LA’s New Housing Crisis

PRESENTED BY ARTISAN

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Future Party. How many of you were following the TikTok ban drama this weekend? If you’re a TikTok user, you were met with a pop-up Saturday night explaining that the platform was offline due to the ban taking effect but that the company was working with President Donald Trump (officially, as of today) on a solution. By Sunday morning, it was already back online, with a note thanking the President for intervening.

Intervening how, exactly? Well, it appears Trump’s administration has triggered a provision in the law to extend TikTok’s availability for 90 days, so it can find a buyer. Is there a legit buyer? Is a deal already in the works? At this point, anything can happen.

As the survivors of the destructive Palisades and Eaton Fires try to recover, they’re now dealing with soaring rental and mortgage costs as some landlords try to take advantage of the crisis.

Why It Hurts: The LA housing market is already one of the most challenging in the nation, thanks to a lack of available homes and sky-high prices. The influx of thousands of now-unhoused residents could bring the market to a breaking point.

Behind The Price Hikes: The first step to recovery for wildfire survivors is finding a place to live — permanent or temporary.

In LA, both are proving to be difficult as they flood the market simultaneously.

Closing Costs: The widespread condemnation of the price gouging has already led many landlords to re-reprice their properties. But LA is such a massive county that stopping every bad actor (not the performance kind) may prove impossible.

When almost 20,000 homes and apartments were affected by the fires, LA may need to get creative in how it houses people, potentially leading to a renaissance in alternative housing, such as the construction of backyard units, turning unused office buildings into housing, and the easing of California’s infamously strict zoning and construction regulations.

Go Deeper: Even before the fires, LA and many other cities were already dealing with critical housing shortages.

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After months of negotiations, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix will have an exclusive run on IMAX screens before it debuts on streaming.

The Big Picture: Netflix has toyed with theatrical over the years, either so films could qualify for Oscars (Roma, The Irishman) or to eventize some very big investments (Knives Out: Glass Onion, Army of the Dead). But the Narnia deal is the biggest bet yet and the first to include premium-format screens worldwide, potentially marking a new era for the company.

Behind The Scenes: After the monster success of Barbie, Gerwig has used her clout to make a (so far) one-of-a-kind deal.

The Future: What Hollywood wants to know is if the IMAX release is just a stunt or foreshadowing similar deals with top filmmakers, especially after losing some projects to those who chose less money, so they could have a theatrical debut. Only time will tell. But Netflix is riding on Narnia becoming a major franchise, which the streamer doesn’t have a lot of in comparison to other studios, so it could’ve just been a perfect storm of elements.

But if Netflix is open to making more deals like this with the top 1% of filmmakers, it may be hard for theatrically-minded directors to ignore the draw of getting both the biggest screens and the biggest streamer.

50.7% of you voted No in Friday’s poll: Do you speak more than one language?

“America is an embarrassingly monolingual culture.”

“One set of grandparents spoke Italian to my father all the time, and the other spoke some Lebanese, but it never caught on with me, and now I regret not carrying on the family traditions. I did take four years of Russian in high school in the ‘70s amid all the Cold War events and thought maybe it would benefit me at some point, but I didn’t keep up with that either. Now that I’m retired, maybe I should learn some Italian and Lebanese languages in my spare time.”

“Sadly! I can communicate a bit in Spanish, but I wish our education system pushed for fluency in a second language. And my ancestral country is English-speaking, so another language wasn’t spoken at home.”

“I have a seven-year French streak on Duolingo but struggle with oral language production. At this point, I really need to go the immersion route to cap off my fluency.”

“Yoruba and Mandarin.”

Let’s keep the conversation going. Join our Poll Of The Day newsletter, so your opinions can shine. Discover how your views line up with your peers’, check out cool insights, and have some fun. It’s data with personality.

🏆 After getting pushed due to the wildfires, the Academy Award nominations will be announced on January 23rd.

📺 Broadcast’s streaming success: ABC’s new sitcom, Shifting Gears, hit a record 17 million viewers in its debut across ABC, Disney+, and Hulu.

💸 A French woman was scammed out of $850,000 by a deepfake of Brad Pitt.

💥 SpaceX’s Starship rocket blew up… err… had a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”… 8.5 minutes after it launched on Friday.

🧑‍⚖️ Memecoin platform Pump.fun is facing a class action lawsuit for being too risky for investors (duh).

📰 Apple paused its AI-generated news alerts after making mistakes like reporting that Luigi Mangione committed suicide and tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

👟 Nike’s RTFKT is rolling out one last collab with 3D-sneaker brand Zellerfeld before it’s boxed for good.

🏃‍♀️ Switzerland’s On sneaker brand is becoming the hottest thing in footwear.

₿ Coinbase is reviving loans backed by bitcoin after the value of crypto skyrocketed.