April 2009 Archives

Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, the man in charge of communicable disease control for Los Angeles County and a professor of epidemiology at UCLA, shares his thoughts about about how prepared Southern Cailfornia is for a flu pandemic.

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The New Village Charter School is not typical of most LAUSD high schools. New Village is a tiny, all-girl’s school where many of the students are either pregnant or parents, some are in foster care, some are gang related and a majority are not used to attending school on a regular basis.

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Marcos Villatoro’s sixteen-year-old daughter wants to move to New York and sell drawings on the street while learning how to survive from the homeless. In this week’s commentary, Villatorro preps himself to allow his children to follow their dreams and passions even if they take them to places he’s not comfortable with.

A Santa Monica entrepreneur has found a way to put shoes on the feet on thousands of poor children across the world—compliments of customers. For every pair that TOMS Shoes sells, another pair is given away to a poor child. Since 2006 nearly 150,000 pairs of shoes have been given away in Argentina, Ethiopia, South Africa and other countries. Founder, Blake Mycoske, also uses an eager army of interns/salespeople to spread the one-for-one idea across the country. Could merging capitalism with charity be a model for sustainable giving?

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When 16-year-old Zac Sunderland told his parents he wanted to sail solo around the world, they didn’t send him to his room. They pulled out a map and started plotting the route.

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$178,789 a year. That’s how much you’d be earning if you were an L.A. City Council member. In fact you’d be earning more than any other city council person in the nation. Higher than New Yorkers. It also puts them in the top 5% of wage earners in the U.S. Plus the raises happen automatically, so L.A. City Council members don’t actually have to vote themselves an increase. Nice.

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A 17-year-old California boy sails around the world solo.

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To commemorate National Poetry Month, SoCal story editor Saul Gonzalez interviews California’s newest poet laureate: Carol Muske-Dukes. Muske-Dukes is prepping to hit the California highways in a “Magic Bus,” full of poets who want to share their love for the written word with kids around the Golden State.

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Community members in South L.A. are trying to get a local liquor store to stop selling alcohol. Century Liquor is across the street from a new library and some neighbors say it’s dangerous to sell alcohol near a facility that caters to youth. The store owners say they’re being blamed for violence in the neighborhood that has little to do with their business. Let us know what you think, by commenting below.

This is the fourth chapter in our series on billboards in Los Angeles. What makes this one different than the other three is the personal nature of the story. Residents are fed up with waiting for city leaders to clean up the signs of LA, so they are taking matters into their own hands. Perhaps they were inspired by the protesters at the hoomes of AIG executives who took thousands in TARP money for fat bonuses. Whatever the reason, Westsiders took to the streets of Brentwood, a place, by the way, where I couldn’t find a single billboard. They displayed a U-Haul sized supergraphic outside the home of a building owner who allows supergraphics on his properties. It was a clever move by activists who are becoming creative in their ways of shaming sign companies and the city leaders into cleansing the city of billboard blight. Stay tuned to see what’s next.

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It’s hard to imagine that hundreds of thousands of Angelenos don’t have an ATM card, or a checking account, savings account, retirement account, etc. But it’s true. LA is the #1 city in the country for “unbanked” as they are called.

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The economy is down, but the number of encounters between people and coyotes on Los Angeles' streets and in its backyards seems to be going up, up, up. Have you encountered any coyotes recently? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you have any photographs, we'd love it if you'd add them to our Flickr photo pool.

Los Angeles has the highest percentage of "unbanked" in the nation. There are 300,000 households in L.A. who do not use banks. Instead they use cash, paying too much at check cashing stores and payday lenders. There are twice as many payday lenders, pawn shops and check cashers in L.A. as there are banks and credit unions. Minority communities are especially "bank poor." But things are changing. Val Zavala reports on the launch of a campaign to move the "unbanked" into the financial mainstream. She visits a home where a community organizer is teaching Spanish-speakers about the benefits of banks. She goes to a community center where tax day is a chance to get the "unbanked" banked. And some banks have already discovered that opening branches in low income areas yields surprising success for the company and the community.

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Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa has been silent on the subject of billboards until we caught up with him last week. You may be surprised to hear how he wants residents to do the job of city employees when it comes to cleaning up the signs of LA. And those signs are getting out of control and are chasing some residents out of town.

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In southern California, coyote attacks against animals and people have been on the rise in recent years. Though not at crisis levels, this rapid increase raises important questions about how seriously to take the coyote threat. How much danger are our pets in? Should we worry about the safety of our youngest children?

We hear from state and local animal safety experts who explain why coyotes behave as they do, and how human development into their habitats has paradoxically increased the coyotes’ numbers. We’ll also see why trapping and killing coyotes may be counterproductive …and find out ways we can minimize the danger and frequency of coyote attacks against our cats and dogs. We’ll hear from a cross-section of Angelenos who’ve lost their pets to coyotes, as well as a mother whose two-year old son was attacked in a playground. The bottom line is that coyotes are here to stay, and that southern Californians have to find new ways of living with these unique wild animals.

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Should LAUSD be spending so much money during this recession, especially when it’s threatening to lay off thousands of teachers?

Marc will often perform concerts at nursing homes and schools. And he performs concerts for charity. He raised more than $800,000 for the victims of the earthquake in China. I asked what it feels like to be so well-known.

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Cortines on using public schools from community events and activities:

On LAUSD's use of eminent domain to build new schools, resulting in the displacement of homeowners:

On the economy, the teacher's union, and layoffs:

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 Marcos Villatoro shares his fear of baseball and how he overcame it for his children's sake

His mother loved classical music and played it for her son even before he was born. At two Marc Yu started playing piano and gave his first recital. Now he travels the world on concert tours, has played with China’s legendary Lang Lang, and appears on national talk shows with a personality as sparkling as his piano performances. But can a remarkable child have a “normal” childhood? And how will this phenom navigate the treacherous waters of adolescence? Val Zavala spends a day with Marc Yu and his mother to discover the boy beneath the prodigy.

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Despite substantial budget problems, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is in the midst of what may be the largest public works project in U.S. history: a $20.1 billion expansion project to build new schools across the city. Should the District be spending all that money during this recession, especially when it’s threatening to lay off thousands of teachers? And will there even be enough students to fill all the new classrooms? Thousands of people throughout the LA area have even lost their homes to make way for new schools they think might not be needed—people like the Villanueva family who show us the site of their former home.

We talk to LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines and other School District employees to find out more about the New School Construction Program.

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Despite looming teacher layoffs and budget problems, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is in the midst of possibly the largest public works project in U.S. history: a $20.1 billion expansion project to build new schools across the city. Watch Thursday, 8PM.

On this week’s “Postcards from SoCal,” the web team visits the Echo Park Time Travel Mart on Sunset Blvd. The store sells products that one might find if they traveled waaaay back in time: canned mammoth meat, chain mail, leeches and donuts from 1985. But the kitschy store is really a way to support a non-profit tutoring and writing center housed in the same building, called 826LA. Time travel and tutoring all in one postcard.

To volunteer at 826LA, check out their website.

The grim news about our economic crisis just keeps coming. Makes you want to get away and forget your troubles. Where better than SoCal’s favorite suburb: Vegas, baby! That’s the thing though, in this age of belt tightening and financial comeupance how will a city built around spending, escapism, reckless gambling and over the top glitz, survive? Sure what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but when it’s your earnings that stay there, where’s the fun—let alone justification—in that? Then, in February, President Obama made a specific reference to how inappropriate it would be for a company seeking bailout money to hold a meeting in Las Vegas. And just like one of those old hotels imploding, convention bookings plunged pretty much overnight.

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Forget Nevada. With its Indian casinos, card clubs, state lottery and racetracks, gambling is a high-stakes, multi-billion dollar industry in California. Story editor, Saul Gonzalez talks with gambling industry expert I. Nelson Rose about the business of betting in the Golden State.

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Brian Frazer thinks ending March Madness pools will help get the economy back on track. He sites employment consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas who claim that lost productivity due to the 19-day event will cost employers more than 3.8 billion dollars. Or, and Frazer likes this idea better, “we can introduce versions of March Madness pools to other countries that are more productive than us, to bring them down to our level.”

Brian Frazer writes the Hollywoodland column for Los Angeles Magazine.

After our original broadcast of Is Anybody Listening viewers nationwide opened their hearts and wallets and made life in Pomona a little bit nicer. We’ll bring you up to date on what’s happened to the kids of Village Academy High School.

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Foreclosures, stalled funding, decreased revenue... things are bad enough in SoCal, but we’ve been hearing that things are even worse in Sin City - and they were supposed to be recession-proof. Las Vegas placed all its bets on bigger and brighter and brassier. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but are the odds against Las Vegas too high? We wondered how Las Vegas, often referred to as a “suburb of Los Angeles,” was faring in this economically challenging climate. We sent correspondent and Vegas-phile John Ridley to find out.

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