AfroLA

You asked. We asked her. Here’s what she said.

Neighbors in Westlake, Pico-Union, Highland Park, MacArthur Park, Chinatown, and Lincoln Heights told us what they actually wanted answered by their city councilmember. Not talking points, real questions. Why doesn’t grant money go straight to street vendors? What do I do when someone’s in crisis outside my shop and calling the police feels like the wrong call? How do we stop losing the businesses that have been here for decades? Why does a sidewalk repair take 10 years?

AfroLA’s Marina Peña sat down with Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — re-elected in June with 58% of the vote — and asked her your questions to her directly.

A few things she said:

* Her goal is that a small business owner struggling with someone in crisis outside can call for an unarmed response team instead of police. Those teams have taken 20,000+ nonviolent 911 calls citywide, and fewer than 6% needed police backup.

* Her office legally can’t hand grant money directly to vendors. That’s why the $400,000 small business grant program is run through PACE and New Economics for Women instead.

* MacArthur Park is getting a $40 million stormwater capture project starting construction this fall, plus an eight-foot perimeter fence her office is moving ahead with — which the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission just came out against.

She also got specific about commercial rent, toxic land blocking new green space, and why she wants Waymo paying the city to use our streets.

Read the full interview!

In April, someone on Nextdoor asked us where to find Black-owned businesses on L.A.’s Westside.

AfroLA reporter Marina Peña followed up and found five in Santa Monica, Culver City, Brentwood and along Robertson Boulevard. A Santa Monica cafe built to honor Black Santa Monica, with banana pudding matcha on the menu. A bookstore that has given away more than 20,000 books in five years. A cookie shop that had a three-hour line on opening day. A coffee shop that opened in 2014 after a GoFundMe helped cover the final requirement needed to pass inspection. And a Brentwood esthetician who opened her own studio two months after the Westwood spa where she had worked for 13 years closed.

Each owner told us how they got started and what neighbors should order or book. The story also includes two businesses suggested by neighbors on Nextdoor.

A prison sentence is never served by one person. When Dr. Vanda Seward, a criminal justice professor in New York, took her students to a correctional facility, they arrived with questions and curiosity. She entered a room she recognized. Years earlier, she had sat in one like it as a wife visiting her incarcerated husband.

In a new essay for AfroLA, Seward writes about what incarceration asks of the families outside the prison walls. She recalls leaving home at 5 a.m. and standing in 19-degree cold. She understands the average family who spends about $4,200 a year supporting a loved one who is incarcerated.

About one in 12 children in the U.S. has experienced parental incarceration. Seward argues that incarceration is not an individual experience, but a shared one with emotional, financial and public health consequences that continue long after a visit or release. It is a hard read and a generous one.