-
2 weeks ago | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
Through April 12 of this year, 39 pedestrians in the city of Los Angeles were killed in traffic collisions, according to LAPD Traffic Division Compstat data. During the same period a decade earlier, there were 26 deaths. In the intervening years, Los Angeles launched a program called Vision Zero, spearheaded by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti. Its goal: Eliminate all traffic deaths in the city by 2025. For pedestrians walking in a famously unwalkable city, the opposite has happened.
-
1 month ago | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
Last year, Los Angeles notched the highest number of animals being run over on record. This year isn’t looking any better. During 2024, the city received 32,398 requests to remove dead animals from the streets, according to records from the MyLA311 service data. That’s a 10% increase from the previous year and a 30% jump from five years prior. As any resident in the city has witnessed, the tally includes cats, possums, raccoons, squirrels and sometimes dogs or even coyotes.
-
2 months ago | 
editorandpublisher.com | Gabriel Kahn |Bob Miller
... because we can tell stories about every neighborhood, not just every city … the question is, how do we actually get [the stories] that last mile, right?
-
Sep 19, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
One hangover of the pandemic has been the stubbornly high number of collisions resulting from driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. It has contributed to the rising fatalities on Los Angeles roads, which last year outnumbered homicides in the city. This recent trend broke years of steady progress in reducing DUIs. In 2019, the U.S. recorded one of its lowest counts ever for DUI-related roadway fatalities since record-keeping began. That all ended with COVID.
-
Jul 24, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
(Created with Mid-Journey) The pace of new construction in Los Angeles is slowing, raising the specter of rising rents and a diminished ability to address the region’s chronic housing shortage. New building permits in the city of Los Angeles for the first half of 2024 totaled 1,831, a 10% drop from the same period a year earlier and down 60% from five years ago. Other indicators are also pointing toward a slowdown in construction.
-
Jun 28, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
For the first time in six years, Los Angeles was able to notch a small improvement in homelessness, as an array of county and city programs to move people off the streets and indoors began to make an impact. Homelessness remains the region’s most glaring humanitarian crisis. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported a drop of 0.3% countywide in its annual count (which takes place each January). The 2024 total of 75,312 is roughly the entire population of Upland.
-
Jun 26, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Jon Regardie |Gabriel Kahn
In the first five months of 2024, approximately 784,000 parking tickets were handed out in the city of Los Angeles. That is 6.4% more than in the same period last year. As always, failing to feed the meter or clearly read (sometimes confusing) signs packs a punch: More than 90% of the tickets this year carried fines of $50 or more. Yet there is a silver lining for drivers: Citation numbers remain below what they were before COVID-19. From Jan.
-
Mar 27, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Gabriel Kahn
Until earlier this month, the Los Angeles Police Department provided the public with an invaluable resource: records of every crime report in the city for the past 14 years. Numbering over 3 million records, it was a tally of every homicide, stolen car, hate crime, assault and act of vandalism. It detailed where it occurred and when, and identified information about the victim and any weapon used. In fact, it was one of the most thorough records of crime available in any major American city.
-
Mar 4, 2024 | 
xtown.la | Jon Regardie |Gabriel Kahn
Many people believe the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles is worsening. Although results from the 2024 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count will not be released for several months, one data stream shows that more people are speaking up about the situation on the streets. In 2023, the city’s MyLA311 system fielded 72,351 calls about encampments, according to publicly available service request data. That represents a 20% increase from the approximately 60,000 calls the year before.
-
Dec 12, 2023 | 
localmedia.org | Gabriel Kahn
Last month, WBEZ – the folks who bring you “Wait, wait don’t tell me!” – sent out 77 new newsletters on the same day. That’s one for every neighborhood in Chicago. Each newsletter featured unique statistics and charts about that specific neighborhood – stories on the number of traffic collisions, tallies of complaints about rat infestations, even data about recycling. But WBEZ staff members didn’t write 77 different newsletters. They wrote one.
