L.A. Reported

Tags: housing By Jarrett Carpenter At a packed meeting of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association inside a local senior center in June, all eyes were on Bob Blumenfield. The outgoing Los Angeles councilmember told a crowd of worried homeowners about how he fought against SB 79 — the new law that allows apartment buildings up to nine stories near transit stops. Read more on Substack Categories: Housing, Public safety Categories: Environment, Housing Categories: Policy, Public safety

By Robert Greene I was struggling with a dysfunctional parking meter in a city-owned lot, and complaining about it perhaps a little too loudly. I looked up to see a woman at an adjacent meter locked in a similar battle. When she saw that her remark had gotten my attention she continued the lesson. “No one has any power to fix anything here,” she explained.

Tags: self-drive cars, waymo By Sarah Silbert Pity the poor robots. Headlines highlight their every mishap: the time last year when one of Waymo’s AI-driven cars mindlessly drove a passenger into an active high-risk felony arrest scene in downtown L.A., or this January, when a Waymo hit a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica. What doesn’t make news: all the times the robots get it right.

By Gale Holland and Gray Mollenkamp The Los Angeles Police Department’s massive bunker-style station on Skid Row is edged by jagged rocks to deter homeless people looking for a safe spot to sleep for the night. Inside, the station houses the Central Traffic Division, where on a recent morning the seven officers on duty were feeling beleaguered, not by the neighborhood’s infamous squalor but by the challenge of keeping 1,139 miles of city roads safe.