Paloma Esquivel

Lupe Breard remembers coming to live in the Queen Anne Victorian house in Echo Park with her mother and siblings when she was a child. The memory is still vivid decades later, she says, because she didn’t want to move there — until she saw the chimney and told herself Santa Claus could bring presents down it at Christmas. She’d never had a fireplace before. She has stayed ever since, raising her three children in the historic home and watching as the neighborhood changed from a quiet, under-the-…

On a cold Thursday afternoon, outreach workers Bianca Lopez and La Bomba Jackson knocked on doors at a South Los Angeles apartment complex, in search of someone at risk of losing their home. Lopez and Jackson, who work with We Are L.A., a program of the nonprofit Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, were looking to help tenants avoid eviction by offering resources such as legal assistance and case management. They were armed with a list of buildings where residents have received eviction notices in rec…

In 2022, not long after a new owner bought the Highland Park rental home where Ana Lopez, 66, lives with her husband, the tenants began receiving offers to leave. At first it was about $22,000, she said. One of her neighbors took the offer and left. But Lopez, desperate to stay in the rent-controlled home where she has lived for more than two decades and pays $800 a month, repeatedly turned down the offers, even when the amount increased to $100,000. After taxes, she felt, the money was not enou…

The eviction courtrooms on the sixth floor of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown were bustling this month, as they have been all year. In one, a woman and her children said they were fighting to hold on to their $750-per-month rent-stabilized apartment near SoFi Stadium, worried that their housing costs could triple if they had to leave. In another, an elderly woman facing eviction was accompanied by her son-in-law, who was also, separately, being evicted from his home. Eviction cases across L…

Jovita Cuevas comes home every day to her 83-year-old Koreatown apartment building, greeted by the signs of abandonment. She passes overgrown rose bushes lining the driveway, boarded-up bay windows on the first floor, No Trespassing signs and a notice, dated 2017, that the complex is set to be demolished. On the second floor, she walks down a dark hallway to the door with a sliver of light through a crack in the upper right corner. This is where Cuevas, 64, and her son Leonardo, 25, live as the…

Four decades ago, during the heyday of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in West Oakland, hundreds would show up for worship on Sundays. The grand sanctuary of the historic Black church, with its stained glass windows and elegant wooden pews, got so full, if you arrived five minutes late it was standing room only. These days, as many Black residents have left amid the high cost of housing, the services are largely empty, save for a couple dozen faithful who return week after week, some of them from fara…

At first, when she became homeless at 59 last year, Laura Garciaros felt lucky to have her motor home, a 1989 Mallard Sprinter she bought with the help of friends. It ran and the A/C worked. She found a spot that felt somewhat safe, just off a street lined with RVs near Hollywood Burbank Airport and parked next to a shady tree near a business where the owners let her fill her water jugs from a spout and plug her coffee maker into an outdoor outlet. But it wasn’t long before she was anxious to le…

The poll suggests broad public support for policies aimed at reducing the spread of the coronavirus in schools, even as protests against mask and vaccine mandates garner attention.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona spoke with the Los Angeles Times about pressing school issues as the new academic year approaches.

L.A. County health officials on Saturday reported 3,628 new COVID-19 cases and 53 more related deaths, high numbers that in part reflect reporting delays in the state’s electronic laboratory system.