The Brief

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

In the months preceding the Los Angeles City Council’s vote to gradually improve tourism industry workers’ wages to $30 an hour, the hotel and developer lobbies threw everything they had into pushing one apocalyptic message: Paying higher wages would prompt the businesses to retrench, downsize operations and abandon projects in and around the city.

They brought the heat. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles warned the local Olympic organizing committee that it might not be able to honor contracts to furnish rooms for the 2028 L.A. Games. One property company said its investors would kill a planned expansion of a Hilton in Universal City if the higher wage kicked in. Another chief executive asserted that the city “has been crossed off the map by investors” in hotel projects.

The councilmembers approved the measure anyway. And one reason they did may be that L.A. hotel owners have already demonstrated they can handle a $30-an-hour wage — and much more.
 

The council’s action came less than a year after a prolonged series of rolling strikes by unionized Los Angeles hotel workers that resulted in new contract agreements with some 60 area hotels. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE Local 11, which led those strikes, is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Those 2024 agreements are illuminating, and there’s no doubt the members of the City Council have been taking notes. Under the union contracts, most room attendants will see their hourly wage reach $35 by July of 2027. Nontipped workers received wage increases of 40% to 50% over the four-and-a-half-year life of those deals, and the hotels agreed to return to pre-pandemic staffing levels and mandatory daily room cleanings.

The new city ordinance initiates a series of annual raises beginning in July, when the workers’ minimum hourly pay will increase to $22.50. (The current hotel minimum wage in Los Angeles is $20.32.) They won’t hit the $30 mark until July of 2028. Airport and hotel workers will also receive $8.35 per hour to cover health care costs by July of next year.

That’s a lot of numbers. Here is some context: According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator, a single working adult in Los Angeles County with one child needs to earn $48.65 per hour just to cover basic living expenses. If two adults are working and have one child, each of those adults must earn nearly $27 an hour.

“We want to be paid enough to live where we work,” Brenda Mendoza told me. Mendoza, a unionized worker at the JW Marriott L.A. Live hotel, is a Koreatown native; she and her family spent nearly a decade trying to afford life in the area before finally moving to San Bernardino County a couple of years ago. Mendoza, her husband and two sons make a nearly 200-mile round-trip commute daily to their jobs in Los Angeles.

The hotel workers strike affected hotels across the region, including in downtown L.A. at the Intercontinental — pictured here at right with the tall antenna.

(

Unite Here Local 11

)

No hourly wage increase is going to suddenly solve the affordable housing crisis in the L.A. area, but the city’s new ordinance is a massive development nonetheless. For airport workers like dishwashers and food caterers, the raises amount to a pay bump of 56% over three years, and it’s a 48% hike in the minimum wage for hotel workers.

UNITE HERE and other pro-labor organizations pushed hard for the ordinance’s passage — but that’s not a new tactic. The groups have spent decades trying to change the labor landscape in and around Los Angeles, stumping for pro-union candidates for public office and helping to pass higher minimum wage requirements in Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Glendale and Long Beach.

In almost every case, those efforts were met with dire warnings from industry leaders and lobbyists about the deleterious effects of raising minimum pay. Those same red flags were raised when the L.A. City Council passed a hotel minimum wage more than a decade ago.

Hotel development and job creation, though, have only grown since then. More recently, the announcements that Los Angeles would host a spate of huge sporting events — the 2026 FIFA World Cup for soccer, the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympics — have spurred a flurry of new hotel projects.

That doesn’t mean every project will work, and it’s certainly possible that some investor groups will cite rising labor costs as a reason to avoid the L.A. hotel market and build elsewhere. Industry analyses, though, find that high interest rates and construction costs are the real challenges. In terms of the market itself, Marriott executive Javier Cano said, “There are always opportunities in L.A.”

Not every company will be eager to jump on them. “The wage is too high. It will drive up costs significantly,” said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry & Commerce Association, which loudly opposed the City Council’s action. “This self-immolation will have dire consequences on the city’s budget for decades to come.”

Or — it won’t. At a council meeting last December, a Berkeley-based economist hired by the city to study the wage proposal estimated that L.A. hotels will accommodate the increase by raising their rates about 6%. The economist, David Roland-Host, also told the council, “We don’t see any empirical evidence of massive layoffs in response to minimum wages anywhere in California.” His projection? Those pay raises will become “a tool for economic growth” and the ultimate creation of 6,000 full-time jobs by the Olympic year of 2028.

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

If you’ve noticed more wildlife visiting your yard in recent years — maybe digging up your vegetable garden or even drinking from your pool — you’re not alone.

A recent study from UCLA found that larger predators like mountain lions and bears are more likely to interact with humans and travel closer to population centers in drier years. To determine this, the researchers analyzed state data collected on reported property damage, nuisances, conflicts and sightings.

“It kind of runs the full gamut of how people interact with wildlife around their neighborhoods and their homes,” said UCLA postdoctoral researcher Kendall Calhoun, the lead author on the study.

It's not just P-22. Mountain lions across the whole state are forced to leave their habitats for survival.

(

Courtesy Kendall Calhoun

)

Different motivations for different animals

As you might expect, different animals might have different reasons for entering populated areas. But in large part, Calhoun said, it comes down to animals’ survival instincts.

The primary motivator for many herbivores is likely to be food. That’s because with less precipitation, there’s also less plant material for them to eat. (Don’t forget: even with all the rain we’ve had recently, much of Southern California is still in a drought.)

“ Deer and elk might be pushed to find those food resources in places that they normally wouldn't go, like agriculture, crops, things from people's yards, persimmons from your tree,” Calhoun said.

And as herbivores get pushed toward humans, the animals that prey on them follow. In fact, the species that saw the highest increases in clashes with humans were omnivores and carnivores, specifically mountain lions, coyotes, black bears and bobcats.

But even these animals have varying reasons for getting close to people.

“Mountain lions might be more inclined to look for supplemental food in livestock — that might be a sheep or a goat,” Calhoun said. “Black bears may be more willing to go into your trash to look for food to help supplement what they're missing in their resource-scarce natural areas.”

Meanwhile, animals of all kinds might enter a yard even when they have enough food to look for standing water.

About the data

Researchers analyzed data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife that were reported over the last several years as part of a citizen science initiative.

One important caveat is that the researchers primarily looked at conflicts between wildlife and residents, and there may be differences in how these interactions are reported.

For example, you might not report a deer eating fruit from an overloaded tree as a nuisance, but even a peaceful black bear digging through your trash could raise alarm bells.

 "People also really value having wildlife living alongside them," Calhoun said. "It really is important for us to try to strike that balance where there's pros for both sides, without some of the negative interactions that come with living in close proximity with wildlife species."

Learn more about human-wildlife interactions

There’s more background on the research on UCLA’s website, and you can find the full study here.

You can also learn much more about interactions between humans and wildlife in LAist’s Imperfect Paradise podcast series, “Lions, Coyotes, & Bears.”

Low-cost internet service will soon roll out in parts of L.A. County at the end of this year, and organizers say eligible households can sign up for alerts when the service becomes available.

The service — a partnership between L.A. County and internet provider WeLink — is the latest project from the county’s “Delete the Divide,” an initiative meant to bridge the digital divide in underserved neighborhoods.

Major funding for the project comes from the American Rescue Plan Act, as well as a grant from the California Public Utilities Commission.

It’s badly needed

About 23%, or more than 20,000, households in the East L.A. and Boyle Heights area don’t have home internet, according to Delete the Divide.

The service will also soon be coming to South L.A., where more than 40,000 households were identified as lacking home internet.

What you need to know

There will be different plans available — including low-income, market-rate and small business options — at fixed prices. The low-cost plan will start at $25 per month for qualifying families. Those who don’t qualify could also purchase plans starting at $65 a month. Monthly rates are fixed until at least September 2027.

Every plan includes unlimited data, a router and parental controls.

Low-cost internet service will soon roll out in South L.A. at the end of this year.

(

Courtesy of L.A. County

)

Low-cost internet service will soon roll out in parts of East L.A. and Boyle Heights at the end of this year.

(

Courtesy of L.A. County

)

How it works 

WeLink will install a Wi-Fi router inside a home and a 4-inch radio on the roof to connect the household to the internet.

Interested households can sign up for updates and be notified by WeLink when service is available here.