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Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Let's imagine a future that works for all of us
When L.A. Times staffers started to assemble a Future of L.A. project last year, we wondered which topics might deserve a deep dive. Housing? Transportation? Entertainment and popular culture? Is L.A. broken, as some say, or could it become a model of urban sustainability? Or something in between? That's a lot to bite off in a sprawling metropolis with millions of people and thousands of opinions about how we might navigate the next few decades. Then Los Angeles was beset by fire, and the Times staff did what it does best, swarming to cover the biggest news story in the city's history. The future would have to wait. But not for long. As Angelenos mourned their dead and sought recovery assistance and cleared the debris of what used to be their homes, it became increasingly clear that the fires left L.A. with an imperative: to pause and think. So we asked an array of experts and our readers and ourselves: What can we —should we — do in the next 25 or 30 or40 years to make our city a sustainable and equitable home for everyone? In these pages you will hear from community leaders about their hopes for Los Angeles, and read about how we might might build the housing we so desperately need. You'll encounter a landscape architect who is helping to build 'sponge cities' and whether they might be a solution for flooding problems in Southern California. You'll learn about future possibilities for fire mitigation — and much more. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik reminds us that Los Angeles and California are 'the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs. ... That has been true since the vision of a land of gold — El Dorado — drew the Spanish conquistadors to these shores. 'The world wishes to know what L.A. and California are, and where they are headed.' So let's imagine a future that works for all of us. It's imperative. — Alice Short
Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Fires and floods have plagued L.A. forever; brilliant marketing lured millions of newcomers anyway
From the book 'GOLDEN STATE: The Making of California' by Michael Hiltzik. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hiltzik. Published on February 18, 2025, by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission. The writer Morrow Mayo seldom minced words, especially when his subject was the gaudy, tawdry city where he made his home in the 1920s and 1930s. 'Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city,' he wrote. 'On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. ... Here is a spirit of boost which has become a fetish, an obsession, a mania. Everything else is secondary to it.' Mayo's acerbic book 'Los Angeles' appeared in 1933, when the city was in its second decade as the dominant metropolis of California; in the 1920 census, its population had finally exceeded that of San Francisco, which had been the center of the state's economic and political life since the Gold Rush and the granting of statehood. That Los Angeles would someday overtake San Francisco in prominence was in some respects preordained. San Francisco is geographically constrained, perched at the end of a narrow peninsula like a fingernail, with water on three sides. Consequently, its population has never reached even 900,000. Los Angeles lies nestled within a vast basin stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountain ranges on the north and northwest, some 3½ million acres of mostly undeveloped territory capable, in the fullness of time, of supporting a population of more than 13 million. Yet seen from another perspective, nothing could be as surprising as the birth in that particular location of a gigantic, vigorous megalopolis. The Los Angeles Basin is a place seemingly devoid of the resources needed to sustain life and commerce. For most of its history, it has had no reliable supply of water, no port. The best natural harbor in Southern California is San Diego's, and the nearest shore is a 30-mile trek from the pueblo that the Spaniards of Mexico established as their civic seat early in the 19th century. Its rivers are dry gulches for most of the year; Mark Twain is said to have quipped that he once fell into a Southern California river and 'come out all dusty.' The Los Angeles that became the queen city of California did not grow naturally, but had to be 'conjured into existence.' Almost everything that made it habitable needed to be imported. Its water came from a river valley 200 miles away and its electricity from a river canyon 300 miles to the east, brought to the city via systems that are titanic marvels of human engineering. It is wrong to think of the basin as a void to be filled up; better to view it as a gigantic canvas on which its settlers painted a new, transformative future for their state. For decades, the economy of the region stretching south of the Tehachapi range stagnated. In 1850, while San Francisco was basking in the stupendous influx of people and wealth produced by the Gold Rush, Los Angeles was still barely a village, with 1,610 inhabitants recorded in the 1850 census and 'no newspaper, hospital, public school, college, library, Protestant church, factory, bank, or public utility of any kind.' One-third of its residents could neither read nor write. With one exception, the Gold Rush left almost no trace of itself in the portion of California from Monterey south to the Mexican border. The exception was the Southern California cattle industry, which briefly prospered thanks to the gold miners' demand for beef. Yet in time, the cattle ranchers fell victim to the emergent boom-and-bust pattern of the Southern California economy. Beef prices were driven so high by the surge in demand that Mexican ranchers flooded the market with livestock, eroding what had been a Southern California monopoly; by 1855, the competition had sent prices plummeting by 75%. Then came a series of natural catastrophes, starting with punishing droughts in 1856 and 1860. They were followed perversely by torrential rains in 1861, which drowned hundreds of head. Yet another drought arrived in 1863, killing cattle by the tens of thousands; for years to come travelers in the south would be 'often startled by coming suddenly on a veritable Golgotha, a place of skulls, the long horns standing out in defiant attitude, as if protecting the fleshless bones.' The promotion of Southern California's Mediterranean climate took hold in the first decade after the Gold Rush and continued into the new century. Travel writers praised the region's moderate temperatures and lack of humidity — dry, but not too dry — and described its healthful effects as almost miraculous. 'The diseases of children prevalent elsewhere are unknown here,' reported Charles Dudley Warner, the co-author with Mark Twain of the 1873 novel 'The Gilded Age.' 'They cut their teeth without risk, and cholera infantum never visits them. Diseases of the bowels are practically unknown. ... Renal diseases are also wanting; disorders of the liver and kidneys, gout, and rheumatism, are not native. ... These facts are derived from medical practice.' Ben C. Truman, an East Coast transplant, compiled the death rates from all causes in American cities for his 1885 book 'Homes and Happiness in the Golden State of California' and found 37 deaths per thousand inhabitants in New Orleans; 24 in St. Louis, Boston and Chicago; and a mere 13 in Los Angeles. 'Fevers and diseases of the malarial character carry off about half of mankind, and diseases of the respiratory organs one-fourth,' he wrote. 'From such diseases many of the towns of California are remarkably free.' The German-born journalist Charles Nordhoff wrote glowingly of the regional climate's health-giving qualities for tuberculosis patients, describing it as the French Riviera's equal, lacking only the deluxe hospitality infrastructure of that renowned gathering place of the rich: 'You will not find ... tasteful pleasure-grounds or large, finely-laid-out places. Nature has done much; man has not, so far, helped her.' If he was trying to alert resort developers to the existence of a blank slate to be written on for great profit, he could hardly have done better In 1887, some 120,000 passengers were brought into Los Angeles by the Southern Pacific railroad, while the Santa Fe served the region with as many as four passenger trains a day. Tourists jammed hotels and boardinghouses, but they were not the only newcomers. The steady rise of land values attracted fortune seekers eyeing the prospect of making a killing in real estate as well as families with the simpler ambition of making new lives in the West. Between 1880 and 1890 the city's population nearly quintupled, from 11,000 to 50,000. Los Angeles 'suddenly changed from a very old city to a very young one.' In 1890, more than three-fourths of its residents had lived in the city for fewer than four years. Recounted travel writer H. Ellington Brook, 'Everybody that could find an office went into the real-estate business ... a crowd of speculators settled down upon Los Angeles like flies upon a bowl of sugar.' The railroads brought swarms of sharp operators who had already drained the Midwest of its potential for land fraud and detected on the West Coast a 'golden opportunity of the fakir and humbug and the man with the past that he wanted forgotten,' a municipal historian wrote. Thus was born Southern California's image as a place to start anew, especially among those with reason to shed memories of a previous life. To a great extent, the boom in real estate values was based on fiction. Los Angeles still had almost no industry to sustain its growing population — indeed, virtually no economic activity at all other than real estate speculation. Promoters established new townsites on every patch of vacant land, building hotels and laying down concrete sidewalks and community halls: 'A miniature city appeared, like a scene conjured up by Aladdin's lamp, where a few months ago the jack-rabbit sported and the coyote howled,' Brook wrote. Climate, romantic mythology, the lure of real estate wealth — all these factors set the stage for the greatest boom of all. Nearly 1.5 million new residents moved into Southern California between 1920 and 1930, an influx that was labeled 'the largest internal migration in the history of the American people,' and one that would not be exceeded until the postwar 1940s and 1950s. The explosive growth brought with it gimlet-eyed reassessments of what it had taken to bring Los Angeles to its newfound stature as reigning metropolis of the West.
Gulf Today
16-07-2025
- Health
- Gulf Today
Miller says Americans will live better lives without immigrants
Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service Stephen Miller, the front man for President Donald Trump's deportation campaign against immigrants, took to the airwaves the other day to explain why native-born Americans will just love living in a world cleansed of undocumented workers. "What would Los Angeles look like without illegal aliens?" he asked on Fox News. "Here's what it would look like: You would be able to see a doctor in the emergency room right away, no wait time, no problems. Your kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with. Classrooms would be half the size. Students who have special needs would get all the attention that they needed. ... There would be no fentanyl, there would be no drug deaths." Etc., etc. No one can dispute that the world Miller described on Fox would be a paradise on Earth. No waiting at the ER? School districts flush with cash? No drug deaths? But that doesn't obscure that pretty much every word Miller uttered was fiction. The gist of Miller's spiel — in fact, the worldview that he has been espousing for years — is that "illegal aliens" are responsible for all those ills, and exclusively responsible. It's nothing but a Trumpian fantasy. Let's take a look, starting with overcrowding at the ER. The issue has been the focus of numerous studies and surveys. Overwhelmingly, they conclude that undocumented immigration is irrelevant to ER overcrowding. In fact, immigrants generally and undocumented immigrants in particular are less likely to get their healthcare at the emergency room than native-born Americans. In California, according to a 2014 study from UCLA, "one in five US-born adults visits the ER annually, compared with roughly one in 10 undocumented adults — approximately half the rate of US-born residents." Among the reasons, explained Nadereh Pourat, the study's lead author and director of research at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, was fear of being asked to provide documents. The result is that undocumented individuals avoid seeking any healthcare until they become critically ill. The UCLA study found that undocumented immigrants' average number of doctor visits per year was lower than for other cohorts: 2.3 for children and 1.7 for adults, compared with 2.8 doctor visits for US-born children and 3.2 for adults. ER overcrowding is an issue of long standing in the US, but it's not the result of an influx of undocumented immigrants. It's due to a confluence of other factors, including the tendency of even insured patients to use the ER as a primary care center, presenting with complicated or chronic ailments for which ER medicine is not well-suited. While caseloads at emergency departments have surged, their capacities are shrinking. According to a 2007 report by the National Academy of Sciences, from 1993 to 2003 the US population grew by 12%, hospital admissions by 13% and ER visits by 26%. "Not only is (emergency department) volume increasing, but patients coming to the ED are older and sicker and require more complex and time-consuming workups and treatments," the report observed. "During this same period, the United States experienced a net loss of 703 hospitals, 198,000 hospital beds, and 425 hospital EDs, mainly in response to cost-cutting measures." Trump's immigration policies during his first term suppressed the use of public healthcare facilities by undocumented immigrants and their families. The key policy was the administration's tightening of the "public charge" rule, which applies to those seeking admission to the United States or hoping to upgrade their immigration status. The rule, which has been part of US immigration policy for more than a century, allowed immigration authorities to deny entry — or deny citizenship applications of green card holders — to anyone judged to become a recipient of public assistance such as welfare (today known chiefly as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) or other cash assistance programs. Until Trump, healthcare programs such as Medicaid, nutrition programs such as food stamps, and subsidized housing programs weren't part of the public charge test. Even before Trump implemented the change but after a draft version leaked out, clinics serving immigrant communities across California and nationwide detected a marked drop off in patients. A clinic on the edge of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that had been serving 12,000 patients, I reported in 2018, saw monthly patient enrollments fall by about one-third after Trump's 2016 election, and an additional 25% after the leak. President Joe Biden rescinded the Trump rule within weeks of taking office. Undocumented immigrants are sure to be less likely to access public healthcare services, such as those available at emergency rooms, as a result of Trump's rescinding "sensitive location" restrictions on immigration agents that had been in effect at least since 2011. That policy barred almost all immigration enforcement actions at schools, places of worship, funerals and weddings, public marches or rallies, and hospitals. Trump rescinded the policy on inauguration day in January. The goal was for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents "to make substantial efforts to avoid unnecessarily alarming local communities," agency officials stated. Today, as public shows of force and public raids by ICE have demonstrated, instilling alarm in local communities appears to be the goal. The change in the sensitive locations policy has prompted hospital and ER managers to establish formal procedures for staff confronted with the arrival of immigration agents.
Gulf Today
29-06-2025
- Health
- Gulf Today
CDC says COVID vaccine protects pregnant women
Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service Here's how one of the well-laid plans of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went blooey. Earlier this month, Kennedy dismantled the all-important Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and remade it into the spearhead for his anti-vaccination campaigns. The rejiggered committee met for the first time Wednesday. Unfortunately for Kennedy's goals, the very first presentation it heard from CDC scientists involved the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, particularly for pregnant women, infants and children. CDC studies found "no increased risk" that the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines caused adverse effects during pregnancy, Sarah Meyer, director of the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, said at the meeting, citing data from 28 analyses of 68,000 pregnant women. The data showed no increases in miscarriages, stillbirths, preterm births, major birth defects, neonatal ICU admissions, infant deaths, abnormal uterine bleeding or other pregnancy-related conditions. In fact, the CDC found that "maternal vaccination is the best proection against COVID-19 for pregnant women and infants less than six months of age," CDC immunologist Adam MacNeil told the panel. The COVID vaccines aren't approved for infants younger than six months, so maternal immunization is their only protection. That's important because Kennedy, on May 17, removed the vaccines from the recommended list for pregnant women and children. "It's common sense and it's good science" to remove the recommendation, Kennedy said in a 58-second video posted on X. "We're now one step closer to realising President Trump's promise to make America healthy again," Kennedy crowed, flanked by Marty Makary, the newly appointed commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Jay Bhattacharya, the newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health. Neither body plays a role in issuing vaccine recommendations for the government. That's the job of the CDC, which has been operating without a director, and which didn't have a representative on the video. Pediatric and obstetric organisations decried the decision, which ran counter to the findings of extensive research. "Clear benefits of maternal immunisation versus COVID in terms of dramatic reductions in maternal mortality and protecting the newborn infant ... has been detailed in the biomedical literature," vaccinologist Peter Hotez told me by email. I asked Kennedy through his agency's public information team for comment on the CDC presentation, but received no reply. On June 9, Kennedy fired all 17 members of ACIP of the immunization advisory committee and replaced them with eight handpicked members, a cadre that includes "antivaxxers, the antivax-adjacent, and the unqualified," as veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski noted. The COVID vaccines have been a leading target of anti-vaccine activists, including Kennedy, since they were introduced in 2021. They've been blamed for a host of purported health harms, most of which have been found by researchers to be largely imaginary. The anti-vaccine camp maintains that the vaccines weren't adequately studied before rolling them out to the general public and haven't been sufficiently monitored for adverse effects since then. The CDC officials' presentation debunked almost all these claims. Indeed, Meyer said, the COVID-19 vaccines have been subjected to "the most extensive safety monitoring programe in US history." The CDC has investigated more than 65 possible adverse effects of the vaccine, Meyer said, including heart attacks, meningitis, spontaneous abortion, seizures and hospitalisation. Other than pain at the injection site, fainting and other transitory conditions common to most vaccines, it has found evidence for one condition — myocarditis, a heart inflammation seen especially in men aged 12 to 29. That appears to be a short-term condition, with 83% of patients recovering within 90 days of onset, and more than 90% fully recovered within a year. No deaths or heart transplants are known to have occurred, the CDC data show. No confirmed cases were seen in children younger than 5. The myocarditis rate among vaccine recipients aged between 6 months and 64 years appeared to spike in 2020-22, when it seemed to be related to the original vaccine and the original booster. After the booster was reformulated, the rate among those aged 12 to 39 fell to about one case per million doses in 2024-25 — half the rate found in the general population. Despite the relative rarity of myocarditis, the condition has underpinned a campaign by anti-vaccine activists to take the vaccines off the market. Among them is Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, who in 2022 advised males aged 18-39 not to get the COVID vaccine. His advisory earned him a crisp upbraiding from the then-heads of the FDA and CDC, who informed him by letter that "the known and potential benefits of these vaccines clearly outweigh their known and potential risks.... Not only is there no evidence of increased risk of death following mRNA vaccines, but available data have shown quite the opposite: that being up to date on vaccinations saves lives compared to individuals who did not get vaccinated."
Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
LA Times Today: Social Security is still in good shape but faces challenges — from Trump
The back and forth battle to save Social Security is never ending. That and Medicare are the two most popular government programs. Making cuts to either is the third rail of politics. But grim predictions about Social Security going broke is causing anxiety for seniors. L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik joined Lisa McRee with more.
