Welcome to the About page

I’m Hayes Davenport. For a long time I’ve been a TV writer and podcast haver, but more recently I spent about five years working in homelessness and local politics — first as a full-time volunteer and then as a Senior Advisor to an LA City Councilmember.

Every day I worked at the city I had at least one experience that shocked and bewildered me. I got to know hundreds of constituents and city workers. I did street outreach almost every day and worked on a bunch of campaigns at night. I worked with other staff and elected offices to develop and pass a lot of new policy with farther-reaching impacts than I ever thought we had a chance to get done in just a few years.

Then in Fall of 2024 I finally hung up my City Hall ID card, which looked like this by the end.

But I still love talking about LA all the time, and I have really loved learning more about how it works. So my big dream is to continuing doing all that here.

Some of the things I’m most interested in:

• Everything about housing and homelessness.

• Local elections and campaign money.

• Neighborhoods and how we talk about them.

• Data on homelessness, crime and policing, rainfall, air quality, other numbers I check compulsively every day to see if they changed.

• Old stories about LA from newspapers and books.

• The gaps between political narratives and what bureaucracies actually do.

• Everything about local media.

• Land use and transportation planning while not being that educated about it.

• The people in power, and how their little quirks and personal ambitions dictate so much about how we live.

In addition to posting, I’ve been recording some podcast episodes with my friend Scott Frazier, who is very smart about LA and public policy and with whom I used to host a different podcast about LA (LA Podcast). Those will go here too.

Thanks for subscribing if you want to. It’s free!