The Brief

The Eaton Fire in January affected 225 dependent children, 60% of whom are Latino and 44% of whom relied on either a permanent placement or extended foster care services, a newly published report from the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families found.

Meanwhile, 36% of the students were involved in family maintenance services, and 20% were receiving family reunification services, according to the research.

“Longstanding educational challenges facing children in foster care were compounded by the Eaton Fire — as Altadena rebuilds, equitable recovery and upholding the educational rights of children in foster care must be a long-term priority,” said Taylor Dudley, executive director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, in a statement.

Three months after the Eaton Fire swept through the region, 17% of youth were living outside of Altadena, an average of 16 miles from home, the report found.

And for foster youth, the fire added to a sense of ongoing displacement. It also interfered with high school seniors’ postsecondary plans.

“The response by education and community organizations in the face of significant loss and devastation is commendable and should be noted,” said the report’s lead author, Tyrone C. Howard, in a statement. He serves as the Pritzker Family Endowed Chair in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA and as the co-director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families.

“Yet moving forward sustained investments towards monitoring educational stability and implementing trauma-informed services through cross-system coordination will be essential to achieve equitable recovery in the short and long term.”

A federal judge this week ruled against the city of Los Angeles in a long-running lawsuit over the city’s practice of destroying unhoused people’s property during encampment sweeps.

In a rare default judgment, U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer found the city willfully fabricated and altered key evidence, ending the case in favor of the plaintiffs without trial. It’s a landmark legal win for six unhoused residents and advocacy organization Ktown For All, who filed the lawsuit in 2019, challenging whether L.A. Sanitation employees violated unhoused residents’ constitutional rights when seizing and discarding belongings during sweeps.

L.A. city code allows employees to remove and impound unattended, abandoned or hazardous items that are in the public right-of-way. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged city sanitation workers arbitrarily seize and destroy property without objective standards or proper notice. With the default judgement, the court accepted those allegations as true.

City’s misconduct 

The judge found that L.A. city employees altered reports or otherwise tainted evidence in more than 90% of the cleanup cases examined by the court in order to justify the city’s legal defenses of unhoused residents’ belongings.

According to the judgement, city employees systematically doctored or falsified records about encampment cleanups, including Health Hazard Assessment Reports, after the lawsuit began. The judge affirmed that city employees rewrote reports to change the reason for seizures, including adding details about “biohazards” and describing property as “surrendered” or “dangerous.”

The L.A. City Attorney’s office hid the misconduct from the court and violated multiple court orders over five years, the judge said.

“The court cannot proceed to trial with confidence that plaintiffs have had access to the true facts,” Fischer wrote.

“Where a party so damages the integrity of the discovery process that there can never be assurance of proceeding on the true facts, a case-dispositive sanction may be appropriate,” she continued, quoting another legal ruling.

Reaction from the attorneys

Shayla Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the city’s fabrication and alteration of documents made a fair trial impossible.

“The fabrication of cleanup reports in this case is itself an indictment of the city's practices,” Myers said. “At these sweeps, the city provides unhoused people absolutely no recourse.”

L.A. city officials did not immediately respond to request for comment on the court’s decision.

What’s next?

The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a permanent injunction blocking the city from seizing and discarding personal property during encampment cleanups. They have until March 27 to file a brief in support of a proposed permanent injunction.

BagelFest, the regularly sold-out New York bagel festival, is heading to L.A. for the first time. BagelFest West takes over the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown on April 12, featuring 15 specially picked bagel bakers from west of the Rockies, with early bird tickets on sale now through March 1.

The organizers say L.A. was the obvious choice for expansion.

"We are seeing a global bagel renaissance, and there are so many skilled, talented artisans bringing this amazing food into their local communities on the West Coast," said BagelUp founder Sam Silverman. "We wanted to lower the barrier to entry and give all of these incredible shops a chance to get some of the spotlight they so deserve."

Silverman pointed to L.A.'s range of styles as a draw — "ranging from a classic New York style to Courage Bagels paving the way of this new wave, to Calic Bagel doing a Korean stuffed bagel. There's just so much diversity."

The local angle

Carlos Perez, owner of Boil and Bake in Costa Mesa, was the first West Coast vendor to exhibit at BagelFest in New York two years ago.

"It was fun to get feedback from New Yorkers, especially 'cause bagels have always been their thing," Perez said. "They would go, 'California?' and then they would try it and go, 'Oh, that's actually pretty good.'"

Now that the festival is coming to his turf, Perez sees it as validation.

"Having them put this project together here, it speaks to the culture that L.A., Southern California has built in bagels," he said. "When they told me, 'Are you interested?' I said, 'What do I sign? Let's go.'"

Silverman says this West Coast iteration is an experiment of sorts.

"This first event is going to be a much tighter, high-touch, curated version of what we've built in New York, with the goal of dipping our toes into the market and then eventually building up to that same scale," Silverman says.

The weekend begins with a Saturday night mixer at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, part of a new partnership with the temple's Jewish Food Lab to "celebrate the bagel's origins as a Jewish food," Silverman said. Sunday features a morning industry session followed by a public session from 1 to 5 p.m., with sampling, demos, panels and competitive awards, including Best of the West, Best Bagel, Best Sandwich, Most Creative, Rising Star and Schmear of the Year.

The awards carry weight. Past BagelFest winners include PopUp Bagels, which took Best Bagel in 2021 and 2022 and is now scaling toward 300 locations nationwide, and Starship Bagel, a two-time James Beard nominee that won Best Bagel in 2023 and 2025. A dedicated kids' area rounds out the afternoon with hands-on activities.

"The response from the bagel shops, the businesses and the media has been frankly overwhelming," Silverman said. "It's such a testament to how actively people on the West Coast want to engage and participate."

Perez sees the scene only heading in one direction.

"I can only see it growing," he says. "For the longest time, all we had were the chains. It's nice that now we have other options."

The full exhibitor lineup will be released in the first week of March. Tickets start at $65 (use code EARLYBAGEL for 18% off through March 1), with $199 all-access passes that include parking. Find them at https://www.bagelfest.com/tickets.

When Conrado Guerrero, a Lincoln Heights resident, walks his dogs or brings his nieces and nephews to the park at night, he has to bring a flashlight.

“There’s a light pole right in front of my house, and it was out for over a year. We had to put an extra light just to make sure that our street was not dark,” Guerrero told LAist on Monday, when crews began the process of installing 91 solar streetlights in Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park using discretionary dollars from the office of L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez.

A few days later, on Wednesday, the L.A. City Council voted to progress a strategy to increase the city’s streetlight repair and maintenance budget, which essentially has been frozen since the late 1990s.

The strategy involves another council approval and convincing property owners to pay more in a yearly assessment on their property tax bill. If it works, Miguel Sangalang, head of the Bureau of Street Lighting, said the city could double its streetlighting field staff, expedite repairs to aging infrastructure and purchase more solar streetlights to help eliminate the growing scourge of copper wire theft.

The background and Wednesday’s vote

Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. That yearly fee, which is around $53 for most single-family homes, has been stuck for three decades because of state law.

A third-party study from 2024 found that the assessments the bureau currently collects equate to 45% of what it needs to “properly maintain and operate the system,” according to a summary of the report from the City Administrative Officer.

The city can’t approve a higher fee without gaining approval from property owners. That’s where Wednesday’s vote comes in.

The L.A. City Council agreed to extend a contract with a consultant who will prepare what’s called an engineer’s report, which will quantify the proposed assessment increases for each parcel and show how the extra revenue will help the Bureau of Street Lighting meet the cost of maintaining service and implementing improvements.

Councilmembers Heather Hutt, Monica Rodriguez and Katy Yaroslavsky were absent for the vote. The rest of the council voted in favor of the item.

Sangalang told local leaders Wednesday that he hopes to return to L.A. City Council in March with the engineer’s report, as well as a more detailed public outreach plan. At that point, L.A. City Council would have to approve the engineer’s report and vote in favor of sending out ballots to the more than half a million property owners that would be impacted.

If all goes according to plan, property owners could receive ballots in April. The city’s timeline has been pushed back in the past, though.

Sangalang said the assessment increase, if approved, would also come with a “three-year auditing mechanism” that would ensure the city is “using every dollar as wisely as possible.”