On the latest episode, host Kadisha Davis speaks to Charisma White of the Safety Net Activists about her work in homelessness advocacy and her past experiences looking for housing with a Section 8 voucher.

A rally outside City Hall in 2023 calling for an end to family homelessness. (Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit)

Charisma White grew up around activists and advocates. Her mother was an artist who attended Medgar Evers College and was deeply involved in community advocacy in Brooklyn, work that gave White the opportunity to meet prominent civil rights activists like Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King.

“I was always involved in protesting,” White said this week on the latest episode of the “Hear Our Voices” podcast, which shares stories, resources and information about family homelessness in New York City (the podcast is produced by the Family Homelessness Coalition, whose members include Citizens’ Committee for Children, a City Limits funder).

But it wasn’t until her own experiences with homelessness that she “fully stepped into the role” of activist herself, she said.

“I wanted to find out…where are the resources?” White told podcast host Kadisha Davis. “Where does the money and funding that comes down from the government to go into the resources, how is it getting there? Where is it going? What stops does it make along the way? Does it actually get to the community?”

White has worked as an advocate with Urban Pathways, the New York City Continuum of Consumer Care and the Safety Net Activists, an organizing group that’s part of the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project. “The number one thing is we have to stick together as a people, right? If we don’t stick together, we won’t make it anywhere,” she said of that work.

You can listen to the conversation below—the first in a two-part interview—in which White also describes her experiences as Section 8 tenant, and the frustration of trying to find an apartment with rental voucher in New York City.

“For five years with my voucher in hand, I could not find housing, and I didn’t really think it was the issue of the voucher,” she told Davis. “It was more of the issue of agencies’ non-communication with each other, landlords and realtors discriminating against the voucher.”

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

The post Hear Our Voices Podcast: ‘If We Don’t Stick Together, We Won’t Make It’ appeared first on City Limits.

The mayor of Venice on Thursday condemned a reported attack over the weekend on an American Orthodox Jewish couple by assailants who shouted “Free Palestine” as a “serious and unacceptable act.”

Italian news agency AGI said three assailants, believed to be of North African origin, were apprehended.

Venice is home to what is widely considered the oldest Jewish Ghetto in Europe. The lagoon city “is and must continue to be an open, welcoming, and safe city, where mutual respect is the foundation of civil coexistence,” Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said in a statement Thursday.

He praised law enforcement agencies for having quickly intervened to identify those responsible, with the help of video surveillance cameras.

The Jewish Community of Venice said in a statement that the attack was just the latest antisemitic act it has registered. It condemned it as a “cowardly and despicable act,” and warned that it called into question Venice’s tradition as a welcoming city.

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The wife of former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez is being sentenced for her conviction for selling her husband’s influence for bribes of cash and gold bars.

Nadine Menendez, 58, could get as little as a year in prison or multiple years behind bars after she was convicted of colluding with her husband, the former Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a variety of corrupt schemes, some involving assisting the Egyptian government.

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Soon after the hearing began Thursday, Judge Sidney H. Stein said he planned to sentence her to a prison term “substantially below” the federal sentencing guideline range of roughly 20 years. The Probation Department had recommended an eight-year prison term.

Prosecutors say she played a large and crucial role in her husband’s crimes, serving as an intermediary between the senator and three New Jersey businessmen who literally lined his coat pockets with tens of thousands of dollars in cash in return for favors he could deliver with his political clout.

Prosecutors have requested that she spend at least seven years in prison.

Her lawyers have sought leniency, saying she shouldn’t spend more than a year in prison after a life of good deeds and recent health problems.

During a 2022 FBI raid on the couple’s New Jersey home, investigators found $480,000 in cash, gold bars worth an estimated $150,000 and a luxury convertible in the garage.

Bob Menendez, 71, is serving an 11-year sentence after his conviction last year on charges of taking bribes, extortion, and acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.

Prosecutors said that, among his other corrupt acts, the senator met with Egyptian intelligence officials and speeded that country’s access to U.S. military aid as part of a complex effort to help his bribe-paying associates, one of whom had business dealings with the Egyptian government.

Nadine Menendez was tried separately because she was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before she was to go to trial. She was convicted in April.

By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

OJAI, Calif. — Downtown Ojai’s newest hotel, which is also its oldest, stands along Ojai Avenue like a rancher in his best string tie and leather vest.

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This property, now known as Hotel El Roblar, has been a fixture on Ojai’s main street for more than a century — party to multiple civic dramas, one fraud conviction, repeated closures and four decades of fitness retreats. Now, after years of negotiation and restoration, a new team of owners has reshaped the place to evoke Old California, celebrate the Ojai Valley’s wild side and lure Angelenos looking to escape the city.

“There’s a hitching post outside, next to the bike rack,” hotel partner Jeremy McBride pointed out, noting that horseback visits aren’t out of the question.

In a town that’s short on lodging supply, the Roblar stands out for its size, its place in local history and the way it wears that history on its walls. Oh, and the two giant tortoises out back.

It went up in 1919, a blend of Spanish Revival and California Mission Revival styles. Its 2 acres include 39 guest rooms, 11 bungalows, a pool, an event space, a dinner restaurant (the Condor Bar) and a breakfast-and-lunch restaurant (La Cocina). It reopened this summer with nightly rates of $455 and up.

“There are so many trendy design hotels out there, and we certainly didn’t want to do that,” said Eric Goode, the partner with the most longstanding ties to the area. “Ojai is rustic and horsey. It’s not Montecito.”

The hotel entrance is framed by an arch that echoes those in Ojai’s downtown arcade building. Most of the bungalows have kiva-style fireplaces. In the Cocina breakfast-and-lunch room, the bar wall is a stack of colored bottles mortared together with concrete like a ghost town bottle-house.

The centerpiece of the lobby is a stacked-stone fireplace. The walls feature a wrap-around mural filled with Ojai Valley flora and fauna.

The room looks like it goes back a century. But the fireplace is new, rebuilt to resemble old photos. So is the mural, painted by artist Stefano Castronovo last year.

Though Goode, 67, is best known elsewhere as an entrepreneur and maker of documentaries, he spent a chunk of his childhood in the Ojai Valley. While his father was teaching at the Thacher School, Goode said, he was “catching horned lizards and rattlesnakes and putting them in my lunchbox.”

Later, Goode created New York’s Area nightclub/art gallery in the 1980s; took ownership roles in several hotels and restaurants, including New York’s Bowery Hotel; and co-founded the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy with Maurice Rodrigues. Later still, Goode produced and directed the documentary series “Tiger King” (2020) and “Chimp Crazy” (2024).

For about 35 years, Goode said, he has kept a home in Ojai and returned frequently. Yet for most of that time, Goode said, “I never thought I’d do a business here.” The key, he said, was finding a historic property whose reopening might feel more like a revival than a disruption to local culture.

When Ojai and the Roblar were born

The Roblar was born as modern Ojai was taking shape between 1917 and 1920. That’s when the town was renamed from Nordhoff to Ojai and local leader E.D. Libbey hired architects Richard Requa and Frank Mead to effectively reshape the city after a fire.

They designed the city’s long arcade along Ojai Avenue; its signature post office and tower; a church that became the Ojai Valley Museum; and the Roblar, all crafted with Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival features.

While Ojai’s reputation spread as a sophisticated small town with a spiritual bent and spectacular setting, the Roblar prospered, faltered, was renamed the Oaks, added a bar, added a pool and added bungalows. It also added a neon sign and then subtracted it, eventually forsaking much of its original design as owners and managers came and went.

By one account, the hotel’s early managers included a Mr. Canfield from Santa Barbara, followed by Mr. Cromwell from San Francisco, both of whom committed suicide. Later came Frank Keenan, a former Chicago alderman who bought the hotel in 1952 and in 1957 was convicted in Illinois of federal income tax evasion.

“We hope not to follow in their footsteps,” Goode said.

The hotel entered a different era in 1977, when fitness entrepreneur Sheila Cluff remade it as a health-oriented retreat, later passing leadership to her daughter, Cathy Cluff. The Oaks closed in 2017 after suffering smoke damage in the Thomas fire — and when the Cluff family put the property up for sale, the new owners stepped in.

New rooms, new art, roaming reptiles

Nobody will mistake El Roblar for a fitness retreat now. Though its pool and gym are likely to get plenty of use, the new owners are clearly focused on comfort, style and history.

Ojai’s Hotel El Roblar includes a bougainvillea-lined pool area. (Christopher Reynolds/The Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Besides Goode and McBride, who has a background as an entrepreneur and filmmaker, the partners include designer Ramin Shamshiri and restaurateur Warner Ebbink (who co-owns the Little Dom’s restaurants in Los Feliz and Carpinteria and Bar Lou in Montecito).

The sale closed in September 2019. Then the pandemic arrived. It took six years of design, permit negotiations with the city, restoration and construction before the hotel reopened under its original name.

Because the the Oaks was run as a mostly private fitness retreat, McBride said, the restart of the hotel means “it’s really open to the community for the first time in 50 years.”

Its dinner restaurant, the Condor Bar, led by executive chef Brandon Boudet, opened July 17, serving “California Mexican” cuisine and using a Santa Maria-style wood-fired grill. Work continues on the eight guest rooms in the hotel’s Sycamore building, scheduled to open in mid-September.

Across Ventura Street from the hotel, the new owners have also bought a property that once housed World University (which closed in 2017). Their plan still needs city approval, but the hotel owners have said they aim to open a 9,000-square-foot spa and wellness facility “to complement the hotel” in the next 18 to 24 months.

The overarching idea, McBride said, is for the Roblar space to feel “not like a new, fancy hotel, but something that’s always been here.”

The public areas and guest rooms are filled with custom and antique furniture and more than 1,000 pieces of art, many of them from California Auctioneers in Casitas Springs and Early California Antiques in Oxnard. The walls of the restaurant are crowded full of condor images and artifacts — “like you’re having dinner in your favorite natural history museum,” McBride said.

In the walled garden by the hotel’s bungalows, two Aldabra giant tortoises, Abra and Cadabra, creep between sun and shade. (They’re on loan from the Turtle Conservancy. For $100 per adult, Roblar guests can sign up for a tour of the conservancy’s Ojai property, which includes about 500 turtles and tortoises.)

The bar in La Cocina restaurant at Hotel El Roblar. (Christopher Reynolds/The Los Angeles Times/TNS)

The hotel’s website notes that the property and its fireplaces, balconies and lifeguard-less pool are “designed for adults” and that “we discourage children [as overnight guests] for safety reasons.” Dogs under 60 pounds are welcome (with a $250 fee). Also, photography and video recording “are not permitted in shared spaces,” though a ban on selfies might be difficult to enforce.

The Roblar’s rates hint at the short supply of lodging in Ojai, which has drawn many entertainment industry figures yet guards its small-town character aggressively.

The city has about 7,600 residents and a dozen hotels. It levies one of the state’s highest hotel tax rates (15%), forbids short-term vacation rentals and bans chain businesses with five or more locations. The largest hotel in town is the 303-room Ojai Valley Inn, which has its own golf course and summer rates that start around $780.

In 2022, the school board turned down a plan to convert a school district site into a 200-room hotel. Last year, Mayor Andy Gilman’s winning campaign called for civil discourse and open minds, but warned of “our over-dependence on tourism.”

Parking might be the most controversial part of the Roblar’s rebirth. To make room for other elements, the new owners got permission to take out the hotel’s public parking lot, secure off-site parking and require that guests use valet service ($50 nightly). This satisfied city officials, but not some neighbors.

“Just another sickening display of LA $$$$. No real parking,” one Ojai resident complained on Facebook.

Awkward as these debates can be, McBride said, it’s the protective attitude of Ojai residents that has helped keep the city’s identity in place.

“This place is still so special,” he said. “There’s a reason why people who are here want to preserve it.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.