The Brief

The past five years have been something of a blur for the crew at Energy Concepts Enterprises. The company, which has been installing solar panels in and around Fresno, California, since 1992, could barely keep up with demand as consumers embraced the technology in ever-greater numbers. Every year was busier than the last.

Until 2023, when business plummeted. According to marketing director Carlos Beccar, sales fell from as many as 40 systems a month to 10, or less. “It’s been an incredible downturn,” he said. “We laid off half of our staff and we’re probably not done.”

California is leading what analysts expect to be the first year-over-year decline in residential solar installations since 2017. Energy consultants at Wood MacKenzie anticipate that the state, which accounts for the bulk of the United States market, will see a 41% drop in 2024. Nationwide, they predict a 12% contraction.

“We’re expecting the first half of the year to be pretty tough for installers,” said Zoë Gaston, a principal analyst for residential solar at the firm. She said she’s heard of more than 100 bankruptcies already across the country.

One culprit is high interest rates, which have made it more difficult for homeowners to afford expensive solar projects. Gaston said this is especially true in states that have traditionally seen a higher portion of systems purchased with loans, such as Texas, which saw a 29% drop in installs between the third quarters of 2022 and 2023. Leased systems have picked up some of the slack and, excluding California, installations are anticipated to grow roughly 4% this year — but any growth, should it happen, would be in stark contrast with recent annual growth rates that have sometimes topped 40%.

Beccar says interest rates have been a factor in California’s decline too, but a relatively minor one that his company was prepared to weather. The much bigger factor has been a state Public Utilities Commission rule change that slashed the rate at which homeowners can sell power back to their electricity provider. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., or PG&E, stated in an annual report that the new rules will reduce compensation for solar new customers by about 80%. Wood Mackenzie says the new net metering rates have caused the payback period for residential systems to almost triple, from five or six years to 14 or 15.

“It’s like they put a brick wall in front of us,” Beccar said, explaining that for many homeowners exploring solar the large upfront investment no longer makes sense. While the company was able to get by most of last year installing systems it had sold before the change, the lack of new sales has installations grinding to a halt and workers sitting idle. “I think the impacts are going to be more severe coming up.”

The commission argued that the rate change brings homeowner compensation more in line with the value of the electricity they produce, rather than having other customers subsidize the program. Another goal, it said in a statement, was also to encourage the addition of battery storage to residential solar systems. In an email, spokesperson Terrie Prosper said battery installations have indeed jumped dramatically, and she contended that payback periods remain in the range of five to eight years. Major utility companies in the state, including PG&E, lobbied in support of the changes.

Of course the utility supported the bill, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “They have natural gas in their middle name,” she said. The association, along with environmental groups, opposed the net metering overhaul. Del Chiaro says the “cost-shift” narrative is misleading and that the commission based its findings on flawed modeling, rather than utility bills, with the end result being less solar deployment.

“All of this flies in the face of where America is trying to go in terms of clean energy,” she said.

A number of other states are poised to potentially follow California, such as Oregon and Wisconsin. This worries Thomas Devine, a solar installer who left California after its recent changes. His company still operates in five other states. “It frustrates the hell out of me,” he said. “We can’t afford to have this spread across the country.”

Gaston expects the nationwide slowdown to be relatively short and the rebound larger than it was after the 2017 slump, which occurred when several companies quit the residential solar business. “There is some upside at the end of the year if the interest rates come down,” she said, also noting that the Inflation Reduction Act extended the 30% credit on solar until 2032. Current headwinds have muted its effects, she said, but “in 2025, we’ll start to see more of the benefits.”

Beccar is optimistic that his company will survive the slump, but he hates the term “rebound.” To him, it conjures images of a basketball bouncing back to almost the height from which it was dropped.

“This is going to be one of those things where it’s like when you throw those weight balls,” he quipped. “You throw it really hard, and it comes back up about an inch.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/buildings/how-california-is-casting-a-cloud-over-residential-solar/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

For more than a year, Tami Outterbridge has been spreading the word. If you have a piece of artwork from her father, John Outterbridge, let her know.

Her father was a prominent artist in California’s Black Arts Movement, rooted in civil rights. While John’s work is in places like LACMA in L.A. and MoMA in New York, the Eaton Fire burned down his Altadena home, destroying what remained of his private work and collections.

That’s why Tami is on this mission. She wants anything and everything, from old cellphone pictures to works of art people are willing to part with. Her goal is vast. It includes plans for an exhibit called "Digging Bridge," a community-sourced archive, a documentary and even a book about her father.

Tami Outterbridge at her father's empty lot in Altadena.

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“I wish I still had my home,” Tami said. “I wish I still had everything in it, all of my father’s artwork, all of the artwork of his colleagues … but this is redemptive.”

So far, Tami has collected more than 1,000 submissions just by word of mouth.

Honoring a legacy

The name “Digging Bridge” is an ode to her father’s nickname and the effort to salvage belongings from his home’s ashes.

John Outterbridge was a groundbreaking assemblage artist in Southern California. His work was heavily influenced by his military service and his father’s junk-hauling job.

His career started in the 1960s. He used everyday objects — even what some would consider junk — to create three-dimensional works of art that explored themes of Black identity and racism in America. Rags were one of his favorite materials.

John Outterbridge at a Watts Towers Art Center meeting in Watts on June 15, 1985.

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Some of John’s earliest works used debris from the Watts uprising in 1965. Among his accomplishments, he spent more than 17 years as the Watts Towers Art Center’s first director. He died at 87 years old in 2020.

Last year, the fire destroyed decades of materials, including slides, photos and artwork.

 “That loss in particular spoke to an erasure of legacy, an erasure of history that I didn’t feel like our family or my father deserved,” Tami said. “So it felt very personal.”

The power of a shoe

Dominique Moody, a highly respected assemblage artist, is one of the people who have responded to Tami’s call from her studio in Historic South Central. John was a mentor to her.

Among other things, Moody is donating part of a shoe installation given to her by John. It was inspired by the time a journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush in 2008. The piece consisted of shoes suspended from the ceiling with rags.

“It came after that moment in the nation’s political history and how an ordinary person with a shoe could then spark a conversation around the world,” Moody said.

John Outterbridge's shoe artwork being donated by Dominique Moody. The photograph is only a placeholder. Moody will donate the real shoe to the archive once she "digs" it up.

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She’s also creating new pieces for "Digging Bridge," alongside many others from L.A.’s Black Arts Movement, including the Brockman Gallery co-founder Dale Brockman Davis, Charles Dickson, LaMonte Westmoreland and Stanley C. Wilson.

One of Moody’s new artworks uses a charred tree branch and iridescent glass bottles from John’s destroyed home. She said it has “extraordinary sculptural bones.”

“The blackening of it, with assemblage, every material you can imagine can be used,” she said. “Which is why I love it. It is always different.”

This piece by Dominique Moody, which is a work-in-progress, uses debris from John's home. She says bottle trees are important symbolism in African culture and were common fixtures where John grew up in North Carolina.

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Moody's other "Digging Bridge" piece is based on a trip Tami’s parents took along Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles.  “What they found was this almost desolate road and small community out in the middle of nowhere,” Moody said. “They, in celebration, danced in the road amongst the tumbleweeds.”

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The artist in John

Another artist who’s donating to "Digging Bridge" is Emily Hopkins, a teaching artist and former executive director of Side Street Projects, a mobile arts nonprofit based in Zorthian Ranch in Altadena.

Hopkins is also an assemblage artist. She remembers John’s love of stories and keen eye for people. “He was very intuitive. A little bit magical,” she said.

She gave Tami an old photo from around the 1940s that John shared in 2012. It shows him as a young child surrounded by his siblings on a small porch  at his childhood home in Greenville, North Carolina. Hopkins recalled that John gave her the photo at a time when she was questioning her life decisions. He picked up on that.

Emily Hopkins holds up a print John gave Side Street Projects, which contained an old family photo and his notes to a publisher for a catalog, on September 4, 2026. It was donated to the organization for a fundraiser.

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Hopkins says John made it clear they all knew they were destined to be artists as children. From left to right is his brother Freddie, John himself, sister Gloria, and brothers Warren and Marvin.

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“He said, you know, ‘I’m gonna tell you something. You are an artist, and you do not have a choice,’” Hopkins said. “Then he pulled out this picture and said, ‘In this picture, this is me. I’m an artist.’”

That’s the kind of personal experience Tami is looking for. She wants "Digging Bridge" to go beyond what you would normally see in a museum or read online about John. “You will know him through the stories that we can tell about him,” she said.

When Nithya Raman becomes mayor of Los Angeles next month, she’ll have just a year and a half to deliver on a huge promise she made with a summer 2028 deadline.

Raman has laid out a plan for moving people off the streets that she says will cut street homelessness by 50% in time for the Olympics and eliminate long-term encampments by the end of her first term.

That may have some Angelenos feeling déjà vu. Soon after then-Mayor Eric Garcetti made the deal for the city to host the Games, in 2018 he promised to all but eliminate street homelessness before the Olympics.

More than eight years later, homelessness remains the city’s most visible crisis, with more than 29,000 unsheltered people in Los Angeles, according to the latest point-in-time count. Under Mayor Karen Bass, unsheltered homelessness in L.A. has dropped by around 11% overall since its 2023 peak, but rose this year, per the homeless count.

Now, Mayor-elect Raman says she can drastically reduce street homelessness by moving away from Bass’ Inside Safe model, which focuses on getting people out of encampments and into motels. Instead, Raman says she will prioritize getting people quickly onto rental subsidies and into more long-term housing.

Success would mean bucking a long-standing tradition of city leaders pledging to slash homelessness and underdelivering.

“I've been hearing those promises for a very long time, but they were always dramatically over-promised,” said Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor of law emeritus, who has followed homelessness policy in Los Angeles for 40 years.

Raman campaigned criticizing the Inside Safe program that Bass staked her first term on as too slow and too costly, saying the city needed to invest in other solutions. Since late 2022, the city has placed 5,800 people into interim housing through Inside Safe, but 40% have returned to homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“Motel rooms are our most expensive intervention — they should be used like emergency rooms to help people stabilize quickly and then move onto their next step,” Raman wrote in a document released during her campaign laying out her homelessness strategy.

Raman's plan for addressing encampments is to move people out of motel rooms within four months and expand a program that provides unhoused individuals with rental subsidies and case management for up to two years to move people into housing more quickly. On the campaign trail, Bass’s team criticized Raman’s strategy as “unrealistic,” saying it relied on private landlords renting to people who had been living on the street.

Experts on homelessness told LAist that Raman’s promise to halve street homelessness in a year and a half was a stretch — but if the mayor-elect could make a significant reduction by 2028, that would be a victory.

“The plan is ambitious, it's bold, and I think that's a good thing,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “When you set an ambitious and bold goal, you tend to get farther than you might have without the goal.”

Steve Lopez, the longtime L.A. Times columnist who has covered homelessness in the city for decades, had a harsher take.

“I cringe when I hear such grandiose proclamations,” Lopez wrote after Raman declared victory last week, citing a laundry list of societal issues outside of mayoral control: income inequality, mental health problems and the high cost of building new housing.

Raman's 2028 goal comes with additional challenges. The Olympics and Paralympics are expected to displace potentially thousands of unhoused people living near venues, if they are within security perimeters determined by the U.S. Secret Service. There’s still no plan from local officials on how they'll address encampments ahead of the Olympics or where people will go. There’s also no additional funding.

Just last week, the L.A. City Council passed a motion asking staff to report back on how the city will respond to homeless encampments near venues during the Games.

Blasi, the emeritus UCLA professor, said the urgency of 2028 could be an opportunity for the Raman administration to lay the groundwork for longer-term solutions that keep people from returning to homelessness, like establishing more options for permanent housing.

"It's not impossible to come up with a plan that's motivated in part and at least time limited by the Olympics, but doing that in a way that's replicable and solves some of the problems that have bedeviled politicians in L.A. for a long, long time," he said.

Advocates say they’re worried that without advance planning, unhoused people could be swept with nowhere to go, or the federal government could intervene.

“It makes sense to think about the Olympics as a really key kind of deadline where we have to get moving and have to make sure we've gotten people into safer situations,” Visotzky said.

Aaron Schrank contributed to this reporting.

The midterm elections saw a “blue tsunami” nationwide with a wave of wins for Democrats — but there’s been a deeper undercurrent locally with candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA-LA, endorsed nine candidates this past election.

Seven of those candidates are winning their races, including in Los Angeles, Burbank, West Hollywood and Inglewood. Another candidate secured an appointment on a South Bay school district board and the last race in L.A. City Council District 9 is still too close to call.

Tom Hogen-Esch, a professor of political science at California State University, Northridge, told LAist that with more people entering the bloodstream of local politics in L.A., the region is going to get a more representative electorate that includes a lot of younger voters and renters, for example, which he expects to have had a big impact on election night.

“I think we've entered a new era in L.A. politics where owners of single-family properties — these high propensity voters — are no longer calling the shots anymore,” he said.

However, he said he thinks it’s way too soon to expect any kind of radical populist and socialist-leaning policies in the city.

“I wouldn't expect a revolution from [Raman’s] time as mayor.”

Here’s what we know about how DSA’s influence is shaking out in L.A. and Orange counties.

L.A. County

It was basically a DSA sweep for the biggest Los Angeles city contests.

Nithya Raman will be the next mayor, and Marissa Roy won her city attorney race by a landslide. City Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez in District 1 and Hugo Soto-Martínez in District 13 also won their races outright in the primary.

Burbank is about to have a DSA-majority City Council, which the local chapter said is the “first one ever on the West Coast.”

The DSA members up for election, Mike Van Gorder and Nolan Southerland, are in second and third out of 13 candidates. Van Gorder and Southerland will join current Councilmember Konstantine Anthony to make up the DSA majority on the five-member council.

Angela Gonzales-Torres unseated incumbent Jimmy Gomez in the race for the 34th Congressional District, which includes downtown L.A., Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock and Koreatown. The Highland Park local will be a newcomer to Capitol Hill.

In West Hollywood, public safety commissioner Stephen Post is landing in third out of 14 candidates running for City Council, on track to secure his seat in the chamber.

In the race for Inglewood Unified School District Board of Education, Trustee Area 3, Yaritza González, a policy manager at the Central American Resource Center, has earned more than double the number of votes of her challenger. For the Centinela Valley Union High School District Board, current school board member Estefany Castañeda was the only candidate on the ballot, earning an appointment to Trustee Area 5.

Orange County

The Orange County chapter made four endorsements in the general election for races in Santa Ana and Irvine.

Councilmember Benjamin Vazquez was running for reelection in Santa Ana City Council Ward 2. He’s winning with more than 74% as of Wednesday, ahead of his challenger by about 4,000 votes.

In Ward 4, DSA-OC endorsed immigrant rights advocate Sandra De Anda. She’s also winning her race at the time of publication, ahead of incumbent Phil Bacerra with 57.5% of the vote.

In Ward 6, Isuri S. Ramos, chair of the Santa Ana Planning Commission, earned the chapter’s endorsement. She was winning with more than 59% of the vote.

Last but not least, it endorsed Measure D in Irvine, which would introduce ranked-choice voting for City Council and mayoral races starting in 2028. As of Wednesday evening, it was passing with a little over 53% of the vote, a margin of about 5,000 vote

It may be entering a new era, but walking into the Original Pantry Cafe still feels like stepping back in time. The caged cash register is still there, with a worn spot on the floor in front of it, and the wood-board menus listing the day’s specials in chalk.

The iconic diner, which had served downtown L.A. from the corner of Ninth and Figueroa streets for over 100 years, closed in March 2025 amid a labor dispute, after the trust that owned it decided to sell the property. Now, under new ownership, it reopens Thursday, Nov. 19.

Leo Pustilnikov, a developer, bought the building in September 2025, and Hope the Mission, a San Fernando Valley nonprofit, will now run it, with all profits going to shelters for L.A.’s unhoused community.

Longtime staff are returning under a new contract with UNITE HERE Local 11. Rowan Vansleve, president of Hope the Mission, called bringing them back “incredibly emotional.”

What’s back and what’s not

Fans of the Pantry will find familiar names on the menu, including the famous coleslaw and sourdough toast from Frisco Baking Co. And of course, the beloved pancakes make their triumphant return, now made from scratch.

“We’ve got the same sourdough that we were using prior to Hope the Mission coming in,” Vansleve said.

The Pantry’s dining room and long counter keep their classic diner look, with a new bakery case near the front windows.

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Other dishes got a 2026 makeover. The Denver omelet now uses poblano peppers, the fried chicken sandwich comes with a spicy chile glaze and pickled radish, and a new bakery case is stocked with cookies, pies, chocolate malt crunch cake and peach cobbler.

“There are a few alterations on the menu,” Vansleve said. “Tastes have changed, and this needs to be successful.”

Two new sandwiches are named after donors who helped fund the reopening. The Betty Burger comes with Cooper sharp cheese, grilled onions, house pickles and Pantry Gold sauce on a sesame bun. Grant’s Sky High Deli piles half a pound of warm corned beef with Gruyère, horseradish slaw and mustard on toasted rye.

“I’m really excited for people to try our burger,” said executive chef Daniel Hur.

A stack of buttermilk pancakes made from scratch costs $16.

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Buttermilk pancakes are $16, and the classic breakfast platter — eggs, meat, Pantry potatoes and toast — is $21.

“We did a lot of research to make sure that we’re just under pretty much everyone else in the local area,” Vansleve said. “We’re not gonna gouge you.”

The Pantry no longer runs around the clock, and it now takes cards.

But Vansleve hopes the shortened hours will be temporary. “The Pantry’s not truly back until it’s 24 hours,” he acknowledged, adding that hours will expand as demand allows. He also hopes to reopen Riordan’s Tavern, the adjoining bar, “in some renewed format sometime late next year.”

Not everyone is sold

As soon as the new menu was posted online, commenters flooded the restaurant’s Instagram page and Reddit, pleading for nothing to change.

Hur, who grew up in Culver City, said he understands. “I love Tito’s Tacos. It’s been around since the ’50s. If someone came in there and changed the Tito’s Taco, I’d be like, ‘Why?’” he said. “So I get it.”

The specials board greets Angelenos ahead of the Nov. 19 reopening.

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Hur said he’s had to weigh purists against diners looking for something new, aiming to welcome back regulars while drawing in a new crowd. He’s open to feedback. “I know even if I’m not open to it, I’m gonna get it,” he said. “So I might as well be open to it.”

Vansleve’s pitch is simpler: “Give it a go, come in.”

Every meal helps, he said. “100% of the profits is gonna go back to the charity.” Hope the Mission runs 35 shelters housing about 3,500 people on any given night, according to Vansleve

To reach its 24-hour goal, he said, “We need to see those lines around the corner like they used to be.”