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<\/p>\nA program that makes it easy to sell food and drink from your kitchen has micro-caf\u00e9s bubbling up.<\/p>\n
Oct 7, 2026<\/p>\n
Updated 12:29 pm PT<\/p>\n
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Dustin Drury and Angela Inferrera serve hand-batched cold brew and avocado toast on homemade sourdough at Cold Brew Coffee Crew, their residential coffee shop in Hollywood.\u00a0(Photo by Betsy Shepherd\/KCRW)<\/p>\n
Here are the morning\u2019s top stories on Wednesday, October 7, 2026<\/p>\n
Los Angeles has over a hundred specialty coffee shops, but a new crop of caf\u00e9s are taking the artisanal coffee experience to the next level. All across the county, people are turning their homes into coffee speakeasies, serving specialty brews out of their kitchens and backyards.<\/p>\n
A county program that gives out licenses to micro-enterprise food and beverage businesses has led to a quadrupling of the spots since the beginning of the year. The program prohibits outdoor signage, so customers led by Instagram and word-of-mouth are lining up at the secret locations for a private-garden experience.<\/p>\n
In the Echo Park neighborhood sits Loto Coffee. There are about a dozen people sitting in a terraced cactus garden \u2013 reading, sipping, chatting \u2013 as homeowner Julian Scharman pulls and pours espresso shots. \u201cThe focus here is excellent Mexican coffees,\u201d Scharman said. \u201cMy mom is from Japan so there\u2019s a lot of Japanese touches here that you\u2019ll see . The handmade ceramics that I made myself that I serve all the coffee in, little Japanese sweets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The personal touch is one of the hallmarks of these backyard cafes. Across town in Hollywood, Cold Brew Coffee Crew serves hand-batched iced coffee and homemade bread under a big avocado tree. Dustin Drury and Angela Infrarera run their cafe out of a leafy bungalow court that used to house actors in Western movies. \u201cThe most expensive thing is what? RENT! Well, we already pay rent for our bungalow so we were like what kind of businesses can we run out of our house?\u201d<\/p>\n
The allure of these private spaces has a lot to do with how Los Angeles is laid out, says cultural critic David Ulin. \u201cThe history of Los Angeles has really been a history of a kind of private space city. There was a domestic quality to cultural life here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Now, Ulin says, the city is becoming more integrated, with public transportation, vertical development and with these residential spaces turning into community hubs.<\/p>\n
Common Sense Media\u2019s Youth AI Safety Institute has rated ChatGPT for Teens as an \u201cUnacceptable Risk\u201d for everyone under 18<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n OpenAI<\/a> launched the teen version in August, promising \u201cstronger built-in safety protections<\/a>,\u201d including alerts to parents when a teen discusses self-harm, a study mode parents can switch on, and a chatbot less likely to act like a friend. \u201cIf our system estimates someone is under 18 or they state their age is between 13 and 17,\u2060 they are automatically placed into ChatGPT for Teens,\u201d the announcement said.<\/p>\n The institute tested the product before and after the launch, running more than 4,000 prompts on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds. Child psychiatrists and a pediatrician reviewed the responses. \u201cWe were actually hoping and expecting to see big improvements across the board based on that announcement,\u201d said Tom Siegel, the institute\u2019s executive director and a former Google trust and safety executive. \u201cIt didn\u2019t, unfortunately, work out that way at all.\u201d<\/p>\n The report\u2019s central finding concerns safety notifications. Testers linked more than a dozen new teen accounts to parent accounts, then spent up to an hour describing suicidal thoughts, self-harm or disordered eating. The parents received no alerts. The only two notifications the testers got came from older accounts with weeks of conversation history on sensitive topics.<\/p>\n OpenAI pushed back on that finding. According to an editorial note added to the report, OpenAI told the researchers parent and teen accounts must be linked for about three hours before notifications can be sent, and the company has updated its help center to reflect this. The help center now says it \u201cmay take up to a few hours\u201d after linking.<\/p>\n California\u2019s school finance watchdog agency has found the Los Angeles Unified School District is at high risk of financial insolvency.<\/p>\n The Financial Crisis and Management Assistance Team presented its analysis at Tuesday\u2019s school board meeting. \u201cFCMAT\u2019s role is not to determine which programs the district should preserve, which reductions it should make or what agreements it should reach with the labor [unions],\u201d Jennifer Noga, an intervention specialist with the agency, told the board. \u201cThat is 100% a local decision. Our goal is to help identify the fiscal risk and help the district understand what needs to be addressed to restore fiscal stability.\u201d<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s analysis of LAUSD is based on a series of questions the agency has identified as risk factors for insolvency. The analysis found that LAUSD\u2019s deficit spending, declining enrollment and increasing costs of employee salaries and special education put the district at risk of exhausting its reserves by the end of next school year<\/a>. It also found LAUSD is at a \u201cmoderate\u201d risk<\/a> of insolvency, but ultimately received a \u201chigh\u201d rating because a previous evaluation<\/a> by the Los Angeles County Office of Education automatically triggered a more severe label. (That LACOE evaluation is also what triggered the state evaluation in the first place.)<\/p>\n United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents LAUSD educators, said in a memo to the board<\/a> and in public comments that FCMAT\u2019s analysis penalized the district for paying teachers more and overstated financial risk.<\/p>\n