The Brief

For several months last year, patrons of a Seattle coffee shop called Tailwind Cafe had the option of ordering their Americanos and lattes in returnable metal to-go cups. Customers could simply borrow a cup from Tailwind, go on their way, and then at some point — perhaps a few hours later, perhaps on another day that week — return the cup to the shop, which would clean it and refill it for the next person. If it wasn’t returned within 14 days, the customer would be charged a $15 deposit, though even that was ultimately refundable if the cup was returned by the end of 45 days.

Tailwind’s head chef, Kayla Tekautz, said her cafe started the program out of a desire to address the environmental scourge of disposable plastic foodware and other packaging, the vast majority of which cannot be recycled. It was a partnership with a reusable packaging and logistics company called Reusables.com, which provided Tailwind and another Seattle area store, Cloud City Coffee, with branded cups and a QR code-operated drop-off receptacle.

But the cafe quickly ran into trouble. It was “overwhelming” to explain the return system to every interested customer, Tekautz said. Many were hesitant to participate after learning that they could only return the cups to Tailwind or the other drop-off location, 6 miles away. Plus, Tailwind’s QR code reader kept malfunctioning, requiring repeated visits from a mechanic. At the end of last summer, Tailwind quietly ended the return program. “It just didn’t work,” Tekautz said. (Reusables.com didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

In an effort to reduce consumption of single-use plastic, Seattle has spent the past several years encouraging local businesses to offer reusable cups, dishes, utensils, and packaging. It has made some laudable progress. Concertgoers at the Paramount Theater and attendees of the Northwest Folklife Festival, for example, can now order their libations in reusable polypropylene cups. And since 2022, students at the University of Washington have been able to check out bright green reusable food containers from a company called Ozzi.

Reusable cups offered at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle.

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Courtesy Reuse Seattle

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These programs are helping Seattle avoid single-use plastic and create a “waste-free future,” according to the city’s reuse website. It’s a target that’s being pursued by many American cities, and at the global level too. Disposable plastic foodware and packaging — which accounts for nearly 40 percent of all plastic production — can only be phased out if there are robust, efficient reuse systems to replace them.

But some businesses, like Tailwind, have struggled to get reusable containers off the ground, often because of the small scale and disconnected nature of existing reuse programs. Instead of pooling resources and employing just one or two large cleaning and logistics services, businesses have so far chosen among several competing initiatives — or in some cases, have created and run their own programs. The result is a slew of incompatible containers, specific to just a few stores or locations, and inefficient systems for gathering, washing, and transporting between customers’ homes, sanitation facilities, and storefronts.

Having so many companies creating their own designs and logistics can be expensive, causing them to miss out on economies of scale that could make reuse more affordable and easily adoptable. According to Ashima Sukhdev, a policy adviser for the city of Seattle, she should be able to “pick up a coffee from my local cafe, and then drop it off in the lobby of my office building. Or drop it off at the library, or at a bus stop.”

What Sukhdev is describing would represent a highly unusual level of coordination across company lines. At coffee shops, this would mean reusable mugs shared not only between Tailwind and Cloud City, but also Starbucks and Peets. For grocery stores, it could mean picking up a jar of olives at Safeway, dropping off the empty container at Walgreens, and then having the same jar refilled with jam and sold at Whole Foods. Achieving this would require companies to rethink the way they compete with each other and differentiate their products. It would also require big changes from consumers, who have been trained for 70 years to expect disposability in just about every aspect of daily life.

Pat Kaufman, right, with Reuse Seattle team members.

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Courtesy Reuse Seattle

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Experts say these changes are necessary. “For this solution to become a reality, you’re gonna need standards,” said Pat Kaufman, manager of Seattle Public Utilities’ composting, recycling, and reuse program.

Kaufman is currently on a yearlong sabbatical working for a nonprofit called PR3, which is trying to create those standards. The questions they’re facing are: What will standardized reusable packaging systems look like — and what will it take to get companies, and consumers, to adopt them?

Every year, the world produces about 400 million metric tons of plastic — almost entirely out of fossil fuels like oil and gas. Some of this is used in essential products like contact lenses and medical equipment, but a much greater fraction goes toward sporks, cups, bags, takeout containers, and other items that get thrown away after just a few minutes of use. Most of this plastic will never be recycled due to technical and economic restraints; more than 90 percent of all plastics get sent to a landfill or incinerator, or turn up as litter in the environment, where they degrade into microplastics and leach hazardous chemicals. Plastics manufacturing causes additional harms, including air pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color living nearby.

For all of these reasons, public pressure to cut back on single-use plastics has escalated dramatically in recent years. Many companies have responded by launching trials and pilot programs allowing customers to borrow and return reusable cups, bottles, trays, jars, and other containers. These include small players like Ozzi, as well as behemoth brands like Walmart and Coca-Cola. There have been “more trials than Donald Trump,” said Stuart Chidley, co-founder of a reusable packaging company called Reposit.

Returnable containers from Reposit are offered at Mark & Spencer grocery stores in the U.K.

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Courtesy Reposit

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As in Seattle, however, their efforts have been siloed, making it hard for the reuse sector to grow. According to a recent report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF — a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” that conserves resources — even companies that have pledged to dramatically scale down their use of plastics have only replaced 2 percent or less of their single-use containers with reusables.

“To realize the full benefits of return systems, a fundamentally new approach is required,” the authors concluded.

The four types of reuse systems

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has identified four broad categories of reuse systems, based on who owns the containers and where they’re refilled or returned: refill on the go, refill at home, return on the go, return from home.

Refill on the go: Consumers bring their own reusable containers to grocery stores and other locations, and refill them there — think the bulk section of a supermarket, where shoppers refill their own jars or bags with nuts, grains, and other foods.

Refill at home: Consumers own their own reusable containers but instead of refilling them at a store, they order refills in the mail. For example, you order concentrated dish soap tablets and then dissolve them in a dispenser you already own.

Return on the go: Businesses own containers and let consumers borrow them — often by charging a deposit that is refunded when the container is returned. This system involves container drop-off points at grocery stores, coffee shops, and other designated locations outside the home.

Return from home: Businesses own the reusable containers, which logistics providers pick up from people’s homes and then transport to a washing facility so they can be used again — much like milkmen of old.

The EMF report focuses on reusable containers that you can return to the coffee shop, grocery store, or another drop-off point — known as “return on the go” — as opposed to those that consumers own and bring with them to stores. It says that three things need to happen to make reuse mainstream. First, companies have to achieve high return rates, so they don’t lose inventory when people steal or forget to return their containers. Second, they have to share infrastructure for washing, collecting, sorting, and delivery in order to achieve economies of scale. Third, reusable containers must be standardized. The third pillar makes the other two much easier to achieve, since it’s simpler to share logistics, scale up, and familiarize customers with reuse systems if they share common characteristics — for instance, if containers are designed with similar shapes, sizes, and materials.

To that end, PR3 has spent the past four years drafting standards for reuse systems, with a particular focus on container design. Through a “consensus body” composed of members from big business, the advocacy world, and government, PR3 is hoping to eventually certify the world’s first reuse standards under the International Organization for Standardization (known as ISO, to prevent confusion around different acronyms in different languages). This would lend legitimacy to the PR3 proposals, as the ISO maintains one of the world’s most widely accepted catalogs of standards. Others within its portfolio cover everything from food safety to the manufacturing of medical devices, and have been voluntarily adopted by many large companies and government bodies.

PR3 released a draft of its standards last year, and it’s been updating them behind closed doors since then. Specific standards on washing protocols are set to be published for public review this week, and the nonprofit hopes that its consensus body will vote to finalize standards for container design later this year.

A worker from Taiwan’s Blue Ocean, an environmental protection company, cleans reusable mugs in Taoyuan.

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Sam Yeh

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AFP via Getty Images

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So, what makes a good reusable container system? It’s complicated. Containers have to hold up under the stresses of logistics and transportation. They have to be relatively inexpensive. Perhaps most intangibly, they have to seem reusable, so customers don’t accidentally throw them in the trash. This can be accomplished through design elements — like containers’ color, texture, shape, and weight — or through other means, like easily recognizable drop-off boxes for used containers. Some reuse advocates support deposit fees, in which customers pay a small amount, usually just a dollar or two, in order to borrow a reusable container. They get the deposit back once they’ve returned the container.

None of these features is guaranteed to work. In designing draft standards, PR3 has often had to make educated predictions about which ones consumers will respond to. And those predictions can have far-reaching implications. If you assume customers will frequently lose or forget to return their containers, for example, then it probably won’t make sense to design thick containers that are capable of withstanding hundreds of uses.

“In the real world, return rates vary wildly,” Claudette Juska, PR3’s technical director and one of its co-founders, told Grist. “You don’t want to design a container for 400 uses if it’s only going to be used four times.” The most recent version of PR3’s standards say containers must be designed to withstand at least 20 uses and reused in practice at least 10 times.

On the other hand, it may be counterproductive to design containers with the expectation that they won’t be returned. According to Chidley, with Reposit, cheap-looking and -feeling containers could actually cause low return rates, since people might be more careless with them. His philosophy is to use features like color, weight, and shape to communicate containers’ reusability, making it less plausible that people will confuse them for disposables.

PR3 doesn’t have much specific advice on these characteristics, but some entrepreneurs Grist spoke with said they’ve hit higher return rates through particular design choices. For Chidley, this means making containers “beautiful” through high-quality, heavier materials with stylish branding. His containers are available at Marks & Spencer grocery stores across England and Scotland. Lindsey Hoell, founder of a reusable container logistics company called Dispatch Goods and a member of PR3’s standards panel, has forgone sharp-edged takeout food containers in favor of ones with smoother edges that “feel fancier.” And because so many single-use plastics are either black or white, her containers are bright red. “There’s a lot of soft science of what makes a consumer feel like something is durable,” she told Grist. Her containers are available across most of the U.S., mostly through grocery and meal delivery programs like Blue Apron and Imperfect Foods.

To some extent, the discussion about expected use cycles and perceived quality is really just another way of asking what kinds of materials reusable containers should be made of: durable plastic or something else? Answering that question can bring into conflict businesses’ economic interests with concerns about health and the environment.

In the published draft of its standards from last year, PR3 recommended that reusable containers be “plastic-free,” citing plastic additives’ wide-ranging impacts on human health and ecosystems. Plastic can be cheap, light, and durable, but plastic-related chemicals have been shown to build up in people’s bodies and the environment, where they may contribute to hormone disruption, cancer, and reproductive harm.

PR3 panel members like Jane Muncke, chief scientific officer for the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, supported the recommendation. “I don’t think plastics are suitable materials for reusable packaging,” she told Grist. She’s concerned about chemicals migrating into foods and beverages — especially hot, acidic, or fatty foods, which are better at soaking up some plastic additives. Durable plastics are also largely nonrecyclable; after being turned into new products a few times, they have to be thrown away or “downcycled” into lower-quality products like carpeting.

Still, many entrepreneurs and even the PR3 founders themselves have moved away from a hard-line stance against plastics. Hoell, for example, originally got into reuse because she was frustrated by plastic-strewn beaches in California — “I’m a surfer and I hate plastics,” she told Grist. She started out making stainless steel containers but soon discovered that rigid plastics had much lower up-front costs, giving her more wiggle room to deal with lower return rates. She didn’t have to worry as much about frequently lost, stolen, or damaged containers.

Plastic was also easier to transport because of its light weight, Hoell added, and she cited some analyses suggesting that it has a lower carbon footprint than alternatives like steel. (These findings are controversial, however; critics say it’s misleading to focus only on plastic-related carbon emissions and not the materials’ other dangers, like toxic chemicals leaching from landfills.)Dispatch Goods now only makes its containers out of polypropylene, a kind of plastic that’s generally considered more inert than others (although it can still leach hazardous chemicals). Other reuse logistics companies like R.world, which operates in Seattle and is also represented on the PR3 panel, have similarly opted for polypropylene containers instead of metal or glass.

At Seattle Pacific University, a reusable container program for students eating at the Gwinn Commons dining hall also uses rigid plastic. The containers’ low cost allows Sodexo, the school’s foodservice provider, to charge students just $5 to participate in its reuse system all year, without tracking return rates or worrying too much about lost inventory. “We don’t have a list of subscribers,” said Andrew Chaplin, the dining team’s general manager. The program “runs itself.”

Representatives from PR3 told Grist that plastic has been a hot topic of debate among consensus body members, and that the final version of the standards is likely to move away from the “plastic-free” recommendation. “The standards are going to address this with the understanding that if the world can move away from plastic, great, but in the meantime, before that’s feasible, we’d better move where we can,” said Amy Larkin, PR3’s co-founder and director, who pointed out that moving to reusable plastics will still make a huge dent in overall plastic demand. “Let’s get rid of 90 to 95 percent of the production of single-use packaging.”

Rather than calling for specific container shapes and sizes, PR3 has drafted a few broad requirements — like that containers be designed to “optimize durability,” and that they follow “best practices for recyclability.” They must comply with existing food-safety regulations. Optionally, companies may label products with a universal symbol — kind of like the ubiquitous “chasing arrows” used to indicate recyclability. Such a symbol doesn’t yet exist for reuse, but PR3 has proposed one: a black, white, or orange rose-like pictogram along with the word “reuse.”

More specific design elements are included only as recommendations. To make washing easier, for instance, PR3’s draft says reusable containers should have interior angles no smaller than 90 degrees, as well as “feet” to maximize airflow during drying. They also say containers should “nest” to save storage space and make transportation easier.

A stack of reusable plastic to-go containers at a restaurant in Denver.

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Hyoung Chang

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The Denver Post via Getty Images

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This flexible approach fits into a category that EMF calls “bespoke with shared standards,” where containers can vary from brand to brand while still sharing common characteristics — like where labels are placed, or the width of a bottle’s mouth. This leaves big brands free to design their own unique packaging if they want to.

PR3’s approach aims to appease big businesses by allowing them to keep using containers that look and feel very different, so long as they conform to a set of broad requirements. “Product companies want that kind of autonomy,” Juska told Grist.

Coca-Cola, for example, sets itself apart with its iconic — and patented — hourglass-shaped Coke bottle. And beauty companies are notorious for differentiated packaging: Walking down the perfume aisle, you might see bottles shaped like everything from a high-heeled shoe to a kitten.

Many reuse advocates want to do away with those unique container designs, going even further than what PR3 has suggested in order to enable sharing among different companies — a situation where packaging is considered “pooled” within a market. So instead of an extravagant diversity of perfume bottles, all fragrances might come in interchangeable cylindrical jars.

A small number of companies — especially in Europe — already do this. For example, through a German program called Mach Mehrweg Pool (roughly translated to “Make Reuse Pool”), brands share a collection of identical glass jars that can be filled with different foods. When consumers return the empty containers to a supermarket, a logistics provider picks them up and brings them back to food producers for cleaning. Another organization called the German Wells Cooperative runs a similar program for reusable soda and water bottles, counting more than 150 beverage makers as members.

Other companies that have experimented with pooling, however, have only done so within the brands they control. Coca-Cola, for instance, has a “universal bottle” initiative in South America in which a single, standardized reusable bottle can be used for all of its beverage brands — Fanta, Sprite, Coke, and others. But the initiative is not universal across company lines; you couldn’t refill a Coke bottle with Pepsi.

Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of Loop, a “global reuse platform” that is represented on the PR3 panel, said standard-setters shouldn’t try to resist companies’ impulses to differentiate. Brands should be allowed to experiment with both unique and standardized reusable packaging and then “let the market decide” which is preferable, he told Grist. He raised concerns that pooling might not make sense for some particular products — like baby food, since shared containers can increase the risk of contamination, and babies are more vulnerable to illness.

There is already evidence, however, that companies are leaving money on the table by choosing not to pool their containers. According to EMF’s direct comparison of pooled and nonpooled standardized packaging, pooling containers reduces the cost of reusable packaging systems by up to 28 percent.

Plus, at least some intervention — perhaps regulation or financial incentives — is likely required to create conditions that are more favorable to reusables; a hands-off, market-led approach is what has led to today’s proliferation of throwaway plastics. EMF’s modeling suggests that only reuse systems “built collaboratively from the outset” can reach cost parity with single-use. Exactly what that collaboration will look like, however, is unclear, since the kinds of government regulations that could help foster it might be incompatible with the United States’ free market ethos and antitrust laws. Internationally, some cities and countries have done more than the U.S. to promote reuse, but none has gone as far as what EMF is suggesting.

Even in the absence of robust regulations, PR3’s standards are likely to nudge the country — and the world — in the right direction. Once they’re finalized, PR3 plans to submit them to the American National Standards Institute, the U.S. member organization of the ISO. From there, the standards would be opened up to public comment, potential revisions, and then final approval. PR3 would have to go through a separate submission and review process to get the standards approved by member countries of the ISO.

What would happen next is unclear. Other ISO standards — like for information security and energy efficiency — have been voluntarily adopted by individual companies or industry groups, either because they contain genuinely useful guidance on a complicated issue or because they increase businesses’ perceived trustworthiness.

ISO standards can also inform government regulations and international agreements. According to Juska, PR3 is already in talks with Canada’s environment ministry to shape new rules on reusable packaging, and the same thing could happen in any number of other jurisdictions. Juska is also hopeful that PR3’s standards will be acknowledged by or incorporated into the United Nations’ global treaty to end plastic pollution. The latest draft of the treaty mentions the need for standards — including for reusable packaging systems — some three dozen times, which Juska said is indicative of how “desperately needed” they are.

“If we want everyone to move in the same direction, we need to set some design parameters for how we want the system to function,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/business/what-will-it-take-to-get-companies-to-embrace-reusable-packaging/.

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

After 170 years, one of the great mysteries of early Los Angeles history remains unsolved: Who initiated the freedom suit that emancipated Biddy Mason and 13 other Black women and children in an L.A. courtroom in January 1856?

The City Council’s recent move to rename Pershing Square for Mason has refocused public attention on her history. Yet we’re no closer to identifying the single figure behind her emancipation, a historic case that broke the back of slavery in Southern California.

I’ll confess, I’ve probably spent as much time as anyone trying to unravel that mystery. As a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, I spent a decade deep in research, resulting in the first scholarly biography of Biddy Mason, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West.

Yet it brought me no closer to the truth. My excuse: The 19th-century official court records were either destroyed or lost, while the accounts of Mason’s own descendants point toward different people, in different places.

Only recently did I realize that I’d been asking the wrong questions all along. No single figure was capable of overturning the institution of slavery in California, which had gone uncontested for years, despite the state’s constitutional ban on human bondage.

The only way to understand Mason’s emancipation was to begin, not with a person, but with a network: the hidden history of Southern California’s Underground Railroad.

Proslavery status quo

Southern California and the Underground Railroad are terms not often paired together. The Underground Railroad, after all, is almost exclusively associated with the history of abolitionism in the Northeast. According to common understanding, it was a network of Black and white allies, working in secret, to ferry enslaved people from the South to freedom in the North or Canada.

That’s all true, of course. But those same networks existed in the American West as well. They helped usher Black people from slavery in Texas to freedom in Mexico. And they challenged the entrenched power of slaveholders in Southern California.

Although California had outlawed slavery in its 1849 constitution, that didn’t stop white Southerners from hauling their human property into the state. Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans had been carried into California by the time Mason’s freedom suit came to trial. Black Californians could count on little support from the state’s courts. Nearly every case they tried went in favor of slaveholders.

Whereas most slaveholders made their way to the gold diggings around Sacramento, a sizable colony of Southern transplants settled in San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. There, they held more than two dozen Black people, including Biddy Mason and her three daughters, in bondage.

Robert Mays Smith, pictured here in old age in Texas, traversed the continent in search of fortune, built on the backs of enslaved people.

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Courtesy Kevin Waite

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By the mid-1850s, San Bernardino was the most prosperous slaveholding settlement anywhere in the American West. And Mason’s owner, Robert Smith, was the single largest slaveholder among them, with 14 people under his control.

California abolitionists challenged the proslavery status quo at their own peril. “The name of ‘black Republicans’ stunk in their nostrils worse than that of a horse-thief,” wrote one Californian of his violently anti-abolitionist neighbors. As the future U.S. Sen. John Conness recalled: “If any man could be found who had temerity enough to believe it [slavery] was a bad system, and his opinions became known, he was proscribed, clubbed, or shot, according to the pleasure of the ruffians who dominated public opinion” in California.

The politics of slavery became a matter of life and death in Los Angeles. In 1851, L.A.’s marshal discovered that a local slaveholder had been whipping a Black man in the courtyard of his adobe home. When the marshal attempted to intervene, he was confronted by a group of vigilantes. “They told me that I was required to leave the city within the space of 24 hours, at my peril,” he later reported in court records, “which I distinctly understood to mean the peril of my life.” The marshal departed the next morning for San Francisco.

“Mob Law,” lamented the Los Angeles mayor, “is triumphant as respects the existence of negro slavery in this district.”

Refuge for Black freedom-seekers

That didn’t dissuade Robert and Winnie Owens, two of the earliest Black settlers in Los Angeles. They knew as well as anyone that freedom often came at great personal sacrifice. They had been enslaved in Texas but managed to purchase their freedom and make their way west with their children. In Los Angeles, they formed the early core of the region’s Underground Railroad.

The San Pedro Street home (right) of Robert and Winnie Owens, a key site on the Underground Railroad of Southern California.

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C.C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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They turned their adobe home on San Pedro Street into a refuge for Black freedom-seekers. “Many slave owners have claimed that their property was kept in hiding” at the Owens home, recalled a resident of early Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Herald. In one instance, Bob and Winnie harbored a fugitive woman from her owner, “a drunken brute” from Rancho Cucamonga.

The Owens family did not act alone, however. The enslaved themselves provided the engine for Southern California’s Underground Railroad. Although their actions were circumscribed and their movements policed, they found ways to resist within the bonds of slavery.

Biddy Mason had been chipping away at her owner’s authority for years. In 1849, a Black man named Rande successfully escaped from Robert Smith and made his way to freedom. Mason almost certainly colluded in his escape. Although she couldn’t flee herself as the mother of three young daughters, she could take a vicarious pleasure in depriving her enslaver of his only adult male worker.

Mason’s was a rebellion in slow motion, a campaign built over months and years. In San Bernardino, she began conspiring with other enslaved people. A woman named Elizabeth Flake played a key role in those efforts, according to a later interview with Mason’s eldest daughter. Flake and Mason had formed a friendship through their shared ordeals, including a harrowing overland journey and enslavement in San Bernardino.

Elizabeth Flake (later Rowan), seen here later in life, played an instrumental role in Mason's quest for freedom in 1855-1856.

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San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society

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It was probably Elizabeth Flake to whom Mason first turned when she discovered that her owner intended to transport her family to Texas in late 1855. Somehow, they got word to the Owens family and a small network of Black and white allies.

From there, those allies alerted local law enforcement, who then apprehended Robert Smith on the eve of his planned departure for Texas. The largest freedom suit in the history of the American West was underway.

A suit for freedom

Despite her success in bringing Smith to trial, the odds were not in Mason’s favor. The presiding judge was a former slaveholder himself who claimed to “appreciate the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.” Mason was prohibited by California law from testifying against her enslaver or any other white person. Meanwhile, Smith or one of his cronies threatened Mason’s lawyer, prompting him to abandon her case. A gang of local rowdies stood at the ready to help Smith reclaim his property “by force.”

As her case rapidly deteriorated, Mason turned once more to her allies. The Owens family harbored Mason and many of the enslaved petitioners, enduring more threats of violence from Smith’s thugs. A white ally, Dr. A.H. Cooper, narrowly escaped a belligerent former constable who threatened to “blow your brains out” for daring to side with the enslaved.

Benjamin Ignatius Hayes in 1849, several years before he would become district judge for Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties.

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The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection

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It may have been one of Mason’s allies who convinced Judge Benjamin Hayes to interview her privately in his chambers (thereby skirting the ban on Black testimony). That interview finally swung the case in her favor. Mason’s “glorious instinct of freedom,” Hayes wrote, had lifted a “bright torch” to expose the subterfuge of her enslaver and convinced Hayes that justice lay on the side of the enslaved. On January 19, 1856, he declared Mason and 13 others “free forever.”

Mason’s courtroom victory emboldened other Black Californians to seek freedom for themselves. A wave of self-emancipations in San Bernardino followed. By 1857, the institution of Black chattel slavery in Southern California had ceased to exist.

California wasn’t born free through its putatively antislavery constitution. It only became free after the coordinated efforts of a courageous network of abolitionist allies — the westernmost spur of the Underground Railroad.

So, we may never know who, specifically, initiated the freedom suit that led to Mason’s emancipation. But I’d argue we shouldn’t lament our ignorance; we should celebrate it. Mason and her allies so carefully covered their tracks that neither the judge, nor their enslaver, nor anyone else in Southern California uncovered the full extent of their abolitionist network. They confound us still.

If Nithya Raman defeats incumbent Karen Bass on Nov. 3, she’ll become the third mayor of Los Angeles to oversee plans for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games — and the first to have started out as an Olympics critic.

Raman told the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter in 2020 that she opposed Los Angeles playing host to the world’s largest sporting event, skewering the city for making a “rushed” deal without public input.

Still, she’ll be stuck with the Games if she becomes mayor, and will also oversee the city in the period that follows, when L.A. will be left with any cost overruns if the private organizing committee LA28 runs out of money.

Depending on how she wields the role, Raman could shift the city’s approach to its host duties, ramping up pressure on LA28 to publicly disclose more about its finances and also changing the leadership on key bodies like the Board of Police Commissioners, Metro Board and even, potentially, the LA28 board of directors.

She’ll also have significant power to set the tone for the Games and the city's agenda leading up to them, observers told LAist.

“I think that she will end up being a booster of the Olympics because she has to be,” said Jim Newton, a veteran L.A. journalist and expert on California politics. “But what she does with that authority is what's up for grabs.”

Would Raman keep police chief through 2028?

The 2028 Games haven’t been a major talking point on the campaign trail, but Police Chief Jim McDonnell's fate has.

Bass nominated McDonnell to the post in 2024, and Raman voted to confirm him. But Raman said she’ll replace the chief if elected as mayor, criticizing LAPD’s response to federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. She has declined, however, to say if she’d do this ahead of 2028.

The mayor can’t directly fire the chief, but appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, which can. If Raman appointed a new chief ahead of the Games, the person would need council approval.

“The mayor appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, so they are unlikely to retain a chief that the mayor doesn't like,” said Raphael Sonenshein, an expert on the city charter and the executive director of the Haynes Foundation. He said it’s more typical for new mayors not to appoint a police chief to a second term than to remove them early. McDonnell’s five-year term is up at the end of 2029.

Moderator Conan Nolan pushed Raman to clarify if she’d remove the chief ahead of 2028 at the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 mayoral debate, citing the high-security status of the sprawling sporting event. Raman responded, saying it would depend on conversations with “other decision-making bodies.”

“I will work towards that with all of the responsibility and all of the care that this moment requires,” Raman said of removing McDonnell. “And I promise you Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger.”

Bass pushed back, saying Raman didn’t have “any idea” what identifying a new police chief required.

“We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you’re going to find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray,” Bass said.

The U.S. Secret Service leads security for the Games but works closely with LAPD and other law enforcement agencies. In the spring, LAPD estimated its policing costs for the Games would exceed $730 million.

Other leadership roles could change

Raman could also shake up the L.A. Metro’s Board of Directors, which is overseeing Metro’s 28 by 28 initiative and steering the temporary bus system planned for the Olympics and Paralympics. Mayor Karen Bass currently chairs the Metro Board, and if Raman is elected, she would hold that position through June 2027, the end of the fiscal year.

She could replace any of the three mayoral appointees: Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker, president of the Ward Economic Development Corporation; and City Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Katy Yaroslavsky

“I want to use those four seats to push Metro to invest in the biggest bang for the buck in terms of public transit investments,” Raman said at a mayoral forum in September, referencing her own spot on the board and her appointees'.

Alissa Walker, a mega-events expert who writes the popular newsletter Torched, told LAist that the mayor’s role on Metro is another way she can flex power ahead of the Games.

 “You could push forward an agenda,” Walker said, referring to former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to accelerate transit infrastructure for the Games. “Let’s remember Garcetti's 28 by 28, that came from him being on the Metro Board. It wasn't something that he pushed through the city.”

The mayor also has direct influence on the makeup of LA28’s board of directors, a body that has faced scrutiny for its Trump allies and its chairman, Casey Wasserman. The city has six members on the board who were appointed by the mayor without city council approval, the mayor’s office told LAist.

The board mainly operates behind the scenes, but the City Council can require the city’s board members to report back on the board’s progress and decisions that impact the city — a right the mayor could encourage the council to flex.

LA’s financial gamble

Then there’s the question of how Raman would navigate the city’s complex relationship with LA28, and unlimited financial risk as the backstop of the Games. The host deal was championed and brokered by then-Mayor Garcetti, but it’s the coming mayoral term that will oversee the actual event and its aftermath.

The Olympics committee is operating mainly on its own to deliver the Games with a $7.2 billion budget, but will use many city resources to pull them off, including police, traffic control, trash collection and more.

Raman was one of four council members to vote against the city’s agreement with LA28 on how it will be reimbursed for those services during the Games earlier this year, saying it left taxpayers too exposed to unexpected costs. The deal established that the city will seek reimbursement for the cost of policing venues from the federal government, which is overseeing Olympics security.

“Would you agree to cover someone else’s bills without knowing what you might have to pay — or even being allowed to see what they’re spending? Of course not!” Raman wrote on X.

If elected, Raman could throw her weight behind her ally, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who subpoenaed LA28 this month for financial documents he said the organization owed the city.

“Right now you have a mayor, Karen Bass, who's really highlighted the Olympics as a signature moment for Los Angeles, and certainly as a signature moment for what she hopes will be her second term,” Newton, the L.A. journalist and historian, told LAist. “Raman, if she were elected, is not as invested in that and may see that she has some leverage over LA28.”

She has also said she would appoint “an experienced financial executive to oversee the City’s Olympic costs” in her first 100 days in office. LAist asked Raman’s campaign whether she would remove Paul Krekorian, who currently leads the city’s Office of Major Events, but did not receive a response.

Kavish Harjai contributed to this story.

Los Angeles Unified will hold another round of community meetings in November as it begins to consider school closures and mergers.

“We're gonna be embarking, I would say, on one of the most consequential initiatives that this district has completed and done over the last 30 years,” said Pedro Salcido, a deputy superintendent, at a similar community meeting in early October.

LAUSD officials’ decisions could reshape the experience of 374,000 students from transitional kindergarten through high school. The meetings, scheduled from Wednesday, Nov. 4, through Monday, Nov. 9, offer community members a chance to share their concerns and questions directly with district staff. Most are virtual, but there are two opportunities to attend in person.

Enrollment has fallen more than 40% in the last two decades, and the district has closed relatively few of its more than 1,000 schools. District officials say resources are often stretched thin at underenrolled schools. For example, small high schools may not be able to offer as many electives or advanced courses.

The district is also under increasing scrutiny by state and county officials because current projections show LAUSD will be unable to pay its bills by the end of the next school year. In response, the district is considering a series of budget cuts that could lead to the elimination of thousands of jobs.

When are the meetings?

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is losing control of responsibilities tied to about $239 million in federal taxpayer funds as the Trump administration continues a push to strip power from the joint city-county agency. Now, Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for control of some of those federal roles.

A key vote scheduled for Monday could help chart the future of the region’s response to its homelessness crisis.

And it’s happening in a unique format. Anyone, including you, can join and likely cast a vote.

Here’s what to know about what’s happening and how to get involved.

How we got here 

A regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care voted earlier this month to designate L.A. County to take over at least two federal roles currently managed by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA — running the homeless count and managing the region’s federal funding application.

The city and county have been competing for two other federal responsibilities currently held by LAHSA — managing a database that tracks unhoused people receiving public services and administering a system used to match people who need help with housing and shelter.

The local process to select LAHSA’s replacements began after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the embattled agency from these federal roles in June, citing financial mismanagement.

Independent reviewers scored the county’s applications higher than the city’s. On Oct. 6, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s 21-member board voted to recommend L.A. County for all four roles.

The following week, the L.A. City Council instructed its attorneys to explore potential legal challenges to the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selection process while negotiating with L.A. County for shared control of these responsibilities.

This week, city officials said those negotiations paid off. On Friday, the City Council voted 10-0 to support a tentative agreement with the county on the two remaining federal roles.

How to participate

The L.A. Continuum of Care’s general membership meeting is scheduled Monday at 3 p.m. The group will vote on whether to approve designating L.A. County for the two federal roles still up for grabs: managing the unhoused database and the housing matching system.

You can attend in person or online via Zoom, and anyone who attends might be eligible to vote.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a regional planning group required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that chooses which agencies handle the region’s federal homelessness responsibilities. It’s a nebulous body without a fixed roster. It technically includes all “persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution oriented planning to address homelessness in L.A. County (with the exception of Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena)," according to its charter. Anyone who fits that description is allowed to vote.

Because L.A. County is the only candidate under consideration in the vote, county officials encouraged county employees not to vote to avoid potential conflicts of interest, according to an email from the county’s homelessness department.

Attend in-person at 637 Wilshire Boulevard, 1st Floor Commission Room, Los Angeles, CA 90017

Register to attend online here.

Worth noting: These are yes-or-no votes. If L.A. County is not approved, no decisions will be made.

How might this change things?

Since 2020, the homeless population has increased by nearly 10% in both the city of L.A. and across L.A. County, according to the official homeless counts.

The region’s homelessness budgets swelled over that same period, with hundreds of millions more spent on shelter beds, housing and services for unhoused Angelenos. Much of that money was available because of local voters who in recent years approved several sales taxes and other measures to fund homeless services.

The decisions getting voted on by L.A. Continuum of Care determine who runs the systems that track and direct that money and who answers to the public when results fall short.

After Monday’s vote, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selections will go to a federal judge for review on Tuesday. The court will then largely determine when and how the transition away from LAHSA happens in the coming months.

It’s unclear how the shift in control will impact homeless services on the ground. LAHSA leaders and employees have warned that transferring these responsibilities is complex and could take up to a year.

A bitter fight over the best path forward played out ahead of the vote.

L.A. city officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, said they want collaborative governance, and argued giving the county sole authority over federal responsibilities would hurt city residents.

“The City of Los Angeles provides the overwhelming majority of housing for the region,” Bass and several city council members said in a statement earlier this month. “The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” the statement continued.

This month, Bass and a group of L.A. City Council members sent a letter to the L.A. Continuum of Care, arguing that the city’s applications should have scored higher, and urging more support for the city’s bid.

Leaders of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said the county applied for all four functions because it’s best positioned to represent and collaborate with the region's 85 cities and hundreds of service providers.

Ben Kay, chair of the L.A. Continuum of Care board, wrote to the mayor, City Council and county supervisors on Oct. 14 that the dispute had shifted from “a united front against federal encroachment to splintered infighting.” Kay warned that it could squander the chance to keep local control of these systems and head off further federal involvement. He defended the scoring and selection, saying the board “stands firmly behind the integrity of that process.”

The L.A. City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 14 to discuss the city’s next steps. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo laid out some options: negotiating with L.A. County for co-leadership of federal roles, separating from L.A. County and forming a city-only continuum of care or potentially filing a lawsuit challenging the whole court-ordered selection process.

After a closed-session discussion, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced the council was formally requesting that the L.A. City Attorney’s Office “develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless.”

The council also asked the city administrative officer to keep negotiating with the county.

Those talks produced a tentative agreement, which the council voted to support on Friday.

It covers the two federal roles still up for a vote Monday. If the county is picked to run both, the agreement would give the city a bigger role in each.

For the database, city staff would keep their current access. The city would also get all data in the system on unhoused people within city limits, including those enrolled in county-funded programs, according to the agreement.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness and health committee, said the city would get the raw data behind the system so it can build its own reports and dashboards. “That’s something we’ve never had,” she said.

For the matching system, the city funds the vast majority of permanent supportive housing in the city, but it doesn’t currently manage matching for any of those units, Szabo said. LAHSA does. Under the agreement, the county would contract with the city to do that matching in buildings funded by the city or its housing authority.

“We’re going from nothing to something, and something substantial,” Jurado said.

The deal isn’t final. Its terms still have to be turned into binding agreements approved by both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, according to a report from Szabo’s office.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the court in an Oct. 20 filing that L.A. County’s homelessness department is an acceptable applicant and that it “prefers” the county over the city.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s court order requires the L.A. Continuum of Care to make its selections by Tuesday. Then, these complex federal responsibilities, supported by scores of LAHSA staff, have to move away from LAHSA on a timeline that will be set by the federal court.

LAHSA workers represented by union SEIU Local 721 have urged both the city and county to protect their jobs during that transition. They argue competent and experienced employees shouldn’t be sidelined because of leadership’s failures.

“We have spent years building relationships, learning these systems, and helping people move from homelessness into housing,” said Heather Varden, a LAHSA employee who posted an open letter from the union. “That experience should not be thrown away because the name at the top of the contract changes.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, is losing its federal responsibilities.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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How to understand the context 

City and county officials created the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, in 1993 as a joint powers authority between the two overlapping jurisdictions. Both the city and county appointed members to LAHSA’s governing commission and relied on the agency to manage public homelessness dollars for the region.

The federal roles were delegated to LAHSA by the L.A. Continuum of Care, an obscure but newly powerful planning group that HUD requires regions across the country to maintain if they want federal money.

Since late 2024, LAHSA has faced a string of critical audits and other scandals, putting its management of L.A.’s growing homelessness crisis under scrutiny.

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors voted last year to divert more than $300 million in county homelessness funding from LAHSA and manage the funds itself. The county's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing took control of those funds in July.

On June 11, HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs, citing alleged failures in financial management, internal controls, grant oversight and conflict-of-interest policies.

The move, according to the Trump administration, meant LAHSA wasn’t able to do the jobs the continuum of care had delegated to it, including applying for $239 million in federal funds on the region’s behalf.

The federal housing department said that with LAHSA suspended, it intended to have L.A. service providers apply directly to HUD for the funds — a move that would have ignored regional priorities.

LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction on LAHSA’s suspension through Oct. 27.

This allowed LAHSA to submit the region’s collaborative application for federal funds by an Oct. 14 deadline. (The agency has since provided notice that it has submitted the application on time.)

Carter also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start taking applications to consider replacing LAHSA as soon as possible. The group hired consultants and ran an application process over about a month, beginning on Sept. 11. LAHSA leadership decided the agency would not compete in it.

L.A. County applied for all four federal roles and was the only applicant considered for two of them. The city applied for and competed against the county for the other two.

A panel of reviewers (whose identities were kept private) scored written applications and interview responses for each of the federal roles up for grabs. L.A. County’s pitch to operate a key database, known as HMIS, used to track service participants through the system earned a score of about 87 out of 100, compared to the city’s score of about 82. On Oct. 6, a committee focused on the database voted 8-0 in favor of the county’s application. Later that day, the board voted 10-4 to pick L.A. County for that role.

The county scored about 91 on its application to manage the system that matches unhoused people with available shelter and other resources — known as the Coordinated Entry System or CES — compared to the city’s score of about 73. The board voted 12-1 to select the county to run CES.

A 21-member board speaks for the L.A. Continuum of Care and guides decision-making. That board voted Oct. 6 to recommend L.A. County for all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA. Bass and several city council members had been urging people to attend the upcoming meeting and vote against the L.A. Continuum of Care board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

Reba Stevens, a community advocate who serves on the 21-member L.A. Continuum of Care board, reviews materials in October 2026.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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How does the Continuum of Care operate?

Communities like L.A. must form and operate a “continuum of care” if they want federal homelessness money. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, introduced the model in 1994 to promote communitywide collaboration toward ending homelessness. Congress wrote it into law in the 2009 HEARTH Act.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is the largest in the U.S. — covering all of L.A. County, except Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which each run their own.

It isn't a government agency with its own staff. It’s a group of service providers, city and county agencies, housing authorities, advocates and people who have experienced homelessness. Known as the L.A. CoC, it operates under a governing charter.

Federal rules require the L.A. Continuum of Care to apply for HUD funding each year, decide which local projects receive it and oversee how the money is spent and how programs perform. The group must delegate who operates a shared database, runs a system for matching people to housing, applies for federal funding and counts the region’s homeless population.

Because it has no staff of its own, the Continuum of Care delegated those jobs to “lead agencies.” Until now, the group had chosen the city and county’s shared homelessness agency, LAHSA, to perform all four of those federal functions:

• Federal funding (Collaborative Applicant): submits the region’s annual funding application to HUD.
• Homeless Count (Point-in-Time count administrator): conducts the annual unhoused population census that shapes funding and policy.
• Homeless Database (HMIS Lead): runs the database where homeless service providers track who they serve and what housing and services those people receive. In Los Angeles, about 400 agencies feed into a system holding about 175,000 active participant profiles.
• Housing matching (CES Lead): manages the system that assesses people and matches them to shelter and housing. That system runs on the HMIS database. 

Sarah Mahin, director of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, made the county's case to the L.A. Continuum of Care board at meeting in October 2026.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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Canceled meeting stirs controversy

On Oct. 9, the Continuum of Care’s general membership held a meeting to formally designate the county to fill the administrative roles. Because that general membership is broad, the vote was likely to be decided based on turnout.

The day prior, the L.A. mayor’s office sent text messages to “thousands of community members,” according to that office, urging them to attend the meeting and vote against the Continuum of Care Board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

County agencies also sent out notices about the vote, including a warning to county employees not to participate because of conflict-of-interest concerns.

More than 1,000 people attempted to attend the meeting online, exceeding the Zoom call’s capacity, according to organizers. The meeting was immediately adjourned by organizers, who told attendees they had to stop the meeting to avoid violating California’s open meeting law.

Katie Hill, CEO at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, called the L.A. mayor's office’s efforts to stack the meeting with voters “outrageous” in an interview with LAist.

“There’s a process that everyone has agreed on that is fair and represents our collective best interests,” Hill told LAist. “We were supposed to ratify it in the same way that Congress ratifies electoral votes. And then all of the sudden they said they didn't like the outcome, and now they want people to not ratify it.”

Some city officials defended the mayor’s push to involve the public. Councilmember Tim McOsker said the board’s recommendations are “not a rubber stamp.”

“The [Continuum of Care] has a responsibility to scrutinize the recommendations, evaluate the scores, and exercise its own judgment rather than blindly accepting them,” McOsker said in a statement. “Public meetings should be attended by the public,” McOsker’s statement continued.

Hill’s organization has several contracts with L.A. County and just one with the city of L.A., she said. Hill previously served on LAHSA’s governing body as an L.A. County appointee.

While Hill thinks the county is better suited to run the system, some homeless services providers are staying neutral.

“We did not mobilize participants for Friday’s meeting,” Jerry Jones, executive director of the Greater L.A. Coalition on Homelessness, a network of more than 60 service providers, told LAist. “The best path forward is for both groups of elected officials to work together.”

“Regardless [of] who the [Continuum of Care] lead is, there are 20,000 people being served — we need to keep that funding,” Ivet Samvelyan, vice president of Hope The Mission, told LAist.

After the capacity issues, the Continuum of Care upgraded its Zoom account and now has capacity for 10,000 people for Monday’s meeting, according to a report the group submitted to the court on Oct. 13.

The group must make its final selections by Oct. 27, the same day the preliminary injunction is set to expire.