The mysteries that followed me into 2025

A barely-there migrant crisis, falling overdose deaths, and a restaurant where something is going on.

To the new subscribers who were directed here from the paywalled episode of Know Your Enemy where I was honored to join as a guest: hello. For anyone who doesn’t already listen, Know Your Enemy is about the modern and historic conservative movement and simply a great American podcast (the hosts were profiled in the local paper a few weeks ago). Sam Adler-Bell and I talked about the right-wing backlash in big cities and what kind of progressive governance could work most effectively against it. What a hoot for me.

Moving on: 2024 is over. I already wrote about it last week and ideally we would just never talk about it again. But somehow… questions remain.

There are three mysteries about LA that dominated my conversations last year. All remain at least partially unsolved. The mysteries follow below.

Mystery 1: Why didn’t LA have the “migrant crisis” that other cities did?

LA has more undocumented people than anywhere in the United States. So it’s at least notable that while Greg Abbott was spending multiple years catapulting buses at sanctuary cities, Eric Adams was openly feuding with the White House over New York’s overflowing shelters, and immigration became one of the two biggest issues of the 2024 election cycle, LA barely figured into the story at all. Even though we codified sanctuary city protections last year!

When I bring this up to people, they tend to focus on Greg Abbott and why he didn’t send that many people to LA. It’s true — he didn’t. Here’s the estimated breakdown of where migrants were bused from Texas as of June 2024, according to Abbott’s office:

New York City: 45,700

Chicago: 36,900

Denver: 19,200

DC: 12,500

Philadelphia: 3,400

Los Angeles: 1,500

Most people think of the busing project as an expression of how much Greg Abbott wanted to antagonize various Democrat-led cities. If that were the case with this breakdown, it’s unclear why he would be thirteen times more interested in antagonizing Denver than LA. It also feels a bit out of character that he wasn’t at all interested in antagonizing the sanctuary city of San Francisco, home of Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco values.

But the distribution of migrants between these cities is probably not about Greg Abbott’s municipal grievances. The evidence suggests that migrants were choosing where they wanted to go.

Abbott’s office has claimed from the beginning that the buses were voluntary, and while you certainly don’t have to take Greg Abbott’s word for it, here’s the breakdown of the most common destinations when Denver also initiated a voluntary busing-out program:

Chicago: 399

New York City: 345

Atlanta: 122

Miami: 95

Orlando: 95

Dallas: 68

So just like with Greg Abbott’s buses, people mostly went to Chicago and New York, along with some cities in Texas and Florida that those states wouldn’t have offered in their busing-out programs. And just like Greg Abbott’s buses, nobody went to LA.

So you have to wonder if we’re emphasizing Greg Abbott’s role to avoid a question that might hurt our feelings: did migrants actively avoid coming to LA?

The New York Times attempted to answer this very question in 2023, and they pretty much say yes, they just did not want to come here.

The number of recent migrants in Texas who want to travel to Los Angeles is currently low enough that it is taking officials there more than a week to fill the Los Angeles-bound buses with enough people to justify the trip, immigrant aid workers and migrants said.

The article threw out a few explanations for why this might be. One was that housing costs in LA are very high, which, okay yes, but that doesn’t explain why so many more people ended up in New York.

The article also mentions that people with established communities in LA (like Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans) made up a lower percentage of overall migrants than in previous years, and that people from those countries tend to avoid the shelter system because they’ve arranged to stay with relatives or friends.

That checks out with what I saw when I was working at City Hall and had a small, kind of smudgy window into what happened when the buses would arrive from Texas. A processing center and emergency shelter would be sprung up, but for the most part people wouldn’t stay in the shelter for very long. I heard about one bus of 30+ people where all but one left the shelter system almost immediately, presumably to stay with whoever they’d come to LA to connect with.

None of that, however, explains why people from Venezuela — who made up the largest constituency of new migrants to the US and haven’t established large communities in any American city — would choose the famously cold New York, Chicago, and Denver over LA.

But a few lines from the NYT article, from Muzaffar Chishti with the Migration Policy Institute, help explain that part for me:

Mr. Chishti said that for Venezuelans, New York is a much more attractive destination, largely because of its legal requirement to provide shelter to families.

“Migrants are smart people,” he said. “Venezuelan social networks were abuzz within days after people started coming to New York City.”

Here’s where we have to look at what happened to the migrant families who did come to LA.

At least as of last year, there were Skid Row shelters with hundreds of parents and children who had recently crossed the border, either on Greg Abbott’s buses or more traditional ways. And some of those families ended up on the street.

Ruben Vives and Doug Smith at the LA Times wrote a story last March about four families — all with young children, all who had no connections to LA, all recent arrivals from countries without large immigrant communities in the city. They made their way to Skid Row’s Union Rescue Mission and were kicked out after ninety days for not being able to pay rent. Then they moved into tents on the sidewalk, still on Skid Row, across the street from a place where they could take showers.

Photo by Brian van der Brug for the LA Times

Apiñas said there are times she feels the journey was all for naught.

“This is not what I wanted my kids to experience,” she said. “Sometimes they would ask me why I brought them here. You hear people screaming, fighting, throwing bottles on the ground.”

Three days ago, her daughter Valentina, 9, woke up when she heard a man screaming. “I held her in my arms and told her everything was going to be fine.”

Here’s one mother who was living in a small tent with children of 2, 3 and 7:

“You have this rosy picture of life here in the U.S., but then you show up and see all this and it’s not anything you thought it would be,” Reyes said. “It’s awful.”

All of the families were subjected to sanitation sweeps.

When the big green sanitation trucks rumbled up, eight of the 10 children living in the Skid Row encampment were away at school, easing the stress on the four sets of parents as they stuffed their belongings into plastic bags and storage boxes and dismantled their tents.

Sanitation workers told them they couldn’t keep a canopy that sheltered their cooking area or the plastic pallets they used to keep their bedding off the cold concrete. Those minimal comforts were soon swallowed up by the trucks.

Doesn’t this probably explain why migrants would choose other cities? If “you can get a shelter bed in New York” got around in Venezuelan group chats, isn’t it likely that “you and your kids might end up on the sidewalk in LA” did too?

If that’s what happened, it raises questions about some of the most widely believed theories about homelessness in this city. You hear all the time that people come to LA from faraway places for the weather and the assumption that they’ll be able to live on the street. But these stories from migrants point to an opposite dynamic: that people stay away because of the possibility that they’ll end up on the street, and head for cold places with available shelter beds instead.

So how should we feel about living in a city that people fleeing some of the most desperate situations in the world turned down?

Mystery 2: Why are overdose deaths falling?

Overdose deaths fell across the country by about 15% in 2024. San Francisco’s early data showed a 23% drop. We don’t have any numbers from LA yet, but what happens here tends to reflect what happens in other places.

Nationwide this trend adds up to almost 100,000 fewer deaths. Cowabunga. But why is it happening?

A recent Vox explainer tackles this question. It admits right in the headline that “no one knows why,” but ventures three possibilities:

• Something is different about the drugs.

• Harm reduction campaigns and public health interventions designed to reduce deaths (including encouraging people to smoke fentanyl rather than injecting it, because smoking is less deadly) have been working.

• A lot of the people who had been using fentanyl died and fewer people are taking it up.

Of course it could be some combination of all three. The LA Times article about San Francisco’s drop in deaths does say that prescriptions for buprenorphine and methadone have gone way up, which would lend credence to the effectiveness of harm reduction. If campaigns to push people toward smoking did save thousands of lives, someone should tell local TV news reporters like Fox 11’s Gina Silva, who did multiple stories flogging a Skid Row nonprofit for doing that exact thing.

But if the public health interventions are the dominant cause of the drop in deaths, it would have to mean that those public health responses look pretty much the same in San Francisco and West Virginia, which reported a 36% decrease in overdose deaths last year. Maybe they do!

Whatever happened, it has something to do with fentanyl. And fentanyl in America in 2024 tends to come from roughly the same source: Mexican cartel labs, manufactured with synthetic precursors from China and trafficked over the border. (Read Ben Westhoff’s book and newsletter to learn much more about it.)

So I’m curious about the “something is different about the drugs” theory. Historically one of the biggest drivers of overdoses has been manufacturing error, like poor mixing that led to larger amounts of fentanyl in one hit, or fentanyl contamination in stimulants. I used to work with a meth user who never knowingly used fentanyl but would test positive for it every time he went to the hospital.

So fewer overdoses could imply that drug production has been “cleaned up” or “made better” somehow. But recent New York Times footage from inside a Sinaloa cartel fentanyl cooking operation does not really display pristine laboratory conditions or scientifically rigorous mixing techniques:

Don’t these guys know YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO USE BLACK PLASTIC KITCHEN TOOLS ANYMORE

Maybe there’s just less fentanyl in the fentanyl now? Here’s someone from the DEA who thinks so:

About 5 out of every 10 fentanyl pills that the agency tested this year had lethal doses of the synthetic opioid painkiller fentanyl, down from about 7 in 10 last year, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said last week at a summit for families who have lost a loved one to a fentanyl overdose.

“Decreases in drug related deaths and the lethality of pills equals lives saved,” Milgram said in a statement. “The cartels have reduced the amount of fentanyl they put into pills because of the pressure we are putting on them.”

So there’s that — even if it’s unclear why using less fentanyl in pills would be a response to “pressure.” Is it not possible that the cartels are just cutting the product to make more money? Like when companies make a product smaller but keep prices the same?

There’s also the question of whether less fentanyl in pills would affect the safety of using fentanyl in powder form, which is how most people use it. So the mystery lingers. But it would certainly be useful to understand what’s working here.

Mystery 3: What is going on with this one restaurant?

There’s a restaurant I go to sometimes for lunch downtown. I’d rather not name it because I’m about to raise the question of whether it is involved in a minor scheme, and I’ve talked to the owner and he seems like a nice enough guy. You can look it up if you want!!

The restaurant is in a very small food hall in one of the more “gritty” parts of downtown not really known for its dining “scene.” You order at a counter and eat in a dining area that the restaurant shares with some other places. I’ve gone to this restaurant three times for lunch and ordered two different things. Both things were good. There’s usually about one other person in the entire food hall when I’ve been there. It’s only open from noon to 6pm.

The restaurant was also the number one restaurant on Yelp in the country in 2023.

Not just in LA!!! In the United States of America. It was #5 in 2019 even though it only opened in 2017. This year it has fallen to #6, but it is still the only LA restaurant in the Top 100.

This restaurant achieved number one status by earning, as of today, a 4.8 star rating with more than 2,100 reviews. For comparison the restaurant right next to it in the food hall, which made the LA Times Top 100 in 2023 and opened a second location last year, has 340 reviews. Musso and Frank has 2,600. So the Yelp restaurant has almost as many reviews as one of the most famous restaurants in the city, even though only about five to ten percent of people I have mentioned the Yelp restaurant to have heard of it.

Here’s the review at the top of the Yelp page right now — this reviewer’s only review ever.

None of this is to say that the restaurant has committed some kind of Yelp fraud. That would be a serious accusation and this is not the place for it. If they did, my guess is that it was the work of some kind of software that went haywire — possibly an AI that fell in love with the owner and was desperate to please him. But it feels like something is going on here.

I haven’t seen anyone question the number and quality of this restaurant’s Yelp reviews, likely because nobody cares. But the #1 ranking got a healthy amount of coverage. Most of the local TV news stations did a piece on it. And most importantly, the owner got to go on Kelly Clarkson and she ate the food.

Kate Walsh and Randy Jackson were also guests on that episode. They sat on the couch next to the owner and ate the food as well. “Have you all been to (the restaurant),” Kelly Clarkson asked them. “I haven’t, but I’ve heard of it,” said Kate Walsh. “My kids have been. My kids have been. My kids love it,” said Randy Jackson.

Sorry: I simply do not believe Randy Jackson has had a conversation about this restaurant with any of his three children, let alone more than one of them. So if there is indeed a conspiracy here Randy Jackson is now implicated in it.

Whatever is going on here: fine with me. It’s hard out there in restaurant world. Any Nosy Nicholas who looks up the restaurant should give it a try! (If you want to actually go eat there, you now apparently have to order online ninety minutes in advance because they are overrun with Doordash orders, probably because they are a top ten restaurant in America on Yelp.)

“The sauce is so good,” said Kate Walsh.