The Brief

Orange County officials are moving forward with a series of projects to stabilize a stretch of coastal railway through San Clemente despite environmental critics saying the “haphazard” measures will only have short term benefits.

The coastal rail is part of the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo, or LOSSAN, rail corridor. Train service has had multiple disruptions since 2021 because of erosion and landslides.

The emergency measures approved by the Orange County Transportation Authority board include the addition of more than 500,000 cubic yards of sand, as well as the repairing and additions of rock along the coastal railway. The California Coastal Commission’s permit approvals also include installing a 1,400-foot catchment wall to hold debris from landslides and restoring a pedestrian trail at Mariposa Point.

But Mandy Sackett, senior California policy coordinator for Surfrider Foundation, said the “haphazard” short term rock walls won’t hold back the ocean and will instead destroy beach access for the public.

Environmental groups say that while the catchment wall will help address the issues that have led to railroad closures, the continued addition of rocks is exacerbating coastal erosion and limiting public access to the beach.

“If everything was natural, as coastal erosion happened, the beach would just move inland. But what the rocks do is that they put an arbitrary line in the sand and they fix the coastline right there,” said Suzie Whitelaw, president of Save Our Beaches San Clemente.

Storm waves crashing against the rocks, she said, then accelerate erosion.

“ It becomes a vicious cycle,” she said.

Sackett added that the current walls prevent the public from walking from city beaches to San Clemente State Beach and San Onofre State Beach.

The sand option

Whitelaw said sand is the the best solution for creating a long lasting buffer, adding  ”the wide sandy beaches protected the tracks for 130 years until they got too narrow.”

The beaches along the rail got so narrow that there was no dry beach left, but sand replenishment efforts by the San Clemente City Council, she said, has now resulted in some dry sand in North Beach.

Researchers at UC Irvine have previously told LAist that sand is the natural defense against strong waves.

The stabilization measures include sand, but it’s not coming soon.

The California Coastal Commission granted emergency permits to OCTA, but now the transportation authority needs to obtain permits from the Army Corps of Engineers for the sand, with the project expected to start next year.

The commission also pushed back on a request to install a 1,200-foot rock wall near San Clemente State Beach, a decision applauded by environmental groups like the Surfrider Foundation.

“This is a $300-million public works project that the OCTA is trying to push through the emergency permit process, which kind of circumvents environmental review, any public input, and it's really frustrating,” Sackett said.

Joel Zlotnik, a spokesperson for OCTA, told LAist the work will result in the temporary closure of the rail line, but the agency is still working out a timeline. He added that OCTA obtained the money for the projects from the federal and state governments.

OCTA has spent about $40 million since 2021 to address emergency closures of the railroad, he said.

What is the long term outlook for the coastal rail corridor?

OCTA is currently spearheading the Orange County coastal rail resiliency study ” to explore long term protection strategies for the coastal rail corridor. The report was supposed to come out later this year, but Zlotnik told LAist that it will likely be released in 2026 because the stabilization measures will take precedence.

“We want to make sure we have sufficient time to get enough meaningful feedback,” he said.

Maria Mendez walks her little white dog, named Peluche, on a wide dirt path in the city of South Gate’s newest park.

“Me gusta mucho el parque porque tenemos este sembradío de aguacates, limones y venimos a hacer ejercicio en las mañanas,” she said. She loves it for the avocado and citrus trees, and because she can exercise in the mornings, she said.

The park has sycamores and oaks too, a small wetland, a playground and throughout, winding walking paths. Mendez said she and Peluche come here most days. It’s convenient because the park is right next door to the mobile home park for seniors where she lives.

South Gate resident Maria Mendez and her dog, Peluche, walk the paths of the Urban Orchard every day.

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This park, though, is in a bit of an odd location.

“If you look around, you'll see you are in between the 710 Freeway and the L.A. River,” said Steve Costley, the city of South Gate’s director of Parks and Recreation. “Not a natural space to think, ‘Hey, let's go plant a park.’”

The park is called the Urban Orchard — 7 acres of renovated city-owned land sandwiched between the freeway and the river. To get there, you have to wind through industrial businesses. The din of the freeway is constant.

But under the new trees and next to the engineered creek and wetland, there’s the sound of birds and water.

Urban Orchard Park officially opened this summer — a brand new green space for the city and Southeast L.A. as a whole. Two other newly renovated parks also opened this year in South Gate.

So how did the small city do it?

A need for more green

South Gate is home to about 100,000 people, 95% of whom identify as Latino, according to census data. The average household income is less than $75,000 a year. And city residents have some of the least access to nearby nature — just 3% of the city’s land is made up of parks, one-fifth the national average, according to data analyzed by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land .

“We're one of the very high-needs cities in all of L.A. County that doesn't have enough park space,” Costley said. 

Lower income communities of color across the region and the country have disproportionately less access to green space than wealthier, whiter communities.

The constructed wetland at Urban Orchard Park is fed by stormwater from the L.A. River and helps filtrate and clean that water to irrigate the park.

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The new Urban Orchard Park in South Gate is sandwiched between the 710 Freeway and L.A. River.

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“Parks are what we love. Parks are what I think people need. I think parks make a city into a community,” Costley said.

Parks can also boost life expectancy , improve air quality and cool neighborhoods as climate change makes heat waves worse . The Urban Orchard will go even further, helping to address food insecurity as well.

Though the city is still working out the details, a grove of 200 citrus trees, along with vegetable beds and an avocado orchard, will be a source of fresh produce for seniors living in the mobile home park next door.

Dayana Molina, community organizer with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which helped fund and design the new Urban Orchard Park.

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“We were really trying to address and bring the vision of the community through this process,” said Dayana Molina, a community organizer with the Trust for Public Land, which helped design and fund the new park. “So we heard about food insecurity. We heard about not enough shade.”

Not only is the Urban Orchard adding green space where it’s badly needed, but it will also recycle stormwater. The 1-acre constructed wetland cleans runoff from the L.A. River and stores water in a large reservoir the city built under the citrus orchard, providing 70% of the park’s irrigation.

Any overflow will return to the river channel, cleaner than before. Eventually, the hope is that native fish can be introduced to the park’s wetland and streams.

“This is not just a South Gate park, it's really a regional project that is bringing benefits to the whole region,” Molina said.

Residents — and wildlife — are already benefiting.

Dale De Julio, a retired truck driver who lives next door to the Urban Orchard, now walks there every day and loves to observe the birds.

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Retired truck driver Dale De Julio lives in the mobile home park next door to the new Urban Orchard. He remembers when the land was an empty dirt lot. He never used to go for walks near his home. Now, De Julio walks the park every day.

“ This has given me an incentive to get out and walk around,” De Julio said. “I need that now that I'm retired.”

He said after years of driving trucks all over the country, seeing countless sights but never having the time to stop and appreciate them, the park is a place he can finally do that.

Just the other day, he said, he even saw a blue heron, a bird he’d never seen in the area before.

How to build a new park

Limited space, expensive land, historic pollution, lack of funding, permitting, other red tape — there are many obstacles to building a new park in Southern California.

The Urban Orchard was no exception, and the process was not cheap or quick. The park ultimately cost more than $31 million and took more than 10 years to complete.

The funding all came through state, county and federal grants, as well as private donors. The project came to fruition via multiple partnerships between the city and the private and nonprofit sectors.

“ South Gate is not a rich community. We don't generate that much revenue on our own, so we're very reliant on partnerships,” said Vice Mayor Joshua Barron.

UCLA research has found that public-private partnerships are essential to the success of greening projects such as the Urban Orchard.

“This really requires, as the proverbial saying goes, a village,” said UCLA professor Jon Christensen, who led that research and studies equitable access to green space.

The Urban Orchard, he added, “is a real testament to the dedication and persistence and creativity that is required to build new parks in Los Angeles.”

That creativity included cobbling together funding from a variety of sources, including $3 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, nearly $8 million from the State Water Resources Control Board, more than $4 million from the state’s Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, nearly $7 million from local Measure W funds, $5 million from Caltrans, Proposition 68 funds, more than $700,000 from the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, and private donations.

Joy Chancellor, 19, of South L.A. plants lettuce in one of the vegetable gardens at the Urban Orchard in South Gate. She's a corpsmember with the Long Beach Conservation Corps, which will maintain the park for its first three years while training young people in environmental jobs.

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The first three years of maintenance will be carried out by the Long Beach Conservation Corps, training young people from the area in environmental jobs. The city will have to find a way to pick up the maintenance tab after that.

“It was not a smooth process. It never is when we have complicated pieces of land adjacent to the L.A. River,” said Nola Eaglin Talmage, the Trust for Public Land’s Parks for People program director. “We've got all kinds of different public funding streams, all with different timelines, all with different requirements.”

Eaglin Talmage said a new county motion brought by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath could help streamline the process. And state efforts such as Proposition 4 are also essential to making these types of efforts possible, especially as federal funds for environmental projects dry up under the Trump administration.

“The passing of Prop. 4 is one of the reasons why we'll be able to continue to build green space in Los Angeles,” Eaglin Talmage said.

A bigger reform idea

Places to sit and enjoy nature in the new Urban Orchard Park in South Gate.

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South Gate Vice Mayor Barron said there’s another way for small cities to have an easier time building projects that benefit the public — updating outdated tax revenue laws.

“Last year, our residents and businesses paid over $80 million in property taxes, but yet the city of South Gate was only allocated about $5 million of that,” Barron said.

Currently, South Gate receives just 6.14% of property tax revenue collected within the city — a percentage set in 1978 through Proposition 13. After Proposition 13, the state created a formula to divide that tax among counties, cities, schools and special districts, with each city’s share based on its pre-1978 property tax base – a formula that still governs allocations today and mostly benefits wealthier cities with higher property values. That hurts cities like his, Barron said.

Only the state legislature can update that formula, something Barron is pushing for.

“One of the things that I really wish that we could look at is helping cities like South Gate, like Bell, like Cudahy, Maywood — the Southeast L.A. region — be a little bit more self-sustainable,” Barron said.

“All we're asking,” he added, “is to be able to be self-sustainable and not have to always rely on grant money to be able to get projects off the ground.”

If you’ve heard about the new Hulu show All’s Fair , chances are that you know it stars Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts and Glenn Close as high-powered divorce lawyers in Los Angeles. And chances are that you’ve also heard: the reviews are not good .

In fact they're so bad some people are checking out the show just for that reason . And here at LAist, we're some of those people.

But as journalists, we also were interested in the facts. Or “Just the facts, ma’am,” to misquote another law-related TV show set in L.A.: Dragnet, created by and starring Jack Webb (the Kim Kardashian of his day).

To get the facts, we turned to women who really are divorce lawyers in L.A. Attorneys Demetria Graves and Emily Rubenstein had heard of All’s Fair.

“ People are bringing it up a lot, including clients and potential clients," Rubenstein said.

However, they hadn’t yet checked it out for themselves before being contacted by LAist.

Both said they do enjoy a good legal drama, though Rubenstein said she much prefers true crime documentaries to scripted shows. Graves cited Law & Order and the TV One true crime show Fatal Attraction as some of her favorites.

“I love the shows,” Graves said, because she gets to watch someone else handle a case that she’s not actually involved in. “It’s not my case, so it’s a good time for me.”

She and Rubenstein generously agreed to watch the first three episodes of All’s Fair and share their professional assessments of what the show gets wrong and what it gets right (cue the Law and Order gavel sound ).

The L.A. of "All’s Fair"

The series is set in L.A. and there are some scenes set in recognizable local landmarks in the first episodes, including the historic Bradbury Building , the Venice Boardwalk and the Petersen Automotive Museum. So, points for accuracy there.

But Rubenstein said the office spaces — some of them dark and library-like — didn't look like L.A. to her: “No one's law offices in L.A. look like that. No matter what level [of] attorney you are [...] I've not been in many East Coast law offices, but it gives more of that vibe.”

Kim Kardashian in a scene from "All's Fair" on Hulu.

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 “Most L.A. law offices are more airy, and looking out into the hills instead of being such a mahogany cave,” Rubenstein added.

The fashion: Gloves, gloves, and more gloves (plus visible thongs)

As for the show’s over-the-top fashions, which have garnered a lot of attention, Graves said she gets why a TV show set in L.A. would lean into that.

“The clothing is beautiful, the aesthetics are beautiful," she said. "However, I don't know how realistic it is for most attorneys.”

The attention-grabbing, or unconventional, fashion choices the characters make — like wearing gloves — didn’t ring true for Rubenstein, either.

 ”For people who are constantly typing and using pens, gloves are not really that convenient of an accessory,” she said.

As for Kardashian’s character Allura Grant wearing a skirt suit with a cutout to expose a thong, Rubenstein said, “ I've never seen a lawyer ass out in a thong in the office the way that Kim Kardashian was in that scene in the conference room.”

But the inaccuracy also didn’t really bother her: “It’s one of those things that made me kind of giggle, which I think is just part of the show. I think it's supposed to be sort of campy. The fashion is a huge element of that. And yeah, I mean, aside from that one example, it did give me some inspo for my own courtroom fashion, so I'll thank them for that.”

The drama and personal life element? Lawyers say: Somewhat accurate

“What I did like is it did shed light on women having their own practices, women having their own firms,” Graves said. “What happens sometimes when you become very successful, what that can potentially do to your own personal relationships. So some of those things I am very happy people do get to see, because I think that is very realistic.”

The hard work involved, the complicated natures of the cases, the “sisterhood” and support among colleagues or mentors (like Glenn Close’s character) and mentees, all rang true to Graves.

 ”The emotion of the clients, true to that extreme? I don't know,” Graves said. “But the emotion, absolutely all of that is true.”

The storyline where Watts’ character is reluctant to marry her boyfriend, partially because of how many marriages she’s seen end badly in her work, also seemed pretty true to life, Graves said.

“You know how bad it can go, you don’t want to be in that,” but she added, “you try not to let it lead your personal life.”

O-T Fagbenle and Naomi Watts in a scene from "All's Fair."

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The sexism

The premise of the show is that the leading women were not being respected at their male-dominated firm, so they decided to strike out on their own, start a women-led firm and only represent woman clients.

Graves currently works independently and Rubenstein heads up an all-women family law practice, but both represent clients of all genders.

As for the idea that women lawyers may not be taken as seriously, Graves said, “ I will say some of the ‘good old boy’ club [or] network or however you wanna call it, that still exists today. And just in the climate that we're in, it gets really nasty in the world of family law because there's so many emotions, so much going on.”

Both said the reasons that people would seek out a woman lawyer (or not) can also lean on stereotypes.

When people want a lawyer who will really “ fight and throw the book, some people equate that with men attorneys,” Graves said. Women, meanwhile, can be viewed as “softer” and operating with “more compassion.”

Rubenstein said sometimes a sense of female empowerment is important to a woman client, and it is meaningful to them to have a woman represent them. But “on the flip side, men and women can both be sexist, right? And so there are women who are going to seek male attorneys [...] And then men also seek out women attorneys, I think for good reasons and bad reasons.”

“I think some men perceive that if they are represented by a woman attorney, let's say in a domestic violence dispute, that that's going to give them some kind of credibility, or leg up,” Rubenstein said.

“Personally, I think rather than looking at the gender of the attorney, the most important thing is to choose someone that you feel the most comfortable with because it is intimate and vulnerable,” Rubenstein said. “So it's really about being aligned on that more than any of the superficial things, whether it's gender or religion or sexuality. Everyone's an individual, right? So you could end up with a woman attorney who's fabulous or not. Someone being a woman or not is not gonna make the difference. But there are a lot of preconceived notions about that.”

The law, best practices and "emotional justice"

As for the accuracy of how the show presents the law or lawyer terminology, neither attorney we talked to had major accuracy complaints, though to be fair, the show tended to keep things fairly general, at least in the first three episodes, and focused a lot on the characters’ personal lives.

But both pointed to something a client of Watts' cahracter said about needing a California lawyer because that’s where she was married.

“ That's not true,” Rubenstein said. “It's about where you live at the time of the divorce. Even if you got married in California, if you have not lived here for six months, you can't get divorced here.”

Though, if people have second homes and there’s a dispute about where someone lives, that can complicate things.

As for Watts’ decision to fly across the country after getting a distressing call from an emotional potential client in New York, Graves said she would never recommend it.

“It's probably best to let things kind of calm down first before you insert yourself,” Graves said. “And to that client as well, it's probably best to calm down first before you contact your divorce lawyer.”

Graves said she always recommends clients have someone to go to for emotional support who is not their lawyer.

“ I tell my clients all the time, I think it is imperative to have a support system outside of your divorce lawyer while going through this process,” because leaning on your lawyer for that “can get very expensive and we are here to handle the business of all of what's going on,” she said.

Somewhat related to that, Rubenstein said her advice to clients is that  they're “not going to get emotional justice through the legal process,” in part because California is what’s called a “no-fault” state, “ meaning that you don't have to prove that someone did something wrong to get divorced.”

In the show, though, “they do focus on that. I get it. It's better TV. It's so much juicier if you get this emotional vindication and win.”

But she said her fear in watching that as an attorney is “that I do spend a lot of time explaining to people that I understand how painful certain things are that have happened, and that those things are not going to impact the final result. And that's very difficult news to deliver because people are expecting justice. They're expecting there to be some kind of punishment for bad behavior [...] So I think it can give people kind of a false hope of what to expect will actually happen.”

The final verdict!

Asked to rate All’s Fair on a scale of 1 to 5 for both accuracy and enjoyability, Graves said she’d  give her “lawyer answer”: “In terms of accuracy for the average divorce lawyer, I would say about a 2. But for those that represent the 1% of the 1%, it might be actually very accurate. That's just not my experience.”

In terms of enjoyability, just as a TV watcher, she said she’d give the show a 3.

“I love the look, I love the fashion. I love the glitz and glamour of it all. So for those reasons, a 3,” she said.

Rubenstein declined to give an enjoyability score (“It’s just not my genre”), but in terms of accuracy she said she’d say 3, because while there were some legal facts that weren’t exactly right, and she could see some people being “self righteous about the details” and giving it a 0, “the accuracy that at least was most meaningful to me was that lawyers do have lives, and that we're all human.”

I am standing in front of a homespun food cart on a dusty side street next to a strip mall in Rowland Heights, the sun beating down from high up, watching as the proprietor makes circles with a millet and mung bean batter on a big round griddle.

“We got everything from China,” says Cong cong Li, referring to that heavy duty piece of cookware, with two gas-powered burners running underneath. Way back in the day, Li says, people used wood fire to make the street snack she's making now.

Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes, selling $10 made-to-order street snack in Rowland Heights.

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She cracks a couple of eggs over the thin, now crispy layer of batter, which Li says they grind with a stone mill themselves at home. Then a sprinkle of black sesames. Next come the scallions. Then the deep-fried dumpling skin. Li finishes my order off with the requisite sweet bean sauce.

She scoops the scalding hot Chinese crepe right off the griddle into a bag – so fresh it burns to the touch – just like the very first time I had jianbing guozi.

The first bite

It isn’t everyday I get to see this traditional Chinese snack made right in front of me. In fact, the first – and last – time was some 20 years ago when I was leaving Beijing.

Literally, leaving after spending months in the country. To mark the occasion, I decided to take a series of public buses to the airport, an idea that quickly became less cute when I got off at the final stop – and the airport was nowhere in sight.

I dragged my luggage and sheepishly followed the handful of people also hauling bags on a long, long trek to close that last stretch, the sun beating down from high up.

That was when I spotted a homemade food cart selling a kind of a wrap I'd never had before on the side of the road.

Hungry, tired and feeling more than a little lost, I watched as the proprietor made circles with the batter, cracked eggs over it, then drowned it in sauces and herbs.

One bite – a mouthful of soft, crispy, earthy flavors – was all it took. I am no foodie but it was the best food I had ever had in my life.

Ever since, I have been searching for that same taste in the San Gabriel Valley.

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Crepe-making, Chinese street food style, in Rowland Heights

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The SGV crepe cart

Li and her husband have operated their Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes cart near the intersection of Jellick Avenue and Colima Road in Rowland Heights for more than two years, working daily from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Before, Li said they were making Chinese crepes at different night markets and festivals around the San Gabriel Valley. Eventually, they struck out on their own for a simple reason.

“We have to feed our family,” Li says, laughing, in Mandarin.

The crepe, jianbing guozi (煎饼果子) in Chinese, is a common street food in the couple’s hometown of Shandong Province. The traditional breakfast snack is said to hail from the city of Tianjin, a little further north. An exact date isn’t known; many sources cite the year 1933 as the first time it was mentioned in a newspaper, but its existence most likely predated that reference by centuries.

Li says jianbing guozi is common now in many areas across China – customized according to local taste – and of course the snack inevitably travelled well beyond the country.

Cong cong Li at the Chinese crepe food cart she and her husband started in Rowland Heights.

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The search

I didn’t learn its Chinese name until several years after I returned to L.A. and that knowledge set me off on a quest of sorts. The San Gabriel Valley, I figured, has got to have it, right?

It wasn’t one of those epic, exhaustive, obsessive searches , but I always did keep an eye out. Internet searches turned up nothing for many years, and friends also drew blanks.

But by the late 2000s, I noticed the snack creeping up in reviews at this or that restaurant. Now it’s found in many more places. There’s even an entire shop, Me + Crêpe , dedicated to that single dish in Pasadena. Last time I had it was at Tai Chi Cuisine in Irvine, recommended by a Chinese foodie. It was great, but the decorum of being served at a restaurant was ... different.

The discovery

The finished product.

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Fast forward to a week ago. I spotted on Instagram a food cart with a big griddle, tossing me back to that fuzzy, serendipitous day in Beijing. I had to go check it out.

And on this weekday early afternoon in Rowland Heights, the vibe is right — pure street food culture. Customers drive up or dash from their parked cars to put in an order – some biting into the steaming hot wrap right away. When their stand first opened, Li says the majority of their customers were Chinese. Now it's more evened out, as word spreads.

Which is how Angel Cueva found the spot, driving from Whittier after seeing a video on social spotlighting the operation.

“ I don't know, maybe just the cart, the preparation, just looked like it had a lot of good stuff in it, Cueva says. “ When I seen this, I was like, I got to try this.”

Cueva was on the go and said he’d eat it in his car. He texted me later to say he loved the crepe. I took that message to Li.

She says when her family first came to the U.S. more than a decade ago, it was impossible to find authentic jianbing – the way it was made in their hometown. That prompted her husband to come up with a recipe, which he taught Li.

“While supporting our family, we want to promote Chinese food culture,” Li says. “The delicacy has hundreds of years of history. It’s a testament to the wisdom of our ancestors.”

A list of ingredients for the Chinese crepes sold at Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes in Rowland Heights.

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