DTLA's Residential Hotels

LA History

We dive into their complicated history

Hadley Meares

Published February 12, 2024 5:00 AM

A old black-and-white photo of a "flop house" offering beds and food.

The U.S. Hotel offered beds for 20 cents each for 450 men and had individual lockers.

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Los Angeles Public Library

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Topline:

As the city searches for solutions to homelessness, one long-standing option — bare bones residential hotels in DTLA — are part of the mix. We lay out the history of these hotels which sprung up as the city expanded.

Why it matters: There is a heavy pressure for higher-end housing construction in DTLA, and it could mean low-rent dilapidated hotels, one of the few affordable options for housing, is at risk.

Why now: In April last year, all 29 properties operated by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust were placed in receivership after falling into disrepair. And the controversial Downtown Community Plan, known as DTLA 2040, was also approved by the city. Its passage may impact the future of thousands of residents in Skid Row and other parts of downtown.

In recent months there’s been a lot of focus on hotels for downtown L.A.’s most vulnerable residents. Through the statewide initiative Project Homekey, efforts have ramped up to convert underutilized hotels into homes, and nonprofit organizations have also purchased old residential hotels to create units for folks experiencing homelessness.

However, despite their vital work, controversies and problems have swirled around the many nonprofit SRO organizations.In April last year, all 29 properties operated by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust were placed in receivership after falling into disrepair and becoming drug hubs.

In fact this discussion has been ongoing for over 140 years. Rooming houses, small residential hotels, tenements and what we now know as “single residency occupancy” residences have all played a vital role in providing housing to hundreds of thousands of Angelenos as downtown has transformed again and again.

Bare bones rooms

Los Angeles was founded in 1781, a tiny, dusty outpost centered around what we now know as Olvera Street and the historic La Placita Church. As it grew, agricultural fields lining the Los Angeles River (roughly bordering what we now know as the Arts District and Little Tokyo) brought seasonal migrants to the area. In 1876, the transcontinental railway arrived, and the Southern Pacific Rail Yard (now the Los Angeles State Historic Park) opened. In 1888, the Arcade Depot opened at Alameda Street, between 5th and 6th Streets.

Small residential hotels and boarding houses began to spring up in the area to house the countless single men who came to work the rail yards, the fields — and help build the Los Angeles we know today. These residences often offered cheap rent, bare bones single or shared rooms, communal bathrooms, and storage facilities near sites of agriculture and industry.

But as the Victorian era made way to the 20th century, these facilities would prove woefully inadequate in the face of Los Angeles’ unprecedented growth.

“Railway fare wars at the turn of the century brought the price of train tickets from the East Coast way down, making travel more affordable. The city was also heavily promoted as a place to recover and recuperate,” said planning historian Meredith Drake Reitan, associate sean at USC Graduate School. “Later, migrants were attracted by Hollywood, by jobs in the aerospace industry, and the port. The population of L.A. basically tripled between 1890 and 1900. The population doubled again between 1920 and 1930. I’ve always loved that Carey McWilliams’ quote about L.A.’s growth: it has been ‘one continuous boom punctuated at intervals by major explosions.’ All of those people needed somewhere to live.”

During the early 20th century, more and more residential hotels and subdivided boarding houses opened in areas including Skid Row, Little Tokyo, Boyle Heights, and what we now know as the Arts District.

“The people who lived closest to industry were those who were the lowest income and who had less healthful conditions for where they lived,” said Catherine Gudis, scholar-in-residence at the Los Angeles Poverty Department and director of the Public History Program at UC Riverside.

“The boarding houses were intended for those seasonal laborers and those working-class men who might have gone to different places following the work,” Gudis added. “There were also different scales of residential hotels to serve those people as well as families, because downtown was an urban enclave.”

While the nicer residential hotels had all the conveniences of a comfortable apartment, seasonal worker and transient accommodations were often shockingly substandard. Some were simply makeshift cubicles — larger rooms divided by plywood walls. Single rooms were not much better. According to Paul Groth’s masterful Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, these accommodations often offered “only a dilapidated bed (sometimes with a straw mattress), one rickety chair, and a hook for clothes.”

A feminine-presenting person looks at the camera while laying on a mattress is a dilapidated room in this black and white image.

According to Groth, these residences had a (often unfair) poor reputation and were frequently targeted by the LAPD:

In the twentieth century, Los Angeles police routinely searched for law offenders in the cheap hotels and rooming houses near the railroad station. Raymond Chandler’s detective character, Philip Marlowe, repeatedly visited hotels ‘whose clerks were ‘half watchdog and half pander’ and where nobody except Smith or Jones signed the register.’

With its unprecedented growth, California did attempt to standardize living conditions at these hotels. “California’s 1917 hotel act showed the framers’ close familiarity with cheap hotel life,” Groth wrote. “They allowed existing cubicle rooms to remain, and they included guidelines for open dormitory rooms, however, they outlawed new cubicle hotels. Most important; the act set lasting bath-to-room ratios for the cheapest lodging houses: a separate water closet and shower on each floor for each sex, at the minimum ratio of 1 per 10 rooms of guests.”

Different classes of hotels

While more and more cheap hotels and boarding houses — often three- or four-story brick buildings — were opening in downtown LA, another type of “hotel” was being built to service middle- and upper-class visitors and residents. Some of these were “palace hotels” in western downtown like the Barclay Hotel (1896) Hotel Alexandria, The King Edward (both opened in 1906) and The Biltmore (1923), large edifices which provided luxury accommodations for visitors and well-heeled residents.

Then there were the mammoth middle-class hotels, which provided guest and living quarters to businesspeople and middle- class visitors like the Rosslyn (1914) and the Hotel Cecil (1924). “If the palace hotel was usually surrounded by some of the city’s most exclusive boutiques, the mid-priced hotel was usually close to the city’s best department stores and reasonably close to the financial district,” Groth wrote.

The need for affordable housing grew exponentially in the 1930s. “The depression increased the number of migrants to the city. We’ve all seen the Grapes of Wrath — the boosters got their way and California became a destination for millions who were pushed off family farms in the South and Mid-West,” Reitan said. “In the 1930s, downtown L.A. remained an important location for reasonably priced rent. And for those who bought the houses, having tenants was an important and steady source of income.”

Luckily, there were options. For working class singles and families there were ample accommodations on Bunker Hill, the once upper-class Victorian hillside neighborhood bordering the Western edge of downtown. Reitan explained:

Rent in 1939 in one of the houses on Bunker Hill was about $10 - $15 per month for a single room with a shared bathroom. In general things were probably pretty spartan. Typically, tenants would have had a very small room, maybe with a hotplate and sink in the corner. Most rooms were furnished with a bed and possibly a closet. There would have been a bathroom down the hall that was usually shared by the residents of a single floor and sometimes by the entire house. The rooming houses all seem to have had electricity, but it was rare to have heat. The number of residents varied considerably. A fact that I find staggering is that in 1939, there were 30 people living in 325 Bunker Hill, a Victorian known locally as the Castle.

Since square footage was at a premium, much of daily life was pushed outdoors.

“A lot of life happened out on the streets,” Reitan said. “If you had the money, you probably ate at least one meal in a café. On the top of Bunker Hill there was a collection of benches. We’ve seen a lot of photographs of these benches, it was obviously a place to meet friends and socialize. There were a lot of single people on the hill, especially widows.”

In nearby Little Tokyo, one iconic building also served as a home to countless Angelenos. According to Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times, a Chinese migrant named Look Mar Jung and his family opened the famed Far East Café (now Far Bar) at 374 1st Street. Above the café, the three-story building served as a 24-room residential hotel. “Over the years,” Rasmussen wrote, “the rooms housed Japanese immigrants: bachelors, dentists, workers in the bustling furniture and hardware industry, and even students of a chick-sexing school.”

But Los Angeles officials knew that these housing options could be better. In 1938, the Los Angeles Housing Authority, dedicated to providing affordable housing to Angelenos, formed. In 1949, the controversial Community Redevelopment Agency formed, dedicated to revitalizing, refurbishing, and renewing economically depressed areas of California (it was dissolved in 2012).

'Coded to death'

These organizations had their hands full — and a skewed perception of the lives of folks living in these spaces. According to Groth, in 1949 a sociologist described a rooming house in downtown Los Angeles as a “universe of anonymous transients.” In post-war downtown, middle class residents and businesses fled the area and headed west for the suburbs easily accessible by the shiny new freeways.

This meant the demographics living in residential hotels in DTLA dramatically shifted.

“Downtown residents in the 1930s and 1940s were well connected to jobs. They were clerks, plumbers, schoolteachers, actors, and beauticians. They also worked in the restaurants in and around downtown,” Reitan said. “As the 1940s became the 1950s, the number of elderly residents and retirees grew – I think living downtown gave them access to services and support that might not have been available elsewhere.”

L.A. businesspeople and city leaders interested in revitalizing downtown decided that the lower-income residents in the area need to go in the name of “progress.” During the 1950s and 1960s, affordable housing in downtown Los Angeles was decimated by “anti-blight” campaigns, and “slum clearance” plans.

“Policy makers began to send out crews of people to call out violations of zoning or code or other things, because they wanted the private property owners to abandon those properties because the cost was too great to repair them,” Gudis said. “So that's what starts to happen in the '50s and into the '60s. People are kind of coded to death.”

Civic leaders envisioned a downtown of shiny skyscrapers, leaving no room for the small hotels and rambling homes that served as a landing spot for working class and transient residents.

“[In Skid Row] there's a dramatic push to get rid of what looks like those horrible Victorians with multiple families living there and putting their laundry out on strings,” Gudis said. “That same kind of discussion takes place on Bunker Hill, and that removes the housing there.”

Clearing out

Reitan believes that the destruction of Bunker Hill in the 1950s and ‘60s forced displaced residents to move into the flats of downtown Los Angeles. “There's a lot of housing that's removed,” Gudis said. “And that puts additional pressure onto those residential hotels.”

A black and white photo of a destroyed building.

Increasingly, it was the former “palace hotels” and business oriented mega hotels, long out of fashion, which picked up the slack. “More and more migrants from central America… start settling in the once grand hotels like Barclay and business-oriented hotels like Cecil,” she said.

According to Groth, this trend was occurring in downtowns across the country. “Building owners … made rooming houses out of run-down palace or mid-priced hotels,” he wrote. “They eliminated service, repairs, and amenities until the rents matched rooming house levels.”

But the thousands of residences removed as part of “slum clearance” was a catastrophe from which downtown has never recovered. According to Gudis, it got so bad that there were ads boasting that you could buy a seat in a theater at Fifth and Main where you could spend the night, albeit sitting up. Or you could pay a little more for bunked rooms with access to a shower.

'Containment'

To deal with the increasing number of unhoused community members, many suffering from mental illness and substance use disorder, the 1970s’ city leaders adopted the controversial policy of “containment.” According to Gudis’ highly informative “The Green Paper,” the problematic “containment” defined the boundaries of Skid Row and made it possible to preserve “housing, community, and services” in the area.

In 1984, the CRA formed the SRO Housing Corporation, which purchased over 1,700 SRO units close together to offer government subsidized housing while fostering a sense of community.

“In 1989, Skid Row Housing Trust was formed as well, to expedite the process and with the aim of securing the housing on the western edge of Skid Row, along Main and Los Angeles Streets, among others,” Gudis wrote.

But over the last four decades, the affordable housing crisis in downtown Los Angeles has only intensified. Many nonprofit community organizations, dedicated to providing emergency, transitional and permanent housing to downtown residents, were severely affected by the dissolution of the CRA, which had provided crucial funds for SRO housing throughout the state.

Nonprofit organizations have tried to fill the gaps with help from other sources of government assistance, with mixed results. The SRO Housing Corporation operates 32 properties which provide housing to over 2,500 formerly unhoused and low-income individuals, which includes refurbished historic small residential hotels, new construction apartments, and the larger former commercial Hotels like the Rosslyn, which offers 264 studio apartments.

AIDS HealthCare Foundation’s Healthy Housing Foundation has also become a major player on the scene, managing 13 SRO hotels and motels like the Madison Hotel on 7th street, which offers single rooms with shared showers for $400 a month. Other properties include the Baltimore Hotel, the iconic King Edward Hotel, and Barclay Hotels (rent $400-$700). According totheir website, in March 2023, AHF purchased the historic 12-story Insurance Exchange Building at 318 West 9th St. They plan to turn it into an SRO with 251 affordable homes.

A wide shot of a thick, stocky block of a building that's actually a hotel.

The economic revitalization and hipsterfication of DTLA in the past 15 years have also destroyed many remaining residential hotels and low-income housing options, as luxury condos and renovated market rate historic apartments have dramatically raised prices and brought middle and upper- class residents back to DTLA.

In an attempt to combat the housing shortage in DTLA and plan for an estimated around 150,000 more downtown residents by 2040, in spring of last year the controversial Downtown Community Plan, known as DTLA 2040, was approved by the city. Its passage may impact the future of thousands of residents in Skid Row and other parts of downtown.

While the DTLA 2040 plan attempts to preserve low-income housing in Skid Row, while also bringing more higher income residents and businesses to the area, community leaders and planners, including the grassroots coalition Skid Row Now, worry that without expanding the proposed IX1 Zone(Affordable Housing Only) throughout the boundaries of Skid Row, low-income housing opportunities will be lost.

“The battle is that if all of those odd parcels and other historic buildings get converted or adaptively reused at a market rate, it will put speculative pressure on everything else,” Gudis said. “If we can re-utilize the existing housing and ensure that when additional housing is built, it's also affordable as opposed to being luxury, then we have a chance of continuing a real sense of community and that's much more ethical.”

In the Green Paper, produced by the Los Angeles Poverty Department, Gudis wrote:

Given how little affordable housing has been built in Skid Row, or Downtown Los Angeles overall with current incentives, it is clear that the market alone cannot provide the housing that is needed. A new model is needed that includes the use of publicly owned land, long- vacant structures, and empty warehouses for low-income housing, rather than using zoning to make these more lucrative for luxury and market-rate housing.

And so, the struggle for every sowntown resident to have a clean, well-lighted place to call their home rages on, as the stakes get higher and the situation more dire.

Explore LA

Knockout round

4 takeaways from the World Cup so far

By Becky Sullivan | NPR

Published June 28, 2026 7:59 AM

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Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP via Getty Images

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Topline:

The worries before the World Cup were many, from visa wait times to high ticket prices. Now, with the knockout round set to begin Sunday, it is time to declare: The North American World Cup has been a success.

Why it matters: Overall, the stadiums have been full. Visitors and hosts alike have been dazzled by the scenes. And of course, the games have been terrific.

Read on ... for more takeaways from the tournament so far ...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The worries before the World Cup were many. There were the visa wait times, the ticket prices, anxieties over hotel rooms and public transit, and countless battles between FIFA and local organizing committees.

Now, with the group stage done and the knockout round set to begin Sunday, it is time to declare: The North American World Cup has been a success.

No doubt there were visitors who were turned away, would-be attendees who could not afford tickets, and hotels and local businesses who feel the promised bump in tourism hasn't materialized.

But overall, the stadiums have been full, even for matchups that seemed lackluster on paper: nearly 70,000 people packed into stadiums to see games like Cape Verde-Saudi Arabia, Algeria-Jordan and Bosnia and Herzegovina-Qatar. And for headliner events, the environment has been top-tier, like at the U.S.-Australia game in Seattle and in Kansas City for Lionel Messi's historic hat trick for Argentina.

Visitors and hosts alike have been dazzled by the scenes. Kansas City was swarmed with tens of thousands of Dutch fans for a pre-game march. Boston was besieged by the Tartan Army. Australian fans seized their chance to come to the closer North American coast, where they packed the stands and belted "Waltzing Matilda."

And of course, the games have been terrific. Now, the knockout round is set, with some blockbusters shaping up for the Round of 16 and beyond.

Read on for more takeaways from the tournament so far:

A medium-light-skinned man in a white soccer jersey on the left and a medium-dark-skinned man in a blue soccer jersey on the right run after a soccer ball.

France is the best team in the tournament

Some pre-tournament favorites have looked good, like Argentina. Others have underwhelmed, like Portugal. Some have mixed their good and bad moments, like England, Germany and Brazil.

But one team has consistently looked a cut above the rest: France. Les Bleus had supposedly drawn one of the toughest groups at this World Cup, with dark horses Senegal and Norway competing with them for the top spot. After a sluggish first half to start their opener against Senegal, France turned on the gas and has cruised ever since. They've made their World Cup look downright easy, with at least three goals in each game.

No path to the World Cup Final is easy, and France would certainly arrive battle-tested if they get there, with a potential later matchups in the Round of 16 against Germany, in the quarterfinal against the Netherlands or Morocco and in a possible semifinal against Spain. But their group stage performance leaves no doubt that they should be the favorites to win all of them, and more.

The U.S. is better than expected, though its path to the quarterfinals isn't easy

Is this finally the World Cup run to remember for the USMNT? The American men were once the plucky underdogs of international soccer, always willing to run for 90 minutes and gut out a tough, gritty game. Those days seemed to fade for a decade or two after their 2002 quarterfinal run.

Suddenly, the results are good, the vibes are even better, and the expectations are growing by the minute. For the first time ever, the starting lineup mostly features players with key roles on teams in top European leagues. And these boys can score: The six goals they scored in their first two group stage games were twice as many as they netted across four games in the 2022 World Cup.

The third group stage match against Turkey, in which U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino gave most of his usual starters a rest and his backups a chance to play, cooled their momentum somewhat with a 3-2 loss.

Still, a Round of 32 matchup against Bosnia and Herzegovina should be winnable. That would be their third win of the tournament so far, the most ever by any U.S. men's team at a World Cup. And a potential Round of 16 matchup against Belgium (or Senegal) is tougher but should be competitive, too. A quarterfinal in Los Angeles, even if it's a loss against Spain, would be an epic and fitting result for this team on home soil.

This will be an epic Golden Boot race

The stars are delivering in this World Cup. Argentina's GOAT Lionel Messi has six goals. France's twin titans Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé are hot on his heels with four goals apiece. The imposing 6-foot-5 Norwegian megastar Erling Haaland has four goals despite resting on the bench for Norway's third game. Brazil's Vinícius Júnior also has four.

Messi should have plenty more opportunities as Argentina drew perhaps the easiest route to the quarterfinal, with a Round of 32 match against Cape Verde, followed by a possible Round of 16 game against the winner of Egypt versus Australia. Plenty of other stars have two or three goals and what could be a deep run ahead, like England's Harry Kane and Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo. Watch this space.

The expansion to 48 was criticized, but it has been a lot of fun

The biggest criticism of expansion was that there would be no real peril for top-quality teams in the group stage, both because there would be more lopsided group stage matchups and because eight third-place teams advance. That has mostly borne out.

The highest-ranked World Cup team that failed to qualify for the knockout stage was Uruguay, which came in ranked No. 16. By contrast, the 2022 tournament had four teams ranked higher and were eliminated in the group stage — Belgium (No. 2), Denmark (No. 10), Germany (No. 11) and Mexico (No. 13). The new Round of 32 will have to do some of that work of adding surprise and peril to the big favorites.

The expanded format has also given us moments and teams to remember, like Cape Verde — which would probably not have reached the World Cup under the old format — taking the pre-tournament favorites Spain to a scoreless draw in their opening match. It's a thrill for fans of teams that rarely have a shot, like Scotland or Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo, to have a chance to see their nation on this kind of stage. In fact, nine (of 10) African countries advanced to the knockout round.

Plus, seven teams have reached the knockout stage for the first time in their country's history: Cape Verde, Egypt, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Congo, Canada and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sure, they won't be favorites to make a deep run. But the games should be electric.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A dark-skinned woman in a crowd of people holds a scarf that reads "Cabo Verde" above her head.

How the landslide started

Point Fermin is where you can get a spectacular view of the water. On a clear day, you can see down the Pacific Ocean as far as Catalina Island.

That scenery is why people wanted to live on its bluff. In the 1920s, Los Angeles was on the cusp of a population boom, so naturally, building homes on the coastline made sense. Developer George Peck took that idea and built an upscale neighborhood with bungalows.

A wide archival view of a large crowd of people standing on a hill overlooking a neighorhood full of homes. A cross with a wreath can be seen toward the right in the middle of the crowd.

It lasted for a few years, but in the months leading up to January 1929, some strange coincidences began to happen. Pipes were breaking more than expected, but it wasn’t clear why.

Then, a waterline broke under an inn and a crack appeared. At first, it was brushed off as a “simple landslide” with minimal danger, but it eventually became known as an uncontrollable “act of God.”

The crack formed near the cliffside back around to Pacific Avenue and Paseo del Mar. Part of it even caved in, forming a deep, 10-foot-long hole in front of homes.

F.L. Ransome, a geology professor at Caltech, reportedly told L.A.’s city engineer that land had slid up to 8 inches, ripping open utility pipes and pulling apart building foundations.

He warned that the area was no longer suitable for large structures and that water in the area may accelerate the movement, producing “disastrous changes on the surface.”

A black and white archival of a man in a suit standing in a large ditch between two sections of land. The foundation he's standing on is much lower than the two sides and you can see the rock layers and roots sticking out of them. Homes are in the background.

At that point, the slide, which covered 5 acres, was mostly blamed on ground weakness and wave erosion. The city filled cracks as they happened and explored ways to protect the area, including with eminent domain. Property owners in 55 lots petitioned the city to buy them out.

But by September, the situation became so risky that geologists recommended the area be condemned. L.A. officials told residents to leave or risk “their own peril.”

A slow march to the sea

For the next several years, Point Fermin was in limbo. The ground still moved but mostly at a snail’s pace. The keyword is mostly. The area was plagued by huge cracks that tore apart the once-thriving community — some 40 feet wide.

Multiple incidents caused the landslide to move faster, including heavy rains. Numbers varied, but it was reported that the grounds shifted more than 30 feet seaward and 30 feet down by 1941.

A black and white archival look at a large section of ground that's cracked off from the bluff. The debris clearly shows paved roads as two people stand on the edge looking over. They are much smaller compared to the size of the crack.

This destroyed the area. The city demolished homes that were too damaged to live in, and others were relocated to other parts of L.A. Officials eventually bought up nearly all of the impacted land to turn it into a park. But with the heightened risk, much of the area was blocked off to the public for years.

Around this period, landslides happened in other parts of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, like the Portuguese Bend. The issue became such a problem that insurance companies refused to insure L.A. homes for landslide damage.

Then came the big drop. After a 5.0 earthquake in 1969, a new “mammoth, crescent-shaped fissure” appeared that damaged three homes along Paseo del Mar and dropped another 200 feet down into the rocks. Still, some residents refused to leave.

“I’ve studied the trench and I’d be willing to bet the house never goes, even if the backyard did,” said resident Larry Penhall in 1970.

In total, the slip eventually grew to 10.5 acres, according to a geological study in 1987, with 40,000 feet of that ending up in the Pacific Ocean. It took down at least two homes and a lot of infrastructure, including roads, utility pipes and rail lines.

Sunken City today

The peninsula is generally still prone to landslides, but the ground is more stable in Point Fermin, or what’s now called Sunken City. It wasn’t the most dangerous landslide we’ve ever seen — no one died at the time, but visitors have in the years since, those who’ve wandered too far toward the cliff edge. It’s become a local legend because of how it looks today.

A satellite aerial view of the landslide area. The cliffside is visible from above, with a clear breakage on the edge. The inland area is flat and unbroken, and further in are homes and the neighborhood.

If you venture to Sunken City, there’s still a neighborhood nearby, but the landslide area itself is closed off. For those bold enough to sneak in, you risk getting caught for trespassing. Visitors have even had to be rescued over the years.

The terrain resembles nothing of its affluent past, but that may change soon. Earlier this year, the City Council approved funding for environmental monitoring and safety upgrades for the upper area.

Sophie Gilchrist, communications director for Councilmember Tim McOsker, said part of the plan includes the design of a new fence that requires coastal development permits.

“While we don’t have a precise timeline for reopening, we have informed the local neighbors that it may take another full year,” she said. “The project is actively moving forward.”

Climate & Environment

Hazardous chemical threat

Residents want answers after pair of incidents

By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde | CalMatters

Published June 28, 2026 5:00 AM

a man in a helmet walks past a lot of debris and fire equipment as hoses spray water

Firefighters battle a blaze at a cold storage facility in the Boyle Heights neighborhood June 22. Authorities declared a state of emergency as the fire intensified, prompting evacuations in the surrounding area. The fire started June 17.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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Topline:

After warehouse fires in both Garden Grove and Boyle Heights, records show state and local regulators knew the facilities; they had inspected them, approved plans, and resolved violations. How they used their authority is now a central question for neighbors in the surrounding areas seeking accountability.

Why it matters: Companies face layers of federal and state oversight designed to help prevent hazardous chemicals from escaping into surrounding neighborhoods. But records show that these two facilities, one in Orange County and one in Los Angeles County, had accumulated violations over years and continued operating.

What's next: Residents want accountability, but the legal bar to hold companies for environmental crimes is high. Criminal prosecution requires more than proving a rule was broken. Prosecutors need evidence of deliberate deceptions — falsifying reports, hiding violations, deceiving regulators.

Read on ... for an in-depth look at the regulatory and legal challenges residents face in getting answers to the problems their neighborhoods face.

Manuel Valle, 84, jumped on his bike and rode through his Boyle Heights neighborhood despite the protests from his worried children. The air was smoky, for the fifth day in a row; he pushed through fits of coughing to pass out 50 N95 masks to his neighbors.

The same day, officials told residents the air was not dangerous and the smoke was clearing out. Valle didn’t agree.

“This is a state emergency,” he said. “Treat it like a state emergency.”

Fire had ignited at a facility, operated by the company Lineage, which stores food before it’s shipped off to restaurants and grocery stores. Lineage uses the toxic refrigerant anhydrous ammonia, which posed a health risk in the early hours of the fire.

Weeks earlier and miles away, the Orange County Fire Authority issued an evacuation order affecting 50,000 Garden Grove residents when fire officials realized a tank at an aerospace manufacturing facility could either explode or leak large amounts of a toxic chemical into the air.

In both cases, records show state and local regulators knew the facilities; they had inspected them, approved plans and resolved violations. How they used their authority is now a central question for neighbors in the surrounding areas seeking accountability.

A lawmaker has proposed some reforms to chemical policy. But prosecuting companies for failing to follow environmental laws is difficult, and how far cities may go to protect residents isn’t clear.

“I don’t know what the local government is waiting for — for a tragedy to occur or something more serious or what … on top of what is already going on,” said Miguel Ocegueda Castillo, who lives near the Lineage warehouse.

a child wears a gas mask and leans up against a fence with some bushes and trees in the background

Years of oversight, unresolved risks

Companies face layers of federal and state oversight designed to help prevent hazardous chemicals from escaping into surrounding neighborhoods. But records show that these two facilities, one in Orange County and one in Los Angeles County, had accumulated violations over years and continued operating.

In 2021 the South Coast Air Quality Management District issued GKN Aerospace multiple notices of violation, including for failing to maintain the required emissions records and operating some equipment without proper permits. The company later signed a settlement with air regulators and paid more than $900,000 — without admitting liability.

During the emergency, authorities gave residents conflicting information about whether the chemical methyl methacrylate had leaked.

“When you go home, you can feel safe. There was no contamination. … There was no leak,” Regina Chinsio-Kwong, Orange County Public Health Officer told residents during one press briefing, even though early reports characterized the incident as a leak.

Days later, Orange County health officials walked back that statement.

In Boyle Heights, the Lineage facility stores more than 12,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The chemical is a refrigerant that if inhaled, can cause severe eye and respiratory irritation, shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting and, at high concentrations, death.

In the early hours of the fire June 17, the Los Angeles Fire Department told residents to shelter in place because of the risk of the chemical being released into the air. The order was lifted, and then imposed again.

Lineage said in a statement that it “proactively took steps to pump out the ammonia and transport it offsite” and that no measurable ammonia concentrations had been recorded in the community since the fire began.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told residents the air was not dangerous. But on the sixth day of the fire, an air monitor detected a hazardous spike of air pollutants.

Federal records show that the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health inspected Lineage in Boyle Heights the day the fire started. It wasn’t their first visit.

In 2020, Cal OSHA opened an investigation into the facility for violations of multiple safety standards. After Lineage lodged an administrative appeal, regulators fined the company $2,250 for violations related to process safety and respiratory protection.

Rebecca Liu Morales, a spokesperson for Lineage, said the company stores food, not hazardous materials, and said it was not responsible for the fire. She said the fire started when a contractor was working on the rooftop solar array, which provided power to the city.

“The health and safety of our employees and the communities we serve is our top priority,” she added. “Our industry is heavily regulated and inspected, with over 200 routine regulatory inspections by various agencies conducted of our North American operations alone between 2024 and 2025.”

The Los Angeles Fire Department is investigating the cause of the June 17 fire. The city department of Building and Safety is also investigating, and the workplace safety investigation remains open.

Luck, rather than strong protections, has saved residents from catastrophe in both Orange and Los Angeles counties, said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics.

Industrial infrastructure has grown near residential communities, Williams said. But state and local oversight of hazardous substances has not kept up.

“I don’t think anybody really thought: Wait, we have these warehouses, a warehouse here, a warehouse there, and what happens if there’s an earthquake and we lose containment at four anhydrous ammonia tanks in one square mile at the same time?” Williams said.

Filling in regulatory gaps

Federal and California laws are designed to protect communities from accidental releases, when a spill or an explosion or a leak releases hazardous chemicals into air, soil or waterways.

The federal Clean Air Act’s Risk Management Program requires companies handling dangerous chemicals in significant amounts to develop preventive and emergency plans for just these situations — and file those plans with regulators. California goes even further: Its risk management program sets stricter thresholds and more demanding requirements than federal law — meaning California law holds facilities to a higher standard, and state regulators have more tools and more authority to act than their federal counterparts.

But critics say even California’s stronger standards have significant gaps that state officials have allowed to persist.

Reactive chemicals, such as the methyl methacrylate stored at GKN, often fall outside of both the federal and state accidental release programs. In Garden Grove, regulators required no risk management plan.

Anhydrous ammonia is a different story. It’s a listed chemical, one of the core hazards state and federal programs aim to regulate. Federal and state environmental protection officials confirmed Lineage in Boyle Heights is part of both programs.

Local agencies called Certified Unified Program Agencies are the layer of oversight closest to the ground. In California, they’re responsible for knowing what hazardous chemicals companies store where, and in what quantities. Local agencies must inspect those facilities regularly and keep emergency plans on file, so that a fire department showing up to a warehouse blaze should already know what’s inside.

Neither local agency has fully disclosed its oversight of these facilities. In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Fire Department did not answer questions about its oversight of Lineage Logistics, despite repeated requests by CalMatters.

In Garden Grove, records obtained by CalMatters reveal that the Orange County Healthcare Agency has inspected GKN more than a dozen times over the last decade and issued violations related to hazardous waste regulations that were later corrected. The facility had emergency plans that were approved in May, weeks before the incident, records show.

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat whose district includes Garden Grove, introduced Senate Bill 883 in the weeks after the GKN episode. It would require the state Office of Emergency Services to maintain a statewide inventory of facilities storing reactive chemicals, add methyl methacrylate to the state’s risk management program, require CalEnviroScreen tool to track facilities that pose an explosion risk and update current environmental review law to ensure that storage sites that have a risk of explosion aren’t exempt from review.

“We must learn from this incident, address the gaps it exposed, and take steps to ensure it never happens again,” Umberg said, in a statement announcing the legislation.

The bill is moving through Assembly policy committees.

The GKN emergency prompted a federal response. The Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the facility on June 10 — but experts say determining whether anyone committed a crime is often difficult after an industrial accident.

smoke spreads across a charred landscape as the sun sets behind a distant cityscape.

Legal remedies are a challenge

Residents want accountability, but the legal bar to hold companies for environmental crimes is high.

Criminal prosecution requires more than proving a rule was broken. Prosecutors need evidence of deliberate deceptions — falsifying reports, hiding violations, deceiving regulators.

The federal government goes after “those that are lying, cheating and stealing,” said Ethan Ware, an attorney who represents companies investigated for environmental crimes. “There’s more to it than just the environmental violation. There’s some effort to deceive, or to hide, or to get enriched by lying on documents.”

That bar gets even higher when no specific rule is broken — when prosecutors argue a company has a general duty to keep people safe. “What the government is saying is you have complied with all of these hundreds and thousands of regulatory requirements, but we still think you pose a risk to the community,” Ware said. “That’s a hard sell to a jury, to a judge, to anybody.”

A federal criminal investigation into an industrial accident is unusual — and the Garden Grove investigation may not lead to charges. The broader federal enforcement landscape has also changed.

A 2026 report by the Environmental Integrity Project found that the number of civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in cases referred by the EPA dropped to just 16 in President Donald Trump’s first year in office — 76% less than in the first year of the Biden administration. Only 12% of facilities with air pollution violations received any kind of enforcement action from EPA or state agencies in the last year.

That federal shift matters for Lineage, which has faced at least three civil enforcement actions in recent years, but none that resulted in criminal charges.

Last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $37,500 for three violations at a Riverside facility, two related to its handling of hazardous materials and emergency plans.

Also last year, the company paid $3,420 to settle alleged violations at a Vernon facility, including that the company didn’t correct a critical safety system deficiency it identified during a 2021 audit.

In 2023, the EPA fined Lineage more than $172,000 for alleged violations of the federal Risk Management Program at an Iowa facility. The EPA said in a news release that the company “failed to correctly document the worst-case scenario in its risk analysis, failed to comply with accidental release prevention requirements, and failed to document emergency response coordination with local authorities.”

In 2024, a Lineage warehouse in Washington burned for 60 days. Hundreds of neighbors to the warehouse reported health problems, and some residents filed civil claims. But the company has not faced criminal charges.

The limits of local power

Weeks after an evacuation sent tens of thousands of people from their homes in Garden Grove, GKN Aerospace came to a City Council meeting. The company had not spoken publicly since the evacuation.

Resident Rodrigo Garay held up a thin red cross blanket.

“This is what I used for the whole week to sleep on,” he said/ “And I’m sure that you slept on really nice beds with your $260,000-a-year salary.”

He and other residents wanted to know why the city wasn’t doing more to ban GKN and other facilities like it from their city.

Miles away in Boyle Heights, Lineage neighbors are also raising concerns about their schools, homes and playgrounds being so close to warehouses and other industrial facilities.

“We shouldn’t wait until after this disaster for Boyle Heights residents to know what was in the facility in their backyard,” said local City Council member Ysabel Jurado.

The frustration in both cities points to a hard truth. The people with the most immediate stake, both residents and city officials, may have the least power after a facility is already operating.

mist and spray surrounds a pair of large metal tanks flanked by piping and scaffolding.

City officials can update their general plans and rezone property to keep facilities they consider a threat to public health and safety away from their residents.

But the Constitution limits how far that authority extends to facilities that are already there. Businesses have a general right to not be over-regulated out of existence, said David Waite, an attorney who specializes in local land use law.

“Where it gets tricky is we have existing uses — such as the GKN facility — that were duly permitted and duly authorized under the existing zoning on that property,” Waite said. “That rezoning effort cannot just simply bar that existing use without running afoul of constitutional takings arguments.”

Cities can try revoking a facility’s permit by proving it is a public nuisance. But that requires showing an ongoing threat, not a one-time event, Waite said.

Garden Grove and Boyle Heights are largely communities of color. Garden Grove ranks among the top 20% of the state’s most environmentally burdened communities, according to CalEnviroScreen; Boyle Heights is in the top 10%.

In Garden Grove, the city’s response has been cautious.

Garden Grove spokesperson Johnathan Garcia said the city is “exploring with its attorneys and engaging in the deliberative process regarding its options in consideration of its authority under the constitution, federal and state laws.”

“What is the point of bemoaning that you don’t have more local control if you don’t use the authority you do have in times like this?” Mai Nguyen Do, a research and policy manager for the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, asked the council.

In Los Angeles, Jurado is calling for an investigation into what went wrong at the Lineage facility and introduced a package of motions, including calls for a public report on the cause of the fire and the facility’s compliance history, increased public transportation service in the area to reduce the amount of time residents are outdoors and funding for neighborhood councils to distribute air purifiers and other protective equipment.

“When a major industrial fire happens here, it’s not viewed as an isolated incident. Residents see it as part of a larger pattern,” Jurado said. “That’s why I have said from the beginning that this is not just a fire response issue. It’s a public health issue, it’s an accountability issue, and it’s an environmental justice issue.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Boyle Heights Beat, a founding community newsroom of The LA Local, a nonprofit covering Los Angeles communities.

Laura Anaya-Morga, Isaac Ceja, Claudia Koerner, Alejandra Molina, Isaiah Murtaugh, Jessica Perez, Steve Saldivar and Nathan Solis contributed to this story.

Alejandro Lazo contributed to this story.

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