The Brief

A bipartisan Congressional bill that would expand the child tax credit could benefit an estimated 2 million children in California, particularly in low-income families with multiple kids.

The measure passed the House last month, and is awaiting its fate in the Senate. And while it’s not as generous as the pandemic-era expansion, advocates say it could bring much-needed relief to families.

“Our North Star is the full expansion again, but this will for sure have a tremendous impact for families, particularly right now as we're heading into tax season,” said Shimica Gaskins, president and CEO of Grace/End Child Poverty CA.

In 2021, the credit temporarily expanded to $3,000 for children from 6 to 17 and $3,600 for children under 6, and was available on a monthly basis. It cut child poverty substantially. It was also fully refundable, meaning families could get back that money even if they didn’t owe that much in taxes.

The child tax credit expansion is part of a larger bill, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act. A representative for Sen. Ron Wyden, who chairs the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, said the goal is to get it passed soon after the Senate reconvenes next week.

What’s the current policy?

After the sunset of the pandemic expansion, the tax credit reverted back to $2,000 per child and is not fully refundable for every family. The new bill increases the amount some families with multiple children can receive and reinstates full refundability by 2025.

For families who would benefit, it would mean an average of an additional $700 this year, according to estimates from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, but significantly more for some lower-income families.

The expansion would help parents like Griselda Calito, a mother of four children who lives in West Hollywood. Back in 2021, she remembers the extra payments were like a lifeline.

“It helped me a lot especially because COVID was happening — working was a little bit harder,” she said. “I'm a single mother, so I had to juggle taking care of the kids and working.”

Calito worked then as a medical assistant at an OB-GYN clinic, and with the pandemic upending the healthcare system, she worked fewer hours. With four children under 10, she said the credit gave her about $900 a month.

“I was able to feed them. I was able to have a roof over their heads. If they needed any clothes, toys, supplies, that was an extra income that helped me a lot,” she said. She also knew the extra payments were expiring at the end of 2021, so she tried to save as much as she could.

That helped as she stopped working as a medical assistant in order to get an associate’s degree in administration of justice at West Los Angeles College. Last year, when she could squeeze in the time, she would drive for Uber.

Under the new expansion proposal, Calito could get $5,700 in tax credits a year — about $350 more a month than under the current law. (The Washington Post built a handy credit calculator that we used for some tax calculation on our end, too.)

“Rent and the food and everything is so expensive, so that extra income would help a lot,” she said. Calito tries to shop for groceries twice a month, after sitting down and making a list of all the expenses she’ll have to pay for the upcoming weeks.

And with four growing children, especially her two boys, she says her groceries don’t go as far as they used to. “The way I'm calculating it, it's usually not enough because they're so hungry and obviously I'm going to feed them, so it's hard.”

Aside from rent and food, gas is also one of her highest expenses. Calito drives a minivan, a necessity for a family with four kids — a 2005 Toyota Sienna. Between their schools and extracurricular activities, she’s on the road often.

And aside from the essentials, she said extra income would help take her children out to places around the city. “As my kids are getting older, they want to do activities,” like going to the movies or the zoo.

“I do spend a lot of time with my kids and I do like to do adventures with them,” she said. “So I try to at least accommodate having one or two outings with them. But if I can't afford it, then I’ll tell them ‘unfortunately I can’t this month, but hopefully next month, I'll take you guys.”

Security for unexpected costs

The expanded tax credit also represents a safety net, insurance against losing a job or extra support for families that add a child.

Irene Sanchez, a treatment coordinator at a dental office and a mother of two kids, qualified for the pandemic expansion. She makes enough together with her husband that the new proposal wouldn’t benefit them this year. But if the expansion was as generous as it was during COVID, she would arrange more outings with her kids.

“Sometimes even just creating healthy memories, like creating activities for them. It's an expense,” she said. “Having kids in California, it's not so easy all the time if you're not making a lot of money.

The extra money would help with medical expenses, too, she said.

“Having two kids and with my son starting preschool, one kid gets sick and he's sick at most like every other week,” Sanchez said.

With her work schedule, Sanchez couldn’t go see her kids’ primary doctor during the day when they were sick, so she took them into urgent care, which costs about $50 a visit per kid. In December and January alone, Sanchez said her kids went around eight times for various colds and ear infections. That’s taken a toll on her family’s budget; if the tax credit increased to pandemic levels, it could mean a couple hundred dollars more a month.

Ngoyzi Nwadiashi, a Hawthorne mother, had just immigrated to the U.S. during the start of the pandemic. When the expanded child tax credits were available each month, she said it was a huge relief, especially as she was looking for work.

“It took a lot of stress and anxiety off me,” Nwadiashi said, who’s now a clinical care coordinator and in the process of taking her medical license exams. She makes about $36,000 a year. She would like to see the expansion match what families saw during the pandemic. Fifty dollars, for example, would mean a week’s worth of groceries for her five-year old daughter.

“Any dollar that's added to my money is going to relieve me a whole lot — extra $60, extra $50, extra $10,” she said. "It goes a long way.”

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article. 

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is hosting a buyback event Sunday where people can exchange their e-bikes and e-motorcycles for up to $1,000 in gift cards. The goal is to reduce the number of illegal bikes on the road, and give parents an incentive to get dangerous vehicles out of kids’ hands.

“These vehicles are not child’s play, and the consequences are incredibly dangerous and increasingly deadly,” DA Todd Spitzer said in a news release announcing the event.

Communities in Orange County have been grappling with a surge in e-bikes and e-motos on the road, including among young kids, and an accompanying increase in serious crashes.

“Our area has pretty much the highest concentration of e-bike injuries and e-bike accidents in the country,” said Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Takeuchi said  just over 70% of the children treated at the hospital for e-bike injuries had some level of head injury, “from a simple concussion to devastating brain damage, brain bleed and skull fracture."

A lot of those injuries are among teenagers not wearing helmets, he said. Plus, many e-bikes on the market are too heavy and fast for children to control, Takeuchi said.

Besides safety concerns, tensions have flared with other drivers, pedestrians, and neighbors in areas with heavy concentrations of e-bikes.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District became one of the first districts in the country this year to restrict e-bikes to high school campuses only. District leaders say the policy is working to disincentivize young students from riding e-bikes to school. But at one middle school, students with e-bikes have opted to ride them anyway, parking in the surrounding neighborhood and raising the ire of homeowners.

The DA’s approach

The DA’s office has started to target parents who allow their children to ride e-bikes and e-motorcycles that have been illegally modified for high speeds, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April, the district attorney filed child endangerment charges against a mother from Aliso Viejo after her 14-year-old son struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest. The boy was riding an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 mph.

Details of the buyback program

The e-bike and e-motorcycle buyback program is part of the DA’s plan to address safety concerns with e-bikes. Local police departments, hospitals and the California Office of Traffic Safety will also be onsite with information booths.

People can bring in functioning or non-functioning e-bikes, e-motorcycles, e-scooters and pocket bikes and exchange them for gift cards worth up to $1,000 — while supplies last.

The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 13, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

An appeals court issued a ruling Friday that strikes down a federal government effort to block a lower court’s order requiring the construction of 2,550 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

The long-running case, brought forward by disabled veterans struggling with homelessness in the L.A. area, has centered on the use of the sprawling 400-acre VA campus.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had previously scrutinized leases for the private Brentwood School’s athletic facilities, a parking lot company, an oil drilling enterprise and UCLA’s baseball stadium.

Ruling that the campus was meant to aid veterans, Carter ordered the VA to not renew the leases and quickly build 750 units of temporary housing and 1,800 units of permanent housing.

But Carter’s September 2024 order has been on hold ever since the defendants asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Case returns to lower court

On Friday, more than two-thirds of the court’s 29 judges ruled against the VA’s petition for a rehearing.

“It's a historic day for veterans,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs.

“The government has been fighting their veterans, who went to fight on behalf of the nation,” he added. “They've been fighting them like they are the enemy. They went to the district court to fight. They lost.”

Rosenbaum said he’s pleased to see the case return to Carter’s courtroom after a long appeals process. Carter, himself a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, took an active role in pushing the VA to address a homelessness crisis that has thousands of former service members experiencing homelessness on any given night in L.A. County.

Could the VA pursue further appeals? 

Carter has also ordered the VA to stop using veterans' disability payment benefits as a reason to make them ineligible for supportive housing programs due to income restrictions.

But Rob Reynolds, an Iraq War veteran who advocates for L.A.’s veteran community, said the federal government’s attempts to win an appeal could continue.

“The government can still appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Reynolds said.

When veterans involved in the case first heard today’s news on the 9th Circuit ruling, he said they immediately asked about the potential for further appeals.

“All of us are really hoping that the government stops this fight, and that we can get housing built for our veterans and end this madness once and for all,” Reynolds said.

A spokesperson for the VA declined to comment on the ruling, saying the department does not discuss pending litigation.

Jenny Yang, a comedian from L.A., has been traveling across the country turning immigrant grocery stores into comedy hubs. Now she’s back in L.A. getting ready to start a mini-residency in Highland Park, tape her first one-hour special and share moments from the tour.

Yang kicked off her Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour in June in L.A., then took it to 15 cities across the country. She told LAist the decision came as a way to cope with the grief from her dad’s death, 10 failed in vitro fertilization treatments between 2020 and 2025 and seeing the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread across the country.

She said the idea to tour grocery stores was a way to reclaim those spaces, after immigration enforcement left many afraid to go out and do simple tasks like buying groceries.

“If we cannot laugh in front of a wall of instant ramen around our bok choy," Yang said, "then what is the American dream for?"

Her routine wove in stories about her fertility struggles and the challenges of having to be a “good egg” growing up as the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. Her hope for the tour was to connect with people, to make jokes and help people feel lighter after.

The tour proceeds went to local nonprofits serving immigrant communities, and Yang said those organizations helped recruit the grocery stores. She said some stores said no at first — they felt overwhelmed by ICE activity in their city, had lost staff or worried about drawing attention.

“That's part of the story of the tour is it's one thing to want to imagine this beautiful world where you can tell jokes inside of immigrant grocery stores," Yang said. "It's another thing to know what those obstacles are, and I think that's still very telling for where we are as a country.”

One moment stood out to Yang: performing at Shuang Hur Supermarket in Minneapolis. It’s near the memorial for Alex Pretti, the nurse that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed in January as federal agents carried out immigration enforcement in the city.

“I was able to talk to Henry, the owner who’s a Chinese American uncle. [He] was so proud of being able to help his regular patrons, who for the most part even though it was an Asian centered grocery store, were majority Latino,” Yang said. “I was able to bear witness to their resilience as a community, what they did to take care of each other.”

Now she’s back in L.A. and is doing a mini-residency at the Outside In Theater at 5317 York Blvd. in Highland Park. Her first show is 6 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by shows on Sept. 19 and 26 at the same time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can find them at Outside In's website.

In February 2027, Yang will be taping her first one-hour special at Rancho Meat Market #1 in Lincoln Heights. She describes it as a love letter to Los Angeles that’s endured so much, from the ICE raids to the January fires.

You can follow Jenny Yang’s work here.