Archive: Economy

The blogger at Here in Van Nuys visited with some of the homeless parked in 15 vans, campers and RVs at North Hollywood Park.

Units that are really just vacation rental businesses will no longer be allowed to take in paying guests unless the resident is there too.

"The future of California is tied to the future of the Latino community in California," he tells Los Angeles Magazine. "If we don't make capital available to people with ability...our country is poorer."

The former NBC 4 reporter will host a monthly show on the economic life of Southern California on PBS SoCal. The first episode airs Thursday evening at 5:30 p.m.

Longtime employes of Junior's Deli at the Rancho Park end of Westwood Boulevard were told today that the Westside landmark will close before the end of the year. A rent hike from the landlord is to blame, along with slumping business, say the sons of Junior's late founder.

The leadership of the clerks union that has been striking the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach agreed Tuesday night to take a settlement deal to its membership. The deal was announced by Mayor Villaraigosa shortly after federal mediators arrived at the negotiating session.

The city council of San Bernardino voted today to seek bankruptcy protection after being told the city faces a $45 million deficit and might not be able to make payroll next month.

Judge Otis Wright II, a George W. Bush appointee who was confirmed in 2007, has filed for personal bankruptcy, "a rare thing for a federal judge." His home in Rancho Palos Verdes will be put on the market.

With consumer spending on the rise, especially among affluent shoppers, it's little wonder that merchants are starting to compete for the most desirable locations.

Kai Ryssdal opened Wednesday's "Marketplace" from American Public Media with a stunning personal announcement — he was leaving as host of the show.

Mr. Cecil's Ribs on Pico is gone and Orris is going. But there are a couple of fresh new entries in Westwood Village.

Ink and Paper spends nine lovely minutes at adjacent shops out of another time in the Westlake district, near MacArthur Park.

Tom Petruno, the longtime markets columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said back in September that he would be leaving the paper right around now to try out some other pursuits.

In a piece titled My Store Just Died, Jeffrey Miller writes at Zócalo Public Square about being manager of "the last great independent video rental store in the city of Los Angeles."

Marcos Villatoro, the author and former KPFK host who lives in the Valley, made a short video for PBS on the sorry state of the American garage sale.

Los Angeles Times veteran pressman and blogger Ed Padgett says the forecast for fall is bad, and worse in the long run if you like the printed paper.

My radio column tonight on KCRW: the new poverty numbers, signs that a new recession may be ahead and the death on a Hollywood street of homeless former basketball star Lewis Brown.

The La Brea Avenue video rental store will stop renting Saturday and put everything on sale. Doors close at the end of the September.

Fraiche is hosting a seven-course wine dinner next Wednesday that's not for the unemployed or those whose 401-k's have cratered.

Pomona had apparently gotten used to being the fifth most populous city in Los Angeles County. Falling behind Palmdale and Lancaster hurts.

Ann Brenoff writes on the L.A. Times op-ed page that "without question, the recession changed my life for the better."

I'm just catching up with this from last week's LA Weekly.

Australia passed the United Kingdom and Japan to become the No. 1 feeder of overseas tourists to Los Angeles in 2010.

Mark at LA Biz Observed has been watching the slow demise of the Borders chain, and in particular the Westwood Boulevard store near his home. Now Gendy Alimurung of the...

Related Cos. said this week that it plans to request a two-year extension of its current February 2011 deadline to begin construction on the big Grand Avenue Project, citing the economy.

Since the real estate bubble popped, "ideas have disappeared from the political landscape of Los Angeles," Jerry Sullivan of the Garment & Citizen argues in a piece at New Geography.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Father Gregory Boyle are scheduled to chat with Patt Morrison on KPCC at 1:35 p.m., talking about the financial collapse of L.A's best-known anti-gang organization.

Father Gregory Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, said the anti-gang organization on Thursday laid off 300 people, including all senior administrators. Homegirl Cafe will stay open.

Tom Gilmore, whose adapative reuse projects in Downtown have benefited from a favorable loan from the city of Los Angeles, is facing a financial pinch and has gone back to the city for a new loan, the Garment & Citizen says.

A study and ranking by Forbes and NewGeography.com has put Los Angeles in the bottom ten of large U.S. cities for job growth. It's the first time L.A. has fallen so low in the rankings.

In a day of bad news on City Hall's financial crisis, Controller Wendy Greuel grabbed the biggest headline.

"This American Life" revisited the demise of the former General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, where an entrenched work force never came around to more efficient and reliable Japanese-style methods. The plant closed in 1992.

An average half-hour of L.A. local news devotes almost three minutes to crime stories, but only 22 seconds to all kinds of local government coverage, according to a big new study by the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

The city's lower credit rating, while expected, "will almost assuredly increase the city’s cost for borrowing money."

No decisions were made, but there was a lot of noise — Mayor Villaraigosa spoke to the City Council for more than two hours — and of course the deficit grew a bit more.

Model Home," the first novel by Eric Puchner, is set during the Reagan presidency and tells the story of a family — Camille, Warren and their three kids — who move from Wisconsin to Southern California so Warren can get into the real estate game. Bad move.

It now costs more to insure Californian municipal debt against default than it does bonds issued by the central Asian country satirized in "Borat."

My weekly Friday afternoon segment on KCRW tied together the Chicago flutist's farewell finger at the L.A. Phil, Michael Brand's departure from the Getty and the end of the Aerospace...

Northrop Grumman's decision to leave Los Angeles marks the end of an era, say scholars William Deverell, Daniel Lewis and Peter Westwick in a Visiting Bloggers post at LA Observed.

Newport Beach philanthropist David Gelbaum has given $94 million to various programs of the American Civil Liberties Union since 2005, another $48 million to the Sierra Club Foundation, and a...

Donna Myrow, the founder of the teen-written paper LA Youth, was having lunch with book agent Charlotte Gusay when security guards at Farmers Market ordered her not to give her...

Rick Caruso, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission when William Bratton was hired to run the LAPD, argues in a Visiting Blogger post at LA Observed that now is...

More of editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg's contributions to LA Sketchbook are in the archive....

It's Wednesday and what? No new outbursts to report? Emotional ones, no. But two more water mains burst in the San Fernando Valley overnight. And what do water officials have...

It's bad enough when a Malibu couple gets creamed by Bernie's outrageousness. It's even worse when the couple has to give up its Malibu Colony home to Wells Fargo. But...

The new hotel going up across from the Pantages opens its recruitment officer, or "Talent Center," this morning at 11. "Available positions range from Whatever/Whenever Agents to Style Supervisors, from...

© Steve Greenberg. May not be reused without permission of the artist Check out more of Greenberg's LA Sketchbook cartoons in the archive....

Steve Greenberg picks up on the lost story of the California budget mess. The crunch and the political fallout of kids being kept out of college in California — and...

After the U.S. waived the visa requirement for South Korean tourists, and Seoul loosened controls on foreign investment, Koreatown was expected to take off. Instead, the Los Angeles Business Journal...

Terranea, which opened last week on the old Marineland site in Rancho Palos Verdes, and the Resort at Pelican Hill near Newport Beach may be the last big resort compounds...

L.A. Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that his life as a fast-food consumer pretty much ended once his kids could drive. But even back then, "I knew that all...

Parking at the Getty Museum will rise to $15 a car on July 1. The Getty likes to call itself a museum accessible to the whole city, but it's starting...

Rachel Uranga left the Daily News last year and now, in her 30s, has left Echo Park to move back in with her father. She writes about it in a...

Downtown has just a single construction crane left on the job, at the Ritz-Carlton tower at L.A. Live. How's that for a sign of the recession. "In the summer of...

Boutiques and other small shops are closing like mad on Montana Avenue and on West 3rd Street, Melrose Avenue and Robertson Boulevard, the L.A. Business Journal observes in a front-page...

Add the Register in Orange County to the list of local media imposing unpaid time off on their workers. Staffers were told today to take off five days between April...

While in Pomona today, President Obama met with students from the Village Academy High Schoool who had made a video about the recession. KCET's SoCal Connected has a story on...

Mark Lacter's Tuesday recession reports on KPCC keep getting better — and more ominous — as the situation worsens. Today I woke to Mark talking about the bleak picture for...

Virgin Megastores' five remaining retail stores will close by this summer, individuals inside the company told TheWrap today. The site says that Virgin Entertainment Group CEO Simon Wright announced the...

The economic downturn is hitting the pro bono legal sector hard, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California imposing layoffs for the first time, today's L.A. Daily Journal...

Staffers at the Daily Breeze came in to find the writing on the wall — OK, technically, the memo on the men's room door. The memo from Media News Group...

Clout positioned itself as a lifestyle magazine mostly for gay and lesbian couples. The passage of Proposition 8, to go with the slumping economy, apparently cinched Clout's demise. From an...

Mark Lacter has been following the afternoon's developments on Sam Zell preparing to seek bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, if he can't renegotiate the loans that allowed him...

I'm hearing at least three more newsroom exits today. Not sure where that leaves the Daily News, other than very thin. * Added: Glenn Whipp, film writer and critic for...

Dodgers owner Jamie McCourt said yesterday the team isn't sure it should spend on free agents this off-season because the big bucks might turn off fans concerned about the economy....

Our own Bill Boyarsky, writing at the L.A. Times Op-Ed page, says the crashing economy and the voters' approval of so many funding measures on the November ballot provides an...