Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.
“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.
I get it. We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times. But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.
“California Southern: Writing From the Road, 1992-2025” by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
(Gustavo Arellano / Los Angeles Times)
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.
Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.
In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight is contained in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.
“Say these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”
Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez, who published her first book, “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories,” after decades of teaching English — including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.
The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it.
Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.’s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
Author, activist and Irvine Valley College professor Lisa Alvarez holds a copy of her short story collection “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories.”
(Don Leach / Daily Pilot)
Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role — people loved and lost, places missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book” as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.
To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California — it isn’t even past.
While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”
A lot of his subjects — L.A.’s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The twin cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.”
Man, I wish I would have written that.
“Elements of Los Angeles” is worth the purchase, if only to read “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster that killed at least 431 people — mostly Latinos — and destroyed the career of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.
But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you/with this sad song/and with a plea to heaven/For those taken by the flood.”
The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland’s L.A.
“Elements of Los Angeles” was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.”
Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others.
We see Japanese Americans posing in front of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the 1960s, standing in front of a car at a World War II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening trucks at a time when they dominated the landscaping industry.
“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.
The rest is a delight that zooms by like the rest of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to read them all and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!
When photographer Peter Turnley was just 20 years old, an acquaintance from the California Office of Economic Opportunity reached out to him with a question. Would he be interested in taking four months off from school in Michigan to come out west, drive around, and take pictures of the state’s poor and working-class populations? An eager Turnley jumped at the chance and ended up spending the summer of 1975 traversing California in his tiny white Volkswagen, doing everything from spending time with migrant farmworkers in the San Joaquin valley to hopping trains with travelers looking for work to chatting up Oaklanders about how they were making ends meet.
But then his OEO contact left mid-project and, while Turnley says he submitted a set of prints to the department, they never ended up seeing the light of day. That will all change Dec. 4, when the pictures — along with others the news photographer has taken in his current hometown, Paris — will go on display at the Leica Gallery in L.A.
Why did California’s OEO think of you for this project back in 1975?
When I was a freshman in college at the University of Michigan, during the winter break, I went back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where I’m from. There was a very progressive mayor in power at that point and he assembled a really interesting group of people in his city government.
When I began photography at the age of 16, I decided to use it to try to change the world, and I particularly admired photographers that had used photography to affect public policy, like the Farm Security Administration photographers in the 1930s, which included people like Dorothea Lange. So I convinced this mayor to hire me to shoot pictures for the city of Fort Wayne on the themes that the city was making policy around.
During that time, I met a woman who was the public affairs officer for the city of Fort Wayne. Unbeknownst to me, two years later she moved out to California and that’s how I got a letter at the end of my sophomore year of college asking me if I would be willing to come out to California to do a four-month road trip to document the lives of the working class and the poor of California. She explained to me that the Office of Economic Opportunity needed to make a report that underlined its efforts in trying to help the the poor of California, and that they they wanted to use these photographs as a way to illustrate that report.
I was given some very basic statistics of pockets of poverty around the state of California, but no other specific direction, and I was promised just enough money to cover fleabag hotels and diner food and gasoline. I was given access to a government darkroom in Sacramento, where occasionally I would go to develop film and make contact sheets and prints, but otherwise, I was out, driving to every corner of the state.
What were your impressions of the state before you came, as someone originally from the Midwest?
I didn’t grow up on a farm [in Indiana] but I knew a little bit about farming and what really struck me when I went out to California was what I think most of the world doesn’t really realize, and that is that [much] of the state is agricultural and rural. In many ways, the San Joaquin Valley felt a whole lot more like Indiana than almost any other place I could imagine.
What did you take away from the project as a whole?
One of the aspects of this body of work that fascinates me and that I guess in some ways I’m very proud of is that one feels in the photography and in the connection with people an almost innocent and authentic view. The pictures are very direct. They’re very human and they really deal with the lives of people, because you’re looking into their eyes and getting close to them.
Another thing that struck me was that because I was dealing particularly with people that were working class or often very poor, that there was something very similar in terms of people’s plight, whether they were living in urban areas or in the countryside. Everyone I met seemed like really decent, good, hard-working people that just wanted a better life for themselves and their family. They wanted to survive with dignity, and I felt that we all owe these people a great sense of debt.
I also remember that when I spent some time with hobos — and I’m not sure if that’s a pejorative word today, but they’re a little different category of people than simply those who are homeless. Hobos were most often men that chose this lifestyle to ride the trains and stop and work in various places. But I remember being in a boxcar with four men and all four were pretty much like everyone else. It was just that their lives had kind of crossed over a line into the margins, just by a thread. And I remember realizing at this young age just how fragile life is, or how close we can be to that line at almost any time.
Something I found striking in these pictures is how little has changed, in some ways. There have always been people working in California’s fields that are underpaid and underappreciated, and in some ways, things have only gotten worse for a lot of that population.
During COVID, I lived in New York City and every day for three months from the very first day of the lockdown, I went out and I walked. I would meet people and I would ask them three questions: What was their name, their age, and how were they making it? And then after three months, I went back to Paris, and I walked the streets there and did the same thing, ultimately making a book of the pictures I took from that time called “A New York-Paris Visual Diary: The Human Face Of Covid-19.”
But the thing that struck me during COVID was that it was the working class of New York that saved all of our lives. There were whole walls of buildings on the Upper West Side that were dark at night because everyone had gone to the Hamptons or left New York, but the people that saved our lives were cashiers, postal workers, FedEx workers, nurses, doctors, medics, ambulance drivers and mostly working-class people. And looking back, I had this hope that maybe when the COVID crisis was over, that we would rectify in a general way how we looked at our society and how we value the people that are actually doing the work in our society, but in actuality, once the lockdown was over, we just went back to being ruled and led by people that have a lot of money. And, really, the well-to-do of California and the rest of the world would never go and pick their own strawberries.
Have you kept in touch with anyone whose picture you took in 1975, or heard from anyone after the fact?
I’ve for sure wondered what happened to all the people in the pictures, but unfortunately over all these years, I’ve never had contact with anyone. It would be absolutely amazing if somebody from that time would come out of the woodwork.
You’ve been a working photographer for over 50 years now, having worked in 90 countries, taking 40 covers for Newsweek, and shooting many of the last century’s most important geopolitical events. Are there moments you still can’t believe you saw, or pictures you can’t believe you took?
Well, just this morning, I signed the prints that will be in this exhibit and they’re really beautiful. They’re made in Paris and they’re traditional silver gelatin prints, beautiful quality. But I held up one of the images from The Other California – 1975, and it was this Okie, a guy that was born during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and moved out to California. Looking at that image today, looking in the eyes and the face of this man, I really had the impression that — even though it’s my own photograph — that I was looking at one of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. I’m very proud of the fact that there’s a continuity of that kind of attention to the heart of people’s lives in my work.
In this modern era of digital photography, on the one hand I think it’s wonderful that everyone is making photographs now more than ever before. On the other hand, I think that the world of photography has moved away from real powerful, direct human connection. And to me, that’s what’s most important. I’m a lot more interested in life than I am in photography. I mean, I care a lot about photography. I love beautiful photographs, and I try to take them as well as possible, but what’s most important to me are the themes of life that I photograph and at the center of all that is emotion.
Peter Turnley — Paris-California
Where: Leica Gallery, 8783 Beverly Blvd. in West Hollywood
When: Dec. 4-Jan. 12. Turnley will present the work at the gallery Dec. 7 from 2 to 4 p.m. and sign copies of his book “The Other California – 1975.”
At least four people have been killed in a mass shooting at a child’s birthday party in California.
Ten others were injured in the shooting at a restaurant on Saturday evening, in the state’s northern city of Stockton.
Local police say the victims include adults and children. The conditions of the injured have not been confirmed.
A suspect is still on the loose and police say they believe the shooting may have been “targeted”.
The San Joaquin county sheriff’s office said the shooting happened shortly before 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT Sunday), and is appealing to anyone with “information, video footage, or who may have witnessed any part of the incident” to come forward.
Spokesperson Heather Brent described the incident as “unfathomable”, adding: “This is a very active and ongoing investigation, and information remains limited.
“Early indications suggest this may be a targeted incident, and investigators are exploring all possibilities.
Stockton’s Mayor Christina Fugazi called the shooting “unacceptable”.
“Families should be together instead of at the hospital, standing next to their loved one, praying that they survive.”
Authorities have not yet released information about the attacker’s identity or motive behind the attack on a family gathering.
Published On 30 Nov 202530 Nov 2025
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At least four people have been killed and 10 wounded after a shooting during a family gathering in northern California’s Stockton, local authorities said.
The shooting took place at a child’s birthday party, Stockton’s Vice Mayor Jason Lee said in a Facebook post late on Saturday.
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“I am in contact with staff and public safety officials to understand exactly what happened, and I will be pushing for answers,” he said.
Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County sheriff’s office, said the victims included both children and adults.
The shooting occurred inside the banquet hall, which shares a car park with other businesses.
“We can confirm at this time that approximately 14 individuals were struck by gunfire, and four victims have been confirmed deceased,” San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said in a post on X.
“This is a very active and ongoing investigation, and information remains limited. Early indications suggest this may be a targeted incident, and investigators are exploring all possibilities.”
Police said they received reports shortly before 6pm (02:00 GMT) of a shooting that occurred near the 1900 block of Lucile Avenue in Stockton.
The authorities have not yet released information about the identity or the motive of the attacker. They did not immediately provide information on the severity of the injuries of the surviving victims.
The office of Governor Gavin Newsom said he has been briefed on the “horrific shooting” in Stockton and will be following up on the evolving situation.
A wealthy young Silicon Valley venture capitalist hopes to recruit statewide and congressional candidates and launch an affordable-housing ballot measure in 2018 because he says California’s leaders are failing to address flaws in the state’s governance that are killing opportunities for future generations.
“I think we have a fundamental breakdown of the American social contract and it’s desperately important that we fix it,” he said. “Even if we had a very well-functioning government, it would be a challenge, and our current government functions so badly it is an extra challenge.”
Altman is the president of Y Combinator, a technology incubator that has provided start-up funding to hundreds of Silicon Valley companies, notably Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe. He first made his mark by co-founding a social media app called Loopt when he was 19 that later sold for $43 million.
He said he hopes to recruit a slate of four candidates to run for office — possibly for governor, lieutenant governor, mayor of a major city in California and Congress — and could provide technology platforms and seed money for their campaigns.
Though Altman said he is not specifically targeting Democratic politicians, he made clear he is not happy with incumbents such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein or the current gubernatorial field, which includes Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
“I’m not satisfied with the current choices,” Altman said. “I don’t want to make this about dumping on specific people, [but] I don’t think any of the current candidates are the best we could do.”
He would not be the first wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur to try to shake up California politics based on his tech resume. Among them are former eBay chief Meg Whitman, who spent $144 million of her own money on an unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2010, and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, who ran for Senate in 2010 before running for president in 2016.
In recent years, tech industry executives have played notable roles helping candidates get elected to top office, including Google parent company Alphabet Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt, who backed former President Obama, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who supported President Trump.
Altman declined to say how much he was willing to spend on his effort but said he would prefer to invest heavily on a cause rather than underwriting individual campaigns.
“That’s always felt gross to me,” he said. “I’m happy to spend a lot of money supporting the movement.”
Over the years, Altman has been registered as a Democrat and as having no party preference, and his political donations swing between liberal and center-left.
Last year, he donated $100,000 to a San Francisco group working to elect moderates to the county Board of Supervisors, and $50,000 to an Airbnb committee that backed an increase in the city sales tax. He has also spent thousands of dollars backing Obama and national and local Democratic groups, as well as congressional, legislative and local candidates.
On a website that launches Wednesday, Altman lays out his concerns and policy goals. He argues that the state’s priorities have become unbalanced, resulting in inequality, stalled growth and declining opportunity. And it will only become worse because of an upcoming economic shift driven by automation, he says.
“We need to figure out a new social contract, and to ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes,” Altman writes on the site.
Altman lays out 10 principles including lowering the cost of housing, creating single-payer healthcare, increasing clean energy use, improving education, reforming taxes and rebuilding infrastructure.
He has few specific policy edicts, and floats proposals that will generate controversy, such as creating a universal basic income for all Americans in an effort to equalize opportunity, public funding for the media and increasing taxes on property that is owned by foreigners, is unoccupied or has been “flipped” by investors seeking a quick return on an investment.
Altman said he recognizes he faces an uphill battle.
“Maybe this will go nowhere,” he said. “There’s always the possibility I put this out and there’s exactly one person who believes in this stuff and it’s me.”
Newport Beach businessman Dale Dykema is a highly sought-after guest when potential Republican presidential candidates visit California.
He recently attended an intimate dinner with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a cocktail party headlined by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and a half-hour tete-a-tete with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
In the last quarter of a century, Dykema, 85, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, party organizations and political action committees. He has yet to make up his mind on whom to back — and more importantly, whom to raise money for — in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“There are just so many candidates in the race. I’m completely on the fence,” said Dykema, founder of TD Service Financial Corp., a company that provides foreclosure services for the mortgage industry. In 2012, he said, he settled quickly on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but for the upcoming election he may wait until after the first couple of primaries before deciding.
The size of the field — well over a dozen likely candidates — coupled with the lack of a clear favorite mean many Republican donors in California share Dykema’s reluctance to commit.
“Normally, there’s a candidate that the entire establishment is behind and there’s this huge fundraising juggernaut for one person,” said Jon Fleischman, a state GOP official from Anaheim Hills and publisher of an influential conservative blog. “This year, no one has the brass ring already in hand. We’re seeing a lot more listening and a lot less giving early.”
On the Democratic side, state donors are already uniting behind former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party’s overwhelming favorite. She raised millions for her nascent campaign at events hosted earlier this month by entertainment and business leaders.
As Republican donors weigh their choices, they’re grilling the 2016 candidates on a range of issues, including immigration, religious freedom and net neutrality. They’re doing so in homes in Bel-Air, boardrooms in the Silicon Valley, parties in Orange County and GOP functions all over the state — a nod to California’s primacy in what is known in political circles as the “invisible primary.”
California probably doesn’t matter in the nominating fight. Its June 7, 2016, presidential primary is almost certainly too late to affect the GOP’s process. The state is also too Democratic to put it in play in next year’s general election. But California is the biggest source of campaign cash in the nation.
In the 2012 election, presidential candidates directly raised more than $112 million from California’s deep-pocketed donors. That’s almost the combined total raised in the next two most-generous states, Texas and New York, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These figures do not include the millions donated to party committees and outside groups such as “super PACs” that are not controlled by a candidate.
Not surprisingly, given California’s tilt toward Democrats, President Obama was the biggest beneficiary then, raising $62.8 million here for his reelection bid, according to the center. But GOP candidates also filled their campaign coffers here — Romney collected $41.3 million, and the rest of the Republican field raised nearly $8 million.
Romney’s extensive fundraising network in California, which he cultivated over nearly a decade, became available to others when he decided in January not to run again.
“We’re talking a lot about it, but no one’s committing to anyone right now,” said Bret de St. Jeor, a Modesto businessman and Romney fundraiser in 2012. “It’s just flat-out too early…. Let’s hear a little bit more. Let’s hear the opening statements from the other candidates before we start jumping on somebody’s bandwagon.”
Donors “love the courting process,” said Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member from Surfside in Orange County. “Most of the serious candidates are coming to California repeatedly, and their mission is to establish a rapport as early as possible … and to try to meet as many folks as possible.”
Steel, who is undecided, recently co-hosted a meet-and-greet and intimate dinner for Walker at the tony Pacific Club in Newport Beach. He noted that the field includes multiple candidates who appeal to the same GOP faction, whether it’s establishment voters, social conservatives or tea party groups.
Many potential candidates, he added, have connections to California, or have the opportunity to grow support.
Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina retains backers from her unsuccessful run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010, Steel said. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry developed ties to the state during his unsuccessful 2012 presidential bid, in part because one of his top strategists is a longtime and well-respected California GOP fundraiser.
Walker is a familiar face in California’s donor community, as he is across the nation, because of his fierce fight against unions in Wisconsin. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has spent considerable time wooing the libertarian streak that runs through Silicon Valley. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has blown away audiences with his oratory, Steel said. And Bush’s family has long-standing alliances in the state.
Jeb Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush, was a prodigious fundraiser here, performing a “cash-ectomy on the California donor community” whenever he visited, Fleischman said. “It was staggering.”
Those relationships haven’t sealed the deal for Jeb Bush here, but they do provide an edge for the yet-undeclared candidate that was visible during a recent, lucrative fundraising swing through the state.
“I really wanted to see him run before his brother ran,” said venture capitalist William H. Draper III, who went to Yale with their father, President George H.W. Bush, and served as his finance chair in his unsuccessful 1980 presidential run.
Draper, a former president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, co-hosted an East Palo Alto fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s committee.
Susan McCaw, a major fundraiser for George W. Bush who served as his ambassador to Austria, said she was impressed by Jeb Bush’s record as governor of Florida and his support for education and immigration reform. She and her husband held a fundraiser for his political action committee at their Bel-Air home.
“I think he has the best chance of beating Hillary in the general,” she said.
Electability was the one quality nearly every donor — committed or not — mentioned as a priority.
John Jordan, a tech entrepreneur and vintner who has spent millions on Republican causes, plans to make a decision over the summer. He is hosting a dinner for Walker at his Healdsburg vineyard and expects to huddle with Paul soon. His sole focus, he said, is backing the candidate who could win the White House in 2016 by attracting the various factions of GOP voters as well as less ideologically driven general-election voters.
“In a pretty cold-blooded way,” Jordan said, “it has got to be someone that can unite the base, that they will like enough to turn out for … but at the same time isn’t someone that’s obnoxious.”
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Capitol Police on Tuesday announced that the agency was opening regional field offices in California and Florida to investigate threats to members of Congress in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Threats against members of Congress have increased in recent years. As of Tuesday, total threats so far in 2021 were double what they were at this point a year ago, according to Capitol Police.
Home to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) and other prominent members of Congress, California gives the law enforcement agency a Western base to investigate claims of threats made against members. The state is also home to the nation’s largest congressional delegation.
Yogananda Pittman, the department’s acting chief, told lawmakers in March that the vast majority of the increased threats were from people who didn’t live near Washington..
The field offices will be in the Tampa and San Francisco areas, according to Capitol Police.
“At this time, Florida and California are where the majority of our potential threats are,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. “The field offices will be the first for the Department. A regional approach to investigating and prosecuting threats against Members is important, so we will be working closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in those locations.”
The new field offices are among the changes made since the attack six months ago in which Capitol Police were quickly overwhelmed by thousands of pro-Trump supporters, hundreds of whom were able to break into the Capitol building, forcing members to temporarily halt certification of the 2020 election results and flee for safety. Capitol Police leaders told congressional committees investigating the incident that they had no information that the crowd would become violent.
Five people died in the melee or the days after. Two officers died by suicide, and more than 140 were injured — some permanently. More than 500 people have been charged for participating in the attack.
Other changes, spurred in part by congressional investigations and reports by the department’s internal watchdog, include increased training for officers alongside the National Guard, improved intelligence-gathering efforts and protocols for reporting sensitive information, and new equipment and technology for officers.
The police agency rarely provides information to the public on how it operates, citing security concerns and member safety. For example, unlike other government agencies, the internal watchdog’s reports are not publicly available.
A spokesperson did not answer questions Tuesday about how many staff would be hired or what the cost to taxpayers would be.
The spokesperson said other regional offices were expected.
Very few members of Congress are accompanied by security outside of the Capitol building, and it is unclear if the new offices will primarily investigate threats against members or also will help when security is needed in the state. The Capitol Police have jurisdiction to investigate all threats made against a member of Congress.
Reporting from Sacramento — Want to be safe from earthquakes in California? You’d need to endure summer scorchers, winter flood threats and full-time politicians. But temblors don’t threaten people living in Sacramento.
In the state capital — River City, Sacratomato, City of Trees — earthquakes are seen only on TV. Here, you’ll escape the Big One.
“Sacramento is one of the safer places,” acting State Geologist Tim McCrink says. “We don’t have that many active faults in the area.”
In fact, Sacramento — based on historical records and fault maps — is unquestionably the safest earthquake refuge among all of California’s major metropolitan areas.
The most unsafe? You already know.
“The worst places are the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles,” McCrink says. “They’ve got most of the faults.”
Is there any pocket of L.A. that’s reasonably safe?
“There are so many faults down there in such complicated geology, I’d be hesitant to say one area is better than the other,” McCrink says.
As a native Californian, I’ve long been curious about this. Fear of the Big One long ago was compartmentalized in a far corner of my mind but always has lurked there, making me a tad nervous. I suspect millions of other Californians share that anxiety.
Growing up in Ventura County, I was bounced around frequently by quakes. In 1971, I covered Gov. Ronald Reagan inspecting devastation from the magnitude 6.6 Sylmar quake in the San Fernando Valley that killed 65. In 1994, I tagged along as Gov. Pete Wilson looked over damage from the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake that killed 57 — and destroyed my sister’s condo.
I worked at the L.A. Times downtown for a few years, always wondering if that old monolith might suddenly crumble in a quake.
But bad quakes aren’t inevitable everywhere in California.
Eastern San Diego County is relatively safe, but downtown San Diego has a dangerous fault.
A large swath of northeastern California and the western Sierra is fairly quake-proof. But those people face scary wildfire threats.
The North Coast from Oregon down into Monterey County is riddled with faults. So is the South Coast from Santa Barbara through Orange County.
In other words, if you can see the sun set over the Pacific, it’s risky.
“The Big Sur coast is pretty good in terms of shaking, but there are massive landslides along there,” McCrink says. “So pick your poison.”
Anyway, there was a magnitude 6.6 San Simeon quake in 2003 that killed two and injured 40. So the Central Coast isn’t immune.
“All that faulting over the millennia has produced some beautiful mountains along the coast,” McCrink says. “The benefit of the tectonics is we have beautiful scenery. And the downside is we have to live with earthquakes.”
On New Year’s Day, when viewers watch the Rose Bowl and marvel at the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains in the backdrop, they’re looking at the product of earthquakes.
Why is Sacramento practically quake-proof?
“For the same reason it’s pretty flat,” UC Davis geology professor Michael Oskin says. “Topography and earthquakes pretty well correlate in California.”
So if it’s flat and unspectacular — like the Midwest — it’s normally good shelter from earthquakes.
But not from floods. There have been horrific, deadly floods in the Sacramento Valley. During really wet winters with heavy Sierra snowfall, valley people fret about flooding.
Sacramento residents may not need to consider earthquake insurance, but they should buy a flood policy. I have and sleep easier, living four houses from the Sacramento River.
Neither quakes nor floods are covered by ordinary homeowner insurance. Wildfires are — if you can find a policy. They’re becoming increasingly hard to buy in high-risk fire zones. Consumer complaints have increased nearly 600% in the last decade, says Michael Soller, spokesman for the state Insurance Department.
“They’ve surged in the last couple of years.”
So there’s no escaping some category of potential calamity in California.
They can even be linked.
On Christmas Eve in 1955, a Feather River levee collapsed north of Sacramento, flooding 90% of Yuba City and drowning 37 people. That provided momentum for eventually building Gov. Pat Brown’s State Water Project because the central feature was a flood control dam upriver near Oroville.
Gigantic Oroville Dam was completed in 1968. And when the reservoir was filled with 3.5 million acre-feet of water, the earth crunched underneath, triggering a magnitude 5.7 earthquake in 1975. That’s the scientists’ theory.
The Oroville quake had lots of repercussions. It killed another big dam project near Auburn northeast of Sacramento. Opponents found a risky fault under the site.
And it prompted legislators to close the state Capitol for a few years so the historic old structure could be retrofitted at a cost of $68 million — even though there’d never been a significant quake in Sacramento’s history.
One upshot of the Capitol restoration: The press offices were demolished and replaced with very fancy, ornate hangouts for the two top legislative leaders. All because there was a fluke earthquake 70 miles away that was barely felt around the Capitol.
There’s at least one refreshing thing about earthquakes: They can’t be blamed on either political party. Neither President Trump nor Gov. Gavin Newsom had anything to do with those quakes in Ridgecrest.
Richard Rider would love to have Gov. Pete Wilson’s job. He dreams of hacking away at bureaucracy, crushing all new tax legislation under a huge rubber stamp that reads “VETO.” He’s even imagined the sound this would make: whoooomp!
Rider, the Libertarian candidate for governor, is a realist, however. The 49-year-old stockbroker from San Diego knows that a minor party candidate such as himself has no hope of being elected governor Nov. 8. Still, he thinks he can help defeat Wilson (whom Rider deems a “wimp” and a “Benedict Arnold” masquerading as a Republican), which is why, not long ago, he wrote Democrat Kathleen Brown a letter asking for $500,000.
“I’m the Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate. Normally that might elicit nothing more from you than a yawn. But I can get you elected,” Rider wrote. “What you need is a third candidate to drain votes from Wilson. I can do that. . . . Dollar for dollar, there is no better use for your campaign funds than in my race for governor.”
Rider’s pitch must have sounded presumptuous coming from a man unknown to most Californians. Like the other minor party candidates for governor–Jerome McCready of the American Independent Party and Gloria La Riva of the Peace & Freedom Party–Rider was not invited to participate in the recent televised debate between Wilson and Brown. He lacks money, exposure and governmental experience.
But Rider has one very powerful thing going for him: a dissatisfied electorate. A recent Times poll shows that California voters are unhappy with Brown and Wilson and that three out of every five are planning to vote for the “lesser of two evils” for governor. If just a tiny fraction of those people vote for a so-called third party candidate, political analysts say, it could alter the race.
“In this state, where elections are won or lost by 1 or 2 points, third party candidates can decide elections,” said Bill Press, chairman of the California Democratic Party, who has followed Rider’s candidacy with interest. “If I had an extra $500,000, I would give it to Richard Rider and it would be money well spent. . . . Every vote he gets is one vote Pete Wilson doesn’t.”
Taken together, the four minor parties that have qualified to appear on the California ballot–American Independent, Green, Libertarian, and Peace & Freedom–represent 456,000 voters, or about 3% of the state’s electorate.
The American Independent and Libertarian parties, though they differ on many principles, are both committed to strictly limiting the power of government and to cutting taxes. Conventional wisdom says that to vote for one of these parties’ candidates is to take a vote away from a Republican candidate.
The Green and the Peace & Freedom parties, though also very different from one another, both seek social justice and equality. These parties are more likely to appeal to voters who might otherwise cast ballots for Democrats.
These minor parties’ candidates face an uphill battle. Virtually ignored by the press and by their more mainstream rivals, they have trouble raising the money needed for expensive broadcast advertising and direct mail flyers. As a result, minor party candidates can campaign tirelessly, making speeches and walking precincts, and still remain largely unknown.
La Riva, the Peace & Freedom candidate for governor, is a printer and labor organizer in San Francisco. McCready, the American Independent nominee, runs a shop that sells pre-hung doors and other construction materials in Castroville. Rider, who closed his financial planning business at the end of last year, is the only minor party candidate who has campaigned for governor full time.
Nevertheless, Press, the Democratic Party chairman, believes that politicians who ignore these alternative candidates do so at their own peril. This year, he has gone so far as to donate his own money to keep a Green Party gubernatorial candidate from competing with Brown.
Leading up to the June primary election, three candidates were vying for the Green gubernatorial nomination–despite widespread concern within the party that a Green nominee would siphon votes from Brown in the general election. Then, one Green leader launched a campaign urging Greens to vote for “None of the Above”–an option that allows Greens to choose no candidate.
Eager to safeguard Brown voters, Press sent a $500 donation to the none-of-the-above campaign, dubbed Friends of Nobody. Then he sent letters to his friends asking them to do the same.
“I raised $5,000 to $6,000 or more for their campaign,” Press said proudly, recalling that the effort to gain more votes for no one than for any of the candidates was successful. “Nobody won. Which I considered a victory.”
Third party candidates are familiar with this kind of circular reasoning. They see no shame in losing, as long as they have introduced new ideas into the race. And they believe that every vote cast for a minor party candidate puts a little more pressure on the major parties to shape up.
That is why a conservative such as Rider is working so hard to help a Democrat such as Brown. Rider is probably the only Brown supporter who wants to do away with state income taxes, abolish the workers’ compensation system and phase out all welfare payments. He wants to repeal the law that requires motorcyclists to wear helmets. He believes the Endangered Species Act will result in the nationalization of all property. And he supports the death penalty–which Brown opposes, though she pledges to enforce it as governor.
“Obviously, I’m no fan of the Democrats’ pipe dream of a socialist utopia. . . . Kathleen Brown would make a terrible governor,” Rider said.
But Brown would do less damage than Wilson, Rider added, and a Brown victory would send a clear signal to the GOP. If he could do that, Rider said, he would feel like a winner no matter how badly he lost.
And, he said, Wilson is not a true Republican.
“Brown is a very ineffective Democrat. Wilson is a very effective Democrat. It’s time the Republican Party stopped running stealth Democrats for governor,” Rider said. “If I pull enough conservative votes to cause Wilson to lose, then Republicans will have to start running real limited-government candidates such as Ron Unz.”
Rider is a big fan of Unz, the 32-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who challenged Wilson for the Republican gubernatorial nomination last spring. Before the primary, Rider endorsed Unz, knowing full well it might cost him some votes. Then after Unz lost, while winning 34% of the Republican vote, Rider began presenting himself as the next best thing.
Unz recently wrote letters that were published in the state’s major newspapers urging his supporters not to launch an Unz write-in campaign Nov. 8. Although he stopped short of endorsing Rider, Unz asked the 700,000 people who voted for him to support “candidates up and down the ticket who are true to the core values of the Republican Party–smaller government, lower taxes and fewer regulations.”
Rider said that is as good as an Unz endorsement. After all, Rider proposes cutting 90% of all state regulations. And he so abhors taxes that he closed his financial planning office in large part to avoid paying them.
“I was working until July 19 for the government,” he said. “For a Libertarian, that’s unacceptable.”
Rider has made sacrifices to run for governor. To enable him to afford campaigning full time, Rider and his wife pulled their two sons out of private school. (“May God forgive me for that,” he said.) The campaign, headquartered in one of his spare bedrooms with a “Rider for Governor” bumper sticker taped to the door, is truly no-frills.
His phones are answered by two volunteers–retirees who refer to Rider as “Guv.” When Rider is on the road, he often sleeps on supporters’ couches. Recently, when he heard about a promotion for a time-share condominium, he and his wife went and sat through the pitch. The reason: In exchange for their time, they received free plane tickets to San Francisco, a city where Rider wanted to campaign.
Most of the $40,000 Rider has been able to raise has gone to buy cable television time for his lone commercial, which features the candidate in a butcher’s smock, whacking a sausage with a meat cleaver and exclaiming, “Wilson won’t cut taxes, but I will!” By Nov. 8 this spot will have aired in the state’s five major media markets, and Rider hopes that combined with his frequent talk-radio appearances, it will get people’s attention.
Wilson campaign officials do not appear worried. With the latest Times poll showing the incumbent 9 points ahead of Brown among likely voters, Rider is barely a blip on the radar screen.
But against all odds, Rider perseveres. He knows that some people see voting for him as a waste.
“We’ve been taught since childhood that third parties are dangerous or crazy or both,” he said, recalling that when he first heard about the Libertarian Party in the 1970s he thought it was a “left-wing, commie group.”
“And yeah, sure, we’re not going to win,” he said. “But the success of a third party is in changing the direction of the country. . . . You vote to send a message to whoever’s in power that this is the direction you want to go.”
Meanwhile, the fund-raising message Rider sent Brown has yet to yield a single penny. Brown campaign spokesman John Whitehurst said he was unaware of the letter asking for $500,000.
Rider is not bitter. If Brown is not farsighted enough to see that a hefty donation to Rider for Governor could result in her own election, he said, it is her loss.
“I keep checking the mail,” he said. “Without my effort, they’re dead meat.”
It is a conspicuously indulgent place, where epicureans can fill their glasses with cabernet and sink into the carefully restored mezzanine’s dark velvet lounges for a tasting of fine caviar and artisan chocolates resembling museum pieces.
One vibe this nook of luxury does not give off is that of a community in distress. Its neighbor in the ornate 1920s Italianate edifice known as the Gordon Building is an Anthropologie store.
The redevelopment of the building, damaged in an earthquake, was bankrolled using a tax shelter created in 2017 for the wealthiest Americans on the promise it would bring opportunity to the most downtrodden places.
Billions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks for the wealthy are being generated by the Opportunity Zone program, often in pursuit of luxury high-rises, high-end hotels and swank office space. It has subsidized hulking self-storage units nestled alongside freeways and upmarket apartments for employees of the hottest Bay Area tech firms.
One thing the tax break has fallen short on: creating opportunities in low-income communities.
Opportunity zones were supposed to encourage investment in low-income communities. But billionaires are building luxury hotels and high-rises, instead.
“This has been perverted into a huge gift for people who did not need it,” said Aaron Seybert, managing director of social investment at the Kresge Foundation, which has found it difficult to put the tax break to work toward its effort to bring opportunity to America’s struggling communities.
“They are spending my money and yours. They said they would do that because these low-income areas are falling behind and they want to help people who live there,” Seybert said.
“The places I work in every day have raised virtually nothing” through the program, he said.
The same grievance can be heard from mayors of struggling towns throughout the nation. Among those declaring the program a bust is the East Baltimore pastor who went to the White House in 2018 to help President Trump unveil it. His community has been passed over as investors chase the double-digit returns that accompany the tax shelter in upscale markets.
The story of how this all happened has deep California roots, sprouting from the vision of a Silicon Valley billionaire who inserted himself into the machinations of federal policymaking.
The Opportunity Zone program was the vision of Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker, shown here in 2018.
(Michael Brochstein / Getty Images)
Sean Parker — founder of Napster, Facebook’s first president and the Silicon Valley bad boy depicted in the film “The Social Network” — seemed a stretch for this role.
Parker began working the Washington circuit late in the Obama era, when it was still hospitable to super-rich tech innovators but few had the patience or humility to navigate it. Washington is not about moving quickly and breaking things. Long, slow insider games of horse-trading precede almost every big new federal policy.
Yet Parker’s plan had bipartisan appeal. It focused on the wealth of Americans loath to reinvest their stock market, real estate and other capital gains profits because of the hefty tax bills that come when that money is moved. The idea was to give them a break on those taxes if they steered the money to communities desperate for investment.
“He really went to school on how Washington works,” said David Wessel, author of “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age,” which chronicles Parker’s quest and what became of the program he championed. “He hired a couple of Washington insiders, one a Democrat and one a Republican, and they created this think tank with the goal of getting Opportunity Zones into law…. They laid the foundation by making the case that we have a problem with geographic inequality in the United States, and it is not just incremental.”
Parker held private dinners with lawmakers of competing ideological loyalties, and he donated generously across the aisle.
“The idea initially sounded great,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley Democrat who had been approached by Parker to run the think tank, called the Economic Innovation Group. “I was quite enthusiastic about it.” Khanna passed on the job offer, as he was gearing up for a congressional run at the time, but once elected, he would join the push behind the tax break.
Downtown Napa’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The historic Franklin Station postal building, a site proposed for a boutique hotel, is in downtown Napa’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It allows investors to park their capital gains in Opportunity Zone projects. When they do, they can put off paying taxes on those gains for years, and cut that tax bill by as much as 15% when it does come due. The bigger draw: If they keep their money in the Opportunity Zone project for a decade, they don’t pay any taxes at all on the potentially large profits they make off that investment. The cumulative cost of the incentive is $1.6 billion in foregone tax revenue per year, which the Urban Institute says makes it one of the largest federal programs for steering investment into distressed places.
It seemed a price worth paying for even some progressive Democrats like Khanna if the end result was a flourishing of opportunity in the nation’s economic deserts.
But the California dreaming was disrupted by Washington deal-making. There was no hearing or any public vetting of the measure by lawmakers before it got quietly tucked into the Trump tax cut package of 2017. The final regulations were astoundingly permissive, full of provisions that allowed census districts in some of the nation’s wealthiest places to qualify as Opportunity Zones.
“It has not been used in ways that actually ended up creating jobs,” Khanna said. “It has been gamed.”
The money often has flowed to projects promising big financial returns that analysts — including those on then-President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors — conclude would have happened without the tax break.
While Parker and his think tank remain bullish that with some tweaks Opportunity Zones will be the “Marshall Plan for the heartland” they promised, many erstwhile backers are angry about what the program has become.
Angel Barajas, a Yolo County supervisor, walks through an Opportunity Zone in Woodland, west of Sacramento, that he says has been left behind by the program.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
“Woodland needs housing, it needs infill development,” said Enrique Fernandez, the former mayor of the heavily Latino city west of Sacramento, which persuaded the state to designate two of its census tracts as Opportunity Zones. The tax break has drawn none of it.
“I am really skeptical about the true intentions of this law and how it was implemented,” Fernandez said.
The city of Woodland’s Opportunity Zone district is only an hour’s drive from Napa’s Gordon Building but is in a different universe economically, riddled with vacant lots and litter. It could be a ripe canvas for development as the nearby main street comes alive with new small businesses bolstered by home buyers and renters moving to the town in search of a cheaper alternative to Sacramento, but the tax break is doing nothing to speed that transition.
Jose Ahumada Ruelas gathers recyclables to help his daughter, who collects them for income, at Yolano Village, a low-income housing development in Woodland’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
On a recent tour of the area, local officials said the investment needed to revitalize the blighted swaths of their community might have come if lawmakers had made good on their promise to steer the incentives only to struggling communities.
There are 8,764 census tracts designated as Opportunity Zones nationwide. Only 16% of them attracted any projects in the gold rush for rich investors in the program’s first year, when the tax breaks were most lucrative, according to an April 2021 UC Berkeley report based on aggregate data from the IRS.
Nearly half the cash invested went to the richest 1% of Opportunity Zones — places that rarely fit the conventional definition of distressed. Data from the consulting firm Novogradac reveal California cities are getting more of that cash than anyplace else.
In Oakland, Opportunity Zone tax breaks are being used to build high-rise apartments on the waterfront; they’ll rent at market rate, far out of reach for most locals. The situation is the same in downtown Long Beach and in Los Angeles neighborhoods like Koreatown and Little Tokyo. In Portland, Ore., the tax break was used to build a Ritz Carlton hotel.
In January, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) launched an investigation into several of these projects, including one in Palm Beach, Fla., where the incentive is being used to build a marina for “super-yachts.”
Todd Zapolski used the Opportunity Zone program to draw investors to his renovation of the Gordon Building in downtown Napa, which is now home to an Anthropologie store and a wine bar.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The Gordon Building developer said its renovation was possible because downtown Napa qualified as economically distressed under the Opportunity Zone program.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Back in Napa, the developer of the Gordon Building said the project will spur growth in a part of Northern California where underlying challenges of joblessness and housing affordability are obscured by the influx of wine vacationers. “We have some of the wealthiest in the country, and we have some of the poorest in the country,” Todd Zapolski said.
The landmark building was badly damaged in the 2014 South Napa earthquake, and Zapolski said repairing it was possible only because of the Opportunity Zone sweetener.
“We couldn’t make it work unless we had that incentive,” he said. “That gave us the extra oomph for investors to say, all right … we’ll take the risk.”
Parker declined to be interviewed, but the leader of the think tank he created took issue with scathing reviews of the program from community leaders, advocates and lawmakers who once saw promise in it. John Lettieri, president and chief executive of the Economic Innovation Group, said layering too many rules and restrictions onto the incentive would chase away investors.
“The trick is to get them to redeploy their capital without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops that would make it hard to access and leave communities in the same place they have been,” he said. “We were trying to create an incentive that can be relevant enough to a wide array of communities nationwide.”
States had broad authority on where to locate their Opportunity Zones, Lettieri said, and some were not judicious in drawing the maps. He said California, which drew the zones into some of the nation’s most wealthy enclaves, was one of the worst offenders.
California officials were not particularly invested in the federal program, which the Trump administration gave states scant time to shape or vet before they had to draw maps. The administration of then-Gov. Jerry Brown initially proposed an expedient process involving an algorithm. The federal rules were so permissive that the state’s draft maps included the campus of Stanford as an Opportunity Zone.
The downtown San Jose Opportunity Zone sits adjacent to the mega campus Google is building in the city.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Stanford and some others were removed from the program, but other pricey ZIP Codes stayed in amid lobbying by local politicians, economic development agencies and builders.
But the state’s ambivalence about Opportunity Zones is clear in its refusal to match the federal tax break with a credit investors in the projects can also claim on their state taxes. Officials in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration signaled to developers they believe the tax break is a giveaway. New York lawmakers gave their own vote of no confidence after the tax break was put to use for luxury projects in some of New York City’s most expensive ZIP Codes. The tax shelter last year was stripped from New York’s tax code.
Even so, there are cases of truly distressed communities making use of the credit.
An organization called SoLa Impact says it is leveraging the incentive to buy run-down residential properties in underserved neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and rehabilitate them for low-income tenants.
No state has had a bigger impact on the direction of the United States than California, a prolific incubator and exporter of outside-the-box policies and ideas. This occasional series examines what that has meant for the state and the country, and how far Washington is willing to go to spread California’s agenda as the state’s own struggles threaten its standing as the nation’s think tank.
Before he was slain, Los Angeles rap star Nipsey Hussle had plans to use it to invest in businesses in Crenshaw. The Central Valley city of Merced is looking to the tax break to bring its downtown back to life.
The place boosters point to most often is across the country in Erie, Pa., a city that is emblematic of the Rust Belt’s economic collapse. Community leaders say the incentive is crucial to the development of 12 residential and retail projects that will reshape the downtown.
But for every dollar the federal government is investing in Erie through the tax break, it is spending several more in downtown San Jose, a place hardly hurting for capital. The Opportunity Zone there sits adjacent to the future home of a sprawling Google campus that is so big it will reshape the footprint of the downtown, bringing in thousands of highly paid tech workers.
They will be able to stroll to a glistening residential tower getting built with the incentive, where 1,000-square-foot apartments will rent for $4,250 per month. The developer, Urban Catalyst, is not required to set aside anything for affordable housing beyond what the city requires for any other project. The building will have an infinity pool.
The Fountain Alley development in downtown San Jose’s Opportunity Zone will feature “the largest rooftop restaurant and bar in Silicon Valley.”
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Erik Hayden, founder, of Urban Catalyst.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
On a tour of San Jose’s Opportunity Zone building boom, Urban Catalyst founder Erik Hayden walked journalists through the construction of another stylish structure getting renovated with the tax break, with soaring ceilings and windows the size of movie screens. It will be home to a swank indoor miniature golf course and cocktail bar inspired by Burning Man. The complex will also house a venue for ax throwing and craft beer drinking.
Asked how such projects fit into the program’s goal of uplifting left-behind communities, Hayden points to properties downtown that remain vacant and boarded up, as the rapid gentrification and flood of investment in this community hopscotches across blocks. “It feels to me like a left-behind community,” he said. “We’re building a variety of different things, all of which are needed by downtown.”
It is hard to reconcile these luxury buildings in San Jose with the stated vision of Parker and that of the lawmaker who was the lead champion for the tax break, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican.
When Scott was invited to the White House in 2017 and asked by Trump how to make amends for the president’s remark that “there were very fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Scott secured Trump’s endorsement for Opportunity Zones.
The senator recounts in his book, “Opportunity Knocks,” how he made the pitch, telling Trump “that we must find fresh ways to alleviate the terrible poverty that is the source of so many of our ills — including the plague of racism.” Scott remains a proponent of the program, saying in a House hearing in November that the tens of billions invested in Opportunity Zone projects are, by the program’s definition, going to “low-income, high-poverty, racially diverse areas.”
The Paseo, a tech office space and retail building in downtown San Jose’s Opportunity Zone, will feature an indoor miniature golf course inspired by Burning Man.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
He pointed to new businesses in Columbia, S.C., an affordable housing development in Rockhill, N.C., and local enthusiasm for the program in Stockton. He acknowledged, though, that accurately measuring the tax shelter’s success is impossible, because there are no disclosure rules that allow taxpayers to learn “exactly what people are doing with the resources and the benefits and the incentives.” Scott says he wants more disclosure.
Those who have soured on the tax break say they have seen enough to know it is doing little to bring the country closer to Scott’s lofty goal of alleviating poverty and racism. But it is, they say, helping a lot of wealthy investors and developers of luxury properties.
One need only peruse the Lake Tahoe real estate ads for evidence.
Among the listings is an 8-acre property directly across the street from Heavenly Mountain Resort ski area. The price tag is $52 million. One selling point: The city has already greenlighted the property for a hotel or condos, shops and a large event space.
Another selling point: It is in an Opportunity Zone.
It’s the subversive act of simply identifying a need in the landscape or the community — maybe the community garden could use some soil revitalization, or the oak trees plagued with weevil pests could use some fumigation — and tending to it with cultural fire. No need for permission.
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California has made supporting Indigenous fire stewardship a priority in recent years to help address the state’s growing wildfire crisis. But burning freely across the landscape (with perhaps only a phone call to the local land manager or fire department to give them a heads up) is still a dream, a long way off.
California outlawed cultural burning practices at statehood in 1850 and in most cases, burning freely without permits and approvals is still illegal. Even recently, Burgueno, a cultural fire practitioner and citizen of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel in San Diego County, has seen local authorities arrest an elder on arson charges for using cultural fire in tending the land.
It’s a practice far older than prescribed burning, the intentional fires typically set and managed by U.S. government fire personnel.
With the tradition comes wisdom: Through joint trainings and burns, fire officials versed in prescribed fire are often delighted by the detailed knowledge of fire’s role in an ecosystem that cultural fire practitioners can nonchalantly drop — for example, the benefits of burning after bees pollinate.
While prescription burns carried out by the Forest Service often focus on large-scale management goals, cultural burns are an elegant dance, deeply in tune with the individual species on the landscape and the relationships they have with each other and fire. Burning is one of many tools tribes have to shape the ecosystem and help it flourish through the years.
“It is grounded in our creation stories, our sacred beliefs and philosophy,” Burgueno said. “It helps us understand how to be a steward of the land, which requires us to be a steward within ourselves — to have a healthy body, mind, and spirit.”
For Don Hankins, a Miwok cultural fire practitioner and a geography and environmental studies professor at Chico State, it’s this fundamental tie to culture that makes the practice unique.
The way willows grow back after fire, for example, “they’re long; they’re slender. They’re more supple than if they were not tended to with fire,” Hankins said. “As a weaver, those are really important characteristics.”
The state now sees its prohibitions, enforced with violence, as wrong and has taken significant steps in recent years to address the barriers it created to sovereign burning. In order to freely practice, tribes need access to land, permission to set fire and the capacity to oversee the burn. But the solutions, so far, are still piecemeal. They only apply to certain land under certain conditions.
Hankins, who started practicing cultural burning with his family when he was about 4, has made a practice of pushing the state and federal government out of their comfort zones. He, too, dreams of a day when a burn is defined solely by the needs of the land and its life.
“The atmospheric river is coming in, and we know that once it dumps the rain and snow … we close out the fire season — but what if we went out ahead of that storm, and we lit fires and worked through the ecosystems regardless of ownership?” he said. “That’s the long-range goal I have. In order to get fire back in balance, first we have to take some pretty bold steps.”
More recent wildfire news
At an October town meeting in Topanga, a fire official with the Los Angeles County Fire Department told residents that, during a wildfire, the department may order them to ride out the blaze in their homes. It’s part of an ongoing debate in California about what to do when an evacuation could take hours, but a fire could reach a town in minutes.
The Los Angeles City Fire Department is requesting a 15% increase in its budget to support wildfire response, my colleague Noah Goldberg reports. The request includes funding for 179 new firefighter recruits and a second hand crew specializing in wildfire response. LAFD’s union is also proposing a ballot measure for a half-cent sales tax to raise funds for new fire stations and equipment.
The U.S. Forest Service completed prescribed burns on more than 127,000 acres during the government shutdown, the Hotshot Wake Up reports, despite fears the disruption would severely limit the Forest Service’s ability to burn during optimal fall weather conditions.
A few last things in climate news
A proposed pipeline could end California’s status as a “fuel island,” connecting the golden state’s isolated gasoline and diesel markets with the rest of the country, my colleague Hayley Smith reports. The state is grappling how to balance consumer affordability with the transition to clean energy, with the upcoming closure of two major refineries.
The Department of Energy is breaking up or rebranding several key offices that support the development of clean energy technologies, Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Heatmap News. It’s unclear how the restructuring will impact the Department’s work.
During the COP30 climate conference in Brazil — which produced a last-minute incremental deal that did not directly mention fossil fuels — the South American nation recognized 10 new Indigenous territories, the BBC’s Mallory Moench and Georgina Rannard report. The hundreds of thousands of acres they span will now have their culture and environment legally protected. Although, the protections are not always enforced.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
In less than five weeks, California voters will decide on Proposition 10, a ballot initiative that would allow cities and counties across the state to expand rent control.
For the record:
2:40 p.m. Oct. 3, 2018An earlier version of this article said that California has 9.5 million renters. California has 9.5 million renters who are burdened by high rents.
Supporters of the measure say it will offer relief for tenants during a time of unprecedented housing affordability problems in California. Opponents contend it will stymie housing construction — the levels are already low — and further increase costs.
Here’s a rundown of some of the difficulties renters face and how Proposition 10 would affect them and broader affordability issues.
Just how dire is the situation for renters in California?
Very. Nine and a half million renters — more than half of California’s tenant population — are burdened by high rents, spending at least 30% of their income on housing costs, according to a recent analysis of U.S. census data by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
Rents have jumped since the end of the last recession as many areas of the state have seen strong job growth but little housing production. In Los Angeles, the median one-bedroom rental is $2,370, according to real estate website Zillow — an increase of 43% over the last eight years. Similar rent hikes have hit San Francisco and the state as a whole.
Rents in California have far outpaced rents in the rest of the country. Nationwide, the median one-bedroom rent is $1,299, according to the Zillow data, increasing 25% over the same eight-year period.
Economists generally believe that when government limits the price landlords can charge for housing, there will be fewer houses produced, which in turn drives up prices.
“When you have a price ceiling, it induces a shortage,” said Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and coauthor of a study on rent control in Cambridge, Mass. “The common wisdom is that rent control reduces the quantity and quality of available housing.”
Instead of rent control, Palmer said, economic research contends the primary solution to housing affordability problems is to build lots more homes and have the new supply force prices down.
But what about California tenants who are struggling now?
But these goals will be very hard to achieve, and some researchers say rent control is necessary to protect tenants from the continued threat of rising prices. The UC Berkeley Haas Institute report contends that rent control is the only way cities and counties can keep costs down cheaply and immediately.
“This is really the one thing that can be implemented most quickly,” said Nicole Montojo, a coauthor of the report. “The building is not going to happen fast enough. It’s just not possible.”
Cities and counties can also tailor rent control rules to limit negative consequences for new construction and other potential downsides, said Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and author of a forthcoming review of existing rent control research.
“For the life of me, I can’t think why you would give up rent stabilization as a tool given the extent of the crisis,” Pastor said.
How would Proposition 10 work? And what is Costa-Hawkins?
Fifteen California cities have some form of rent control now. But local governments are hamstrung when it comes to implementing most new rent control policies because of a 1995 state law, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
That law restricts city and county rent control efforts in three ways. Local governments are not allowed to:
Implement rent control on single-family homes.
Take away the right of landlords to charge what they want for apartments after a rent-controlled tenant moves out.
Control rents on buildings constructed after 1995. The law also locked into place rules in cities with rent control when Costa-Hawkins passed. For instance, Los Angeles ties rent hikes to inflation on apartments built on or before Oct. 1, 1978, and is prohibited from applying its provisions to more recently constructed properties.
Proposition 10 does not change existing rent control policies — it simply repeals Costa-Hawkins. So passage of the initiative would not, in most cases, immediately lead to new rent control rules. Instead, it would allow cities and counties to craft policies without restrictions.
Proposition 10 also would be hard to undo in the future. The initiative includes a provision that says any effort to implement statewide restrictions on rent control would have to be approved by California voters. The authors of Proposition 10 say they wrote the measure that way to prevent state lawmakers from undermining it. But the provision has faced criticism from those who contend any negative consequences from the measure would be very hard to fix.
Among the biggest beneficiaries: longtime tenants who would have been forced out of the city without renter protections. The study found rent control especially helped older and black and Latino tenants from being displaced.
Landlords who weren’t able to charge higher prices lost out. The study also found that landlords responded to rent control in San Francisco by converting their rental properties to owner-occupied condominiums, which decreased available apartments in the city and increased prices overall. The research contends that the system added to gentrification in San Francisco by increasing the number of older rental properties being made into units that were typically sold to wealthier residents.
“It may seem like a solution in the short run, but in the long run it really hurts renters and the rental market,” said Rebecca Diamond, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford and the study’s lead author.
Rent control supporters believe the study unfairly blamed the system for fueling gentrification and said the city could have worked to lessen some of the negative effects.
“Even though the costs they found are substantial, those costs could have been contained by the city of San Francisco having tighter controls on condominium conversions,” said Stephen Barton, a coauthor of the UC Berkeley Haas Institute study.
If Proposition 10 passes, what happens next?
Expect a lot of new local battles over rent control.
Fights at the city and county levels are likely to be long and contentious. Mountain View, which in 2016 passed a limited version of rent control that’s allowed under existing state law, has had a continuous struggle over rent control policies for the last three years with no end in sight.
WILLOWS — As hospital staff carted away medical equipment from abandoned patient rooms, Theresa McNabb, 74, roused herself and painstakingly applied make-up for the first time in weeks, finishing with a mauve lipstick that made her eyes pop.
“I feel a little anxiety,” McNabb said. She was still taking multiple intravenous antibiotics for the massive infection that had almost killed her, was unsteady on her feet and was unsure how she was going to manage shopping and cooking food for herself once she returned to her apartment after six weeks in the hospital.
But she couldn’t stay at Glenn Medical Center. It was closing.
The hospital — which for more than seven decades has treated residents of its small farm town about 75 miles north of Sacramento, along with countless victims of car crashes on nearby Interstate 5 and a surprising number of crop-duster pilots wounded in accidents — shut its doors on October 21.
McNabb was the last patient.
Registered nurse Ronald Loewen, 74, checks on one of the last few patients. Loewen, a resident of Glenn County and a former Mennonite school teacher, said the hospital closing is “a piece of our history gone.”
Nurses and other hospital workers gathered at her room to ceremonially push her wheelchair outside and into the doors of a medical transport van. Then they stood on the lawn, looking bereft.
They had all just lost their jobs. Their town had just lost one of its largest employers. And the residents — many of whom are poor— had lost their access to emergency medical care. What would happen to all of them now? Would local residents’ health grow worse? Would some of them die preventable deaths?
These are questions that elected officials and policymakers may soon be confronting in rural communities across California and the nation. Cuts to Medicaid funding and the Affordable Care Act are likely rolling down from Washington D.C. and hitting small hospitals already teetering at the brink of financial collapse. Even before these cuts hit, a 2022 study found that half of the hospitals in California were operating in the red. Already this fall: Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe filed for bankruptcy and Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine sought emergency funds.
But things could get far worse: A June analysis released by four Democrats in the U.S. Senate found that many more hospitals in California could be at risk of closure in the face of federal healthcare cuts.
“It’s like the beginning of a tidal wave,” said Peggy Wheeler, vice president of policy of the California Hospital Association. “I’m concerned we will lose a number of rural hospitals, and then the whole system may be at risk.”
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1.Medical assistant Kylee Lutz, 26, right, hugs activities coordinator Rita Robledo on closing day. Lutz, who will continue to work in the clinic that remains open, said through tears, “It’s not going to be the same without you ladies.”2.Rose Mary Wampler, 88, sees physician assistant Chris Pilaczynski at the clinic. Wampler, who lives alone across the street from Glenn Medical Center, said, “Old people can’t drive far away. I’m all by myself, I would just dial 9-1-1.”
Glenn Medical’s financing did not collapse because of the new federal cuts. Rather, the hospital was done in by a federal decision this year to strip the hospital’s “Critical Access” designation, which enabled it to receive increased federal reimbursement. The hospital, though it is the only one in Glenn County, is just 32 miles from the nearest neighboring hospital under a route mapped by federal officials — less than the 35 miles required under the law. Though that distance hasn’t changed, the federal government has now decided to enforce its rules.
Local elected officials and hospital administrators fought for months to convince the federal government to grant them an exception. Now, with the doors closed, policy experts and residents of Willows said they are terrified by the potential consequences.
“People are going to die,” predicted Glenn County Supervisor Monica Rossman. She said she feared that older people in her community without access to transportation will put off seeking care until it is too late, while people of all ages facing emergency situations won’t be able to get help in time.
Kellie Amaru, a licensed vocational nurse who has worked at Glenn Medical Center for four years, reacts after watching a co-worker leave after working their final shift at the hospital.
But even for people who don’t face a life or death consequence, the hospital’s closure is still a body blow, said Willows Vice Mayor Rick Thomas. He and others predicted many people will put off routine medical care, worsening their health. And then there’s the economic health of the town.
Willows, which sits just east of I-5 in the center of the Sacramento Valley, has a proud history stretching back nearly 150 years in a farm region that now grows rice, almonds and walnuts. About 6,000 people live in the town, which has an economic development webpage featuring images of a tractor, a duck and a pair of hunters standing in the tall grass.
“We’ve lost 150 jobs already from the hospital [closing],” Thomas said. “I’m very worried about what it means. A hospital is good for new business. And it’s been hard enough to attract new business to the town.”
Dismantling ‘a legacy of rural healthcare’
From the day it started taking patients on Nov. 21,1950, Glenn General Hospital (as it was then called) was celebrated not just for its role in bringing medical care to the little farm town, but also for its role in helping Willows grow and prosper.
“It was quite state-of-the-art back in 1950,” said Lauren Still, the hospital’s chief administrative officer.
When the hospital’s first baby was born a few days later — little Glenda May Nieheus clocked in at a robust 8 pounds, 11 ounces — the arrival was celebrated on the front page of the Willows Daily Journal.
But as a small hospital in a small town, the institution struggled almost immediately. Within a few years, according to a 1957 story in the local newspaper, the hospital was already grappling with the problem of nurses leaving in droves for higher-paying positions elsewhere. A story the following year revealed that hospital administrators were forcing a maintenance worker to step in as an ambulance driver on weekends — without the requisite chauffeur’s license — to save money.
In a sign of how small the town is, that driver was Still’s boyfriend’s grandfather.
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1.A customer walks into Willows Hardware store.2.Cheerleaders perform during Willows High School’s Homecoming JV football game against Durham at Willows High School.3.The press box at Willows High School’s football field is decorated with previous Northern Section CIF Championship wins.
Still, the institution endured, its grassy campus and low-slung wings perched proudly on the east end of town. Generations of the town’s babies were born there. As they grew up, they went into the emergency room for X-rays, stitches and treatment for fevers and infections. Their parents and grandparents convalesced there and sometimes died there, cared for by nurses who were part of the community.
“They saved my brother’s life. They saved my dad’s life,” said Keith Long, 34, who works at Red 88, an Asian fusion restaurant in downtown Willows that is a popular lunch spot for hospital staff.
Glenn Medical’s finances, however, often faltered. Experts in healthcare economics say rural hospitals like Glenn Medical generally have fewer patients than suburban and urban communities, and those patients tend to be older and sicker, meaning they are more expensive to treat. What’s more, a higher share of those patients are low-income and enrolled in Medi-Cal and Medicare, which generally has lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. Smaller hospitals also cannot take advantage of economies of scale the way bigger institutions can, nor can they bring the same muscle to negotiations for higher rates with private insurance companies.
Across California, in the first decades of the 20th century, rural hospitals were running out of money and closing their doors.
T-Ann Pearce, who has worked at Glenn Medical Center for six years, sits in the medical surgical unit during one of her last shifts with only a few remaining patients left to care.
In 2000, Glenn Medical went bankrupt, but was saved when it was awarded the “Critical Access” designation by the federal government that allowed it to receive higher reimbursement rates, Still said.
But by late 2017, the hospital was in trouble again.
A private for-profit company, American Advanced Management, swooped to the rescue of Glenn Medical and a nearby hospital in Colusa County, buying them and keeping them open. The Modesto-based company specializes in buying distressed rural hospitals and now operates 14 hospitals in California, Utah and Texas.
The hospital set about building back its staff and improving its reputation for patient care in the community, which had been tarnished in part by the 2013 death of a young mother and her unborn baby.
“We’ve been on an upswing,” Still said, noting that indicators of quality of care and patient satisfaction have risen dramatically in recent years.
Then came the letter from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. On April 23, the federal agency wrote Glenn Medical’s management company with bad news: A recent review had found that Glenn Medical was “in noncompliance” with “distance requirements.” In plain English, federal officials had looked at a map and determined that Glenn Medical was not 35 miles from the nearest hospital by so-called main roads as required by law — it was just 32. Nor was it 15 miles by secondary roads. The hospital was going to lose its Critical Access designation. The hit to the hospital’s budget would be about 40% of its $28 million in net revenue. It could not survive that cut.
At first, hospital officials said they weren’t too worried.
“We thought, there’s no way they’re going to close down hospitals” over a few miles of road, Still, the hospital’s chief executive, said.
Especially, Still said, because it appeared there were numerous California hospitals in the same pickle. A 2013 federal Inspector General Report found that a majority of the 1,300 Critical Access hospitals in the country do not meet the distance requirement. That includes dozens in California.
Still and other hospital officials flew to Washington D.C. to make their case, sure that when they explained that one of the so-called main roads that connects Glenn Medical to its nearest hospital wasn’t actually one at all, and often flooded in the winter, the problem would be solved. The route everyone actually used, she said, was 35.7 miles.
“No roads have changed. No facilities have moved,” administrators wrote to federal officials. “And yet this CMS decision now threatens to dismantle a legacy of rural health care stability.”
Without it, the administrator wrote, “lives will be lost for certain.”
But, Still said, their protestations fell on deaf ears.
In August came the final blow: Glenn Medical would lose its Critical Access funding by April 2026.
The news set off a panic not just in Glenn County but at hospitals around the state.
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1.A bicyclist passes by Glenn Medical Center. First opened to patients on November 21, 1950, the center was called Glenn General Hospital then.2.A member of the staff signs a farewell board on closing day at Glenn Medical Center on October 21, 2025.
At least three other hospitals got letters from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid saying their Critical Access status was under review, Wheeler said: Bear Valley Community Hospital in Big Bear Lake, George L. Mee Memorial in Monterey County and Santa Ynez Valley Cottage Hospital in Solvang. The hospitals in Monterey and Big Bear Lake provided data demonstrating they met the requirements for the status.
Cottage Hospital, however, did not, despite showing that access in and out of the area where the hospital is located was sometimes blocked by wildfires or rockslides.
Cottage Hospital officials did not respond to questions about what that might mean for their facility.
Asked about these situations, officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid said the law does not give the agency flexibility to consider factors such as weather, for example, in designating a critical assess hospital. They added the hospital must demonstrate there is no driving route that would make it ineligible based on driving distances included in the statute.
Jeff Griffiths, a county supervisor in Inyo County who is also the president of the California Assn. of Counties, said he has been following the grim hospital financing news around the state with mounting worry.
The hospital in his county, Southern Inyo, came close to running out of money earlier this year, he said, and with more federal cuts looming, “I don’t know how you can expect these hospitals to survive.”
“It’s terrifying for our area,” Griffiths said, noting that Inyo County, which sits on the eastern side of the Sierra, has no easy access to any medical care on the other side of the giant mountain peaks.
‘This is the final call’
In Willows, once word got out that the hospital would lose its funding, nurses began looking for new jobs.
By late summer, so many people had left that administrators realized they had no choice but to shutter the emergency room, which closed Sept. 30.
Helena Griffith, 62, one of the last patients, waves goodbye as patient transport Jolene Guerra pushes her wheelchair down the hallway on October 20, 2025.
Through it all, McNabb, the 74-year-old patient receiving intravenous antibiotics, remained in her bed, getting to know the nurses who buzzed around her.
She became aware that when they weren’t caring for her, many of them were trying to figure out what they would do with their lives once they lost their jobs.
On the hospital’s last day, nurse Amanda Shelton gifted McNabb a new sweater to wear home.
When McNabb gushed over the sweetness of the gesture, Shelton teared up. “It’s not every day that it will be the last patient I’ll ever have,” she told her.
As McNabb continued to gather her things, Shelton retreated to the hospital’s recreation room, where patients used to gather for games or conversation.
With all the patients save McNabb gone, Shelton and some other hospital staff took up a game of dominoes, the trash talk of the game peppered with bittersweet remembrances of their time working in the creaky old building.
Registered nurse Ronald Loewen, 74, looks out the window on closing day at Glenn Medical Center on October 21, 2025. Loewen, who grew up and attended school in Willows, had four children delivered at Glenn Medical, two of them survived, and took care of former classmates at this hospital, says the hospital closing is, “a piece of our history gone.”
Shelton said she is not sure what is next for her. She loved Glenn Medical, she said, because of its community feel. Many people came for long stays or were frequent patients, and the staff was able to get to know them — and to feel like they were healing them.
“You got to know people. You got to know their family, or if they didn’t have any family,” you knew that too, she said. She added that in many hospitals, being a nurse can feel like being an extension of a computer. But at Glenn Medical, she said, “you actually got to look in someone’s eyes.”
The building itself was in dire shape, she noted. Nothing was up to modern code. It didn’t have central air conditioning, and it was heated by an old-fashioned boiler. “I mean, I have never even heard of a boiler room” before coming to work there, she said.
And yet within the walls, she said, “It’s community.”
Bradley Ford, the emergency room manager, said he felt the same way and was determined to pay tribute to all the people who had made it so.
At 7 p.m. on the emergency room’s last night of service, Ford picked up his microphone and beamed his voice out to the hospital and to all the ambulances, fire trucks and others tuned to the signal.
He had practiced his speech enough times that he thought he could get through it without crying — although during his rehearsals he had never yet managed it.
“This is the final call,” Ford said. “‘After 76 years of dedicated service, the doors are closing. Service is ending. On behalf of all the physicians, nurses and staff who have walked these halls, it is with heavy hearts that we mark the end of this chapter.”
Nurses and other staff members recorded a video of Ford making his announcement, and passed it among themselves, tearing up every time they listened to it.
In an interview after the hospital had closed, Ford said he was one of the lucky ones: He had found a new job.
It was close enough to his home in Willows that he could commute — although Ford said he wasn’t sure how long he would remain in his beloved little town without access to emergency medical care there.
Rose Mary Wampler, 88, waits to have blood drawn at the lab beside a cordoning off, signaling the closure of the hospital side of Glenn Medical Center, on October 22, 2025. Wampler lives alone across the street from the hospital.
Rose Mary Wampler, 88, has lived in Willows since 1954 and now resides in a little house across the street from the hospital. Her three children were born at Glenn Medical, and Wampler herself was a patient there for two months last year, when she was stricken with pneumonia and internal bleeding. She said she was fearful of the idea of driving more than 30 miles for healthcare elsewhere.
She looked out her window on a recent afternoon at the now-shuttered hospital.
“It looks like somebody just shut off the whole city, there’s nowhere to go get help,” she said.
Glenn Medical Center patient Richard Putnam, 86, closes the window in his hospital room. A month shy of it’s 75th year, the hospital closed on Oct 21, 2025.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Times photographer Christina House contributed to this report.
California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom recently convened a meeting that might rank among the top sweat-inducing nightmare scenarios for Silicon Valley’s tech bros — a group of the Golden State’s smartest, most powerful women brainstorming ways to regulate artificial intelligence.
Regulation is the last thing this particular California-dominated industry wants, and it’s spent a lot of cash at both the state and federal capitols to avoid it — including funding President Trump’s new ballroom. Regulation by a bunch of ladies, many mothers, with profit a distant second to our kids when it comes to concerns?
I’ll let you figure out how popular that is likely be with the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.
But as Siebel Newsom said, “If a platform reaches a child, it carries a responsibility to protect that child. Period. Our children’s safety can never be second to the bottom line.”
Agreed.
Siebel Newsom’s push for California to do more to regulate AI comes at the same time that Trump is threatening to stop states from overseeing the technology — and is ramping up a national effort that will open America’s coffers to AI moguls for decades to come.
Right now, the U.S. is facing its own nightmare scenario: the most powerful and world-changing technology we have seen in our lifetimes being developed and unleashed under almost no rules or restraints other than those chosen by the men who seek personal benefit from the outcome.
To put it simply, the plan right now seems to be that these tech barons will change the world as they see fit to make money for themselves, and we as taxpayers will pay them to do it.
“When decisions are mainly driven by power and profit instead of care and responsibility, we completely lose our way, and given the current alignment between tech titans and the federal administration, I believe we have lost our way,” Siebel Newsom said.
To recap what the way has been so far, Trump recently tried to sneak a 10-year ban on the ability of states to oversee the industry into his ridiculously named “Big Beautiful Bill,” but it was pulled out by a bipartisan group in the Senate — an early indicator of how inflammatory this issue is.
Faced with that unexpected blockade, Trump has threatened to sign a mysterious executive order crippling states’ ability to regulate AI and attempting to withhold funds from those that try.
Simultaneously, the most craven and cowardly among Republican congresspeople have suggested adding a 10-year ban to the upcoming defense policy bill that will almost certainly pass. Of course, Congress has also declined to move forward on any meaningful federal regulations itself, while technology CEOs including Trump frenemy Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Zuckerberg and many others chum it up at fancy events inside the White House.
Which may be why this week, Trump announced the “Genesis Mission,” an executive order that seemingly will take the unimaginable vastness of government research efforts across disciplines and dump them into some kind of AI model that will “revolutionize the way scientific research is conducted.”
While I am sure that nothing could possibly go wrong in that scenario, that’s not actually the part that is immediately alarming. This is: The project will be overseen by Trump science and technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios, who holds no science or engineering degrees but was formerly a top executive for Thiel and former head of another AI company that works on warfare-related projects with the Pentagon.
Kratsios is considered one of the main reasons Trump has embraced the tech bros with such adoration in his second term. Genesis will almost certainly mean huge government contracts for these private-sector “partners,” fueling the AI boom (or bubble) with taxpayer dollars.
Siebel Newsom’s message in the face of all this is that we are not helpless — and California, as the home of many of these companies and the world’s fourth-largest economy in its own right, should have a say in how this technology advances, and make sure it does so in a way that benefits and protects us all.
“California is uniquely positioned to lead the effort in showing innovation and responsibility and how they can go hand in hand,” she said. “I’ve always believed that stronger guardrails are actually good for business over the long term. Safer tech means better outcomes for consumers and greater consumer trust and loyalty.”
But the pressure to cave under the might of these companies is intense, as Siebel Newsom’s husband knows.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the last few years trying to thread the needle on state legislation that offers some sort of oversight while allowing for the innovation that rightly keeps California and the United States competitive on the global front. The tech industry has spent millions in lobbying, legal fights and pressure campaigns to water down even the most benign of efforts, even threatening to leave the state if rules are enacted.
Last year, the industry unsuccessfully tried to stop Senate Bill 53, landmark legislation signed by Newsom. It’s a basic transparency measure on “frontier” AI models that requires companies to have safety and security protocols and report known “catastrophic” risks, such as when these models show tendencies toward behavior that could kill more than 50 people — which they have, believe it or not.
But the industry was able to stop other efforts. Newsom vetoed both Senate Bill 7, which would have required employers to notify workers when using AI in hiring and promotions; and Assembly Bill 1064, which would have barred companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors if they couldn’t prove they wouldn’t do things like encourage kids to self-harm, which again, these chatbots have done.
Still, California (along with New York and a few other states) has pushed forward, and speaking at Siebel Newsom’s event, the governor said that last session, “we took a number of at-bats at this and we made tremendous progress.”
He promised more.
“We have agency. We can shape the future,” he said. “We have a unique responsibility as it relates to these tools of technology, because, well, this is the center of that universe.”
If Newsom does keep pushing forward, it will be in no small part because of Siebel Newsom, and women like her, who keep the counter-pressure on.
In fact, it was another powerful mom, First Lady Melania Trump, who forced the federal government into a tiny bit of action this year when she championed the “Take It Down Act”, which requires tech companies to quickly remove nonconsensual explicit images. I sincerely doubt her husband would have signed that particular bill without her urging.
So, if we are lucky, the efforts of women like Siebel Newsom may turn out to be the bit of powerful sanity needed to put a check on the world-domination fantasies of the broligarchy.
Because tech bros are not yet all-powerful, despite their best efforts, and certainly not yet immune to the power of moms.
Ontario’s Christmas on Euclid experience began in 1922, when the fire department decorated a tree in the old city hall park with 125 colored electric lights, 2,200 feet of decorations and 900 square feet of cotton batting “for a snow effect,” according to a history on the event’s website. The event grew with merchant-promoted holiday extravaganzas such as the time in 1930 when Santa dropped from an airplane and landed on the roof of a bank to toss numbered slips into the crowd. (Those lucky enough to grab a slip could collect a prize donated by a local retailer.)
In 1958, the Christmas on Euclid Avenue Committee, sponsored by the Assn. of Commerce and Industry (later renamed the Ontario Chamber of Commerce), embarked on holiday programs “that would bring back a traditional respect, and meaning for the celebration of Christmas,” including the construction of 12 illuminated scenes depicting the nativity and life of Jesus with life-sized wood figures carved by Mexican immigrant sculptor Rudolph Vargas.
Today, the holiday celebration includes a blend of old and the new, with the 12 historic nativity scenes, which visitors can experience through an online history, and more modern light shows such as the annual Holiday Light Parade, tree lighting ceremony and drone show at Ontario Town Square on Dec. 6, which includes cookie decorating and visits with Santa.
Date: The historic nativity scenes are on display from Nov. 27 through Jan. 1 along Euclid Avenue. The Holiday Light Parade & Tree Lighting is Dec. 6 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. A menorah procession is scheduled for Dec. 21 at 6:30 p.m. at Ontario Town Square.
SACRAMENTO — “This is one of the most obscure issues the California voter has ever been asked to decide.”
That was how Fred Main, vice president and general counsel for the California Chamber of Commerce, described Proposition 162 on the Nov. 3 ballot, a measure that would give governing boards of public employees retirement systems more authority and independence.
Obscure though the initiative may be, supporters say it is needed to protect the $70-billion Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) fund and other public employee pension funds from political “raids.”
They cite the deal that allowed Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature to use $1.9 billion in supplemental pension funds to balance the 1991-92 state budget and also to Wilson’s attempt last year to place more gubernatorial appointees on the PERS governing board.
However, opponents argue that the measure does little to prevent raids but instead makes pension fund governing boards more autonomous and less accountable to the Legislature and other elected bodies.
Proposition 162 would change the state Constitution to:
* Give the governing board of a public employee pension fund “sole and exclusive authority” over investment decisions and management of the system.
* Require governing boards to place more emphasis on providing benefits to the system’s participants and less on the costs to taxpayers. The state, using taxpayer funds, makes an annual contribution to PERS.
* Allow the PERS board to hire its own actuaries–experts who calculate the contributions needed to keep the fund sound–instead of using those named by the governor, as state law requires.
* Maintain the present composition of PERS and other public pension fund governing boards.
The measure is supported by the California State Employees Assn., the state School Employees Assn. and other public employee unions. It is opposed by the California Taxpayers Assn., the state Chamber of Commerce and the League of California Cities.
Backers of the initiative raised $1.6 million by Sept. 30, Common Cause reported, while there is no organized financial effort in opposition.
Although there are more than 100 public employee pension systems in the state, most attention is focused on PERS because of last year’s budget maneuvering.
Jeff Raimundo, communications director for Californians for Pension Protection, said giving governing boards sole authority to manage the funds would “keep it away from the Legislature, keep their hands out of the cookie jar.”
Raimundo acknowledged that future governors, Legislatures and PERS governing boards still could reach agreements similar to last year’s $1.9-billion deal but said the Legislature “won’t be able to grab these funds unilaterally. They’ll have to negotiate with the governing board whether this use of the money is in the best interests of the trust fund.”
Ron Roach of the California Taxpayers Assn. said the change would “create a lack of accountability and give public employee pension boards–which often are dominated by public employee unions–control over the amount of taxpayer contributions, which are in fact taxpayer dollars.”
Wilma Krebs, a retired economics professor and a supporter of the initiative, said restoring the PERS board’s right to name its actuaries was important because “if the governor makes the appointment, we feel that spells political control.”
The actuaries study the pension system’s assets and liabilities each year and determine what the state contribution to the fund should be.
Wilson was given the authority, subject to approval by the Legislature, to name the PERS actuaries in legislation passed last year. Wilson’s nominees were approved by the Senate but rejected by the Assembly, and the pension system has continued to use its own actuaries.
“Over time, there could be a big cost to taxpayers” if PERS names the actuaries, Roach said. “The fund is so large that a change in the estimate (of state contributions) by one-half of 1% could mean hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Reporting from Sacramento — Two of California’s leading candidates for governor say they’re going to end the housing shortage, a driver of the state’s affordability crisis.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa both have said they want developers in California to build a half million homes in a year — something that’s never happened, at least in modern history. And they want builders to do it for seven straight years, resulting in 3.5 million new homes from the time the next governor takes office through 2025.
Those numbers are so out of scale with California’s history that they might be impossible to achieve. Practical concerns, including developers lining up enough financing and construction workers to build so many homes so quickly, could stymie the effort. Meeting the goals could also require rolling back decades of popular state policies on growth, taxation and the environment, according to housing academics and economists.
Without specific plans to transform how housing gets approved in California, said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Los Angeles-based consulting firm Beacon Economics, Newsom and Villaraigosa’s promises are empty.
“You’re just saying it,” Thornberg said of the homebuilding goals. “You don’t really mean it.”
Newsom and Villaraigosa said in separate statements to The Times that setting the 3.5-million home goal ensures they’ll be held accountable to whatever needs to be done to attain it.
Here’s why the two candidates’ goals will be so difficult to achieve and how they say they’re going to do it.
How many houses are we actually talking about?
For decades, not enough homes have been built in California to accommodate a growing population, leading to a spike in housing costs. Since 2011, for instance, the Bay Area has added about 627,000 new jobs but only 138,000 homes, according to the Building Industry Assn. of the Bay Area.
Newsom and Villaraigosa’s homebuilding goals would address that problem, but they’re without precedent.
Only twice since 1954 — the year the state building industry began tracking permits — have developers built more than 300,000 homes in a year. The highest year on record is 1963, when 322,018 home permits were issued.
To reach 500,000 homes in a year, the state would need to replicate its largest production in modern history plus an additional 178,000 homes, a number the state has surpassed just three times in the past 27 years.
Overall, the state’s rate of homebuilding would have to triple the historical average, quadruple last year’s production and reach nearly seven times the pace of building in the last decade.
The report found that California ranked 49th in the country in housing production per capita and estimated the state would need 3.5 million new units through 2025 to build homes at a per capita rate equivalent to New Jersey and New York.
California could achieve that goal, the report said, through a dramatic increase in development near transit, increasing building on parcels already zoned for apartments and condominiums and adding some units to single-family parcels.
But there’s a crucial difference between the McKinsey report and the pledges from Newsom and Villaraigosa. The McKinsey report sets a goal for California to build 3.5 million homes from 2015 through 2025, an 11-year period. The gubernatorial candidates want to do it in only seven years, a period that would begin when the new governor takes office in 2019.
How do they plan to get there?
Housing affordability has emerged as one of the most prominent issues in the gubernatorial campaign, and all major candidates have pledged to address the problem. State Treasurer John Chiang, also a Democrat, has set a goal of having developers build 1.6 million homes for low-income Californians by 2030 through a mix of state bond funding, tax credits and other subsidies.
Newsom and Villaraigosa, however, are the only ones to have set the 3.5-million home goal.
Newsom’s proposal relies on spending hundreds of millions of dollars more on low-income homes, approving some development through regional governments rather than solely at the local level and financially rewarding cities and counties that approve housing, especially near transit, and punishing those that don’t.
Neither of them, though, have specified how many homes they expect each part of their housing plans to produce to add up to 3.5 million homes. Instead, they contend that simply setting a bold goal will require them to allocate funding and reduce the red tape needed to meet it.
“A crisis of this magnitude requires ambitious goal setting matched with focused leadership and bold, innovative policy initiatives,” Newsom said in a statement responding to questions from The Times. “It requires an affordable housing ‘moonshot.’”
“Housing has to be delivered at the local level, and building consensus is the only way to get there,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “It comes down to having the courage and experience to lead on this issue, and I am committed to getting it done.”
What would it actually take?
As governor, Newsom or Villaraigosa would have to reshape how housing gets permitted to make the process faster and more likely to result in approval.
Doing so, experts said, could require taking on three of the most substantial barriers to large-scale housing production, all of which have had long enjoyed broad support
— The California Environmental Quality Act, which creates a lengthy process for assessing the effects of new housing and leaves projects vulnerable to litigation. Environmental groups also credit the law with preserving the state’s natural beauty.
— Local control over development decisions. Cities and counties determine what is built in their communities, and desirable coastal locales often prefer restrictions on growth. Los Angeles, for instance, had in 1960 zoned enough housing to accommodate 10 million people, a figure that’s since been reduced to a little over 4 million. Residents like to shape how their neighborhoods look.
Michael Lens, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, said the candidates would need to make substantial changes to all three policies, potentially even scrapping them, if they wanted to reach the homebuilding targets.
“You could take away one of those pillars and have a wobblier table of housing resistance,” Lens said. “But [removing] all three would be more useful.”
The housing production goal also could conflict with other promises. Newsom and Villaraigosa support California’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, which require concentrating homes near jobs and transit so people drive less. That means the state couldn’t count on large, single-family developments, such as suburban projects built during an early 2000s surge in production, to meet the 3.5-million home target.
Even if it were politically possible to supercharge housing production, there are practical problems that the candidates would have less control over. After a long period of growth, Gov. Jerry Brown has warned that the state economy should expect a slowdown in the coming years, which could also decelerate development.
In addition, it takes time for builders to secure land and financing, no matter how quickly a government approves blueprints and permits. Changes implemented on the first day of a Newsom or Villaraigosa administration might take years before they’d lead to ribbon cuttings for new homes.
“Depending on the size of the project, the stuff that starts in 2019 might not even come online until somewhere around 2025,” Lens said.
Maybe not the entire six-pack, but almost. They include:
–A salable message. How’s the candidate going to make life better for the voter? Specifics, not just poll-generated platitudes. And beating up on President Trump isn’t going to be enough for Democrats next year.
Voters will probably be getting migraine headaches from listening to both Trump and his critics.
–Curb appeal. It greatly helps to have matinee-idol looks like Gov. Gavin Newsom. But that gift is rare. Average appearance, verbal skills and a good message will usually suffice.
–Boatloads of money. It costs tens of millions of dollars to market a gubernatorial aspirant’s message in far-flung, heavily populated and diverse California.
–A strong desire to win, also known as “fire in the belly.” Rather than relaxing in a recliner while watching the Rams or 49ers, the willingness to fly off to beg strangers for campaign donations.
–A thick skin. Top-tier candidates are constantly attacked by rivals and often covered by the news media in ways deemed unfair. But overreacting can destroy a candidacy.
–A strong record of public service to show voters you’re committed and won’t need lots of time with training wheels.
There also are other assets that can help. For example: youth.
“We are, in fact, going through a generational change in American politics,” says longtime Democratic strategist Darry Dragow. “That’s inevitable. New generations of voters have not been widely represented in government. The boomers have held political power for a very long time.”
Baby boomers are roughly ages 60 through 79 — born after World War II, between 1946 and 1964.
Another plus is political incumbency — the ability for a candidate to be identified on the ballot label as, for example, attorney general or lieutenant governor. That denotes credibility and a record. You’re not allowed to call yourself a “former” anything.
Democratic strategist Garry South calls the current crop basically “a field of formers” and says that saddles them with an extra burden.
That’s largely because the public’s political focus has been on Trump and the toady Republican Congress. But it’s also because none of the gubernatorial candidates possesses the full six-pack of vital assets.
For months, the contest was frozen in waiting mode: Waiting for former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla to decide whether they wanted to run. Either would have been an early favorite, but not a shoo-in. They’d have faced a fight. And neither apparently felt the job was worth it. No fire.
Democratic donors and activists also were focused on Proposition 50 and waiting for the Nov. 4 redistricting election to be over. Most money and effort were going there.
Now that’s all behind us and the real race is underway.
“It’s a total free-for-all,” Sragow says. “None of these candidates is really on anybody’s radar.”
“You can’t read anything into the polls,” Democratic consultant Gale Kaufman says. “Just because somebody is a few points ahead doesn’t make them a front-runner. We don’t even know who all the candidates are yet.”
A late October poll of registered voters by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed that 44% were undecided. Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter led Democratic candidates with a scant 11%. Former U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra was second at 8%.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, was first overall with 13%. But never mind. No Republican has been elected to statewide office in California since 2006. And one won’t be 20 years later.
Last week, two more Democrats leaped into the race:
–Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, 68, who ran for president in 2020 and got nowhere. He has a good populist, anti-Sacramento message and tons of money to voice it. But he has never held elected office. And Californians have historically rejected mega-rich, self-financing candidates attempting to begin their political career at the highest level.
–Rep. Eric Swalwell, 45, from the San Francisco Bay Area, who also ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020. He has a good message for progressives. But right now it may be too focused on Trump and not enough on Californians’ needs.
Aside from Steyer, none of the other Democratic aspirants are independently wealthy. They’ll need to raise barrels of money — ”24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Sragow says. That takes fire.
Other Democratic candidates:
–Porter, 51. She has curb appeal. But she publicly showed a thin skin with a contentious, rude performance during a TV interview in October. The nasty episode probably wasn’t fatal. But it apparently dropped her in polls, and that hurts fundraising.
–Antonio Villaraigosa, 72, former Los Angeles mayor and state Assembly speaker. No one is more qualified to be governor. And he lets voters know where he stands. But they may be looking for someone younger.
–Betty Yee, 68, former state controller, Board of Equalization member and chief state budget honcho. She knows every inch of state government’s fiscal quagmire and has good ideas about unraveling it. But she’s short on curb appeal.
–State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, 57, the lone incumbent in the field. But he missed an opportunity to shine as state schools chief.
One of these people will probably be our next governor, although others could still enter the race. So, maybe it’s time to start paying attention.
Before I moved to L.A., I’d spent pretty much my entire professional life working for New York-based publications. One of the primary reasons I decided to take this job and transfer my life to the West Coast was because it seemed to me that California was at both the spear point of climate risk and the cutting edge of climate adaptation.
I didn’t expect the peril of climate change to rear its heads as quickly, and as close to my new home, as it did when the January fires became one of the biggest stories in the nation just a month after I started at The Times. I was less surprised to see how widespread a sophisticated understanding of climate issues was at the publication — an expertise borne out by the exemplary coverage of the fires and their aftermath.
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The same, I think, can be said for most of the people I know or have recently met who live in L.A.: There is very little sanguinity about what’s happening here, climate-wise, among Angelenos, regardless of where they work or come from.
So maybe I should have expected that an exhibit of recent work by L.A. artists would be similarly, logically, oriented toward these same (largely home-grown) anxieties around our place in a world increasingly shaped by the developing climate crisis.
Nevertheless, it struck me how many of the artists centered the interface between the built and “natural” environments at the Hammer Museum’s biennial “Made in L.A.” exhibition when I visited last weekend.
Many of the artists seemed to be grappling with how we situate ourselves in a climate-changed world.
From Alake Shilling’s uncanny cartoon bears driving buggies and mowing down weeping, humanoid sunflowers to Kelly Wall’s installation of glass swatches painted the color of toxic L.A. sunsets displayed, for tourist consumption, on an erstwhile pharmacy rack, the exhibition communicates Los Angeles as a place of largely unresolved conflict between human beings and whatever we define as “nature.”
Part of Kelly Wall’s installation, “Something to Write Home About.”
(Elijah Wolfson / Los Angeles Times)
I thought that as a climate journalist, I might just be primed to see such things, but Essence Harden, who co-curated the biennial, noted that “concerns around the environment are historical, they’re rooted. They’re not ahistorical. They don’t come from nothing or nowhere. I think art produced in Los Angeles has a relationship to the site specificity and the dynamic of architecture and history which grounds it.”
Harden said that she and her co-curator, Paulina Pobocha, didn’t seek out artists grappling with climate specifically for the seventh edition of Made in L.A. But after scouring dozens of local galleries, they found that climate and environmental anxieties permeated the scene.
Much of this Anthropocene-angst is “rooted in a sort of longer history of capital,” Harden said. Indeed, as a relative outsider, I have always sort of felt that L.A. wears its supposed climate excellence a little too loudly on its sleeves — or maybe, on its postcards and souvenir T-shirts. The iconic palm trees, for example, are transplants, forced to live in neighborhoods that don’t want them.
“The idyllic palm trees sight line of Los Angeles comes from these neighborhoods that were historically Black and Japanese and Latinx,” Harden said. “They are rooted in these places that people who are buying the product of Los Angeles don’t want to go.”
There are no palm trees in the Hammer biennial. At least, none that I remember. What there are instead are painted cinder blocks and hunks of glass, graffiti and rutted acrylic paint, twisted tubes of neon and roughly formed clay.
Anthropocene Landscape 3 by Carl Cheng
(Hammer Museum)
It was refreshing to see a show that grappled with the environment but was not didactic. Describing her curatorial process, Harden said she is mostly attracted to “people who are more ethereal and capture dreams and sensation.” If they also happen to be engaging with climate change, all the better.
More recent news and ideas on climate and culture
Writing for The Guardian, Beth Mead — a star forward on England‘s national soccer team for nearly a decade, with the all-time most assists in the history of the Women’s Super League — shared how climate change has changed the game she loves over the last decade. For professionals on her level, yes, but more importantly, for the many kids around the world who are now less likely to be able to regularly play what she calls “the world’s most accessible sport” thanks to extreme heat, droughts and flooding.
A “milk apocalypse” is coming for your burrata, reports Motoko Rich for the New York Times. Cheesemakers and dairy farmers in Italy, which produces and exports some of the most popular cheeses in the world, report a declining supply of milk, thanks to rising temperatures.
And if you wanted to pair your favorite Oregon pinot with that cheese … well, better do it now. The Willamette Valley has long had a nearly perfect climate for growing pinot noir — to the point where “Oregon wine” is often shorthand for the varietal. But as Branden Andersen reports for the local outlet Newsberg, thanks to changes in temperature and humidity, the region may need to rethink what’s been practically a vineyard monoculture.
In Belém, Brazil, COP30 is coming to a close. I’ve always been drawn to the art and performance at past COPs, and was glad to see some examples from this year’s climate conference. But what was even more interesting to me was Spanish artist Josep Piñol’s performance piece, in which he was commissioned to produce a large-scale sculpture in Belém and then canceled, saving what he said would have been the emissions equivalent of 57,765 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
The past week in broader climate news
Melody Gutierrez has been in Belém reporting on COP30 for The Times, and this week, she wrote about an image that has come to represent the socio-economics of this year’s events: two gigantic diesel-powered cruise ships, used as temporary housing for the global elite that comprise much of the COP delegations, docked at the mouth of the Amazon River, whose rainforests and people have felt much of the brunt of fossil fuel-driven climate change.
Meanwhile, the California Air Resources Board is expected to vote today on new measures to address methane leaks and underground fires at landfills which — unsurprisingly — are more likely to impact poorer Californians. As my colleague Tony Briscoe reports, landfills are a climate change and environmental health menace, and updates to the rules governing California’s are long overdue.
Earlier this week, a U.S. appeals court put a hold on a California law set to go into effect in January that would require any company that makes more than $500 million annually and does business in the state to report, every two years, the financial impact of climate change.
Finally, there was a lot of talk this week about how the build-out of data centers is driving up energy costs across the U.S. I found this Pew Research article to be a useful one-sheet to get a feel for what we know to be real when it comes to AI’s impact on the energy sector, what is hyperbole and what we still don’t fully understand.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Naples, Italy for the first time.
One of the many reasons to visit this historical and culinary diamond is to experience the famed Margherita pizza, invented there in the late 19th century.
My wife, a group of travelers and I caught a break when a table opened at 50 Kalò, a pizzeria lauded in Italy’s Michelin guide and known for its amazing doughs.
We ordered a variety of Neapolitan pizzas, including a pair of the tomato, mozzarella and basil-based Margheritas. How fortunate we were.
One person at our table, however, refused to try them. Her name is Jan and she’s from New Jersey.
“It’s not better than New York style,” she told a stunned table. “I’m sure it’s fine, but my guy is better.”
We all know a Jan in our lives — or sometimes, it’s us. We all have our favorites, whether it’s pizza, tacos, draft beers or wines. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying something different.
Harris takes readers from Hermosa Beach to Eagle Rock, and from Santa Monica to Los Feliz in search of a lovely pie.
Let’s jump into a few selections from Harris’ list — and remember, don’t be a Jan.
A pepperoni pizza from Sonny’s in Hollywood.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Sonny’s (Hollywood)
I have seen all the social media influencers proclaiming Sonny’s to be the best new pizza in Los Angeles. It’s a giant pizza, with a diameter that seems like the size of a semi-truck tire. The crust is so crisp, the crackles are audible in every video of people munching on it.
A layer of bronze oil sits atop the pizza and settles in the many cups of pepperoni. It creates a sheen over the cheese. My fingers were shiny. The oil dripped down my chin. The cheese, sauce and crust coalesce into a slender slice that’s sturdy enough, but flops at the tip.
Some of the crust was cracker-like and golden. Some of it was burnt. It’s not a perfect pizza, but I appreciated the thin crust and the flavor of the grease-streaked mottled cheese. And if someone else is offering to go through the trouble of ordering the pizza, I’ll happily eat it.
The D-Fresh pizza from Redwood Pie in Hermosa Beach. The pizza is topped with pickled serrano chiles and spicy sausage.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Redwood Pie (Hermosa Beach)
I first encountered Erik Vose’s pizza when he was operating Vivace Pizzeria, a food truck that housed a 5,500-pound Acunto Mario oven. He made some of the best bubble-flecked Neapolitan pies in the city. Now he’s creating his own category of pizza at Redwood Pie in Hermosa Beach.
He’s making a sourdough crust with a blend of five flours from Central Milling. It’s bready and wonderfully chewy, a sheath of amber orbs and tight, tiny bubbles that create the ideal crunch.
The slice of pepperoni is textbook perfect from Redwood Pie, with a well-balanced sauce, a blanket of cheese and pepperoni cups that transform into blistered meat candy in the oven. For the white pie fans, there’s the “D-Fresh.” A rugged landscape of hot Italian sausage crumbles, frizzled basil and pickled Serrano chiles tops the mozzarella base — and leaves your lips humming with heat.
Pork-and-beef bolognese pizza at Bub and Grandma’s Pizza in Highland Park.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Bub and Grandma’s Pizza (Highland Park)
If you’ve been following Andy Kadin’s career, you know that his breads can be found at restaurants around the city. So it should come as no surprise that his sourdough pizzas possess a wonderful tang and a durable crust that cracks with each fold and bite.
Kadin developed his pizza dough alongside chef Jeff Whittaker, who previously cooked at Hippo and Bar Monette. For the Bolognese pizza at Bub and Grandma’s Pizza, they slather the crust in a robust, meaty pork and beef ragu, with big boulders of meat protruding from the melted mozzarella.
The porchetta pie is painted with a decadent garlic cream and cloaked in ribbons of porchetta, charred broccolini and plenty of pepperoncini. It’s finished with a drizzle of garlic oil and a sprinkle of fennel salt. Imagine all the makings of a stellar porchetta sandwich in pizza form.
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