The Brief

The evacuation shelter at the Pasadena Civic Center is expected to close soon — possibly next week — according to operators, leaving more than 200 remaining wildfire evacuees to wonder where they will go next.

The facility, operated by the American Red Cross, has housed hundreds of displaced residents since the Eaton Fire erupted Jan. 7, damaging or destroying more than 6,000 homes in Altadena and Pasadena. As of early this week, more than 270 residents were still sheltered there, Red Cross officials said.

L.A. County officials are saying the shelter will close Feb. 12, but the Red Cross and Pasadena officials say no official date has been set. They say they are working with the county to identify a location for a new shelter closer to Altadena.

"We want to make it clear that no one will be left behind or shut out,” Pasadena officials said in a statement Wednesday.

But people in the shelter aren’t so sure.

“If I don't find a place, I will go buy a tent and go up on my land and just set up camp, because sleeping on my land will be a little safer than sleeping in a park under a tree," said Alphonso Browne, who had lived in his Altadena home for 30 years before it burned.

Alphonso Browne lost his home in Altadena to the Eaton Fire and has been staying at the Pasadena Civic Center since.

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Looking for a new shelter

Angel Sauceda, regional communications director for The Red Cross said Pasadena shelter residents will be moved into a new shelter once a location is identified. In the meantime, Sauceda said, Red Cross workers are meeting with evacuees to make sure each has a plan for next steps that is tailored to their needs.

That may include connecting some residents with short-term stays in hotels or Airbnbs, according to Pasadena officials.

But evacuees say the uncertainty is causing anxiety.

“They say Friday, and then I heard a guy say it's gonna be Sunday," said a woman who asked that her name not be used in this story. She said she’s been living at the shelter since Jan. 8.

"This is not hopscotch or playtime," she said. "This is real life.”

Kamaisha Peppars, who has been at the shelter since Jan. 12, said many evacuees need more time to figure out how to rebuild their lives from nothing.

“We’ve never been through this before,” she said. “We don't know what to do. We come to you guys for help, for resources. I know a lot of people would like to have it happen overnight, but it doesn't work that way.”

Once a new shelter is opened to replace the one in Pasadena, it will stay open as long as it is needed, according to shelter operators.

“The Red Cross will continue to have a congregate sheltering option until all the residents have a plan in place to get them to their next housing solution,” Sauceda said.

A shelter resident interacting with a Red Cross worker at the Pasadena Civic Center.

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Why is it closing?

The Pasadena shelter opened Jan. 7, about 90 minutes after Cal Fire ordered evacuations in the city. At first, it was operated by the city, but the Red Cross took over a few days later. According to the Red Cross, representatives from the Civic Auditorium Complex asked the nonprofit to return the facility to the city for normal operations by early February.

The Red Cross signed a 30-day agreement with the city of Pasadena in January to operate the shelter, Finance Director Matthew Hawkesworth told councilmembers at a meeting Monday. Other events are scheduled to happen at the Convention Center later this month.

“Some business decisions will have to be made,” he said.

City and Civic Center representatives did not respond to LAist’s questions about those agreements, but the facility’s online calendar shows a full slate of events scheduled this month. They include a comedy show scheduled this Saturday in the auditorium and a youth leadership conference next week in the conference center. Next month, the Pasadena Civic Auditorium is scheduled to host live tapings of NBC’s "America’s Got Talent."

Los Angeles County, along with the Red Cross, is responsible for moving the remaining residents into another facility, according to Pasadena City Councilmember Tyron Hampton. He explained that most of the people still sheltering there are not residents of Pasadena, but of Altadena.

The Red Cross confirmed this week that two-thirds of the current shelter residents are from Altadena.

“We have the jurisdiction for our Pasadena residents,” Hampton said. “Unfortunately, we don't have the jurisdiction to do all we can for our county residents. And so the county is transitioning them to another facility.”

Officials with L.A. County's Coordinated Joint Information Center confirmed they are helping to find a new shelter site.

Residents say they’re having trouble finding new places to live at rates they can afford. Rent is already high for many in L.A. County residents, and some have reported instances of price gouging after the fires. Shortly after the fires began, tenant advocates began tracking hundreds of online listings for rental housing that raised asking rents far above the 10% post-disaster limit set by state law.

Many people displaced by the recent wildfires have encountered rent increases of 30% or more and a severe lack of available units.

"With so many of us displaced, it's hard to find a place, and the rent has gone from reasonable rent, like $1,000-$1,500, to like $2,500 and above," said Browne, who survives on Social Security retirement benefits.

William Lee, an Altadena resident who also relies on Social Security, said he hasn't gotten much help finding housing.

“There’s nothing from FEMA, nothing from the Red Cross, no emergency Section 8,” he said. “There is no subsidized housing for us. This is something that we need. I need some help.”

American Red Cross officials outside of the Pasadena Civic Center.

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Shelter conditions

Some evacuees say conditions at the convention center have been bad and described high turnover in Red Cross staff and volunteers.

“Everybody comes in with their own different rules and their own different way of doing things,” Browne said. “There’s no one system, so everyone is confused.”

In recent days, shelter residents sleeping in separate rooms have been consolidated into a single room, a cause of concern for some evacuees.

“We were condensed into one room where animals, children, everyone was just condensed into this room," Lee said. “I’m a disabled dialysis patient. Twice a week I have to have a safe place where I can lay down and just be relaxing.”

Last month, there was an outbreak of stomach flu among evacuation center residents, according to Pasadena Public Health officials.

“A lot of people got sick,” said Browne. ” We were bringing in our own food because a lot of people in here cannot eat the food. The children were getting sick from the food.”

Several evacuees say their experience at the shelter has changed their view of the American Red Cross, though some acknowledge positive interactions with several staff and volunteers.

“I had a lot of respect for the Red Cross,” said Browne. “But now that I'm here, I have lost so much respect for them.”

Red Cross officials did not respond to LAist’s request for a response to evacuees' complaints about the shelter.

Aside from the Pasadena Civic Center, the Red Cross also continues to operate a wildfire evacuation shelter at Westwood Recreation Center. That shelter remains open and had 88 people living there as of Wednesday.

Red Cross officials did not say when that facility is scheduled to close.

L.A. city leaders will discuss on Wednesday whether to pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the regional homelessness agency and assign different oversight.

L.A. County supervisors voted to withdraw funding for the L.A. Homeless Services Authority last April, citing ongoing problems with the agency's oversight of homelessness funds.

Now 10 months later, City Council members are planning to talk about whether to pull the city’s funds from LAHSA — which amount to just under $300 million this fiscal year.

It’s one of the most consequential decisions on homelessness city officials have faced in years. In deciding the future of LAHSA, the City Council will be deciding who will be entrusted with taxpayer funds meant to address the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population.

What the council will discuss

On Wednesday, the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee is scheduled to discuss a range of options that include:

• not changing anything major
• keeping the city money at LAHSA, but beefing up city oversight
• shifting the funding from LAHSA to direct city control
• shifting the city’s funding from LAHSA to the county homelessness department to administer it

The committee also is scheduled to discuss whether to pursue shifting the city’s federal homelessness funding from LAHSA to more direct city control.

The options were first laid out in a staff report to delivered last April, two years after it was requested by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

At a City Council meeting in January, Rodriguez criticized housing and homelessness committee chair Nithya Raman for not scheduling a committee discussion on the options.

“It's been sitting [for] 280 days, a report in your committee that you won't hear,” Rodriguez said at the January meeting. “So let's stop playing this false notion of the arsonists showing up as the firefighters.”

Asked for a response Monday, Raman’s spokesperson Stella Stahl told LAist the item is on Wednesday's agenda.

In a statement, Raman said she expects to hold two meetings to discuss all the city’s options before the council makes a decision.

Raman and Mayor Karen Bass urged the county not to pull funding from LAHSA last spring, saying the agency was making progress on homelessness.

The supervisors went ahead last April with their decision to withdraw the more than $300 million in annual county funding from the agency.

The vast majority of county funds will be shifted from LAHSA starting July 1.

Raman recently announced she’s running in the June primary against Bass, whom she previously endorsed for re-election.

LAHSA is in ‘crisis,’ its CEO says

LAHSA was created by the city and county in 1993 to oversee homeless services. It’s governed by a CEO who reports to a commission of 10 members. Half of the members are appointed by the L.A. mayor, and the other half by each of the five county supervisors. Bass also serves on the commission, having appointed herself in fall 2023.

While it’s long faced criticism, it’s been under particularly close scrutiny for more than a year.

An audit and court-ordered review found it failed to properly track its spending and whether services were being provided.

LAHSA also has been facing criticism more recently for months-long delays in paying tens of millions of dollars to reimburse service providers — a problem officials vowed to fix nearly two years ago. Several providers recently told LAist they've had had to dip into reserves or take on debt.

While addressing the commission that oversees the organization on Friday, CEO O’Neill said LAHSA was “in crisis. And I say this not as a criticism to any of our really hardworking staff. They've built what they were asked to build.”

LAHSA’s staff report to “essentially 21 elected bosses, all of whom have different, sometimes conflicting agendas,” O’Neill said. “This creates a structure that is unstable.”

“LAHSA has been structured for decades as the entity that takes the blame,” she added. “Political incentive…has been to point at LAHSA rather than to address structural issues.”

“Morale is very low,” O’Neill said of LAHSA staff.

Fifteen years ago, when modern electric vehicles were just hitting the road, no one knew exactly what to expect from their giant, expensive lithium-ion batteries.

As batteries age, they hold less and less energy. Anyone who's ever had a dying smartphone, or had to replace a vehicle's 12-volt starter battery, knows this painfully well.

EV batteries were intended to last longer than those smaller, cheaper batteries. But how much longer?

The predictions were not soothing. In 2010, the New York Times wrote that "estimates of [EV] battery packs' lifespan — no one knows for sure — range upward from seven years." The average car on the road is more than 12 years old. And that discrepancy made some would-be EV buyers nervous.

Batteries come with warranties, but they don't last as long as the car. If a high-voltage battery chokes out midway through a car's life, it needs replacing — at a price tag that can run in the ballpark of $5,000 to $20,000.

But there's good news.

As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.

How a battery ages 

Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there's calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.

Then there's cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.

That means there's no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.

But the trajectory of aging isn't a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an "S curve." There's a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

"It's very much like breaking in a pair of shoes," says Liz Najman, the director of market insights at Recurrent. The shoes start out stiff, but quickly get a little more give. "And then your shoes just last you," she says, until at some point, "It's all over, it's a rapid decline."

And when it comes to EV batteries, two things are becoming clear. The initial drop-off is not as severe as some people had worried. And the sharp end-of-life decline is taking a long, long time to materialize.

At auto auctions, a lot of healthy batteries

Adam George is a vehicle services director at Cox Automotive, which runs used car auctions around the country. In recent years, the number of used EVs for sale has increased enormously — reflecting the sharp rise in production a few years ago.

That's given Cox Automotive a growing pool of used EVs to evaluate before they're re-sold.

"We were expecting battery health to be experiencing mass degradation over the first one to three years of owning a vehicle," George says. "What we have seen, though, is that these 2, 3, 4-year-old off-lease cars that are coming back have battery health scores well upwards of 95%."

Recurrent's data also shows that cars from most major brands retain 95% or more of their expected range after 3 years, thanks in part to software and battery management systems that are designed to correct for the battery's early degradation, and give drivers consistent range.

So the initial drop-off in that S curve is in the range of 5% or so, give or take. After that? Well, Cox Automotive has tested nearly 80,000 EVs, and found an average battery health of 92%.

Decade-old EVs are overwhelmingly on their original batteries 

That data set is naturally skewed toward younger vehicles, because the vast majority of EVs on the road today are fairly new. There were only a million EVs sold between 2010 and 2018, and now there are more than a million sold each year.

So what about the oldest EVs, specifically?

Recurrent's data can help answer this question. Najman, a data scientist, notes a few caveats: It's a fairly small dataset, just because there weren't many EVs built more than a decade ago. And some of the oldest EVs use technology that can't connect to Recurrent's opt-in network.

But based on their community, among EVs that are 10 years old or older, only 8.5% have ever had a battery replacement. More than 90% of them are still on their original battery.

"EV batteries are holding up phenomenally well," Najman says.  

Recurrent has also looked at EVs of any age that have more than 150,000 miles on them, which provides a closer look at the effects of that cyclical aging. There, too, the batteries outperformed expectations.

"Cars with 150,000 miles or more, and that have not had battery replacements, are getting at least 83% of their original range," Najman says.

Now, there is one common reason why EV batteries will be replaced very early on: a defect. There have been multiple large-scale battery recalls, and any individual battery might have a flaw that requires replacement. But because all new EVs come with warranties, that kind of replacement isn't a financial blow to owners.

"That would be something that would be synonymous with, like, your engine or a transmission going bad," says Adam George, of Cox Automotive. "That's what warranties are for."

EV battery warranties typically cover at least 8 years and 100,000 miles, and automakers will replace the battery in the case of catastrophic failure, or a reduction in capacity (usually to 70% of the original or less).

A robotic arm displays the dual engine chassis of a Model S electric sedan at the Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles on October 9, 2014.

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The tale of one Model S 

What do all these stats look like in real life? Consider Norman Hajjar's Model S.

Hajjar was an early adopter of electric vehicles. He kind of had to be: In 2013 he became an executive at the electric vehicle drivers' app Plugshare.

His 2012 Model S is one of the first that Tesla ever built. When he got it, he was well aware of the question mark about battery lifespan. "There was really no way of knowing what the future held for it because there was zero track record," Hajjar says.

In his case, the future held a battery defect: a loud noise followed by his car coming to an abrupt stop. He recalls Tesla replacing the battery — free of charge and under warranty — in 2014.

Since then, he's spent 12 years on that second battery. He's put around 200,000 miles on the car overall. And it's driving great, thank you very much.

"This vehicle still is a monster," Hajjar says, affectionately. "It is extremely fast, quick off the line."

The vehicle was originally rated to have 265 miles of range. Now it has about 220. Do the math, and it's at 83% of its original capacity. "The amount of degradation is pretty minor," Hajjar says.

Hajjar has moved on to a newer vehicle for his daily driver, mostly to enjoy higher-tech features. (His newer Model Y has Tesla's advanced driver-assistance software.) His son uses the Model S these days for his commute to college. "It's just sort of a backup vehicle now," Hajjar says. But he plans to hang on to it. He's sentimental about it, he says.

Why are batteries outlasting expectations? 

The engineers who developed modern EVs knew that prolonging battery life would be crucial. They designed systems to actively manage temperatures to improve battery lifespan, and software to constantly check battery health. Years have shown those efforts paid off.

But there's another reason EV batteries have out-performed expectations. It turns out that testing batteries is harder on them than the real world. Their lifespan was underestimated.

Simona Onori's lab at Stanford University has done research into the longevity of lithium-ion batteries, including a 2024 paper in Nature Energy showing that traditional methods for testing battery life are very stressful, and don't match the way batteries are actually used.

In most lab tests, researchers repeatedly cycle them from a very high state of charge to a very low one.

Real-world driving is gentler, with stops and starts — each start draws a bit of the battery's energy down, while each stop gives it a little time to recharge. A driver would never slam the accelerator to the floor and keep it there until the battery is dead.

"We accelerate, we decelerate," Onori says. "The battery will be charged, and discharged, some rest if you're at a traffic light."

Her lab's findings suggest that the traditional tests for battery life were unrealistically challenging, and Onori says ongoing work with real-world data is now confirming that. When they're actually driven, she says, EV batteries "age gracefully. Very gracefully."

Just like humans, she notes: "When we live a life with less stress, we live longer."

A decade plus … and counting 

So how long do EV batteries last? It's still too soon to put a precise number on it, because — as a group — the cars already on the road haven't yet reached the end of the S-curve, the point when they will start to show massive performance declines. In other words, they're not dead yet.

Meanwhile, battery technology keeps improving. The oldest EVs, like Hajjar's Model S, may not be the best indicator of how long newer EVs will last. Software systems to manage batteries have gotten more sophisticated. A lot of new EVs use a different battery chemistry — lithium iron phosphate or LFP — which lasts even longer than other lithium-ion batteries.

As Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, who follows EV trends for Cox Automotive, puts it: "These batteries are built to outlast the cars."

And there's one more wrinkle when it comes to figuring out the end of life for a normally-aging EV battery. They don't die abruptly, like an old engine cutting out. It's more that their range shrinks; they can only hold enough energy for shorter and shorter trips. Instead of shelling out for an expensive battery replacement, some EV owners might just put up with that limitation.

Thomas McVeigh, of Ontario, Canada, drives a 2014 BMW i3. That vehicle didn't have an impressive range even when it was new, and now it can only manage about 55 miles on a single charge in the winter. But it still looks great. It's pleasant to drive. It saves him on gas. Maintenance is wildly cheap for a 12-year-old vehicle, and especially for a BMW; his only real cost is new tires.

He's fine with its diminished range. And he's not inclined to put what he estimates would be a $6,000 battery into an aging car. Instead, maybe he'll pass it on to his kid. "Teenagers generally aren't going for long drives," he says.

Or maybe he'll keep it for himself, after all. "I mean," he says, "I love that car."

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This week the Getty Villa Museum will begin offering a rare look at scrolls from its ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” collection.

The collection of 19 manuscripts written on scrolls of papyrus and linen fragments are fragile, with one of them dating back nearly 3,500 years. Because of that, the materials are not usually on display to the public and the gallery will be carefully lit, temperature and humidity-controlled.

Sara Cole, associate curator of antiquities, told LAist that a lot of the language in the spells is written in first person speech for the deceased spirit to say while navigating the afterlife.

“One of my favorite phrases that I have on a wall of the gallery is ‘May I join with the stars that call out to me in the night boat,’” Cole said.

Cole explained that the manuscripts have been in the Getty’s collection since 1983, when they were donated by a bookseller in New York, who got them from the private collection of a British rare manuscript collector.

Egyptian mummy wrapping of Petosiris, Son of Tetosiris, from around 332–100 BCE.

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A years-long project is underway to translate the spells and rituals immortalized in the Getty's “Book of the Dead” scrolls and fragments, with a “large publication” in the works, Cole said.

The exhibition will feature four papyri belonging to women named Webennesre, Ankhesenaset, and Aset. Cole said “Book of the Dead” materials belonging to women are rare, because most were reserved for men.

Twelve of the manuscripts in the exhibition are written on fragments of linen that were used to wrap the mummified remains of the people they belonged to. Cole said she hopes visitors will understand that the material was very intimately associated with peoples’ burials.

Cole said her goal is to foreground the identities of the people who owned the scrolls, including two women who were ritual singers for the god Amun in the ancient city of Thebes.

“We see in these manuscripts the ancient Egyptians really grappling with this question and thinking about what might happen when we die... And I think that’s something we can all connect with and understand,” she said.

Cole recommends visiting the Getty’s website for a calendar of curator tours and special events related to the exhibition, including an upcoming talk by an Egyptologist.

The “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” at the Getty Villa runs from March 4 to Nov. 30.

The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in an important gun case that has united an array of strange bedfellows, from conservative gun rights groups to liberal civil liberties groups. At issue is a federal law making it a crime for drug users to possess a firearm. It's the same law that was used to prosecute then-President Joe Biden's son for illegal gun possession — only this case involves marijuana use and gun ownership.

The briefs in the case present diametrically different versions of the facts. On one side, the Trump administration portrays Ali Danial Hemani as a drug dealer and someone with terrorist ties and a marijuana habit. Importantly, he is not being prosecuted for any of those offenses, however. Rather, the government has charged Hemani with violating a federal gun law that bars people with drug addiction from possession of firearms, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the indictment, declaring that the federal law violates Hemani's Second Amendment right to own a gun.

The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that because Hemani admitted to FBI agents that he used marijuana several times a week, he is a "persistent" drug user, thus rendering illegal the possession of the gun he bought legally and keeps securely in his home.

Hemani's lawyer, law professor Naz Ahmad of the City University of New York, paints a very different picture of her client. Hemani, she notes, was born and raised in Texas, "attended high school there, played on the high school football team, attended the University of Texas at Arlington, was an honor student there" and is "a really valued member of his local religious community."

"The Second Amendment doesn't support disarming and prosecuting somebody for mere possession of a firearm if they happen to have used marijuana occasionally," she says.

"That's a mismatch," she adds, especially at a time when 40 states, to one degree or another, have legalized marijuana use.
 
If the court rules against Hemani, she says, "the statute could apply to anybody. It could apply to somebody who uses like a marijuana sleep gummy."

The Trump administration's advocate, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, acknowledges that under the Supreme Court's landmark gun decision four years ago, the government has a heavy burden to show that modern-day gun laws are analogous to laws in place at the nation's founding. But he contends that the statute used to prosecute Hemani is both justified and analogous to founding-era laws and practices.

Specifically, in his Supreme Court brief, Sauer points to the harsh punishments imposed during the founding era on "habitual drunkards." And he contends that both Congress and the states have restricted firearm possession by illegal drug users "for as long as that social evil has plagued America."

That said, for the most part, the case seems to have united groups from left to right, from civil liberties groups to gun rights advocates.

"It's outrageous that they tried to get him on a marijuana gun charge," says Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America. He contends that the government is seeking to criminalize conduct that was widely tolerated at the founding.

"It was the universal custom of founding-era militias to imbibe," he notes, adding that Thomas Jefferson and other famous Americans "possessed firearms while being users of drugs ranging from opium to cocaine."

At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum are a variety of gun-safety groups that fear that if Hemani wins his case, it could gouge a hole in the existing system of national background checks.

Under the current system, dealers are required to first clear the sale by submitting the buyer's name to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The hitch is that there is a very small window in which to complete the check — just three days. And gun-safety groups say that anything that makes the rules more complicated and unclear could really screw up the system.

"We're saying" to the court, "whatever you do, it's essential that you keep the rules clear so that in that short window, federal agencies can give a quick answer to the dealers," says Douglas Letter of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 

An adverse ruling, he says, would mess up the criminal background check process. That, in turn, would result in "so many, particularly women and children, who will die if that kind of a system is not in place."

A decision in the case is expected by summer.
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