President Donald Trump’s border czar told reporters Thursday that federal authorities planned to increase immigration raids in Los Angeles and other so-called “sanctuary cities,” with Chicago likely the next target.
“You’re going to see a ramp up of operations in New York; you’re going to see a ramp up of operations continue in L.A., Portland, Seattle, all these sanctuary cities that refuse to work with ICE,” Tom Homan said.
Since June, Southern California has been ground zero of thousands of immigration arrests as well as legal battles over whether the raids violate the U.S. Constitution.
There is no agreed-upon definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities, but the terms generally describe limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Homan did not elaborate on specifics about new raids in L.A.
But talking to reporters Thursday morning, he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering using a naval base north of Chicago as its hub when potential enforcement raids take place in that city.
Tom Homan said, “there’s discussions about that, yes,” when asked by reporters outside the White House.
He didn’t provide an exact timeline for the use.
“The planning is still being discussed,” he said. “So, maybe by the end of today.”
Earlier this week, Trump said Chicago would likely be the next city in which he’ll direct a crack down on crime and, in particular, illegal immigration.
He recently sent 2,000 National Guard troops to Washington D.C. after having dispatched soldiers, ICE and border patrol agents to Los Angeles since early June. The Department of Homeland Security said that as of Aug. 8 ICE and Border Patrol agents had arrested 2,792 illegal aliens in the Los Angeles area.
He also called the City of Broad Shoulders a “mess” and that its residents were “screaming for us to come.” Three days after Trump railed about crime in Chicago, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson released a statement, saying overall crime in the city had dropped by 21.6%, year to date, with homicides falling by 32.3%.
Homan would not commit to how many soldiers and agents would be used in any immigration enforcement.
“We’re not going to tell you how many resources we’re going to send to the city,” he said. “We don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re sending.”
He added, “It will be a large contingent.”
Since a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from targeting people solely based on their race, language, vocation or location, the number of arrests in Southern California declined in July.
But raids are continuing, with Home Depot stores becoming a common target in recent weeks.
On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Trump administration request to lift the restraining order prohibiting roving raids.
Across the United States, more than 121,000 dams quietly shape daily life by supplying water, generating hydropower and providing flood control. But according to the National Performance of Dams Program, on average about 10 dams fail each year.Sometimes these failures have devastating, even deadly consequences. Many are aging, high-hazard structures in need of costly repairs, and the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit found money is scarce and owners are often left footing the bill.Behind a locked gate and up a winding road in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the nearly 100-year-old McClure Dam. It supplies up to half of Santa Fe’s drinking water and is owned by the city. “This is a high hazard dam,” John Del Mar said as he looked out at the dam. Del Mar is an Engineering Section Supervisor with the City of Santa Fe Water Division. “The current rated condition from the state engineer’s office is poor for this dam,” Del Mar said. “That stemmed from some analysis that was done back in 2018.”Because this dam was built 100 years ago, there’s uncertainty in how it was built, so the dam was given the rating of “poor condition.” It’s also high hazard, meaning lives and property would be at risk if it failed. “We have to manage them as a public asset, part of our utility system, and once we know of problems, we’re obligated to fix them. So that’s what sets us on the course of this kind of a repair,” Del Mar said.Del Mar said the dam could cost $20-$30 million to repair. The city of Santa Fe is already in the midst of repairing the Nichols Dam downstream as well. That project costs roughly $20 million. To fund the projects, Santa Fe is dipping into funds they have, proposing raising utility rates and tapping into state funding—options many owners don’t have.Private dam owners struggle to get repair funds Just north of Santa Fe lies Las Vegas, New Mexico. There, Storrie Lake is known to locals as a place to camp, boat and fish. But for cattle rancher Michael Quintana, the lake is more important to him.”We’re in the business of capturing as much water in our lake as we can so we can use it for agriculture purposes,” Quintana said.Quintana is one of the owners of the Storrie Lake Dam, a crucial part of the state highway.”If we were to lose our dam, it would be a huge inconvenience for people to try to get to the Northern part of the state,” Quintana said.But he recently received unfortunate news from state dam officials.”They downrated our dam. Right now, it’s in poor condition,” Quintana said.Roughly 62% of U.S. dams are privately owned, leaving many owners like Quintana responsible for repairs.”There’s a lot of fear in having that ownership for the fact that we lack a lot of ability to fund the maintenance on a dam,” Quintana said. Estimated repairs are about $75 million—far beyond what the owners can afford. Looking for outside sources, the owners are reaching out for help securing funding through sources like local lawmakers.They have sought state help and applied to FEMA’s National Dam Safety Program as well. National funding gap remains largeUsing FEMA’s online money allocation data, the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit has discovered that since 2019, New Mexico has received about $3.7 million from FEMA’s National Dam Safety Program.”Money is always limited and there is often not enough to go around,” said Sushil Chaudhary, chief of the Dam Safety Program in New Mexico.Nationwide, FEMA has allocated roughly $304 million over six years across all 50 states. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimated in their 2025 report that it will take $165 billion to fix the nation’s non-federal dams.Chaudhary expressed another problem he feels his department and many around the country deal with: small staff sizes. In New Mexico, 10 staff members, seven of whom are inspectors, oversee about 300 non-federal dams. They have the third-best ratio of dams to staff of any state.Nationwide, roughly 530 state dam officials monitor more than 117,000 non-federally owned dams. Inspection responsibilities fall upon the federal government for the other 3% of dams that are federally owned.Working with the Hearst Television Data Team, the National Investigative Unit found that 25% of high hazard dams have not been inspected in the past five years or do not have record of a last inspection date. A high hazard dam would cause loss of life if it were to fail.Right now, there are roughly 2,600 high hazard dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition across the country. Dams in poor condition have a safety deficiency, and dams in unsatisfactory condition require immediate or emergency repair.But that could be an undercount. The most up-to-date records gathered by the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit and Hearst Television Data Team indicate that 67% of dams don’t have a condition rating. Of those, 4,000 are high hazard dams.Chaudhary said they get behind on inspections at times because they have other responsibilities.”We also need to perform the analysis that we need for regulatory purposes,” Chaudhary said. “We cannot rely on dam owners to do the analysis all the time. So we have to do our own.”Chaudhary circled back on the statistic that about 10 dams fail every year.”If you look at that data, the failure is not slowing down. So failure will keep happening. The dams are getting older. With that, various components of the dams deteriorate. While we cannot prevent failure of the dams, we can manage risk. We can save lives. We can do things that allow us to save lives and property,” Chaudhary said.Dams near youCurious if any of these dams with late inspections are near you? The Hearst Television data team has built a tool that allows you to see all of the dams in your area and learn whether any are in unsatisfactory or poor condition. Simply search your address or town name in the box below, and the map will populate with any dams near you, their latest condition rating and when they were last inspected.This story was shot and edited by Hearst National Investigative Photojournalist Reid Bolton.PHNjcmlwdCB0eXBlPSJ0ZXh0L2phdmFzY3JpcHQiPiFmdW5jdGlvbigpeyJ1c2Ugc3RyaWN0Ijt3aW5kb3cuYWRkRXZlbnRMaXN0ZW5lcigibWVzc2FnZSIsKGZ1bmN0aW9uKGUpe2lmKHZvaWQgMCE9PWUuZGF0YVsiZGF0YXdyYXBwZXItaGVpZ2h0Il0pe3ZhciB0PWRvY3VtZW50LnF1ZXJ5U2VsZWN0b3JBbGwoImlmcmFtZSIpO2Zvcih2YXIgYSBpbiBlLmRhdGFbImRhdGF3cmFwcGVyLWhlaWdodCJdKWZvcih2YXIgcj0wO3I8dC5sZW5ndGg7cisrKXtpZih0W3JdLmNvbnRlbnRXaW5kb3c9PT1lLnNvdXJjZSl0W3JdLnN0eWxlLmhlaWdodD1lLmRhdGFbImRhdGF3cmFwcGVyLWhlaWdodCJdW2FdKyJweCJ9fX0pKX0oKTs8L3NjcmlwdD4=
SANTA FE, N.M. —
Across the United States, more than 121,000 dams quietly shape daily life by supplying water, generating hydropower and providing flood control. But according to the National Performance of Dams Program, on average about 10 dams fail each year.
Sometimes these failures have devastating, even deadly consequences. Many are aging, high-hazard structures in need of costly repairs, and the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit found money is scarce and owners are often left footing the bill.
Behind a locked gate and up a winding road in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the nearly 100-year-old McClure Dam. It supplies up to half of Santa Fe’s drinking water and is owned by the city.
“This is a high hazard dam,” John Del Mar said as he looked out at the dam.
Del Mar is an Engineering Section Supervisor with the City of Santa Fe Water Division.
“The current rated condition from the state engineer’s office is poor for this dam,” Del Mar said. “That stemmed from some analysis that was done back in 2018.”
Because this dam was built 100 years ago, there’s uncertainty in how it was built, so the dam was given the rating of “poor condition.” It’s also high hazard, meaning lives and property would be at risk if it failed.
“We have to manage them as a public asset, part of our utility system, and once we know of problems, we’re obligated to fix them. So that’s what sets us on the course of this kind of a repair,” Del Mar said.
Del Mar said the dam could cost $20-$30 million to repair.
The city of Santa Fe is already in the midst of repairing the Nichols Dam downstream as well. That project costs roughly $20 million. To fund the projects, Santa Fe is dipping into funds they have, proposing raising utility rates and tapping into state funding—options many owners don’t have.
Private dam owners struggle to get repair funds
Just north of Santa Fe lies Las Vegas, New Mexico. There, Storrie Lake is known to locals as a place to camp, boat and fish. But for cattle rancher Michael Quintana, the lake is more important to him.
“We’re in the business of capturing as much water in our lake as we can so we can use it for agriculture purposes,” Quintana said.
Quintana is one of the owners of the Storrie Lake Dam, a crucial part of the state highway.
“If we were to lose our dam, it would be a huge inconvenience for people to try to get to the Northern part of the state,” Quintana said.
But he recently received unfortunate news from state dam officials.
“They downrated our dam. Right now, it’s in poor condition,” Quintana said.
Roughly 62% of U.S. dams are privately owned, leaving many owners like Quintana responsible for repairs.
“There’s a lot of fear in having that ownership for the fact that we lack a lot of ability to fund the maintenance on a dam,” Quintana said. Estimated repairs are about $75 million—far beyond what the owners can afford. Looking for outside sources, the owners are reaching out for help securing funding through sources like local lawmakers.
They have sought state help and applied to FEMA’s National Dam Safety Program as well.
National funding gap remains large
Using FEMA’s online money allocation data, the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit has discovered that since 2019, New Mexico has received about $3.7 million from FEMA’s National Dam Safety Program.
“Money is always limited and there is often not enough to go around,” said Sushil Chaudhary, chief of the Dam Safety Program in New Mexico.
Nationwide, FEMA has allocated roughly $304 million over six years across all 50 states. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimated in their 2025 report that it will take $165 billion to fix the nation’s non-federal dams.
Chaudhary expressed another problem he feels his department and many around the country deal with: small staff sizes. In New Mexico,10 staff members, seven of whom are inspectors, oversee about 300 non-federal dams. They have the third-best ratio of dams to staff of any state.
Nationwide, roughly 530 state dam officials monitor more than 117,000 non-federally owned dams. Inspection responsibilities fall upon the federal government for the other 3% of dams that are federally owned.
Working with the Hearst Television Data Team, the National Investigative Unit found that 25% of high hazard dams have not been inspected in the past five years or do not have record of a last inspection date. A high hazard dam would cause loss of life if it were to fail.
Right now, there are roughly2,600 high hazard dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition across the country. Dams in poor condition have a safety deficiency, and dams in unsatisfactory condition require immediate or emergency repair.
But that could be an undercount. The most up-to-date records gathered by the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit and Hearst Television Data Team indicate that 67% of dams don’t have a condition rating. Of those, 4,000 are high hazard dams.
Chaudhary said they get behind on inspections at times because they have other responsibilities.
“We also need to perform the analysis that we need for regulatory purposes,” Chaudhary said. “We cannot rely on dam owners to do the analysis all the time. So we have to do our own.”
Chaudhary circled back on the statistic that about 10 dams fail every year.
“If you look at that data, the failure is not slowing down. So failure will keep happening. The dams are getting older. With that, various components of the dams deteriorate. While we cannot prevent failure of the dams, we can manage risk. We can save lives. We can do things that allow us to save lives and property,” Chaudhary said.
Dams near you
Curious if any of these dams with late inspections are near you? The Hearst Television data team has built a tool that allows you to see all of the dams in your area and learn whether any are in unsatisfactory or poor condition.
Simply search your address or town name in the box below, and the map will populate with any dams near you, their latest condition rating and when they were last inspected.
This story was shot and edited by Hearst National Investigative Photojournalist Reid Bolton.
Police in Minneapolis have responded to a reported shooting at a Catholic school during the first week of classes. Local media reports emergency responders were called to the Annunciation Catholic School on Wednesday morning in the city’s Windom neighborhood, about 8 miles west of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Stream live video from the scene”I’ve been briefed on a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and will continue to provide updates as we get more information,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a statement on social media. “I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence.”In a social media post, the city of Minneapolis said the shooter is “contained” and there is no active threat to the community.It is unknown how many people may have been injured in this shooting. A person answering the phone at Annunciation School said students were being evacuated.Local and state police, FBI, federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and other authorities converged on the school.Dating to 1923, the pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school had an all-school Mass scheduled at 8:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to its website. Monday was the first day of school, and social media photos from that day show students in green uniforms greeting each other at bicycle racks, smiling for the camera and sitting together.The gunfire was the latest in a series of fatal shootings in the city in less than 24 hours. One person was killed and six others were hurt in a shooting Tuesday afternoon outside a high school in Minneapolis. Hours later, two people died in two other shootings in the city.The Associated Press contributed to this story.This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
MINNEAPOLIS —
Police in Minneapolis have responded to a reported shooting at a Catholic school during the first week of classes.
Local media reports emergency responders were called to the Annunciation Catholic School on Wednesday morning in the city’s Windom neighborhood, about 8 miles west of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Stream live video from the scene
“I’ve been briefed on a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and will continue to provide updates as we get more information,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a statement on social media. “I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence.”
In a social media post, the city of Minneapolis said the shooter is “contained” and there is no active threat to the community.
It is unknown how many people may have been injured in this shooting.
A person answering the phone at Annunciation School said students were being evacuated.
Local and state police, FBI, federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and other authorities were converged on the school.
Dating to 1923, the pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school had an all-school Mass scheduled at 8:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to its website. Monday was the first day of school, and social media photos from that day show students in green uniforms greeting each other at bicycle racks, smiling for the camera and sitting together.
The gunfire was the latest in a series of fatal shootings in the city in less than 24 hours. One person was killed and six others were hurt in a shooting Tuesday afternoon outside a high school in Minneapolis. Hours later, two people died in two other shootings in the city.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
PORTLAND, Ore. – The City of Portland has launched a nationwide search for its first long-term city administrator, a key leadership role created under the city’s newly restructured form of government.
Mayor Keith Wilson announced the search Tuesday, marking what he called a “milestone” in Portland’s transition to a stronger mayor-council model approved by voters in 2022. The city administrator will oversee day-to-day operations, managing an $8.6 billion budget and supervising 6,800 city employees across public safety, public works, economic development and internal operations.
The position is expected to be filled by late 2025 or early 2026, following a multi-round selection process that includes interviews with city leaders, staff and community partners. The mayor will ultimately select a candidate for city council confirmation, as required by the city charter.
The role offers a salary between $284,000 and $393,000. Applications are being accepted through Sept. 25, when the first round of reviews will begin.
Michael Jordan, who has served as interim city administrator since the transition began, plans to retire at the end of the year. Jordan helped implement the city’s new organizational structure and delivered its first budget under the revised system.
WASHINGTON — President Trump took executive action Monday threatening to cut federal aid to cities and counties that offer cashless bail to criminal defendants, a move that could place Democratic jurisdictions throughout the country under further financial strain.
Trump’s first executive order specifically targeted the practice of cashless bail in the District of Columbia, where the president has sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets. His second action directed the Justice Department to draw up a list of jurisdictions that have “substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order” — a list that would then be subject to federal funding cuts, the White House said.
“That was when the big crime in this country started,” Trump said. “That was when it happened. Somebody kills somebody, they go and don’t worry about it — no cash, come back in a couple of months, we’ll give you a trial. You never see the person again.”
“They thought it was discriminatory to make people put up money because they just killed three people lying in the street,” he added. “We’re ending it.”
Trump does not have the power to unilaterally change D.C. law. But administration officials hope the threat of significant financial pressures on the city will force local lawmakers to change it themselves.
Similarly, his second order could ultimately result in cuts to federal grants and contracts with Los Angeles County, where courts use cash bail only in the most serious criminal cases.
Studies have not shown a correlation between cashless bail policies and an increase in crime.
As of October 2023, nearly everyone accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies in Los Angeles County is either cited and released or freed on certain conditions after their case is reviewed by a judge. The judge can offer other conditions for release, including electronic monitoring or home supervision by probation officials.
“A person’s ability to pay a large sum of money should not be the determining factor in deciding whether that person, who is presumed innocent, stays in jail before trial or is released,” then-Presiding Judge Samantha Jessner said at the time.
The county reached out to the court on how Trump’s executive order may affect the county’s bail policies and had not heard back.
The county policy has proved controversial with some cities saying they believed the lack of cash bail would make their communities less safe. Twelve cities within the county sued unsuccessfully to block the cashless bail reform, arguing it would lead to higher crime rates and violated the court’s responsibilities to uphold public safety. Sheriff Robert Luna told the supervisors in 2023 that some communities were alarmed at the “lack of consequences for those who commit crimes.”
The sheriff’s office and the public defender’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The county had initially begun a zero-bail system during the pandemic to prevent crowding in jails. A report to the Board of Supervisors found instances of re-arrest or failure to appear in court remained relatively stable despite the change.
In the fall of 2022, six people sued the county and city, arguing they spent five days in custody solely because they could not afford bail, leaving them in “dismal” conditions. Demanding cash bail created a “wealth-based detention system,” the plaintiffs alleged. The suit led to a preliminary injunction barring the city and county from enforcing cash bail requirements for some people who had yet to be arraigned.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill in 2018 to end cash bail across California. Voters nixed it after the bail bond industry spearheaded a campaign to send the measure to voters. The referendum was defeated in 2020 with 56% voting “no.”
Trump also signed an executive action directing the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute individuals for burning the American flag, calling it an act of incitement, despite standing Supreme Court precedent that doing so is an expression of free speech.
They were the latest steps in a spree of executive actions from Trump ostensibly targeting crime in the United States, following Trump’s deployment of Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles in June and his federalization of the National Guard in D.C. earlier this month.
He has threatened to launch similar operations with federal forces to New York and Chicago, despite local officials telling the Trump administration that the deployments are not necessary.
“They probably do want it,” Trump said. “If we didn’t go to Los Angeles, you would literally have had to call off the Olympics. It was so bad.”
Ahead of the 2028 Olympics, to be held in Los Angeles, American cities should be “spotless,” Trump added.
Wilner reported from Washington, Ellis from Los Angeles.
Two women are dead after a domestic-related shooting Sunday night in Orlando, the city’s police department said. >> Video above is earlier reportingIt happened at 5 p.m. at Village Springs apartment complex on Cinderlane Parkway north of Lake Orlando. When officers arrived, they found two female victims with gunshot wounds. Both victims were transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center, where they later died, Orlando police said. “Preliminary investigation indicates one of the victims found at the scene was in a relationship with the suspect,” OPD said. “The second victim was a friend of the deceased.”The suspect, Eliette De Jesus Marquez, fled the scene on foot but was eventually charged with two counts of first-degree murder.>> This is a developing story and will be updated
ORLANDO, Fla. —
Two women are dead after a domestic-related shooting Sunday night in Orlando, the city’s police department said.
>> Video above is earlier reporting
It happened at 5 p.m. at Village Springs apartment complex on Cinderlane Parkway north of Lake Orlando.
When officers arrived, they found two female victims with gunshot wounds.
Both victims were transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center, where they later died, Orlando police said.
“Preliminary investigation indicates one of the victims found at the scene was in a relationship with the suspect,” OPD said. “The second victim was a friend of the deceased.”
The suspect, Eliette De Jesus Marquez, fled the scene on foot but was eventually charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
The Trump administration cannot deny funding to Los Angeles and 30 other cities and counties because of “sanctuary” policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration agencies, a judge ruled late Friday.
The judge issued a preliminary injunction that expands restrictions the court handed down in April that blocked funding cuts to 16 cities and counties, including San Francisco and Santa Clara, after federal officials classified them as “sanctuary jurisdictions.”
U.S. District Judge William Orrick of the federal court in San Francisco ruled then that Trump’s executive order cutting funding was probably unconstitutional and violated the separation of powers doctrine.
Friday’s order added more than a dozen more jurisdictions to the preliminary injunction, including Los Angeles, Alameda County, Berkeley, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago.
Mayor Karen Bass’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House said the Trump administration expected to ultimately win in its effort on appeal.
“The government — at all levels — has the duty to protect American citizens from harm,” Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement. “Sanctuary cities interfere with federal immigration enforcement at the expense and safety and security of American citizens. We look forward to ultimate vindication on the issue.”
The preliminary injunction is the latest chapter in an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to force “sanctuary cities” to assist and commit local resources to federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice published a list of what it determined to be sanctuary jurisdictions, or local entities that have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.”
“Sanctuary policies impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk by design,” Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi said in a statement accompanying the published list.
Several cities and counties across the country have adopted sanctuary city policies, but specifics as to what extent they’re willing — or unwilling — to do for federal immigration officials have varied.
The policies typically do not impede federal officials from conducting immigration enforcement activities, but largely keep local jurisdictions from committing resources to the efforts.
The policies also don’t prevent local agencies from enforcing judicial warrants, which are signed by a judge. Cooperation on “detainers” or holds on jailed suspects issued by federal agencies, along with enforcement of civil immigration matters, is typically limited by sanctuary policies.
Federal officials in the suit have so far referred to “sanctuary” jurisdictions as local governments that don’t honor immigration detainer requests, don’t assist with administrative warrants, don’t share immigration status information, or don’t allow local police to assist in immigration enforcement operations.
Orrick noted that the executive orders threatened to withhold all federal funding if the cities and counties in question did not adhere to the Trump administration’s requests.
In the order, the judge referred to the executive order as a “coercive threat” and said it was unconstitutional.
Orrick, who sits on the bench in the Northern District of California, was appointed by former President Obama.
The Trump administration has been ratcheting up efforts to force local jurisdictions to assist in immigration enforcement. The administration has filed lawsuits against cities and counties, vastly increased street operations and immigration detentions, and deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles as it increased immigration operations.
The U.S. Department of Justice in June sued Los Angeles, and local officials, alleging its sanctuary city law is “illegal.”
The suit alleged that the city was looking to “thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations” by enacting sanctuary city policies.
The city of Los Angeles, an epicenter of sport championship events, is adding yet another tournament to its host list: global competitive esports.
The Global Esports Federation announced Tuesday that it had selected the city of Los Angeles to host the 2026 Global Esports World Finals Games, with the Los Angeles Times Media Group serving as a host partner.
“The Los Angeles 2026 games will stand as a symbol of how esports is shaping the next generation, driving opportunity for building digital skills and inspiring cultural change,” said Paul Foster, CEO of the Global Esports Federation, from The Times building in El Segundo.
The media group will embark on reinventing a warehouse adjacent to The Times building, off of Imperial Highway, which will become a virtual arena for players and spectators, said Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Los Angeles Times Media Group’s executive chairman.
“We now have a challenge where by July 2026, Los Angeles’ first and largest global esports stadium will have to be built on this campus and El Segundo Mayor Chris Pimentel has graciously given us his support,” Soon-Shiong said.
The arena will house the weeklong competition and event celebration slated for Dec. 4, 2026.
Los Angeles and El Segundo beat out eight other international cities prior to selection, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the two cities were uniquely positioned to host the global event. “We are adding yet another major international event to the lineup, showing that Los Angeles is where the world comes to compete in every form, from the field to the arena to the digital stage.”
This is the first time the esports world finals will be hosted in the United States. The relatively new global competition has been held previously in Singapore, Istanbul, Riyadh and Lima.
The competitive video gaming event will feature a mix of team sports and individual games and an estimated 1,000 athletes representing more than 100 countries.
By hosting an unprecedented short-notice summit with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and key European leaders on Monday, President Trump significantly raised the prospects for ending Russia’s three-and-a-half-year-long war against Ukraine. The vibe at the opening was affable and positive. The participants genuinely looked determined to work out compromises that only a few weeks ago appeared illusory. It was a good sign for long-term Euro-Atlantic security cooperation in the face of challenges that, in Trump’s words, we have not faced since World War II. Toward the end, Trump’s call to Moscow brought a follow-up U.S.-Ukraine-Russia summit within reach.
But the rising expectations also reveal formidable obstacles on the path to peace. As the world’s leaders were heading to Washington, Putin’s forces unleashed 182 infantry assaults, 152 massive glide bombs, more than 5,100 artillery rounds and 5,000 kamikaze drones on Ukraine’s defenses and 140 long-range drones and four Iskander ballistic missiles on Ukraine’s cities. The attacks claimed at least 10 civilian lives, including a small child. This is how Russia attacks Ukraine daily, signaling disrespect for Trump’s diplomacy.
The Monday summit also revealed that Putin’s ostensible concession at the Alaska summit to agree to international security guarantees for Ukraine is a poisoned chalice. On the surface, it seemed like a breakthrough toward compromise. The White House summit participants jumped on it and put the guarantees at the center of discussions.
And yet there has been no agreement, and the world has more questions than answers. How could the Ukrainian armed forces be strengthened to deter Russia? Who would pay? How could Russia be prevented from rebuilding its Black Sea Fleet and blocking Ukrainian grain exports? What troop deployments would be needed? Who would put boots on the ground in Ukraine? What kind of guarantees should match what kind of territorial concessions?
Such questions are fraught with complex debates. Between the U.S. and Europe. Within Europe. Within the Trump administration. Within Ukraine. And all of that even before having to negotiate the issue with the Kremlin. The net outcome of the past week’s diplomatic huddles will be Putin buying time for his aggression as Washington abstains from sanctions hoping for peace.
Disingenuously, in exchange for this poisoned chalice of a concession, Putin demanded that Ukraine should cede not only lands currently under Russia’s illegal military occupation but also a large piece of the Donetsk province still under Kyiv’s control. That area is home to 300,000 people and is a major defense stronghold. Controlling it would give Russia a springboard to deeper attacks targeting big cities and threatening to bring Ukraine to its knees.
Putin’s offer also threatens to tear apart Ukraine’s society. In my tracking poll with Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology completed in early August, close to half of 567 respondents want Ukraine to reassert control over all of its internationally recognized territories, including the Crimean peninsula illegally annexed in 2014. Only 20% would be content with freezing the conflict along the current front lines. The option of ceding territories to Russia still under Kyiv control is so outrageous that it was not included in the survey. Eighty percent of Ukrainians continue to have faith in Ukraine’s victory and to see democracy and free speech — core values Putin would take away — as vital for Ukraine’s future.
Getting Ukrainian society right is important for Trump’s peace effort to succeed. Discounting Ukrainians’ commitment to freedom and independence has a lot to do with where we are now. Putin launched the all-out invasion in February 2022 expecting Ukrainians to embrace Russian rule. Then-President Biden assessed that Ukrainians would fold quickly and delayed major military assistance to Kyiv.
Misjudging Ukrainians now would most likely result in a rejection of peace proposals and possibly a political crisis there, inviting more aggression from Moscow while empowering more dogged resistance to the invasion, with a long, bloody war grinding on.
Thankfully, Trump has the capacity to keep the peace process on track. First, he can amplify two critically important messages he articulated at the Monday summit: U.S. willingness to back up Ukraine’s security guarantees and to continue to sell weapons to Ukraine if no peace deal is reached. Second, he can use his superb skills at strategic ambiguity and pivot back to threats of leveraging our submarine power and of imposing secondary sanctions on countries trading with Russia. Third, he can drop a hint he’d back up the Senate’s bipartisan Supporting Ukraine Act of 2025, which would provide military assistance to Ukraine over two years from confiscated Russian assets, the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal proceeds and investment in America’s military modernization.
The Monday summit makes the urgency of these and similar moves glaringly clear.
Mikhail Alexseev, a professor of international relations at San Diego State University, is the author of “Without Warning: Threat Assessment, Intelligence, and Global Struggle” and principal investigator of the multiyear “War, Democracy and Society” survey in Ukraine.
Insights
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The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The recent summit between Trump, Zelenskyy, and European leaders represents a significant breakthrough that has substantially raised the prospects for ending Russia’s prolonged war against Ukraine. The author emphasizes that participants appeared genuinely determined to work out compromises that seemed impossible just weeks earlier, marking a positive development for Euro-Atlantic security cooperation in the face of challenges not seen since World War II.
Putin’s offer of international security guarantees for Ukraine constitutes a deceptive “poisoned chalice” that appears promising on the surface but creates more problems than solutions. The author argues that this ostensible concession has generated complex debates about military strengthening, funding, territorial deployments, and guarantee structures without providing clear answers, ultimately allowing Putin to buy time for continued aggression while Washington abstains from sanctions.
Putin’s territorial demands are fundamentally outrageous and threaten Ukraine’s social fabric, as the author notes that surveys show nearly half of Ukrainians want complete territorial restoration while only 20% would accept freezing current front lines. The author contends that ceding additional territories currently under Kyiv’s control would provide Russia with strategic springboards for deeper attacks and potentially bring Ukraine to its knees.
Trump possesses the strategic capacity to maintain momentum in the peace process through amplifying U.S. commitments to Ukraine’s security guarantees, utilizing strategic ambiguity regarding military threats, and supporting bipartisan legislation that would provide sustained military assistance through confiscated Russian assets and defense modernization investments.
Different views on the topic
Trump’s approach to Putin diplomacy has been criticized as counterproductive, with concerns that his warm reception of the Russian leader constituted a major public relations victory for the Kremlin dictator that was particularly painful for Ukrainians to witness[1]. Critics argue that Trump’s treatment gave Putin undeserved legitimacy on the international stage during ongoing aggression.
Analysis suggests that Trump’s negotiation strategy fundamentally misunderstands Putin’s objectives, with observers noting that while Trump appears to view peace negotiations as a geopolitical real estate transaction, Putin is not merely fighting for Ukrainian land but for Ukraine itself[1]. This perspective challenges the assumption that territorial concessions could satisfy Russian ambitions.
Military and diplomatic experts advocate for increased pressure on Russia rather than accommodation, arguing that Russian rejection of NATO troop deployments in Ukraine and resistance to agreed policy steps demonstrates the need to make Putin’s war more costly through additional sanctions on the Russian economy and advanced weapons supplies to Ukraine[1]. These voices contend that Putin’s opposition to current proposals underscores the necessity of making continued warfare harder for Russia to sustain.
For the last four years, Katherine Taylor rented out her Westside guesthouse on Airbnb. She came to rely on the extra income at a time when it felt like everything was getting more expensive.
But this spring, she took the listing down.
“I’m out,” Taylor said. “The rules are too much. All these new regulations kept popping up, and it felt like it was only a matter of time before I got fined.”
Across the L.A. region, many people who rent out their homes for income seem to be changing their preferences. Short-term rentals are much more lucrative than longer stays, but the steady turnover often creates headaches for landlords, and increasingly they are in the crosshairs of local ordinances, including the risk of fines.
Because of this and other factors, short-term rental registrations have dipped over the last year.
Last July, there were 4,228 active Home Sharing registrations in the city of L.A., according to the Planning Department. This July, there were 3,972 — a 6% decrease.
Short-term rental software platforms show a decrease in listings as well, to varying degrees. In analyzing a sample set of short-term rentals in the L.A. metro area, Hospitable estimated a 44% drop in listings year over year, with steady declines each month. AllTheRooms reported a 13% drop in Airbnb listings across L.A. County over the same stretch.
The data sources vary, since companies have different access to listing data. AirDNA reported an 8% increase in Airbnb and VRBO listings in the L.A. metro area over the last year, but noted a decrease since January fueled by big drops in fire markets: a 56% decrease in Altadena, 36% decrease in Pacific Palisades and 25% decrease in Malibu.
Expert opinions differ on the cause of the drop-off, but the fires are definitely a factor. Thousands of homes burned down in the Palisades and Eaton fires, taking many rentals off the market. But in the wake of the disaster, many short-term rentals were converted to mid- or long-term rentals to house fire victims.
Other hosts are opting for mid-term rentals — stays of longer than 30 days but less than a year — independent of the fires.
“The short-term rental space got stuck. Regulations hit, and people are finding that the next best option is mid-term rentals,” said Jesse Vasquez, an entrepreneur who runs a mid-term rental summit every year.
Vasquez said L.A. is the best market for mid-term stays because so many people visit the city for extended periods with no permanent plans: travel nurses, students, digital nomads or people working on long-term projects such as films or construction.
He said mid-term rentals rake in about 15% to 20% less than short-term rentals, but in exchange, homeowners deal with less turnover. If a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in a popular neighborhood can make around $10,000 per month as a short-term rental, it could still bring in $8,000 per month as a mid-term rental, Vasquez said.
Last year, Airbnb Chief Executive Brian Chesky identified mid-term stays as a “huge growth opportunity” for the company, and said such bookings make up 18% of the company’s business compared with 13% to 14% before the pandemic.
Mark Lawson used to rent out his San Fernando Valley home on VRBO for weekend stays, but last year he set the parameters to only accept bookings of 30 days or more.
“I got tired of having someone new in the house every few days,” he said.
Short-term rentals have long been contentious. While advocates say sites such as Airbnb and VRBO offer income for homeowners and options for tourists, critics claim home-sharing removes long-term rentals from a market in the midst of a housing crisis.
To prevent L.A.’s housing stock from being converted into short-term rentals, Los Angeles in 2018 passed the Home-Sharing Ordinance, which regulates short-term rentals by restricting hosts to renting out only their primary residences and requiring them to get a license.
The regulatory framework worked — somewhat. Listings dropped 70% from 2019 to 2023, though much of the drop could be attributed to the pandemic. Last year, the restrictions spread to unincorporated areas in L.A. County, which previously weren’t subject to the rules.
But despite the new requirements, thousands of hosts still operate without a license, or fake their registration numbers, due to lack of enforcement.
Last year, a report from the L.A. Housing Department said that as of October 2024, there were an estimated 7,500 violations of the Home-Sharing Ordinance, but only 300 citations. So in March 2025, the L.A. City Council approved a slew of recommendations to beef up the ordinance even more, arming the city with a war chest of new enforcement tools.
The plan calls for 18 staffers to monitor violations and increased fines based on the square footage of the rental: $1,000 for rentals less than 500 square feet, up to $16,000 for homes greater than 25,000 square feet. The fines double and quadruple on the second and third violation, respectively.
The recommendations even call for city staffers to go on spy missions in illegal rentals. Under the proposed plan, Housing Department staff would use prepaid cards to book home-sharing rentals and stay in homes to gather evidence that they’re operating illegally.
However, two months later, the city’s $14-billion budget scaled back spending for many city departments. As a result, no new enforcement officers have been hired, and many of the plans have yet to be implemented.
But simply the threat of higher fines and stricter enforcement has had a chilling effect.
“Talking to our customers, regulation is the biggest factor in short-term rental inventory decreasing,” said Derek Jones, Hospitable’s vice president of sales and partnerships. “L.A.’s ordinance combines all the strict rules from other markets around the country.”
Jones said the potential for $1,000 fines — now able to be doled out without a warning beforehand — are causing some hosts to remove listings from the market out of fear, since the fines far exceed the nightly revenue brought in by the average listing.
“Housing is expensive already, then you add high penalties and zoning that limits supply,” Jones said. “All that put together, it creates a market where housing investors are cautious to invest. And that proved to be the case this year.”
Taylor is one such investor. She specifically bought her Westside home because it had a guesthouse she could rent. But she found herself frustrated by the maximum days she could rent it annually under the Home Sharing Ordinance — 120 days.
Her space was larger than 500 square feet, so under the new rules, it could be subject to a $2,000 fine for the first violation, $4,000 for the second, and $8,000 for the third. Ultimately, she decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
“I’ll keep an eye on how the city is enforcing the rules. Maybe I’ll try it again someday,” she said. “But for now, it’s gonna stay empty.”
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s decision to appoint an “emergency police commissioner” in Washington is just the latest attempt to change an increasingly uncomfortable subject for the White House. Last month President Trump told the American people he was never briefed on the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2019 was charged with sex trafficking minors. We now know that Bondi told the president in May that his name appeared multiple times in those files, which traced Epstein’s operation back to the mid-1990s.
So — either you believe a city experiencing a 30-year low in crime is suddenly in need of an emergency police commissioner or you agree with Joe Rogan’s assessment: This administration is gaslighting the public regarding those files.
Now there will be pundits who will try to say Republicans are too focused on kitchen table issues to care about the Epstein controversy.
If only that were true.
According to the Consumer Price Index, goods cost more today than they did a month ago. And prices are higher than they were a year ago. It would be wonderful if Congress were in session to address kitchen table issues like grocery prices. However, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) ended the House session early to avoid a vote on the release of the Epstein files — a vote that could have displeased Trump. Those are the lengths some in the MAGA movement are willing to go to prevent the public from knowing the truth about Epstein’s clients. That is the backdrop for what is currently happening in the streets of Washington. It’s not inspired by a rise in crime, but by a fear of transparency.
It’s important to look at Bondi’s “emergency police commissioner” decision with clear, discerning eyes because the administration is purposefully conflating the issues of crime and homelessness in order to win back support from Trump’s base. While it is true that the district has made huge progress against crime, and the number of unhoused residents is far lower than a decade ago even though homeless populations nationwide have soared, the rise of conspicuous encampments around Washington is one of the reasons Virginia was almost able to lure away the city’s NBA and NHL teams. However, the nation’s capital was able to keep those sports franchises because of the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Instead of taking over the city’s police force, perhaps Bondi should ask Bowser for some advice that could be replicated in other cities nationwide. Ask the mayor’s office what resources it might need to continue its progress on homelessness and crime. But again, this really isn’t about what benefits the people, is it? It’s really about what’s in the best interest of one person.
Now there will be pundits who will try to tell you Republicans are too focused on making this country “great” to worry about who is in the Epstein files. I ask you, when has trampling over democracy ever made us great? In Iran, we contributed to the overthrowing of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950s, and we continue to be at odds with the nation. In Chile in the early 1970s, we moved against Salvador Allende, and it took 20 years to normalize our relationship again.
Here at home, in 2010, the state of Michigan took over the predominantly Black city of Benton Harbor under the guise of a financial emergency. The City Council was prevented from governing as state officials tried to save the city from a crippling pension deficit and other financial shortages. There was temporary reprieve, but Benton Harbor is still on economic life support. That’s because the issue wasn’t the policies of the local government. It was the lasting effects of losing so much tax revenue to a neighboring suburb due to white flight. The explanation for Benton Harbor’s woes lies in the past, not the present.
The same is true in Washington. The relatively young suburbs of McLean and Great Falls, Va., are two of the richest in the country. When you have the same financial obligations of yesteryear but less tax revenue to operate with, there will be shortfalls. And those gaps manifest themselves in many ways — rundown homes, empty storefronts, a lack of school resources.
Those are legitimate plagues affecting every major city. What Bondi is doing in Washington isn’t a cure for what ails it. And when you consider why she’s doing what she’s doing, you are reminded why people are so sick of politics.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The author argues that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appointment of an “emergency police commissioner” in Washington D.C. serves as a deliberate distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein files controversy, rather than addressing any legitimate public safety emergency.
The author contends that President Trump misled the American public by claiming he was never briefed on the Epstein files, when Bondi actually informed him in May that his name appeared multiple times in documents tracing Epstein’s operation back to the mid-1990s.
The author emphasizes that Washington D.C. is currently experiencing a 30-year low in crime rates, making the justification for an “emergency police commissioner” appear fabricated and politically motivated rather than based on actual public safety needs.
The author criticizes House Speaker Mike Johnson for ending the legislative session early specifically to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files, suggesting this demonstrates how far the MAGA movement will go to protect Trump from transparency.
The author argues that the administration is purposefully conflating crime and homelessness issues to win back support from Trump’s base, while ignoring the actual progress Washington D.C. has made under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s leadership in reducing both crime and homelessness.
The author draws historical parallels to failed U.S. interventions in Iran and Chile, as well as Michigan’s takeover of Benton Harbor, arguing that federal takeovers of local governance consistently fail and represent an assault on democratic principles rather than effective problem-solving.
Different views on the topic
Trump administration officials justify the federal intervention as part of a broader crime-reduction initiative, with National Guard forces working alongside law enforcement teams to carry out the president’s plan to reduce violent crime in the city[1].
The administration cited legal authority under Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, which grants the president the power to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control during a declared emergency, marking the first time a president has invoked this unprecedented authority[2].
Federal officials defended the directive as necessary for enforcing immigration laws, with the revised order specifically directing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to provide assistance with “locating, apprehending, and detaining aliens unlawfully present in the United States” regardless of local D.C. law and police policies[1].
The administration’s approach focused on nullifying the city’s sanctuary city policies and ensuring that all Metropolitan Police Department leadership obtain federal approval for policy decisions moving forward, framing this as essential for effective federal law enforcement[2].
Following legal challenges, the Justice Department demonstrated flexibility by scaling back the original directive after meeting with D.C. officials, ultimately leaving the local police chief in charge while maintaining federal oversight for immigration-related matters[1].
President Trump’s decision to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington has California officials on high alert, with some worrying that he intends to activate federal forces in the Bay Area and Southern California, especially during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Trump said that his use of the National Guard to fight crime could expand to other cities, and suggested that local police have been unable to do the job.
Legal experts say it is highly unusual and troubling for forces to be deployed without a major crisis, such as civil unrest or a natural disaster. The Washington deployment is another example of Trump seeking to use the military for domestic endeavors, similar to his decision to send the National Guard to Los Angeles in June, amid an immigration crackdown that sparked protests, experts said.
Washington has long struggled with crime but has seen major reductions in recent years.
Officials in Oakland and Los Angeles — two cities the president mentioned by name — slammed Trump’s comments about crime in their cities. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said in a statement that the president’s characterization wasn’t rooted in fact, but “based in fear-mongering in an attempt to score cheap political points.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it “performative” and a “stunt.”
Trump has said he would consider deploying the military to Los Angeles once again to protect the 2028 Olympic Games. This month, he signed an executive order that named him chair of a White House task force on the Los Angeles Games.
The White House has not said specifically what role Trump would play in security arrangements.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who sits on the city panel overseeing the Games, acknowledged last week that the city is a “little nervous” about the federal government’s plans for securing the event.
Congress recently approved $1 billion for security and planning for the Games. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security declined to explain to The Times how the funds will be used.
Padilla said her concern was based on the unpredictable nature of the administration, as well as recent immigration raids that have used masked, heavily armed agents to round up people at Home Depot parking lots and car washes.
“Everything that we’re seeing with the raids was a real curveball to our city,” Padilla said during a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum event. It dealt “a real curveball to [efforts] to focus on the things that folks care about, like homelessness, like transportation … economic development,” she said.
Bass, appearing on CNN this week, said that using the National Guard during the Olympics is “completely appropriate.” She said that the city expects a “federal response when we have over 200 countries here, meaning heads of state of over 200 countries. Of course you have the military involved. That is routine.”
But Bass made a distinction between L.A. Olympics security and the “political stunt” she said Trump pulled by bringing in the National Guard and the U.S. Marines after protests over the federal government’s immigration crackdown. That deployment faces ongoing legal challenges, with an appeals court ruling that Trump had the legal authority to send the National Guard.
“I believed then, and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case, and I think D.C. is a test case as well,” Bass said. “To say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want, and I’m the commander in chief, and I can use the troops whenever we want.”
On Monday, Trump tied his action to what has been a familiar theme to him: perceived urban decay.
“You look at Chicago, how bad it is, you look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore —they’re so far gone,” he said. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said officers and agents deployed across the District of Columbia have so far made 23 arrests for offenses including homicide, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, lewd acts, reckless driving, fare evasion and not having permits. Six illegal handguns were seized, she said.
Citing crime as a reason to deploy National Guard troops without the support of a state governor is highly unprecedented, experts said. The National Guard has been deployed to Southern California before, notably during the 1992 L.A. riots and the civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.
“It would be awful because he would be clearly violating his legal authorities and he’d be sued again by the governor and undoubtedly, by the mayors of L.A. and Oakland,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University. “The citizens in those cities would be up in arms. They would be aghast that there are soldiers patrolling their streets.”
The District of Columbia does not have control over its National Guard, which gives the president wide latitude to deploy those troops. In California and other states, the head of the National Guard is the governor and there are legal limits on how federal troops can be used.
The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, largely bars federal troops from being used in civilian law enforcement. The law reflects a tradition dating to the Revolutionary War era that sees military interference in American life as a threat to liberty and democracy.
“We have such a strong tradition that we don’t use the military for domestic law enforcement, and it’s a characteristic of authoritarian countries to see the military be used in that way,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and a constitutional law expert. “That’s never been so in the United States, and many are concerned about the way in which President Trump is acting the way authoritarian rulers do.”
Whether the troops deployed to Los Angeles in June amid the federal immigration raids were used for domestic law enforcement in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is central in the trial underway this week in federal court in San Francisco.
If Trump were to send troops to California, Banks said, the only legal lever he could pull would be to declare an insurrection and invoke the Insurrection Act.
Unlike in D.C., Trump wouldn’t be able to federalize police departments in other parts of the country. There are circumstances where the federal government has put departments under consent decrees — a reform tool for agencies that have engaged in unlawful practices — but in those cases the government alleged specific civil rights violations, said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California sheriff’s deputy and legal counsel on policing.
“You are not going to be able to come in and take over because you say crime is rising in a particular place,” he said.
Oakland Councilman Ken Houston, a third-generation resident who was elected in 2024, said his city doesn’t need the federal government’s help with public safety.
Oakland has struggled with crime for years, but Houston cited progress. Violent crimes, including homicide, aggravated assault, rape and robbery are down 29% so far this year from the same period in 2024. Property crimes including burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny also are trending down, according to city data.
“He’s going by old numbers and he’s making a point,” Houston said of Trump. “Oakland does not need the National Guard.”
Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.
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Hannah Fry, Dakota Smith, Richard Winton, Andrea Castillo
WASHINGTON — In an expansion of tactics started in June during immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Trump on Monday announced he would take federal control of Washington’s police department and activate 800 National Guard troops in the nation’s capital to help “reestablish law and order.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at the White House.
“This is liberation day in D.C.,” he declared.
Trump, who sent roughly 5,000 Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. in June in a move that was opposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, issued an executive order declaring a public safety emergency in D.C. The order invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act that places the Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.
The California governor decried Trump’s move in D.C., warning that what happened in L.A. was now taking place across the country.
“He was just getting warmed up in Los Angeles,” Newsom said on X. “He will gaslight his way into militarizing any city he wants in America. This is what dictators do.”
In his briefing, Trump painted D.C. in dark, apocalyptic terms as a grimy hellhole “of crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor and worse.” He said he planned to get tough, citing his administration’s stringent enforcement on the nation’s southern border.
Already, Trump said, his administration has begun to remove homeless people from encampments across the city, and he said he planned to target undocumented immigrants, too. He vowed to “restore the city back to the gleaming capital that everybody wants it to be.”
As the White House noted in a fact sheet Monday, D.C. had a 2024 homicide rate of 27 per 100,000 residents, the nation’s fourth-highest homicide rate. By comparison, Los Angeles’ homicide rate is 7.1 per 100,000 residents.
Just a few weeks before Trump took office, the Justice Department announced that violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low. Homicides were down 32%, robberies down 39% and armed carjackings down 53% when compared with 2023 levels, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department.
In a press conference Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s deployment of troops “unsettling and unprecedented.” But she also tried to strike a conciliatory tone with the president, acknowledging he was operating within the letter of the law in her district.
“We’re not a state. We don’t control the D.C. National Guard,” she told reporters. “… Limited home rule gives the federal government the ability to intrude on our autonomy in many ways.”
Bowser suggested the president was misinformed about crime in the district, advancing the idea that his views of D.C. were largely shaped by his COVID-era experience.
“It is true that those were more challenging times,” Bowser told reporters. “It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-COVID. But we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we have seen a huge decrease in crime.”
Accountability for gun-related crimes in the district remains an issue of concern, Bowser said, again offering an olive branch to Trump. But she noted that crime in the capital is down to pre-pandemic levels and that violent crime statistics are at 30-year lows.
Brian Schwalb, the elected attorney general of the District of Columbia, said in a statement that “there is no crime emergency” in D.C. and the administration’s deployment of troops was “unprecedented, unnecessary and unlawful.”
His office refuted the claims of Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who said juveniles, or as she put it, “young punks,” were too often granted probation or other lenient sentences
In D.C., the U.S. attorney’s office handles all adult felonies and the majority of adult misdemeanors, while Schwalb’s office exercises jurisdiction over crimes committed by juveniles and some adult misdemeanors.
Since Schwalb took office in January 2023, the office has prosecuted so many juveniles at higher rates that the mayor has had to issue an emergency order creating more space at juvenile detention facilities, according to his office. Last year, the office prosecuted over 90% of homicide and attempted homicide cases, 88% of violent assault cases and 87% of carjacking cases, according to the statement.
Ken Lang, a veteran of the Baltimore Police Department and an expert on law enforcement, said that Trump’s actions in D.C. could be an effort “to model a new national law enforcement strategy by having federal, state and local agencies better partner together.”
But because it is a federal district and not a state, he said, D.C. occupies a “unique legal position” under the Home Rule Act.
Oklahoma Mayor David Holt, who is also president of the United States Conference of Mayors, condemned Trump’s move as a “takeover,” and said “local control is always best.”
Holt noted that the Trump administration’s data — specifically, the FBI’s national crime rate report released last week — shows crime rates dropping in cities across the nation.
Trump said the deployment of troops in D.C. should serve as a warning to cities across the nation — including Los Angeles.
“Hopefully L.A.’s watching,” Trump said as he berated Bass and Newsom for their handling of the firestorm that swept through the region in January, destroying thousands of homes.
“The mayor’s incompetent and so is Gov. Newscum,” Trump said. “He’s got a good line of bull—, but that’s about it.”
Trump’s announcement that he was deploying troops to D.C. comes more than two months after he sparked a major legal battle with California when he sent thousands of troops to Los Angeles. He argued they were necessary to combat what he described as “violent, insurrectionist mobs” as protests broke out in the city against federal immigration raids.
But the protests calmed relatively quickly and local officials said they were primarily kept in check by police. The National Guard troops and Marines wound up sparsely deployed in Los Angeles, with some protecting federal buildings and some assisting federal agents as they conducted immigration enforcement operations. Military officials said the troops were restricted to security and crowd control and had no law enforcement authority.
Trump’s deployment of troops to D.C. immediately found its way into the pitched court battle in California over whether his administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars federalized military from civilian law enforcement.
As top U.S. military officials testified before Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, California lawyers quickly maneuvered to get Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement into evidence, hoping to bolster their argument that the government had not only knowingly violated the law, but was likely to do so again.
“That’s one of the tests for injunctive relief, right?” Breyer said. “Present conduct may be relevant on that issue.”
In June, Breyer ruled that Trump broke the law when he mobilized thousands of California National Guard members against the state’s wishes.
In a 36-page decision, Breyer wrote that Trump’s actions “were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused that court order, allowing the troops to remain in Los Angeles while the case plays out in federal court. The appellate court found the president had broad, though not “unreviewable,” authority to deploy the military in American cities.
That decision is set to be reviewed by a larger “en banc” panel of the appellate court. Meanwhile, California continues to fight what it says are illegal uses of the military for civilian law enforcement in Judge Breyer’s court in San Francisco.
In 2019, when the Thai government announced plans to turn an abandoned tobacco factory in the nation’s smoggy capital into a public park, Bangkok-based landscape architect Chatchanin Sung saw an opportunity to address another of the city’s chronic problems: flooding.
For Bangkok, a city of 11 million sitting on low-lying swampland, the management of its water has increasingly become a matter of survival. With the capital facing more frequent and extreme rainfall as well as rising sea levels due to climate change, experts have warned that entire swaths of the city may be underwater within the next few decades.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Like Los Angeles, where intensifying droughts and floods have revealed limitations of conventional flood control systems like the L.A. River, Chatchanin felt that Bangkok’s own stormwater infrastructure had reached its tipping point.
An aerial view shows pathways through the Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Krit Phromsakla Na Sakolnakorn / Associated Press)
Decades of rapid urban development have encased the city with impermeable concrete surfaces that hinder the natural drainage of water. As a result, the city’s network of over 1,600 urban canals, which were once used for transporting goods and people but now primarily act as stormwater channels, are regularly overwhelmed.
“Because the canal water mixes with public sewage, the water quality is really bad,” Chatchanin said. “The park project was an opportunity to absorb and clean this water.”
To design the new space, a 102-acre expansion to the pre-existing Benjakitti Park, Chatchanin partnered with Kongjian Yu, a Beijing-based landscape architect who has long advocated what is known as a “sponge city” model of urban water management.
The idea is that, unlike “gray” infrastructure, which is designed to flush water away as quickly as possible, cities like Bangkok can mitigate flood risk simply by making its surfaces more absorbent like a sponge, capturing stormwater before it can turn into runoff that pollutes streets and strains drainage systems.
Their winning design, which was opened to the public three years ago, was realized in just 18 months and reflects the idea that such urban water management systems can also provide valuable aesthetic and recreational benefits to communities.
Today, the former brownfield is a popular bird-watching spot. It features forested walkways alongside badminton and pickleball courts built in repurposed cigarette warehouses, all the while capturing and cleaning water.
People take a rest at Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
Fed by a nearby canal, a long system of wetlands containing thickets of aquatic plants removes pollutants from the water as it winds around the park’s perimeter, releasing what’s left into a large pond dotted with small islets.
This, alongside the park’s porous landscape and additional retention ponds, enable it to capture 23 million gallons of stormwater during Bangkok’s rainiest months. The water that’s entering permeable earth instead of being blocked by concrete is helping to replenish natural underground reservoirs that benefit humans and the environment.
“Last year we had really heavy rains,” Chatchanin said. “The park also flooded but eventually absorbed it much more quickly.”
The park’s long system of wetlands contains thickets of aquatic plants that remove pollutants from the water.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
She pointed to the pond, which no longer had the foul odor or the oily sheen of the canal despite being just a few steps away. Dragonflies buzzed overhead — a common sign, she noted, that the water is clean.
Chatchanin acknowledged that one park alone can’t fix Bangkok’s water issues. But its modest success might, at the very least, encourage cities to rethink their relationship to water.
“People want fast answers,” Chatchanin said. “But hiding the problem is no solution. You can’t just raise your house on stilts, or flush out the water. It all comes back in the end.”
The idea that cities need to adapt to — not outrun — their floods has been a lifelong preoccupation of Kongjian Yu, whose work with sponge cities has earned him the prestigious Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and comparisons to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park.
Yu traces its beginnings to a near-death experience he had as a child growing up in rural China.
At the time just 10 years old, Yu had been playing on the banks of his village’s river, which was more voluminous than usual due to heavy monsoon rains, when he suddenly found himself being swept away by the powerful currents.
What saved him were the river’s reeds and willows, which slowed the water and gave him a chance to pull himself out.
Kongjian Yu’s work has earned him comparisons to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park.
(Gilles Sabrié / For The Times)
“My experience in these villages, my experience with the river and the creek, taught me how to live with nature,” he said.
Later, Yu earned a landscape ecology degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and spent two years in Los Angeles working for SWA Group before returning to China in 1997.
Dismayed that the rapidly modernizing country had lined its cities with concrete dams and channelized waterways, Yu began writing to local mayors, warning of the risks of this approach and advocating instead for “rewilding natural water systems.”
“Sponge cities follow three principles: retain, slow down and embrace water,” Yu said. “That means removing all unnecessary concrete and pavement.”
At first, his ideas found few sympathetic ears. Some people, he recalled, sent letters to the Communist Party claiming he was “a spy from the U.S. sent to demolish Chinese infrastructure.”
But things changed in 2012, when severe flooding in Beijing destroyed thousands of homes and killed 79 people, some of whom were caught off-guard in the street.
A man uses a signboard to signal motorists driving through flooded streets following a heavy rain in Beijing. Flooding prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to adopt Yu’s “sponge city” philosophy as a national agenda.
(Associated Press)
“Every sort of paradigm shift, you need a crisis,” Yu said. “People dying in the street — that was the critical point.”
The floods prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to adopt Yu’s sponge city philosophy as a national agenda in 2015. Since then, the government has pledged more than $28 billion to help fund over 33,000 sponge city projects in 90 cities, aiming to have them capture and reuse at least 70% of their rainwater by 2030.
By 2020, over 40,000 sponge city projects were completed nationwide, contributing to around 3.8 trillion gallons of rainwater being recycled that year, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. The ministry noted that this amount was equal to about one-fifth of China’s annual urban water supply.
Many, like Bangkok’s Benjakitti Park, are wetlands designed to address urban flooding. Others, like a mangrove forest built on the banks of a river in the tropical southern city of Sanya on Hainan Island, act as a natural buffer against saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion from rising sea levels.
“The idea is to not build too close to the water in order to create a buffer zone,” Yu said. “Instead of building a wall, we allow the water to come in.”
Women stop near ponds and water plants at the “Fish Tail” sponge park that’s built on a former coal ash dump site in Nanchang in north-central China’s Jiangxi province.
(Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
This approach, said Yu, has made sponge city projects uncomplicated and low-cost compared with conventional solutions, deployable just about anywhere.
Benjakitti Park, for example, cost $20 million and was built by the Thai army, which had little experience in environmental landscaping. Yu scribbled the design on a napkin during his flight to Bangkok to meet Chatchanin, keeping it simple enough to be achievable — at least in theory — with only a single excavator.
Still, the program hasn’t been without challenges.
Wetlands are often breeding grounds for mosquitoes. And with local governments expected to foot up to 80% of the cost for their projects, much-needed investments from the private sector have been slow to materialize. Meanwhile, critics have pointed out that some of China’s most touted sponge cities, like Zhengzhou in Henan province, have still experienced devastating floods.
“If a city can’t handle a flood, that means it’s not spongy enough,” Yu said.
“Ultimately, it’s not about getting rid of every piece of concrete. It’s about combining gray and green — upgrading the current model.”
Since 2006, Singapore has been turning its own waterways and reservoirs into public parks that also absorb stormwater, an initiative known as the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme.
In the Netherlands, a flood-prone country famous for mastering the art of keeping water out with techniques like land reclamation, the government has also experimented with a softer approach, strategically allowing its rivers to flood in certain areas in order to spare others.
In L.A., too, there has been a growing awareness that the area’s city’s own impermeable flood control system, which discards billions of gallons of rainwater that might otherwise be stored and reused, is overdue for change.
With around 490,000 acre-feet of stormwater available to be captured a year in an area that includes Long Beach and Anaheim, the L.A. area ranks first in the West in stormwater runoff potential and, 19th out of 2,645 urban areas nationwide, according to a Pacific Institute report last year.
Pedestrians use the Los Angeles River Bikeway.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Among the efforts to make the city spongier — and therefore less dependent on imported water — is the Safe Clean Water Program, which L.A. County voters approved in 2018 as ballot Measure W.
The program levies a property tax on impermeable surfaces to provide around $300 million a year in grants for municipal stormwater capture projects.
The aim of the program is to capture 98 billion gallons annually. Experts have said that projects like this in the upper L.A. watershed could simultaneously help prevent flooding downstream.
Yet officials have estimated that it will take decades to achieve this goal, and progress has been slow.
Just 30 acres of green space were added to the county in its first three years, according to a report by Los Angeles Waterkeeper, a local watchdog.
And although the program has recently begun to pick up pace, with around $1 billion allocated across 130 projects, Bruce Reznik, the group’s executive director and a member of the Measure W scoring committee, pointed out there are a host of challenges not present in China’s centralized model.
Among them are scant federal support and the slow, costly bureaucratic processes involved with the program, such as cleaning up contaminated project sites and getting permits. He estimated that the projects the county needs will cost around $50 billion, 10 times what Measure W funding can provide over the next 20 years.
“In terms of expenses, that’s a question a lot of us are asking: Why are these projects so expensive?” Reznik said. “I get that there’s inflation, but man, projects we thought were going to be $10 million are now $25 million. I think we’ve got to figure out ways that we can streamline some of this stuff.”
Special correspondents Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul and Xin-yun Wu contributed reporting from Bangkok and Taipei, respectively.
Twenty-five years from today, Santa Ana winds will scream through Los Angeles on a dry autumn morning, turning a small hillside campfire into a deadly, fast-moving blaze.
At that moment, the city will spring into action.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Satellites will team up with anemometers, pairing live aerial footage with wind patterns to tell firefighters exactly where the fire is going. Fleets of autonomous Black Hawk helicopters and unmanned air tankers will fill the skies, dropping fire retardant in the path of the flames.
Wearable technologies will guide us in the city below: “ALERT: A wildfire has been spotted 2.4 miles from your location and will reach your location in approximately 43 minutes.” Angelenos will receive a live satellite map of the blaze’s trajectory and directions for a safe evacuation.
People in threatened neighborhoods will quickly run through to-do lists: close vents, check on neighbors, etc. Some renters and homeowners will arm fire-retardant sprayers on their roofs and jam valuables into fireproof ADUs tucked in their backyards. Others will have outfitted their super-smart homes with technology that cuts down on decision-making for an even quicker get-away. Apartment safety teams will follow their well-rehearsed plans to ensure evacuation.
Then, everyone will follow their community evacuation plan by driving their electric vehicles or ride-sharing to safety, eased along by a steady flow of green lights programmed by the city to divert all traffic away from the fire. Fleets of self-driving vans will circle back through the neighborhoods, picking up any stranded residents.
Michael Kovac’s house stands among burned homes in Pacific Palisades.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The scenario might seem improbable, but according to firefighters, architects and futurists, it’s a realistic outline of what L.A.’s fire defense could look like in 2050.
Devastating fires have pummeled Southern California in the last several decades, shifting the public conversation from fire suppression to fire preparedness and mitigation as governments begrudgingly acknowledge the disasters as regular occurrences. In the wake of the deadly January fires that burned through Altadena and Pacific Palisades, many people are wondering: Can we truly fortify our city against a firestorm?
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Architect Michael Kovac thinks we can. Kovac, a Palisades resident whose clients include celebrities, built his home to be fire-resistant knowing that, at some point, it would be subject to a firestorm.
Michael Kovac designed his home in Pacific Palisades The house is clad in fiber cement; the roof is made of fireproof TPO (thermoplastic polyolefin); the deck is made with specially treated wood for fire resistance; and a fire suppression system in the back of the house sprayed fire retardant onto the vegetation.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
On Jan. 7, his entire street burned, but his house survived. Now, it serves as a blueprint for fire resistance. “We built it to be able to withstand a small fire,” Kovac said. “We never imagined our whole community would be erased.”
Kovac’s home is wrapped in fire-resistant fiber cement-panel siding. The green “living” roof is topped with grass and more than 4 inches of fire-resistant soil. The windows feature three panels of quarter-inch glass, which lessen the possibility of breakage in the face of scorching temperatures and protect the interior from radiant heat — one of the primary ways fires can enter a home.
Before fleeing the fire, Kovac loaded all his valuables into a room wrapped in concrete and equipped with a fire door capable of keeping out smoke and flames for three hours. He monitored the blaze from afar using security cameras. As the flames approached, he activated three sprinklers that sprayed fire retardant along the perimeter of the property, keeping the fire at bay.
Fire-proofing safeguards generally aren’t cheap. Fire-proof doors run from a few hundred dollars into the thousands, and fire-retardant sprinklers can cost tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the system. But Kovac also installed some DIY upgrades for next to nothing, including dollar-store mesh screens on all his vents to block embers from entering — another frequent cause of fires spreading.
Every improvement helps, but the harsh reality of the next 25 years is that across L.A., older structures that don’t comply with modern fire codes will burn. The collective hope is that by 2050, they’ll be replaced by fire-resistant homes, adding a herd-immunity defense to neighborhoods.
“The 1950s housing stock in the Palisades — smaller, older homes more vulnerable to fires — are all gone. I’m sad because I enjoyed the texture they brought, but whenever one burned, it made it likelier that the home next to it would also burn,” he said. “Now there’s a clean slate, so the neighborhood we build next will be more fire-resilient.”
The front garden at Michael Kovac’s home is filled with succulents and native plants and covered in volcanic rocks instead of mulch.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
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Ken Calligar has the same hope.
“The housing replacement cycle is slow. It upgrades every 50 years or so, with 2% of homes being replaced per year,” said Calligar, the chief executive of resilient building company RSG 3-D. “But large-scale incidents like fires or earthquakes are an opportunity for a migration to a better system.”
Calligar’s company creates insulated concrete panels that are made with fire-retardant foam sandwiched between two wire-mesh faces, which are, in turn, wrapped in concrete.
The future of fire mitigation, he said, boils down to building with non-combustible materials.
“In California, 98% of homes have wood frames. All those homeowners have a future tragedy on their hands,” he added. “You can’t knock down all of California and start new, but you can mitigate portfolio damages by making new parts of the portfolio better.”
In addition, Calliger said, “By 2050, Californians should have a fire-proof place to store their assets in case of a fire. That way, you at least have something to get back to.”
Some home builders and designers are offering fire-resilient designs as demand continues to grow in the wake of the fires. KB Home recently unveiled a 64-home fire-resilient community in Escondido equipped with covered gutters, non-combustible siding and defensible space. The Santa Monica-based architectural firm SweisKloss offers fire-rated glazes and foam-retardant sprayers on its custom-built designs. By 2050, experts say, the vast majority of home builders will offer fire-resistant homes.
There’s a reason so many California homes are built with wood: It’s relatively cheap. There are plenty of futuristic building materials — including graphene, hempcrete and self-healing concrete, which is capable of repairing its own cracks after damage — but they’re not cost-efficient for most home buyers. Even traditional concrete, which stands up to the elements better than wood, runs roughly 20%-50% more than wood for home building, and building a fire-resistant home adds tens of thousands of dollars to the building cost, according to most experts.
For Daniel López-Pérez, the solution is a return to wood. Mass timber, specifically.
In addition to being a professor of architecture at the University of San Diego and a futurist, López-Pérez is the founder of Polyhaus, a home-building startup that says it can assemble a house in three days. To prove it, he put together a small prototype in his La Jolla backyard over a weekend in February. The 540-square-foot ADU is wrapped in 60 mass timber panels made of three 1.5-inch layers of plywood sealed together.
With traditional wood construction, the wood, studs and insulation leave plenty of room for oxygen, which fuels fires. With mass timber, the three layers are sealed with no air gaps, making them much more fire-resistant. When exposed to fire, the mass timber charcoals and burns a half-inch every hour — so a 4.5-inch panel would last six or seven hours before fully burning, he said.
The 540-square-foot Polyhaus ADU was assembled over a weekend in Daniel López-Pérez’s back yard.
(Daniel López-Pérez)
“It’s like in forest fires where big, old-growth trees survive by charcoaling. The exterior chars, but the inside survives.”
Mass timber is a new trend in fire-proofing; in this year alone, there are multipleconferences across the country dedicated to the engineered wood.
Lever Architecture, a firm with offices in Portland, Ore., and L.A., has helped pioneer the use of mass timber in the U.S. Among Lever’s projects are mass timber buildings for Adidas and the Oregon Conservation Center in Portland — and a mixed-use office/retail building at 843 N. Spring St. in Chinatown.
Though his backyard prototype is his only model so far, Polyhaus has been flooded with inquiries after the January fires. He’s been telling customers that he can put a unit up in six weeks from start to finish, with 540-square-foot units running $300,000 all-in.
For López-Pérez, the future is also about using new technology, such as the robotic arms that assemble panels, to get more out of the stuff we’re already using.
“By 2050, we’ll be mixing ancestral materials with high-tech solutions,” he said. “Think Star Wars: a lightsaber in a cave.”
In the meantime, he suggests that instead of tearing down the 1950s tinderbox houses strewn across L.A.’s fire-prone hills, we should tack mass timber panels onto their exterior or interior to give firefighters hours, instead of minutes, to try to save homes once they catch on fire.::
Mass timber is one of multiple approaches that would make Brian Fennessy’s job easier. Fennessy, who serves as fire chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, has been fighting wildfires for 47 years. But over the last few decades, as blazes penetrate deeper into cities, he’s dealing with a different kind of problem: urban conflagrations.
Wildfires burn forests or brush, but urban conflagrations are fires that burn through cities. They’re becoming more common, and the toxic fumes released when homes burn present new dangers to his squad. “These are typically wind-driven fires, and they’re driving smoke into the lungs of firefighters,” he said. “We do blood draws, and early testing shows higher levels of heavy metal.”
Firefighters have a 14% higher chance of dying from cancer than the general population, according to a 2024 study, and the disease was responsible for 66% of career firefighter line-of-duty deaths from 2002 to 2019.
He hopes 2050 brings more safety precautions for his team, such as personal respirators for every firefighter and fleets of trucks that share their location in real time for better communication between departments, and he imagines fleets of drones flying alongside firefighting aircraft.
He’s also optimistic about funding and said he’s never seen so much legislative interest in putting money toward fire services as he has in the wake of the January fires. The Los Angeles Fire Department is one of the few city departments poised to gain new hires under Mayor Karen Bass’ $14-billion spending plan released in April, which proposed adding 227 fire department jobs while cutting 2,700 jobs in other departments.
A few weeks after the January fires, a California Assembly bill was introduced to explore the use of autonomous helicopters to fight fires. The choppers, including Black Hawk helicopters traditionally used for military operations, can be remotely programmed to take off, find fires and drop water where it’s needed. By 2050, experts hope firefighting stations will have entire fleets at their disposal to limit risk to pilots during shaky weather conditions.
In March, Muon Space launched a low-orbit satellite designed to detect wildfires early. By 2030, the company expects to have a fleet of 50 satellites circling the globe.
“The next few years are a pivotal moment for both fire services and citizens,” Fennessy said. “We have to get it right.”
Over the last century, L.A.’s love affair with the single-family home has created a suburban sprawl of epic proportions.
Three bedrooms. A white-picket fence. A square of grass for the barbecue.
But for many, the dream of home ownership will never be realized. Home prices have soared, wages haven’t kept pace, and more than half of L.A. residents rent their home. What’s more, the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades earlier this year destroyed thousands of homes, sending droves of homeowners scrambling back into the rental market.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
The Los Angeles City Council has given final approval to a sweeping rezoning plan to meet state-mandated housing goals, clearing the path for an additional 255,000 homes to be built. But single-family zones will be left largely untouched; the new housing will be developed along commercial corridors and existing dense residential neighborhoods. In the meantime, some municipalities are fighting the state’s housing mandates.
A two-story ADU shares a lot with a 1916 Craftsman bungalow.
(Yoshi Makino)
Market fluctuations and legislative uncertainty make predictions challenging. But some observers believe that by 2050, the fate of L.A.’s housing stock will be decided by one of two competing ideologies:
One of them is associated with many corporate landlords and investment firms, which buy up increasing shares of homes and rent them out to tenants. If they prevail, it’s likely that 2050 will look the same as it does now, only the chasm between the rich and the poor will grow. Home prices will keep rising, as will L.A.’s percentage of renters, according to Tiena Johnson Hall, general manager of the L.A. Housing Department.
The other view comes from a coalition of policymakers, nonprofits and aspiring homeowners who are hoping for a future where L.A.’s homes are within reach of its working class, and properties are owned by the people who live in them.
Their shared vision looks like this: Denser neighborhoods. Smaller homes, some modular or 3-D-printed. Properties co-owned by friend groups instead of just families. ADUs in backyards across the city, many of them separated from their original properties and bought and sold as separate homes.
L.A. County Assessor Jeff Prang, who points out that people commute to L.A. from Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Lancaster and Riverside, believes people will start moving closer to the city.
“People don’t want to live 40 miles away from L.A. and slog through two hours of traffic every day. It affects their quality of life,” Prang said. “The answer is to increase density, upzone areas and allow multifamily housing.”
But he doesn’t see the battle between the state and local governments (and HOAs that hope to keep things the way they are) ending any time soon.
The Burbank Housing Corp. held an open house to show an affordable housing project called the Fairview Cottages in Burbank. There are three single-family homes on the property.
(Raul Roa / Los Angeles Times)
Sacramento has a few tools at its disposal, including what is colloquially known as builder’s remedy, a penalty for cities that don’t adequately plan for California’s inevitable population increase. California cities are required to produce a housing plan every eight years that brings zoning for additional housing. If they fall far enough behind on that plan, developers in those cities can essentially ignore local zoning restrictions and build whatever they want, as long as the project includes a handful of affordable housing units.
A handful of cities have fallen behind on their plans, and developers capitalized, getting the green light for high-density projects that wouldn’t be approved otherwise.
Currently, housing element laws only require cities to plan and zone for additional housing. But by 2050, the state could go further, forcing cities to permit and encourage housing construction and punishing those that don’t.
A drone shot shows a two-story ADU, which rests an inch from a 1920s bungalow and five feet from a 1990s duplex and a few feet from a dingbat apartment to the south.
(Steve King Architectural Imaging)
The most important tool for shaping the future of L.A. housing may very well be Senate Bill 9, which makes it easier for California homeowners and developers to add density by splitting single-family lots in half and building duplexes, townhouses and ADUs.
Thanks to a handful of bills that make ADUs easier and faster to build, Prang said ADU applications have skyrocketed since the law passed in 2021, and his office spends around 40% of its time processing them. Many applications this year have come from fire victims looking to build ADUs quickly to live in while they rebuild their homes.
Today, building takes time. There are a dozen governmental agencies involved, and projects get mired in red tape. But Prang said by 2050, he expects there to be a single portal that consolidates all the applications and checkpoints required, so new developments can be green-lit in weeks or months, not years.
L.A., where 72% of residential land is zoned for single-family use, is also looking to Measure ULA to help mitigate its housing woes. The measure, which took affect in 2023 and brings a transfer tax to property sales above $5 million, has already raised more than $660 million for housing and homelessness initiatives.
It’s a polarizing policy. A recent analysis from UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies — titled “The Unintended Consequences of Measure ULA” — suggests the tax has chilled a once-robust market in L.A., while sales above $5 million have remained steady in other markets across L.A. County not affected by the tax. But by 2050, Measure ULA will likely have raised tens of billions of dollars — an unprecedented amount of cash that, if used effectively, has the potential to solve many of the cities housing woes.
“We’ll use those funds to bring housing to market faster and look at creative models for home-ownership — things we haven’t been able to do for lack of funding,” said Johnson Hall, whose Housing Department oversees Measure ULA.
Three- and four-bedroom townhomes mix with single-family homes in the background in Yorba Linda.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Other cities are grabbing our youth. Seattle and Denver offer more affordable homes with walkable amenities,” Johnson Hall said. “Our economy is dependent on giving those 20- to 30-somethings a reason to stay here.”
Real estate agent Christopher Stanley is all too familiar with L.A.’s grueling application process for building, rebuilding, or even remodeling. He specializes in tenancy-in-common properties, a form of possession where residents share ownership of a property.
The TIC model often comes in the form of developers replacing single-family homes with townhouses, splitting one house into two. Stanley said there’s plenty of demand for it, since the price-per-square-foot typically runs about 25% less than single-family properties, but the lengthy permitting process makes it unattractive for many developers.
By 2050, Stanley said AI could make the permitting process so quick and painless that not only house-flippers and developers, but also individual homeowners, could add density to their neighborhoods. Single-family homes become duplexes. Empty backyards become lots for ADUs.
A 650-square-foot ADU behind an 1890 home in Los Angeles.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s the easiest way to get affordable housing stock onto the market,” Stanley said. “But changing the laws will be crucial.”
For Stanley, the biggest boost would come if more cities allow ADUs to be sold as separate properties, not just rented — a trend that has already caught on up the coast in Oregon and Washington. California’s Assembly Bill 1033 allows such sales, but cities have to opt-in. San Jose was the first in 2024, and a few Bay Area cities followed. But Southern California, a region that has grown accustomed to the single-family lifestyle, hasn’t been as eager to adopt the idea.
“If we want more people owning their homes instead of renting, we have to make ADUs something you can buy,” he said.
In 2016, Stanley said, he sold a 900-square-foot tiny house in Boyle Heights to a 31-year-old for $375,000. The buyer used it as a way into the market, and three years later, they sold it for $515,000 and upgraded to a bigger mid-century home in Mount Washington. He said if prices and wages continue the way they’re going, ADUs and tiny homes will be the easiest way into the market for young people.
“They’re a jumping off point. It’s the quickest way to stop paying your landlord’s mortgage and start paying your own,” he said. “It’ll be happening a lot more by 2050.”
Homes won’t be the only things changing in 25 years. The people filling them will, too.
The 20th century saw the rise of the nuclear family, and most homes were bought and occupied by parents and their children. But these days, young people are waiting to get married — if they’re getting married at all — and not having as many children.
Combine that with their inability to afford a home in the first place, and we’ll soon see the rise of co-buying: Groups of friends going in on a Silver Lake bungalow. Two families splitting an Eagle Rock Craftsman. Parents purchasing a Mid-City property along with their adult children.
An aerial view of Valencia. A vertical city may tempt people from the suburbs who no longer have the dream of a single-family home.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Matt Holmes is the chief executive of CoBuy, a company that helps groups of people co-buy homes and collectively manage the property. He said California is its biggest market due to the price of homes outpacing wages across the state.
The company’s data don’t go back that far, but in 2023, a CoBuy survey found that roughly 27% of U.S. home sales were bought by co-buyers — groups beyond married couples. The same year, data from the National Assn. of Realtors showed that co-buyers made up a bit less of the market for first-time homebuyers at roughly 19%. Either way, it’s a big hike from a few decades ago, when the trend was virtually nonexistent.
“It’s an expedited path to home ownership, and it helps people gain access to a broader swath of housing stock beyond just starter homes,” he said.
Holmes co-founded the company with his mother a decade ago. Over the last year and a half, he said, friend groups have taken over family groups as his biggest clients.
If neighborhoods get denser, homes get smaller, and shared homes become more common, one factor often associated with single-family homes will be up in the air. What happens when all you can afford is a cramped 500-square-foot ADU? Or the grassy backyard where your dog used to run around is replaced by a two-story townhouse?
Angelenos will probably spend more time outside the house in 2050. As a result, parks and communal spaces will become not just a want, but a need.
An ADU in South Pasadena.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“In Los Angeles, our parks include everything from neighborhood recreation centers and open spaces to theaters, beaches, lakes, aquariums, equestrian centers, golf courses, historic homes and gardens. They are the shared treasures of our community,” said Lindsey Kozberg, executive director of the Los Angeles Parks Foundation, a nonprofit that formed in 2008 as a response to budget cuts to park programs during the recession.
Kozberg said parks funding could be in danger once again, given the nearly $1-billion budget shortfall the city is facing. If the trend continues, by 2050, it’ll likely require a mix of philanthropic funding and community partnerships to make sure every Angeleno has a safe and accessible park to visit.
“There are more than 500 parks across the city alone, and they encompass a wild and wonderful collection of spaces,” she said.
By 2050, the city could have even more by simply rethinking spaces that already exist. Kozberg suggested converting neighborhood schoolyards into public parks on nights and weekends — a cost-effective option since the city wouldn’t have to build anything new.
Jordan Lang, president of McCourt Partners, said gathering places have become so much more important in the age of the internet, and investing in them is vital to the growth of the city.
Lang serves as president of Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies, the limited liability company behind the controversial proposed gondola system that would take baseball fans from Union Station to Dodger Stadium. The aerial transportation hasn’t been approved, as the environmental impact report needs sign-off from a handful of government agencies.
“This is a test case of what we can do in L.A.,” Lang said, adding that it would also serve nearby Elysian Park, getting people out of their cars and into green spaces.
By 2050, he envisions massive, well-funded parks and public spaces filled with people both day and night. Such spaces will be inviting, constantly programmed with community events, and easy to get to via public transportation.
“L.A. is an incredible place to live,” Lang said. “People will keep moving here. We need to create a city that makes them want to stay.”
When presented with the problem in the past, builders and developers were able to turn lima bean fields and orange groves into row after row of homes. But the vast swaths of open land on the city’s fringes vanished decades ago.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development has said that Los Angeles should add 456,643 new units by 2029 — a number that has generated controversy. To meet those demands, the city will have to create new ways of growing its inventory — strategies that will allow the city’s established communities to welcome many more residents than they are able to accommodate now.
The big questions are, as always: where, how and how much new housing should be built.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
The Times reached out to two sources with scenarios that challenge conventional thinking — two plans for the San Fernando Valley, which, half a century ago, provided the space for much of the city’s growth.
The first scenario proposes awakening a sleepy commercial corridor with low- and mid-rise apartments. The other focuses on 20 miles of vacant land — below electrical transmission lines that snake through the Valley.
Reseda reimagined
Like many L.A. suburbs, Reseda began as a small town center surrounded by fields.
As the West San Fernando Valley developed after World War II, those fields filled with an expansive grid of single-family homes.
Vestiges of Reseda’s small-town beginning still survive in block after block of single-story businesses like the Traders pawnbroker and jewelry store at the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way.
But snapshots of the future have begun to appear. A few blocks to the north, a five-story apartment building rises between a Thai restaurant and a used car lot.
How many more of those would be needed for Reseda, or any similar community, to contribute its fair share of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation for the city of Los Angeles?
The Times posed that question to Los Angeles-based policy think tank Center for Pacific Urbanism, which has spent years examining the causes of and solutions for L.A.’s housing shortage.
Its recent research created an equity scale to calculate targets for individual communities based on five factors: affordability, environmental quality, transit availability, past down-zoning and socioeconomics.
In the modern era, housing construction across Los Angeles peaked twice, once before the Great Depression and then in a postwar boom.
Reseda was a part of the postwar boom. Initially dominated by single-family homes, growth then shifted to medium-size apartment buildings. Construction of both types fell off precipitously by 1990, as anti-development sentiments gained ascendance. A tiny sliver representing accessory dwelling units has appeared in the last decade, part of a shift in housing topology that is just beginning.
The Reseda-West Van Nuys community falls near the middle of the city’s 34 community planning areas and will need 13,885 new housing units to meet its target. At one extreme, 14,000 single-family homes would meet the need. At the other it would take 1,400 10-unit buildings. The first is unfeasible — there isn’t that much land — and the other, a new high-rise canyon, would be unpalatable.
The Pacific Urbanism staff imagined a hybrid model that, they believe, would allow Reseda to achieve its goal with the least amount of community angst.
The plan looks a lot like a return to the building patterns of the 1970s but with a few significant differences. Like then, more than half of the new units would be provided in large and medium-size apartment buildings. But in place of single-family home construction that was already dwindling, almost a quarter of the new units would come from new housing types that did not exist then — accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and the conversion of existing commercial space into housing.
Above all, the pace of development would have to increase precipitously to reach the state’s 2029 goal.
The reimagined Reseda includes 37 buildings of 100 or more units, 73 medium-size buildings of 25 to 99 units and 484 duplex and small apartment buildings of up to 24 units. There would be 1,854 ADUs, including more than 1,000 that have already been built or permitted since 2020 and more than a thousand units in commercial conversions.
Here’s how the Pacific Urbanism hybrid model could work
The reimagined Reseda includes 37 buildings of 100 or more units, 73 medium-size buildings of 25 to 99 units and 484 duplex and small apartment buildings of up to 24 units. There would be 1,854 ADUs, including more than 1,000 that have already been built or permitted since 2020 and more than a thousand units in commercial conversions.
Existing
Permitted
Projected
The low-density area could see a variety of new building sizes with the largest added along the main corridors
At the moment the majority of the structures are one to four unit properties.
Single-family
2-24 units
25-99
100+
City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Assessor and Pacific Urbanism
A similar result could be achieved with a different mix of housing types. But Dario Alvarez, Pacific Urbanism president, says that his organization’s hybrid scenario, based on building trends across the city, is the most feasible, if those trends persist.
Some progress has been made. Since 2019, city law has given single-family homeowners a right to build second units on their property. A raft of recent state laws provides incentives to builders and homeowners such as increased density for affordable housing and up to four units on single-family lots. And Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Order 1 streamlined the approval of affordable projects.
Those changes have helped, but don’t “get us anywhere close to what’s needed to meet the target, much less in an equitable way where all communities contribute a fair share,” Alvarez said. According to his calculations, the current rate of construction in Reseda would have to increase 16-fold to meet the target by 2029.
Pacific Urbanism proposes upgrading the zoning from medium- to high-density near the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way and creating medium-density zones to replace much of what is now single-family residences and small businesses.
A review of the Reseda-West Van Nuys community plan, including the zoning, is underway and is in the consulting phase. It’s expected to be complete in a year or two.
Considering the fight that single-family communities generally put up to preserve the character of what has come to represent the “American Dream” — and the single family home and yard —there’s no guarantee those changes will be made. The state housing mandate requires the city only to create a pathway to the housing targets by adjusting zoning that is currently too restrictive.
Bury the transmission lines; build on top
If you’ve spent time in the San Fernando Valley, it would be easy to view the overhead electrical transmission lines that stretch for more than 20 miles simply as essential wallpaper of modern living. The lines help ensure that 1.6 million households and businesses across the city can turn on the lights through a mostly uninterrupted band of 100- to 200-foot tall towers on a 150-foot wide strip of land.
This 20.5-mile path of electrical transmission lines in the Valley could fit 23,000 housing units
California Energy Commission, City of Los Angeles
But what if that land, which travels through the heart of Northridge, Granada Hills, Mission Hills, Arleta and North Hollywood, could continue to power Los Angeles while also meeting the housing needs of tens of thousands of people? The idea is almost too simple: Put the transmission lines underground and homes on top.
We wish such an innovative concept was ours. But it comes from Jingyi “Jessy” Qiu, a Boston-based landscape designer who conceived of the idea while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design a few years ago. In Qiu’s vision, the project reclaims dead space in the middle of bustling neighborhoods for the public good.
Qiu calls the right of way beneath the power lines “a land of opportunity to solve the housing problem in L.A.”
The project ticks many of the boxes for what large, sustainable development in Los Angeles can be.
It’s climate-friendly. As the region becomes hotter and drier, taking down overhead power lines lowers the risk of sparking wildfires. And by building in established communities, new residents will be able to reduce their commutes for work and shopping, while existing residents will have new offices and stores nearby.
There’s a way to pay for it. At one point, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns the lines and the land underneath, told us it would cost roughly $100 million to put the lines underground. More recently, the public utility said it couldn’t provide a price tag, and that, although possible, undergrounding transmission lines is rare, complex and expensive. An optimist would respond that revenue from the new development could cover much of, if not all, the cost, especially since the land itself would be free.
It’s a lot of housing. By Qiu’s calculations, 23,000 homes could be built along the 20 miles.
Qiu modeled the project through designing superblocks that could be repeated end to end throughout each community.
Courtesy Jingyi “Jessy” Qiu
Neighborhoods and topography along the route differ and so does the planned development. In North Hollywood, a denser mix of small apartments, mixed-use complexes and single-family homes with casitas fills the flatlands. In Granada Hills, lower densities fit in the highlands. In Northridge, student housing is prioritized near the state university.
Today, people who live near the power lines complain of dust, litter and loitering, and worry about wires falling in high winds and storms.
It’s not that the right of way under the power lines now is unkempt. Many nursery businesses fill the land underneath. Landscaping is maintained. It’s just that, as one neighbor put it, barren land attracts negative activity. Of all things, the right of way is dark at night.
Besides housing, the development opens up space to the broader community. There’s room for continued nursery operations while adding parks, courtyards and shared gardens. Qiu even proposes repurposing some existing transmission towers, especially in the hills, into platforms for bird-watching.
How one Granada Hills block might look
Courtesy Jingyi “Jessy” Qiu
One fear, of course, is adding this many new homes to an existing area could cause congestion. But the 20-mile stretch of homes ensures that traffic would be spread out. Superblocks could tie into the current road network and add parking while also providing long and unified bike and pedestrian infrastructure — not to mention the centralized open and community space — to neighborhoods lacking it now.
A future Los Angeles that takes its housing and climate challenges seriously will have to look for opportunities to make better use of space. Fitting 23,000 new homes into the Valley by redeveloping a land now used for a relic hits that mark.
MOJAVE, Calif. — One of the largest solar and battery power plants in the United States is now supplying Los Angeles and Glendale from Kern County.
Local leaders and clean energy experts gathered Tuesday beneath a blazing desert sun to mark the initiation of full production from 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries that make up the Eland solar-plus-storage electricity project. It’s as large as 13 Dodger stadiums, parking lots included, and will generate 7% of the electricity for all of the city of Los Angeles, much of it at a record-low price.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s biggest solar and battery storage plant, the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County on Nov. 25, 2024, near California City, Calif.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“This is the largest project for LADWP when it comes to solar and battery, and that is a huge accomplishment for us because it takes away the fear of doing more of these — and we need about 10 more of these to hit our goals,” said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The city has committed to 100% clean energy by 2035.
With Eland’s power now flowing through its grid, L.A. is nearly two-thirds of the way there: The project has pushed the city’s total supply to 64% clean energy, Quiñones said. Other sources of power in L.A.’s portfolio include hydrogen, natural gas, biomass, geothermal, nuclear and coal, which the city aims to decommission by the end of this year.
The $2-billion Eland project was developed by Arizona-based Arevon Energy and will also supply solar electricity to Glendale Water and Power.
While Eland’s sprawling solar panels are eye-catching, it’s the unassuming batteries — which look like rows of large white shipping containers — that are the real crux of the project.
Battery energy storage units at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s biggest solar and battery storage plant, the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Locating batteries together with solar power or wind allows them to charge up on the clean energy, then feed it back to people’s homes after the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. At the end of 2023, there were close to 469 such “hybrid” clean power plants in the U.S., according to a recent report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In California, nearly every new solar project waiting to be connected to the electrical grid included batteries.
All scenarios for effectively addressing climate change call for using storage.
The Eland project is also coming online as the Trump administration is slowing the transition to clean energy with dozens of measures that favor electricity made from coal and natural gas. The president’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill ends federal tax credits for wind and solar within the next two years.
But in California and a number of other states where addressing climate change is mandated, the transition is likely to continue.
“I spent 12 years in D.C., and to be home, where this is not a controversy — there’s no controversy about climate goals and solar and renewables — it’s an exciting day,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told The Times.
Eland “represents a significant milestone toward reaching our climate goals, and it also just reinforces our stature of leading the country in terms of renewables and moving toward clean energy goals,” Bass said.
Kevin Smith, chief executive officer of Arevon, said solar paired with battery storage is currently the cheapest source of energy “with or without tax credits,” and the fastest to deliver to market. The Eland project took about two years to complete once the first shovel was in the ground, compared with nuclear or natural gas projects that can take several years longer, he said.
Smith also cited the sudden increase in forecast need for electricity for data centers. “If we don’t meet that demand, that means the AI future is going to be won by the Chinese, because they’re building more solar in a month than we build in a couple of years.”
Two-thirds of all the renewable energy installed globally in 2024 was in China, which strongly encourages the buildout.
In the U.S. now, such projects must either begin construction by next July or be placed into service by the end of 2027 in order to receive a federal tax credit.
But much of Eland’s success will depend on DWP, which has committed to a 25-year, $1.5-billion contract for its power, with options to buy the facility outright as soon as Year 10, according to company officials.
Eland marks DWP’s first utility-scale integrated solar and battery project. Its two facilities combined — the first phase opened last year — will generate 758 megawatts of solar power and store up to 1,200 megawatt-hours of energy, all of which can be dispatched during peak demand in the evening or nighttime.
DWP officials said Eland is the lowest-cost project in their portfolio, with the cost of generation and storage averaging about 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The energy is expected to be neutral or even a cost savings for ratepayers, company officials said.
Workers install solar panels for the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
That’s partly because DWP was able to contract for the power prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing supply chain issues, and well before new market uncertainties related to tariffs, according to Quiñones.
Experts say such projects can’t come soon enough. Last year was Earth’s hottest on record, with rising global temperatures driven primarily by fossil fuel emissions. The Eland project alone is expected to avoid emissions equivalent to about 120,000 cars, according to company officials.
“When the City of Los Angeles first pursued renewable power some twenty years ago, it did so on moral grounds. It was ‘the right thing to do’ to reduce the City’s greenhouse gas emissions,” Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Resolve, said in a statement. “Flash forward to today — and solar power is now the right thing to do economically, producing electricity at a cost lower than that of coal, natural gas and nuclear power.”
About 75% of the state’s energy on Tuesday came from renewables, according to the California Independent System Operator.
With Eland, DWP is well on track to meet its 100% clean energy goal by 2035, although Quiñones said the last 3% to 4% will be the most challenging.
But a project like Eland — the largest DWP has ever done — “demonstrates our commitment toward our renewable and clean energy transition,” Quiñones said. “We’re not backing down from that.”
