The Brief

Brad Thomas has been up since 6 a.m. on a Sunday — farmer's market first, then prep. By 2 p.m., he's back at the craftsman on 7th and Cherry, the home of his business partner, Clay Wood. The tablecloths go down. The gold cutlery comes out. By 6 p.m., the first of two seatings will fill the living room and front yard — 32 people across the night, all for a six-course dinner at $69 a head: hanger steak, crispy frites, a rotating dessert spread, much of it prepared over open flame in the backyard of the old craftsman.

This is Steak Freaks, and it is exactly the kind of food business that Long Beach just made legal.

Earlier this month, Long Beach became the 19th jurisdiction in California to authorize Micro-Enterprise Home Kitchen Operations — or MEHKOs — joining Riverside County and L.A. County and a growing statewide movement reshaping who can afford to start a food business.

What makes Long Beach different is that it's allowing renters to run these businesses from their homes. (Wood's house, for example, is a rental). In a city where 60% of residents rent and more than half of those renters are cost-burdened, these home kitchens aren't just a creative outlet. For many, they're an economic lifeline. And for those who find success, the program's own limits may push them toward the next step faster than they planned.

Guests dig into the hanger steak frites course during a Sunday dinner at Steak Freaks in Long Beach. The supper club seats 32 people across two seatings and has sold out every dinner since opening.

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Gab Chabrán

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Who's behind them

Prior to AB 626, the informal economy long existed in immigrant communities where neighbors sold plates, fed the block and cooked for whoever showed up. That changed in 2018 when the bill passed and gave it a legal pathway and a social media following.

A screenshot from CookConnect, the COOK Alliance's map of permitted MEHKO operators across California, shows the concentration of home kitchen businesses across Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

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According to the COOK Alliance, the nonprofit at the forefront of MEHKO adoption statewide, 79% of operators are people of color and 70% are women. The home-based model removes barriers that have historically kept certain communities out of the food business — no need for a commercial kitchen, massive upfront capital, or to be in two places at once.

Geraldine Gonzales works the wok at Lomo Fuego, where lomo saltado is cooked over an open flame in the backyard.

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Gab Chabrán

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It’s worked for Heidi Randolph, who didn't set out to run a restaurant. A couple of years ago, she was selling plates of Peruvian food to soccer players at Lakewood parks on weekends.

I visited Lomo Fuego in March and found families pulling up chairs, her brother working the wok over open flame and her mother pitching in between shifts at her day job. It's started with a handwritten chalkboard and a MEHKO permit posted to a bulletin board that Randolph had to find herself after the city told her it was impossible. What's changed since then tells you everything about both the promise and the limits of the program.

The hanger steak frites at Steak Freaks are finished tableside with a kitchen torch. The six-course dinner runs $69 a head out of a rental home in Long Beach.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Brad Thomas of Steak Freaks came to it differently. A pastry chef who spent years alongside teams trained by Thomas Keller, Nancy Silverton, and Josiah Citrin, he moved to Long Beach from Texas three years ago and started leaving anonymous pastry deliveries on doorsteps across the city — Lover Boy Provisions, with a flirty note attached.

That's how he met Clay Wood, who owns Clayonfirst pottery studio in the East Village Arts District. When Long Beach passed its MEHKO ordinance, Steak Freaks was born. Every dinner has sold out.

The Steak Freaks menu and a welcome note from collaborating poet Vic Hurtado of Vessel Poetics, set out before service at the Long Beach supper club.

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Gab Chabrán

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The landlord question

The council's vote this past April came down to one sticking point: should operators who rent be required to notify their landlord? Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, who pushed the motion forward, believed that notification should be voluntary. The COOK Alliance's Roya Bagheri backed that position for a practical reason — even informal landlord approval can evaporate once paperwork gets involved.

Wood's situation says it plainly: his landlord is a former neighbor who follows Steak Freaks on Instagram. No formal conversation has happened. "I make pottery here," Wood said, "and the stuff I do for my pottery business is way crazier than a couple of steaks in the backyard."

The ceiling

When I revisited Lomo Fuego recently, a sign outside announced scaled-back hours — two days a week, down from four. After a neighbor complained, the county health inspector paid a visit and told Randolph she was approaching the annual revenue cap of $110,442 in gross annual sales (a figure adjusted every year for inflation by the California Department of Public Health).

To stay under the cap, she’s opening only on weekends for the near future.

Heidi Randolph with her mother Fritz and brother Luis at Lomo Fuego, the Peruvian restaurant she runs out of her Lakewood home. Randolph is now scouting restaurant locations and pursuing an additional permit to sell at farmers markets.

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Randolph took the health department visit as a sign to move forward. She's actively scouting restaurant locations, and her daughter left her job at a local restaurant to cook alongside her full-time.

Randolph didn't see any of this coming — from the park to the backyard to her daughter cooking beside her, her mother finally getting a day off. The program did exactly what it was supposed to do. She just needs a bigger kitchen now.

"I hope in the future," she said, "people can say — this still tastes like food from home."

A couple who paid nearly $15,000 in monthly rent while displaced by the Eaton Fire are now taking their landlords to court, alleging they violated bans on price gouging in the wake of a disaster.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, during the same week the county is set to end its post-fire rent gouging protections.

Over the last 16 months, state prosecutors have filed a handful of criminal rent-gouging charges. But the couple’s lawyer, Josh Nuni with the People's Law Project, said to his knowledge this is the first civil rent gouging case filed by private citizens following the January 2025 fires.

“They want to get back the money that was taken from them, and they also want to make sure to send a message to others that this shouldn't be done to other families when they're in times of crisis,” Nuni said.

How the alleged rent gouging began

Candy Renick’s home in Altadena was left standing after the Eaton Fire, but it was severely smoke damaged. Until it could be professionally cleaned, it would remain uninhabitable.

Renick said when she started looking for temporary housing, she quickly realized thousands of other families were competing for the same listings.

“I started feeling pretty desperate, like I needed to move on something fast,” Renick said.

Less than two weeks after the fires, Renick and her daughter spotted a new Zillow listing for a three-bedroom home in Glassell Park. She said the landlords were asking for $12,990 per month on a one-year lease.

When Renick and her husband asked for a shorter, six-month lease, the owners agreed to a higher monthly rent of $14,938.50, she said.

“I was telling friends what we were paying and everybody was like, ‘Are you kidding? That is crazy,’” Renick recalled. “But we had to do it… We were just kind of desperate to get settled so that we could move on with our lives and move on with fixing our house.”

Candy Renick stands outside her family's home in Altadena.

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How rent gouging laws worked 

Once the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, state and local governments quickly passed emergency declarations that triggered price-gouging bans. These laws made it illegal for landlords to increase rents by more than 10% from pre-fire levels.

For properties that were not listed for rent before the fires, a different limit applied: Landlords offering furnished properties could not charge more than 165% of the area’s fair market rent, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For the ZIP code where the Glassell Park property is located, the legal monthly limit for a furnished three-bedroom unit was $5,032.50. The Renicks paid nearly triple that amount.

A warning letter and a short text exchange

Shortly after moving in, the Renicks got a letter from the L.A. City Attorney’s Office, according to the lawsuit. It alerted the tenants and the landlord that the listing may have violated post-fire rent gouging bans.

The letter said if the landlords were violating the law, they should “immediately lower the rental rate” and “refund the tenant the overcharged amount plus 10 percent interest.”

According to the lawsuit, the Renicks texted a screenshot of this letter to their landlord, Catalina Chow, and she responded: “We did not increase rent due to the state of emergency.”

Her text went on to say, “I hope this does not apply to me. Thanks for sending anyway!”

When LAist called Chow to ask about the lawsuit, she picked up but said she was on another call and ended the conversation. LAist was later unable to reach her or Terrence Chow, another defendant named in the complaint.

LAist also contacted the City Attorney’s Office to ask why it did not pursue the case beyond the warning letter. No one from the office responded.

Why tenants are taking cases into their own hands

Tenant advocates have expressed disappointment over what they see as a lack of price gouging prosecution in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

By the one-year anniversary of the fires, a group called The Rent Brigade had found more than 18,000 listings that appeared to have broken the law. The group found that few criminal charges were ever filed, and laws that allowed private citizens to file their own cases and gave county departments the ability to fine landlords directly went largely unused.

Chelsea Kirk, a founding organizer of The Rent Brigade, said tenants like the Renicks are taking action on their own because governments failed.

“Tenants should never have been put in the position of having to enforce disaster protections themselves,” Kirk said. “After thousands of reports and virtually no meaningful action from the city attorney or county and state agencies, people have realized they can’t rely on government enforcement to protect them from exploitation.”

What the plaintiffs say they want

The Renicks returned to their Altadena home in November after it was professionally remediated. The complaint alleges they paid $95,758 more than what should have been legally allowed during their stay at the home in Glassell Park. The lawsuit asks the court to award damages, civil penalties and attorney’s fees.

Candy Renick said money was not the primary reason she and her husband decided to file the case. Any overpaid rent they manage to recover will largely go back to their insurance company, she said.

Instead, Renick said, she hopes the lawsuit sends a public message.

“People should not tolerate being overcharged for rent again, especially when they're in a very difficult situation,” she said. “And landlords need to know they can't take advantage of people in a crisis.”

A federal judge has declined to temporarily block President Trump's executive order that calls for restricting voting by mail.

The ruling released Thursday by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee based in Washington, D.C., leaves in place — at least for now — an executive order on voting that tests the limits of the president's power under the Constitution. A separate, 2025 executive order on voting was halted by courts.

The latest executive order, issued March 31, calls for the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists of adult U.S. citizens in each state, and to send those lists to state election officials. It also calls for the U.S. Postal Service — a federal agency that's independent of a president's administration — to come up with lists of eligible voters and to only deliver mail-in ballots to people on those lists.

"The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws. Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted," Nichols wrote about the decision not to block the order.

Nichols' ruling comes as another federal judge is preparing to issue a ruling in the coming weeks for a similar set of lawsuits based in Boston.

Since Trump signed the order, it's been unclear whether and how it would actually affect mail-in voting, which has been taking place for state primaries in this year's midterm election. In early May, the administration said in a court filing that federal agencies were still deliberating how to carry out the order. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche later told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the Justice Department is working with other agencies to "make sure" the order's goals are implemented.

Democrats, voting rights groups and almost two dozen states, plus Washington, D.C., have filed five lawsuits challenging the order.

They argue that Article I of the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress — not the president — the power to set rules for federal elections. Their lawsuits also contend that Trump's order directs USPS to make rules about election mail that would overstep the mailing agency's authority.

Trump, who himself voted by mail in Florida in March, has said he issued the order to stop illegal voting by noncitizens in federal elections, which reviews and research have found to be incredibly rare. While there are voters across the partisan divide who rely on mail-in voting, more registered Democrats than Republicans say they voted by mail in the last national election in 2024.

The new court ruling on Trump's order comes out of the three lawsuits filed in federal court in D.C. A decision on a similar request to block provisions of the order may come out of the two Massachusetts-based lawsuits as soon as early June.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Law enforcement officers will be banned from interfering with California elections under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Wednesday, just in time for the June 2 primary election.

The law, which takes effect immediately, criminalizes the act of taking cast ballots from the custody of a local election official, as gubernatorial candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco did earlier this year when he seized more than 600,000 ballots from his own county’s registrar of voters. Although Bianco claimed he was checking for proof of fraudulent voting, there was no evidence to suggest any ballots were cast improperly.

“We have to step up, and we have to draw the line. We have to clarify the rules of engagement,” Newsom told reporters before signing the legislation. “It’s a warning to the folks out there that think they can do the bidding of the Trump administration.”

State lawmakers originally introduced the measure, Senate Bill 73, to guard against potential federal interference with California’s elections, given the Trump administration’s animosity toward the state and the president’s desire to keep Congress in GOP hands.

But Bianco’s decision to seize ballots turned a hypothetical threat into a real one, spurring legislators to seize the moment and rush the bill through so it could take effect before Election Day.

The new law makes it illegal for a county registrar to surrender ballots or voting equipment to law enforcement agents such as Bianco or his deputies. Riverside County Registrar Art Tinoco would have violated the law by allowing the sheriff’s department to take the ballots, despite the search warrant they presented.

“Voters should never wonder whether ballots were improperly handled,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, one of the bill’s Democratic coauthors and a former Santa Cruz County registrar. “And law enforcement powers should never be misused in ways that jeopardize the integrity of our democratic process.”

The law also reiterates that the attorney general, secretary of state or local county elections officials can sue any person, business or entity that takes “a package containing ballots” from an election official’s custody.

Election and voting advocates praised the Legislature for responding quickly to what they say was an “unprecedented” act of local law enforcement seizing ballots from an elections office.

“That never happened anywhere in the country before,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. She added that the Legislature’s decision to push for this law shows voters “they are aware that something unprecedented has taken place.”

Legislators included safeguards in the law that allow the attorney general and secretary of state in some circumstances to override the authority of a county election official — such as if a registrar permitted armed personnel to stage near polling places.

Those override privileges are pointed, preemptive maneuvers likely spurred by the threat of a rogue county election official such as Shasta County’s embattled registrar of voters, Clint Curtis. The self-proclaimed “elections integrity advocate” lived in Florida and had no experience administering elections before the county board of supervisors appointed him registrar in 2024.

Lawmakers are seeking to ensure state officials are “able to override a local effort to undermine the state's rules,” Alexander said. “This is not the first time the state is being responsive to events happening in Shasta County.”

Curtis has aligned himself with 2020 election deniers, publicly expressed skepticism about voting machines and significantly reduced the number of ballot drop boxes in the county. He faces several accusations of workplace violence and harassment, including threats to drag staffers out of his office by their hair. Curtis has denied all accusations.

The new law also prohibits any individual from allowing any law enforcement agent to “access, disrupt, modify or take possession of” any voting technology without a court order.
Another provision prohibits election observers from challenging voter signatures. Last fall, the U.S. Justice Department, at the request of the California GOP, announced it would send election observers to California for the special election on Proposition 50, which sparked fears that President Donald Trump was meddling in an effort to change the outcome.

Ballot seizure is just one way outside actors could interfere with California’s elections, Alexander said. Another is the state’s lengthy ballot counting process, which has fueled conspiracy theories and baseless claims that the results should not be trusted.

Advocates are pushing Newsom to include about $55 million in the state budget for county election offices to buy new equipment and hire more staff to speed up counting.

Newsom told reporters Wednesday that funding negotiations are “very, very positive” and “we’re going to land on a number very, very shortly.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.