sites. Buck, the Stahl family said, had built a model of his dream house to take to architects — many of whom turned the job down because the lot was seen as undevelopable.
The Stahl House, part of the Case Study House program, was completed in 1960.
Enter Koenig, who signed on for the challenge in 1957. A month before construction began in 1959, the project was christened Case Study House #22. The Stahl House was completed a year later, according to the Los Angeles Times, at a cost of nearly $38,000.
The birth of cool
With its sleek lines and inviting airiness, Case Study House #22 has come to embody the good life in postwar Los Angeles, an idea reinforced by its countless appearances in movies, TV shows and magazine spreads over the decades.
But the photographs that started it all — elevating the home into the stuff of mythology — were taken by Julius Shulman. He was tapped to document the entire Arts & Architecture program after charting an unlikely career photographing modernist architecture in L.A., starting with those designed by Neutra.
Julius Shulman was responsible for documenting houses in the Case Study House program. The Stahl House is among a number of houses he took photos of.
Shulman shot the Stahl House in May 1960, shortly after its completion. In the most iconic shot of the series, two young women in white party dresses are sitting in the glass living room, conversing leisurely as the house dissolves into the shimmering sprawl below.
"It was not an architectural quote-unquote 'photograph,'" said Shulman about the image in an interview for the Archives of American Art. "It is a picture of a mood.”
