Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.

The city’s crumbling roads lay bare the costs of the city’s addiction to band-aid budgeting. Simply filling a pothole doesn’t repair the damage to the underlying structure of the street, which means potholes soon return, explains John Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, and the director of the UC Pavement Research Center.

“A pothole is the gravestone on a pavement that died previously,” he says.

“We’re trying to save money because we don’t have money, and yet we are mortgaging our future by making it much more expensive to get these streets in order later,” says Michael Schneider, the founder and CEO of Streets for All, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit advocating for streets that make more room for pedestrians and cyclists.

Streets for All released a report in April that modeled how bad the city’s streets could get if Los Angeles continued down its current maintenance path. Right now the city has an $8 billion backlog. The report projects that the backlog will swell to $15 billion by 2035.

As the report noted, eliminating cracked pavement isn’t all the city has put off. It has, the report alleged, purposely engaged in patchwork rather than resurfacing in order to delay having to make legally required improvements to pavement.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into federal law in 1990, mandates that cities install sidewalk curb cuts at street corners when they do street repairs. Then, two years ago, city voters passed Measure HLA, which orders L.A. to add lanes for bikes and buses whenever the city does major resurfacing. The city’s streets bureau says it cannot afford to meet the demands of either the federal government or local voters. So, as of July 2025, Los Angeles halted all major street repaving across the city. This kind of municipal budgeting — delaying pavement maintenance for a year, or two, or more — can seem to make sense in the short term, says Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning and public policy and a research fellow in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA.

“But then the roads start to break down and it cascades,” Taylor says. “It’s like getting caught in credit card debt. The interest gets worse and worse and you fall farther and farther behind.”

This past year has been one of hard fiscal choices for Street Services. The city has slashed its budget for two years running, resulting in a 26% workforce reduction. These “severe” cuts, the bureau wrote in its November budget request to the mayor’s office, “created too many operational holes, and has resulted in crews being dismantled, consolidated, or shut down.” Sometimes, the cuts themselves are costly, the bureau wrote, as “crews can remain idle and have to await truckers or equipment operators to perform work.”

The result: Los Angeles resurfaced 312 miles of roads last year, less than half of the 850 miles or so of pavement it repaired annually in the late 2010s. This year, in a city with 23,000 miles of roads, the bureau is on track to repave 100 to 160 miles of road, according to Streetsblog LA, a daily online publication reporting on transportation and sustainability issues in the city. The majority of that repaving, about 100 miles, is large asphalt repair, Streetsblog LA reported. The patches are short, less than 1/8 of a mile, leaving at least some portion of the street untouched, and often end just short of crosswalks, avoiding intersections. These limits are strategic and deliberate, critics charge.

The length is the city’s attempt to avoid HLA restriping, contends Joe Linton, editor of Streetsblog LA, in the latest of two lawsuits he’s filed against the city, trying to force it to adhere to HLA standards. The patches don’t run curb-to-curb or into intersections to avoid triggering ADA mandates for new or improved curb cuts, Streets for All alleges in its report.

“It’s just gross,” says Oren Hadar, who writes a newsletter examining the city’s housing and transportation woes, called The Future Is LA. In December, Hadar broke the story about how the city had ceased major repaving. “Really? Somebody is sitting there, with a mapping tool, figuring out, okay, well, how do I make this 659 feet so it doesn’t trigger HLA? I mean, it’s just awful to think that they’re planning this out.”

Mayor Karen Bass, facing re-election this year and under fire from opponents who accuse her of neglecting city infrastructure, proposed a budget in April that restores 170 of the 406 positions StreetsLA lost to budget cuts in the last two years alone. She’s also proposing increased funding for constructing ADA-compliant curb ramps and street repairs.

It’s too little, too late, said Adam Miller, one of Bass’ challengers in the mayor’s race. If the city doesn’t allocate substantially more resources towards its pockmarked streets, “you’re driving the city into the ground,” he said. The Bureau of Street Services directed a request for comment to the mayor’s office, which did not respond to multiple emails.

Los Angeles also continues to grapple with the legal fallout from its failure to meet ADA standards — most significantly the Willits class-action suit. That suit resulted in a 30-year, $1.4 billion settlement in 2016, mandating that L.A. fix its broken sidewalks and add curb ramps. Los Angeles reports paying $50,000 per curb ramp, meaning repaving an intersection could cost $200,000 in curb ramps alone (by comparison, a 2021 Kaiser Health News investigation found the average national cost of curb ramps to range from $9,000 to $19,000 each). With the city finding, year after year, that it cannot come up with the funds to meet the demands of Willits, council files show that as recently as mid-March, the council’s Public Works Committee met in a closed-door session to discuss the settlement.

L.A. paid out $1.4 million in settlements in fiscal year 2024-2025 to people who tripped and fell on city potholes. The city does not have a category solely for pothole claims for vehicles, which could include cars or bikes (the closest number is the $5.2 million the city paid out last year for roadway maintenance claims).

The pothole problem is just a small piece of overall lawsuit costs for “dangerous conditions” on the city’s streets and sidewalks. In the last fiscal year, the city paid a total of $54 million in settlements — a 35% increase from the previous year and more than double the total five years before.

Liability claims are paid out of a central fund, not by the department that triggered the claim. For the coming fiscal year, the city controller’s office expects to spend $106 million on liability claims and financing for Street Services — roughly three-quarters of the $141 million it will pay the department’s workers, the very workforce it has spent two years cutting.

Spending less now is supposed to save money. But the money the city doesn’t put into streets is spent on the consequences of not spending on streets — settlements, legal bills, and repairs that cost more every year they’re deferred.

In the meantime, Street Services continues to deploy what crews it has to patch streets, while beneath the patches, the streets’ aging pavement grows more and more fragile.

“Is anybody developing some kind of strategy, whether it’s spending more money on curb ramps or giving more money to construction crews?” Hadar said. “Because it can’t keep going like this.”

Constance Sommer is an independent writer living in Mar Vista. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, and Westways (AAA) Magazine, among others.

By Ralph Vartabedian

To the long list of major problems bedeviling California’s bullet train, here’s a new one to add: The project now appears trapped in a financial and legal bind.

In order to afford the first section of California’s high-speed rail, from Merced to Bakersfield, the agency in charge of building the train recently proposed making significant unpleasant compromises, including stopping six miles short of downtown Bakersfield and three miles outside of downtown Merced, amid farm fields.

In order to comply with state law, however, the state-appointed inspector general said in a recent letter to the rail authority that it is required to connect the two downtowns. Nor is it allowed to make several other cost-saving cuts, such as laying one main track instead of two, which would force trains traveling in one direction to pull over on sidings to let trains from the other direction pass.

The Merced-to-Bakersfield starter segment was launched by newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022, who asserted there was no realistic plan to complete the original goal of building a Los Angeles to San Francisco bullet train system that voters approved in 2008. Instead, efforts would focus on an initial segment within the Central Valley that could be completed with existing funding. That less ambitious effort has since encountered skyrocketing costs and delayed schedules that are tapping out funding and prompting the latest alterations.

The draft 2026 business plan issued earlier this year projected that the latest round of cuts and compromises would allow the initial operating segment to be finished for $35 billion by 2033, a deadline that the inspector general, Benjamin Belnap, has previously said is unlikely to be met.

The rail authority’s business plan asserts it has sufficient funds to complete the project, though the cost would have been an estimated $14 billion higher without the changes it has made. The implication is that Sacramento would have to find another $14 billion on top of the $35 billion estimated cost for the Bakersfield to Merced system to comply with the legal requirements.

The rail authority did not respond to written questions from L.A. Reported.

According to Belnap’s letter, the authority’s proposal to build only a single track over 89% of the route from Bakersfield to Merced violates a requirement in SB 198 that the route have dual tracks. The same law also specified stations in the downtowns of Bakersfield and Merced, he said.

The downtown Merced station was supposed to serve as the transfer point for passengers taking commuter trains to the Bay Area, as well as linking with Amtrak service from Sacramento.

Belnap said the draft plan also fails to provide a detailed funding plan for the construction of the Merced to Bakersfield segment that was required under AB 377.

“These omissions mask the true cost and timeline for completing the project’s initial operating segment as defined in statute,” Belnap warned. The “extent of these omissions makes the draft plan objectively incomplete and, if not addressed, noncompliant with state law.”

Many of Belnap’s conclusions parallel those of the Legislative Analyst’s Office. In a report delivered to the Senate committee, high-speed rail expert Helen Kerstein noted a lack of transparency in the draft business plan.

“The decision not to highlight information on key scope changes in the document — instead stating that cost savings are from unspecified ‘optimization measures’ — obscures the nature of these changes and makes comparisons between annual plans difficult,” she wrote.

Assemblyman David Tangipa, a Republican who represents parts of Fresno and nearby foothill counties that are near some of the rail construction, expressed outrage at the draft plan’s failure to comply with the legislation, including AB 377, which he introduced.

Noting that the bond act authorizing the project was approved in 2008, the 30-year-old legislator said, “I did not vote for high-speed rail because I was 12 years old at the time. And it’s looking like my children and my grandchildren won’t even be able to ride it.

“We should have infrastructure,” he said. “The current California High-Speed Rail Authority plan is not that. It is a fantasy.”

The latest criticism comes on top of recent reports by the rail authority showing that the bullet train’s high-speed segment would eventually run only from Palmdale to Gilroy, not Los Angeles to San Francisco as originally envisioned.

Despite the bullet train’s ever-lengthening list of troubles, political support remains robust in Sacramento. Sen. Dave Cortese, chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, whose district includes San Jose, where high-speed rail remains popular, defended the rail authority’s decisions in its draft business plan at an April 27 committee hearing.

“The project has to be completed,” he said in a recent KCRA interview.

Belnap’s letter appears to have forced the rail authority to rethink how it can legally achieve that goal. The business plan was on the rail board’s meeting agenda for approval in late April. After Belnap’s letter, dated April 15, it disappeared from the agenda.

The controversy over the business plan’s cuts was compounded on Friday, May 8, when Gov. Gavin Newsom replaced rail authority chair Tom Richards and vice chair Nancy Miller with two close political confidants, Steve Kawa and Jason Elliott.

The rail authority and the governor’s office declined to comment on whether the moves were related to Belnap’s concerns or to the board’s action to delay approval of the draft business plan. In a statement, a spokesman said Newsom “is committed to making sure leadership is in place to shepherd every dollar and every mile of track with continuous rigor and accountability.”

Exactly what would happen if Newsom and the rail authority ignore Belnap’s concerns about the business plan’s legal lapse is not clear.

Ethan Elkind, a rail proponent and director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said, “It could be the subject of a lawsuit.” But he notes that for years California courts have taken a hands-off approach to the project.

“It is more a question of politics,” he said.

Ralph Vartabedian is a Los Angeles-based independent journalist who has reported extensively on the bullet train for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

By Sam Quinones

Families living near the property at 6110 S. Main St. in Los Angeles say they watched it descend into chaos over the last couple years.

The SoLa Foundation, a nonprofit organization, intended the site as an affordable-housing development. But the builder went bankrupt midway through the project and left it a half-built concrete shell, according to a press release from Councilman Curren Price, who represents District 9.

Squatters took over. Soon there was noise at night, trash in the back alley. A bag of chickens, most of them dead, were found, with a few of the live but diseased-looking chickens running about.

“All these homeless people were in there doing drugs,” said Alfred Garcia, who lives nearby. “At night, they’d be arguing. You could hear them fighting, the girls yelling.”

Taggers hit the structure. One kid even brought a ladder and tagged the front-facing wall — in midday, Garcia said. Neighbors called the police, but nothing seemed to happen. There were several small fires from inside the property.

“We called police, 311,” said Monica Romero, 25, who lives next door with her parents and two autistic younger siblings. “We don’t know what has to happen for them to do something. We’re desperate for help.”

Then in early April, a fire broke out on the building materials left at the site. Flames poured from the structure’s windows, lapping near Romero’s family apartment. No one was hurt. Damages were confined to the unfinished structure.

Still, Garcia said, “you don’t feel safe.”

The public was jolted into greater awareness of homelessness as a source of fires by the stubborn blaze that shut down the Harbor (110) Freeway in early May. Authorities believe the origin was a trash pile within a homeless encampment.

But people are less aware of how routinely fires are caused by homeless squatters at abandoned properties in L.A., or properties under stalled construction, endangering nearby houses and families. So common are such fires that they are quickly forgotten, as are the stories of people who live nearby.

In Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.

Especially vulnerable are working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods, where housing is generally older, therefore more vulnerable to fire, and more costly to remodel to prevent blazes.

The issue even briefly entered the mayoral debate. Mayor Karen Bass fretted that city “firefighters spent 30% of their time putting out fires related to homelessness.” Challenger Spencer Pratt promised to clear city streets of “drug addicts,” many of whom, he said, invade “abandoned buildings … lighting them on fire virtually every other day.”

Homelessness- or tent-related fires now average 46 a day in the city, with about 75,000 of widely varying sizes reported from 2020 to 2025, according to an ABC7 review of Los Angeles Fire Department data published in April.

People living next to a house squatted by homeless people face months of noise and chaos, and the constant threat of losing everything.

All this happened to Juan Galicia and his family, a story recently told by L.A. Reported. Galicia, a pastor and contractor, purchased his home on St. Andrews Place in Hollywood in 2008. He said he made improvements in it for years. “It was going to be my retirement,” he said.

Then a vacant house next door was squatted by a dozen homeless people displaying disturbing behaviors — up all night, screaming, fighting, and spending all day scavenging recyclables. A former squatter there said methamphetamine use at the house was rampant. Galicia and his neighbors called police and their city councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez for a year. On Sunday, March 8, Galicia was preaching a sermon in his South-Central church when fire erupted at that squatted house next to his up in Hollywood. It quickly consumed the Galicia family’s house as well.

Two months after the inferno, the remains of both houses show no signs of being touched. The eight-member Galicia family, homeless for a couple weeks, finally found an apartment in South Los Angeles.

In the eyes of many people, this incursion on private land began with the city relinquishing control of its public spaces.

In 2011, Occupy L.A. at City Hall normalized the use of tents on public spaces. From there, tents colonized nearby Skid Row. Within a few years, they spread to Venice and, after that, to Hollywood, Koreatown, Mid-City, South L.A., and to freeway onramps and underpasses. Until recently, a series of court cases enshrined in case law the idea that homeless people have the right to live where they want on public land, including sidewalks, if the government failed to provide housing for them. Their tents are deemed private dwellings that police need warrants to search.

Methamphetamine is a common part of life for L.A.’s homeless, whether addiction drove them to the streets or its cheap availability tempted the already unhoused into using it. The drug causes mental illness characterized by aggressive, deranged behavior and worsened by the trauma of street life.

During Covid, bus stops and Metro trains, parking lots, parks and libraries, and, of course, sidewalks were occupied by homeless people. Tent encampments have receded recently but remain common to the city’s landscape.

A predictable result is that encampments would move to occupying vacant private spaces as well.

Older homes left untended, abandoned, or put up for sale are vulnerable to squatters, and the city is often slow to respond or tells residents there’s nothing it can do because the land is private and eviction is up to the landowner.

This fuels anger and alienation among residents, who feel powerless to address a problem that they see as urgent as it is easily solvable. They can call authorities but chronic trespassing is a misdemeanor that squatters often ignore.

Getting a “trespass arrest authorization” — allowing police to actually arrest trespassers, instead of just shooing them away — is “a byzantine process,” said Kim Cooper, a historic preservation advocate who runs the Esotouric’s Secret Los Angeles newsletter. “The amount of time it takes and many ways it can go off the rails … most people walk away.”

Fire consumed most of a 1907 Craftsman at 1970 S. Lasalle Avenue in Harvard Heights on April 27. A young man had squatted at the place for months, even causing a fire a couple days before by throwing a burning gas can out into the yard, said neighbor Michael Morgan.

Morgan, 65, a retired engineer, has owned the house next door for 40 years. The blaze scorched the side of his house.

“We couldn’t get the guy out of there,” Morgan told me. “Cops came a couple times. He would leave, come back a few hours later. A month ago, [the owner] boarded everything up. He still got back in. You’d hear him yelling, things crashing, throwing things out the window, breaking glass.”

Perhaps the most predictable recent example of a private space creating public danger was the house at the corner of Bonnie Brae Street and West 12^th Place in Pico-Union.

The Craftsman on the lot had burned three times before it was finally consumed on the morning of April 27 in flames visible from two blocks away. The fire burned parts of two adjacent houses, one for at least the third time.

The saga began in 2017 when a tenant’s fire left the house standing, but unlivable and condemned. The remains were never cleared. They became a magnet for homeless people for the next nine years, even as the house partially burned again in 2020 and a third time in 2022, scorching cars parked nearby.

Neighbors walking pets would avoid the sidewalk next to it. Rats from the house scurried across cables to nearby houses. Meanwhile, homeless squatters stripped the streetlights of copper, leaving the neighborhood in partial darkness until the city installed solar-powered lights.

The house is now a pile of charred wood and rubble, perhaps ending the neighborhood’s nightmare.

Neighbors of the property at 6110 S. Main St. aren’t sure what’s next. Construction will not re-commence until at least next year.

“We don’t know who’s going to jump the fence and steal our stuff,” said Monica Romero. “We don’t know if it’s going to set on fire. It’s anguish we live with. It’s heartbreaking that we have to be this desperate for something that they can control easily.”

Independent journalist Sam Quinones is the author of five books of narrative nonfiction and the Dreamland Newsletter. Contact him at www.samquinones.com. This article was produced in collaboration with his Dreamland Newsletter and is published there simultaneously as part of L.A. Reported’s mission of supporting the work of reporters delving into the deeper, untold stories of Los Angeles.

By Robert Greene

In August 2021, Karen Bass was in Mozambique.

It was her job. As head of the House panel on Africa policy, the congresswoman was investigating violence in the Southeast African nation in order to inform Congress and President Biden on the situation.

Half a world away, Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas was speaking to the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum about the moral urgency of the city’s homelessness crisis. He then made a surprise announcement: He would remain on the council to focus on the problem. He would not run for mayor.

Word quickly reached Bass in Africa. “And I was like, ‘Oh, crap! Well, I guess it’s clear what I need to step up and do,” she told the same forum in May 2023.

Bass handily defeated shopping mall developer and multiple city commission appointee Rick Caruso and was sworn in as L.A. mayor in December 2022. By then, Ridley-Thomas had been suspended from the council on corruption charges, and City Hall was leaderless in the debate over tent encampments and deteriorating conditions on the streets.

On Bass’s first day in office, she bypassed City Hall and headed straight to the Emergency Operations Center, a fortress-like building on Temple Street (but this is Los Angeles, so, a fortress fronted by palm trees). There, she declared a homelessness state of emergency, the first L.A. mayor to do so, empowering herself to take some immediate actions.

She took steps to fast-track housing construction, moved people from street encampments to interim housing, slashed permitting requirements, and successfully urged the county Board of Supervisors to “lock arms” with her on combating homelessness.

Migrants bused to L.A. from Florida and Texas who lacked basic supplies, a fire-damaged section of the I-10, even preparations for a looming hurricane that never arrived — Bass dealt with it all. She was off to an impressive start.

On Jan. 7, 2025, Karen Bass was in Ghana. It was her job.

Or was it? Bass was part of a Biden administration delegation attending the inauguration of the West African nation’s president, but she was no longer a member of Congress with an Africa portfolio. The new mayor left L.A. despite forecasts of hurricane-force Santa Ana winds.

As Pacific Palisades was being consumed by fire, she hurried home but seemed to have lost her footing. Her best attributes abandoned her. Her claim — that she wouldn’t have left if the fire chief had told her of the serious danger — rang hollow because the day before she traveled, the National Weather Service forecast “major risk — take action” and “extreme fire conditions.” The public scoffed at her office’s assurances that she was managing things from afar until she arrived.

Admired for her dignity-preserving knack for quietly moving officials along when she deemed them unsuited to their jobs, Bass instead had a very public spat with Fire Chief Kristin Crowley and fired her. She hired former Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff as her rebuilding and recovery czar but left him unsure of his role and authority. She angered county Supervisor Lindsey Horvath by holding a news conference without her.

“Doesn’t seem very ‘locked arms’ to me,” Horvath texted, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Bass has rarely used her old catchphrase since then.

The enthusiasm that greeted her first election to mayor has seriously waned. And yet by last fall there seemed to be equally little enthusiasm about any potential opponent, including Caruso. She might win in November in a runoff or even win outright in June, and still be unpopular — just less unpopular than the other candidates.

Pasadena Councilmember and former mayor Rick Cole put the odd situation this way: “I think if Mayor Bass were running unopposed she’d lose.”

What was behind this seemingly overnight change from the generally popular head of the city to the target of a hundred complaints? Was it that her background was more legislator and bridge-builder than manager and leader? That her experience was in state, federal, and foreign affairs more than local? That the very setup of L.A., different from most large cities, makes it difficult for any mayor to take command? Or is it simply that current events went in an unforeseen direction?

Schooled in the ways of the state Legislature and Congress, Bass is the first L.A. mayor elected without ever having served previously in city elected office or on a city commission since Sam Yorty in 1961. She grew up, worked, and organized in Los Angeles. But she was a City Hall newcomer.

Los Angeles mayors have to be jugglers and gamblers. Jugglers, because they have more floundering city departments and programs than they can fix all at once. And gamblers, because they have to bet which festering problem is about to explode into crisis, and then direct resources and attention there, and away from other programs. Bass’s bets seemed smart at the time. Amid worries about crime, she focused on police, ushered out a chief not to her liking, picked a new one, and squeezed the city budget to rebuild the LAPD after budget cuts and shrinking staffing. For a brief moment, she looked like a public safety genius.

And she picked homelessness, a problem within the ambit of her professional expertise as a former physician assistant with a master’s in social work and as a founder of an organization that fought the proliferation of liquor stores and addictive drugs in Black and Latino communities.

Violent crime and homicide have plunged on Bass’s watch. But they have plummeted in most other U.S. cities as well. Homelessness is down too, for two years running, and that’s an L.A. first. Street homelessness, specifically, is down 10%. But the problem is so large, and received insufficient attention for so long, that it may take decades to see large-scale homelessness reductions.

In contrast, it didn’t take time and statistics for the public to see the results of the Pacific Palisades fire, turning Bass into political poison. Her allies kept their distance. Her return visit to the Board of Supervisors was received coldly, and the county pulled out of joint homelessness programs. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a close ally and Bass’s successor as leader of the community organization she founded, had trouble rounding up votes to back her programs. President Trump, Rick Caruso, Elon Musk, and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong questioned her “competence.”

She was blamed for fire hydrants running dry, a reservoir empty for repairs that weren’t completed on time, a fire truck not being stationed in Pacific Palisades during the windstorm, and a host of other failures, most of which were not under her control. Hydrants, for example, are part of a decades-old system built for fighting housefires a few at a time, and if opened all at once will have insufficient pressure. It is one of many inadequate city systems inherited by L.A. mayors from decades of population growth without accompanying funding for infrastructure growth, maintenance, and modernization. Any mayor who would countermand their chief on deployment would be blundering outside their zone of competence.

The city’s arcane management structure interposes a fire commission between the mayor and the chief, blurring the lines of authority.

But Bass can indeed be blamed for the fact that her appointees to the commission weren’t clear on their proper role or authority over the department — much like Soboroff, the recovery czar. She bears responsibility for Fire Department budget cuts even if those cuts seemed like the best of bad options during a budget crisis.

And what about the city’s report examining the fire response, which the Los Angeles Times reported (attributing to two people “with knowledge of Bass’s office”) was watered down by Bass?

That’s a thornier issue. If it actually happened, that could be seen as an outrageous effort to divert blame from herself, or a troubling yet defensible move to limit city liability to avoid costly payouts that might require slashing city services even more. But then, how about the city’s responsibility to be transparent even if there is a practical down side?

In any event, Angelenos fumed at Bass for the entirety of the fire disaster and for problems that have been festering for decades under previous mayors, like homelessness, poorly maintained parks, plodding permit approval, neglected infrastructure; and for problems that are newer, like late-night youth street takeovers, copper wire theft from streetlights, and abandoned and graffitied skyscrapers.

If Bass had placed different bets — if she had focused instead on disaster preparedness, Fire Department management, infrastructure replacement — she might be a political winner today.

She may be anyway. Caruso shrank from challenging her for reelection. Voters may still pick her when they consider the alternatives.

But her former ally, Councilmember Nithya Raman, jumped into the race at the last possible moment and is polling well. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Raman at 44 represents a younger generation of leftward-leaning leaders than Bass, 72.

Months before challenging the mayor, Raman said in an interview that most Angelenos have their eye on something other than sweeping ideological change.

“What they’re asking for is a functional city,” she said.

Whether any L.A. mayor can deliver that given the city’s structural challenges is open to question.

Perhaps that’s why even one of Bass’s severest critics borrowed her favorite phrase. In a New Year’s social media post, Rick Caruso worked out on his elliptical while urging his followers to ready themselves for an important year.

“Let’s everybody lock arms,” he said.

Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, is an L.A.-based independent reporter and 2026-27 John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation fellow.

By Gale Holland and Gray Mollenkamp

The Los Angeles Police Department’s massive bunker-style station on Skid Row is edged by jagged rocks to deter homeless people looking for a safe spot to sleep for the night. Inside, the station houses the Central Traffic Division, where on a recent morning the seven officers on duty were feeling beleaguered, not by the neighborhood’s infamous squalor but by the challenge of keeping 1,139 miles of city roads safe.

Before the pandemic and George Floyd’s death, 40 officers had been assigned to Central Traffic, whose territory stretches from El Sereno to Historic South Central. Since 2020, the deployment has dropped to 20, but illness, training, work restrictions, and court time bring the number of staff actually in the office down to less than half that. Even with 20 they would be stretched thin. It can take 40 minutes to get to Newton station on the far side of the district, Sgt. Doug Panameno said.

In 2026, the understaffed and overstretched Central Division is not the exception, it’s the rule. Citations for moving violations plummeted citywide from over 213,000 in 2019 to just 79,000 in 2025, a decline of 63%. Tickets for speeding, a critical factor in most fatalities, have dropped roughly 40% over the same period.

Street races, sideshows, distracted driving, and open defiance of the law have made the job tougher in recent years. Pedestrians get away with more now, too. The 2023 state Freedom to Walk act decriminalized jaywalking except when crossings are unsafe. “This is the new America,” Officer Michael Belmonte said sardonically. “Everybody does what they want.”

At the same time that enforcement has fallen, L.A.’s streets have become significantly more dangerous. Fatal traffic crashes are up 55 percent in Los Angeles since 2015, with a total of 290 deaths last year. For the past three years running, more people have died in collisions than in homicides. Over half were pedestrians. Traffic-related injury is the leading cause of death for children 5 to 14 in Los Angeles County.

By the numbers

While it’s impossible to precisely quantify how much of the decline in enforcement has reduced the safety of L.A.’s streets, an insurance study last year found that cuts to police rosters are associated with an increase in impaired-driving deaths. “For things like speeding…impaired driving, you need that enforcement,” said Jessica Cicchino, senior vice president of Behavior and Infrastructure Research for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which authored the study.

Fatal and serious injury accidents also contribute to L.A.’s auto insurance rates, among the highest in the nation, Cicchino and other experts at the insurance institute said.

The drop in the enforcement of L.A.’s traffic laws stems from a wide array of causes, said Panameno. One example: New certification requirements for using radar guns have clogged the pipeline of officers eligible to crack down on speeders.

The primary cause of the enforcement decline, however, traces its roots to the nationwide police shortage that emerged with the pandemic and the death of George Floyd. Stung by anti-law enforcement protests and increased scrutiny of racial bias, many officers retired early. The LAPD has dropped from 10,000 sworn officers in 2019 to 8,700, the lowest deployment in decades. Panameno said his division has shrunk from 100 to 80 motorcycle officers.

The LAPD has not provided specific changes in traffic division staffing numbers, but officers say that the declines in department-wide staffing understate the impact on traffic enforcement, one of the easiest areas for departments to trim hours. During the pandemic, many traffic officers shifted to patrol and those who remained quit responding to all but serious injury and fatal accidents.

The dramatic reduction in citations is also intertwined with efforts to make traffic enforcement safer and more equitable, particularly for Black and Latino residents.

Los Angeles has a famously fraught history with violent police stops. The bludgeoning of Rodney King followed a high-speed police chase, leading to the 1992 civil uprising. The 1965 Watts riots were ignited by the aggressive arrest of Marquette Frye.

Los Angeles police officers stop and search, handcuff, and detain Black and Latino motorists far more often than white drivers, particularly for minor equipment violations — expired tags, misplaced license plates, and air fresheners dangling from rear-view mirrors. Officers, including those from elite Metro and gang units, use some of the stops as excuses to look for more serious crimes. Critics assail those so-called “pretextual stops” and infractions as “driving while Black.”

The city has responded with a pair of major changes to address them as well as racial profiling and violent traffic stops. The first was a 2020 proposal that called for turning over much of traffic enforcement to unarmed civilians. Supporters said it would save money, prevent potential fatal encounters, and free officers up to investigate more serious crimes. Police officers were skeptical. “When calls turn violent, they end up calling the police anyway,” Sgt. Panameno said.

After consultants recommended civilian traffic enforcement go forward, the council in 2024 requested departmental feasibility reports. The key reports were finally posted this February, a year and a half late, only to face another roadblock when the city’s legislative analyst ruled that civilian traffic stops would be illegal. Advocates for civilian stops dispute that conclusion, meaning the political battle to create a non-police arm of traffic enforcement is likely to grind on in the coming years.

The second reform began in 2022, when the LAPD ordered pretextual stops limited to times when there is a threat to public safety. To enforce that rule, officers were required to state on their body-worn cameras specific information about the more serious crime they were investigating. The City Council later called for exploring a halt to pretextual traffic stops.

After an initial drop, pretextual stops rebounded, a police commission study this year found. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Los Angeles City Council, said 86% of pretextual stops were of Black or Latino people. A third of the stops uncovered contraband or evidence of a crime.

“They are such a waste of resources,” said Chauncee Smith, associate director of Reimagine Justice & Safety at Catalyst California. “It’s not about improving public safety, it’s police going on a fishing expedition, disproportionately applied to people of color and low-income people.”

A proposal to tighten pretextual stop restrictions was sent to the City Council last month.

Speed cameras approved in 2024 offer another promising option for supplementing the depleted ranks of traffic police, but that program too has faced delays due to a cumbersome contracting and community engagement process. After San Francisco installed cameras in March 2025, speeding infractions at key locations fell by 72 percent in the first month, the transit agency reported. New York City also cited 70 percent-plus speed reductions from cameras in school zones.

Los Angeles now is set to launch its cameras by the end of 2026.

“The city is extraordinarily slow,” said City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. “We really seem to lack the capacity and the accountability to actually build the projects we’re supposed to be building.”

Reversing the slide in traditional traffic enforcement seems unlikely to happen soon. Mayor Bass issued an order to streamline LAPD hiring and pushed $4.4 million through the City Council in December to hire up to 480 new officers. But facing a budget deficit projected in the hundreds of millions — and continuing police attrition — Bass in April acknowledged that the best hope for the city was to stop the department from shrinking further.

Panameno expects traffic to fare even worse. Several of his officers are expected to retire in the next 18 months, he said, and patrol, which is also short-staffed, is in front of traffic in the transfer chain. “There are more people leaving than we’re hiring,” he said.

In the station hallway, Panameno pointed to a glass case with a historic photo of dozens of uniformed motorcycle cops. “As you can see, there were more than seven people in these old photos,” he said. Rows of motorcycles awaiting servicing occupy the garage out back due to a shortage of mechanics.

Officers in the LAPD’s central traffic division said they are so bogged down with crash investigations they have little to no time for proactive patrols and education. “You seldom get time to do traffic enforcement specifically against speeding and right of way violations,” said Panameno. “We definitely don’t have the resources to make a dent in making the city safer.”

Gale Holland reported for the Los Angeles Times for many years and is now a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

Gray Mollenkamp is a senior at Claremont McKenna College.

By Ralph Vartabedian

Bullet trains connect major cities around the world on acclaimed and well-traveled routes. In France, it’s Paris to Lyon; in Japan, Tokyo to Osaka; in Italy, Florence to Rome; and in China, Beijing to Shanghai.

In California? From Gilroy to Palmdale.

Since voters approved a $33 billion high-speed electric train system in 2008, seemingly endless delays and cost overruns have turned the undertaking into an object of global ridicule. Now the latest business plan from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, made public last week, has revealed perhaps the most consequential alteration in the project’s 18-year history of diminution and disillusionment.

According to the new plan, the high-speed segment would run at 220 miles per hour from Palmdale to Gilroy, while at both ends passengers who want to travel to the larger cities would have a much slower ride or possibly switch to other forms of transportation to get to their destinations.

That change promises to dramatically degrade the experience and convenience of the train’s future riders — or discourage them from hopping on board altogether — with an estimated travel time about the same as just hopping in the car and driving from one city to the other.

The new Palmdale-to-Gilroy plan has some superficial similarities to a well-known and much-criticized plan promoted by Governor Gavin Newsom since 2019. That proposal sought to launch service with an initial operating segment of high-speed rail in the central valley, between Bakersfield and Merced, before extending high-speed service in both directions. The new proposal is a more fundamental change, doing away with high-speed travel at either end for decades or possibly forever.

The planned route from L.A. to San Francisco covers about 438 miles, so the combined 148 miles being relegated to slower speeds at the bookends eliminate roughly one-third of the high-speed track promised back in 2008.

Exactly how would passengers travel to and from those final destinations? That is left murky in the new business plan. Construction of the northern segment would depend not on the rail authority but on the state and “local partners” to build tracks and install a high voltage electrical system along an existing Union Pacific freight line at a cost of up to $5 billion, which is in addition to the $126-billion system cost. No agreement exists with Union Pacific to use its right of way.

Here in L.A. County, the business plan shows a map of the Palmdale area, tracing a route along an existing Metrolink track as well as a section where a future tunnel would be constructed but without details on what that map means.

If the future system operates at similar speeds to Metrolink in the south and Caltrain in the north, that could add more than four hours of trip time to the two hours it would take to complete the high-speed section. And that’s not counting transfer time from train to train, if that becomes necessary.

“Six hours is about right,” said Louis Thompson, a rail industry veteran and former chairman of the state-appointed peer review panel on the bullet train project. “It is driving time.”

The bullet train was originally supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes, so six hours would more than double it.

“Clearly, if you increase the trip time, you will reduce demand,” Thompson said.

Notably, the new business plan does not include an estimated trip time for the route, even though speed will be a big factor in attracting — or turning off — travelers. Rail authority spokeswoman Annie Parker said the speeds along some of non-high-speed segments are still being calculated. Parker declined to provide an estimated total travel time for the route. She said costs were cut sharply along the Palmdale route by reducing the amount of tunneling and by sharing Metrolink tracks. More details on the routes will be provided in technical reports to be released in the future, she said.

While the new 118-page report doesn’t formally abandon the original concept of a continuous bullet train between the state’s biggest metropolitan areas, it leaves its future and timing undefined. The rail authority also disclosed that building the system as originally conceived would cost a staggering $231 billion, while the new plan would use engineering and route changes to keep the total cost to an estimated $126 billion.

The changes are driven by the recognition that both voters in California and politicians in Washington are increasingly resistant to plowing more money into the project. Even at the $126 billion price tag, the plan acknowledges that the rail authority faces a $93 billion funding shortfall.

Ian Choudri, the embattled chief executive officer of the rail authority, argues that it is a mistake to focus just on the original goal of travelling between L.A. and San Francisco and ignore service to smaller cities along the way. “The promise of high-speed rail is larger than fast trips between two endpoints,” he wrote in a letter included in the new business plan. But the project was largely sold to voters as a connection between the Bay Area and the state’s largest city. It’s unclear whether it ever would have been approved by voters as a Palmdale-to-Gilroy train.

The gutting of the bullet train’s original ambitions leaves some critics dumbfounded.

“Who would use such a thing?” asks Robert Poole, transportation policy director at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank that has long been skeptical about the program.

While avid rail enthusiasts might welcome the opportunity to shoot through the nation’s most fertile farm belt at 220 miles per hour, would tourists, business people, or farmers choose it? The state rail authority insists the answer is yes, and has produced ridership studies showing as many as 30.6 million people would ride the system annually.

Such estimates of ridership in the distant future are hard to take at face value. When Europe or Japan introduced bullet trains decades ago, it represented an improvement over already popular rail service, allowing planners to anticipate increased use. By contrast, the California bullet train is known as a “green field,” a new route in a state with a limited long-distance rail system and one of the most sophisticated air travel markets in the world. The ridership estimate of 30.6 million for the full system when it is in place is more than double the 12 million people who fly between the five commercial airports in the Los Angeles region and the three in the Bay Area.

Worse for Southern California, the line from the Central Valley to Palmdale would come after the completion of a link to Gilroy, leaving this region out of the plans altogether until about 2038 if not longer.

“Southern California absolutely [has] not been able to see any tangible benefit from the system,” said Ethan Elkind, a rail proponent and director of the climate change program at UC Berkeley’s Center for law, energy, and the environment. Although there is no money to connect Los Angeles to the future system, he said there is still public support for the program.

“It’s obviously taken a lot longer and cost a lot more money than it really should have, but the question now is, how do we salvage the investment?”

The completion of even a truncated high-speed line from Gilroy to Palmdale depends entirely on a more immediate and risky challenge: completing the initial 171-mile segment in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield.

Originally estimated to cost $15 billion to $20 billion, the starter system cost is now put at $35 billion and completion in 2032. But that schedule is “increasingly unlikely,” the inspector general for the rail authority reported last year.

The rail authority claims it will meet that deadline and that it has a new cost discipline, because without engineering changes the segment would have cost $16 billion more.

The smaller price tag came with plenty of compromises, such as using only single tracks in some areas. The top speed will be cut. And grades through hills and mountains will be sharply increased from 1.25% to 3.5%, which could affect braking distances, speeds, energy consumption, and wear on many components, according to Bill Ibbs, a former UC Berkeley civil engineering professor and current chairman of the peer review panel.

“There are a lot of questions about it and so far we don’t have a lot of information,” Ibbs said.

Given the authority’s history of cost overruns, outside experts are not optimistic.

Even if you accept the rail authority’s cost and revenue estimates for the Bakersfield to Merced system, Helen Kerstein, an expert on the project at the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, said, “You don’t have sufficient funds.”

Thompson has long argued that the state needs to make a serious commitment to building the system in a “more manageable time frame, backed by a dedicated funding source, or seriously consider winding down the program and adapting the existing construction in the Central Valley to improved conventional rail service.”

Both alternatives have attracted almost no support by the Democratic majority in Sacramento.

Ralph Vartabedian is a Los Angeles-based independent journalist who has reported extensively on the bullet train for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

By Sam Quinones

Editor‘s note: This article was produced in collaboration with Sam Quinones’s Dreamland Newsletter on Substack and is published there simultaneously as part of L.A. Reported’s mission of supporting the work of reporters delving into the deeper, untold stories of Los Angeles.

At 2 p.m. last Sunday, Juan Galicia began his sermon at the small South Los Angeles church where he is a pastor. His theme at Ministerio Esperanza (Hope Ministry) that afternoon was how, in the most difficult times, God will not forget us.

At that moment, up in Hollywood, the four-bedroom home he had bought in 2008, that he, a licensed contractor, had renovated himself, where he and his wife had raised their three children, now in their 20s, was going up in flames.

Virtually nothing survived. Juan Galicia, a 55-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, and his family were left with only the clothes they wore to church. Three of their six dogs burned to death.

Suspicion immediately fell on the homeless encampment that had taken hold in an abandoned house next door. At times, more than a dozen people were in and out of the house, displaying signs of methamphetamine use: yelling, up all night, fighting, delusional. Bags of bottles and cans, many scavenged from the neighbors’ blue residential recycling containers.

For a year, Galicia and numerous neighbors had called the office of their councilman, Hugo Soto Martinez, and police.

“They did nothing. We were abandoned,” he told me, standing outside his property three days later.

“The city has nuisance abatement laws for this very purpose,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, in an email. “The city can prosecute civilly (and maybe criminally), people who don’t maintain their property in a safe and healthy way.”

As with the massive piles of trash that plague areas of Hollywood, largely from homeless encampments, the city of Los Angeles has procedures and plans for remedying houses like this — but neighbors still end up waiting, seemingly endlessly, for action.

Nick Barnes-Batista, a spokesman for Soto Martinez, said the office was aware of the threat the encampment posed and tried unsuccessfully to contact the property owner. “The property owner is legally responsible for securing their own property,” he said. Last month, the office sent the case to the city’s Department of Building and Safety, which has the power to place a lien on the property. “That’s the step the process was in,” he said. “This just takes so long.”

Meanwhile, Galicia and his neighbors put up with the all-night noise, the trash, and the safety concerns. Indeed, fires at homeless encampments have for several years posed grave danger to city residences and businesses.

Barnes-Batista said various council members have recently proposed quicker responses to dangerous encampments, including allowing the city to remove them when they contain hazardous materials or represent a fire danger. But none of that had been put in place by the time the fire broke out.

Neighbors told Galicia that they heard what sounded like a gas explosion. Fire then raced through the abandoned house. The squatters fled. The flames quickly spread next door to Galicia’s place, where he lived with eight family members, consuming it in 10 minutes. “Had it happened at night, we’d have all died,” he said.

A hundred firefighters battled for an hour to knock down the blaze, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s X account. Arson investigators were sent to the scene, but the department did not respond to L.A. Reported emails requesting information on the cause of the blaze.

The story of Juan Galicia’s house at 513 St. Andrews Place in Hollywood reveals a city whose actions too often work in opposition to its stated goals.

Los Angeles, whose elected officials proclaim their dedication to expanding the city housing supply, has now lost three livable houses to damage apparently caused by occupants of long-running encampments of homeless people on the 500 block of St. Andrews.

The first house, two doors down from Galicia, was torn down five years ago by an owner when homeless people damaged it beyond repair, Galicia said. The lot remains vacant and overgrown with weeds, encircled by a chain-link fence. The second house the owner didn’t take down, but left vacant; it was then squatted, and finally burned Sunday. The third was Galicia’s home.

Outside the property, a homeless man named Luis had been digging through a blue recycling container on St. Andrews. He said he’d lived in the homeless encampment at the vacant house for several months before leaving last October to live in an alley.

Almost everyone in the squatted home used methamphetamine, he said, including himself. One woman in particular was prone to periodic psychotic episodes where she would yell and throw things. “We were all on drugs,” he said. “Meth was the most important thing in our lives because it helped us forget our problems.”

It also gave them energy as they scavenged for recyclables, he said, allowing them to walk for miles, lugging bags of bottles and cans, which they redeemed for cash, with which they bought methamphetamine.

“Wednesday and Thursday are when they put out the [city’s] blue recycling containers,” Luis said. “You can make $100 a day then, but you have to walk for 10, 11, 12 hours.”

Galicia said he remembered Luis from the encampment next door. As Galicia recalled, one late afternoon he was getting out of his car. “Coming home from work?” asked Luis, carrying several garbage bags of recyclables. “Me, too.”

Scavengers of recyclables, Galicia said, are “why neighbors don’t bring their containers out late at night. We bring them out in the morning. Otherwise, they go through them all night.”

“You learn to survive however you can,” Luis said, before traipsing off across the vacant lot of weeds, looking at the fire’s remains, which included metal chairs, a grill, and spidery rebar. “I wonder if we can go on the property and grab the metal.”

The manager of several apartments in the area also is frustrated with the lack of action.

“The city seems to care more about the people who burned his house down rather than [taxpayers],” said the manager, who asked to remain anonymous.

“In 2019, people wanted to move here,” he said. “Now, we’ve watched this area deteriorate. The homeless population used to be a drunk guy near a 7 Eleven. Now we are seeing a much more aggressive, more drug-fueled problem.”

Now when he quotes Los Angeles apartment owners the fees he would charge to manage their units, he told me, he includes a budget line item he calls “L.A. BS” – money to cover things that the new homeless population will break, steal, or destroy.

“We had to redo all our intercoms, our gates, our mailboxes,” he said. “They’re constantly stealing copper out of the street lights. We have to price these units lower and lower to get people to want to live in this area and tolerate how disgusting this place has become.”

On a sunny afternoon this past week, Galicia walked through the ruins of all he had worked to achieve in the United States. He said he had come to the country 30 years ago and started his business, “Handyman and House Painting.” It now employs five people.

He said he bought the St. Andrews house for $425,000, put another $80,000 into it, and places its market value at well over $900,000 before the fire.

“This is where I buried my husky, Chase,” he said, walking through what had been the front yard. “Over here, this is where we’d have coffee in the morning, this little patio.”

He stepped through the ruins inside, amid the odor of charred wood and plastic.

He pressed the keys of a ruined upright piano that his sons played. He pointed out the rooms where they slept and the bathroom he had renovated before they moved in.

The house was insured and Galicia plans to rebuild.

He didn’t know it last Sunday when he gave his sermon about getting through difficult times, Galicia said, but God meant that sermon for him. God would not forget him, Galicia was certain.

Independent journalist Sam Quinones is the author of five books of narrative nonfiction and the Dreamland Newsletter. Contact him at www.samquinones.com.

By Crystal Villarreal

The havoc and heartache caused by L.A.’s dependence on cars can be measured in many ways: insurance bills, hospital stays, funerals. But human beings aren’t the only ones at risk. Last year a record number of animals were found dead on the streets of Los Angeles.

The number of humans killed by automobiles in L.A. peaked in 2023, when 185 people died, before dropping to 169 in 2024 and 153 in 2025, according to preliminary figures. Meanwhile, the number of animals killed by automobiles has only continued to grow, reaching a new high of 33,458 in 2025, according to new data from the city’s MyLA311 service.

That’s 35% higher than the number of animal traffic deaths in 2020, with similar increases reported by the Department of Animal Care and Control, which covers unincorporated Los Angeles County and 45 of its smaller cities.

A breakdown of the types of animals killed in 2024, compiled for L.A. Reported by Crosstown L.A., a data newsroom based at USC, shows that cats made up the largest group by far, close to a third of all the dead animals picked up by the city. Dogs are the next most common victims, followed closely by opossums, a non-native marsupial.

The reasons for the diverging death rates of two- and four-legged pedestrians are complicated.

Animal accidents can sometimes be traced back to issues caused by humans, said Melya Kaplan-Tsakirides, founder and executive director of Voice for the Animals, a nonprofit animal-rights organization. Many of the domestic animals hit by cars are unneutered male cats and dogs.

“They’re looking to breed, and they run away, and people don’t spay and neuter. There needs to be stronger laws for people who are not spaying and neutering their animals,” she said.

Kaplan-Tsakirides also blames the financial picture.

“Vets are very expensive, and people cannot afford vet care,” she said. Her organization assists pet owners struggling with vet bills and food costs so they’re able to keep their pets. “The shelters are beyond capacity all over the country, and people are turning in animals, and I see it every single day.”

An increase in animal populations also may help account for the high number of road deaths. Valerie Marcano, a veterinarian with At Your Service Vet Hospital in San Pedro, attributed the increase to a rise in the cat population. San Pedro was the city’s hot spot for animals hit by cars, followed by Boyle Heights, according to Crosstown.

“My understanding is that the population of cats has been growing,” Marcano said. “If we are not spaying and neutering, cats will reproduce fairly quickly, like a female cat can start cycling at five months of age.”

Many of the city’s cats are feral — without owners and surviving on the streets. L.A. has close to 1 million of them, about one-sixth of all the cats in the city. In an effort to reduce their numbers, L.A. Animal Services created a program in December 2020 to provide groups with the resources to spay and neuter feral cats, which are then returned to the streets.

While the trap-neuter-release program should theoretically reduce the number of feral cats, the Animal Humane Society, though a proponent of the programs, concedes that they don’t reduce the populations.

Tony Tucci, chair and co-founder of Citizens for Los Angeles Wildlife, said that conserving habitat and connecting wildlife areas with safe crossings could help reduce the number of animal road deaths. “Many animals are not naturally attracted to roads,” Tucci said, “but when their habitat starts to disappear and there are no corridors available for them to traverse, the animals are forced into our streets and highways and freeways.”

Whatever the exact reasons for the increase in animal vs. human deaths in the last three years, looked at from a longer perspective it’s clear that L.A.’s reliance on automobiles makes it unacceptably dangerous for every species. Over the last decade, the number of human deaths is up 33% while animal deaths are up 38%. Four legs or two, the streets of Los Angeles are shockingly unsafe.

Crystal Villarreal is an independent journalist based in Los Angeles.

By Sam Quinones

Editor‘s note: This article was produced in collaboration with Sam Quinones’s Dreamland Newsletter on Substack and is published there simultaneously as part of L.A. Reported’s mission of supporting the work of reporters delving into the deeper, untold stories of Los Angeles.

Every Wednesday, Sabine Phillips pedals her yellow beach cruiser around a 12-square-block strip of Hollywood’s east side, filling her notebook with the locations of discarded couches, mattresses, old TVs, cabinets, aquariums, wall paneling, and just plain trash, reporting it to the city’s 311 service line. For this, plus picking up three or four bags of trash every weekend, she earns $800 a month.

“When I talk to people in the neighborhood, I hear it a lot: `Somebody ought to do something about it,’” Phillips told me when I met her on Virginia Avenue near Western Avenue. On the sidewalk, as she took notes, a blue recycling bin overflowed with trash, surrounded by dumped boxes, a junked flat-screen TV, a couple discarded coffee tables, stacks of drawers from a dresser, and scattered litter. “This corner is trashed up all the time.”

Phillips was hired by Stephanie, a Hollywood photographer who for years had waged a one-woman war on the increasing piles of trash before she found her civic efforts were interfering with her business. She pays Phillips out of her own pocket.

Stephanie, who asked that I use only her first name to protect her business, started by picking up litter constantly.

But the trash was even more constant. Apartments without on-site managers bred trash dumping. Street vendors left bags of trash every evening. And renters moving out would dump mattresses, sofas, old TVs.

“Once homelessness really got bad, these bulky items were within an hour of becoming an encampment,” Stephanie said. She drove her streets looking for illegal dumps, bulky items left on corners – reporting their locations to the city’s 311 line.

The homeless themselves had changed. Those she saw now seemed belligerent, incoherent. Stephanie said one spray-painted her face and another threw bricks at her as she tried to clean the streets. “The type of drugs changed the kind of homelessness there was,” she said. “Then the pandemic and complete non-enforcement spread [the trash] all over.”

The Los Angeles Sanitation Department reports that last year, it “addressed more than 13,000 chronic dumping locations across Los Angeles, collecting more than 13,500 tons of trash.” Reports of illegal dumps rose from 73,000 in 2024 to 91,000 last year, though many were duplicate reports, so it is impossible to say how many illegal dump sites the city actually had.

Behind this relentless flow of trash is the spread of tent encampments during COVID-19, a general lack of consequences for dumping trash, residents uninformed about city trash services and a change in homelessness caused by methamphetamine addiction. Not to mention the city’s sanitation department, which had gone without an increase in monthly fees for residential trash pickup since 2008 – the deficit made up by the city’s general fund.

Into this void have stepped residents, like Stephanie — trash vigilantes who use their own time and money, attempting to clean their neighborhoods and keep back this flood of garbage.

Stephanie organized an inter-neighborhood clean-up on NextDoor as the pandemic retreated. Two people showed: Stephanie and Keith Johnson, also a photographer, who had taken on a similar task for his neighborhood eight blocks away.

For a while, they paid a neighborhood trucker to occasionally drive their streets, hauling away anything that could be used to start a homeless encampment — sofas, mattresses, large chairs.

But the relentless trash and the city’s incapacity or ineptitude met residents’ apathy and they fed on each other. “It was taking care of an entire neighborhood,” Stephanie said. “I couldn’t do it myself anymore.” That was when she hired Phillips.

Trash vigilantes also have emerged in Venice, South L.A., Larchmont, and Silver Lake.

“It’s to bring back a bit of pride in the city — stop walking by the trash on your street,” said Chris Shanley, an architect who organizes cleanups through a neighborhood committee in Larchmont he helped form last year.

Juan Naula, an Ecuadoran immigrant who has lived in the United States for 30 years, last year started a nonprofit, Clean LA With Me. Through it, he accepts donations and now spends virtually all week clearing trash from L.A.’s beleaguered neighborhoods and businesses. On Saturdays, he runs trash MeetUps, marshaling volunteers to clean different neighborhoods. “My goal is to do 52 this year,” he said.

Despite several weeks of asking, a Sanitation Department spokeswoman did not respond to my requests to interview department officials about the situation – and how going 18 years without a fee increase affected the department. The galling accumulations of garbage are poised to be a major issue in this year’s council and mayoral elections.

It has been building for years. In 2021, then-City Controller Ron Galperin issued a report – “Piling Up” — on city trash. Requests to pick up dumped trash had nearly tripled: from 850 a month in 2017 to 2,494 a month in the first eight months of 2020, Galperin reported.

During the 2010s, homelessness also spread, along with semi-permanent tents and relentless supplies of methamphetamine. The hyper-potent version of the drug, coming out of Mexico, now covers Los Angeles. It promotes homelessness and psychosis, along with hoarding and digging wildly through trash bins.

Skid Row east of downtown saw this collision first. It was the city’s first tent-colonized neighborhood by 2013 and 2014, just as meth replaced crack as Skid Row’s most common drug for sale.

Massive amounts of trash followed. It came from tent-ensconced homeless people but also from charities that donated food and clothing, much of which remained to fester as garbage.

Skid Row’s Business Improvement District was forced to become the city’s first private entity to take on the task of daily, public trash collection. It now employs 23 people to collect trash: almost 1,200 tons in 2016, rising to more than 3,400 tons by 2024, which is separate from what the city also collects in Skid Row.

By 2018, Skid Row had outbreaks of typhus, borne by rats feeding on the garbage and carrying fleas that spread the disease.

Before long, Skid-Row-style tented homeless encampments spread to Venice, Hollywood, and other areas. Much of this was encouraged by court cases, which held — or were interpreted by city officials to hold — that homeless people had rights to live on the sidewalk and keep bulk items: couches, tables, televisions. Many nearby cities hold the opposite interpretation of these court cases, and prevent tent encampments from forming.

But in Los Angeles, when residents complained, city officials “just blamed the court,” Elizabeth Mitchell, attorney for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, which has battled the city over its encampment policies, wrote in an email. “It’s still happening, but to a lesser extent. The mayor has made some visible encampment-reduction efforts, but largely in the most visible or wealthy areas, while places like Skid Row are exploding with trash.”

Yet homelessness is only part of the city’s trash problem. The issue is married, as well, to a lack of consequences for dumping trash. Ron Galperin, in his 2021 report, found the city had no comprehensive strategy to attack illegal dumping and “little work put into educating the public” about trash collection.

In November, the Los Angeles City Council finally approved increasing monthly residential trash-pickup fees by 80 percent from 2026 to 2029. Still, the department is playing a massive game of catch-up.

In Hollywood, with a large immigrant population, the lack of education about the trash-collection system means that recycling bins sometimes stay on the street all week, filling with trash. The city won’t pick up trash in a recycling or compost bin.

Meanwhile, all this has fostered a general disregard for individual responsibility among L.A. residents.

“Trash signals that we don’t care about the city,” said Dylan Kendall, who is running for Council District 13 seat, which includes Hollywood. “It’s the first domino that falls when we start to see an erosion of our city life.”

In many areas, trash stifles small businesses, which in turn reduces the collection of taxes that fund city services even as Los Angeles addresses huge budget deficits.

One business is Kalaveras, a Mexican restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard, at the 101 overpass. Homeless people routinely go through the restaurant’s trash bins, a manager told me: “We throw out stuff, then three days later we’ll see it strewn on the street. Flowers, plates, decorations. We had this whole area cleaned a month ago.”

Recently, the restaurant recruited Juan Naula to organize a clean-up. Trash lay along the street, piled next to the freeway offramp, and embedded in an encampment on a street island.

L.A.’s trash problem “is worse than a Third World country. Not even Ecuador looks like this,” Naula said. “Everyone has to do their part. The government, businesses, the people. Everybody.”

He assembled a group of 15 volunteers, outfitted with rakes, gloves, brooms and trash bags. It took them an hour to remove it all – though they left the encampment intact, so they may have to return in another month. Then they broke for lunch provided by Kalaveras.

“People need community now more than ever,” said Rich Sarian, a member of the group, who is vice president of the South Park Business Improvement District downtown. Sarian is seeking signatures to run for the seat in Council District 13. “I hate that there’s so much trash on the streets but it gives us a reason to come together.”

L.A.’s trash tests the limits of a volunteer force doing the government’s job. Volunteers face a difficult choice: If they clean a litter-strewn street, dumpers are absolved of consequences; but leaving trash allows it to fester, along with residents’ sense that there’s nothing to be done.

Recently, Stephanie told me, she was cleaning the trash from a spilled garbage bag left in front of a nearby apartment building for two days. She asked a tenant to help.

“I didn’t put it there,” he told her.

Independent journalist Sam Quinones is the author of five books of narrative nonfiction and the Dreamland Newsletter. Contact him at www.samquinones.com.

By Katharine Gammon

Every day in Los Angeles, responsible, environmentally concerned residents go to the effort of tossing landfill-bound garbage in one trash container and recyclable waste in another, and then keep that separation going with their curbside bins — blue for recyclables, black for mixed garbage. Yet, while all that effort may seem both virtuous and valuable, a shocking amount of it is doing the environment no good at all.

A dismaying proportion of used water bottles and other recyclable plastic in Los Angeles is crushed and sent to recycling centers that trash half or more because the items are too dirty to bother recycling. Until recently, much of it also was sent to Asian countries, where some was recycled but more was burned or dumped in landfills, rivers, or the ocean. And even that’s not an option these days.

The city’s efforts to cut down on single-use plastic, a long-lasting bane of the environment, are in trouble.

For more than a decade, the city has worked to drastically reduce single-use plastic, setting a goal of becoming a zero-waste metropolis by 2039. County data shows that 70% of all waste — including paper, aluminum, and yard clippings — is diverted from landfills, instead heading towards recycling centers, compost, or reuse programs.

But not plastic. Numbers from CalRecycle, the state’s waste-management agency, show that only 2% of #5 plastics, used for yogurt tubs and microwavable trays, are recycled statewide. And even clear bottles with a #1 label, the common plastic for bottled water and soda, are recycled only 16% of the time.

To make matters worse, plastic is considered a low-value recyclable, so there just isn’t much demand. Nations such as China and Thailand that used to accept America’s plastic trash have cut us off or severely restricted what they will accept. Most recently, as of last July, Malaysia ended plastic imports. And the cost of recycling plastic has risen.

Recycling plastic is more expensive than making it new. “Virgin plastic continues to be incredibly cheap,” said Daniel Coffee, a project manager focusing on plastics and climate research at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. rPlanet Earth, the state’s only large-scale recycling plant for PET plastic from curbside bins — the one most water and soda bottles are made of, with the #1 insignia on the bottom — once located in Vernon, shut down just a few months ago.

Because the demand for recycled plastics is so low, said Heather Johnson, a spokeswoman for LA Sanitation and Environment, the city now sends half of its recyclable plastic out of state.

But Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who founded the nonprofit Last Beach Cleanup, said that’s not accurate. She has placed trackers on the city’s trash and recyclables to see where they go. And most of those unrecycled plastic bottles — compressed into giant bales — aren’t leaving California, she found. They are piling up in warehouses, because there is nowhere to go.

“Over the entire lifetime of the [plastics recycling] industry, less than 10% of all plastics ever produced have been recycled even once,” Coffee said. “And of those, less than 10% have ever been recycled more than once.”

The city tells people to put plastics of #1, 2, and 5 into the blue bin at their curb — but what happens next?

LA Sanitation & Environment trucks pick the recyclable items and bring them to material recovery facilities. There, the materials are sorted into their various types. Automated sorters identify and remove bulky or dangerous items such as furniture and electronics. Finally, human sorters provide quality control and remove any incorrectly sorted items.

Once materials are sorted by type, they are compressed into shipping bundles called bales. These bales are purchased and picked up by recyclers who want to turn the material into post-consumer recycled products. Some plastics that come from redemption centers instead of blue bins are likely to have less contamination like sticky films of greasy residue, and are considered more valuable bales of a higher grade.

Plastics that are recyclable, including plastics #1, PET (polyethylene terephthalate), plastics #2, HDPE (high-density polyethylene), and plastics #5, PP (polypropylene), are segregated during this process. All other plastics, including plastic bags, plastics #3, #4, #6, and #7, and all bioplastic/compostable plastics, are sent to landfills.

The recovery facilities that the city contracts with are required to process, sort, and sell as much recyclable material as possible. The city says these facilities successfully segregate and sell 85% of the recyclable plastics that they receive.

In 2024, LA Sanitation polled its facilities to see where the materials ended up. They reported that plastics #1, #2, and #5 are primarily sold to recyclers in California and Alabama. “If primary markets decline to purchase a material, the facilities ship it to secondary markets,” the city told L.A. Reported. But the picture is more complicated than that.

Selling plastic isn’t the same as recycling it. A public records request that L.A. Reported filed with the city yielded some puzzling information, all of it from 2024. At some of the facilities, such as Burbank, only about half of the #1 and #2 plastics they received ended up being recycled — while others, like Athens Materials Recovery Facility, had rates closer to 90%.

The city says that various factors such as the technology at each plant can affect the recycling rate.

Clear plastics marked with #1 and #2 plastics —PET bottles — are considered the most recyclable types of plastic waste. They used to be shipped off to recycling facilities inside the state and became useful items, like benches and playground equipment.

The closure of rPlanet Earth dealt a major blow to recycling efforts here and statewide because it accepted curbside PET plastic, the trash you conscientiously tossed in the blue bin, which is more likely to have sticky soda drops or other contamination. It’s also a bigger source of plastic waste than plastic from redemption centers.

“There is nowhere for curbside PET bottles to go in California right now,” said Dell, who has conducted surveys on which materials-recovery facilities take in different types of recyclables. “rPlanet was shut down because it was a money-loser, even though it was subsidized.”

The city told L.A. Reported that “the volume of materials retained in California has recently decreased,” but didn’t say where the materials were going. California has increasingly turned to domestic recyclers in such states as Alabama — which doesn’t necessarily mean all or even most of that plastic is being recycled.

California is looking at new ways to reduce plastic waste. Senate Bill 54 would require all single-use plastic packaging and single-use plastic foodware sold in California to be either recyclable or compostable by 2032, while also mandating a 25% reduction in the amount of such materials entering the market. But in January, CalRecycle withdrew proposed regulations for the bill, saying the agency intended to improve clarity around food and agricultural packaging.

But there’s a big difference between recyclable and recycled, and the bill doesn’t address that.

Dell said Californians need to stop thinking there’s a technological solution coming to save humanity from single-use plastic. “There has never been, and never will be, a place to magically recycle all this waste,” she said. She favors strategic bans on some single-use plastics, banning false “recyclable” labels on plastic packaging that is not accepted into recycling streams, and pressuring companies to switch to materials that are truly recyclable, like aluminum and paper. If people could actually see the mounds of plastic waste, Dell said, they would probably change their ways.

Coffee is more optimistic about the potential of recycling to be part of the solution. “Even if the problem is big, it’s important to recognize that taking the time to recycle the things that are recyclable is reducing the environmental burden, and that’s reducing the harm,” he said. “It’s a worthy endeavor.”

Katharine Gammon is a freelance environment and science writer based in Santa Monica.

By David L. Ulin

In February 2016, a New York-based attorney and cartographer named Jake Berman created a self-described “dream map,” imagining how the Los Angeles Metro system might look in 2040. To build out his projection, Berman incorporated “all of LA Metro’s currently unfunded projects,” as well as those already constructed or underway. The result envisions a different version, or iteration, of the Los Angeles in which we live. At its center sits a lavender stripe representing what is now called the D Line, running from Union Station to Westwood Village, for the most part along Wilshire Boulevard. It’s not quite the so-called “subway to the sea”— a phrase first introduced in 1961, and later popularized by former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — but it represents its own kind of sea change.

Wilshire, after all, has long been a kind of third rail for Los Angeles transit. Despite its status as the city’s most traveled bus corridor, it has remained conspicuously absent from most subway or light rail plans.

A century ago, merchants and developers demanded a streetcar ban along the boulevard. In 1985, a methane explosion at Ross Dress for Less near Third Street and Fairfax Avenue led then-Congressman Henry Waxman to block subway construction in his district. More recently, the Beverly Hills Unified School District spent over $16 million in a protracted legal battle to prevent tunneling under Beverly Hills High School.

Now, three decades after reaching its terminus at Wilshire and Western Avenue, the D Line is scheduled to arrive in Miracle Mile. Sometime during the late winter or early spring — Metro remains cagey about the specifics, in no small part due to the complexities of tunneling and testing — three new stations will be opened: at La Brea Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, and La Cienega Boulevard. Construction is underway for two additional stages of extension, first to Beverly Hills and Century City, and then to Westwood.

“There’s something futile about riding rail in Los Angeles, something out of step,” urban historian William Fulton wrote in his 2001 book The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. A quarter of a century later, we might be at the precipice of a different era, in which the D Line, along with other options, may prove Fulton wrong. “This extension is a game changer,” insists Jody Litvak, who spent more than thirty years as an executive at Metro before retiring in 2024.

I believe Litvak’s right for a variety of reasons, beginning at the level of the neighborhood. I’ve lived for many years in mid-Wilshire and anticipate these new stations as a nexus for reimagining my relationship to the community. For me, it starts with walking. I’ve long experienced Los Angeles as a pedestrian, which has required me to think of it in terms of public space. The neighborhood represents a key example: the most essential building block of an urban environment that is often dismissed as undifferentiated sprawl.

In a way, it’s an antidote to hugeness, by providing digestible and diverse bites of city experience. Public transit makes our urban spaces even smaller, putting us in closer proximity. On a train or bus we have no choice but to acknowledge one another. The very act of riding necessitates a meeting in the middle, the sharing of some fundamental piece of common ground.

My first few years in Los Angeles often made me feel like the city’s sole pedestrian. In its early days, Metro Rail also seemed more a novelty than a public gathering place. When my son, now 31, was small, we availed ourselves of the subway as if it were an amusement park ride, driving to Koreatown to board at Wilshire/Western, disembarking at Pershing Square. But I also longed for something with a broader reach. It’s no stretch, then, to say I’ve been waiting for the system to take full shape since I moved here from Manhattan in 1991.

And yet, the further it gets built out, the less Metro resembles New York’s subway — which, it turns out, is precisely as things should be. In the first place, the system is largely light rail reliant, the Wilshire corridor to the contrary. More essentially, it serves a region that is exceedingly complex. Just think about the balance of neighborhoods and sprawl again, as well as many other factors, which include the overlapping, and at times conflicting, jurisdictions of the city and the county, with its 88 cities. How can a single transit model support such a multimodal megalopolis? Even a hundred years ago, when downtown might still be considered a hub or center, the Red and Yellow Cars, which at their peak covered nearly 1,200 miles of track, could only do so much.

Now, Litvak points out, it’s important to consider how the transit network is used, and by whom. In the case of the D Line, she notes, it may be most useful to understand the boulevard it services as a horizontal downtown. With commercial and recreational opportunities present most of the way along Wilshire, “the number of people coming into the Westside every day is greater than the number of people who start in the morning on the Westside and go out.”

This, then, is a city of microclimates, starting with the “streetcar suburbs” that developed around access to the old Red and Yellow cars. In that sense, perhaps, the extension of the D Line, as well as Metro’s many other active projects, becomes a way of going back to the future, of re-examining how we navigate civic space. “We can’t underestimate what a big deal this is,” suggests Alissa Walker, a journalist who has long focused on transportation and urban issues and now edits the policy newsletter Torched. “For Wilshire, you’re going to have a lot of people who could choose other ways to get around, and if they’re changing their habits, maybe reducing their car ownership because of this, or moving closer to the train station because it can get them where they need to go, that’s potentially a huge change.”

The key here is, of course, potential. On a personal level, that’s easy for me to see. My wife and I gave up our second car during the pandemic, and we’ve remained a one-car couple. After the new stations are operational, I’ll be able to walk to the D Line and travel by rail to USC, where I teach. Because I’ll need to switch downtown to the E Line, my journey will be what’s known as a “linked trip,” which, in Metro’s usage, refers to “a complete trip from one point to another within a transit system, including any transfers made.” At its October meeting, Metro’s board of directors shared ridership projections for the extension — 20,700 linked trips a day, growing to 33,700 by 2035. Such estimates are hardly overwhelming. But multiply them out across a full year, and they add up.

After cratering during the pandemic and its aftermath, Metro rail ridership is up by 0.3% from 2024. In October, the most recent month for which statistics are available, this amounted to more than 6 million boardings. Factor in buses, whose riders account for close to 80% of all Metro users, as well as other options, and we begin to see how a multimodal transit environment is taking shape.

“There’s some really interesting research from Australia,” notes Eli Lipmen, executive director of the advocacy organization Move LA, “that when you have four or more options, people start to shift their mode away from the car.” That can mean scooters, bike shares, and walking as well as trains and buses. “But once you hit four or more, that’s when people start to shift.”

Still, safety remains a concern, with incidents rising in 2024 to “2.18 crimes per 100,000 riders, compared to 1.2 at this time in 2021 and 0.84 in 2019,” CalMatters reported in July 2024. Opening more routes will help to only a limited extent if they are perceived as unsafe.

In addition, the system must be woven into the fabric of the city as it exists, unlike Jake Berman’s dream map, which views the future through a kind of tunnel vision, imposing rail and rapid bus lines over a geography that is otherwise blank. We see no freeways, no streets, or boulevards. Nothing indicates the environment that is already built. A transit system, however, cannot exist within a vacuum. It is — it must be — part of the city’s inner life. It must be, in other words, not only a wish or a projection but also — and more fundamentally — a component of the way Los Angeles chooses to function. It must express and reflect the physical and social landscape we share.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method and Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. He is a professor of English at USC, where he co-directs the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and edits the journal Air/Light.

By Sam Bloch

In the late 2010s, Nicole Deering, a community resource specialist in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Neighborhood Prosecutor Program, began a push to remove a shabby turquoise shelter covering a bus stop on Vermont Avenue near 54th Street. The problem, she wrote in an email to the city’s streets department, was the “persisting and increasing” number of transients the shade and benches attracted to the South L.A. sidewalk.

The city attorney had empowered Deering’s division to take loiterers and other minor offenders to court. But sometimes, the attorneys and their staff took a different approach, attempting to prevent the offenders’ presence by taking away the shade that shielded them on blistering days. “I’m a true believer in environmental design and how it can increase the opportunity for crime,” Deering wrote in an email to the urban forestry division.

Her effort failed that time, though the city took away some benches and put up armrests on what remained, making it more difficult for homeless people to take advantage of the shade. But in many other cases, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of L.A., Deering and other city officials succeeded in removing precious sources of shade to discourage the homeless, shoo away day drinkers, and drive drug users elsewhere.

That included trimming the leafy canopy on Main Street in South L.A. and cutting down a Pico-Union street tree. A bus shelter was removed from another Vernon Avenue stop.

Emails and internal spreadsheets obtained by L.A. Reported through public records requests reveal how city attorneys, police officers, and city council and department staff manipulate shade — a too-rare public resource in Los Angeles that is seldom thought of until we need it — to move people where it wants them. Their goal: to curb so-called quality-of-life infractions that are blamed for making neighborhoods feel unsafe.

The short-sighted removal of shade, especially by cutting down trees, detracts from efforts to make Los Angeles look less like a landscape of beige and gray concrete; it contributes to climate change; and it deprives people of a source of cool comfort when they must be outside or don’t have air conditioning at home.

Perhaps more important, this also appears to be a policy rooted more in personal belief than on solid ground. In fact, a large body of research tells us the reverse: A 2017 study by the U.S. Forest Service found that trees in urban environments appear to reduce crime, not add to it. Other studies around the nation have confirmed this, and another 2012 study by the Forest Service found that even when comparing neighborhoods of very similar demographics, neighborhoods with 10% more tree canopy had 12% less crime.

Indeed, the tree removals in L.A. generally don’t seem to work well in the long run. Neighbors interviewed by L.A. Reported at several spots where trees had been removed said it hadn’t made a difference in the prevalence of sometimes annoying or occasionally criminal behavior. Despite the reduction in seats at the bus shelter on Vermont Avenue, it still was filled with transients on a recent hot, sunny day, leaving no space for the mother and three children who were waiting for a bus.

What it has done is make some neighborhoods less hospitable, residents said.

“It’s part of a larger project of making people disappear, and if you make people disappear, then you don’t address the real problems,” said John Raphling, a Los Angeles-based advocate for the homeless and former associate director for Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program. “Rather than, ‘Let’s try to find some place where someone can sleep,’ it’s ‘let’s make it uncomfortable for him, so he will go somewhere else.’ ”

Crime deterrence is another reason cited to justify the cutting back and removal of shade trees. Police have long opposed trees in high-crime areas, claiming their canopies inhibit visibility and interfere with surveillance. Lisa Sarno, the former executive director of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s million-tree campaign from 2007 to 2013, said that LAPD’s neighborhood liaisons called senior lead officers resisted her efforts to expand the urban canopy in poor neighborhoods.

Some LAPD liaisons told Sarno not to plant empty tree wells, and others demanded that existing trees get “trimmed to the point where there were no branches with leaves on them,” she recalled. “They were basically just tree trunks without limbs.” This happened in the least-green residential neighborhoods where large trees and park access were scarce.

Just four neighborhoods in L.A., all of them affluent and totaling just 1% of the city’s population, accounted for 18% of the city’s tree canopy, a 2019 study found. (One of those neighborhoods was Pacific Palisades, where many trees were destroyed by the 2025 fire.)

Under City Attorney Mike Feuer, neighborhood prosecutors worked with LAPD’s Rampart Division to thin out street trees in targeted areas outside downtown. For example, in 2016, deputy city attorney Andrew Said asked urban foresters to trim canopies on Kenmore Avenue because police were “concerned about the foliage providing an overly comfortable hangout for gang members.” In 2020, deputy city attorney Maria Aguillon was informed by senior lead officer Carlos Diaz that the city “eliminated” the sidewalk tree at “our problematic location” on 11th Place, hoping it would curb “the intoxicated groups and gang activity.”

In 2017, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s staffer Albizael del Valle asked Lance Oishi of the streets department to dismantle bus shelters at Western and Vernon to deter drug use and gambling.

In the San Fernando Valley, council offices and neighborhood police targeted parking lots, believing their trees attracted homeless encampments. In 2018, Councilman Bob Blumenfield’s district director Michael Owens asked the urban forestry department to trim a carrotwood tree at Darby Avenue and Sherman Way in Reseda, noting in an email that it created a “shady area for individuals who are causing problems for businesses.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Topanga Division senior lead officer Jose Moreno advised businesses to “take away the comfort level” from the homeless. In 2020, he told a Canoga Park librarian to trim “down any trees that provide shade.” A neighbor passing by the library on a recent day said the reduction of shade had helped lower the numbers of homeless people but had not eliminated it. Indeed, several homeless people were sitting on the curb adjacent to the library.

In 2021, Moreno gave similar advice to USPS Postmaster Harv Jandu, whose Canoga Park parking lot was used for overnight sleeping. The post office chopped down three mature trees, potentially violating a city ordinance requiring businesses to shade their parking lots to mitigate urban heat.

It is understandable that Moreno turned to environmental design to manage L.A.’s homeless crisis. During the pandemic, the city suspended encampment sweeps to slow the spread of the virus. Arrests and citations had not dispersed the unhoused from city streets and parking lots. “The open container tickets and drinking in public tickets will never go anywhere,” Moreno complained in a 2020 email. “They never become warrants, and if they do, they are almost out immediately.” Cutting back trees would at least make a parking lot a “less desirable place to stay.”

City council offices declined to comment to L.A. Reported on the removals they ordered or to give their views on whether or not those worked.

Moreno and other LAPD neighborhood liaisons also did not respond to similar questions from L.A. Reported or address their current policies on taking away shade to fight crime. (In an email to L.A. Reported, LAPD’s public information office stated that senior lead officers generally “resolve conditions that contribute to crime or disorder” and “focus on enhancing safety, visibility, and community well-being.”)

Deering and deputy city attorneys declined to comment to L.A. Reported on street tree and bus shelter removals, referring inquiries to the city attorney’s communications staff. Deputy communications director Ivor Pine did not address the incidents identified by L.A. Reported, which occurred under a previous attorney, and did not respond to multiple inquiries about current policies on reducing shade.

Echoing studies on the subject, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a UCLA urban planning professor and interim dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs, argued that depriving poor neighborhoods of shade doesn’t make them safer, but more dangerous — especially for children, older residents, and those with chronic illnesses — by worsening heat exposure. Residents of South L.A. and the San Fernando Valley already suffer more heat-related emergencies due to higher ambient temperatures and limited green space and cooling options. Studies also have found that lack of shade keeps residents from going outside. Those empty streets invite more crime, researchers concluded.

Loukaitou-Sideris was equally skeptical that neighborhood crime could be prevented by felling trees and throwing out bus shelters. “I would find this very surprising, to be honest,” she said. “If the police have data to show that trees represent criminogenic items, we have to see it.”

Sam Bloch is author of the 2025 book Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource (Random House).

Los Angeles freelance writer Emily Beyda contributed reporting.

By Matthew Tupper and Scott Woolley

When the winter sun shines on Los Angeles County and solar power courses through its electric grid, millions of Angelenos in cities from Santa Monica to Pomona can save money by using that cheap, green energy to charge their Teslas or heat their pools. As the sun sets, those discounted rates, offered to customers of Southern California Edison, disappear and the utility hikes power prices a whopping 127%.

But within the city of L.A., the 3.9 million residents served by its own municipal utility have no similar opportunities to benefit both the planet and their pocketbooks. It’s a mystifying omission for a city that has committed to some of the country’s most ambitious environmental goals. L.A.’s Department of Water and Power offers customers no discounts for using low-cost, low-carbon power when the sun shines. Nor does it charge a premium for dirty, expensive power generated at night by fossil fuel plants.

“We are missing out on a major opportunity for ratepayers to reduce their costs, support the grid, and help the environment,” said Timothy O’Connor, head of the city’s Office of Public Accountability.

In theory, no American city should be better positioned than Los Angeles to prove it can power itself with energy that is both environmentally and budget-friendly. In L.A., unlike every other big city in the country, the citizens own the electric utility, from the plants that produce the power to the poles and wires that deliver it. That gives L.A. a unique ability to modernize its power system without having to negotiate with the private shareholders and state regulators who control America’s other urban utilities.

Yet rather than enabling flexibility and innovation, municipal ownership of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has kept its grid stuck in the past, charging power prices that make neither environmental nor economic sense — and making a mockery of the city’s public commitment to lead the way into a zero-carbon future.

The LADWP can trace its unusual ownership structure — and the roots of its current policy paralysis — to the Chinatown era in the early 20th century. After scandals exposed plutocrats’ efforts to control the public’s access to water, city of L.A. voters decided to control their own destiny, building an aqueduct, seizing power generation from private hands, and setting up a city-run utility to keep both water and electricity cheap and local. In the rest of the U.S., big cities put their trust in regulators to oversee privately owned utilities.

While both approaches to running a natural monopoly have their drawbacks, for most of the 20th century L.A.’s municipal ownership model did an admirable job of living up to its progressive-era ideals. Angelenos paid lower prices than other Californians served by the big investor-owned utilities regulated by the state. The political checks and balances proved largely effective in keeping the utility aligned with its customers. L.A.’s City Council appoints a five-member board to oversee the utility and employs an independent ratepayer advocate to act as an additional watchdog. Ultimate control rests with the council and city voters, who, if necessary, can overrule both the DWP board and the bureaucracy.

In the 21st century, however, that political system began to calcify. Nowhere is that inflexibility as apparent as the way LADWP has — alone among the state’s big utilities — refused to adapt its prices as new technologies revolutionized the electric system.

From 2009 to 2019, the price of solar power in sun-soaked California plunged over 90%, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a result, during daylight hours the grid often can be powered mostly by solar energy. But that also means the amount of pollution required to generate L.A.’s electricity varies wildly depending both the season and the time of day. On winter nights such as last Friday, when the DWP produces most of its power in natural gas plants, generating the electricity needed to charge a typical electric car results in roughly five pounds of carbon going into the atmosphere. That’s triple the amount that would have been emitted during the middle of that same day, when solar power flooded the grid. (See chart.)

Those disparities grow even wider during the rest of the year. Come spring, there will often be more solar power than Southern California can use for several hours in the middle of the day, meaning gigawatts of zero-carbon power go to waste for lack of demand.

In the rest of California, the number of customers who pay prices that reflect the needs of the modern electric grid has been growing for more than a decade. The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates California’s other big utilities, recognized the obvious economic and environmental merits of “time of use” pricing in 2015, passing a rule to encourage varying prices that benefit both the environment and customers’ pocketbooks. Yet over 99% of LADWP’s residential customers still pay the same flat rate, technically known as R-1A, which sets the same price at noon and at 7 p.m., even though the grid is awash with solar at midday and shifts to power from natural gas plants in the evening. The utility offers a time-of-use rate, but it’s upside down, based on the outdated “peak usage” model, when electricity was more expensive when the sun shines and cheaper overnight. Only about 12,000 of its customers take that option.

Electricity prices are tricky to compare between utilities. (Different utilities vary prices based on, among other things, customer location, time of year, the ratio of fixed to variable charges, and total usage.) A typical LADWP bill charges 24 cents for the first 700 kilowatt hours per month, then 30 cents for every additional kilowatt hour. Southern California Edison customers on its time-of-use rates pay 22 cents for all power used during sunny “super off-peak” hours. Prices jump to 50 cents at 5 p.m.

If LADWP were to combine its overall cost advantage with a modern rate structure, it could beat SCE’s cheap power rates during sunny hours, offering a huge incentive for customers to use clean electricity.

Robert Cudd, a researcher at UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, cautions that modern time-of-use rates don’t offer an instant fix, since electricity users are “famously slow” to change their behavior. Still, he adds, if L.A. is serious about making its electric system greener and cheaper, the sooner it starts the process of pushing consumer demand to daytime use, the better.

The city’s previous ratepayer advocate also encouraged the city to modernize power prices, telling the city council that “This matter is urgent because power customers need notice of a change before this summer. It can be accomplished with a single sentence amendment to the power rate ordinance.”

That was four summers ago.

LADWP management is eager to modernize rates, but can’t act until the city council allows it. “We support and need modern time-of-use rates,” says Ellen Cheng, a spokesperson.

O’Connor, the new ratepayer advocate, says that while it’s true that the council could amend the law to modernize pricing, complicated state laws mean that the move could have “cascading effects,” including a major reduction in the amount of money the city could extract from the DWP to fund its budget. Last year the department sent $219 million to the city.

But while there are bureaucratic and accounting hurdles in the way of modernizing LADWP prices, there are no fundamental economic or environmental compromises that need to be made. In fact, the opposite is true. “There are savings on the table when you do comprehensive rate reform. Savings for the city and savings for residents,” O’Connor said. “There is a win-win solution.”

And that’s the sad irony of America’s largest municipally owned utility. The politicians who run it are happy to set grand environmental goals but unwilling to take one of the most obvious, painless steps to make them a reality.

Until that changes, it’s hard to take Los Angeles’ commitment to running a zero-carbon electric grid by 2035 as anything more than empty talk.

Your home is the new wildfire battlefront

By Robert Greene

As California fire officials repeatedly blow through deadlines for adopting statewide landscaping restrictions in high fire hazard zones, the Los Angeles City Council is moving ahead — though not necessarily in the way the state intended. On Tuesday, the council endorsed rules that would require homeowners to remove some combustible materials from a five-foot buffer zone around their houses to decrease the chance that wind-blown embers could ignite plants or wood fences and then destroy the homes.

At first blush it might seem that the council, still struggling with the fallout of last year’s deadly Palisades wildfire (and simultaneous fires in Altadena and other areas outside L.A. city limits) is finally fed up with waiting for the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to act. More than five years have passed since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill requiring the board to adopt statewide rules for the ember-resistant barrier, known as Zone Zero. There are still no rules. But the council’s concern is that the state will move too quickly — and rigidly.

The state board has floated several options, some more stringent than others. The rules L.A. is pushing ahead with would be far less restrictive, out of concern that the state mandates might cost homeowners too much without necessarily being effective: Pulling out plants, replacing wood fences, taking down wood planters and moving pergolas all would cost homeowners plenty. Critics complain that the result would be a zone of nothingness — stark, lifeless, unornamented.

In contrast, San Diego in December adopted strict rules that kick in for new construction next month and for existing homes next year. Berkeley’s regulations took effect Jan. 1.

The different rules all attempt to strike the proper balance between protecting homes and protecting the livability and aesthetics of California as we know it. Is it wise public policy to require massive, costly changes in the absence of conclusive evidence that they work? Or, since scientific study will be continuing for decades, is it even more foolish to delay taking aggressive actions that are likely to reduce the unpredictable spread of fire from embers?

The state rules, as envisioned so far, would transform much of the iconic Los Angeles suburban landscape: bougainvillea or ivy draped over entryways, tropical flowers blossoming from well-watered soil. But then, residential yard design here has often incorporated a hefty dose of fantasy, including misplaced woodsy motifs borrowed from the rainy English countryside, to transform the feel of the dry Western landscape.

You can grow almost anything in L.A. — with enough precious water and as long as Santa Ana winds and wind-blown fire don’t take them down and with them, your house.

Zone Zero opponents have also questioned the scientific expertise behind the not-yet-adopted state rules, and have offered their own experts and evidence to defend their claims that at least some plants — well-watered succulents, for example — might actually protect homes from embers.

The real estate industry and homeowner associations find themselves at odds over Zone Zero with insurers and firefighters. But remember this: Those same groups once faced off over laws to ban wood-shingled roofs in high-fire-risk areas, a change now almost universally seen as basic common sense.

The squabbling has repeatedly derailed statewide fire-safety rules, despite a succession of horrific Northern California wildfires amid a drought that began in 2011. The 2017 Tubbs Fire wiped out a large chunk of Santa Rosa, then was exceeded the next year by the Camp Fire, which swept through Butte County, killed 85 people, destroyed more than 18,000 buildings and obliterated the town of Paradise. All told, more than 1,000 large-scale fires burned in California in 2018, killing more than 100 people.

But most of the fires were in areas with names like Butte, Shasta, Trinity, conjuring the image of wildfire as something that strikes mostly distant, rural areas. That led to a widely held impression that people who lost their homes and even their lives were authors of their own fates for choosing to live in the Wildland-Urban Interface. Building a home in paradise (or Paradise) comes with certain risks. At least the fires of 2018 didn’t touch suburban communities. Like, say, Pacific Palisades. Or Altadena.

In fact, not only are many suburban and some urban areas within Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones but the number keeps expanding, in part because of improving fire science, and in part because a changing climate is subjecting more of the state to extreme fire risk.

Nor is living outside of an official danger zone any guarantee of safety. Most of the parts of Altadena that were destroyed in the Eaton fire did not fall into the highest risk zone in March 2025, when the most recently updated maps were released. (You can use this tool to see whether your house is in a high fire hazard zone.)

The current debate kicked off in 2019 with a bill to require a five-foot, plant-free, ember-resistant zone in all high-risk areas. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying he couldn’t support a one-size-fits-all approach that failed to recognize the varied needs of different communities.

Just one year later, though, Newsom signed a similar bill, after fire experts testified that structures weren’t necessarily gobbled up by flames moving in a steady front, but more often burned when wind-carried embers hopscotched far ahead of the main fire to ignite wood fences and other flammable items, including landscape plants.

They also repeated the same warnings they’d been making for years: The Wildland-Urban Interface is not limited to developments directly facing forests, brushlands or other open space. Any leafy neighborhood subject to dry, downhill-rushing winds (the Santa Anas, for example) had of late simply been enormously lucky. Had we forgotten the deadly Oakland Hills fire of 1991? The Bel Air fire of 1961? Urban communities needed ember-resistant zones as much as anyone, they said.

The legislation called for the nine-member Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to adopt rules by Jan. 1, 2023, specifying what could and could not remain in Zone Zero. But the deadline came and went as homeowners complained about onerous and often expensive proposed requirements to denude their yards. More galling, many of them had recently ripped up lush lawns at the behest of state officials and experts, installing environmentally friendly native plants that are lush in the rainy season but that may crisp up in summer heat. Planted trees and tall bushes to cast cool shadows on plaster walls that would otherwise bake in the sun and require more electricity to keep air conditioners running longer. Supported an “urban forest” that promotes biodiversity and replaces lost habitat for birds and other creatures.

Now we have to reverse all that?

Would any plant be banned from the zone? What about juicy succulents that might actually block blowing embers from reaching the house? What if we recently replaced our ugly chain-link fence with a beautiful and costly, but flammable, wooden one? Do we have to re-uglify our property? What if there’s a law (and there is, in some cities) that criminalizes cutting down native oak trees in our own yards? Does it take precedence over this new law that now might criminalize not cutting down oak trees? And how are we going to pay for all of this?

Board members trying to balance fire-safety needs against the burdens and costs to homeowners essentially gave up for two years.

Then came January 2025.

Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds swept down Eaton Canyon and roughed up the Santa Monica Mountains. Firestorms destroyed much of Pacific Palisades, Altadena and neighboring communities. At least 31 people died in the flames and smoke, followed by an estimated 440 deaths due to toxic air or delayed medical care. Approximately 16,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed. And this had happened here, in suburbia. Newsom ordered the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to get back to work on the Zone Zero rules, and to wrap up by the end of 2025.

“Believe the science — and your own damn eyes,” Newsom said. “Mother Nature is changing the way we live and we must continue adapting to those changes.”

The board held hearings and workshops although, oddly, stuck close to its Sacramento home until a September session in Pasadena, where homeowner pushback was harsh. The board again missed Newsom’s deadline, and now will not act before its March 10-11 meeting.

The homeowners argued that the science of Zone Zero is far from complete, despite the high level of confidence that state fire experts expressed at legislative hearings. Is a row of Italian cypresses, for example, a protective wall that blocks blowing embers from reaching the house? Or is it a source of more embers? Or both?

Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park said the Fire Board needs to take a lot more time to get it right.

Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, told the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on Jan. 12 that residential landscaping is only one of many responses to consider, including home-hardening (double-paned windows, for example, and tight metal mesh over vents).

“Of all the things that went wrong on Jan. 7, I’m not ready to blame the trees,” she said.

David Lefkowith, president of the Mandeville Canyon Association, questions the certainty expressed by fire experts and the insurance industry.

“The science around fire is like religion,” he said. “Different people just believe different things.”

Lefkowith also pointed out that the cost estimates of complying with Zone Zero rules generally leave out indirect but very real expenses, like higher electricity bills for the additional air conditioning needed to keep homes livable once shrubs that shade south-facing windows are removed. Or the cost of repainting after removing clinging vines from walls. Or the hazard posed by storms once hill-stabilizing plants are pulled out.

After going door-to-door examining dozens of yards and houses in Mandeville Canyon, Lefkowith estimated that compliance with proposed Zone Zero rules would cost his community between $50 million and $60 million.

The board has generally stood its ground on the science, citing more than a decade of studies from as far afield as Australia and Alberta, and side-by-side burn demonstrations by Cal Fire, the agency of which it is a part. But it also acknowledged a widely cited study suggesting that plants should be studied based on how well-watered they are.

The state is required to consider the cost of homeowner compliance, and competing shade and water-saving needs. What we know so far: It likely will not require removal of mature trees, as long as they are trimmed to avoid becoming wicks that could carry flames up to roofs. Fallen leaves would have to be cleared (constantly) from the ground and the roof. Branches must be cut back to no more than 10 feet from chimneys. Wood fences within the five-foot zone will likely have to go, but as a concession to homeowners, not wood balconies or decks — even though they could easily catch blowing embers. Hedges and shrubs that sit under eaves will likely have to go, even if they provide needed shade. Property owners will get three years to comply.

Last January, I was unaware of the 2020 legislation to require a five-foot ember-resistant Zone Zero, and I had only recently learned that my house, in a not particularly woodsy part of Highland Park in Los Angeles, was deemed to be in the high-risk zone. All I knew was that the weather reports warned of the coming super-Santa Anas, and I was nervous. I looked at my wooden balcony, draped with a Rogers Red grapevine that I planted after months of research. It once seemed perfect: a hybrid between a native California grape and a wine grape, with tiny berries for the birds and leaves that glowed bright red in autumn. It grew next to a tangerine tree that bears fruit I can pick from the balcony, and a rambling bougainvillea growing just short of my bedroom window. It was the whole package: California heritage, shade, fruit, wildlife habitat, low water consumption, stunning good looks. But with the dry wind picking up, every piece of that tableau suddenly seemed menacing.

As it happened, I was packing up to move out of my Highland Park neighborhood for three months of renovation and a temporary stay 10 miles to the northeast. Altadena. My wife and I were in our new home for three days before it burned down in the Eaton Canyon fire. It was just a rental, and the two of us (and our cat) escaped safely. But we lost our clothes, books, furniture, computers, kitchen gear and personal mementos it still hurts to think about.

When I was finally able to return to the scene, I saw that although the house was gone, the trees remained. A thin strip of lawn in the front was still green, almost lush. But there weren’t any plants remaining within five feet from the house. It was impossible to tell whether the burning walls had ignited the plants, or, at least as likely, the other way around.

I felt lucky. Nature had shaken a fiery finger at me by taking my temporary home but kindly left intact my own Highland Park house, with its wall-hugging vines and other flammable accoutrements.

Much of California has been periodically swept clean by fire for thousands of years, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Science tells us that we’ve made things worse by trying to stop natural fires and thus allowing brush to build up and trees to grow too dense, then by building in the Wildland-Urban Interface. California’s Native American tribes used to set prescribed burns for various reasons, among them to reduce brush near their dwellings. That method doesn’t work in urban and suburban settings, but we still can minimize the fuel that turns an ember into a torch into a conflagration.

I was just a toddler in 1961, too young to remember the Bel Air fire that destroyed nearly 500 houses and injured hundreds of firefighters. One other thing it should be remembered for: the debate it sparked over wood shake and shingle roofs, which were widely considered an essential part of the woodsy look of that wealthy neighborhood. Proposals to ban such roofs, many argued, would eliminate the area’s special feel. Sound familiar?

Robert Greene is an independent writer based in Los Angeles. He previously wrote for the Los Angeles Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize.

My year as a fire nomad

By Deanne Stillman

L.A. was always a water mirage and there have always been droughts, but this was the truth of it: In the land that the original residents called “The Valley of Smokes,” the firemen turned on the tap but the reservoir was empty.

Soon came the thrill of hearing the announcement that “they’re dropping the Phos-Check now.” Has a ring to it, like Sig Alert, I remember thinking when the planes finally arrived after the damage was done…isn’t the poetry of L.A. grand?… I actually feel a heightened sensation when the jargon kicks in, and then a few days later when the Pacific Palisades had succumbed to the inferno, all that was left was the oddly soothing rhythm of the headlines. “There is now a red flag alert for all of Los Angeles…northbound and southbound PCH is closed…”

I never thought this kind of danger would come into the residential area where I lived, just north of the bluffs at Asilomar in Pacific Palisades, south of Sunset, and west of Temescal. My beloved Temescal Canyon! I’ve told my friends that I lived at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and the Ice Age, of flora and fauna that invoke the Pleistocene, and mountain lions that are probably watching you on the trail, tracing a line from the sabertooth tigers of yester-millennium right through the 21^st century, not by blood but by spirit and ways.

So it was hard to leave — to flee — this place that I loved but run I did a year ago on Jan. 8 as the flames headed east from the coast on Sunset, right past Starbucks in the Highlands where cars had stalled and were on fire and drivers were getting out and running down the street, following me in fact, as I finally emerged from the bumper-to-bumper traffic on my two-lane street, turning right on Temescal and heading for the beach — water! — just as flames fully engulfed a plant emporium, half of Palisades Charter High was burning down, and palm trees on either side of me were lighting up as if bursting from the inside and the heat had traveled up through the fronds, causing a spontaneous combustion of L.A.’s most enduring symbol.

Read the full essay →

Also in this issue:

Quick and cheap fire protection

By Lucy Jaffee

You don’t have to wait for the state to act. Here are six quick, cheap ways to protect your home from embers.

Read the tips →

That’s it for our first edition. Thanks for joining us. Reply to this email anytime — we read everything.

By Lucy Jaffee

No one needs to wait for the state to regulate what we can or can’t have in Zone Zero — the five feet immediately surrounding our homes — to take action.

There are quick, easy and cheap ways to start the process of protecting our dwellings by eliminating some of the items and spots that would give embers a chance to turn into flames, according to experts:

Move outdoor furniture or decor at least five feet away from the base of your home.

This easy strategy reduces the risk of an ember igniting your patio chairs and spreading fire to your house. Furniture made from plastic, wood or fabric is combustible, whereas aluminum is more fire safe. Other common culprits may be garbage bins, a kids’ playhouse and planters containing vegetation. Fire science shows keeping objects five feet away versus 10 feet makes no meaningful difference, which makes prepping your house simpler.

Replace mulch with rock.

Mulch, including wood chips, is a popular landscaping material, but easily catches fire. Pea gravel is a fire-safe alternative, said Clark Stevens, architect and Director of Resource Design at the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. Other non-flammable options include stones and decomposed granite.

Cover your vents.

Embers can be sucked into attics through the vents, so the nonprofit fire-safety group My Safe: LA suggests covering those vents with ⅛-inch or 1/16-inch mesh screening. It’s a quick and inexpensive fix, even for those who don’t consider themselves particularly handy.

Tweak your gardening regimen.

Clear dead or flammable material from within the first five feet of your home. Start by raking the leaves piling beneath your trees or weeds and toss any dead plants.

Clean your gutters and cover them while you’re at it.

Check your gutters for leaves and twigs, random debris or a bird’s nest. All this material can catch fire easily and should be removed.

To prevent future buildup in your gutters, consider installing a metal gutter guard. These are commonly made of aluminum and steel and can be easily installed with a few screws on a free morning. Plus, they’re pretty cheap.

Lucy Jaffee is a student at Claremont McKenna College.

By Deanne Stillman

L.A. was always a water mirage and there have always been droughts, but this was the truth of it: In the land that the original residents called “The Valley of Smokes,” the firemen turned on the tap but the reservoir was empty.

Soon came the thrill of hearing the announcement that “they’re dropping the Phos-Check now.” Has a ring to it, like Sig Alert, I remember thinking when the planes finally arrived after the damage was done…isn’t the poetry of L.A. grand?… I actually feel a heightened sensation when the jargon kicks in, and then a few days later when the Pacific Palisades had succumbed to the inferno, all that was left was the oddly soothing rhythm of the headlines. “There is now a red flag alert for all of Los Angeles…northbound and southbound PCH is closed…”

I never thought this kind of danger would come into the residential area where I lived, just north of the bluffs at Asilomar in Pacific Palisades, south of Sunset, and west of Temescal. My beloved Temescal Canyon! I’ve told my friends that I lived at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and the Ice Age, of flora and fauna that invoke the Pleistocene, and mountain lions that are probably watching you on the trail, tracing a line from the sabertooth tigers of yester-millennium right through the 21^st century, not by blood but by spirit and ways.

So it was hard to leave — to flee — this place that I loved but run I did a year ago on Jan. 8 as the flames headed east from the coast on Sunset, right past Starbucks in the Highlands where cars had stalled and were on fire and drivers were getting out and running down the street, following me in fact, as I finally emerged from the bumper-to-bumper traffic on my two-lane street, turning right on Temescal and heading for the beach — water! — just as flames fully engulfed a plant emporium, half of Palisades Charter High was burning down, and palm trees on either side of me were lighting up as if bursting from the inside and the heat had traveled up through the fronds, causing a spontaneous combustion of L.A.’s most enduring symbol.

And thus began my entire year. From that point on, I became a fire nomad, relying on the generosity of friends, and staying with one after another as my house was no longer inhabitable. There was smoke damage, I was told; it wasn’t destroyed, and when the embers had settled, and after inspections, I could probably move back any week now, maybe in a few days. I heard that soothing report for about eight months. So, while awaiting imminent smoke remediation, I spent time in just about every neighborhood in L.A. My odyssey would take me from FEMA-sponsored hotels in West Hollywood and Venice (nice ones!) to guest houses in Rancho Park and Eagle Rock, to spare bedrooms in Woodland Hills and Monrovia. En route I would find true love, caught up in the kind of fire that has no source other than the Great Mystery.

The first stop on my journey was the Red Cross shelter in Westwood, in the rec center on Sepulveda and it began filling up with fire refugees. And lest you think that emergency-shelter food sucks, soon enough, Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop donated fancy meals from her takeout menu, and then so did some other chic bistros in Santa Monica. But after a few days, as the fires raged on, more and more people showed up and the novelty wore off and the center sheltered not just fire victims but also homeless people, as word got out that the shelter was taking anyone with a need and locals with shopping carts arrived, claiming the few remaining cots, and by the end of week two, I think, the gymnasium was packed and someone had stolen the plastic bag of my medication under my cot.

After that, there were memorable moments of grace. I reported the theft the next day to representatives of an L.A. County pharmacy who were there and all of my medications were quickly replaced and then the scene took on a religious tone. There came pastors ministering to the afflicted and I joined a prayer circle with an ex-con and his son from a church called Sandals and after days of sleeping under the floodlights of the gymnasium and having been cast out of my home, I found the communion a comfort. On another night there were Salvation Army volunteers who formed an ad hoc gospel group; they were just as good as the Staple Singers, I found myself thinking, and for a brief moment, the din in the shelter vanished and hundreds of people sitting on cots swayed along with the songs as the fires continued to burn all over L.A. now, it seemed, with the acrid smoke drifting south on Sepulveda toward the shelter.

After leaving the shelter, I got a resident pass to re-enter the Palisades and retrieve some belongings from my house. There were ashes and embers everywhere and the Palisades looked like Mad Max but my wooden patio wall had somehow survived the fire, with several wooden posts singed only several feet away from my house, and all of my magic rocks were still exactly in place along a plank; there was my purple quartz and jasper and pyrite cluster from the Mojave just as I had left them, talismans of mine for many years, and then there was my bougainvillea which I had had for more than two decades, fully intact and so were my beloved tortoise wind chimes, fashioned from a coconut shell with bamboo pipes, and hanging from a faltering oak tree. I picked up my conch shell, another survivor, and listened to the ocean through it. The Santa Anas wafted through that day in the aftermath of the fire and my chimes began to sound, and for a moment, all seemed right in the world — at my little patch of it, anyway.

In town, the stores along the main drag had been devastated but driving past the Art Deco DWP building — unscathed, paradoxically enough — I finally realized that it’s the most beautiful structure in town. And the healthy little barrels of its cactus garden were a mighty harbinger of hope.

Because even conflagration can bring unexpected gifts — consider the native plants called fire followers that come to life only after a good scorching. During my nomadic existence in the months following the inferno, I met a man with whom I would fall deeply in love, as if he had materialized out of the ashes. It happened at a friend’s house in the San Gabriel Valley — one of the many places I stayed in the fire’s aftermath, where I hardly ever visited because that’s the way it is in L.A.: The West Side never visits the East Side (too much traffic!), thus creating a limited world in which surprising things may never happen.

I guess it took an inferno for our paths to have crossed, and for that, I say thanks to the terrible thing that changed L.A. forever, for out of ruins comes new life and as we enter 2026, one year after the Palisades burnt down, I recently found out that the house I had rented has to be torn down and so I’m moving, this time not to another waiting room but a real place, accompanied by my tortoise chimes and magic rocks. My days as a fire nomad have come to a close and I believe that the wheel is turning.

Deanne Stillman is an L.A.-based writer, a founding professor of the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program and the author of several books, most recently Blood Brothers (Simon and Schuster).

By Robert Greene

As California fire officials repeatedly blow through deadlines for adopting statewide landscaping restrictions in high fire hazard zones, the Los Angeles City Council is moving ahead — though not necessarily in the way the state intended. On Tuesday, the council endorsed rules that would require homeowners to remove some combustible materials from a five-foot buffer zone around their houses to decrease the chance that wind-blown embers could ignite plants or wood fences and then destroy the homes.

At first blush it might seem that the council, still struggling with the fallout of last year’s deadly Palisades wildfire (and simultaneous fires in Altadena and other areas outside L.A. city limits) is finally fed up with waiting for the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to act. More than five years have passed since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill requiring the board to adopt statewide rules for the ember-resistant barrier, known as Zone Zero. There are still no rules. But the council’s concern is that the state will move too quickly — and rigidly.

The state board has floated several options, some more stringent than others. The rules L.A. is pushing ahead with would be far less restrictive, out of concern that the state mandates might cost homeowners too much without necessarily being effective: Pulling out plants, replacing wood fences, taking down wood planters and moving pergolas all would cost homeowners plenty. Critics complain that the result would be a zone of nothingness — stark, lifeless, unornamented.

In contrast, San Diego in December adopted strict rules that kick in for new construction next month and for existing homes next year. Berkeley’s regulations took effect Jan. 1.

The different rules all attempt to strike the proper balance between protecting homes and protecting the livability and aesthetics of California as we know it. Is it wise public policy to require massive, costly changes in the absence of conclusive evidence that they work? Or, since scientific study will be continuing for decades, is it even more foolish to delay taking aggressive actions that are likely to reduce the unpredictable spread of fire from embers?

The state rules, as envisioned so far, would transform much of the iconic Los Angeles suburban landscape: bougainvillea or ivy draped over entryways, tropical flowers blossoming from well-watered soil. But then, residential yard design here has often incorporated a hefty dose of fantasy, including misplaced woodsy motifs borrowed from the rainy English countryside, to transform the feel of the dry Western landscape.

You can grow almost anything in L.A. — with enough precious water and as long as Santa Ana winds and wind-blown fire don’t take them down and with them, your house.

Zone Zero opponents have also questioned the scientific expertise behind the not-yet-adopted state rules, and have offered their own experts and evidence to defend their claims that at least some plants — well-watered succulents, for example — might actually protect homes from embers.

The real estate industry and homeowner associations find themselves at odds over Zone Zero with insurers and firefighters. But remember this: Those same groups once faced off over laws to ban wood-shingled roofs in high-fire-risk areas, a change now almost universally seen as basic common sense.

The squabbling has repeatedly derailed statewide fire-safety rules, despite a succession of horrific Northern California wildfires amid a drought that began in 2011. The 2017 Tubbs Fire wiped out a large chunk of Santa Rosa, then was exceeded the next year by the Camp Fire, which swept through Butte County, killed 85 people, destroyed more than 18,000 buildings and obliterated the town of Paradise. All told, more than 1,000 large-scale fires burned in California in 2018, killing more than 100 people.

But most of the fires were in areas with names like Butte, Shasta, Trinity, conjuring the image of wildfire as something that strikes mostly distant, rural areas. That led to a widely held impression that people who lost their homes and even their lives were authors of their own fates for choosing to live in the Wildland-Urban Interface. Building a home in paradise (or Paradise) comes with certain risks. At least the fires of 2018 didn’t touch suburban communities. Like, say, Pacific Palisades. Or Altadena.

In fact, not only are many suburban and some urban areas within Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones but the number keeps expanding, in part because of improving fire science, and in part because a changing climate is subjecting more of the state to extreme fire risk.

Nor is living outside of an official danger zone any guarantee of safety. Most of the parts of Altadena that were destroyed in the Eaton fire did not fall into the highest risk zone in March 2025, when the most recently updated maps were released. (You can use this tool to see whether your house is in a high fire hazard zone.)

The current debate kicked off in 2019 with a bill to require a five-foot, plant-free, ember-resistant zone in all high-risk areas. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying he couldn’t support a one-size-fits-all approach that failed to recognize the varied needs of different communities.

Just one year later, though, Newsom signed a similar bill, after fire experts testified that structures weren’t necessarily gobbled up by flames moving in a steady front, but more often burned when wind-carried embers hopscotched far ahead of the main fire to ignite wood fences and other flammable items, including landscape plants.

They also repeated the same warnings they’d been making for years: The Wildland-Urban Interface is not limited to developments directly facing forests, brushlands or other open space. Any leafy neighborhood subject to dry, downhill-rushing winds (the Santa Anas, for example) had of late simply been enormously lucky. Had we forgotten the deadly Oakland Hills fire of 1991? The Bel Air fire of 1961? Urban communities needed ember-resistant zones as much as anyone, they said.

The legislation called for the nine-member Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to adopt rules by Jan. 1, 2023, specifying what could and could not remain in Zone Zero. But the deadline came and went as homeowners complained about onerous and often expensive proposed requirements to denude their yards. More galling, many of them had recently ripped up lush lawns at the behest of state officials and experts, installing environmentally friendly native plants that are lush in the rainy season but that may crisp up in summer heat. Planted trees and tall bushes to cast cool shadows on plaster walls that would otherwise bake in the sun and require more electricity to keep air conditioners running longer. Supported an “urban forest” that promotes biodiversity and replaces lost habitat for birds and other creatures.

Now we have to reverse all that?

Would any plant be banned from the zone? What about juicy succulents that might actually block blowing embers from reaching the house? What if we recently replaced our ugly chain-link fence with a beautiful and costly, but flammable, wooden one? Do we have to re-uglify our property? What if there’s a law (and there is, in some cities) that criminalizes cutting down native oak trees in our own yards? Does it take precedence over this new law that now might criminalize not cutting down oak trees? And how are we going to pay for all of this?

Board members trying to balance fire-safety needs against the burdens and costs to homeowners essentially gave up for two years.

Then came January 2025.

Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds swept down Eaton Canyon and roughed up the Santa Monica Mountains. Firestorms destroyed much of Pacific Palisades, Altadena and neighboring communities. At least 31 people died in the flames and smoke, followed by an estimated 440 deaths due to toxic air or delayed medical care. Approximately 16,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed. And this had happened here, in suburbia. Newsom ordered the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to get back to work on the Zone Zero rules, and to wrap up by the end of 2025.

“Believe the science — and your own damn eyes,” Newsom said. “Mother Nature is changing the way we live and we must continue adapting to those changes.”

The board held hearings and workshops although, oddly, stuck close to its Sacramento home until a September session in Pasadena, where homeowner pushback was harsh. The board again missed Newsom’s deadline, and now will not act before its March 10-11 meeting.

The homeowners argued that the science of Zone Zero is far from complete, despite the high level of confidence that state fire experts expressed at legislative hearings. Is a row of Italian cypresses, for example, a protective wall that blocks blowing embers from reaching the house? Or is it a source of more embers? Or both?

Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park said the Fire Board needs to take a lot more time to get it right.

Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, told the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on Jan. 12 that residential landscaping is only one of many responses to consider, including home-hardening (double-paned windows, for example, and tight metal mesh over vents).

“Of all the things that went wrong on Jan. 7, I’m not ready to blame the trees,” she said.

David Lefkowith, president of the Mandeville Canyon Association, questions the certainty expressed by fire experts and the insurance industry.

“The science around fire is like religion,” he said. “Different people just believe different things.”

Lefkowith also pointed out that the cost estimates of complying with Zone Zero rules generally leave out indirect but very real expenses, like higher electricity bills for the additional air conditioning needed to keep homes livable once shrubs that shade south-facing windows are removed. Or the cost of repainting after removing clinging vines from walls. Or the hazard posed by storms once hill-stabilizing plants are pulled out.

After going door-to-door examining dozens of yards and houses in Mandeville Canyon, Lefkowith estimated that compliance with proposed Zone Zero rules would cost his community between $50 million and $60 million.

The board has generally stood its ground on the science, citing more than a decade of studies from as far afield as Australia and Alberta, and side-by-side burn demonstrations by Cal Fire, the agency of which it is a part. But it also acknowledged a widely cited study suggesting that plants should be studied based on how well-watered they are.

The state is required to consider the cost of homeowner compliance, and competing shade and water-saving needs. What we know so far: It likely will not require removal of mature trees, as long as they are trimmed to avoid becoming wicks that could carry flames up to roofs. Fallen leaves would have to be cleared (constantly) from the ground and the roof. Branches must be cut back to no more than 10 feet from chimneys. Wood fences within the five-foot zone will likely have to go, but as a concession to homeowners, not wood balconies or decks — even though they could easily catch blowing embers. Hedges and shrubs that sit under eaves will likely have to go, even if they provide needed shade. Property owners will get three years to comply.

Last January, I was unaware of the 2020 legislation to require a five-foot ember-resistant Zone Zero, and I had only recently learned that my house, in a not particularly woodsy part of Highland Park in Los Angeles, was deemed to be in the high-risk zone. All I knew was that the weather reports warned of the coming super-Santa Anas, and I was nervous. I looked at my wooden balcony, draped with a Rogers Red grapevine that I planted after months of research. It once seemed perfect: a hybrid between a native California grape and a wine grape, with tiny berries for the birds and leaves that glowed bright red in autumn. It grew next to a tangerine tree that bears fruit I can pick from the balcony, and a rambling bougainvillea growing just short of my bedroom window. It was the whole package: California heritage, shade, fruit, wildlife habitat, low water consumption, stunning good looks. But with the dry wind picking up, every piece of that tableau suddenly seemed menacing.

As it happened, I was packing up to move out of my Highland Park neighborhood for three months of renovation and a temporary stay 10 miles to the northeast. Altadena. My wife and I were in our new home for three days before it burned down in the Eaton Canyon fire. It was just a rental, and the two of us (and our cat) escaped safely. But we lost our clothes, books, furniture, computers, kitchen gear and personal mementos it still hurts to think about.

When I was finally able to return to the scene, I saw that although the house was gone, the trees remained. A thin strip of lawn in the front was still green, almost lush. But there weren’t any plants remaining within five feet from the house. It was impossible to tell whether the burning walls had ignited the plants, or, at least as likely, the other way around.

I felt lucky. Nature had shaken a fiery finger at me by taking my temporary home but kindly left intact my own Highland Park house, with its wall-hugging vines and other flammable accoutrements.

Much of California has been periodically swept clean by fire for thousands of years, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Science tells us that we’ve made things worse by trying to stop natural fires and thus allowing brush to build up and trees to grow too dense, then by building in the Wildland-Urban Interface. California’s Native American tribes used to set prescribed burns for various reasons, among them to reduce brush near their dwellings. That method doesn’t work in urban and suburban settings, but we still can minimize the fuel that turns an ember into a torch into a conflagration.

I was just a toddler in 1961, too young to remember the Bel Air fire that destroyed nearly 500 houses and injured hundreds of firefighters. One other thing it should be remembered for: the debate it sparked over wood shake and shingle roofs, which were widely considered an essential part of the woodsy look of that wealthy neighborhood. Proposals to ban such roofs, many argued, would eliminate the area’s special feel. Sound familiar?

Robert Greene is an independent writer based in Los Angeles. He previously wrote for the Los Angeles Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize.

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