Hillel Aron

Michael Weinstein peers out the window of his corner office on the 21st floor. Hollywood is growing all around him. In every direction, there are construction cranes, dirt pits and street closures. "It's just ungodly," he says. Two blocks to the north, on the east side of Argyle, a construction......

It's been said (not so much in these words) that Los Angeles is a big sprawling mess of a city. That's bad if you need to drive from Silver Lake to Marina del Rey on a Wednesday afternoon. But it's good if you like surprises. L.A. is complicated! It has......

Los Angeles has new policy for dealing with its homelessness crisis: containment.  Not contain, as in, keep more people from becoming homeless by building more housing. Contain, as in, making sure homeless encampments don't become veritable sidewalk favelas.  Yesterday, City Council voted to rejigger the rule on how much stuff......

Hating Los Angeles will never not be popular.  Why, just last week Gawker's Hamilton Nolan referred to us with the following headline: "Second-Class City Is First-Class Hellhole, of Traffic." Hey, at least we don't owe Hulk Hogan $115 million! (Too soon?) But Nolan didn't stop there. He wrote that Angelenos......

In November, L.A. County denizens will enjoy the privilege of voting on a new, half-cent sales tax to fund $120 billion worth of public transit, doubling L.A.'s existing rail network. Lots of people are psyched (though not everyone) about a train through the Sepulveda pass, offering at least the possibility of......

If you have an unpaid traffic ticket that was due before January 1, 2013, you're probably eligible for a steep discount. That's thanks to a proposal by state Senator Bob Hertzberg (aka that politician who's always hugging everyone), which was integrated into the budget last year. Under the new law,......

It's one of Los Angeles' most enduring cliches: The 405 freeway is the worst; it is less a roadway and more a merciless, elongated parking lot into which no hope of mobility can merge. "The freeway's congestion problems are legendary, leading to jokes that the road was numbered 405 because traffic......

Richard Alarcon, a man who has taken the term "career politician" to new and hilarious extremes, is running for Congress. "It was a very last minute decision," Alarcon tells L.A. Weekly. "Running against an incumbent is not easy. And also, given my recent legal troubles, we had to give it......

A new paper published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review argues that short-term rentals, like the kind on offer at Airbnb, are exacerbating L.A.'s housing crisis. The paper's author, graduate student Dayne Lee, found that Airbnb "decreases the supply of housing and spurs displacement, gentrification, and segregation." Recent studies have......

My friend Rich took the above photo in Silver Lake on Sunday. That's a mural by local artist Dallas Clayton outside Dangerbird Records, at the corner of Sunset and Lucile near Sunset Junction. It's one of those highly Instagram-able pieces of street art that some will find charming and others......