The Brief

In 2022, the Los Angeles electorate voted to slap the sale of mansions and other high-value real estate deals across the city with a hefty tax.

Locals have been debating Measure ULA ever since. Supporters call it a vital lifeline for the city’s unhoused and housing insecure who stand to benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars the initiative has already raked in. Critics call it an economic own-goal that has choked off new apartment construction in a city where new housing is in excruciatingly short supply.

That debate is about to go statewide.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a low tax advocacy group, is currently gathering signatures to put a measure on California's November 2026 ballot. A central part of their pitch: No more Measure ULAs.

The proposed constitutional amendment takes aim at two types of taxation common across California:

• Transfer taxes on the sale of real estate. The measure would cap rates at a little more than one-twentieth of one percent of the value of the property. Los Angeles' highest rate is one hundred-times higher.

• Local tax measures put on the ballot by voter-backed campaigns (as opposed those put there by city councils) that are earmarked for a particular purpose. The tax-capping proposal would raise the electoral support needed to pass these types of “special” tax measures to two-thirds, up from a simple majority of more than 50%. 

Municipal governments across the state stand to lose billions of dollars (with taxpayers standing to save just as much) if the measure ultimately succeeds. Voter-proposed tax hikes have been approved by simple majorities in cities and counties across California. Transfer tax hikes have also been a popular funding source for certain local governments.

Measure ULA, which 58% of Los Angeles voters backed in 2022, happens to be both. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and its political allies appear happy to make it the face of the statewide campaign.

Putting a lid on both citizen-initiated tax measures and high transfer taxes “is something that we have always had as a priority,” said Rob Lapsely, president of the California Business Roundtable, a coalition that has yet to take a formal position on the measure but which backed an earlier version. “The question was, ‘can we actually find the right opportunity?’”

“And then suddenly, along came Measure ULA.”

The fight over the “mansion tax”

The City of Los Angeles’ measure was sold to voters as a “mansion tax,” because it sticks new, elevated transfer fee rates on only the highest value sales: 4% on properties between $5 million and $10 million and 5.5% for those above that. Those numbers have inched up with inflation. All sales below those thresholds are taxed at roughly half of 1%.

Since going into effect in 2023, the measure has raised some $830 million for affordable housing construction, subsidies for cash-strapped renters and legal assistance for tenants facing eviction. It is by far the largest single contributor to the city’s overall homelessness spending.

But ULA has its critics. Not just a tax on mansions, the high rates apply to commercial, industrial and multifamily residential projects too, including land sales for new apartment developments. Apartment construction has indeed slowed to a crawl across the city in recent years and developers and researchers have laid at least some of the blame on the city’s high transfer taxes which they argue has driven new construction down further than in surrounding cities. One report by researchers at UCLA and the Rand Institute estimated that the measure has resulted in 1,910 fewer apartments per year, including 168 fewer affordable units. Another study by researchers at Harvard, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, found that property tax collections fell steeply as a result of the dramatic slow down in sales, off-setting an estimated 63% of the collect transfer tax revenue, if not significantly more.

Backers of the mansion tax have taken issue with the UCLA study in particular. They also note that the program is currently accepting applications for its first major distribution of funds, with plans to push nearly $400 million out the door, which could ultimately ramp up affordable housing development across the city.

But there’s growing concern, both in Los Angeles and among Democrats in Sacramento, that ULA as it currently exists has become a political vulnerability — and one that could fuel the campaign behind the statewide tax busting measure.

“Measure ULA is the tail wagging the dog,” said Mott Smith, a developer and board member of the California Infill Builders Association who co-authored another study that found a chilling effect on the housing market. “Anyone with assets in Los Angeles is like, ‘please where can I send my check to Howard Jarvis?’”

In the final days of the California Legislative session, Mayor Karen Bass and former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg tried to hammer a grand bargain into state law. Senate Bill 423 would have exempted certain new residential developments from the tax, offering a reprieve to many multifamily housing developers. It would have also given the city more flexibility to renegotiate affordability requirements on housing projects funded by the measure, addressing concerns by some developers and financiers that ULA cash comes with too many strings attached to be of use.

The bill would have also exempted homes destroyed in the recent wildfires.

But there was a catch: The ULA tweak would only go into effect if the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association pulls its ballot measure or it fails to qualify for the ballot.

All of that ultimately proved too complicated, contentious and of questionable legality to ram through the Legislature in the final days of the session. Long Beach Sen. Lena Gonzalez and Inglewood Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, both Democrats, vowed to pick it up again in January.

But that may be too late to neuter the anti-tax campaign. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is already gathering signatures and raising funds.

“This was an attempt to cut us off early in the process, but since we’re moving forward I think the attempt to leverage this is not going to prevail,” Jon Coupal, the association’s president. “Their opportunity to ambush us is now over.”

That’s given local government groups billions of reasons to worry. Along with making it more challenging to raise revenue in the future, cities with existing high transfer taxes would see them slashed. Parcel taxes currently on the books that were approved by majorities of less than two-thirds would be similarly nixed.

Cities would lose between $2 billion and $3 billion each year if the measure becomes law, according to an analysis commissioned by the League of California Cities, a lobbying group. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone funding dedicated for new housing and homelessness services in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. But it also includes hundreds of millions more for cities that don’t use these transfer dollars for new, specific purposes and projects, but simply to top up their budgets.

The City of Berkeley, for example, stands to lose between $33 million and $63 million, according to the League’s analysis. That’s the equivalent of between 15% to 30% of the town’s general fund.

California’s favorite fight

Californians have been having some version of this fight for nearly half a century.

In 1978, voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and put strict limits on local and state governments’ ability to raise revenue. Defending, rolling back and revising those limits in court battles and subsequent state ballot measure campaigns is now a storied California political tradition.

The latest chapter begins in 2017 when the California Supreme Court ruled in a case against the southern California city of Upland that citizen-initiated special tax measures only need to get more than 50% of the vote to pass. Up until that point it was presumed that the required threshold was the much more electorally formidable two-thirds.

Since then cities and counties have passed two dozen of these measures by margins of less than two-thirds. That includes taxes on parcels, sales and gross receipts that have been used to fund local schools, parks, street repairs and housing and that have been put on the ballot by homeless advocates, environmentalists and organized labor groups. It also includes Measure ULA.

And since then, business groups have been clambering to close the “Upland loophole.”

“This is now the vehicle for unions and others to be able to try and pass new taxes on targeted business sectors using a majority vote,” said Lapsely. “That only hurts job growth.”

Over that same period some cities have also turned to transfer taxes as a new source of revenue. It’s a fiscal avenue only available to a select number of cities. Under state law, most municipalities max out their transfer taxes at 55 cents for every $1,000 in sale value. But for “charter cities” — local governments with their own municipal constitution — there is no upper limit. Twenty-six have taken advantage of that fiscal opportunity.

They include Santa Monica, which passed its own version of a high-value transfer tax (Measure GS) in 2022, and Los Angeles. Voters in cities across the San Francisco Bay Area have voted to make more modest or incremental hikes over the last 10 years.

Electoral hurdles to come

The transfer tax trend has particularly irked landlords and real estate developers.

Last year, they joined forces with anti-tax advocates and other business groups to rein in both types of bothersome taxation with a ballot measure. The California Supreme Court took the unusual step of striking it from the 2024 ballot, ruling that it proposed too “substantial” a change to state government to be enacted by a mere ballot measure.

This year’s version is much more carefully targeted making it less likely to hit this same constitutional snag.

But even if the signature gathering effort is successful, the Howard Jarvis campaign has its work cut out for it — even for a conservative-coded measure in reliably blue California. In late 2023, the Legislature floated its own head-spinning ballot measure that would require future initiatives that want to hike the threshold needed to pass other measures (see: the business-backed measure) to meet that same higher threshold (in this case, two-thirds) before becoming law.

That effort to hoist the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association on its own petard is already slated for the November 2026 election. If it passes, it would apply to any other measures also on the ballot.

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

The Trump administration has abandoned the legal defense of its campaign to strip federal funding from schools and colleges that promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The administration formally dropped its appeal Wednesday in a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, leaving in place an August ruling from U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland.

A coalition of groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, challenged a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the U.S. Department of Education in February, which targeted practices the administration said “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’”

Gallagher said the federal government ran afoul of procedural requirements and violated the First Amendment with its letter, online portal to report discrimination, and other federal guidance.

“The government did not merely remind educators that discrimination is illegal,” Gallagher wrote in her August order, “it initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished.”

The latest legal development is “a victory for California students and families,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director of EdTrust-West, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to dismantle racial and economic barriers in California’s education systems.

“The evidence is clear: diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies expand access and help close opportunity gaps,” Nellum said in a statement to EdSource. “Federal funding threats aimed at dismantling these efforts undermine public education and harm the students who need support most.”

Educators and advocates said that over the last year, the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives had a major effect on the landscape of both TK-12 schools and higher education, even in California.

“The damage has already been done across the nation and even in California, where people think we’re impervious to the conservative backlash or right-wing movement,” said Royel Johnson, who leads the Race and Equity Center’s National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates at USC.

Back in February, Johnson and other advocates for DEI policies said the federal government’s guidance was not law and warned institutions from overreacting to the February 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter. Johnson has seen schools cut funding or staff to departments and programs focused on underserved groups. Some institutions have also scrubbed references to race, ethnicity, the LGBTQ community, diversity or equity in favor of something more general like community, Johnson noted, including his own employer, USC.

Some educational institutions in California made subtle changes over the last year. EdSource found that California State University institutions scrubbed some diversity buzzwords from their programs and websites. At Stanislaus State, for instance, “diversity” was dropped from events once called the Presidential Diversity Celebration Series. At CSU Monterey Bay, the Office of Inclusive Excellence became the Office of Community and Belonging.

Johnson says something is lost when schools drop “identity safety clues” from spaces and organizations that serve as a beacon to students who “have a tough time seeing themselves on campus.”

Some institutions were undeterred by federal and political pressure. Johnson points to Sacramento State as an institution that “doubled down” on its commitment to Black students and was among three colleges designated a California Black-Serving Institution. The Los Angeles Unified School District put more money into its Black Student Achievement Plan, despite being sued by a conservative group that called the program discriminatory.

The latest development is a legal victory that establishes support for the values of equity and inclusion, said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. But he says the Trump administration’s tactics were successful in disrupting education over the last year.

“One of my concerns is that the strategy of the Trump administration is to disrupt and instigate a sense of conflict within local communities,” Rogers said.

He points to other actions taken by the Trump administration that have also been disruptive, such as canceling protections for schools against immigration enforcement or targeting policies that are aimed at supporting LGBTQ students, especially transgender students.

Johnson said that he hopes that schools and colleges can capitalize on this legal victory and stop self-censoring work under the banner of DEI that supports students and addresses the harms of the past. But he warns there will be more fights ahead.

“I hope folks can feel more emboldened today,” said Johnson. “It doesn’t mean more isn’t coming.”

Along busy streets in Long Beach’s Washington neighborhood, longtime resident Jesus Esparza says locals will consider just about anything to keep themselves safe from speeding drivers.

The latest idea: leaving reflective vests on the worst street corners so pedestrians can don them while crossing and leave them for the next passerby.

It’s a grassroots tactic that illustrates their frustration with Long Beach’s increasingly deadly streets. In 2025, the city recorded 53 fatal traffic collisions, a sharp increase from 2024 and the most in more than 10 years.

Long Beach has been striving for years to make its roads safer. In 2016, the City Council said it hoped to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2026. It was their version of a Vision Zero plan that many municipalities have adopted.

But in the ensuing decade, Esparza, who leads the local neighborhood association, says he’s seen little progress. He’s regularly passed along residents’ requests for traffic-calming measures — things like adding more lighting or delaying green lights so pedestrians get a head start in a crosswalk. But, he said, he’s yet to see any effective measures installed.

“We would always ask for speed bumps or speed tables,” Esparza said in Spanish, “but they don’t put them [on our streets.]”

Despite a rise in deadly crashes, a spokesperson for Long Beach’s Public Works Department, which manages streets, said the city is still confident in its strategy.

Its “core principles” include protecting pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists by slowing down drivers, Public Works spokesperson Jocelin Padilla wrote in an email. Those plans “remain unchanged.”

She said speeding is a primary factor in the city’s most serious crashes. Bad driver behavior, such as impairment and distraction, is also to blame.

Their greatest toll has been on people outside of cars. Last year, 32 people were killed while walking, biking or riding an e-scooter. That eclipses the number of people murdered here last year: 29.

Other residents have also pressed for faster action.

On another dangerous section of roadway along Orange Avenue, resident Kelsey Wise said she’s seen countless near misses. In response, she spent hours putting together a PowerPoint presentation to convince the city to install speed humps on Orange Avenue between Seventh Street and Hellman Avenue.

Wise estimated that roughly half of the drivers on her street travel above the posted 25 mph speed limit — a habit she finds increasingly troubling when teenagers from the nearby school zip through her neighborhood on electric scooters and e-bikes.

Last month, Wise presented the information to Councilmember Mary Zendejas’ office, who told her they would refer the presentation to Public Works. She’s yet to hear anything back.

“I think the system right now is designed to respond once something catastrophic happens, not when residents are signaling that something catastrophic is likely to happen,” Wise said.

Public Works told the Long Beach Post that seemingly simple fixes like the speed bumps Esparza and Wise asked for aren’t feasible. Its engineers prefer other “traffic calming treatments.” Speed humps slow down emergency response vehicles and the department has received “objections to noise” caused by drivers hitting them, Padilla wrote in an email.

Padilla said they instead favor “bulb outs” that extend curbs into the street at a crosswalk and “diverters” — islands that separate bicyclists from regular traffic and prevent cars from turning into neighborhoods or where it’s unsafe.

Over the past few years, the city has “made meaningful investments” to redesign major corridors with those principles in mind, Padilla wrote. Last May, Long Beach celebrated the completion of a $44.2 million project that installed protected bike lanes, new crosswalks and other traffic safety features on Artesia Boulevard.

On Tuesday, the City Council voted to approve reducing speed limits on dozens of streets.

Kurt Canfield, an organizer with local street safety group Car-Lite LB, said he was skeptical that speed limit reductions would slow down drivers unless it ramps up enforcement. Cops have been writing fewer speeding tickets since the pandemic.

The city has pivoted to relying on automated enforcement. Officials plan to install speed cameras at 18 locations throughout the city, but they’re not scheduled to be installed until the summer. They’ll then start issuing warnings to drivers until fines begin in the fall.

Canfield said he hopes last year’s high death toll will be an outlier.

“I think people are wanting to get back out and bike and walk, but as more people start doing that, now we have what essentially amounts to more targets to be victimized,” Canfield said.

The high death toll, he said, doesn’t mean the city’s approach is wrong, Canfield said.

“It just means that we need to try more, we need to continue building safer streets and changing behaviors because it does work,” he said.

It was short lived, but the wintry spell that graced Southern California is leaving the area. We're in for dry, sunnier weather this weekend and warmer weather early next week.

Today's highs will again be mostly in the mid-60s along the coast, topping out around 67 degrees in the valleys and Inland Empire.

Coachella Valley will see highs from 67 to 72 degrees. Meanwhile, in the Antelope Valley, cooler conditions will continue with highs from 54 to 64 degrees.

This weekend will be fairly windy across SoCal starting Saturday evening. The National Weather Service forecasts winds from 15 to 25 mph across L.A. County mountains and hills. Come Sunday, winds will be strongest in Inland Empire and inland Orange County, where gusts could range from 30 to 40 mph.

The Los Angeles City Council has approved plans to hire more police officers this year, ending a months-long struggle over the city budget with the mayor's office.

The vote this week will allow LAPD to hire 410 officers, up from the 240 included in the city's original budget for this fiscal year.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass had pushed for the additional hires, citing the coming World Cup and Olympic Games, while some councilmembers questioned where the money would come from.

In December, the City Council voted to allow for an additional 40 officers to be added to the force, using the city's general fund.

This week's vote got Bass the rest of the way there. It will bring LAPD's ranks to around 8,500 sworn officers. At its height in 2009, the police force had more than 10,000.

It's a victory for Bass' office, but she said in a statement that hiring still is not keeping up with attrition.

"Although this is an important step, there is more work to do to invest in the safety of Angelenos,” Bass said.

The council approved the additional hires only after City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo found that the funds could come from the police department rather than the city's general fund.

In a report submitted to the council last week, Szabo identified around $3 million in funds from LAPD savings and a projected surplus in an account used to pay officers their accumulated overtime when they retire.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez called the move "robbing Peter to pay Paul." Councilmember Tim McOsker called it "robbing Peter to pay Peter." They both supported the motion.

But the funds identified by the city administrative officer will only cover the new hires this fiscal year. In his report, Szabo estimated that adding 170 more recruits to LAPD and resources in the personnel department to support them would cost around $25 million in the next fiscal year. He suggested his office could identify potential police department budget reductions or general fund revenues in next year's budget cycle to continue funding the new officers.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who heads the budget and finance committee, voted for the plan to add new hires. She said Wednesday that most councilmembers were supportive of increasing the ranks of sworn officers but expressed dissatisfaction with the process that led to this move.

"I would have preferred that this issue of these additional officers that weren't in the budget that was adopted and signed by the mayor was addressed in the next budget," Yaroslavsky said. "But that being said, here we are."

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez was not convinced. He told the council he thought the ongoing cost of additional hires likely would lead to cuts elsewhere.

"A budget is a document of our priorities," Soto-Martinez said. "And it just feels like every single time, LAPD gets what they want. Every single time. And the conversations that are not happening in the public is about how that affects other things that the city does."

He voted against the extra hires, along with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Nithya Raman.

Soto-Martinez, who sits on the public safety committee, also said he wanted more transparency on police spending on costs like overtime. He said every quarter the city spends $50 million on police overtime.

Soto-Martinez and Raman introduced a motion instructing the city administrative officer and legislative analyst to transfer some LAPD auditing and accounting into a new bureau of police oversight within the city controller's office. That motion was referred to the personnel and hiring committee.

Police Chief Jim McDonnell pushed back against that idea Wednesday, saying it would take additional personnel away from the department.

"We're working on a skeleton crew," he said. "We're two years out from the Olympics, five months out from the World Cup, and we've got a deficit [of officers]."

The vote came after LAPD requested nearly $100 million in its proposed budget for next fiscal year for new vehicles and equipment to police the Olympic Games.