The Brief

Olvera Street sits in the oldest plaza in California — the heart of El Pueblo de Los Ángeles.

The vibrant stalls that line the terracotta cobblestone road sell Mexican goods, like leather guaraches, talavera pottery, and woven blankets.

They were once a tourist hotspot, packed with locals and visitors alike shuffling between the many restaurants, shops and museums. But on a weekday during the World Cup, before one of the most anticipated matches in L.A. between Mexico and South Korea, the corridor was quiet.

Maria Naranjo operates a stall and sells T-shirts, traditional dishes, ponchos, and more. She’s worked at Olvera Street for more than 16 years.

Naranjo told LAist that she and other shopkeepers thought the World Cup would provide a lifeline to Olvera Street with an influx of visitors and their business. Hopes were high after a devastating year of federal immigration enforcement, a slowing economy and lasting impacts from the COVID-19 shutdown.

“Estábamos esperando eso para ver si venía mucha más gente porque entre la semana, si te fijas, está solo,” Naranjo said. “Fin de semana un poquito, pero no es como que 'wow'.”

Weekdays are lonely, Naranjo said, and on weekends, traffic picks up a bit, but barely.

“Yo trabajo aquí nomás como tres días a la semana de los siete días que se abrían. Muchos puestos han cerrado por lo mismo,” Naranjo said.

Naranjo said she only works three days out of the week. Especially after the ICE raids, many shops had to close down because Olvera Street was mostly deserted. Folks struggled to recuperate.

Xochitl Rios was setting up shop on a Tuesday afternoon — a booth her family has operated since the 1960s. The street was quiet aside from a few locals and other stores setting up for the day.

Rios told LAist that most shop owners are unable to pay for employees for a full day of work, let alone a full week.

“In the '60s, we used to close, probably around 11 o'clock,” Rios said. “Coming in 8 o'clock in the morning. Right now, you can come in at 10 [a.m.] and leave no later than three or four.”

Vendors thought business would trickle in from World Cup watch parties and other events, but even on the day of the tournament’s most anticipated game — Mexico vs. South Korea — the corridor was mostly empty.

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You can’t tell the World Cup is in town 

Rios said city officials made it seem like World Cup hype would trickle down to Olvera Street, whether it was through watch parties or an increase in tourism. But Rios said that isn’t the case so far.

“Everybody was so happy, but it's not happening,” Rios said, adding that she sees tourists mostly run through the area for the restroom before getting back on their tour buses.

Jasmin Lopez of South L.A. has been working on Olvera Street for eight years. As she set up the candy stall, Lopez told LAist that the city is having events as promised, but she sees most traffic go to La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the home base for Casa México during the tournament.

“We could have done more. They do look for bars, parties, and I send them to Little Tokyo or Chinatown, because that's where I know the bars are,” Lopez said. “We could have organized better.”

Lopez said she would like to see more efforts from local leaders to keep Olvera Street alive.

“This is a historic landmark. We have the oldest house here in L.A.,” Lopez added. “You would think, because this is a historic landmark, they would put a little bit more effort. Isn't that what you do when something is supposed to be part of history? You try to preserve it. Maybe they should try a little bit harder.”

Some vendors try to capture the moment 

Some shopkeepers slightly upgraded their inventory to try attracting soccer fans with jerseys or World Cup T-shirts.

Diana Diaz is a newer addition to the corridor. At her hot pink kiosk, you can find embroidered button-ups, colorful jewelry, and her most recent addition — soccer leather handbags. She told LAist that she uses social media, such as TikTok, to reach new shoppers.

Diana Diaz added soccer ball handbags to her Olvera Street shop to capitalize on the World Cup excitement.

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“People are coming to Olvera Street just to buy the soccer bag for the World Cup,” Diaz said. “I'm trying to capitalize on that and also create beautiful memories and beautiful images for people that want to look back on World Cup 2026 and feel good about the celebration that the city collectively organized.”

Shopping local is critical, Diaz added.

“By investing in small businesses, you're investing in the community,” Diaz said. “You help businesses grow, especially businesses that are contributing to the growth of our local economy, that are invested in our youth, that are invested in hiring local, that are invested in really showcasing the diverse cultural landscape that exists within L.A. It’s powerful.”

How did we get here? 

Vendors say it’s a culmination of things — the pandemic, immigration enforcement and a struggling local economy, people are struggling to pay for basic needs, like groceries and rent.

Michael Mariscal now owns a shop that he says has been passed down through generations.

“The immigration stuff chased away half of our base, because half of our base is the local Latino community,” Mariscal told LAist. “Even when parts of their family come to visit, first place they’d to come (to) is Olvera Street. We've lost a lot of that.”

Michael Mariscal owns a shop on Olvera Street that he says has been passed down through generations. The World Cup, he said, has had little effect on business, but he hopes it will improve as the games continue.

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Mariscal said he takes the good with the bad.

“We work hard. The Lord provides. It'll be what it'll be,” Mariscal added. “I expect it to be better the last two or three weeks, because that's the end of it. People may be taking souvenirs back. It just also depends the teams that are coming and where they're playing, and where they're going to be watched at.”

What does the city say? 

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado represents the district that includes El Pueblo. Jurado’s office did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

Domenika Lynch, general manager of El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, said the Olvera Street story is a comeback one, but that’s going to take some time.

“We have seen increased traffic since before the World Cup, but are they shopping as we wish that they would? I think that is where the challenge lies,” Lynch told LAist. “I sympathize. The venue is cleaner, it's safer. We need Angelenos to come back.”

“I'm a firm believer that people will come. We just have to give people a reason to come back,” she added.

Lynch said her job for the last eight months has been to improve foot traffic and create activities with a very limited budget.

“I'm addressing a lot of the neglect that happened. There's a lot of different maintenance needed, so we are addressing it. I know our best days are ahead,” Lynch said. “The World Cup, it's one of those moments where we're better today than we were eight months ago, but is that enough? Absolutely not, and we are working on it every single day.”

How to visit Olvera Street

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.