The Brief

On a recent spring Saturday, about 20 people gathered in a parking lot of a building off of Florence Avenue in South L.A. They each stood by a brand new, bright orange electric bike.

“How often do we get to experience electric bikes in South L.A.?” said Adé Neff, founder of Ride On Bike Shop in Leimert Park. “Electric bikes are all over the city. But they're not within South L.A.”

Until now. Neff is part of a coalition of community-based groups that helped launch a new e-bike rental program called South Central Power Up.

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The program brings 250 e-bikes to South L.A., where, after a safety training, residents will be able to get an e-bike to take home for at least a month, and then they will be able to renew the bike for free, for the first six months of the program. After that, they’ll be able to rent them for a small fee that will be determined later.

It’s part of a growing trend to make e-bikes more widely accessible — e-bikes run at least a few hundred bucks, and more often are more than $1,000. And, most car trips we take are relatively short, so e-bikes can help replace those miles and have a significant impact on climate pollution as well as help folks save money on gas. The South L.A. program is modeled after similar programs in Pacoima and Wilmington.

Adé Neff, owner of a bike shop in Leimert Park and long-time L.A. bicyclist, is part of a coalition of community-based groups that helped launch the new e-bike rental program.

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The goal is to bring a climate friendly and money-saving mode of transportation to an area that lacks dependable public transportation, has disproportionate levels of air and climate pollution, and where high gas prices are particularly burdensome.

“We're offering opportunities to folks that will allow them to have more autonomy and agency over their travel and commute,” said Lena Williams, program director for People for Mobility Justice, one of the community-based groups spearheading the program.

Williams said they aim to serve street vendors and other entrepreneurs such as delivery drivers, and people who frequently use public transportation or walk or bike to get around, as well as folks who want to save on gas money, or just have some fun on a bike without the physical exertion of a traditional bike.

“There’s a place for e-bikes within our society and our communities,” said Neff. “I was on a bike for 10 years in L.A. — I didn't have an electric bike. And I was going from South L.A. to Santa Monica to Long Beach to Pasadena, downtown and by the time I got to my destination, I'm winded, I'm sweaty. Whereas, I can get on the e-bike and get to my destination and I'm not exerting that much energy.”

Lena Williams, program director for People for Mobility Justice, one of the community-based groups spearheading the South Central Power Up e-bike program.

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An e-bike tour of South L.A. 

But on this particular Saturday, the group is going for a ride on the new e-bikes to have some fun and learn about South L.A. and the long fight for environmental and social justice.

South L.A. resident Patrena Shankling, 62, came out to try the bikes with her 32-year-old son Lonnie, who joined from Bellflower.

“I want to get out of my car and get some exercise in,” said Shankling. “It's good for the environment, good for me, health-wise.”

She said she also wants to save money on gas.

South L.A. resident Patrena Shankling, left, and her son Lonnie, came out to try the e-bikes and have some mother-son time together.

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South L.A. resident and community advocate Blanca Lucio said she’s long used regular bikes to get around but this is her first time on an electric one.

“Tengo muchos años este usando bicicleta,” she said. “En mi comunidad, la gente siempre anda caminando, anda en el bus, entonces cuando yo llegué a vivir en sur centro, yo era la mamá que siempre llevaba a los hijos en la bicicleta, la dejarlos a la escuela.”

“I have for many years used a bicycle,” she said. “In my community, people are always walking, taking the bus, so when I came to South Central I was the mother who always took the children on the bicycle to drop them off at school."

She said e-bikes are one way to get around more easily and address air pollution, an issue that’s particularly important to her.

Community advocates Blanca Lucio, left, and Guadalupe Rivas hanging out before the e-bike tour on a recent Saturday.

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Zaakiyah Brisker grew up in South L.A. and only uses a bike to get around. She got rid of her car because of the financial stress of paying the car off, the registration, and maintaining the vehicle, but also because it’s better for the environment.

“When I started riding my bike, it was easier because I used to live in mid-city and all of the shopping that I would do would be in Culver City, which is a totally walkable neighborhood,” Brisker said. “Since moving back to South Central, it's been a challenge because this is not a walkable area. But I love riding my bike so much and I believe in the values of not harming the planet and not adding to climate change as much as possible, especially as it relates to hood areas like South Central.”

It’s one reason why Brisker is a communications associate at Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE for short, a long-time civil rights organization in South L.A. and another partner on the project, and the launching point for our ride today.

South L.A. resident Zaakiyah Brisker stands beside new electric bikes that will be available to rent for free for community members through the new South Central Power Up program

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Turning points for justice in South L.A.

After a safety briefing and getting comfortable on the bikes in the parking lot, it’s time to head out on our ride.

The group listens to Williams discuss safely using the e-bikes.

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We get off to a rough start. As soon as we tried to cross Florence Avenue, an aggressive driver tried to nose through our line of bikes crossing the street — evidence of the dangers bikers face every day on L.A. roads, especially here in South L.A., which has some of the least infrastructure for bikes.

But we safely make it to our first stop — the corner of Florence and Normandie, the very spot where the 1992 unrest began.

Once we got off Florence and onto quieter neighborhood streets, everyone started to relax and have some fun. Soon, the party grew.

Juan Brown, 21, and his buddy decided to join us on their own bikes. They popped wheelies and did other tricks, riding alongside us as we and people watching from outside their homes cheered.

“I ride my bike every day,” Brown said. “For fun, to get around, everything. It's bike life all day.”

21-year-old South L.A. resident Juan Brown joined us for part of our ride.

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But he said dangerous drivers and the lack of infrastructure for bikes is a major, and sometimes deadly, challenge. He says he’s lost friends who have been hit by cars. But it hasn’t stopped him. He said that’s because of the community that biking provides.

Our next stop is Exposition Park, where we talk about how gentrification and housing costs around USC are impacting the community. Next, we head to a former oil drilling site that, after a decade of organizing, the community successfully got shut down.

A map showing the "hubs" where South L.A. residents will be able to pick up e-bikes as part of the South Central Power Up program.

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Courtesy of South Central Power Up

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We end our ride at Village Market Place off Vermont, which sells fresh, locally grown produce and other goods at an affordable price. And, by the way, it’s powered by solar panels.

The ride was 12 miles altogether, but all of us barely broke a sweat.

Our group rides towards Exposition Park.

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Each stop we made on our ride showed how the climate problem is really a justice problem, like how the racism and disinvestment that sparked the L.A. uprising is the very same disinvestment that makes south L.A. worse off when it comes to climate impacts such as extreme heat. And how the climate crisis intersects with food insecurity, and housing costs driving displacement and exacerbating financial stress.

But each stop also revealed the opportunity to turn that around — such as the former oil drilling site, which has been bought by a community trust that has the goal of turning it into a park with permanent affordable housing. Or how growing food locally is a way to boost health and resilience. And the effort to get e-bikes here and get more people out of cars and spur deeper investment in bike infrastructure and public transportation.

The threads tying it all together were the folks who have long pushed for these changes in south L.A.

Without infrastructure, too soon for e-bikes?

Throughout the ride, the lack of safe street infrastructure was glaringly obvious. It’s a problem across L.A., but more so in South L.A, where potholes are rampant, bike lanes are few and far between, and protected bike lanes are nonexistent.

So is it too soon to be pushing e-bikes?

“The streets of South Central are notoriously dangerous, whether you're walking, biking, driving,” Williams said. “But I think there is something super, super important about actually just taking up space — people being seen in this way that says, ‘This is what we're doing. The streets are intended to be multi-modal and we want to show the ways that we can coexist.’”

The slow progress on improving bike infrastructure has been a challenge that the e-bike lending program in Pacoima, Electro-Bici, which has now run for nearly three years, has also faced, said Miguel Miguel, policy director with Pacoima Beautiful, the grassroots group that is heading the project there.

“We're creating a program in a community where a program like this, the infrastructure for it, wasn't ever really thought of,” Miguel said. “It's almost like we're trying to paint the wall right before we fix the drywall. So some of the challenges have been like, we're offering this service, but how do community members now utilize the actual transportation network to be able to go from point A to point B.”

The Electro-Bici program received 100 refurbished electric bikes from the New York-based Shared Mobility Inc., which has provided "e-bike libraries" in several U.S cities.

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Courtesy Pacoima Beautiful

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The huge lack of even the simplest infrastructure such as bike racks to lock bikes at destinations like grocery stores is also a major barrier, Miguel said. But that hasn’t made the program a failure — far from it actually. Miguel said one big lesson learned has been that the “need” doesn’t always have to come before the “want.”

“This is an activity that community members have been asking for, for a while, but unfortunately there's some true income inequality issues that don't allow folks to have access even just to a regular mechanical bike,” Miguel said. “If we come into this first thinking we want to repair people's relationship with their inner child, we want to repair people's relationship with what it is to have a bike – I think that's what these programs are.”

Miguel said many of the folks who regularly use the e-bikes through Pacoima’s program are either on the older side or the younger side, and rather than only using it to get to and from work or run errands, they’re often using the bikes for exercise, or to go to the park, or just ride around with friends.

“This is an opportunity to have community members step aside from the day to day of working, of living in a city, and into just being a child for a while and just enjoy playing and healing through playing.”

Williams would agree.

“Biking is medicine. If we allow the fears to keep us from getting there, it's such a detriment to our experience,” Williams said.

So e-bikes may be great for saving money on gas and getting around sustainably (they can truly help lower climate pollution), but they’re also just plain fun. And having fun — experiencing joy — well, that’s an important piece of building resilience too.

Los Angeles’s trees are in increasingly dire health, according to one measure, weakened by climate, poor planning and a city stretched too thin to adequately care for them.

The number of “tree emergencies” reported to the city’s MyLA311 service has been climbing steadily, reaching 1,844 in December, the highest level recorded since the city began releasing data last April. A tree emergency, by the city’s own classification, typically means a tree has fallen or is at imminent risk of doing so. A Crosstown analysis shows that the increase is not isolated to just some parts of the city, but is more or less consistent across all neighborhoods.

The sudden rise — propelled by recent rains — is an illustration of what arborists have been warning about for some time: Los Angeles is failing to properly care for its urban tree canopy, pushing once healthy trees to the point of failure. They expect conditions to get worse, exacerbated by a lack of regular maintenance and increasing stresses brought on by hotter temperatures and intense storms.

The various city agencies in charge of maintaining trees are so underfunded that they “are not able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Aaron Thomas, the urban forestry director at North East Trees, an environmental advocacy organization. The lack of adequate care only accelerates that decline. “It’s a vicious cycle, young trees that need structural pruning that will prevent issues in the future don’t get care. Trees that are just not healthy because they are not being cared for become hazardous.”

Workers respond to a tree emergency on Venice Blvd.

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Once every 17 years

There are approximately 660,000 trees that make up the city of Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, one of the largest in the nation. Keeping them healthy requires attention at every stage. A young tree that does not receive early pruning grows unevenly and eventually becomes a hazard. Without that investment, the city ends up spending more money later on bigger, more dangerous trees.

A representative for the city’s Bureau of Street Services, which houses the Urban Forestry Division, said that despite the city’s recent budget woes, staffing has remained more or less consistent, with about 220 workers. That allows the division to operate on a 17-year maintenance cycle.

That 17-year interval is far longer than what arborists recommend, according to Esther Margulies, a landscape architect and urban planning professor at the University of Southern California. “The more you defer maintenance, the more expensive and difficult it becomes,” she said, “because you’re dealing with bigger trees and more structural problems.”

Recent patterns of intense rainfall followed by high winds have made conditions worse, and have likely pushed up the number of tree emergency calls. Saturated soil loses its grip, and trees that might have held come down.

Margulies described the situation as an infrastructure problem. Trees provide shade, stormwater absorption, and cooling in a city that faces more extreme heat every year. “None of that happens for free,” she said, “just like other infrastructure in our city.”

New trees needed for a new climate

Bryan Vejar is the associate director of community forestry at TreePeople, an organization that helps maintain the local tree canopy, among other things. The city’s Urban Forestry Division is “so undercapacity, their priorities are responding to tree mortality and hazards, not planting.”

Part of what is occurring now is the consequence of bad decisions made years earlier. Trees planted across the city were chosen for their looks rather than their ability to survive in Los Angeles’s evolving climate. Only 10-15% of them are native to Southern California, says Vejar. Species selected for fall color or flowering, popular in wetter climates, were never suited for prolonged drought or rising heat. Many are now approaching the end of their lifespans. Vejar noted that Los Angeles street trees survive on average between eight and 25 years, even though many of the species planted are capable of living hundreds of years under the right conditions.

Simply planting more trees won’t fix the problem. “Once you plant it, as a minimum, you have to care, water for three years,” says Vejar. “We can’t plant ourselves out of tree mortality.”

Trees need to be capable of surviving in compacted soil that is often poor quality. “These different pressures winnow down the inherent tree palette. Climate change makes it harder,” says Vejar. He added that in some cases, even native tree species are no longer adequate. “Sometimes, we have to plant for a climate that is hotter, drier. We can’t plant native trees, but ones that can survive in that new climate.”

How we did it: We analyzed 10 months of MyLA311 data for tree-related services requests and also broke down the data by neighborhood.

The Los Angeles Unified School District announced Thursday that it has joined hundreds of school districts across the country in a landmark lawsuit against social media companies, alleging platforms have fueled the youth mental health crisis and disrupted education for students in the district.

“Los Angeles Unified educators, counselors, and administrators are confronting unprecedented levels of student anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, self-harm, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, cyberbullying, sextortion, and excessive exposure to extreme and exploitative content, much of which is amplified and monetized by social media design features,” the announcement said.

The lawsuit, which targets Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, X and other platforms, aligns with broader efforts in California to address a youth mental health emergency “tied to defendants’ social media features, misrepresentations about the safety, and failures to warn about the dangers of their platforms for youth,” according to the announcement. The lawsuit also pointed to a sharp rise in reported sexual exploitation and mental health referrals for students experiencing eating disorders.

A 2025 report from the Los Angeles County Youth Commission revealed that mental health has become the leading concern for young people in Los Angeles, surpassing education and employment, with nearly two-thirds of surveyed youth identifying it as their top need.

Ghost, the pinkish Pacific octopus that inspired wonder for dategoers, parents and children across Southern California, has died at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Aquarium officials said that Ghost died of senescence, a natural end-of-life process for female octopuses that started after she laid eggs last fall. Staff say the eggs are unfertilized and will not hatch, even if they try to relocate them.

No arrangements have been announced as staff at the Long Beach aquarium decide how to memorialize her.

Originating from the waters of British Columbia, Canada, Ghost first came to the aquarium in May 2024 at a weight of about three pounds.

Ghost the Pacific octopus at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

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By her time of death, the eight-armed Pacific octopus weighed more than 50 pounds. Unsure of her age, officials guess she was between 2 and 4 years old.

Experts say these octopuses have up to a five-year lifespan, largely in isolation and only seek companionship for reproduction. Afterward, males die while females slowly die over the course of months as they protect their laid eggs from contamination.

Considered the smartest of the non-vertebrates, octopuses are curious creatures that have keen eyesight and plenty of creativity.

Ghost was no exception. Staff said she was known for being “super active,” known to love toys and puzzles specifically made for her. She learned to lift herself into weighing baskets and often took time during feeding to play with her caretakers.

Her final days were spent in delicate care, aquarium officials say, eating quality food and enjoying company with staff to ease her slow decline.

“We are going to miss her,” said Nate Jaros, Aquarium of the Pacific’s vice president of animal care. “Ghost left a big impression on us and on so many people, even those beyond our Aquarium.”

Officials received a new octopus in the fall that, they hope, will carry on the spirit of its predecessor.

Citing fear of authoritarianism and invasive surveillance, California lawmakers voted this week to audit the operation of joint intelligence centers where federal, state, and local agencies share information.

The decision was made Tuesday along party lines by the Joint Committee on Legislative Audit, a 14-member body made up of members of the California Senate and Assembly. Nine members voted in favor, one against, and four did not vote. The audit will be conducted by State Auditor Grant Parks.

Advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Oakland Privacy urged lawmakers to demand the audit to rein in what they described as abuses at the facilities, known as fusion centers. They cited an incident in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly asked La Habra police to run searches on its behalf at an Orange County fusion center and several others in which San Francisco police circumvented a local ban on facial recognition by asking for help from a fusion center with access to the technology.

CalMatters investigations last year and last month found instances where local law enforcement agencies shared license plate information with ICE or the Border Patrol, violating state law. California Attorney General Rob Bonta sent letters to more than a dozen local law enforcement agencies since 2024 for potential violations of the state law banning it and sued the City of El Cajon for allegedly violating the ban.

The audit will seek details about three California fusion centers, including:

• Information about violations of legal authority and policies for the past decade and disciplinary actions taken in response.
• What state and local law enforcement personnel are assigned to the fusion centers. 
• What private sector entities work with fusion centers.
• Which state or local officials oversee fusion center activity to ensure compliance with state and local law.

Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside, requested the audit. She believes that fusion centers have undermined state law that prohibits cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies for immigration purposes. A 2024 Surveillance Technology Oversight Project report cited in her audit petition alleges that a California fusion center routinely shares information with ICE. She also said the centers put at risk the privacy of Californians more broadly, particularly given what she describes as the slide of the federal government into authoritarianism.

“It’s been 13 years since the last federal audit,” Cervantes said during the hearing. “I am not seeking to ban fusion centers. I’m seeking transparency, and 40 million Californians deserve to know whether fusion centers are serving their intended counterterrorism purpose or whether they have become unaccountable surveillance infrastructure operating in the shadow of our democracy.”

California has five fusion centers, located in San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Diego. Fusion centers were established nationwide in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack with federal government funding and a combination of federal, state, and local law enforcement resources.

Lawmakers and activists have since sought to scale back or end fusion center activity in Maine, Massachusetts and Texas.

No Republicans on the committee voted in support of the audit, with one opposing it and three not voting. Carl DeMaio, a Republican from San Diego, called it “a political witch hunt” that places the needs of immigrants over American citizens and, with the war in Iran, comes at a time when we need the centers to detect terrorism threats.

“This is not the time to politicize when homeland security is being stretched,” he said at the hearing.

In response to DeMaio’s remarks, former FBI agent Mike German said a time of national security risk is exactly when you want to know whether centers are functioning in an effective way to identify real risks.

“It’s a waste of resources when they’re not operating in a manner that can stand up to public scrutiny,” he told the committee. “As federal law enforcement and immigration agencies are increasingly acting lawlessly, it's essential to subject these state and local intelligence operations to democratic controls.”

A 2022 study of fusion centers coauthored by German for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that there is little to suggest that fusion centers have aided counterterrorism efforts. It said they have repeatedly portrayed racial justice, environmental and abortion activists as violent extremists or otherwise menacing. A 2012 congressional report that took two years to complete found that Department of Homeland Security support for fusion centers has resulted in little benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts and has endangered Americans’ civil liberties and privacy.

No representatives from California’s five fusion centers spoke in opposition to the audit.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.