CITY BLUES - It is a familiar, exhausting Los Angeles routine.
First, a property sits vacant for years. Then come the squatters, the trash, and the neighborhood complaints. The City issues paper citations that are ignored. This brings up the following questions: Did the local councilmember ignore the escalation? And, did the Mayor’s office look the other way?
Then, inevitably, comes the fire.
Once the smoke rises and local news cameras arrive, the politicians suddenly wake up. They rush to the scene, issue emergency orders, order Building & Safety crews to erect temporary security fences, and hold press conferences to tell us how deeply they care.
We saw this playbook unfold at the vacant Cielo Hotel building on Schrader Boulevard in Hollywood back in May 2024. And this past week, we watched the exact same rerun play out when a fire erupted in Studio City on Babcock Avenue in the early morning hours of Wednesday, August 26, with a second abandoned lot on nearby Laurel Grove Avenue sitting as yet another high-risk, unmitigated fuse waiting in the wings.
The City of Los Angeles was fully aware of the squatter hazards at all of these locations. Yet, in two instances, it took outright fires, TV news crews, and rising neighborhood outrage to force law enforcement, code enforcement, and elected officials to do their basic jobs.
The Anatomy of a Rerun: Hollywood to Studio City
The systemic nature of this failure makes the political posturing so egregious.
In Hollywood, an abandoned 1915 brick building on Schrader Boulevard sat red-tagged and vacant after being structurally compromised during adjacent construction. It became an immediate magnet for unauthorized occupancy. The City did nothing until May 19, 2024, when a massive fire tore through the structure, requiring 127 LAFD firefighters to extinguish it while arson investigators tracked 10 other nearby fires that broke out at the exact same time.
Fast forward to Studio City in Council District 4. KTLA 5 highlighted not just one, but two abandoned nuisance properties in the neighborhood owned by the same entity: the fire site on Babcock Avenue and a second derelict parcel on Laurel Grove Avenue.
Neighbors had logged formal code enforcement complaints regarding illegal dumping, unpermitted structures, and squatter encampments across these lots dating all the way back to 2021. For five years, the City did nothing.
On August 26, 2026, a 3:30 a.m. blaze swept through the Babcock lot, destroying makeshift structures and nearly consuming a neighbor's garage.
Only after KTLA 5 broadcast live from the scorched neighborhood did the City machinery move. Within hours, Mayor Karen Bass called into the morning show, dispatched Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) crews, and issued an emergency summary abatement order to fence the lot, promising to bill the owner.
Two Mayoral Candidates, One Shared Failure
What followed the Studio City fire wasn't governance; it was a bitter, defensive political circus between Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman, both of whom are vying for the city's top seat.
Both politicians want voters to believe they were helpless bystanders caught off guard. Reality check: Both appear to be completely asleep at the wheel.
Mayor Karen Bass defensively shrugs off criticism by reminding Angelenos during the most recent (and perhaps only) debate that she has only been Mayor for three years. But Bass isn't a novice taking her first civics class. She is a seasoned political veteran with decades of high-level legislative experience: a former Speaker of the California State Assembly and a six-term U.S. Representative. For a leader with that pedigree to claim she couldn't get her own city departments (LADBS, LAFD, LAPD) to coordinate routine nuisance abatement across multiple properties over three years (until a TV station aired a live broadcast) is embarrassing.
Bass publicly scolded Raman on air, saying, "The councilwoman has my cell phone number... She knows she can pick up that phone and call me." That statement alone is an admission of operational failure: in Bass’s Los Angeles, municipal enforcement doesn't run through functioning systems - it depends on personal cell phone favors. Which begs the obvious question: Is this the model of executive governance Angelenos are expected to accept? A "call-me" Mayor whose city departments only move when an insider dials her personal line?
Councilmember Nithya Raman attempted her own deflection, issuing statements claiming her office "sounded the alarm" and flagged the Studio City properties to the Mayor's office back in November 2025. But sending an email nine months ago and throwing your hands up when nothing happens isn't leadership, it's a confession of governing surrender.
Raman isn't just a backbencher. She is an urban planner with degrees from Harvard and MIT, serving her second term on the Los Angeles City Council. She has chaired the Housing and Homelessness Committee and sat on the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee. She commands immense legislative authority and direct access to the City Attorney's Special Enforcement Unit to declare public nuisances.
If a second-term Councilmember sitting on key land-use committees cannot get dangerous squatter lots on Babcock and Laurel Grove secured in her own district without relying on direct intervention from the Mayor, what is she actually accomplishing at City Hall? And if Raman were elected Mayor, who would she call when code enforcement fails in a neighborhood? Will she simply be another "call-me" Mayor running a city on personal favors instead of functioning departments?
The $15 Million Paper Trail They Both Ignored
Neither Bass nor Raman can claim this specific property owner caught them by surprise.
Both the Hollywood hotel and the Studio City properties on Babcock and Laurel Grove belong to the same corporate footprint: Shaun Tan and his registered entity, Haller LLC (CA SOS Entity #201411410130).
City Hall has been locked in an intense, high-stakes legal battle with Tan since June 2022, when Tan and Haller LLC filed a $15 million inverse condemnation lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and developer Thomas Safran & Associates (Consolidated Case No. 22STCV11937 / 22STCV19257). City Attorneys and inspectors have actively litigated this case in Superior Court for four years, processing discovery motions as recently as June 2026.
City Hall was intimately aware of Shaun Tan, aware of his red-tagged vacant properties, and aware of the fire history. The municipal record was right in front of them. They simply chose not to act.
The Illusion of Choice at the Ballot Box
As Bass and Raman trade insults over call logs and bureaucratic emails, Angelenos are left with a sobering, exasperating realization.
When it comes to electing the leader of Los Angeles, voters are routinely presented with very little real choice. We are forced to choose between political incumbents who treat municipal neglect as someone else’s job until the cameras start rolling, and seasoned insiders who govern by press release rather than proactive policy.
When neighbors are left to fight off fires, rising insurance rates, and squatter hazards because City Hall only moves for a news crew, the political system isn't just dysfunctional - it has completely ignored the public. If Karen Bass and Nithya Raman want to convince Angelenos they deserve to lead this city, they need to wake up and start governing before the next neighborhood goes up in flames.
(Ziggy Kruse Blue and Bob Blue are frequent contributors to CityWatchLA. They can be reached at [email protected])
