from the series East L.A. Portraits, 1978-80

John Valadez

Los Angeles, CA. $500.00

“Available now!”

“Room for rent unattached to larger home in backyard area.” 

“Room is 8 x 7″

“Must have proof of income. Nothing personal, just business.”

You can live in our garden shed, if you want…

But over the years, cheap overseas labor lured many apparel makers to outsource to foreign competitors in far-flung places such as China and Vietnam.

Now, Los Angeles firms are facing another big hurdle — California’s minimum wage hitting $15 an hour by 2022 — which could spur more garment makers to exit the state.

Last week American Apparel, the biggest clothing maker in Los Angeles, said it might outsource the making of some garments to another manufacturer in the U.S., and wiped out about 500 local jobs. The company still employs about 4,000 workers in Southern California.

“The exodus has begun,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands and a former director at Forever 21. “The garment industry is gradually shrinking and that trend will likely continue.”

In the last decade, local apparel manufacturing has already thinned significantly. Last year, Los Angeles County was home to 2,128 garment makers, down 33% from 2005, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. During that period, employment also plunged by a third, to 40,500 workers. Wages, meanwhile, jumped 17% adjusting for inflation, to $698 per week — although that can include pay for top executives, as well as bonuses, tips and paid vacation time.

Many apparel companies say Los Angeles is a difficult place to do business. Commercial real estate is expensive and limited, the cost of raw materials continues to rise and it can be difficult to find skilled workers who can afford to live in the city. They expect things will become even more challenging after the minimum-wage hike further raises their expenses.

Felix Seo has been making clothes for wholesale in downtown for 30 years. His company, Joompy, used to count giant retailers like Forever 21 among its clients. But as prices have gone up in recent years, he said, those fast-fashion peddlers are no longer giving him orders.

“I used to pay $5 to get this sewn, and now it costs $6.50,” Seo said, holding up a patterned dress. “But my customer doesn’t want to pay that, so I can’t sell it anymore.”

To survive, Seo, 59, said Joompy may have to start importing goods instead of producing them locally. “It will be impossible to make clothes in Los Angeles,” he said.

The minimum wage is accelerating changes in the L.A. apparel industry that began decades ago, industry experts said.

In the 1990s, as borders opened up, foreign competitors began snatching up business from Southland garment factories.

Eventually, many big brands opted to leave the region in favor of cheaper locales. Guess Jeans, which epitomized a sexy California look, moved production to Mexico and South America. Just a few years ago, premium denim maker Hudson Jeans began shifting manufacturing to Mexico.

Jeff Mirvis, owner of MGT Industries in Los Angeles, said outsourcing was necessary to keep up with low-cost rivals. MGT, which makes apparel sold to retailers, moved its production to Mexico in the 1990s, China in the early 2000s and Southeast Asia a few years later. Its designs and samples are still made in Los Angeles, Mirvis said.

“Manufacturers really have no choice,” said Mirvis, whose father started the company in 1988. “With the rise of Forever 21 and stores like that, price points have gone down and down and down.”

Love how they manage to blame the 2022, $15 wage for the Exodus that started under NAFTA.  Also find it funny how some people grumbling about what they MIGHT do, is translated into catastrophic job loses.

tldr 'the customer' here that won't pay living wage prices for dresses isn't even the customers, it's retailers like forever 21. i mean, that most of us are still broke since 2008 is part of the problem, but it's also the same problem, rooted in 80s free trade wiping out midcentury local labor power.

anyways motherfuckers who said the $15/hr wage in seattle would destroy the restaurant industry have opened a ton of restaurants since they said that, oops, giving ppl more money increases spending and boosts the economy, man, who knew except henry ford a hundred years ago and everyone alive since

actual tldr don't listen to the fucking business page gaslight ppl abt corporate greed being the fault of greedy poors

John Boyega photographed by Miller Mobley for The Hollywood Reporter (x). 

L.A. Cracks Down on Tiny Houses for Homeless

Elvis Summers turned the tiny home trend into a viral campaign to bring innovative shelters to homeless men and women living in and around Los Angeles. He’s raised more than $85,000 in crowdfunding for the project, called Tiny House, Huge Purpose, and received an overflow of volunteers and building materials.

City officials, however, are not so thrilled. According to the Los Angeles Times, senior assistant city attorney Valerie Flores said at a committee hearing Monday evening that the tiny homes are considered “bulky items.” Bills passed earlier this year in an attempt to crackdown on homeless encampments permit authorities to seize such items without notice.

The tiny homes have sparked a serious debate, but are just a small part of the complicated puzzle. Los Angeles has a growing homeless population – one that rose by 12 percent in the past two years. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority estimates 44,300 people spend each night living on the streets, in cars, abandoned buildings and independent and government-funded shelters.

Summers reached out to city officials in May when the project first launched. He told the Los Angeles Times that officials have not responded to multiple requests.

“They’re stupid if they think I won’t file a lawsuit of my own,” said Summers.

More on Yahoo Makers:

Elvis Summers, the Man Behind the Mobile Homes

Elvis Summers built the first tiny home for a 60-year-old woman named Irene “Smokie” McGhee, after discovering she was sleeping on the streets in his South Los Angeles neighborhood. (Photo: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Source: Yahoo Makers

Inside the Tiny House

The interior is bare, but gives the homeless a private place to sleep and hold their belongings. (Photo: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Source: Yahoo Makers

Tiny House, Huge Legal Headache

The 8-foot-long building, which cost less than $500 to make, is considered an eyesore by some city officials. The Los Angeles Times reports that Councilman Joe Buscaino said at a committee hearing, "These wooden shacks are not the real estate I’m looking for in my district.” (Photo: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Source: Yahoo Makers

Updated Houses With the Help of Donations

Since launching the campaign and receiving donations from contractors, builders and other volunteers, the tiny homes have improved. (Photo: Tiny House, Huge Purpose)

Source: Yahoo Makers

The City Is Cracking Down on Tiny Houses

Still, the tiny houses are considered “bulky items,” which recently passed bills in attempt to crackdown on homeless encampments allow authorities to seize without notice. Senior assistant city attorney Valerie Flores believes the city could face lawsuits if someone were injured in one of the homes while on the street. (Photo: Tiny House, Huge Purpose)

Source: Yahoo Makers

They literally want people to die.

god. this is literally: well. these homeless ppl are making little homes. but they’re ugly. so they must be removed. “what about the ppl?” “they’re ugly too and removing the homes will… i’ve said too much”

“Bulky items”??? FUCK YOU!!! They’re HOMES!!! 

The Chicano Moratorium against the war in Vietnam drew 30,000 demonstrators on August 29, 1970 in East Los Angeles. (Photo by Oscar Castillo)

Held a four minute and 30 second moment of silence for Mike Brown on Cesar E. Chavez in Los Angeles, CA; November 26th.

EMA - 3Jane (Official Video) by EMA BAND

1,500 ft. above Los Angeles with Tianna G.

Van Styles should win the Nobel prize

HOW?! How is Tianna posing out an open chopper? 

She dead

This is a dope concept for real.

Los Angeles Stands Against Gentrification & Displacement!

Please join Los Angeles for LA Gente Blog's nationwide social media campaign to answer how gentrification hurts your communities. Post your image with the hashtags #OURHOODSMATTER #WEFIGHTDISPLACEMENT 

…. Even Junot Díaz is against gentrification in Los Angeles, and all over the country. Send us your image at  [email protected]

She walked screaming out of the white smoke, a black-clad goddess of death, exuding aggressive sex. Her eyes held just a tinge of threat. Her nails, phallic daggers of implied violence. Waist shrunken to a ghastly circumference, her eyebrows archly painted, her long black hair swirling behind and around her, she shocked, titillated, angered, obsessed.

She called herself Vampira.

She introduced every show with a scream, a bloodcurdling extrusion that had to issue out of some cavern too big, dark, and lonely to live inside her impossible 36-17-36 figure. She screamed and looked directly at the camera, a goth Garbo who seized the eye of the audience, refusing to become a simple object of their regard. She seduced them with the offer of a night of B-movies, horror and sci-fi fare, mostly execrable, but seasoned with her spicy sweetness and her undertone of aggression that radiated underneath heavy white pancake make-up.

Nobody could turn off the TV. It was 1954.

Maila Nurmi screamed in a postwar America of chilling optimism, everyday repressions, and awkward silences. She was the child of Finnish immigrants, a runaway in the 30’s who worked as an actor, a model for softcore men’s magazines, and a burlesque dancer. She had a taste for the macabre that led her to delve into the sediment of midcentury America until it yielded its dark treasures. A pin-up model who found herself turned into the 50’s American middle class housewife, she refashioned herself to escape the confines of cultural expectation.

Nurmi had explored the tangled underside of the country since the mid-1940s; an underground gothic land lived beneath the sun- lit world of postwar America. As a young runaway, she performed in a New York horror/burlesque show known as “Spook Scandals” that had called for her to rise out of a coffin and scream. There she had begun to craft the character of Vampira, thinking about how the sexy and the horrific could intertwine, a dance between Eros and Thanatos.

“Dig Me, Vampira” was like nothing that had yet appeared in television’s brief existence. Premiering on April 30, 1954, it became an instant hit in the Los Angeles area. Then things exploded. *****

Vampira quickly reached a larger audience through a Life magazine photo shoot. She appeared on Red Skelton’s popular show alongside Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. She hung out with James Dean and his entourage at Googie’s Restaurant, one of the few late night spots in 1950s Hollywood. She became part of “the night watch,” aspiring actors and directors that hovered around Dean, the strange and beautiful boy from Indiana who had yet to reach superstardom in East of Eden.

Ratings for the Vampira show shot through the roof in the year to come and Nurmi seemed on the verge of major stardom. But KABC cancelled her contract around the time of the death of James Dean. Despite her popularity, Vampira had spun a web of controversy that entangled her and the station. FCC warnings, a lawsuit by a starlet who thought her career had been ruined by the image of Vampira, and, finally, the end of Nurmi’s marriage to Reisner, a blow to the station’s public relations campaign that had attempted to portray her as a normal housewife who liked to play dress-up as a bit of “horrific whimsy.” Dean’s death, or at least the bizarre rumors that surrounded Nurmi in the aftermath of it, represented the final straw.

By the late 1950s her television career was over; she lived with her mother while receiving unemployment benefits. She appeared in the Ed Wood directed Plan 9 from Outer Space that, while later a cult hit, barely had any audience at all in the first years of its existence. True and lasting stardom never came calling again. By the 1960s, Nurmi supported herself as a tile contractor. Stories, patently untrue, circulated of roles in pornographic films. She became a figure of local legend in West Hollywood, part of a cast of peculiar characters who’d once been famous and now were not.

Vampira disappeared. But she thrived in the cultural underground. Maila Nurmi hung out with the punk/metal band the Misfits in the 80s at places like West Hollywood Vinyl Fetish. She also worked on a book she never finished, a memoir of underside of a 50s Hollywood that stayed up late nights at Googies Restaurant, popped pills, and lived off the warm glow of stardom it stalked.

She died, alone, in 2008.

Perhaps this is all that we need know of her story. Perhaps it’s more or less all that can be known. It’s true that her influence has spread far and wide. There may not be a horror convention where her visage doesn’t influence the tattooed seductress cos-players, not a horror host who doesn’t owe something to her camp humor, no mistress of the night anywhere whose ultimate origin point can’t be traced to this runaway, this late night comedian.

Vampira borrowed from many of the ghosts that haunted American culture, elements never before brought together with the kind of sexual energy and threatening cultural pose that Vampira adopted. She described her character as a monster crafted out of the elements of American history, the terrors of the great depression, and the postwar style of the Beats. She raises questions about everything we think we know about the American fifties.

Excerpted from Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. Copyright 2014 by W. Scott Poole. Published by Soft Skull Press. All rights reserved. Photos: Collection of the Author

Los Angeles students protesting neglect of poorer schools took to the streets, and brought their desks with them.

Some 375 empty desks blocked a downtown street, blocking traffic for several hours Tuesday outside the Los Angeles Unified School District offices.

Organizers say the number represents the count of students who drop out of district schools each week.

Protesters want a student voice on the school board, and more funding for English language learners, foster children and low income students.

District officials declined comment on the protest.

Source

Children of the Knight by michaeljbowler.

Gay, Latino protagonist with a supporting cast that ranges in color, sexual orientation, and economic status. Urban fantasy.

WOW this looks really appealing to me, I want to read it.