LAX had the World Cup arrival window circled for years — and the brand-new people mover picked opening week to start stumbling. This is L.A. Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: a federal push to rewire homelessness money, the transfer tax back in the planning conversation, and a train that missed its moment. Hundreds of millions, a global audience, and one deadline the city knew about for years. Let's start with SkyLink. Here's LAist:
More than $4 billion in federal funding is at stake. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates the proposed changes could cost California nearly $238 million for permanent housing, and threaten to put nearly 15,000 Californians back on the street.
Four billion dollars in federal homelessness money, and the Trump administration is taking another swing at gutting Housing First — after a judge already blocked them once. They want temporary shelter with sobriety strings attached. And this week's challenge came out of federal court in Rhode Island — from the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Santa Clara County. So for now, we're talking about litigation, not a new rule on the books. Here's what eats at me, Hope. This lands on a city that's spent $300 million on Inside Safe, with a 40-percent washback rate to the motels — and 250-plus permanent apartments sitting empty. If HUD restructures the money midstream, that shaky handoff doesn't get cleaned up. It gets a cliff under it. Right — if the feds yank the floor around, it lands on a program whose own numbers are already hard to defend, not one that's humming. And the irony is, the city was already slow signing the checks. Now the funding underneath those checks might move while they're still looking for a pen. This one's from California Planning & Development Report:
The Los Angeles City Council moved to request the City Attorney to draft a proposal exempting new apartment buildings in Los Angeles from Measure ULA, or mansion tax. Measure ULA, approved by voters in 2022, imposes a 4% tax on most property sales above $5.3 million and a 5.5% tax on sales above $10.6 million, generating revenue for affordable housing and homelessness prevention programs.
CP&DR's brief puts Imperial County and our own transfer tax side by side — two local boards reaching for blunt land-use tools. Imperial just dropped a 45-day moratorium on data centers, unanimously, three months after greenlighting the biggest data center in the state. And listen to why. Rucci's outfit spent a year swearing the thing would run on recycled wastewater — then turned around and sued the irrigation district for 260 million gallons of Colorado River water a year. That's enough for 7,300 people. A million square feet of AI complex, 750,000 gallons a day for cooling. The supervisors approved it, then hit the brakes the second the lawsuit landed. Pure whiplash. Now a 19-member committee studies it until January 2027. So it's a year-long pause because nobody asked the water question up front. Same delivery culture, different county. The L.A. line in that same brief matters for us too — it confirms the ULA transfer tax thresholds are live in the planning conversation now, not buried in a finance footnote. Five-point-four million, ten-point-nine million. Real numbers, this week. Which leaves that $177 million pipeline question open. Imperial slams the door on water; L.A.'s still arguing over how much of its own tax money it actually spends. Both jurisdictions are improvising — only one of them's trying to build housing with it. This one's from AOL:
But the long-awaited automated people mover — considered by some to be a crucial missing link in the region's commuter rail network — has yet to transport a single passenger. Three years after its planned 2023 opening date, the newly dubbed SkyLink system remains mired in technical hiccups and legal disputes.
Three years past the 2023 opening date, and SkyLink still hasn't moved a single human being. Not one. The week the World Cup crowds land — that's when it sputters. LAX had this arrival window circled for years, Matt. The people mover was the whole pitch — skip the traffic loop, glide above the chaos to the transit center. And now the whole planet's watching the bill come due. The contractor's even blaming LA World Airports for slapping on "blockers" — so now it's a lawsuit sitting on top of the technical mess. I want to know what the delay actually looks like — headways, dwell times, full shutdowns? The phrase "technical hiccups" hides too much. But yeah, the timing is brutal. This is the same town that put a fire tax on the ballot at 14-0 in a single meeting. We can move when the politics are easy. Deliver a train? Apparently not. If you're tracking Los Angeles politics, you might also like California Governor's Race — daily 2026 race coverage on candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy, for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
What we're watching next: LINXS now projects SkyLink passenger service won't begin until at least early October.
We've linked the sources for today's stories in the show notes, so if one of them deserves a closer read, start there. That's Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.