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.

Today will be dry and warm. Expect temperatures in the mid-to-low 90s in some areas, as a heat advisory is in effect for much of L.A. County between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Wind speeds between 30 and 40 miles per hour can be expected in the valleys. In downtown L.A. and along the coasts, the gusts will be a bit weaker, between 15 and 20 miles per hour.

The increased temperatures are fueled by northeasterly winds originating in Nevada’s Great Basin that have pushed their way into Los Angeles, resulting in moderate Santa Ana winds.

Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, says to expect areas around downtown L.A. to hit at least 90 degrees.

“Pretty warm temperatures for this time of year, in general," he said. “Even all the way down to the coast, we're going to see some very warm temperatures, upper 80s to low 90s.”

Temperatures are expected to cool down for the next couple of days as the Santa Ana winds dissipate, but they’re likely to pick back up on Wednesday.

Higher temperatures — between 80 and 90 degrees — could last until Friday.

Across much of the United States and Canada, daylight saving time begins Sunday at 2:00 a.m. local time.

Most people will turn their clocks forward an hour, trading an hour of sunlight in the mornings for more daylight at the end of the day. When it ends, clocks will turn backward by an hour nearly eight months later to have more morning light in the darkest days of winter.

But British Columbia will switch their clocks for the last time — ushering in a new era of permanent daylight saving time. The switch was supported by "more than 90% of British Columbians," said David Eby, premier of British Columbia.

"The way that we live our lives now in the modern era, having an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day, whether it's the winter or the summer, makes a big difference for people," Eby told NPR's Adrian Ma on All Things Considered.

While the idea may be a popular one among British Columbia residents, experts in sleep medicine and public health are not fans of the time change.

"Daylight saving time has been shown to have a lot of negative effects," said Emily Manoogian, a senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute and an executive member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego. "And actually the United States tried permanent daylight savings in the '70s for one year. It was so awful that they reverted it almost immediately."

People went to work in the dark and children walked to school in the dark. And then, "there were a few fatal car accidents," she said, which led to the reversal.

Eby acknowledged health risks, but added that people in his province are used to waking up in the dark and taking their kids to school in the dark during the winter.

"We're on the very western edge of the time zone, and so we have dark mornings anyway," he said. "People really want that hour at the end of the day."

Why daylight saving is bad for our bodies

While our modern world and lifestyles may favor permanent daylight saving, our biology supports a permanent standard time. That's because our internal circadian clocks — which control not just our sleep-wake cycle, but also our cardiac and metabolic pathways — are synced to daylight, according to Manoogian.

"Light is the largest cue to coordinate behavior," she said. When we wake up and our eyes detect sunlight, they send a signal to the brain to tell the rest of the body to wake up and gear up for the day.

"So when you're not getting light in the morning, your body thinks it's not morning yet," she explained. "And it's very hard to just force your body to wake up without that light."

Similarly, in the evenings, when it's bright outside, our bodies find it harder to go to sleep. And it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of later bedtimes and a tougher time waking up in the mornings. That cycle can affect our cognitive functioning during the day and our metabolism all day long. This has widespread public health impacts, said Manoogian. It can also lead to more car accidents, heart attacks and strokes in the week following the start of daylight saving time.

"We know that sleeping, eating, getting light at the wrong time is a huge risk for cardiometabolic disease," said Manoogian. "Every medical and scientific society would argue we should never go to daylight saving time. It was originally created to try to save energy, [but] evidence has shown it does not save energy."

A study by Stanford researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2025 found that switching our clocks twice a year takes a massive public health toll, primarily by driving up the number of strokes and cases of obesity per year. It also found that switching permanently to standard time would result in 300,000 fewer people having strokes and more than 2 million fewer cases of obesity.

"When we can realign better to our environment, we get better sleep," said Manoogian. "We have lower risks of almost any chronic disease you can imagine — cardiometabolic, cancer, even depression, bipolar disorder."

The Stanford researchers also found that permanent daylight saving reduced the number of strokes and obesity, but less so than permanent standard time. In other words, as Manoogian puts it, "the health benefits of standard time are pretty great."

Soften the blow of time change on your body

If you're concerned about how daylight saving time might affect your and your family's health, Manoogian has some tips to soften the transition on your body.

• Get enough light in the mornings: If the sun is out when you wake up, make sure you get enough light, said Manoogian. If it's dark when you wake up, at least turn on as many lights in your home as possible. 
• Prioritize getting enough sleep: Seven to nine hours of sleep is considered ideal for adults, with some people needing closer to seven and others needing closer to nine hours. You know what your body needs, so make sure you get that. "Consistency is also key," said Manoogian. So try to get the same amount of sleep every night. 
• Have consistent meal times: "Keeping a consistent eating pattern to the part of the day when you're active and best able to process food can have dramatic health benefits," she said. That might mean waiting an hour or two after you wake up to eat breakfast and keeping all meals to within an eight-to-10-hour window. "It can decrease Hb1C, which is kind of the gold standard for measuring blood glucose," she says. "It also is shown to decrease cholesterol in animal studies. It's shown to increase health span and even lifespan." 
• Ease kids into the time shift: "Usually what we do for our family is we try to shift like 20 minutes a day over like three days," said Manoogian, who has two children. "That can go a long way" toward helping kids' bodies to adjust to the shift forward.

Copyright 2026 NPR

When Tina Trahan first stepped into the Studio City house made famous by The Brady Bunch, she thought, “I have to have it.”

The art collector grew up watching the classic family sitcom and was struck by a rush of familiarity in the mid-century, split-level house used in the sitcom’s exterior shots.

The Brady Bunch house in North Hollywood, CA on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025.

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Myung J. Chun

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Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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“It feels like you walked into your childhood home when you were 10 years old,” Trahan said. “I thought, ‘No one can get this feeling anywhere else.’”

Her 2023 purchase has led to something more: The Brady Bunch house is now officially a Los Angeles landmark, putting it in the same league as the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Bowl.

The City Council last Wednesday granted the house at 11222 Dilling St. historic-cultural monument status — the culmination of a two-year campaign Trahan embarked on to preserve the house for future generations of fans.

Tina Trahan painstakingly recreated the sets of the Brady Bunch.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“People are really, really connected to the whole TV show,” Trahan said. “It just made me realize, what if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? Is there anything I can do to preserve this?”

Now, as a historic-cultural monument, the house can’t undergo demolition or major changes by any future owners without city review.

The Zillow listing

The Brady Bunch, which debuted in 1969, isn’t even Trahan’s favorite sitcom. That honor is reserved for Three’s Company.

The living room has been recreated to look like the TV show’s iconic set, with the open staircase and mid-century décor.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles Conservancy

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But growing up in front of the TV as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, she came to know The Brady Bunch episodes by heart from years of syndicated reruns.

Decades later, when she was on the hunt for a new house, she caught sight of the Brady Bunch house while scrolling through Zillow.

She stopped at a photo of an open floating staircase that looked just like the one the Brady kids barreled down on their way to the next family misadventure, always neatly wrapped up by episode’s end.

HGTV had put the house up for sale, after previously gutting the interior for a reality series with the original cast and rebuilding it to match the show’s sets.

Not everyone approved of the $3.2 million purchase, including Chris Albrecht, Trahan’s husband and the former HBO chief who oversaw shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Owner Tina Trahan had three elephant stuffed animals made for the girls' room until she settled on the right size.

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Tina Trahan

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“He said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” Trahan said. “He was under the impression that I wanted to move into it.”

But Trahan said she cares too much about preserving the house to ever live in it.

“What if someone drops a meatball on the sofa, or something?” she said. “I would have a nervous breakdown.”

Over the last couple of years, she’s added some 400 items to the rooms, easter eggs nodding to different episodes — like the flashlight that oldest brother Greg used to fake a UFO sighting and the stuffed giraffe in the room shared by the three girls. Trahan had three different giraffes made until she settled on the right size.

Fan destination

Trahan has also opened up the house for tours, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities like No Kid Hungry, the John Ritter Foundation and Wags and Walks, from where she’s adopted elderly and disabled dogs.

She said the actors who portrayed the Brady kids — including Christopher Knight, who played Peter, and Maureen McCormick, who was Marcia — gamely take part in the fundraisers at the house.

The Brady Bunch cast members continue to support the show's legacy and appear at fundraisers.

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Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM

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Getty Images North America

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“They could not have found six people to better represent that show,” she said.

In the time that she’s owned the house, Trahan said she’s come to realize that Brady Bunch fans aren’t fading away, but continuing to grow in number.

The show has essentially been in nonstop reruns on various channels since its original run ended in 1974, and is also available to stream. Every day, fans of all ages make the pilgrimage to Studio City to take selfies in front of the house.

Tina Trahan sits on a Plymouth Satellite wagon she bought for the house. It's,like the ones the Bradys drove on the show.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“I just don't want that taken away from people who it means so much to,” Trahan said.

So Trahan set her sights on landmark status, and brought in legal and preservation experts to help make the case. Among them was Heather Goers, an architectural historian who also worked on getting Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood home designated as a historic-cultural monument in 2024.

Protecting a pop culture icon 

Trahan thought the team had an uphill battle, given the fact that the house was not very old (having been built in 1959) and that only the exterior was filmed for the show.

“I'm sure there are people that are like ‘But wait, that's not historical,'” Trahan said.

But then the nomination was approved by the Cultural Heritage Commission, which Trahan said surprised her by extending the historic-cultural designation to the interior, even though it had been thoroughly remodeled.

Then came approvals by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee of the City Council and finally the full council.

Tina Trahan's eye for detail extended to the backyard of the Brady House.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“It was a relief because it’s been two years I’ve been working on this,” Trahan said. “It’s been a long, long road.”

So how does it feel to own a landmark? Trahan says not much has changed — except she now needs a new homeowner’s insurance policy.

Her insurer canceled coverage last week after news broke that the house had gained landmark status.

Historic homes are seen as pricier and trickier to insure — but a small tradeoff she's willing to accept to protect a piece of TV history.

Happy Daylight Saving, when time is bent so mere mortals can have more time to play in the sunshine.

It's a reminder of how much we treat the sun as an inalienable right here in L.A., as we emerge from months of long nights when darkness descends at the inconvenient hour of, say, 4:30 p.m.

For artists, filmmakers, writers, the light of Los Angeles has been a source of inspiration.

The late David Lynch was an avowed fan. He wrote about its transformative quality in his 2006 book of musings and reflections, "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity."

"The light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places," Lynch recounted.

That same L.A. glow was memorialized in the New Yorker three decades ago by writer Lawrence Weschler, who chopped it up with a constellation of notable names in the arts, sciences and beyond — including the great Vin Scully — about the light that the writer "pined for every day" since leaving Southern California.

Actually, it's pollution

All this sweet talk rankles  Paul Wennberg, who teaches air pollution chemistry at Caltech. He and his research team have worked to reduce pollution in cities across Asia, Mexico and the U.S.

 "They're waxing poetic about the L.A. glow," he said. "A lot of it is caused by smog."

L.A. glow

Wennberg is not talking about the glorious magic hour sunsets, but the gentle sunlight we've come to associate with Los Angeles.

The kind of light that doesn't produce harsh, defined shadows. And why not? Because of the many tiny particles of smog in the air that are perfectly sized to ricochet light in all conceivable directions.

"It's all the pollution in the air that is scattering, as we say, redirecting the light from the sun," he said.

That process, Wennberg said, makes the air "glow, literally."

Lynch’s "bright and smooth."

"This is why artists say they like Los Angeles — it's because the light comes at us from all directions," he said.

And on really polluted days, Wennberg continued, the sky looks overcast. "It keeps us from having shadows."

That means we're actually getting less sunlight, says Suzanne Paulson, director of the Center for Clean Air and a professor at UCLA.

" It varies obviously from day to day, but it can be easily half the sunlight that is actually not reaching the ground because of the pollution," Paulson said.

The drastic difference on a non-polluted day — with its full direct sun casting hard shadows — can be seen on clear days, like during the Santa Anas.

Those winds can be “so strong that they come and basically scour out the whole basin and push all the smog off the coast," Paulson said. "And sometimes you can see this smog layer out over the ocean."

Even as the L.A. light continues its glow, both Wennberg and Paulson said the bad air we experience here in 2026 is nothing like what it was in decades past — thanks to the pioneering work done by the state and the city.

'L.A. smog'

The first major Los Angeles smog event happened July 26, 1943, and caused panic among the populace who feared the ominous dark haze was a Japanese chemical attack.

In essence, that was the birth of photochemical smog, often known as L.A. smog, distinct from other serious episodes that had happened in the winter elsewhere.

But how it was different chemically wasn't known until the early 1950s, when Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit discovered that certain tailpipe pollutants along with industrial emissions get baked by intense sunlight — and result in L.A. smog.

By then, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District was formed, the first in the nation. It was merged with similar entities in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to create the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 1977.

"The air quality was horrendous," Paulson said.

But through hundreds of laws, from those regulating consumer products like lighter fluid or oil paint, to requiring reformulated gasoline and catalytic converters for cars, the air has become dramatically healthier.

"Over the years in California, we have really led the world and made what has been a crowning achievement," she said. " The air is 70, 80% cleaner than it was."

So much has been done, she said, that regulations have just about reached their limits.

"We've done all the easy things, and it's just really hard to find additional things that we can regulate to improve the air quality," she said.

Bigger changes — for example, electrifying more vehicles and appliances, and burning less fossil fuel — will be needed to curb pollution further. Because even at reduced levels, pollutants are still harmful, leading to not just respiratory illnesses but cardiovascular issues and environmental degradation.

Are we special?

So is the L.A. light unique?

Los Angeles's geological features — our mountains that trap heat, deserts that produce hot winds and coasts that create cool sea breezes — all contribute to pollution being held close to ground in a process known as inversion, Paulson and Wennberg noted.

And the stuff just sits there, stubbornly shrouding the city until the winds come to chase it away.

But no, the glow in L.A. isn't special, said Wennberg at Caltech, but our romanticization of it is. And if you are ever curious if pollution is around, he said just look at the ground.

" You'll see a shadow, but it'll be much less sharp," he said.  "When I see the really bad pollution here, it still makes me very sad. I think we need to, you know, make shadows great again."