Los Angeles

I wrote last week about the 67 percent annual increase in first-time residential foreclosures in New York City in July. That's a sharp jump, no doubt. But compare it to Miami and Los Angeles, and it starts to pale.

In L.A., foreclosures jumped 249 percent annually to 5,982 in July, according to a report from research firm PropertyShark, which defines a first-time foreclosure as a property scheduled to have an initital auction take place during the month. In Miami, foreclosures were up 137 percent annually in July to 1,099.

The total number of first-time July foreclosures in New York was 338.

Los Angeles had 17 times New York City's number of new residential foreclosures in May, according to a new report from research site PropertyShark. The nation's second-largest city had 5,308 new foreclosures in May, compared with 313 in New York.

The report defined a new foreclosure as a property scheduled for a foreclosure auction during the month.

The L.A. comparison's the good news. And so is the fact that the number of new foreclosures in New York dropped in May for the second consecutive month, falling 4.86 percent from April.

However! Compared with last spring, foreclosures in the city jumped. The May 2008 number represents a nearly 50 percent increase from the number in May 2007. As the chart above shows, there's been a general increase in new foreclosures in 2008, especially in Queens and Staten Island.  read more »

Los Angeles' residential forceclosure rate in April was 13 times that of New York's, according to a new report from PropertyShark (PDF).

Los Angeles recorded 4,540 newly scheduled foreclosure auctions in April, up an astounding 466.8 percent from the number in April 2007. New York City recorded 329 foreclosure auctions in April, up 84.8 percent from April 2007, but down from March of this year. New York's foreclosure rate per household in April was 0.011 percent. L.A.'s was 0.145 percent.  read more »

Mocking Los Angeles is a time-honored pastime for New Yorkers. We cling to the L.A. that Woody Allen imagined in Annie Hall: a culturally barren land of liposuction and libidos, a crass, one-industry town full of phonies. Sure, the weather is better on the West Coast, we tell ourselves as we trudge the city’s sidewalks for the ridiculous procession of slushy weeks from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day. But look at the trade-offs they make in sunny California: traffic, pollution, sub-par museums, second-rate theaters, no seasons.

Lately, the younger generation of Manhattanites seems to be rejecting the L.A. stereotypes perpetuated by their parents. Some plan to settle back in New York after their spells on the West Coast, but others have come to call L.A. home.  read more »

We all know one—that friend or relative who split New York City recently for the common cascade of reasons: high home prices, high rents, high living costs, high noise, high stress, or too much getting high or all of the above.

And when these people exit our five boroughs, they really exit: City Comptroller Bill Thompson’s office analyzed the Census Bureau’s recent American Community Survey and found that about two-thirds of the 190,150 people age 25 to 64 who left in 2005 moved not to the green suburbs to get just a daily break from the city grind, but outside of the metro area altogether.

Nearly a quarter of them split for the South, with 14.9 percent settling in Florida and 5 percent in Georgia, especially Atlanta. (And, no, the Florida settlers weren’t all ancient—far from it: over 90 percent were under 65.) Another 4.4 percent went to California. Only about 36 percent settled in New Jersey or elsewhere in New York state.

About 40 percent left big-city life altogether, opting out of the metro region as well as out of those large cities that traditionally compete with New York. L.A.? It claimed 2.6 percent of our people; Boston, even less at 2 percent. Wheezing Philadelphia (motto: Please Let Us Be Your Sixth Borough! We Got Rid of the Rocky Statue!)—claimed 3 percent; San Francisco and Chicago less than 2 percent. Atlanta led all cities with 4.5 percent. The rest of the percentages were dotted all over American exurbia.

In the end, of course, who went where depends on why. New Yorkers with younger children were more likely than childless people to leave the city, according to the comptroller, and those that left and stayed in the metro region—most of them still work in the city, trading the costs of living here for longer commutes.  read more »

Metro editor Joe Sexton has been busy answering reader questions the past few days. Here's a good one:

Q. Last year, the Metro section published a one-week series of daily articles (on Sept. 29, Sept. 30, Oct. 1, Oct. 2, and Oct. 3, 2006) about a toilet-related controversy at a chess match in Elista, Russia, in the republic of Kalmykia.

Is Kalmykia considered part of the New York metropolitan area?

-- Max

A. Dear Max: I have always considered Kalmykia to be the city's sixth borough.

Sexton was joking, of course! And although Philadelphia received the most attention in the Times as New York's best fake sixth borough, there have been several others in recent years: Palm Beach, Washington Heights, Miami, Hudson County, Nassau County, Los Angeles, and the Middle East.

Need more proof the Manhattan housing market's unique?

While inventory here dropped in the first quarter of 2007, inventory in markets like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., increased. In the quarter ending March 31 in Manhattan, the inventory of unsold homes on the market was down 0.2 percent from the quarter before, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel. (It was also down more than 14 percent from the first quarter of 2006.)

In other markets, though, inventory went up--sometimes by a lot--during recent months. The Wall Street Journal reports that inventory in Los Angeles was up 12.8 percent from February through March, and, in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was up 12.2 percent. In fact, the inventories of unsold homes in 18 major metropolitan areas, not including New York, was up 6.5 percent in March from a month earlier.

- Tom Acitelli

Should the L.A. Times be loaning out their offices to Donald Trump and his would-be Apprentices, in order to create a Sunday promotional supplement?

Obviously, last night's Apprentice was taped long before Grazergate. But still, with the commotion over the Times selling out to celebrities for promotional purposes, it was an unhappy coincidence.

Thankfully, publisher David Hiller didn't meet with Donald. Instead, he was greeted by executives from SmartMouth, the company that the two teams would be working for.

For anyone interested: Team Kinetic created the more eye-catching supplement, won the task, and got to see their work in the Sunday Times. They did not guest edit the op-ed pages.

--Michael Calderone

Next Year in … Antigua? New Yorkers Flee City for Tropical Seders    read more »

Next Year in … Antigua? New Yorkers Flee City for Tropical Seders    read more »

The night of April 8 is going be a big, big, BIG one for HBO.  read more »

Showtime’s Sapphic shag-fest The L Word will air its season finale Sunday night, capping off,  read more »

• Celebrities like living amongst celebrities, just like non-celebrities like living amongst celebrities! The local 'hoods that have been dubbed star-studded include "Brooklyn," "Lower Manhattan," and "Upper Manhattan." NYC is so famous like that. [Forbes]
• Question of the Week: "Children, have you ever wondered what the New York apartment of a couple of swanky design queens looks like?" [Real Estalker]
• The $16.5 million listing at 92 Jane Street is A-OK, thanks to a transparent facade and a guru-worthy reflecting pond, plus one of the two "private walled gardens" in New York. [Gawker]
• Best TV Show of the Year: Los Angeles' Real Estate Confidential on "Fine Living TV Network." It premieres this week! Read more after the jump and get excited. Get very, very, very excited. [PR Release] - Max Abelson  read more »
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Two of Barack Obama's key bundlers in Los Angeles were first approached by Hillary Clinton's campaign, but turned her down in part because of what they said were her husband's broken promises on gay rights issues.

"We were both like no, we didn't really want to do Hillary," said Jeremy Bernard, who is working with his partner Rufus Gifford as a paid fund-raising consultant to the Obama campaign.

Explaining his grievance with the former President, Bernard, a former Clinton appointee who once served as a treasurer on Bill's inaugural committee, said "There was 'Don't ask, don't tell,' there was DOMA and then there was the last election when he told Kerry that he should support all the anti-gay initiatives in the different states. A lot of people thought, you know what, three strikes and you're out - you can only screw us so many times."

Bernard helped organize the Dreamworks event that raised $1.3 million for Obama, and which provided the platform for David Geffen, another gay bundler who defected from the Clinton camp, to mouth off about his old friends.

Bernard said he expects Obama's next visit to Los Angeles to come at the end of April, during the California Democratic State Party Convention.

I've got more on the battle for influential gay operatives and activists -- which, Bernard notwithstanding, is going quite well for Hillary -- my story in the paper this week.

--Jason Horowitz

It was a kind of ritual offering: Told that a neighbor on Riverside Drive was forsaking the Hudson&r  read more »

The Wright Stuff: Manhattan Avant-Garde Praises Lawrence Wright’s Al-Qaeda Outtakes    read more »

The Wright Stuff: Manhattan Avant-Garde Praises Lawrence Wright’s Al-Qaeda Outtakes    read more »

On the Couch with Gwyneth Paltrow    read more »

On the Couch with Gwyneth Paltrow    read more »

Bob Shrum, for one, thinks that Hillary Clinton's campaign made a potentially damaging tactical error by going after Barack Obama yesterday.

"I understand the Clinton mantra is 'attack,' but attack attack attack doesn't always work, as the people in the charge of the Light Brigade found out," said Shrum in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "In this case it seems that they gave the story much greater visibility -- it would have been a one-cycle story."

He was referring to Howard Wolfson's response yesterday to Obama supporter David Geffen's comments about the Clintons -- "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling" -- in a Maureen Dowd column Wednesday.

The result was a remarkably sharp exchange between Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs and Wolfson, who argued that the Obama campaign had embraced "slash & burn politics."

The whole thing seemed to be the perfect embodiment of the Democrats' new we'll-never-get-Swift-Boated-again-offense-as-best-defense philosophy. But Shrum (who advised John Kerry in 2004) thinks the Clinton response may have made the potential damage worse.

"I think they took this from being a 12-hour cycle to it being a 48-hour and 72-hour story, and maybe an ongoing story. If you think that the headline of the story is that 'Obama is a bad negative person,' which I think is a hard sell, frankly, then I suppose you could argue for it."

Today's Daily News headline, if it's any indication, read "It gets Ugly Early as Hil Slams Bam." The New York Times wrote about a "the sensitivity in the Clinton camp to Mr. Obama's rapid rise as a rival and his positioning as a fresh face unburdened by the baggage borne by Mrs. Clinton."

Shrum speculated about what the motive was. "Maybe the Clinton campaign feels it has to mow Obama down before the primaries," he said, "but they could end up shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, the John Edwards campaign could have planned this whole thing."

But he foresaw unintended consequences.

"They clearly think every attack must be instantly replied to. And I think that can be a big mistake. They had a very successful campaign launch, her image had some of the hard edges taken off, and they've all now been put back."

--Jason Horowitz

Memo to: Al Gore From: Ari Gold Subject: Your Oscar Speech   Dear Al:    read more »

Laurence Mark, producer of Dreamgirls, carried his Golden Globe in one hand as he made the congratul  read more »

Today, New York Times' staffers received an email from Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman and Standards Editor Craig Whitney, outlining ethical concerns about posting to the new Travel web site.

Righ now, readers--and Times reporters--can comment on London, Paris and Los Angeles.  read more »

After the jump is the full memo with guidelines, such as no anonymous posting in the comments section. Take that "sprezzatura!"

I spent Christmas Eve at two parties in LA hosted by Jews—friends of my gentile brother-in-law. Didn't plan it that way; just worked out that way.

The first party was all film industry. I asked the host's daughter about being Jewish and having a Christmas party and she laughed and said, "Yeah. Basically we do whatever's fun. Like we had an Easter egg roll." I liked her attitude. California. No baggage.

The next party was more interesting because there was a Holocaust survivor there. He grew up in a wealthy German family, then spent years in Theresienstadt. After the war, stateless, he said No to Palestine and came here. In the last few years he has been able to recover some of the family's actual property. The survivor's wife took me in the kitchen and showed me some china they had finally gotten back. "This too survived Hitler," she said, touching the beautiful Deco-styled plates.

It felt like a west coast dream. Attitudes are different out there, people are more open to new ideas. At New York parties, I get in fights about Jewishness. Not in L.A.

I sat with the wife for a while at dinner and talked about my issues. She explained that she was firmly secular. Religion is a negative force in society. Jewish identity was important to her, but worship was no real part of her children's lives, and she'd never tried to separate them from kids of other creeds. She was a little regretful about intermarriage but it wasn't like she could have stopped it. Hey, it's America. The Holocaust was not something they talked that much about. When I asked her about Israel, she said, "Israel is important." When I asked her to elaborate, she repeated that statement.

I went in to get Christmas cake and passed a pretty towheaded girl singing, "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel." It felt surreal to me.

One of the claims of Jewish parochialists is that Where Hitler failed, intermarriage is succeeding: eliminating the Jewish people. It may be an incorrect statement (the latest Forward reports that Jewish #s in the U.S. are up to between 6-7 million). But right or wrong on the #s, it's ugly. It's guilting Americans who are making free and wide cultural choices, saying they're betraying their people. And the answer of the Michael Steinhardts and Elliott Abrams is, Segregating youth. Segregating privileged youth, at that. Think of the little blonde girls who won't get to sing the dreidel song.

Oh, what a year for newspapers! They’re dying! They’re keeling. They’re ghosts!  read more »

Joke’s on You   To the Editor:    read more »

Joke’s on You   To the Editor:    read more »

Joke’s on You   To the Editor:    read more »

Film director Robert Altman passed away last night, around midnight, in Los Angeles, according to publicist Bobby Zarem. Mr. Altman, 81, had been admitted to the hospital on Friday. He received a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, according to his Oscar speech this year.

The History Boys is one of the best, most reverent, comprehensive and seamless transfers from stage  read more »

The Waverly Inn: On the Fritz!    read more »

The Waverly Inn: On the Fritz!    read more »

The Waverly Inn: On the Fritz!  read more »

The Waverly Inn: On the Fritz!    read more »

At 3:04 p.m. on Wednesday, employees of trendy L.A.-based clothier American Apparel emerged from the brightly illuminated storefront at 142 Fifth Avenue, clapping and cheering to the beat of loud pop music blaring in the background.

One clerk carried a bullhorn. "We're open! Finally!" announced the amplified black-clad lad named Jonny, who further identified himself as company founder and CEO Dov Charney's illegitimate lovechild. (The Observer does not confirm nor deny that claim.)

For days, passersby would stop to glimpse inside the partially unveiled storefront at racks of tees, hoodies and undies, as well as the company's trademark posters of employees in provocative poses. One posterior shot, visible from the location's expansive 19th Street side, demonstrates the snug fit of the company's cotton spandex jersey tank thong.

The Observer spotted former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek sneaking a peek through the window around 1:05 p.m. today.

The approximately 5,000-square-foot store -- which operations manager Max Sugiura described as "a much cleaner version" of the national retailer's usual layout -- is the company's 15th location in Manhattan and Brooklyn in just three years. (See our previous coverage here and here.)

Its increasing ubiquitousness has created some critics, particularly given that this latest store replaced much-beloved Weiss & Mahoney.

Good thing, then, that the sprawling franchise is now looking to slow things down a bit.  read more »

"This will be our last store in New York," said Sugiura, "for a while."

- Chris Shott

Let’s just do it. Let’s get it over with. For better or worse.  read more »

For years, the city's congressional delegation repeated like Buddhist mantra the fact that New York sends more money to Washington than it gets back in federal aid.

Now, New York's congressional delegation is in the majority, and presumably, a flood of money will be heading to New York to right this wrong. Not so says Steven Malanga of City Journal.

"The city, in particular, already gets a huge premium from this spending. Several years ago I broke down federal spending on a host of social programs and found that the city received nearly four times the national per capita average of welfare expenditures, three times the average in Medicaid, and twice the average in subsidized housing spending. The city even received far more per capita than other major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. "Consequently, there is no major pot of gold waiting for New York, only perhaps a few more scraps of pork sent our way. At most, an old Lefty like Rangel may be able to use his chairmanship to block GOP legislation, but that isn't the same as promoting an agenda that actually benefits New York. But after waiting so long to get back into power, the Charlie Rangels of the world no doubt need to beat their chests a little for effect."

-- Azi Paybarah

Health-conscious L.A.-based frozen-yogurt purveyor Pinkberry is plotting a massive low-calorie invasion of New York.

But can a trendy Southern California upstart truly compete in a cooler Northeastern climate long dominated by the Tasti D-Lite juggernaut?

With one Manhattan location already open (7 East 32nd Street) and another three sites now under construction, Pinkberry's local leasing reps, Robert K. Futterman & Associates, announced plans Monday to establish 15 additional so-called "GUILT FREE" venues by 2007, "in Manhattan, the Outer Boroughs, Westchester County, Long Island, Rockland County and throughout New York State," according to a press release.

An aggressive expansion to be sure but still a far cry from the 30 sites presently under Tasti D-Lite control in Manhattan alone.

A spokesperson for "NEW YORK'S #1 FROZEN DESSERT" downplayed the potential Pinkberry threat.

"We don't consider it any competition at all," says Tasti D-Lite's Gertrude E. Bakel, who likened the frosty faceoff to an "apples and oranges" comparison.

"It's a very different product," she says of Pinkberry. "It's frozen yogurt, and our product is a unique frozen dessert which contains no yogurt at all."  read more »

Among the lactose intolerant, at least, Tasti's top-dog status remains safe.

- Chris Shott

Mark Grotjahn’s large abstract drawings are so meticulously crafted and striking in effect that, l  read more »

Mark Grotjahn’s large abstract drawings are so meticulously crafted and striking in effect tha  read more »

... can you snag a celebrity property for $3 million. That's what Nikki Sixx is asking for the Agoura Hills pad that he and wife Donna D'Errico just put on the market. From the L.A. Times:

The master bedroom suite has a balcony, vaulted ceiling, two walk-in closets, a spa tub, a steam shower and a redwood sauna. One of the other bedrooms was designed as a sound studio. All the closets are cedar-lined.

Read on for details of the built-in cappuccino machine, what every glam metaler secretly desires.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

What's Next for Tom Freston? Arianna Huffington turns on abrasive bloggers! Gotham’s Very Gay Bachelor List. 27 out of 101? Really? Mrs. Tobey McGuire Does Lunch. In L.A., everyone can hear you talk about therapy and baby names at lunch. Meeting Prince Charles. Royal protocol at Asprey. Chris Meloni Rocks the Globe. The celebs continue to convene for the Globe Theater that as of yet isn't....

The city of New York is a magnificent place to be, if you’re on television.  read more »

The city of New York is a magnificent place to be, if you’re on television.  read more »

On Sept.  read more »

For some reason, flights heading toward a place always seem to be filled with people from that place  read more »

Dick Zanuck was on the phone from London, where he’s in pre-production on a Tim Burton–directed  read more »

We're peeling ourselves off the sticky floor over here to head off for a week of vacation. Don't be sad! Today's double issue is crammed full of enough stuff to keep you occupied on the crapper for the next two weeks.

First-year banking boys enjoyed their coke-snorting, hot-dog-eating summers just fine; L.A. sucks and Lindsay Lohan will go for a sister's neck; The Martignetti brothers, of the LES's Martignetti Liquors, are opening a restaurant; there are young policy wonk intellects!; and Dustin Hoffman is a playa.

There's the closing of the Stonewall bar (attracting "wrong," "urban" element say (cough! white!) neighbors. Who are those Anthropologie-shopping gals? Brian Williams, the last old man of TV news, wants you to touch his Peabody.The vaunted Trend Piece may be as dead as a dodo. Hey, we sneaked a Black Panther onto the front page! In movies, there's Half Nelson and Leopold's Ghost and 13 and Snakes and Idlewild. Simon Doonan recaps his homosexualist summer; Tortoise still post-rocks; Neil Sedaka sold off part of his apartment and Elizabeth Lindemann bought a $10-mil bachelorette pad, and there's a scheme for an idealist fantasy of New York. And what a heap of Iraq books!

There's Tennis! And tennis! And tennis! And tennis! And tennis! Do you like tennis?

There's our extremely self-referential comic strip. There's Christine Quinn and Malachy McCourt and the DNC and reports from Jerusalem and Beirut.

Don't ever forget there's someone for everyone. And two more words: Yacht Rock.

FRANCESCA: I am not a big believer in white shoes. Even to wear with a wedding dress. And then there's the whole - "I will NEVER wear these again" thought. Still, it struck me as appropriate.

When, after two days of shopping, I failed to find the magic shoe, or any white sandal for that matter, I began to wonder. Where were all the white strappy heels? Had they gotten dirty? As I grew increasingly impatient with the shoe hunt, I asked a salesman at Nordstrom in Los Angeles.  read more »

As I sit down to write this diary, it’s been 103 degrees in Los Angeles for six days running.  read more »