The Brief

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home. 

The community space sometimes feels safer than the confines of her home, where she sits alone watching the constant reports of violence and death flash across her screen — reminders that her homeland of Palestine is being torn apart by war.

There isn’t much she can do from thousands of miles away, so she and hundreds of others find solace in the refuge that Astralab provides. 

And the space is at risk of closing.

After nearly two years in the Westlake neighborhood, the founders of Astralab say they’ve been told to leave. The news arrived abruptly as the founders said they were in talks to extend their lease with their landlord JMF Development.

The building manager had even thanked them for bringing life into the studio and creative office space.

“We’ve been great tenants and kind neighbors. We’ve really built a space for people to come and to gather and not just grieve, but also joyfully be together,” said Yusuf Misdaq, co-founder of the third space venue that borders Koreatown.

“But they just took it off the table and gave us no response since then,” he said.

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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Located in the Granada Buildings — a block-long Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival complex on La Fayette Park Place with open courtyards and greenery — Astralab sits as a kind of refuge in an otherwise blighted stretch of the neighborhood. 

In February, Astralab received a 60-day notice to vacate. Co-founder Christina Lila said they are now working with a pro bono lawyer to challenge the landlord. 

When reached by phone, a person at the real estate office declined to provide his name and questioned why anyone was asking about the notice to vacate. 

“Why is this a story? I don’t know why I’m even entertaining this conversation,” he said. 

He said Astralab’s tenancy ends April 19 and that they would need to vacate the space. The real estate company did not respond to requests for comment via email. 

'Community is medicine'

While all are welcome at Astralab, the space was created to provide refuge with a specific community in mind.

Lila is half Iranian and Misdaq is originally from Afghanistan. The community space was meant to cater to people from Southwest Asia and North Africa, or the SWANA region, who often feel unmoored away from home.

“We really saw the lack of cultural centers in America, frankly. And while working in the SWANA region, I saw the vibrant cultures and the community love and how powerful it was,” Lila said. “It feels like there’s almost a psychological torture in America, and you can’t get the medicine. Community is medicine, and we just don’t have it as much here.”

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Courtesy Astralab

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Muhammad said that sense of community is what drew her to Astralab.

“My kids have performed cultural songs and dances there. That place just reminds me of who we are and it just gives me that comfortability of being there,” she said.

Muhammad, who owns Knafeh Queens, a dessert shop based in Rancho Cucamonga, has also hosted workshops at Astralab, teaching people how to make the dessert and sharing its history.

“I’ve rarely been able to find spaces like this that I barely have to put effort into. I always show up as my full self, but there’s something really special about Astralab and how welcoming they are to everyone regardless of background and faith,” she said.

Shortly after opening, Astralab quickly started hosting a steady rotation of gatherings, drawing people from across Los Angeles and beyond. Some nights are quiet, with poetry readings or small group discussions, Lila said. Other nights spill into the courtyard.

“We host regular bazaars where we open our courtyard, and there’ll be 30, 40 creators and so many people, artists, musicians, healers — we have a ‘Silk Road’ type of space where people will come and put their creations — all sorts of different medicines and jewelry and things like that,” Lila said.

More than 200 artists, musicians and small business owners have participated through those events over the last two years, according to the founders. Astralab is sustained through event-based income and the bazaar, Lila said, but most paid events include sliding scale or free tickets for those who could not otherwise afford to attend. 

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Courtesy Astralab

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Misdaq can tell that people often visit carrying the weight of what’s happening back home.

“With Iran being so prominent, people are coming in tears. We’ve had a lot of grieving events where people can just come and just be,” he said.

But “a lot of dance happens here, a lot of celebration happens here. It’s not all sad. In fact, it’s mostly joyful, actually,” Misdaq adds.

'A drop of solace'

Parisa Nkoy, an Iranian-Congolese organizer, had been following Astralab online before visiting earlier this year. She has used the space to host workshops connecting struggles across the world, including Congo and Palestine.

Earlier this year, she led a teach-in on Congo, inviting Congolese organizers who do advocacy work for refugees and immigrants.

“We did a little presentation and a workshop, and then we were able to connect to Palestine as well. It was a fundraiser as well to raise money that we donated to folks on the ground in Congo and I just don’t know that I could have found another space that would have been as comfortable for me to do that,” she said.

“I think that that’s super important and we need more of that, not less of that,” she said.

Neighbors say they haven’t seen similar action taken against other tenants.

“As far as I know, no one else here has gotten something like this just randomly. I mean, most people will move out on their own accord if they can’t pay rent. We’ve only really had positive interactions with them,” said Eric Gorvin, who runs a branding agency next door.

“Every time they’ve had an event, it’s been really respectful people. It’s always community-driven,” he added. “I didn’t know much about that community until meeting them, and it’s been really refreshing to have them around.” 

The founders say they haven’t been given a reason for the notice to vacate, but they believe it’s due to their pro-Palestine stance. 

“We’ve basically been speaking a lot about the genocide in Palestine, and we’ve used our platform to try and not shy away from that too much, but we also do a lot of other things besides that,” Misdaq said.

“We just had a Passover [seder] led by a Jewish mystic, and it’s a testimony that we feel the world needs right now where there can be an alliance of all these different people,” Lila said.

“We can share the beauty of our uniqueness together,” she said.

The founders said they invested most of their personal savings into creating Astralab and had only recently moved beyond breaking even. Lila said that milestone would have allowed them to begin offering new programs.

“We’ve become a home to so many people separated from their families during these wars, our space gives people a drop of solace while watching their homelands being bombed,” they said.

“If we have to, we’ll be nomadic, which is kind of appropriate maybe in some ways for our people. So maybe we’ll take it on the road for a little while before we find a space if they do kick us out,” Misdaq said. 

Astralab will host HAYAT, a Middle-Eastern/Persian celebration of dance and music on April 18. More details can be found on their Instagram page, @astralab_la .

The two candidates for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman, traded sharp jabs Wednesday night over homelessness, housing and police hiring in the first debate of the general election season.

The debate, hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, came as both campaigns began ramping up door-to-door canvassing in a race that’s expected to be close.

Bass, who was elected mayor in 2022, finished five points ahead of Raman in June but is considered vulnerable with unfavorable ratings at 57% in a poll taken before the primary.

Homelessness

During the debate, Raman, who represents Council District 4, said Bass had not made enough progress on the No. 1 issue facing Los Angeles: homelessness.

“You’ve been the mayor for four years and the results have not changed — the results are visible on our streets,” Raman said.

The latest homeless count showed unsheltered homelessness rose 8% from January 2025 to January 2026. The increase followed a two-year drop of 17.5%.

Bass countered that her Inside Safe program has brought thousands of people off of the streets and pointed out that Raman was head of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee until recently and therefore shared responsibility for the city’s progress on the issue.

“She has been the point person for homelessness — a very powerful position that she declared as powerful when she lost it,” Bass said.

Raman touted a 49% drop in unsheltered homelessness in her council district, which stretches from Silver Lake to Sherman Oaks.

Bass claimed Inside Safe was largely responsible for the drop.

If elected, Raman promised to conduct an audit of homelessness spending in her first six months of office and said she would fully staff a new Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to hold the city accountable for its spending on the issue.

Auditors have also flagged major problems with the handling of tax dollars by the regional L.A. Homeless Services Authority. The failures stem from poor bookkeeping and accounting of taxpayer money at the agency, which spent over $800 million in public funds last fiscal year.

Raman also promised to lobby L.A. County more forcefully than Bass for mental health, drug abuse and other social services for the unhoused.

Housing

The two also sparred over housing policy, with Raman saying the city needed more density in housing to address a severe shortage.

“This is a massive problem for the future of Los Angeles,” Raman said. “Let’s have a Planning Department that does the work to build these units, zone for these units.”

Raman said the city is “not zoned for more housing,” adding that’s why the state has stepped in with mandates for more dense housing in cities and counties across California.

Raman supported the law.

Bass opposed it.

“I do not support Sacramento telling us what to do,” Bass said. “The best way to build is to reach agreement with communities.”

Bass has billed herself as someone who would do more to preserve residential neighborhoods in the city and protect them from density. She added that 42,000 units of affordable housing were in the pipeline.

Policing

The two also tangled over the hiring of police officers.

Bass pointed to a 2020 social media post by Raman that declared “defund the police.”

“She’s irresponsible in what she talks about,” Bass said.

Raman returned the verbal jab, arguing that Bass was irresponsible for backing a big raise for police officers in 2023.

“This is about fiscal management of public tax dollars,” Raman said. "This contract gave raises to the [Police Department] that our city couldn't afford and we suffered as a result.

”We cut street lighting, we cut pothole repair — we have more potholes on our streets than we did before," she continued. “We do less graffiti removal than we did before.”

Bass has said the raises were necessary to recruit new officers and keep current officers from leaving the department.

Raman also criticized Police Chief Jim McDonnell’s response to federal immigration raids, noting he refused to enforce a state law that largely prohibited federal agents from wearing masks. The council member said she didn’t believe the chief’s response to ICE raids “met the moment,” stopping short of saying whether she would seek to remove him.

Supporting business

Bass and Raman also fought over whether the city had sufficiently supported the entertainment industry.

“We need a tax credit and advocacy in Sacramento for the kind of tax credit that Georgia has, that’s the same as New Jersey has that’s taking jobs away from here,” Raman said.

Bass said she appointed a film czar to fight for such policies and criticized Raman for doing nothing on the issue.

“You have been on the City Council for six years,” Bass said. “You’ve been at City Hall twice as long as I have. I realize you want to pitch yourself as somebody from the outside. But where were you? You’ve introduced no motion for the entertainment industry.”

Bass said Raman would not be a good mayor because she lacks support from any of her colleagues on the City Council.

“She has no support from the council members because nobody can work with her,” Bass said.

Raman said she works well with colleagues and that Bass had locked up their endorsements before she made her last-minute entry into the race.

Five news reporters and two members of the military who were invited to an event at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California were briefly detained at gunpoint by security officers who thought they were gate crashers, according to local news reports.

The incident happened Monday ahead of an invitation-only groundbreaking for a new training facility for missile operators at the federal airfield near Santa Barbara, Calif. Reporters from Noozhawk and KEYT were among those detained, and both outlets published articles detailing the detainment.

In a statement to Noozhawk, a Space Launch Delta 30 Public Affairs spokesperson called the incident a breakdown in communication.

“Vandenberg Space Force Base is experiencing an increased number of unauthorized entry attempts,” the statement said. “Every potential unauthorized presence must be treated as a legitimate threat until proven otherwise. While we recognize this may have been unsettling, the security of the base and its personnel is our priority.”

The reporters and military members were part of a convoy being escorted onto the base by uniformed public affairs staff in a government minivan when they were suddenly ordered out of their vehicles with their hands up, according to news reports.

Officers pointed guns, sirens were sounded and barricades went up at the gate entrance, KEYT reported.

The two military members assigned to the base — one enlisted and one a junior officer — were handcuffed and placed in base vehicles, while the civilians were ordered to sit on a curb, Noozhawk reported.

The reporters for outlets also including KSBY-TV and the Santa Maria Times/Lompoc Record were held for more than 30 minutes, causing them to miss the event. All were let go without further incident.

“We respect the military’s need to provide security for the base,” Tom Bolton, Noozhawk’s editor in chief, said in a statement Wednesday. “But clearly what occurred was unfortunate and unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, as firearms were drawn.”

Bolton said he hopes to have a conversation with base leadership later this week to review what happened in the hopes of preventing a similar occurrence in the future.

As severe wildfires burn across the Western U.S., California has adopted the toughest rules in the country to help protect communities from burning. Homeowners in wildfire-prone areas will be required to limit plants within five feet of their house, a protective measure that wildfire experts say can help prevent homes from igniting.
Research shows that dry, dense vegetation around buildings can cause wildfires to spread. In extreme conditions, high winds carry a deluge of tiny, burning embers far beyond the fire itself. When those embers get caught in vegetation, they can ignite, spreading flames to nearby buildings and homes.
Wednesday's vote by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection comes after years of debate and delays. The state originally considered rules that would have restricted all vegetation within five feet of a house, aside from well-maintained trees. That generated pushback from some communities, concerned about losing greenery in their gardens and the cost of yard maintenance.
California regulators ultimately struck a compromise about plants allowed within the five-foot zone, known as Zone Zero. Lawns, flowers and non-woody plants up to 18 inches tall will be allowed, unless they are located directly under the roofline of a house. Trees will be allowed, though branches must be trimmed five feet away from a structure. The rules will apply to new construction right away, but will be phased in for existing structures, affecting almost 2 million homes in high-risk areas.

State regulators say the rules reflect the new reality of more extreme wildfires, driven in part by rising temperatures from climate change. More than 57,000 homes and buildings have been destroyed in California in the last decade, according to state regulators.

"California's faced an existential crisis that has affected our health, that has affected our finances related to our ability to buy and sell homes, to insure homes and has put us in a very precarious place," testified Yana Valachovic of the University of California Cooperative Extension at Wednesday's hearing, who also advised the state on the new rules.

Growing tensions across Western states

California's debate reflects growing tensions across the Western U.S. about how communities should prepare for wildfires. Wildfire experts warn even fires that start in open, wildland areas can quickly become urban fires, destroying thousands of homes in neighborhoods that residents never thought were at risk, like in the 2025 Los Angeles fires. This summer, more than 800 homes were destroyed in Spokane, Wash., by three wildfires that burned through dense neighborhoods.
Across several states, homeowners in public meetings have said wildfire regulations threaten private property rights, reduce urban wildlife habitat and require costly maintenance.
"You are about to approve a set of regulations that will cost millions of California homeowners tens of billions of dollars," testified Dave Lefkowitz, president of the Mandeville Canyon Association, a community group in the Los Angeles hills. "The math is insuperable."

Vegetation management rules were recently defeated in both Oregon and Washington after strong public pushback, including misinformation that spread online. Some community groups wanted regulators to wait for more scientific research on wildfire spread.

Research shows plants can increase risk

In experiments, researchers have shown that even green plants can ignite in the dry, windy conditions of an extreme wildfire. Analyses of past California wildfires have also shown that homes with vegetation predominantly within 6 feet of the exterior walls were at higher risk of being lost. Managing vegetation also creates "defensible space" for firefighters, providing better access for defending a structure.

California has long been at the forefront of wildfire policy, pioneering regulations that other states have adopted. For almost 20 years, California's wildfire building codes have required homes to use fire-resistant materials for construction. A handful of other states recently adopted similar codes. Research shows that while there are no guarantees a house will survive a fire, protections are strongest when homeowners address both building materials and vegetation. Even in some of the most severe wildfires in recent years, some homes made it through.
California regulators say the widespread regulations are needed because voluntary measures don't provide enough protection. Communities are safest when all homeowners comply, since one home with dense, dry vegetation can spread fire to its neighbors. Insurance companies in California are also required to provide discounts to homeowners that make their homes more fire-resistant.

New rules depend on inspections

While California's new rules provide more flexibility for homeowners, some wildfire experts say they don't go far enough, given that any combustible material next to a house could pose a risk. The new vegetation rules will be enforced by local fire departments and state agencies that do home inspections every year. Those inspectors will bear the brunt of educating homeowners and ensuring compliance.
"I want the board to understand what this compromise asks of local inspection programs," Todd Lando of the Central Marin Fire Department testified at the hearing. "A clean Zone Zero is a five-minute inspection with one question: Is anything combustible within five feet? Easy for the homeowner to understand and take action on." Lando says the new rules will involve more conditional judgements by inspectors, opening up debate with homeowners that could affect compliance.

California regulators say inspectors will focus on educating homeowners at first, before compliance becomes mandatory. For existing homes, the new vegetation rules will go into effect in 2029 at the earliest.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Clemente Larraín, a doctoral student from Chile, chose his program at UCLA because it offered subsidized childcare on campus. His young daughter was enrolled for free, giving him the peace of mind to focus on his studies.

Now, the university has thrown a wrench in those plans.

In an email to families enrolled in UCLA’s Early Care and Education program, Darnell Hunt, executive vice chancellor and provost, announced two university-run childcare centers will close at the end of the 2026-27 academic year because the university has determined “the program is not sustainable.”

“ For international students, this is the worst news because we don't have networks here," Larraín said. "We don't have family. Some of us have some friends, but not too close to just trusting them to our kids.”

He earns around $3,000 a month working on campus, which he said barely covers his rent, forcing the family to dig into savings. Meanwhile, his wife is waiting for a work permit so she can start to bring in additional income.

Having to find full time care for their daughter is causing immense stress.

“ This obviously changed radically the experience of the graduate students with family at UCLA,” Larraín said.

Limited childcare options for parents

The announcement comes as a changing landscape is making it harder for parents to find childcare across California. A new report by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley found that the rollout of a new grade for 4-year-olds in the state’s public schools is having unintended consequences for childcare businesses. Those businesses have typically cared for children 5 and under but are now losing more children to transitional kindergarten.

Between 2019 and 2025, about 1,100 preschools have closed across California.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, an associate professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, has two children enrolled in a UCLA-run childcare center, which she said costs her around $6,000 a month — and that’s at a subsidized rate.

“Having a high-quality, safe, reliable childcare option for my children just allows me to do my job as a UCLA professor, which includes research and publishing, but also teaching and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students,” Gandhi said. “I'm really not sure how I'll be able to do that job if I don't have adequate childcare next year.”

Gandhi said the only alternative she has for her daughter is Bright Horizons Westwood, which is part of a large chain of childcare facilities across the U.S.

“ But to be honest it doesn't have as good of a kind of teacher-child ratio as [UCLA's Early Care and Education] does, and it has a super long wait list,” she said.

LAist has reached out to the childcare facility to ask about its waitlist, teacher-child ratio and rates.

Earlier this year, Gandhi said, tuition at UCLA’s Early Care and Education program increased by 4%, Gandhi said. At the time, UCLA also announced it would eliminate “all food program services (which includes all meals, baby formula and food, milk and snacks), discontinuing support for diapers and formula, not backfilling vacant positions, and other cost reducing measures.”

After families protested, the university backed down.

‘Disconnected from its mission’

Yvonne Yang, an assistant clinical professor at UCLA in psychiatry, called it "callous and heartless," even "cruel" that the university decided to close down the childcare centers.

“It means to me that the university has completely become disconnected from its mission and basically lost its soul and is focusing only on profits,” said Yang, who is also a physician and researcher at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.

Yang said she’s now competing with all the families enrolled in the UCLA program for the limited childcare options available on the west side.

 ”When our kids were young and still breastfeeding, moms are welcome to just walk up to the daycare and to feed our kids during the workday, which is so much better than having to pump,” she said. “It's just a way of maintaining that connection with your kids so early in that transition.”

Having the childcare center on campus allowed her to integrate having a family life and being a professor, she said.