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An affordable housing complex for Hollywood workers grapples with tenant complaints
Dozens of tenants at an affordable housing complex for arts and entertainment workers are in rebellion amid a dispute over a rent increase and other alleged issues at the Hollywood property.
A group of residents at the Hollywood Arts Collective released a statement Thursday accusing Thomas Safran & Associates, the property management company, and the Entertainment Community Fund, which helped develop the project, of luring them into signing leases under false pretenses.
“After just one year of existence, tenants have been advised by property management, Thomas Safran & Associates (TSA), that their rent WILL BE increased every year,” the resident group said in a press release.
“This is in spite of multiple false verbal promises made to prospective tenants during the application process that rent would not be raised, or if it were to be, that the raises would be minimal, at 2-3%. … The struggle to pursue a dream in Hollywood led many of the tenants to a living nightmare.”
The management company denies misleading tenants and contends that the terms of residency, including potential rent increases, were clearly outlined in the contracts that they signed. Jordan Pynes, president of TSA, called the tenant uprising “very disheartening” in a statement.
“We are saddened and disappointed that some residents of the Hollywood Arts Collective are unhappy with the property,” Pynes said.
“TSA is committed to providing exceptional affordable housing to residents in Hollywood and around Southern California, and the assertion that we did not properly disclose how the affordable Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program works for this project is simply not true.”
Keith McNutt, executive director of the Entertainment Community Fund’s Western Region, said in a statement that the nonprofit organization “remains dedicated to supporting the performing arts and entertainment community at The Cicely Tyson Residential Building (part of The Hollywood Arts Collective)” in collaboration with the property manager.
This type of quarrel is common at Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties, according to Anya Lawler, a legislative advocate for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.
“The way that rents are set in LIHTC properties does not guarantee that tenants’ rent will stay affordable over time, and tenants are often unaware of that,” Lawler said.
“It can be really jarring to find out that they’re living in an affordable property, and their rent … can continue to go up in ways that they can’t afford. And it’s a real problem. The whole system is in need of rethinking and reform.”
Billed as a haven for struggling artists, the complex began housing residents in April 2023. The 10-story building on Schrader Boulevard boasts 151 units.
Applicants had to prove they work in a creative field and make 80% or less of the area median income. Rent prices were set between 30% and 50% of tenants’ monthly income at move-in.
After TSA notified residents in August of an impending 7% rent increase, nearly 40 tenants emailed letters protesting the rent spike and airing grievances, including malfunctioning fire alarms and elevator breakdowns.
“As a working low-income artist, this news is financially devastating, and represents a break of confidence in the mission that the Hollywood Arts Collective claims to represent,” the letters read.
Elena Theisner, vice president of property management at TSA, responded to residents’ concerns by scheduling a community meeting. She cited rising operational costs as the primary reason for the rent increase in an email to tenants.
Following the meeting, Theisner told The Times on Sept. 25 that TSA had reached a compromise with residents by agreeing to lower the rent increase to 4%, schedule an informational session and hold quarterly meetings with tenants.
Some residents, however, were not satisfied.
On Oct. 30, the newly formed Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn. emailed TSA and the Entertainment Community Fund a list of demands, including providing new accommodations for residents with disabilities, covering the cost of utilities, enhancing building security and abolishing the rent increase altogether.
Julia Mata, a resident and organizer at the Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn., told The Times that 39 residents signed the demand letter.
On Nov. 5, the building managers provided written responses to each of the association’s demands. They stuck to the 4% rent increase, explaining that the collective is not rent controlled or project-based Section 8 housing, which keeps tenants’ rent payments capped at roughly 30% of their income.
“This is not unique to this building — annual rent increases are normal and to be expected at Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects,” the response from management read.
The building managers also declined to cover residents’ utility costs beyond existing discounts or provide additional security measures. They were more amenable when it came to disability accommodations and community amenities — granting some and agreeing to consider others.
Central to the conflict are various artist-friendly facilities — such as a recording studio, galleries and a theater — that residents say were never provided or were falsely advertised as perks.
McNutt said in a statement that a number of services will be available to Hollywood Arts Collective residents starting in 2025. Those services will include career and financial wellness workshops.
McNutt added that the fund is working with the city to begin construction on the Rita Moreno Arts Building — a structure next to the apartment complex with a 71-seat theater to be rented for rehearsals, performances, film screenings and other purposes.
Targeted for completion in 2026, the arts building is not intended to be “a direct amenity solely for residential tenants” — though residents may be permitted to use the theater when it isn’t being loaned out, according to a document provided to The Times.
“This has been a much more lengthy process than anticipated,” McNutt said in a statement, “but will deliver more wonderful amenities for the local community in Hollywood, including a beautiful new theater, two gallery spaces for non-profit arts partners and our new training center.”
The building management team is scheduled to meet with disabled tenants Tuesday evening to review their requests, which included accommodations for individual units and more accessible parking spots. The Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn. is expected to hold a news conference Wednesday.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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