The Brief

First Amendment advocates are raising concerns about a Los Angeles proposal to use anti-littering laws to outlaw mass dissemination of antisemitic flyers that have appeared in some city neighborhoods.

The motion, submitted last month by council members Bob Blumenfield and Nithya Raman and approved last week by the city's Public Safety Committee, seeks a report from the city attorney and the police department on "littering in mass as a method to disseminate hate speech" and what legal options may be used to prevent it.

Although it does not identify who is responsible for the antisemitic flyers, the motion notes there have been incidents in recent years in Culver City, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Huntington Beach, and that they are "sadly becoming a common occurrence."

“They go into a Jewish community and they put these very antisemitic pieces on people’s front steps trying to target, trying to intimidate a particular community,” Blumenfield said.

Los Angeles is not the first California city to consider combating hate speech with anti-littering laws, but the idea is still relatively untested.

David Loy, legal director of the California-based First Amendment Coalition, said flyers and leaflets are “at the core” of the country's constitutional protections.

“We have a long historical and protected tradition of people using flyers and leaflets and pamphlets to express their point of view going back to the founding of the republic,” he said. That includes hate speech, he added.

However, the constitution does not protect true threats of harm.

“What is a true threat cannot arise simply from the content of viewpoint or speech,” Loy said. “It has to be a genuine threat.”

So one question that could be used to determine whether the idea — if it becomes law in L.A. — would pass constitutional muster is: Does it target behavior that amounts to a real threat? Another is: What was the motivation behind creating it?

In other words, Loy said, if a “superficially neutral” statute is motivated by “hostility to content, that can present a First Amendment problem.”

Last month, the city of Poway in San Diego County approved a similar measure. The city council voted to ban “hate litter” in response to the distribution of antisemitic flyers near a synagogue where a gunman opened fire in 2019, killing one person and injuring others, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Loy said he is keeping an eye on the ordinance and “considering what our next steps will be.”

The motion in Los Angeles comes as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues and tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists in the United States have increased.

Pro-Palestinian activists worry that passing an ordinance in L.A. like the one in Poway could lead to censorship of their message criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Too often, they say, criticism of Israel is equated with antisemitism.

“It's very alarming,” said Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. “This is a shameful move to intimidate and harass people who are expressing their political views and who are speaking out for the liberation of Palestine.”

At a meeting of the city's Public Safety Committee last week, activist Christian Sanchez called it “dishonest” to connect the issue to littering.

“The people of L.A. will not tolerate the impediment of our rights,” he said.

The motion asks the city attorney, with the help of the Los Angeles Police Department, to look at ways “to increase penalties that make it a misdemeanor for any person to litter with the intent to willfully injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person based on their perceived characteristics.”

Right now, littering is an infraction usually punishable by a fine.

In an interview, Blumenfield insisted he is not interested in restricting free speech rights.

“It's complicated in terms of the free speech issues,” he said. “The idea is to look at how we can say that this is wrong and that as a city we can have some penalties to prevent people from intimidating people in this manner.”

For Sanchez, the pro-Palestinian activist, the move is ominous. “The descent into fascism is a slippery slope,” he told the committee.

Peter Eliasberg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said he sees a number of potential problems with the move.

“I think the city council is treading in dangerous territory here,” he said. "It's going to depend a lot on how any ordinance is written by the city attorney. There are a lot of potential landmines here."

Now that the Public Safety Committee has approved the motion, the next step is for it to be considered by the full city council.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Boxing has never just been about throwing punches for Daysi Garcia.

“When people say boxing saves lives, we don’t mean that superficially,” Garcia said, a Pico Union native and boxing coach at gang intervention programs across Los Angeles. “We literally see boxing save people’s lives.”

That belief has become visible in young people like Elijah Rivera. The teen’s father Daniel Lopez said his son was able to avoid returning to juvenile hall after Garcia advocated for him in court and connected him to her boxing program.

“She showed up on his behalf as a third-party program,” Lopez said. “That ultimately helped him with his case. She really does dive deep into these kids and gets real personal with them. She cares about all aspects of their lives. It’s not just in boxing.”

Lopez said his son, now 17, was able to complete probation while participating in the program.

“It was a real good diversion for him to be able to focus on boxing instead of the streets,” Lopez said. “He was able to ultimately turn his life around.”

For Garcia, stories like Elijah’s reflect the kind of impact she hoped she could have through boxing. Over the last several years, Garcia has helped young people across Lincoln Heights and Echo Park build confidence through boxing and mentorship in gang intervention programs. And now she’s also back in Pico Union coaching at the Graff Lab, in the same gym where she once trained herself.

“If my neighborhood didn’t invest in me, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” Garcia said. “So being able to pay it forward is a big deal for me.”

The 35-year-old started the program because she saw firsthand the impact boxing had on her own life.

Born and raised in Pico Union to Mexican immigrant parents, Garcia said she first discovered boxing around age 20 through a gang intervention program connected to the University of Southern California boxing team. At the time, she said she was struggling to find direction in her life.

“It worked for me,” Garcia said. “Training in a neighborhood gym alongside collegiate boxers helped put me on a pathway back to college.”

Six months later, Garcia said she found herself in college. She eventually earned a bachelor’s degree from Mount Saint Mary’s University and years later enrolled at Southwestern Law School, where she completed her first year of law school before taking time off during the pandemic.

It was during that break that Garcia began working at PUC Excel Charter Academy, a charter school in Lincoln Heights, where students were barred from playing traditional sports because of COVID-19 restrictions. Garcia proposed creating a boxing fundamentals program as a way to keep students engaged after school and off the streets.

Within the first week, between 20 and 30 students signed up.

“Five, six years later, those students are still with me training,” Garcia said.

Garcia first launched the boxing program in Lincoln Heights during the height of the pandemic. The program later expanded to El Centro del Pueblo in Echo Park and eventually it will also be held at the Graff Lab in Pico Union. 

For Silvia Martinez, an 18-year-old immigrant from Michoacán, Mexico, joining the boxing program in Echo Park was a way to build discipline.

“I’m working on that because in the future I want to go into the army,” Martinez said in Spanish. “The first few times I started boxing, I was scared of getting hit, but now it feels normal to me. I like it because Daysi and the other coaches make you feel safe and supported.”

Garcia’s programs now offer mentorship, literacy support through a boxing-themed book club, court support for young people involved in the juvenile justice system, college guidance, emotional support and conversations around the school-to-prison pipeline and students’ rights.

Garcia said she and members of the boxing team often show up to court hearings to advocate for students like Rivera and demonstrate to judges that they have community support systems behind them.

“I started my boxing program to help students get off the streets and get students out of juvenile hall,” Garcia said. “I really want to finish my law degree because I’m passionate about juvenile justice.”

Garcia was recognized for her work this week at Los Angeles City Hall by Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, an honor she said felt emotional because many of her students were standing beside her during the recognition.

“When people celebrate me, it’s not just me,” Garcia said. “I want my students to know they deserve to be celebrated this way too.”

Garcia also played a role in the creation of the inaugural World Boxing Council collegiate amateur belt with the USC boxing team. Now collegiate boxers can compete for a WBC-recognized title. Garcia also said students in the program have received scholarships through the Los Angeles Collegiate Boxing Scholarship initiative she created.

For grandparents like Marcela Sanchez, even though her grandchildren aren’t competing in boxing, she’s also seen how the program has affected them positively. 

Sanchez said she saw changes in two of her grandchildren after they joined Garcia’s boxing classes and other youth activities connected to the program, including art, sewing and tutoring programs.

“They talk more, they understand more, they listen more. Their behavior is way different now from the beginning,” Sanchez said.

Garcia said one of the biggest misconceptions about her work is that the hardest part is dealing with students or the courts. In reality, she said, the biggest challenges are often securing funding, transportation and safe spaces for youth.

Still, Garcia said she continues to push students with a disciplined but trauma-informed coaching style that she believes helps them build resilience.

“We’re all in this together, we want to see our students succeed,” she said. “And we want to see more boxing gyms in L.A.”

Brad Thomas has been up since 6 a.m. on a Sunday — farmer's market first, then prep. By 2 p.m., he's back at the craftsman on 7th and Cherry, the home of his business partner, Clay Wood. The tablecloths go down. The gold cutlery comes out. By 6 p.m., the first of two seatings will fill the living room and front yard — 32 people across the night, all for a six-course dinner at $69 a head: hanger steak, crispy frites, a rotating dessert spread, much of it prepared over open flame in the backyard of the old craftsman.

This is Steak Freaks, and it is exactly the kind of food business that Long Beach just made legal.

Earlier this month, Long Beach became the 19th jurisdiction in California to authorize Micro-Enterprise Home Kitchen Operations — or MEHKOs — joining Riverside County and L.A. County and a growing statewide movement reshaping who can afford to start a food business.

What makes Long Beach different is that it's allowing renters to run these businesses from their homes. (Wood's house, for example, is a rental). In a city where 60% of residents rent and more than half of those renters are cost-burdened, these home kitchens aren't just a creative outlet. For many, they're an economic lifeline. And for those who find success, the program's own limits may push them toward the next step faster than they planned.

Guests dig into the hanger steak frites course during a Sunday dinner at Steak Freaks in Long Beach. The supper club seats 32 people across two seatings and has sold out every dinner since opening.

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Who's behind them

Prior to AB 626, the informal economy long existed in immigrant communities where neighbors sold plates, fed the block and cooked for whoever showed up. That changed in 2018 when the bill passed and gave it a legal pathway and a social media following.

A screenshot from CookConnect, the COOK Alliance's map of permitted MEHKO operators across California, shows the concentration of home kitchen businesses across Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

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According to the COOK Alliance, the nonprofit at the forefront of MEHKO adoption statewide, 79% of operators are people of color and 70% are women. The home-based model removes barriers that have historically kept certain communities out of the food business — no need for a commercial kitchen, massive upfront capital, or to be in two places at once.

Geraldine Gonzales works the wok at Lomo Fuego, where lomo saltado is cooked over an open flame in the backyard.

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It’s worked for Heidi Randolph, who didn't set out to run a restaurant. A couple of years ago, she was selling plates of Peruvian food to soccer players at Lakewood parks on weekends.

I visited Lomo Fuego in March and found families pulling up chairs, her brother working the wok over open flame and her mother pitching in between shifts at her day job. It's started with a handwritten chalkboard and a MEHKO permit posted to a bulletin board that Randolph had to find herself after the city told her it was impossible. What's changed since then tells you everything about both the promise and the limits of the program.

The hanger steak frites at Steak Freaks are finished tableside with a kitchen torch. The six-course dinner runs $69 a head out of a rental home in Long Beach.

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Brad Thomas of Steak Freaks came to it differently. A pastry chef who spent years alongside teams trained by Thomas Keller, Nancy Silverton, and Josiah Citrin, he moved to Long Beach from Texas three years ago and started leaving anonymous pastry deliveries on doorsteps across the city — Lover Boy Provisions, with a flirty note attached.

That's how he met Clay Wood, who owns Clayonfirst pottery studio in the East Village Arts District. When Long Beach passed its MEHKO ordinance, Steak Freaks was born. Every dinner has sold out.

The Steak Freaks menu and a welcome note from collaborating poet Vic Hurtado of Vessel Poetics, set out before service at the Long Beach supper club.

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The landlord question

The council's vote this past April came down to one sticking point: should operators who rent be required to notify their landlord? Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, who pushed the motion forward, believed that notification should be voluntary. The COOK Alliance's Roya Bagheri backed that position for a practical reason — even informal landlord approval can evaporate once paperwork gets involved.

Wood's situation says it plainly: his landlord is a former neighbor who follows Steak Freaks on Instagram. No formal conversation has happened. "I make pottery here," Wood said, "and the stuff I do for my pottery business is way crazier than a couple of steaks in the backyard."

The ceiling

When I revisited Lomo Fuego recently, a sign outside announced scaled-back hours — two days a week, down from four. After a neighbor complained, the county health inspector paid a visit and told Randolph she was approaching the annual revenue cap of $110,442 in gross annual sales (a figure adjusted every year for inflation by the California Department of Public Health).

To stay under the cap, she’s opening only on weekends for the near future.

Heidi Randolph with her mother Fritz and brother Luis at Lomo Fuego, the Peruvian restaurant she runs out of her Lakewood home. Randolph is now scouting restaurant locations and pursuing an additional permit to sell at farmers markets.

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Randolph took the health department visit as a sign to move forward. She's actively scouting restaurant locations, and her daughter left her job at a local restaurant to cook alongside her full-time.

Randolph didn't see any of this coming — from the park to the backyard to her daughter cooking beside her, her mother finally getting a day off. The program did exactly what it was supposed to do. She just needs a bigger kitchen now.

"I hope in the future," she said, "people can say — this still tastes like food from home."

A couple who paid nearly $15,000 in monthly rent while displaced by the Eaton Fire are now taking their landlords to court, alleging they violated bans on price gouging in the wake of a disaster.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, during the same week the county is set to end its post-fire rent gouging protections.

Over the last 16 months, state prosecutors have filed a handful of criminal rent-gouging charges. But the couple’s lawyer, Josh Nuni with the People's Law Project, said to his knowledge this is the first civil rent gouging case filed by private citizens following the January 2025 fires.

“They want to get back the money that was taken from them, and they also want to make sure to send a message to others that this shouldn't be done to other families when they're in times of crisis,” Nuni said.

How the alleged rent gouging began

Candy Renick’s home in Altadena was left standing after the Eaton Fire, but it was severely smoke damaged. Until it could be professionally cleaned, it would remain uninhabitable.

Renick said when she started looking for temporary housing, she quickly realized thousands of other families were competing for the same listings.

“I started feeling pretty desperate, like I needed to move on something fast,” Renick said.

Less than two weeks after the fires, Renick and her daughter spotted a new Zillow listing for a three-bedroom home in Glassell Park. She said the landlords were asking for $12,990 per month on a one-year lease.

When Renick and her husband asked for a shorter, six-month lease, the owners agreed to a higher monthly rent of $14,938.50, she said.

“I was telling friends what we were paying and everybody was like, ‘Are you kidding? That is crazy,’” Renick recalled. “But we had to do it… We were just kind of desperate to get settled so that we could move on with our lives and move on with fixing our house.”

Candy Renick stands outside her family's home in Altadena.

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How rent gouging laws worked 

Once the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, state and local governments quickly passed emergency declarations that triggered price-gouging bans. These laws made it illegal for landlords to increase rents by more than 10% from pre-fire levels.

For properties that were not listed for rent before the fires, a different limit applied: Landlords offering furnished properties could not charge more than 165% of the area’s fair market rent, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For the ZIP code where the Glassell Park property is located, the legal monthly limit for a furnished three-bedroom unit was $5,032.50. The Renicks paid nearly triple that amount.

A warning letter and a short text exchange

Shortly after moving in, the Renicks got a letter from the L.A. City Attorney’s Office, according to the lawsuit. It alerted the tenants and the landlord that the listing may have violated post-fire rent gouging bans.

The letter said if the landlords were violating the law, they should “immediately lower the rental rate” and “refund the tenant the overcharged amount plus 10 percent interest.”

According to the lawsuit, the Renicks texted a screenshot of this letter to their landlord, Catalina Chow, and she responded: “We did not increase rent due to the state of emergency.”

Her text went on to say, “I hope this does not apply to me. Thanks for sending anyway!”

When LAist called Chow to ask about the lawsuit, she picked up but said she was on another call and ended the conversation. LAist was later unable to reach her or Terrence Chow, another defendant named in the complaint.

LAist also contacted the City Attorney’s Office to ask why it did not pursue the case beyond the warning letter. No one from the office responded.

Why tenants are taking cases into their own hands

Tenant advocates have expressed disappointment over what they see as a lack of price gouging prosecution in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

By the one-year anniversary of the fires, a group called The Rent Brigade had found more than 18,000 listings that appeared to have broken the law. The group found that few criminal charges were ever filed, and laws that allowed private citizens to file their own cases and gave county departments the ability to fine landlords directly went largely unused.

Chelsea Kirk, a founding organizer of The Rent Brigade, said tenants like the Renicks are taking action on their own because governments failed.

“Tenants should never have been put in the position of having to enforce disaster protections themselves,” Kirk said. “After thousands of reports and virtually no meaningful action from the city attorney or county and state agencies, people have realized they can’t rely on government enforcement to protect them from exploitation.”

What the plaintiffs say they want

The Renicks returned to their Altadena home in November after it was professionally remediated. The complaint alleges they paid $95,758 more than what should have been legally allowed during their stay at the home in Glassell Park. The lawsuit asks the court to award damages, civil penalties and attorney’s fees.

Candy Renick said money was not the primary reason she and her husband decided to file the case. Any overpaid rent they manage to recover will largely go back to their insurance company, she said.

Instead, Renick said, she hopes the lawsuit sends a public message.

“People should not tolerate being overcharged for rent again, especially when they're in a very difficult situation,” she said. “And landlords need to know they can't take advantage of people in a crisis.”