Community Relations

Sergio Merida and his relatives built taco trucks into a family business. To sell their fresh-cooked tacos, carnitas and tortas, each day they spread out across Palos Verdes Estates -- Merida to the east, his wife, Maggie Avila, to the center, and Sonia Avila, Maggie's mother, to the west. At lunchtime, Merida and Sonia Avila would pull alongside a small park and spend two hours feeding gardeners, construction workers and nannies, and the occasional local.

When the Larchmont Bungalow opened a couple of weeks ago, the "Artisan Cafe, Bakery and Brew" coffeehouse seemed a perfect fit for the tony neighborhood, with its exposed wooden beams, reconditioned hardwood floors and roasting coffee wafting through the airy space. But there was just one problem -- and it had everything to do with the chairs and tables where patrons sat, drank coffee and noshed on offerings such as red velvet pancakes and jerk chicken sliders. Those chairs and tables, contended a group of residents, threatened the very fabric of Larchmont Village because they transformed what had been permitted as a takeout restaurant into something vastly different.

The company's brochure features an aerial shot of the Balboa Peninsula and describes its 90-day drug and alcohol recovery program as "located in the warm, healing climate of Southern California." It's that kind of promise -- in this case from Sober Living by the Sea -- that has made Newport Beach an unlikely capital for drug- and alcohol-free homes.

Neighbors along the beachfront strand of Manhattan Beach, where a few homes recently sold for $8 million, have grown accustomed to the sight of a few double-lot homes and a parade of bizarre new construction -- Italian villas, English castles and glassy modern cylinders. But nothing has struck fear into the hearts of neighbors like the latest addition: the Strand's first three-lot mansion.

Nearly 300 environmentalists, union members and civic leaders turned out Monday to debate a proposal that would allow the city to review a 5,500-unit residential development plan north of Sylmar. Debate began about 7 p.m. and continued for roughly an hour before the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee began deliberating the fate of the Las Lomas project, which has been billed as a "smart growth" development. Santa Monica-based developer Dan Palmer has proposed building the residential project near the 5 and 14 freeways.

They knew they couldn't set this little country community right in a day -- the storms had been too brutal for that. But at least, they figured, they could clean it up. All along the two-lane road through town, men in hunting jackets moved around quickly in heavy machinery, plowing and piling debris. Farmers in ball caps amputated horizontal cedars, poplars and pines with buzzing chain saws. Church ladies in fresh makeup and work gloves tidied the yards in front of roofless homes.

Like so many conflicts in the American West, this one began when newcomers put up a gate. It was an artsy barrier, much like the posh developments that began to swell Mammoth Lakes even before Dave McCoy sold the famed Mammoth Mountain ski area in 2005. Owners in the new gated communities said they were only trying to keep cars off Ranch Road, where locals had long parked to ski or snowboard the Sherwins, a series of much-loved powder chutes on the edge of town.

With clarinets, trumpets and tubas, the Oaxacan Echo youth band blasted its raucous music into the ceiling of St. Cecilia Catholic Church in South Los Angeles on a recent Sunday afternoon. Hector Mata, a Oaxacan immigrant, watched from the wings. St. Cecilia's was packed. That's the way it's been ever since the church began holding monthly Masses honoring the Virgin of Soledad, patron saint of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Under the image of a stern serviceman in uniform, the sign in the window of the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting station extols the traits of America's armed forces: "Smart. Tough. Elite." This famously liberal town recently added its own descriptor: Unwanted.

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners unanimously agreed Monday to spend $2.2 million to look at the effect of airport pollution on communities around LAX. The ambitious study, said to be the largest of its kind, will monitor Westchester, El Segundo, Inglewood and Lennox to identify the sources of pollution there and determine how much of it can be attributed to airport activities.