Rents in West Coast cities are on the rise. Rep Mark Takano joins us to talk about what's happening in the Inland Empire, where people are spending up to 50 percent of their income on rent. Then, LA Times revamps its Homicide Report blog, vigilantes in the Mexican state of Michoacan face off against Knights Templar drug cartel, and developer Rick Caruso explains why his outdoor mall model is such a hit, plus much more.
Rental prices on the rise in West Coast cities
Rent prices throughout California's largest cities are on the rise, according to new data from the real estate site Trulia.
The data shows that San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles all had increases in rent prices during the month of December. And that rise isn't just confined to the state. Portland also had a 10.5 percent month-to-month average increase.
Why is this taking place now? And what does that market mean for homeowners and potential renters?
For more, we're joined by Stuart Gabriel, Professor of Finance and Director at the Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA.
Rent in Riverside rising faster than incomes
Rent for residential housing in the Inland Empire has risen much faster than incomes, according to a new report by Congressman Mark Takano, who represents the 41st district out there.
His paper "Rent on the Rise in Riverside" notes that a third of renters out there are paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing. Representative Takano joins the show with more.
Seeing none, Korean-American community works to recruit foster parents
It can be difficult to recruit foster parents who speak English. In LA County, it's even more difficult to find foster parents who speak Asian languages. KPCC's Josie Huang says the county's testing a new program to attract more bilingual foster parents, Koreans in particular.
LA Times revamps The Homicide Report blog
Paul Smith, a 58-year-old black man. an Hoyt, a 45-year-old white man. Ramiro Antonio Melendez-Lobos, a 22-year-old Latino.
To most of us, these four people are just names, but they're significant when you find out how they're related. They are four of the many who've been killed in Los Angeles already this year.
Their stories -- when and how they died -- might have stayed anonymous but for the Los Angeles Times and its revamped blog, The Homicide Report. The report debuted in 2007 as a way to tell unknown stories of homicide victims.
This week it re-launched. Nicole Santa Cruz is a reporter for the blog and joins us now to talk about it.
LA sheriff’s race: Can outsider Jim McDonnell overcome tradition?
The race to succeed Sheriff Lee Baca is pretty wide open, but one candidate is attracting support from prominent elected officials and the law enforcement community.
Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell once said there was no way he'd run for sheriff. But KPCC's Frank Stoltze says he changed his mind after incumbent Lee Baca suddenly decided to retire.
Boehner wading into the fight over California water
It's not news to us anymore here in California, but it's dry. Too dry.
Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought here last week and made a reference to it in his State of the State speech yesterday. As Governor Brown was speaking, House Speaker John Boehner was gathering with a trio of San Joaquin Valley Republicans near Bakersfield.
They stood in a dusty cotton field to introduce emergency legislation to bring more water to valley farms. The California Report's Sasha Khokha was there.
Rick Caruso explains why his 'Americana' outdoor mall model works
The Americana at Brand is an outdoor shopping center smack in the middle of Glendale. But walking around it almost feels like you're in another mini-city — or maybe Disneyland, with its pedestrian streets, trolley, huge fountain and constant music.
Americana at Brand is the work of L.A. developer Rick Caruso, who's also responsible for The Grove in the Fairfax district and about 10 other projects throughout California and Nevada. He's championed mixed-use buildings, where people live, shop and just come to hang out.
Caruso says indoor malls are a thing of the past.
“The highest grossing stores anywhere in the world are outside, on a street,” he said citing Madison Avenue in New York City as an example. “Malls have got to reinvent themselves. They can’t just be the tired, indoor mall and expect to survive when there are so many different channels for people to buy products.”
But you won’t see his projects just anywhere.
When asked if he’d build in a community like Inglewood, he said: “We are very careful about the demographic; we need a lot of people to support these properties, so we want to be located where there are a lot of people living. We have a pretty good formula; we know what works.”
Caruso considered running for Los Angeles mayor in 2013 and said politics could be on the horizon again — if the circumstances are right.
“I love people; I love this city, and I really believe I can make a difference,” Caruso said. “I’m not constrained by the typical constraints that politicians have, which mostly is I’m willing to risk my job every day. Since I don’t need to do it, I can make decisions that are right for the people.”
Hilton Als on 'White Girls', Eminem and André Leon Talley
New Yorker writer Hilton Als' latest book, "White Girls," is a collection of essays that explores the intersections of race, gender and sexuality.
Part memoir, part cultural critique, the book has been announced this month as a finalist for a National Book Critics Award. Als joins the show to talk about his new book, his thoughts on Eminem's appropriation of black culture and his relationship with fashion icon André Leon Talley.
Interview Highlights:
On the meaning behind the title, "White Girls":
"I really didn't mean it to be that provocative. In a way, I wanted it to be as generic as some other title that define blackness, for instance. I came up with the title as a way of doing something that was a little bit off the beaten path, vis-a-vis describing blackness in a title. We had Richard Wright, 'Black Boy,' we had Toni Morrison's 'Tar Baby,' we had James Weldon Johnson's, 'Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.'"
On the response to the book:
"I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think. I haven't been reading the reviews, but what people have told me is that there's been some sort of feeling of, not outrage, but annoyance. That the book has a lot of difficulties, textually. I think, what's the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting? We want to be in a place where people asking us what the book is about and you being disrupted."
What do the title and the author have in common?:
"The title has something to do with the number of the people in the book who are identifying with a certain white woman in their lives. So, in the Richard Pryor section, there's Jennifer Lee's testimonial about her marriage to Richard Pryor. We also have this sort of anti-relationship so in the André Leon Talley piece, the white girl is a figure of disturbance. Flannery O'Connor talks about race and blackness so she's the white girl looking at blackness. The pivotal white girls are often center or marginalized people themselves who either identify with or condemn blackness."
On his relationship with André Leon Talley:
"Unfortunately, a lot of people are more excited when one black gay man goes after another. I didn't go after him. I was really sort of critiquing a world in which he was very much isolated. If you go back through that piece, I actually say that I love him, in the piece. The level of acceptance that André seeks in his heart is not equal to what fashion world can give him. I really do love him."
On Eminem navigating between black and white culture:
"I think he's a great artist in that he applied his story to black style instead of appropriating blackness for his own ends. He tells his story in a black syntax and the white girl in that piece, for instance, is his own mother, whose level of verbal and emotional hysteria I think really informed him as an artist. His making an art out of that kind of hysteria and then finding the rhythm of blackness to apply to it, I think was a genius stroke and not the same old kind of appropriation that you would get from anyone from Elvis Presley to any blue-eyed soul singer who makes claims to blackness. I don't think Eminem does that at all. I think he's telling his story in the rhythms that he grew up with which was black music, but I don't think he makes any claims to be black at all."
Read an excerpt from "White Girls":
(Marshall) Mathers's elders could not keep blackness away from their children, who had to attend the city's public schools, which were predominantly black. There, Marshall found his voice - in black music. He also ran up against race hatred.
When he was nine years old, a black classmate attacked Mathers a number of times - at recess, in the school bathroom. Once, the same bully knocked his skinny white victim down with a heavy snowball; Mathers sustained severe head injuries. Subsequently, Mathers's mother filed a claim against the school, saying the attacks had also caused her son to have debilitating headaches, intermittent loss of vision and hearing, nightmares, nausea, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1983, when a Macon County judge in Michigan declared that public schools were immune when it came to such lawsuits.
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs's failed litigation must have felt like a failure of language. Unlike her son, she never learned to control it. How could she not bend the law to her will? Her hysteria, telling tales about her victimhood, had worked on Marshall, making other kinds of knots in his head. Why should the courts be any different? (Her tendency to treat the wrongs that had been inflicted on her son and thus herself as an occasion for a public airing was not restricted to Mathers's defense. Indeed, after her son's second album came out, his mother sued him for defamation of character.)
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs had a penchant for showing off the knocks and bruises incurred by living. Just like an American. Mathers's inheritance was the Mrs. Mathers-Briggs show. He brought it with him when he left her to marry his audience. But he refined her hysteria, controlled it, gave it a linguistic form. By becoming an artist, he served and separated from Mother. He served her divorce papers by making records where he talked about their marriage. And then he married her again by talking about her again. But a mom that is your Mrs. can never forgive you for believing you are someone different, and not herself. That separateness belies her existence.
That the slings and arrows of Mathers's outrageous misfortune in and out of school, in the outside of Detroit's black world, did not deter him from falling increasingly in love with black music is a testament to his interest in and commitment to exploring difference - his and theirs. Unlike many of the whites he grew up with, Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn't feel white and privileged.
Correction: An earlier version of this transcript had erroneously credited Richard Pryor as the author of "Black Boy." The author is actually Richard Wright. We apologize and regret this typo.
State Of Affairs: LA Sheriff's race, Governor's race, drought and more
It's Thursday, and that means it's time for State of Affairs, our look at politics and government throughout California. This week we have a special treat, KPCC Washington D.C. Correspondent Kitty Felde is here, and of course we're joined as we are almost every week by KPCC reporter Frank Stoltze.
Frank Stoltze recently produced a piece about Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell running for Los Angeles County Sheriff, but now another person has thrown his hat into the red-hot race.
This week, we got the news that a new candidate is jumping into the governor's race. Now Governor Jerry Brown still hasn't said whether he's running for mayor but Republican Neel Kashkari threw in his hat. What do we know about this guy?
This week, the Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx was in Los Angeles with his first stop being the groundbreaking of yet another rail line in L.A. Why would the federal transportation secretary show up for that?
The Metropolitan Transportation Board today takes up the issue of whether to run the Crenshaw line all the way to LAX. As of now, MTA staff says it would be too expensive. At lease one MTA Board member is raising a stink about this.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has been back schmoozing his buddy President Obama a lot over the past few months. But what’s he really getting out of the president?
One of the big stories unfolding in California is the drought. It’s an environmental story, but it’s also a political story. How is the drought likely to play out in Congress particularly among the California delegation?
Tonight’s "Tonight Show" is a must watch. House Speaker John Boehner coming to Burbank to appear on the show with Jay Leno.
Tour bus safety: Casinos look the other way, regulators overwhelmed
This is the second of two KPCC stories on safety and the burgeoning business of casino tour bus brokers. As the buses have grown in popularity, regulation has become more lax, with dangerous consequences for passengers and other drivers on the road. Here's a link to part one.
As we been hearing all week on the program, the buses that carry people to and from casinos are a booming business in Southern California. But they've also been involved in a string of recent accidents.
RELATED: Is the tour bus you're taking on California's watch list?
Despite the popularity of these casino bus tours, KPCC has found regulation has become more lax. Ben Bergman has the second of two reports.
New program aims to help veterans navigate post-war life
According to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America — or IAVA — the unemployment rate for veterans nationwide is more than 7 percent. Here in California it's just over 6.5 percent.
Hundreds of thousands of veterans are stuck in a massive backlog at the VA, waiting an average of 125 days for their claims to be reviewed. At least 22 veterans take their own life each day, including an increasing number of young veterans.
So the IAVA has created what it calls the Rapid Response Referral Program to help veterans navigate post-war life. That program is already underway in New York, and starting tonight, it launches here in Los Angeles.
We're joined by Jason Hansman of the IAVA, and Angela King, a Navy medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vigilantes in Michoacan face-off against Knights Templar drug cartel
In the Mexican state of Michoacan, armed vigilante groups have challenged a powerful drug cartel, known as the Knight Templars. Federal forces have moved in to dozens of municipalities and some residents are expressing relief and concern.
For more, we're joined by journalist Verónica Calderón, she's a native of Michoacan herself and has been covering the situation for Mexican newspaper El Pais.
Where are the politically engaged techies?
The latest boom in Silicon Valley has brought with it massive traffic jams, stratospheric housing costs, and resentful blowback. Some people are now using the word "techie" as a pejorative in the San Francisco Bay Area, meaning someone whose young, male, affluent and out of touch with his community.
Like any stereotype, there are those who fit the bill, and a lot of people who don't. The California Report's Rachael Myrow has more.
SoCal Rain Dance: Song suggestions to bring on the rainfall
In case you haven't heard, it's really cold back East and in the Midwest, like it often is during winter.
NPR's All Things Considered recently did a segment about songs to help warm people up during the cold winter days. A cabin fever playlist of sorts. But it's certainly not cold here on the West Coast. In fact it's too hot and too dry for the middle of January. Put simply, we could use a little rain.
So, we have our own version of a weather playlist here on Take Two, but instead of cabin fever, we need a rain dance. And it's all based on your suggestions. Check out the playlist and the segment that was on the air.
Thanks for your contributions. I think I can feel that rain comin'.
Playlist and your contributions below:
Rubén Blades has the best rain song, 'Lluvia de tu cielo', and it's salsa, so it's totally danceable
— A Mejías-Rentas (@lataino)
@tessvigeland @taketwo Rubén Blades has the best rain song, 'Lluvia de tu cielo', and it's salsa, so it's totally danceable
— Antonio Mejías-Rentas (@lataino) January 23, 2014
Rain by The Cult http://t.co/DoMvJRMAgq
— OCLegend.Com (@oclegend)
.
Have You Ever Seen the Rain - CCR. And I hate to go east coast, but Make It Rain - Fat Joe.
— LetsGoLA (@VamonosLA)
.@KPCC @taketwo Have You Ever Seen the Rain - CCR. And I hate to go east coast, but Make It Rain - Fat Joe.
— Dingbattitude! 加油 洛杉矶 (@VamonosLA) January 23, 2014
.
also, need some reverse psychology w this drought, so California Dreamin' & Who'll Stop the Rain are in too.
— LetsGoLA (@VamonosLA)
.@KPCC @taketwo also, need some reverse psychology w this drought, so California Dreamin' & Who'll Stop the Rain are in too.
— Dingbattitude! 加油 洛杉矶 (@VamonosLA) January 23, 2014
"Rainmaker" by Harry Nilsson.
— Joe Napolitano (@JoeNapolitano)
@taketwo "Rainmaker" by Harry Nilsson.
— Joe Napolitano (@JoeNapolitano) January 23, 2014
Ann Peebles' "I Can't Stand the Rain" & Billie Holiday's "Keeps On Rainin'"
— Anika (@faboomama)
"Escape" by Rupert Holmes!
— Brittany Levine (@brittanylevine)
1) November Rain by Guns n' Roses 2) No Rain by Blind Melon
— Tim Biden (@TimBiden)
Singing in The Rain
— Cathi Mims Yamaguchi (@MimsyYamaguchi)
@taketwo Singing in The Rain
— Mimsy (@MimsyYamaguchi) January 23, 2014
I'm Walking on Sunshine!
— Mr. Damage (@damagedgears)