LA's been promising reform for years — today we find out how many of those promises are already running into a wall. This is The LA Daily Fix — cops, crumbling streets, housing taxes under fire, and a rail line that took six decades to build. Big reform energy. Very messy follow-through. Spoiler: the part where things actually change for regular Angelenos? Still waiting. We’ll get into all of it — starting with City Council voting to limit traffic stops while LAPD keeps doing what it’s doing. Los Angeles Times writes:
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday voted in favor of new restrictions on so-called “pretextual” traffic stops, signaling a growing impatience with the Police Commission’s failure to rein in a controversial LAPD tactic that critics say enables racial discrimination. The vote was largely symbolic.
City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to push back on pretextual traffic stops — broken taillights, minor equipment violations — and asked the Police Commission to adopt tighter guidelines. The Times has the story. But the word here is ‘requesting.’ This changes zero LAPD policy today. Right, a symbolic vote — which in LA city government apparently counts as bold action. The Police Commission has had years to move on this. Years. Black and brown Angelenos keep getting pulled over for busted taillights while the watchdog body just sits there. San Francisco already bans these kinds of stops unless there’s a real safety threat. That’s the model the Council is pointing to. Whether the Police Commission actually follows through is a totally separate question. Councilmember Padilla told the Commission ‘no excuses’ from the dais. I’ll believe it when ignoring that comes with actual consequences. Los Angeles Times writes:
When she ran for mayor four years ago, Karen Bass said she wanted to regrow the Los Angeles Police Department to the 9,500-officer force it was before the ranks began to shrink. Now up for reelection — and facing a budget crunch — Bass says her plan has shifted.
Mayor Bass ran on growing LAPD back to 9,500 officers. Now, with a budget crunch and reelection on the line, the goal is basically: don’t shrink any further. The department is at 8,677 sworn officers, the Times reports, lowest in nearly 25 years. So the campaign promise was 9,500, and now it’s ‘please don’t lose anyone else.’ That’s not a policing strategy, that’s a holding pattern with a press release on top. To be fair, she did push streamlined hiring and recruitment. It just hasn’t moved fast enough to offset attrition. That’s not spin — it’s a real structural problem. And somehow the budget crunch doesn’t hit the housing voucher program or bus service with that same ‘we are not there now’ energy. The bar moves depending on who’s asking. Here’s Kavish Harjai at LAist:
Los Angeles city streets will worsen and repairing them will become more expensive unless the city overhauls its approach to maintenance, according to a report from transportation advocacy group Streets For All. “We’re looking towards a dire future for the streets of Los Angeles if we continue on the status quo,” said Josh Vredevoogd,
LAist’s Kavish Harjai has the numbers, and they’re ugly — Bureau of Street Services says it can resurface 60 lane miles this fiscal year. Last year it was over 300. That’s not a dip, that’s a collapse. Streets For All is calling it a ‘dire future,’ and honestly that’s polite. The city keeps patching instead of fixing, and every year you kick the can, the bill gets bigger. This is what chronic underinvestment looks like when it finally hits your commute. And the kicker is, bad streets aren’t just annoying — they slow everything down. Buses, trucks, emergency vehicles. The whole city moves worse when the pavement is garbage. Meanwhile the permitting office is fully staffed, I’m sure. Fix the roads, not the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. This one's from California Apartment Association:
The California Apartment Association is urging Los Angeles officials to exempt multifamily housing from Measure ULA and shift money away from tenant right-to-counsel programs and into direct rental assistance as city hearings continue and officials take feedback on possible changes to the tax.
The California Apartment Association is at the table as LA weighs changes to Measure ULA — the 2022 transfer tax voters approved to fund affordable housing and tenant assistance. CAA wants multifamily properties exempted, and it wants right-to-counsel money redirected into direct rental subsidies. Of course the landlord lobby wants to gut the legal aid piece — that’s the part that actually levels the playing field in eviction court. Swapping it for rental subsidies sounds compassionate until you remember the money goes right back into landlord pockets with zero accountability. To be fair, the ‘mansion tax’ label has always been a little slippery — it hits big multifamily deals too, which does affect new housing supply. That’s a real tension, not just industry spin. Sure, but the city already stalled on revising this once this year. If the answer to ‘ULA is imperfect’ is ‘exempt the entire asset class that benefits most from the housing shortage,’ that’s not a fix — that’s a carve-out in a reform costume. Here's Los Angeles Times:
No one back then thought it would take 65 years of political battles, funding struggles and worsening motor traffic for the Wilshire subway to actually open. This week, Metro is set to unveil the first part of a nine-mile subway under Wilshire, one of the most dynamic and traffic-clogged stretches of Los Angeles.
The Times has the full history on this one — sixty-five years from Pat Brown pulling a drill handle to Metro actually opening the Wilshire subway. Nine miles, nine point seven billion dollars, Koreatown to the Westside. Sixty-five years. My grandparents were alive in 1962. The densest corridor west of the Mississippi, and we spent six and a half decades on funding fights and political theater instead of just building the thing. To be fair, the story is more complicated than bureaucratic failure — there were methane fears, ballot restrictions, a no-zone ordinance that locked out subway tunneling under Beverly Hills for years. LA made it hard on itself in very specifically LA ways. Beverly Hills blocking a subway tunnel so commuters could keep sitting on Wilshire in traffic — that sentence should be in every urban planning textbook under ‘NIMBY hall of fame.’ And we’re supposed to celebrate that we eventually got around it? You’ll find links to every story we talked about in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can take a closer look there. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with more soon. That’s The LA Daily Fix for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.