LA Squawk Box for Friday, June 19, 2026

William Mead community in Chinatown pushes back on demolition plans, Raman says Mayor Bass screwed with charter reform, a new hole in the ground is all-the-rage, and more.

What’s happening today?

LA is observing Juneteenth today.

What just happened?

Tenants at LA city’s William Mead public housing community say their buildings needs repair — not demolition

LA’s public housing agency is planning to redevelop the William Mead public housing community, which is expected to put that community under private management. This involves demolishing the existing 415 units, which are in two-story brick buildings spread out over several blocks that reminds one of an idyllic college campus. Those buildings would be replaced with 1,600 units, close to Chinatown and Dodger Stadium. This area, surrounded by industrial uses and growing into quite a foodie destination in recent years, is unsurprisingly ripe for real estate interests.

There are promises that the original tenants will be able to return after redevelopment, but some residents are worried that once people move away for a spell, not everyone ends up coming back, and the community that is there won’t really be the same. That’s not something to take lightly, they say.

They also worry things may be going down the same path as other public housing sites that have been put under private-sector nonprofit management. They point to the pattern that has played out under similar redevelopment programs in New York as examples for how what is promised may not end up being what happens.

Phoenix Tso, with LA Public Press, covered a rally held Thursday morning by residents of the community who do not want the demolition to occur. Those residents are demanding that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles repair the existing buildings instead. Their efforts drew support from groups concerned about privately managed affordable housing, including efforts to convert public housing into privately managed low-income housing. Those groups include POWER, CCEDLA, a volunteer group that has organized with tenants who often raise concerns that their wellbeing isn’t being prioritize by their private-sector affordable housing landlords.

The housing agency says such redevelopment is needed to improve building conditions, while also having the benefit of increasing the city’s overall housing inventory amid an affordable housing crisis. But some residents say that while the condition of their buildings could be better, they are still in better condition than at many private-sector affordable and market-rate housing complexes. Any rundown conditions are fixable without needing to go to the extreme extent of razing down their community, they say.

HACLA officials have conducted surveys and community meetings, as well as set up some committee structures, to discuss the redevelopment plans, but residents and organizers have described some of that as window dressing, and they told reporters during the rally that they did not actually have a genuine say as to whether they really wanted their community to be redeveloped in such a way. Some of them include Justine Martinez, who said that word about the redevelopment project had first started off as “a verbal rumor” in 2019. And at first they didn’t realize a crucial detail about the plans, which is that their existing homes would be demolished.

Martinez told The LA Reporter that her mother, Mona Ayala, who has lived in their community, has played an important role at William Mead, running a summer day camp. Martinez said that effort started off “pretty small” and grew into something that offered tutoring to many of the young people there, including herself. Her mother often also got involved with helping her neighbors get maintenance issues resolved, she said.

In the remarks she made during the rally, Martinez — whose pet bearded dragon was resting on her shoulder — noted an inaccurate, negative public perception of public housing that people often have. She sought instead to describe the pride she had in her community.

“The historic brick buildings at William Mead are more than just structures,” she said. “They represent history, culture, identity and community built over generations. Residents want these buildings preserved, not replaced by developments that could change the neighborhood’s character.”

Even though housing agency officials say “residents will not be permanently displaced, many worry that temporary relocation will disrupt their lives, separating them from support networks and create barriers to returning,” Martinez said. “Even if families return, the communities we know today may be gone.”

And a note on where the William Mead redevelopment plan is in the process. While there was a federal grant secured to do the “transformation” plan, this isn’t a done deal. In other words, while housing agency officials are working toward getting them, they haven’t actually applied for the city planning approvals to move forward. There are some details in the Housing Authority of Los Angeles’s board meeting files. Some of the pertinent ones are organized in the William Mead redevelopment website. HACLA officials told The LA Reporter that they are doing a “housing needs review to prepare a relocation plan” as a way to understand what residents need and how that could be included into “a future development.”

Raman says Mayor Bass screwed with the charter reform process

At LA City Hall, so much of what people are really thinking are often only hinted at. But some are done being shy. In a follow-up to Controller Kenneth Mejia breaking loose with his feelings of disappointment over the charter reform process, mayoral candidate and City Council member Nithya Raman has gone on record in a campaign video blasting Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass as the culprit for the failure of the charter reform process in getting issues that many care about — such as council expansion, ranked choice voting and an independent budget for the controller’s office (which serves as LA’s own elected City Hall gadfly)— onto this November’s ballot. The delay of council expansion was especially notable for many, with The LA Times highlighting its conspicuous absence in the slate of issues the City Council decided to move forward on for the November ballot. Golden State’s Mariel Garza also noted that even as this item was put off, another less-studied issue, non-citizen voting seemed to have been put on the fast-track.

In the video posted on Thursday, Raman pointed to the current mayor as the reason for such issues getting referred for further study. “Nearly four years after we started this process, some of the biggest and most heavily anticipated changes are now going to be punted to another committee,” Raman said in the video. But, Raman said, “there was time to study it. A full commission was created two years ago to do exactly that, but Mayor Bass sat on her appointments for nearly a year. One publication called her ‘the most conspicuous logjam in the whole process.’ The commission lost almost a year of work, raced to finish, and now the council says the work feels rushed. Of course, it was.”

She said that what happened with the commission “was by design. This is how the status quo protects itself.” Raman said that gets done by stretching out the process “until the clock runs out, and nobody has to explain to Angelenos why reform was killed. Angelenos deserve the chance to vote on real reform in November, but you won’t get it, and we should all ask Mayor Karen Bass to explain why.”

Also, Raman’s video comes after Bass had told POLITICO’s Melanie Mason in a sit-down interview at Union Station last month that she was “not really happy” with the charter reform process.

A few more things…

Fire at Boyle Heights warehouse, operated by Lineage Logistics, prompts continued ‘shelter-in-place’ order: There was a new “shelter-in-place” order issued on Thursday, after officials learned that a fire was still going at the Lineage Logistics warehouse in Boyle Heights, after fire broke out at the facility the day prior on Wednesday, June 17. Council member Ysabel Jurado posted a video update on Thursday about this order, which included urging people to stay indoors. The LA Times story points to a past, smaller fire in 2024 at the Boyle Heights warehouse, and to federal penalties related to Lineage Logistics, in Iowa. [Note: The Los Angeles Fire Department lifted this latest shelter-in-place order on Friday, June 19.]

LA city sanitation head named, six months after position became vacant: Mayor Karen Bass has appointed Joone Kim-Lopez to be the new executive director of the Bureau of Sanitation. Kim-Lopez is currently the CEO of the Moulton Niguel Water District in Orange County. The appointment was forwarded this week to the City Council, which would need to confirm Kim-Lopez for the role. When the previous head of the Sanitation department, Barbara Romero, stepped down at the end of last year.,LA Waterkeeper called it a “major loss,” for the city. This appointment was first spotted by Unrig LA.

A new Los Angeles hole in the ground blows up: There appears to be a new hole in the ground in Los Angeles that’s blowing up the Internet and becoming quite the local spectacle. There was recently another hole in the ground that Film the Police had dubbed the “basshole,” after the city’s most powerful official, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, that exposed electrical wiring.

LA releases building rules for folks who want to live in a more modest abode: In 2023, Mayor Karen Bass issued Executive Directive 7 to make it easier to build smaller homes, which is supposed to make homeownership more affordable. Think townhomes, row housing, and bungalow courts. Three years later, we now have some draft ordinances to review for building more of these types of smaller, and more affordable-to-purchase homes in Los Angeles. Bass announced that the planning department has just released theddraft ordinances for review. They’ve been dubbed the Missing Middle LA ordinances.

City Attorney submits language for prohibiting RSO demolition in Valley Glen: A proposed prohibition on demolishing of rent stabilized housing in Valley Glen should be up soon in the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, after the City Attorney’s draft ordinance language to do an “interim control ordinance.” Read the attorney’s letter summarizing the language is here, and the draft language is here. This was originally proposed by Council members Adrin Nazarian, and seconded by Council member Monica Rodriguez, last August. It had to get approval from the state housing department, which it ended up getting back in January.

Longtime San Fernando Valley business group leader moves onto BizFed: Stuart Waldman, the longtime executive director of the San Fernando Valley-focused Valley Industry Commerce Association, was just named as the new president of BizFed.