The Brief

Tree planting programs across the U.S. are on the chopping block as a result of federal funding cuts under the billionaire Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.

The cuts include $75 million to the U.S. Forest Service, $1 million to nonprofits in Nashville and $12 million to Philadelphia.

In Los Angeles, thousands of trees may now go unplanted.

“We’re taking a hit somewhere to close to $2.5 million, which for a small nonprofit is a big deal,” says Aaron Thomas,  director of urban forestry for North East Trees.

North East Trees is a tree-planting nonprofit that primarily operates in low-income communities in Los Angeles like Watts, Boyle Heights and Northeast and South L.A. They build parks, run cleanup events in the L.A. River and plant thousands of shade trees.

“Between 80 and 90% of our budget is from government grants,” Thomas said.

This year’s funding is largely spoken for thanks to grants from CalFire, but since “the Biden administration secured so much funding for urban greening, California decided to not use their own funding for these kinds of programs going forward,” he added.

North East Trees applied for federal grants for 2026, which Thomas says were approved. But with federal dollars gone, Thomas and his team will run out of funding by the end of this year.

That will mean abandoning projects to plant 1,000 trees in Watts and another 1,000 trees in eastern unincorporated L.A. County, Thomas said.

A woman shades herself on a street with few trees in Boyle Heights.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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A loss of essential infrastructure

Research has shown that people living near fewer trees die earlier.

One study found that just three trees can lower the chance of health-related deaths by 1%. With adequate funding, nonprofits like North East Trees can plant several hundred trees in an afternoon.

“If we can't continue to regenerate and rejuvenate our urban forests, we're in deep trouble,” said Esther Margulies, a professor of landscape architecture at USC.

“Trees  are essential pieces of our city's infrastructure,” she said. “They do everything from providing cooling, to retaining storm water, to supporting habitats, to promoting physical and mental health.”

Marguiles said the parts of Los Angeles with the fewest trees tend to be lower-income, and would feel the federal budget freezes the most.

“People who depend on transit, people don’t have air conditioning, kids walking to school in the morning… These people really need shade,” she said.

But the benefits of increased tree canopy are universal, she added.

“When temperatures rise and there is more heat, we see more chemical reactions that increase ozone and other substances that are harmful to our health,” Marguiles said, adding that some trees are able to also absorb some of these chemicals. “So the cooler we make our environment, the more we fight the urban heat island, the better our air quality will be.”

Aaron Thomas poses in front of the Ramona Gardens housing development where he has been planting trees for many years, photographed in 2022.

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Brian De Los Santos

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LAist

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‘A ricochet effect’

Millions of dollars of lost grant funding affects more than just the trees themselves.

North East Trees hires people in the communities where they work. And they purchase most of their trees from a nursery in Watts, supporting the local economy.

It’s not just North East Trees, Thomas said.

“The larger urban forestry community and other nonprofits, L.A. city, all of them are taking hits," he said. "Collectively, there will be a ricochet effect across all of our partners.”

Thomas said he anticipated budget cuts in the wake of President Donald Trump’s return to office. But, he added, when the cuts were announced, “it was shocking nonetheless.”

“Real people's lives — vulnerable people — will be hurt unnecessarily," he said. "That should not be okay with anyone."

Despite losing nearly 90% of their funding for next year, Thomas said their mission is as important as ever. He hopes private funding and state partnerships can make up some of the losses.

“We just have to work through this to make sure that our communities here in Los Angeles have the quality of life that they deserve,” he said. “Act locally, think globally. We can't let anything prevent us from doing that.”

Nine months had passed since a wildfire destroyed Mark Johnson's southern California home, and he was still waiting for State Farm to pay his claim. Desperate for a resolution, Johnson asked the insurer in October to negotiate a settlement so his family could rebuild.

"I was on the verge of leaving money on the table," Johnson recalls, "just to get some kind of assurance of what we could move forward with."

Then, just before Thanksgiving, a State Farm representative told him the money was on its way.

"Needless to say, it was a huge relief," Johnson says, fighting back tears.

Johnson isn't alone. State Farm is California's top home insurer, and many customers around Los Angeles started to get checks in November after L.A. County announced it was investigating complaints about how the company had handled claims from last January's wildfires, says Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

For homeowners, the battle to collect insurance money after the Eaton and Palisades fires has exacerbated a grueling recovery that's far from over. As Johnson's case with State Farm languished, he had to scramble for other sources of funding to try to rebuild. Other fire survivors have gone into debt while bouncing between rental housing, as they wrangled with State Farm and other insurers over coverage.
The struggle Los Angeles residents have faced with insurers mirrors what's happening in communities around the United States. Years of rising premiums, due in part to threats from climate change, have added to the frustration with insurance companies.

"This is a national issue," Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, told reporters recently. He added, "the first commandment of the insurance industry is to pay as little, as late as possible."

Asked about its handling of insurance claims, State Farm sent NPR a statement from its website that says the company takes every claim seriously and tries to provide customers with appropriate coverage.

"The rebuilding process [in Los Angeles] is underway, but frustration with the pace is understandable," David Sampson, chief executive of American Property Casualty Insurance Association, an industry group, said in a statement to NPR. "Insurers have paid tens of billions of dollars to policyholders impacted by the fires, and that process continues."

Insurers face 'staggering' costs from LA fires

The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures around Los Angeles. They rank as the most expensive blazes ever globally, with $40 billion of insured losses, according to Swiss Re Institute, the research arm of reinsurance company Swiss Re.

Soon after the fires were extinguished, homeowners started to complain about how insurance companies were responding to the disaster.

"The price tag is so staggering for the insurers here that they are bringing strategies to try to limit the pain" they experience financially, says Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a national consumer advocate. "But it's nothing new under the sun what we're seeing."

In November, the Los Angeles County counsel opened an investigation of State Farm following reports from residents that the company delayed, underpaid and denied valid insurance claims. The county counsel's office declined to comment on the state of the investigation.

State Farm said in a statement on its website that the investigation is a distraction from its efforts to help fire victims recover.

Chen of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network says State Farm's alleged behavior was devastating for its customers.

"Around February or March, I realized that whether a family was recovering or not depended largely on which insurance company they were with, which was shocking," Chen says. "These are all people who have been paying [their] insurance premiums faithfully for 20 or 30 years, but only some of them were getting the benefits."

The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures around Los Angeles.

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Ryan Kellman

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NPR

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The fight for insurance money has been especially hard for homeowners whose houses survived the fires but were contaminated with lead and other toxins from the smoke, according to survivors and consumer advocates.

"With total loss, it's a very clear-cut, 'OK, we either rebuild or we sell. And if we rebuild, it's this. And if we sell, it's that.' And we do not have any paths to take," says Krista Copelan, whose Altadena home suffered smoke damage and lead contamination in the fires. "It's 100% trying to figure it out, fighting every step of the way, having no clear-cut answers."

Until about Thanksgiving, Andrew Wessels says State Farm resisted replacing his family's personal belongings, like clothes and bedding, that had been contaminated with lead, insisting the items could be cleaned instead. As the one-year anniversary of the fires approached, Wessels still didn't know how much State Farm would pay to remediate lead contamination in his Altadena house. To get rid of all the toxic ash, Wessels says floorboards need to be pulled up and walls torn down.

"We're here almost a year later, and we haven't taken one step forward," Wessels said in December.

As they've waited, Wessels, his wife and two young children have moved a dozen times, and the family has taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

A lot of families are in similar situations. In Altadena, 65% of residents are still in temporary housing, according to a report this month from Department of Angels, a nonprofit that was set up to help victims of last year's fires. In Pacific Palisades, the number is even higher, with nearly three-quarters of residents still displaced.

As the recovery has dragged on, the toll on residents has grown, according to the Department of Angels report. Around half of respondents said they have depleted much or all of their savings. And about the same share said they worry about their mental health.

"I think everyone has been overwhelmed and drained for, literally, the past 11 months," Copelan, a State Farm customer, said in December.

'They're trying to make it difficult'

More than a thousand miles east, in Oklahoma, State Farm faces separate allegations that it has shortchanged policyholders. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, recently accused the insurer of running a scheme to deny and minimize payments for roof damage from hail and wind.

"Oklahomans are paying rising homeowners insurance premiums yet receiving less protection in return, as State Farm simultaneously pursues additional rate increases while allegedly escalating its claims denials and underpayments practices," Drummond wrote in a December court filing.

Drummond's complaint is part of a growing wave of frustration with insurers nationwide as rising premiums strain household budgets.

In Texas, Democratic state Rep. Mihaela Plesa recently told reporters that homeowners who are struggling to pay for insurance in her district near Dallas routinely have their claims denied.

"That's not insurance, that's extraction," Plesa said. "That's a system that's designed to pull maximum dollars out of Texas pockets and providing minimum protection when disaster strikes."

And in southwest Florida, Jessica Gatewood, a Realtor, told NPR that home insurance feels like "a scam."

"You pay into it for, like, 30 years, 40 years, and then you have to make a claim, and they don't want to pay you what you actually need," Gatewood says.

The insurance industry says it has been dealing with years of rising disaster costs that have forced companies to raise premiums and to limit coverage in some high-risk areas.

The cost of disasters is increasing in part because climate change fuels more-intense storms, floods and wildfires that damage and destroy property. Additionally, people continue to move to coastal regions vulnerable to hurricanes and to forested areas prone to wildfires. That means more property is in harm's way. Then, when homes get damaged or destroyed, inflation has made it more expensive to rebuild.
Robert Gordon, a senior vice president at American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the industry group, says Florida and other states have also been plagued by cases of what Gordon described as insurance "fraud" related to alleged roof damage from storms, which he says have contributed to rising costs.

Construction workers build a home in the Palisades fire zone on the one-year anniversary of the fires.

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Allen J. Schaben

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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In California, Mark Johnson hopes to move into his rebuilt Altadena home by fall. Reflecting on his ordeal with State Farm, part of him wonders if the insurer was just overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. But he can't shake the feeling that all of the delays he faced were intentional.

"They're just trying to push you away," Johnson says. "They're trying to make it difficult for you so that you won't ask for much, so you'll be happy with whatever you get."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed record levels of public funding for K-12 schools, but in several Southern California school districts declining enrollment and rising costs may still lead to cuts next school year.

The budget proposal allocates $125.5 billion, the highest-ever level, according to Newsom. That’s $20,427 per student.

“There's an increase in per pupil funding, but I wouldn't be fooled into thinking that those numbers indicate that schools really have more money to work with than in previous years,” said California School Boards Association spokesperson Troy Flint. The organization represents almost 1,000 districts and county offices of education statewide.

That’s because declining enrollment combined with rising teacher salaries, un-funded state mandates and other increased costs are squeezing local school districts.

LAist spoke to Flint and several other school finance experts to understand the financial challenges California districts face as they create their spending plans for next school year.

How does the state fund school districts?

The majority of the state’s general fund comes from personal income, sales tax and corporation tax revenue.

“That's great when the economy is good and state revenues are growing, and it's trickier when the economy is bad and state revenues are small,” said USC education professor Lawrence Picus.

California law guarantees TK-12 schools and community colleges a minimum level of funding each year, usually about 40% of the state’s general fund. (Property tax is a local revenue source, and considered to be less volatile but with limited growth.)

The state provides a base amount of money multiplied by each student and there is additional funding for every low-income, English-language learner, unhoused or foster youth student in the district. This system is called the Local Control Funding Formula.

How does enrollment affect school funding?

Since California sets funding rates per student, it needs a way to count those students. This is average daily attendance — how many students show up for class each day.

Currently, fewer students are enrolling at schools throughout the state, particularly in areas with high costs of living like Los Angeles. Students who are enrolled are also missing more school compared to before the pandemic.

“The intuitive response is, ‘well, if you have declining enrollment, you have fewer students, you should need less money,’” Flint said. “But in practice it doesn't really work that way.”

That’s because a district may lose a few students from each class across several schools each year, which may not justify laying off staff or closing a campus.

California education law blunts the immediate impact of declining enrollment by calculating funding based on the highest of three attendance counts: current year, prior year, or the average of the three most recent years, but over time fewer students means a smaller multiplier for state funding.

Increasing costs

Michael Fine is CEO of Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), the California agency that supports public schools' financial and business practices. He estimated schools are experiencing an estimated 5-6% cost increase every year.

The sources of that increase can include an increase in sexual assault claims (and the ensuing legal costs), utilities and insurance costs.

California provides money toward these increased costs through the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). This year’s proposed COLA is a 2.41% increase, less than half the estimated increase districts are experiencing, Fine said.

“At the state, they can say we are fully funding our commitment to TK through 12 education,” Fine said. “But at the local level, it feels like things are constrained. It feels like a pinch or actually a reduction.”

Another factor is the push to increase educators’ salaries in light of California’s high cost of living.

This year unions representing teachers at 32 school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, are negotiating contracts under a unified platform called “We Can’t Wait.” The campaign has already led to one strike and negotiations have stalled in more than a dozen districts, including LAUSD.

Federal, state budget uncertainty

This year’s state revenue projection is higher than expected, in part because of high salaries tied to artificial intelligence, but there’s no guarantee the funding will last.

Alix Gallagher studies school finance at Policy Analysis for California (PACE) and said that because revenue is unpredictable, lawmakers often opt to fund short-term initiatives rather than make long-term commitments.

“Whatever positive effects we're seeing [from short-term funding] are not the types of positive effects we might see if our funding was more stable,” Gallagher said.

For example, this year there is $1 billion for community schools, $757 million to support learning recovery related to the COVID-19 pandemic and $22.9 million for schools damaged by the January 2025 wildfires in L.A. County.

The budget also includes a one-time $2.8 billion grant that can be used for a variety of purposes from filling in the funding gap left by declining enrollment to supporting teacher training.

“Many districts will use that to mitigate some of their struggles,” Fine said. “All it does is buy time.”

The federal government also provides some money for education, but it’s also unclear how that funding will change in the second year of the Trump Administration’s second term.

In 2025, there were cuts to migrant education, mental health, and some internet access programs, although the courts ordered the administration to restore funding to several programs including teacher-training and afterschool programs.

What’s next for California school funding?

Newsom will present a revised spending plan in May and California lawmakers have until June 15 to pass the state’s budget.

In the meantime, local school districts will begin crafting their own budgets based on the governor’s proposal.

Fine said district administrators and elected school boards will have to manage the financial consequences of declines in enrollment over time.

“They make the hard decisions, their boards make the difficult, hard decisions to make, cuts to services and programs,” Fine said.

How can I monitor my school district’s financial health?

School budget proposals should be presented at public meetings, often the school board, where elected leaders can ask questions and the public can weigh in.

Districts may also create a working group, often called a budget advisory committee, of staff, families, community members and students to come up with a plan to address the district's financial challenges.

One indicator of your school district’s financial health are interim reports due in December and March to the County Offices of Education. These reports show how and whether the district can meet its financial obligations for the current and two following years and are labeled:

• Positive, the district can meet its obligations
• Qualified, the district may not be able to meet its obligations
• Negative, the district cannot meet its obligations without changes

Two of Orange County’s 32 districts filed qualified reports in December— Cypress and Saddleback Valley Unified. LAist has also requested this information from the Los Angeles County Office of Education and will update this article when we hear back.

$8.63 million in emergency grants sent to 562 families.

That’s how much financial assistance the Entertainment Community Fund has provided to performing arts and entertainment industry workers since fires broke out in Southern California in January last year. And the organization still is distributing grants, with the knowledge that needs are likely to increase soon.

 ”We know that the trajectory of the recovery process with homeowners and their insurances is that they will often pay some portion or all of a rent expense while people are displaced from their homes,” says Keith McNutt, the ECF’s Western Regional director. “That usually only lasts nine months to a year, and we're of course coming up on that year.”

Why entertainment workers?

Providing support to the entertainment community is nothing new for the nonprofit Entertainment Community Fund (formerly known as The Actors Fund), a national organization that’s been around since 1882 and is a sort of safety net for arts and entertainment workers in any kind of need or crisis. They also have built some of their own affordable housing.

A significant portion of their work, McNutt says, is making people aware that help is available and also that it’s OK to access it.

“It’s hard for any professional person in their craft to ask for help from anyone,” McNutt says. “But literally, we were created 140 years ago for exactly that reason. Because people work hard in this industry, but the industry doesn't provide regular income, regular benefits, [...] predictability, a standard career ladder.”

On top of the normal unpredictability factors of a career in the performing arts, there’s also the fact that the past five years have been “such a brutal onslaught of crises,” as McNutt describes it, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 to the January 2025 fires, “that people have not had time to recover.”

What help is available?

The Entertainment Community Fund’s staff of social workers, career counselors and health insurance counselors provides a wide range of services (many of them free), like classes on things like building “parallel” or “sideline” careers to supplement income and support groups (including some specifically designed for people impacted by the 2025 fires).

Some services, like emergency financial assistance, require a more formal application to show that a recipient does in fact work professionally in performing arts or entertainment.

From ‘parallel’ careers to career changes

For a long time, McNutt says, he heard from arts professionals who saw their non-arts-related day jobs (ECF calls them “parallel” or “sideline” jobs) as sort of betrayal of their art, but “ our message has always been, ‘No, no, no [...] that's what helps you stay in your creative craft.’”

Over the past couple of years, though, with hardships compounding and  ”profound shifts in the amount of employment, particularly in television and film,” McNutt has seen something different.

“We have seen significant increases in the number of people who are coming to our career center to consider transitioning to other careers," he says. "And that is definitely a change.”

And even for those cases and questions like, “How do you apply for a job that's not in the industry when you've never worked outside the industry?” McNutt says that's "something we can help people with.”

When it comes to renters, Scorpios are “particular,” Libras are “gold,” and Aquariuses “can't make up their mind.” That’s according to Dave Goldstein, the Los Angeles landlord behind the company Art Deco Apartments.

For years, Goldstein has asked prospective tenants to tell him their astrological sign as part of the application process. He said he doesn’t care about credit scores, and he loves tenants with pets. He knows his approach to tenant screening is unusual. But when it comes to picking the right renters for his century-old, tastefully appointed buildings, he said it works.

“It gives me an idea of their personality,” Goldstein told LAist outside The Mauretania, a well preserved example of 1930s Streamline Moderne architecture in Hancock Park.

“I mean, it's impersonal to just get an application,” he said. “You're going to get buildings that aren't that good. You're going to get impersonal people that don't care about anything.”

The question might be helpful to Goldstein, but some housing rights experts say it could be pushing the boundaries of what’s legal.

Why Leos make good tenants

While he hasn’t blacklisted any particular star sign, Goldstein said in his experience, people with certain signs are easier to deal with as tenants.

“If they say that they're a Leo, I go, ‘Great,’” he said. “‘I can't wait to rent to you. You're your own boss. I don't have to do nothing. You'll change every light bulb. You'll never call us.’”

Goldstein also likes to ask tenants where they grew up and the color of their car. He said people are sometimes surprised by the questions, but they tend to like his approach.

“They just can't believe it, because they're used to just texting a management company,” he said. “They're not used to personal service.”

The Mauretania, a 1930s apartment building with distinctive curved windows looking out on the street, is one of the properties Dave Goldstein owns through Art Deco Apartments.

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Housing rights lawyers weigh in

But is asking a tenant about their astrological sign legal? Housing rights attorneys told LAist they’re not aware of any laws or court rulings that explicitly ban landlords from screening tenants based on their birth month. But they said the question is still legally precarious.

“There's not a specific law against it,” said Rodney Leggett, director of litigation at the L.A.-based Housing Rights Center. “But because of the seemingly arbitrary nature of asking somebody about their astrological sign, it could potentially violate the [California Unruh Civil Rights Act].”

The law bans businesses from discriminating against people based on personal characteristics including sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status or sexual orientation.

It does not specifically mention astrology. But lawyers said depending on how businesses treat people with different signs, an argument could be made that they’re being discriminated against for no legitimate business reason based on a personal characteristic they can’t control.

“Astrological signs are not a traditional ‘protected characteristic’ in most anti-discrimination laws,” said Alisa Randell, a managing attorney with the legal aid organization Public Counsel. “But we do have this expansive law in California that is not limited to the categories that are laid out… So I think this is dicey for him.”

Goldstein said he has tenants of all astrological signs, and he plans to keep asking applicants about their birth charts.

“I don't know if it's legal to ask about it or not,” he said. “But it's fun to. And I know they're not going to lie about it.”