Three separate money fights, three systems failing, all landing on the same Wednesday. And no, none of it comes tied in a bow. This is LA Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today — who gets carved out of the ULA tax, why the county's writing a ten-million-dollar check, and a packed Venice room asking about the wrong thing. Here's Bisnow:
The ballot measure would allow voters to decide whether to allow an exemption for multifamily properties built in the last 10 years from the city’s Measure ULA tax. Measure ULA, which adds a 4% tax to property purchases from $5.3M to $10.6M and 5.5% to trades larger than $10.6M, has been the target of ire from the commercial real estate community in Los Angeles.
So Sacramento couldn't kill ULA for them last week, and now the Council's gonna take its own swing — a July 1 hearing, then a November ballot measure to carve out multifamily built in the last ten years. That's from Bisnow. And it lands on a November ballot that already has the fire tax. Three separate asks for public money in one cycle — voters are gonna love that. Here's the thing that gets me on the exemption — new multifamily gets the break. Existing affordable stock? Still paying the 4% and the 5.5%. So who exactly gets carved out, and who keeps writing the check? And remember whose money this is — ULA proceeds go into housing programs. So you're changing the tax that funds the thing you say the tax is choking. Circular, but here we are. The CRE crowd's been calling ULA a housing killer for two years. The city's own legislative analyst pushed back on that — the dampening effect looks a lot weaker than the sales pitch. Doesn't stop the Council from moving fast when the right people ask. Here's LAist:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Tuesday agreed to pay $9.6 million to the family of a man fatally shot by sheriff’s deputies in Compton in 2020 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. The unusually large settlement came amid claims Samuel Herrera Jr. was unarmed, targeted by deputies because he was Mexican-American and that the deputies involved were part of a law enforcement gang.
Nine-point-six million from the county to settle the wrongful death of Samuel Herrera Jr., shot by sheriff's deputies in Compton back in 2020. LAist calls the settlement 'unusually large' — and that word choice tells you what county counsel was staring at. And that's the tension. A coroner's inquest and a DA review both cleared the deputies. But the county still writes a check for almost ten million dollars rather than put this in front of a jury. The lawsuit goes beyond 'a bad shooting.' It says Herrera was unarmed, targeted because he was Mexican-American, and that the deputies belonged to a law enforcement gang inside the department. It reaches beyond one incident into the department's pattern of practice. Three kids lost their father. Two minor sons, a minor daughter. And in an Olympic cycle where nobody's signed off on policing costs yet, this is what 'the taxpayers eat it' actually looks like in dollars. From DNYUZ:
After those four years, our neighborhoods now host half as many tents. But they also have 20% more people living in their vehicles and sleeping rough. That means today’s unsheltered population is now 14% smaller overall, but needier, more mobile and harder to engage than before. It is time to think about what comes next.
The number to sit with here is 14% — that's how much smaller the unsheltered population in Hollywood, Skid Row, and Venice has gotten over four years, per RAND LA's census. In that same window: half as many tents, and 20% more people in cars or sleeping rough with nothing over them. And RAND is counting every two months with professional field staff, not relying on the once-a-year volunteer count. So the read is more granular — the population's smaller, but harder to find. Right, and the whole outreach model was built around tents. Workers knew the corner, showed up week after week, built the trust. Disperse the clusters, and maybe you've kept the number down — but you've blown up the map. That's a service-delivery problem and a transit problem. If your clients are mobile and scattered now, an outreach worker has to actually reach them — and this city's already leaving whole corridors off the planning maps. And keep in mind who bankrolls whatever the 'next act' is — the same funding pipeline whose oversight we've been chewing on all week. If that money's tied up in court, there's no next act to fund. FOX 11 Los Angeles writes:
Frustration boiled over at a packed community meeting in Venice as residents confronted leaders of two supportive housing programs they say have brought an increase in crime, drug activity and public safety concerns to their neighborhood. More than 100 residents, business owners and community members filled St. Mark Parish Hall to demand answers from representatives of The Journey Program and Safe Place for Youth headquarters, neighboring facilities along Lincoln Boulevard.
More than a hundred people packed St. Mark Parish Hall in Venice to confront two supportive housing programs on Lincoln Boulevard — The Journey Program and Safe Place for Youth. One resident called it, quote, 'lip service.' A hundred people fill a hall on the Westside, and by the end of the night a councilmember's there warning about funding. That's the response time working-class LA never gets. Traci Park said the organizations have to be held accountable, and floated making future funding depend on improvements. That's a real lever — supportive housing runs on that money. Right, and that's the piece that gets missed — threaten the funding, and you threaten the housing. The room should be pressing on staffing: can the program actually work with the people and resources it has? LAist writes:
Just is among the rising number of Long Beach Unified educators who have been seriously hurt during interactions with students in recent years. It’s a trend that’s alarmed classroom staff. In February, Peder Larsen, vice president of the local teachers union, told his membership he was “a bit in shock” at the rate of injuries he was witnessing.
LAist has a Long Beach Unified story — Lisa Just, a special ed teacher at Carver Elementary, left the classroom after a student headbutted her hard enough to permanently damage her vision. And she's careful about it — these are kids with acute behavioral needs, kindergartners who climbed into her lap. She's not villainizing them. She's saying the support wasn't there when things went explosive. Right, and that's the part the district hides in a staffing line item. You put one teacher and a couple of aides in a room with acute behavioral needs, and no plan for the hot September day everybody knew was a trigger — that's a resourcing choice. An ER trip and permanent eye damage — that's what understaffing actually costs. It doesn't show up on a budget until it's a workers' comp claim and a teacher who never comes back. And the accountability question here is different from everything else on today's rundown — there's no single bad actor to point at. The failure is a support system that only shows up as a last-resort restraint. If you follow L.A. politics, check out California Governor's Race — daily 2026 coverage of the candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy, for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We'll be watching the Los Angeles City Council's July 1 hearing, where members are set to take up the Measure ULA multifamily exemption proposal.
Links to every story we covered today are in the show notes. If one caught your ear, you can follow it there and read more. That's Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.