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| Mayor Bass' ambitious housing program calls on L.A.'s wealthy. Can she pull it off? - Los Angeles Times | | Los Angeles has always been a city of extremes, but the homelessness crisis is exposing the divide between rich and poor in startling ways.
A-listers in designer gowns and million-dollar jewels parade down the red carpet, blocks from tents where people live in unsanitary conditions. Private jets take off at Van Nuys Airport, soaring over streets lined with RVs and crowded apartment complexes.
Rising housing prices are turbocharging the finances of homeowners while leaving others unable to afford a roof over their heads.
Now, Mayor Karen Bass is calling on L.A.’s wealthy residents to help narrow that economic chasm with a new initiative that will rely on private donations and loans to buy apartments for the city’s unhoused, who at last count numbered more than 46,000.
Philanthropic and real estate leaders reacted with hope and skepticism to the initiative, LA4LA, which Bass unveiled Monday during her State of the City address. LA4LA will target corporations and foundations as well as individuals.
While Bass’ allies applauded her work on homelessness, others privately questioned how far the donations raised by LA4LA would go, arguing that billions are ultimately needed to fix the problem. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-24 | | | | LA County $45.4 billion draft budget focuses on homeless, mental health services – Daily News | | Los Angeles County will spend about $45.4 billion in the coming fiscal year, about $1.4 billion less than last year’s final adopted budget, according to a preliminary budget recommended by county CEO Fesia Davenport released on Monday, April 22.
However, the county is adding 835 new positions for a total of 116,159 total county positions in the 2024-2025 fiscal year budget, Davenport reported. The new positions are funded almost entirely by federal and state dollars.
The county budget will include about $390.2 million in new revenues, mostly due to a 2.5% expansion of the economy driven by increased consumer spending, a strong jobs market and optimism in the investment market related to artificial intelligence technology, wrote Davenport in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-04-23 | | | | LA Metro touts ridership growth for trains and buses in March – Daily News | | Los Angeles Metro on Tuesday reported a 9.4% increase in ridership on its bus and rail services in March compared to the same time last year, with nearly 26 million boardings.
Average weekday rail ridership grew to 205,320 from 193,025 in March 2023, representing a 6.4% increase, while average weekday bus ridership grew to 750,598 from 642,468 from the same period last year, or a 16.8% increase.
The agency noted that combined the total bus and rail average weekday ridership grow more than 14% since March 2023. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-04-23 | | | | Sacramento is decreasing its managed homeless encampments | Sacramento Bee | | When a divided Sacramento City Council assigned City Manager Howard Chan with the establishment of new “safe ground” homeless-managed encampments last August, there were two legally sanctioned homeless camps in the city at the time. Soon, there may only be one.
The city announced recently that it intends to close the Camp Resolution encampment in North Sacramento by mid-May. Breaking its lease for the city-owned site amounts to breaking a promise.
The city had contractually obligated itself to keep Camp Resolution open through automatic lease extensions until the residents in its 33 promised trailers (fewer materialized) had all found permanent housing.
When city officials signed this lease in May of 2023, they knew that to honor this lease condition, they would likely need to obtain an extended waiver from the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board to keep the camp open. The water board, concerned about vapor contamination at the former vehicle maintenance site, agreed to the temporary waiver on the condition that no residents live on the ground in tents.
But the city didn’t even try to get a longer waiver. Asked why, city spokesman Tim Swanson referred to a Nov. 14 letter from Sacramento District Attorney Thien Ho demanding the closure of Camp Resolution. In the letter, Ho said, “It is dangerous and deplorable to house the unsheltered on a toxic dumpsite where people are exposed to cancer-causing chemicals. To do so is not only inhumane but raises questions regarding criminal liability.” [Article] | | by , Sacramento Bee. 2024-04-23 | | | | Anti-Nepotism Bill Sparked By LAist Investigation Moves Forward In State Senate | LAist | | An anti-nepotism bill that's making its way through the California legislature cleared a hurdle this week when it passed the Senate Committee on Local Government in a 6 to 0 vote.
About the bill: Senate Bill 1111 would "expressly forbid state and local officials from voting on public contracts that benefit their adult children, spouse, parents, siblings, in-laws, or other relatives." [Article] | | by , . 2024-04-23 | | | | Housing developers win first ‘builders remedy’ battles in fight to bypass local zoning – Orange County Register | | A year-long tug-of-war between California cities and developers over the state’s anarchic “builder’s remedy” law is starting to make its way to the courts as litigants spar over the intricacies of the 34-year-old pro-housing provision.
And if three recent Los Angeles County court rulings are any indication, developers appear likely to come out on top of the building-and-zoning tussle. [Article] | | by , Orange County Register. 2024-04-23 | | | | Nearly 3 million Californians at risk of losing home internet service - Los Angeles Times | | Four years ago, Claudia Aleman and her family had only one way to get online — through their cellphones. Without internet service on a computer, her youngest daughter couldn’t get homework assignments in on time, her parents couldn’t keep up with online doctor visits, and the English classes she wanted to sign up for were out of reach.
Then came a game-changer: The federal government started offering a subsidy that covered $30 of the family’s $80 monthly internet bill.
But while opening mail at her home in South Gate two months ago, Aleman came across a letter from the Federal Communications Commission announcing that the Affordable Connectivity Program they had come to rely on would end in May unless Congress approved more funding.
“My husband is the only one who works, and everything is so expensive right now,” Aleman said. “Sometimes we don’t have $30 to spare.”
“The program made a significant difference in our lives,” she added. “Without it, life is going to be difficult, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.”
The program, which was created after the pandemic forced many Americans to turn to the internet to connect with work and school, has 23 million enrollees nationwide — 1 in 6 U.S. households — including nearly 3 million in California.
Since 2021, it has provided a $30 monthly subsidy for low-income households and $75 for those on tribal lands. But the $14.2 billion funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has run out.
April was the last month of full program benefits, but households could receive a partial discount in May.
In a letter to Congress this month, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel warned that not funding the program would have widespread impact, especially for senior citizens, veterans, schoolchildren and residents of rural and tribal communities.
“Households across the country are now facing hard choices about what expenses they have to cut, including food and gas, to maintain their broadband access, with some households doubtful they can afford to keep their broadband service at all,” she wrote. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | ‘Welcome to the Covid Hotel’: Skid Row History Museum tackles county-run quarantine sites | Arts and Culture | ladowntownnews.com | | A new exhibit showcasing the untold story of Los Angeles County-run quarantine sites is now on at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive. “Welcome to the Covid Hotel,” presented by the Los Angeles Poverty Department, is ongoing through Saturday, Dec. 14. [Article] | | by , . 2024-04-23 | | | | Editorial: The criminal justice system worked well in Venice assaults - Los Angeles Times | | Crime in Los Angeles is real, it hurts people and the community, and it is a problem that requires constant vigilance. Just as critics of needed justice reforms are often off-target, so are those who argue that there is no crime, we don’t need police and everything’s fine.
The last several weeks have seen reports of astonishing crimes, including a woman apparently disturbed by the impending solar eclipse who police say stabbed her boyfriend and threw her children from her car onto the freeway; a $30-million Easter Sunday cash heist; and freeway jewelry robberies linked to South American criminals here on tourist visas. A sheriff’s deputy was charged with stealing from drivers and pedestrians. On Sunday, an intruder was arrested inside Bass’ home. April alone provides enough fodder for several seasons’ worth of TV dramas.
None of these, though, nor the Venice assaults besides, appear to be linked to any supposedly soft-on-crime policy. Or to what Park called a “failed social experiment.”
Nearly four years ago, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, philosophy professor (and now presidential candidate) Cornel West called the United States itself a failed social experiment, in large part because he said its justice system could not adequately protect rights and liberties, especially for people without privilege.
He was right that the justice system needs improvement. He was wrong to call the American experiment a failure, and Park is similarly wrong about attempts to improve it. Criminal justice reform is not a departure from the long tradition of American justice, but a continuation of the necessary work to constantly redeem, refine and perfect it. Impediments to that work have always included racism, politics and self-interest.
They also include sloppy thinking, misleading assertions about crime and policy based on anxieties rather than facts. Los Angeles is not well-served by attempts to falsely link reform policies to crimes they have nothing to do with. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | LA Mayor Bass says $12.8B budget will focus on homelessness and potholes – Daily News | | Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is proposing a city budget of $12.8 billion for the 2024-25 fiscal year – a decrease of $293 million (about 2%) from the current fiscal year as the city grapples with rising labor costs and other expenses, plus lower-than-expected revenues.
Despite an overall decrease in planned spending, officials insist the city will continue prioritizing funding for key areas such as homeless programs, public safety and basic city services like filling potholes or picking up trash. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-04-23 | | | | How L.A. County is trying to change addiction treatment - Los Angeles Times | | Gary Horejsi wrestled with the decision before him, knowing a life could be in his hands.
It was the third time that the woman had used drugs or alcohol since coming to CRI-Help, which runs a 135-bed residential facility in North Hollywood where people are treated for substance use disorder.
CRI-Help needed to be a safe place for people grappling with their addictions. In the past, others had been removed for less. Horejsi, the clinical director, had the final say on whether she should be discharged.
He perused her file on his computer. The woman was still trying, CRI-Help staffers told him. She hadn’t shared drugs with anyone. And if she were to leave, the risks of an overdose were graver than before.
Horejsi decided to let her stay.
“Things can’t be business as usual anymore,” their chief executive, Brandon Fernandez, later said at a CRI-Help staff meeting. If someone leaves treatment and resumes using drugs the same way they were before, “that could very well look like them dying.”
“So are we going to be willing to do something different?”
Fernandez had gathered CRI-Help staff in their North Hollywood conference room to talk about a Los Angeles County initiative that could reshape such decisions. It’s called Reaching the 95% — or R95 — and its goal is to engage with more people than the fraction of Angelenos already getting addiction treatment.
Across the country, more than 48 million people had a drug or alcohol use disorder, according to the latest results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Only 13 million received treatment in the previous year. Among those who did not get treatment, roughly 95% said they did not think that they should.
Those numbers have collided with the grim toll of fentanyl, an especially potent opioid that has driven up deaths across the country. In Los Angeles County, the number of overdose deaths tied to fentanyl skyrocketed between 2016 and 2022, soaring from 109 to 1,910, according to a county report.
“We can’t just take the approach that we’ve been taking and kind of assume that everyone wants the services that we offer,” said Dr. Gary Tsai, director of the Substance Abuse Prevention and Control division at the L.A. County Department of Public Health. “That’s just not the reality.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | Column: Disneyland will never be completed. Neither will healing the Earth | | It didn’t take much for Eric Swenson to start a chain reaction that in less than two years would prompt the world’s most influential entertainment company to make a powerful clean energy commitment.
Swenson was at Disneyland with his wife, celebrating her birthday. He was startled when he realized that the classic 1955 Autopia ride was as “loud and foul” as ever, with oil-fueled cars spewing lung-damaging, planet-warming gases.
“When I saw Autopia was still like 1,000 lawnmowers running at the same time, I took pictures and sent a note to Paul,” he said.
That would be longtime electric vehicle advocate Paul Scott. Startled by Swenson’s message, Scott and fellow advocate Zan Dubin filed complaints about Autopia’s air pollution with California regulators, raising questions about possible health dangers to guests waiting in line, and to Disney employees working the attraction, breathing in those fumes for hours on end.
Dubin and Scott also reached out to an L.A. Times climate reporter (me), urging me to write about the opportunity for Disney to convert Autopia to electric cars. I started pressing the company for answers on why it hadn’t done so yet — especially in an area of the park known as Tomorrowland, intended by Walt Disney to showcase technologies that would create a better future.
Lo and behold, Disney quickly promised to ditch gas engines at Autopia. A win for the climate and for our bodies.
Then last week, under continued pressure from a growing coalition of electric car proponents, Disney went further, pledging that Autopia’s new vehicles would be fully electric, not hybrids. The company also promised to stop operating the combustion vehicles by fall 2026 — a much firmer commitment than its initial timeline of “in the next few years.”
On Sunday, Swenson was among two dozen climate advocates who gathered outside Walt Disney Studios in Burbank to cheer the company’s action — and celebrate their own achievement. Dubin led the group in a collective call of “thank you, Disney.”
As a climate journalist and lifelong Disneyland obsessive myself, it was hard not to feel inspired.
Several attendees held handmade “Lightning McClean” signs emblazoned with lightning bolts, a reference to Lightning McQueen, the lead character in Disney’s “Cars.” One attendee raised a Mickey Mouse cutout with “I Love EVs” written on Mickey’s ears.
I chatted with veteran EV evangelist Linda Nicholes — who bought one of the first Teslas ever made and pulled up to the rally in a newer Tesla model with the license plate ZAP OIL — and also with 17-year-old Maya, a Santa Monica High School student and one of the youth plaintiffs in a lawsuit designed to force the Biden administration to take stronger action on climate.
“Autopia going electric isn’t going to fix all of the world’s problems,” said Maya, who’s been advised not to share her last name for safety reasons. “More than anything it’s a symbolic change. And it’s showing that we are transitioning away from the fossil fuel industry, and just showing the world that hey — this is not OK for workers. This is not OK for kids going to Disneyland.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | How homeless people built their own house in L.A.'s Highland Park - Los Angeles Times | | In a city of multimillion-dollar houses and celebrity estates, Cesar Augusto’s home stands apart.
The walls consist of discarded fencing and wood paneling repurposed by Augusto, a tarp serves as a roof, and the front yard is the industrial backdrop of a city’s flood channel.
Balanced on a thin slice of land between the 110 Freeway and the Arroyo Seco flood channel, the home — not a house in the conventional sense — is framed under a stand of trees by a white lattice fence and window shutters. The rectangular shelter appears above the channel like a section of a wood-paneled suburban basement, and a sign hangs near the entrance: “Ponte trucha,” or “Stay sharp.”
Augusto climbs a ladder up the steep wall of the channel to reach his makeshift shelter, another example of the extreme measures taken by many Angelenos struggling to find a place to live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
The unhoused in Los Angeles sleep in tents on the street, in government-built tiny home villages or in converted hotels. Those with construction skills and a bit of ingenuity — like Augusto — build their own shelters on whatever strip of unused or discarded land they can commandeer.
Augusto, 43, arrived in Los Angeles roughly 20 years ago from Guatemala. For 15 years he worked as a house painter throughout Los Angeles County, but he struggled to find jobs after his employer died five years ago.
“There wasn’t enough to live on. And it just became harder and harder to pay for a room to live in,” Augusto said in Spanish while standing in the concrete channel, which carries runoff through the Highland Park neighborhood.
Several TV news crews have passed through his riverside community in the last few days, asking him and his neighbors about their way of life. Augusto doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. He’s just trying to keep a roof over his head.
Reporters have recently focused on his neighbor, Alejandro Diaz, who built a much more elaborate shelter than Augusto — one that sports a bright yellow facade, decorative plants, solar panels and a concrete path leading to his front door. The shelter appears above the flood wash like a seaside cottage plucked from a coastal town.
One reporter described Diaz’s home as having “riverfront appeal,” and other news stories have highlighted the ingenuity of the encampment amid an ongoing homelessness crisis. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | The true cost of vaccine misinformation: A vulnerable nation – Daily News | | Now what we’re seeing is that the “misinfodemic” has slowly made its way off our phones and into pediatrician offices nationwide. During the 2022-23 school year, kindergarten vaccination rates did not return to pre-pandemic levels and our nation is now reporting the highest rate of vaccine exemptions, including medical and nonmedical, ever seen. Of the kindergartners with vaccine exemptions, over 93% had a nonmedical exemption. Parents are choosing to exempt their children from life-saving vaccines at the cost of our community’s safety.
Higher rates of unvaccinated people in a community are associated with a greater incidence of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, which has made a startling return. Take for example the 2014 measles outbreak that began at Disneyland, California, or in 2019, the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. that occurred in a New York City community with a cluster of unvaccinated children. And now, in the first three months of 2024, as reported by the Associated Press, the CDC shows that the number of measles cases is 17 times higher than in the previous three years of the same timeframe.
Why are parents hesitating in getting their children vaccinated or avoiding them altogether? Addressing the scourge of misinformation requires a multi-faceted approach to improve vaccine uptake across the nation. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-04-23 | | | | New interventions will fight climate change. How much can they help? - Los Angeles Times | | TRACY, Calif. — Behind a chain-link fence in a corner of San Joaquin County sits one of California’s — and perhaps the world’s — best hopes for combating climate change.
Here at the nation’s first commercial direct air capture facility, towering trays of limestone mineral powder are working round-the-clock to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Robots skitter and whir around the 40-foot-tall columns, which are part of a multi-step process that will ultimately convert the CO2 to concrete, rendering the planet-warming compound into nothing more harmful than a stone.
“We need to do this all around the world,” said Vikrum Aiyer, head of public policy for Heirloom, the California-based company that owns and operates the facility. The good news, he said, is that “CO2 removed anywhere is CO2 removed everywhere.”
The idea for their carbon-removal technology was born in the wake of a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels will require transformative innovations in energy, land, urban and industrial systems that go beyond national pledges to cut back on emissions.
The 1.5-degree limit is an internationally agreed-upon benchmark intended to prevent the worst effects of climate change. But the planet is already beginning to experience the effects of that warming, including worsening wildfires, simmering oceans, extreme heat waves, prolonged droughts, crop shortages and species loss. Last year was the planet’s hottest on record so far, with the global average temperature hovering around 2.67 degrees — or 1.48 degrees Celsius — warmer than the late 1800s.
While reducing the use of fossil fuels is the surest way to prevent that warming from getting worse, Aiyer and many other experts, researchers and public officials are converging around the notion that scientific intervention will be necessary.
“We need to move fast, and we need more lawmakers to not move at the speed and scale of government, but rather at the speed and scale of our children’s generation, and the next generation, depending on it,” he said.
The government is getting on board — as is Silicon Valley. The Tracy facility is capable of capturing 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, which will be stored for centuries in concrete that is already being used to build bridges, roads and other local infrastructure. The company makes a profit by selling carbon removal credits to buyers such as Microsoft, Stripe and Klarna, which are investing heavily in the technology.
But it will take a lot more than 1,000 tons of annual CO2 removal to make a dent in global warming: Current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are 425 parts per million and counting. To truly make a difference will require carbon removal at the gigaton scale, or billions of tons each year, according to the IPCC.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $50 million to Heirloom and its partners to develop what will become a massive, million-ton direct air capture facility in Louisiana. The funding was part of a larger $1.2-billion investment into direct air capture technologies announced by the Biden administration last year.
Several Los Angeles startups are also getting into the carbon removal game, including Captura, a company working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean, and Avnos, a company whose technology produces water while capturing carbon. Avnos also recently secured funding from the Department of Energy.
The hope is that operating such projects around the country and the world will not only stop global warming, but eventually help reverse it, said Christian Theuer, Heirloom’s policy communications manager.
“You halt it by getting to net zero, by not putting out any new CO2 emissions into the atmosphere,” Theuer said as he circled the towers in Tracy. “Then you can move into the negative emissions territory, where you’re cleaning up legacy pollution that is already warming the planet.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | On a Mission to End Hunger in Orange County | | Local food bank leaders, food pantry organizers, the groups that fund them, nonprofits and government officials are sitting down together for the first time ever to map out how best to tackle hunger in Orange County. [Article] | | by , Voice of OC. 2024-04-23 | | | | How To Have The Pregnancy You Deserve, According To Black Parents And Maternal Health Experts | LAist | | We already know that the health and mortality stats about Black babies and mothers don’t look good. The statistics about racial disparities point to a long history of systemic issues, with structural racism at the root.
But if you’re pregnant, how can you set yourself up for the healthy pregnancy you deserve? [Article] | | by , . 2024-04-23 | | | | 63 Albertsons in California to be sold to C&S Wholesale if Kroger merger OK’d – Orange County Register | | Kroger and Albertsons Cos. on Monday, April 22 announced a revised plan to divest 579 stores, 63 of them in California, to C&S Wholesale Grocers as part of a proposed $26.4 billion merger. [Article] | | by , Orange County Register. 2024-04-23 | | | | Southern California steelhead trout are declared endangered - Los Angeles Times | | Southern California’s rivers and creeks once teemed with large, silvery fish that arrived from the ocean and swam upstream to spawn. But today, these fish are seldom seen.
Southern California steelhead trout have been pushed to the brink of extinction as their river habitats have been altered by development and fragmented by barriers and dams.
Their numbers have been declining for decades, and last week California’s Fish and Game Commission voted to list Southern California steelhead trout as endangered.
Conservation advocates said they hope the designation will accelerate efforts to save the fish and the aquatic ecosystems on which they depend.
“Historically, tens of thousands of these fish swam in Southern California rivers and streams,” said Sandra Jacobson, director of the South Coast region for California Trout, an organization that advocated for the listing. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | | | O.C. Board of Supervisors approves new parking vendor for John Wayne Airport - Los Angeles Times | | Orange County supervisors Tuesday approved a contract with a new company to provide parking services at John Wayne Airport with one abstaining for lack of more information and two others complaining about the
company’s communications with their offices.
The board voted 4-0 with Orange County Supervisor Doug Chaffee abstaining for Ace Parking, which will take over for LAZ Parking California.
Orange County officials recommended approval of the five-year contract for up to $60 million with an option for a two-year term. The owner of the company pledged to the board that it would live within the budget.
Orange County Board Chairman Don Wagner criticized comments company officials made during a presentation to the board Tuesday about “external forces” attempting to change supervisors’ minds on the staff recommendation. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-04-23 | | |
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