Mario Canel met his wife inside the apartment where he’s lived for the last 33 years. Canel, a house painter, was at the Silver Lake complex off of Sunset Boulevard on a job, but he and his customer quickly connected over their shared Guatemalan roots. It wasn’t long before Mario and Sabina married, and her […]
There was a jarring reality check in the Legislature last week for interest groups plotting to change Proposition 13 and raise property taxes on major businesses. The reality is that raising any taxes will be very hard to sell voters. The plotters are led by some powerful public employee unions, including those representing teachers and […]
Home builders are pulling back from new construction, the opposite of what economists say is needed to ease California’s housing affordability crisis. In the first six months of 2019, builders gained approval for 51,178 new homes in California, nearly 20% fewer than the same period a year earlier. That puts the state on track for […]
If you know anything about solar and wind farms, you know they’re good at generating electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and not so good at other times. Batteries can pick up the slack for a few hours. But they’re less useful when the sun and wind disappear for days […]
Summer is here and the electronic hum of scooters is filling city sidewalks all over the world. From L.A. to D.C., many American downtowns have hit their one-year anniversary with scooters, and European capitals have begun to allow them. The benefit is obvious: Scooters provide on-demand, affordable mobility to any able-bodied smartphone user. As the […]
A majority of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday saw the justification offered by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census for exactly what it was: a lie, though the court was more delicate in its terminology. Ross has said repeatedly that government needs to ask […]
For years, critics of California’s cap-and-trade program have lambasted it as a government slush fund. They say that politicians are able to dip into it to fund their pet projects or raid it to fill the shortfall of the moment — as long as they can assert a mildly credible connection between the spending and […]
Fourteen Democratic presidential contenders blew into San Francisco last weekend to woo the delegates to the state Democratic Party convention and whisper sweet nothings to California voters. They promised to give us the time and attention we deserve, now that we’ve moved our primary up into early March. And then they were gone — headed […]
Austin Yi said he couldn’t take it anymore. Noise from the tents along Shatto Place rose to his third-floor Koreatown apartment at night: yelling, screaming, the clanging of tools as people repaired bikes. When he couldn’t drown out the racket with white noise, the 27-year-old and his wife would drag blankets into the hallway to […]
The sluggish Southern California housing market showed signs of perking up in April, as prices ticked up one month after they fell for the first time since 2012. In a report released Wednesday, real estate firm CoreLogic said the six-county median sales price climbed 1.4% from a year earlier to $527,500. Sales, meanwhile, were up […]
An effort to temporarily protect California tenants from steep rent hikes cleared a major hurdle in the Legislature on Wednesday, even as other measures meant to insulate renters from the state’s rising housing costs continue to fall short at the Capitol. A bill to cap annual rent hikes statewide at 7% plus inflation cleared the […]
Earlier this spring, residents of a San Francisco waterfront neighborhood put up a plea on GoFundMe, seeking to raise $100,000 to file a lawsuit under one of California’s landmark environmental laws. The fundraiser, which surpassed its goal, wasn’t intended to fight a toxic waste facility or industrial warehouse. Instead, residents plan to sue to stop […]
The 2019 report, prepared by Beacon Economics, shows that creative industries throughout the state support 2.6 million jobs, $227.8 billion in labor income and $604.9 billion in annual economic output. One million of those jobs represent workers directly employed in creative industries and the other 1.6 million are jobs indirectly generated by those sectors. When […]
As California has rebounded from the Great Recession, the Imperial Valley has largely defied attempts to expand its economy beyond seasonal farming and government work, and the county continues to suffer the highest unemployment rates in the state. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest five-year estimate, Imperial County’s unemployment rate stands at 16% — […]
For the first time in 15 years, the number of would-be freshmen applying to the University of California has dropped, the first sign that a national trend of declining college enrollment could be hitting the West Coast. Applications for the coming school year dipped by 3% to 176,530, according to preliminary UC data released Tuesday. […]