Newsletter: Today: When a home means abandoning your past

Aug. 16, 2019 5 AM PT

A special housing initiative gave the residents of a Los Angeles homeless encampment the chance to move into apartments. But their pasts still found them.

When Having a Home Means Abandoning Your Past
In their tents along Broadway Place in South Los Angeles, some homeless neighbors forged a tenuous kind of community. One, known as Big Mama, tried to keep everyone in line — until a special housing initiative gave them the opportunity to move into apartments. But leaving the streets also meant abandoning the past and imagining the future, and that was its own challenge. “Homelessness is like that car,” as one new resident put it, pointing to her old Chrysler. “You can tow it, but you’ve got to open the hood to see why it’s not running.” Our four-part series The Street Within chronicles their struggles.

— Part 1: After nine years on L.A.’s streets, Big Mama needed a home. But it wasn’t that easy.
— Part 2: Broadway Place’s homeless residents were promised homes. Had the city forgotten them?
— Part 3: An entire L.A. encampment moved into apartments. Their past still found them.
— Part 4: When L.A. moved them off the streets, some knew it was their last chance. Others didn’t see it that way.
— Journalist Thomas Curwen describes what he learned about homelessness in reporting the series.

Detained Children Must Get Enough Food and Toothbrushes
In a case that dramatized the plight of children detained at the border, a federal appeals court Thursday upheld an order requiring immigration authorities to provide minors with adequate food, water, bedding, toothbrushes and soap. A three-judge panel rejected an appeal by the Trump administration to a Los Angeles federal judge’s ruling that the government was violating the 1997 Flores agreement. That settlement required the government to provide detained minors with safe and sanitary conditions. Meanwhile, President Trump’s immigration crackdown has brought hard times for smugglers.

More Politics:
— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bowed to Trump and barred Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel. It was a calculated but risky move, and one roundly criticized even by the staunchly pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. In a statement Friday, Israel’s interior minister said he has granted a request by Rep. Tlaib to enter the Israeli-occupied West Bank on humanitarian grounds.
— For Democrats to deliver on their presidential candidates’ promises, they’ll need to win the Senate. We broke down what that would require.

A Prop. 13 Rework Looks Ballot-Bound
Nothing’s stuck around in California politics like Proposition 13, the 1978 tax cut that became a symbol of voters’ reluctance to pay more money for more government services. But now, its critics’ demand to downsize it by excluding most commercial property from its strict tax limits is all but certain to win a spot on the November 2020 ballot — setting up an epic campaign clash that could alter California’s political landscape for years to come.

Midwives, Doulas and Photographers
At 9 centimeters dilated, Terra Hall’s first priority was the epidural. Her second: “I don’t care what faces I’m making, I don’t care if it’s disgusting — I wanted photos of everything.” She’s in good company, as more and more millennial parents in L.A. and beyond pay professionals to capture them for wedding-style albums of their labor. The practice is so popular at Westside hospitals that some providers carry photographers’ business cards in their exam rooms. To Angelenos who can afford one, a birth photographer is as de rigueur as a doula.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

On this day in 1964, The Times ran its review of “Mary Poppins.” Our critic Philip K. Scheuer’s take: “It will amaze and delight more people than you can count, and I imagine quite a lot of them won’t be kids, either.” He wrote that Julie Andrews, in her screen debut, played the titular nanny “coyly and captivatingly,” and he particularly enjoyed Dick Van Dyke’s dance with a bunch of animated penguins. Read the rest of the review here.

CALIFORNIA

— California now has the biggest legal marijuana market in the world. But its black market is even bigger, and that troubles supporters of Proposition 64.

— L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva won office with a rare endorsement from the Democratic Party. Now it’s issuing a rare rebuke.

— In the Santa Barbara Channel, an underwater sound system aims to to keep whales and ships apart.

— Nipsey Hussle would have turned 34 yesterday. Fans flocked to the parking lot where he was shot to mark his birthday.

— A jury found Michael Gargiulo guilty in three brutal knife attacks on young women who were his neighbors — a string of stabbings that began in Chicago in 1993 and ended in Los Angeles in 2008.

YOUR WEEKEND

— Get thee to a farmer’s market, and load up on peaches to make these eight great end-of-summer recipes — from sweet to savory to boozy.

— This weekend’s Baja Beach Fest in Rosarito, Mexico, has met its first goal: booking Puerto Rican superstars Bad Bunny and Ozuna on the same bill. Its next? Reviving a once-glamorous beach town.

— How the Instagrammed Playbill became the ultimate theater humblebrag.

— It’s harder than ever to run a restaurant in Los Angeles, as the costs of payroll, rent and ingredients all go up.

— Flying home from a summer vacation? We’ve compiled some tips to avoid jet lag.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

— With the president vilifying Latinos, their cultural representation is more important than ever, Carolina Miranda writes. And “rendering an entire segment of the population invisible makes the cultural arena complicit in a marginalization that is entering increasingly dangerous territory.”

— One of Hollywood’s last scenic painters can’t quite put down his brush.

— A new lawsuit filed by an ex-girlfriend of “That ‘70s Show” actor Danny Masterson along with three other women accuses him and the Church of Scientology of trying to silence their sexual assault accusations against him.

NATION-WORLD

— Police chiefs in the nation’s largest cities, including L.A., called on lawmakers to pass another assault-weapons ban.

— As protests grip Hong Kong, Trump’s reaction has ranged from muddled to indifferent, showing he’s not inclined to use his office to promote democracy and is more focused on trade than human rights.

BUSINESS

— The Mountain — a stunning 157-acre Beverly Hills property touted as the city’s finest undeveloped piece of land — almost went to foreclosure auction yesterday, before its owners took drastic measures to delay the sale.

— The U.S.-China trade war is starting to split tech’s decades-old supply chain in two.

— Payday lenders were about to face tough new rules protecting consumers, until Trump took office and said he’d undo them, columnist David Lazarus writes.

SPORTS

— The Dodgers think Rich Hill still can build enough stamina to start in the playoffs if his rehabilitation from a left forearm strain goes as planned.

— Megan Rapinoe and her U.S. Women’s National Team teammate Christen Press say any discussions with U.S. Soccer to end their lawsuit must start with equal pay.

— Recently acquired Laker DeMarcus Cousins has torn his ACL.

OPINION

— Southern California’s Joshua trees are threatened, and the Trump administration is refusing to admit it, the editorial board writes.

— For our mountain lions to survive, we must make it easier for them to cross freeways to reach open land, the board also says.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

— The history of crab rangoon wends its way from the anti-Chinese immigration laws of the late 19th century to postwar America’s obsession with tiki culture. It also makes us hungry. (Atlas Obscura)

— Desert farmers along the Colorado River are striking lucrative deals with big cities including Los Angeles. But as the water runs out, not everyone’s coming out a winner. The big reckoning is just seven years away, and it could remake how an entire region grows its food and uses water. (Bloomberg)

ONLY IN L.A.

That 30-cents-a-gallon gas we told you about yesterday — a ‘50s-era pricing promotion as part of the Emmy campaign for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — was shut down by police after causing backups on the 10 Freeway in Santa Monica for hours, as commuters flocked to the cheap fill-up. Throwback prices are nice, but how about some throwback traffic?

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