LA's reform agenda is hitting every wall at once — cops, streets, housing taxes, and a rail line that took six and a half decades to open. This is LA Politics and Urbanism Daily — today we're in the weeds on traffic stop limits that don't change LAPD policy yet, streets that are falling apart with a price tag that'll make you wince, and, yes, 65 years for one rail line. The city keeps passing things and then immediately explaining why nothing changes. Today is basically a master class in that. Let's get into it. 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 to push the Police Commission on pretextual traffic stops — broken taillights, minor equipment violations, that kind of thing. The LA Times has it. It won't change policy by itself, but the Council is basically saying: move, or we're not letting this drop. Symbolic. That word is doing a lot of work here. The Commission has had years to act on this and hasn't. At some point 'we're watching' needs teeth, or it's just a press release with a vote attached. To be fair, Councilmember Padilla made it personal — her father, repeated stops with no explanation. That testimony landed. And the research is pretty consistent: these stops skew heavily toward Black and brown drivers and don't move the needle on violent crime. San Francisco already banned this. If LA can't follow a city that gets roasted in conservative media as a failed experiment, what exactly are we waiting for? 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 came into office promising to grow LAPD back to 9,500 officers. Now, with a budget crunch and reelection on the horizon, the goal has shifted to just not losing any more. The department is at 8,677 sworn personnel right now, the lowest in about 25 years, per the Times. So the campaign promise was 9,500, the reality is 8,677, and the new ask is 'we'll try not to make it worse.' That's not a policing strategy, that's a managed retreat dressed up as governance. To be fair, she did push hiring reforms and recruitment boosts — the Times credits that. The pipeline just hasn't caught up with attrition. That's a real structural problem, not just a political one. Sure, but if you're running for reelection on public safety, 'we stabilized the decline' is not the bumper sticker you want. Angelenos are going to notice the gap between 2022 Karen Bass and 2026 Karen Bass. 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 on this one — and they're ugly. The Bureau of Street Services can only resurface 60 lane miles this fiscal year. Last year it was over 300. That's an 80 percent drop. Streets For All is calling it a 'dire future' and honestly that's underselling it. This is what years of deferred maintenance and underfunding look like — you patch a pothole, skip the real resurfacing, and eventually the bill is catastrophic. LA has been choosing that bill for decades. The kicker is that the cheaper, smaller-scale fixes now mean exponentially more expensive reconstruction later. The city is basically financing its road debt on the worst possible terms. And who gets hit hardest when streets crumble? Not the Westside with its city council clout — it's working-class neighborhoods that have been watching their streets deteriorate for years while the budget conversations happen somewhere else entirely. 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 in front of the city's Measure ULA committee this week, pushing to exempt multifamily properties from the transfer tax entirely and kill the right-to-counsel program — redirecting that money into direct rental subsidies instead. Right-to-counsel is one of the few things keeping working-class tenants from getting steamrolled in eviction court, and the landlord lobby wants it gone. Shocking. Truly shocking. To be fair, the 'mansion tax' framing was always a little slippery — ULA hits multifamily deals too, which does complicate the new-supply math. That's a real tension, not just spin. Sure, but CAA's solution is 'exempt us and gut tenant protections,' not 'let's carve out small new-construction projects.' That's not a housing supply argument, that's just a tax avoidance argument wearing a hard hat. 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.
Sixty-five years. Pat Brown said 'let's start drilling' in 1962, and the Purple Line extension is finally opening this week. The Times has the full autopsy on why it took so long, and it is not a flattering read for this city. Nine billion dollars and six and a half decades of political cowardice, NIMBY litigation, and funding fights — all to connect Koreatown to the Westside on a corridor that transit experts have been calling the most important rail route in LA since before I was born. We didn't fail to build this line. We chose not to, over and over again. To be fair, Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi — so when it does open, ridership projections are serious. This isn't a vanity line. The question is just what those 65 years of car traffic cost everyone who had to live through them. If this briefing helps you keep up with Los Angeles politics and urban change, take a moment to subscribe or leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can follow it there and read more.
That's Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Thursday, May 7th. This is a Lantern Podcast.