The Brief

This piece is adapted from the first issue of Building Your Block, a seven-issue newsletter course that unpacks the obstacles to housing development in L.A. and what you can do to make things better. Sign up for the whole series here.

Experts agree that L.A. County is in a housing shortage, including the state housing department, the state legislative analyst’s office, policy analysts and academics.

This shortage, they say, is the main driver of the exorbitant rents and housing prices across Southern California. But no single policy or elected official is to blame — today’s challenges are the result of decades of building too little housing to keep up with population growth. Here are some numbers to consider: over a 40-year period since the 1970s, California added only 325 new housing units for every 1,000 people added to our population. It’s a similar story for the country at large.

That’s why the state government set ambitious housing production goals for counties across California. The state housing department establishes new goals every eight years for how much new housing to produce. For the period from 2021 to 2029, California’s overall goal is 2.5 million new homes — more than double the target for the previous cycle.

Southern California needs to plan for 1.3 million new homes by 2029 to keep up with demand in our region and hit the state’s targets. All the cities within L.A. County are responsible for 812,000 in total, with 450,000 of those units coming from the city of L.A.

L.A. County is nowhere near meeting these numbers.

Together the 88 cities in L.A. County are supposed to add about 101,500 units per year to stay on track with their goals. In 2024, they built 28,453.

Why progress is so slow: We made it difficult to build 

In Southern California, we built our cities out, not up. There are a lot of historical reasons for why our region ended up spread out and decentralized. Jobs opportunities grew in different areas, instead of a single urban core, and during the housing booms of the late 19th century and early 20th century, there was room to sprawl. Suburbs and single-family homes were idealized and developed in large numbers. Discriminatory housing practices, such as racially restrictive covenants, furthered segregation. Car culture spawned freeways and parking lots. This all means that today, there’s not much empty land left to build on.

Another factor: local zoning rules. Because there isn’t a lot of empty land left, adding housing density is key — for example replacing a five-unit apartment building with a 20-unit one. But our rules restrict where we can densify housing.

Until recently in the city of L.A., for example, it wasn't even legal to build the housing required to reach state-mandated goals. When the city received its target of building 450,000 new homes, its regulations only allowed for about half of that to be built. The city had to change its rules about what housing can be built and where.

Building anything new takes a long time and is really expensive 

Even if city ordinances allowed us to build more housing, a labyrinth of red tape slows down the approval process, including getting departments to review the plans and waiting for utilities to get connected.

And when housing proposals get political, as they so often do, the process gets bogged down even more with public hearings, lawsuits, City Council discussions and so on.

There’s also the cost of building housing. Any one of myriad factors can make prices jump: supply chain disruptions, the scarcity of materials, labor shortages, inflation and more.

Plus, since most of the land in L.A. is already built on, to build something new you usually have to tear down existing structures first. That makes it — you guessed it! — more expensive.

These factors don’t just affect the rate at which we’re getting new housing, but also the kind of housing we end up getting.

We can’t get out of this crisis without building more housing 

Plenty of other factors exacerbate the crisis we’re seeing today: Corporations or foreign investors buying up housing. The proliferation of short-term rentals like Airbnb. Gaps in rent control or other tenant protections. Empty lots or buildings that aren’t utilized.

But housing experts agree: we still need to build. And even if building new housing can’t solve the crisis alone, we also can’t solve the crisis without it.

Those state housing production goals we mentioned? There are consequences if cities don’t make a meaningful effort to cooperate. They could lose access to affordable housing funds, get sued, and get fined as much as $600,000 a month. The state could also take over decisions about what buildings get approved, which means L.A. residents would have less influence on new housing in their communities.

The big questions: What kinds of housing and where? 

Surveys show that a majority of Angelenos support building new housing.

But where should it get built?

And what kind of housing should it be? Subsidized apartments for low-income residents? Permanent supportive housing for formerly unhoused people? High-rises? Duplexes? All of the above and everything in between? What should be preserved, and how do we alleviate our housing shortage without worsening gentrification?

These are the questions that underlie most local housing battles today — and the answers we choose will shape our neighborhoods for years to come.

Weighing in on L.A.’s housing future starts with figuring out what kind of housing you want to support and where you think it should go, then figuring out what stands in the way of that. For more information to help you do that, sign up for the Building Your Block newsletter course here.

Just off the Beach Boulevard exit of the 22 Freeway in Westminster, you'll find a Walmart Supercenter. Make your way through the busy parking lot, and you'll spot a retired school bus parked near the entrance, painted in psychedelic purples and blues. This is Playa Baby, and they're quietly making some of the most interesting tacos in Orange County right now.

A name with two meanings

The name Playa Baby holds double significance for husband-and-wife team Amanda Rios and Red Feather — two people who came to this parking lot from very different places.

Amanda Rios and Red Feather outside their Playa Baby fish taco truck in Westminster.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

The two got married in 2022 at Burning Man, on a dried lakebed known as the playa. And in Spanish, playa means beach — a nod to the region Red Feather's family is from in Nayarit, a state in west-central Mexico next to the Pacific. The state itself takes its name from Red Feather's people, the Naayeri.

Combined cultures

Red Feather grew up in the mountains of Nayarit with his grandmother after losing both his father and grandfather in a car accident. His mother, known as Chicha, had already immigrated to California and was working to send for her children. He lived in an indigenous community largely untouched by colonization — matriarchal and connected to the land. When Chicha finally sent for him, the family settled in Santa Ana, where he grew up working alongside her, selling tamales and other food from small shops — and learning to cook in the process. He eventually went to art school, became an industrial designer, and found it so unsatisfying that he walked away, instead launching a fish taco truck in 2020 under the name School Fish Taco.

Amanda is originally from Bayan, Georgia, a small town she describes as "an hour from anything" — the kind of place where food isn't casual, it's communal, and you cook for everyone who comes through the door. She dropped out of the University of Georgia to start a small catering operation from her apartment, then enrolled at Johnson & Wales in Charlotte before working her way through kitchens across the South. In 2016, she moved to California and eventually became a private chef, including cooking alongside Chef Nikki Stewart on Dave Chappelle's team — events like his 50th birthday, Summer Camp, and the Blue Note Jazz Fest in Napa.

It was during that time she crossed paths with Red Feather. She came on as a consultant to his food truck business — and never left.

For a while, she treated Playa Baby like a side hustle, balancing the truck with her work on Chappelle's team. Then she started to notice something. "I was still on the road and I was watching our numbers uptick," said Rios. So she decided to come home and focus on the business, rounding out the menu to include the lemonade program that would become one of its biggest draws.

The OG Combo at Playa Baby — three tacos and an elote on a stick.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

The food

When you go, start with the OG Combo — three tacos (fish, shrimp, Mixto), elote on a stick, and a Playa Punch.

The fish is tilapia, marinated in lime before it's battered. The batter itself is seasoned and thinned out, resulting in a crisp, delicate exterior that's the opposite of the puffy cloud you'd get from classic fish and chips — citrusy and light, a technique Red Feather learned from his mother.

The elote at Playa Baby comes loaded — Cotija, chipotle drizzle, cilantro, crema.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

The shrimp is more traditional than you might expect from a shrimp taco, yet still manages to stand out. Seasoned before and after, it comes out plumper and crisper, leaning closer to a classic tempura. Both tacos arrive topped with red and green cabbage slaw, crema, chipotle mayo, and Cotija cheese. The tortillas come from Ranchera Tortilleria in Garden Grove — lime, salt, corn, no preservatives — and taste handmade, holding their own against the stuffed contents. The fish itself comes from D&D Seafood in Westminster.

The elote is loaded — Cotija, chipotle drizzle, cilantro, crema — and the corn is fresh enough to pop with each bite.

The lemonade

At Playa Baby, the lemonades — Amanda calls them Buckets — are as central to the menu's identity as the tacos. Each one starts with fresh-pressed lemonade or limeade and handmade ginger syrup, then gets dressed up with fruit and herbs: Georgia Girl (peach, mint) is a nod to her own roots; Florida Boi leans blackberry and coconut; O.C. Gworl goes tropical with lychee and passionfruit.

The Playa Punch, one of Playa Baby's signature handcrafted lemonades, served with a yellow flower garnish.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

The idea came together in 2023 at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago, where in-house beverage was the buzzword of the year. After seeing a woman on TikTok fund pharmacy school by selling lemonade, Amanda tracked down the man in Alabama who builds pneumatic lemon smashers and spent a month testing 50 combinations before landing on the menu they have now.

More than a fish taco

Despite Amanda's imprint on the food, she's quick to point out that this isn't a Black fish fry. In her home state of Georgia, fish fry means catfish. What she's bringing to Playa Baby is a philosophy — season everything before it hits the batter, never leave a taco unfinished, treat the food like a gift rather than a transaction.

That philosophy extends to how the business is run. The truck has spent the past year parked at this Walmart Supercenter after years of working Taco Alley in Santa Ana, a move Amanda made after finding a vendor program through a Facebook group for women food truckers. The new spot opened the truck up to people who couldn't easily get to them before — families with strollers, older customers, anyone in a wheelchair.

There's no brick-and-mortar in the plan. The goal, eventually, is to franchise the truck model — without losing what makes it work. As Amanda puts it: "I gave you everything I got in this tiny menu, so it all hits."

What Playa Baby teaches us is that good food doesn't need to rely on rigid technique or even the "right" ingredients — sometimes it just needs to be an honest expression of the people behind it and the story they're telling. That feels significant and worth the trip.

For more than 50 years, the Education Department has revealed a host of realities about how students are being treated in every public school across America: which kids are being bullied, which ones are being harassed and which students can access the internet, among other things. The agency's Civil Rights Data Collection is intended to do just that — help keep schools accountable.

The latest information, collected about the 2023-24 school year, was supposed to be published last December, according to the Education Department's own deadline.

But it hasn't been.

The agency hasn't responded to multiple requests from NPR asking what's behind the delay.

Federal bureaucracy can be slow, and delays aren't always cause for concern, but advocates are on edge in the midst of recent plans the Trump administration announced to move the Office for Civil Rights — which houses the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) team — from the Education Department to the Department of Justice.

That planned transfer follows months of federal action that upends the way students' civil rights have been protected in the past: The Trump administration has cracked down on initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, for example, and prioritized investigating schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women's sports.

"This administration has repeatedly applied civil rights law in ways that ignore or dismiss the very real inequities that persist in our education system," says Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, a think tank focused on addressing education inequity. The delay in releasing the CRDC data, she says, "raises serious concerns, particularly as this administration seeks to downplay the impacts of racism and economic inequality in public education."

A former Education Department employee who worked on the CRDC tells NPR the team is still intact. However, its future is unclear: While the Trump administration has announced the Office for Civil Rights is moving to the Justice Department, the process could take months, like other plans to outsource parts of the Education Department's work. The former employee, who asked not to be named out of fear of professional repercussions, said part of the delay may have to do with the 2025 government shutdown that affected operations at the Education Department for over six weeks, including work on the CRDC.

The department also has been winding down its operations since the Trump administration took office, cutting about half the department's overall staff last year.

Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, agrees with Forte's assessment that a delay in this data may have to do with the Trump administration's chipping away at systems that have historically helped hold schools accountable for protecting students' civil rights. "This administration unfortunately has proposed a lot of policies that would make it less transparent on how students with disabilities in particular are being served in public schools," he says.

For example, Kubatzky points to how the Trump administration has proposed eliminating a requirement for states to track which students are being identified as having disabilities based on race and ethnicity. Historically, Black and brown students are more often wrongly identified as needing special education than their peers.

While that disability data is not directly tied to the CRDC, Kubatzky says it's an example of the administration working to undo federal civil rights accountability tools. The CRDC, he says, also plays a key role in helping advocates show where "schools are not serving students and it also gives us a lever to push for policies that are more inclusive and less negative toward students."

For example, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of N.J. and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas used findings from CRDC data to craft a bill proposing the expansion of access to Advanced Placement courses for underrepresented students, including minority and disabled students, whom the data found had unequal access to these classes. A spokesperson for Booker's team said the bill would be reintroduced in the coming days.

One of the questions the delayed dataset was set to answer is which students have access to the internet as AI plays a bigger role in education, according to the former CRDC staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Like, are our schools ready to usher in this wave of AI? Will all students have equal access to devices and internet capabilities?" the person said. "How do we know if the CRDC doesn't come out?"

The former staffer described the CRDC team as a deeply committed group of people who are focused on ensuring "access and opportunity" for the nation's most marginalized students. "We can't make the right decisions for students if we don't have insight into their current realities."

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

Most Fourth of July guides focus on how to see fireworks shows. This one offers something a little different.

There are lots of reasons why you might seek out some peace and quiet on the Fourth of July. Whether you can’t deal with fireworks because of your pets, sensory or mental health reasons, or, in my case, because you’re just trying to chill in your apartment at midnight.

To be clear, we’re not talking about the big fireworks shows, which are mostly over by bedtime — some of these locations even have their own official fireworks shows. We’re talking about illegal fireworks that regularly light up skies and eardrums in SoCal neighborhoods.

But as any illegal firework-hating Angeleno should know, you can’t win against the booms. Even if you convince one neighbor to stop, you can’t convince them all. To me, the only solution is to steal a moment away for yourself and get out of Dodge.

I’ve been avoiding the Fourth of July in L.A. for years now — though admittedly not every year, especially when friends with rooftop grills invite me over — and I put together a list of recommendations that should be calm and firework-free at night.

Of course, there are no guarantees that people still won’t light fireworks illegally in these places, like what led to the tragic El Dorado Fire in 2020. But you can probably see a theme emerge here: areas in or near state and national parks, mountains, the beach and anywhere that’s wildfire-prone will likely provide a reprieve.

Angeles/San Bernardino National Forest

Fawnskin in the San Bernardino Mountains is one place to soak up the vibes.

Though a few towns make this list, going into nature is going to be your best bet. State parks like Chino Hills and Crystal Cove close at sunset, but you can stay as long as you want in national forests. And if you park your car in the right turnout, you’ll enjoy a pretty nice panorama. Controversially, there will still be a fireworks show in Big Bear, so you can sneak a peek if you so choose.

Idyllwild

This store in Idyllwild, pictured in 2025, certainly got into the July 4 spirit.

This is where I spent the last Fourth of July. It was exactly what I was looking for: very festive with plenty of activity during the day, but there wasn’t a firework to be heard around this forested mountain town when the sun set.

Joshua Tree/National Parks

Not a firework in sight here in Joshua Tree.

Fireworks are strictly banned for visitors to U.S. national parks, as well as on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. It’s a federal offense that could carry up to six months in jail. Joshua Tree is obviously the closest national park you can drive to, but Sequoia and Kings Canyon also have a strict ban on pyrotechnics and other fires. Bonus: National park entry is free this July 4.

Malibu (or most places along the beach)

Zuma Beach is one of many beaches in Southern California near state parks.

(

Kevin Tidmarsh/LAist

)

The farther you get into Malibu, the farther from your neighbors’ fireworks. I’ve found Zuma Beach to be a pretty good place to park, especially since it’s surrounded by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, but everyone has their spot (or you’ll find one). If Malibu’s too far, try somewhere like Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach. You can likely catch neighboring beach cities’ fireworks shows from afar there, too, at least until the park closes at 10 p.m.

Ventura County/Ojai

Los Padres National Forest near Ojai could be a good escape after you're done with official fireworks shows in Ventura County.

(

U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr Creative Commons

)

This is a good place to go if you want to split the difference between seeing official fireworks shows in places like Ventura, Ojai and Oxnard and having peace and quiet after they end. Ventura County has seen its fair share of wildfires recently, and the more mountainous, rural areas in and around Ojai tend to be pretty peaceful later at night as nearby cities embrace the chaos.

The Catalina Island Ferry

The Catalina Express ferries run late on July 4.

I’ve never done it, but I imagine the open ocean is a pretty good place to avoid Fourth of July fireworks. Like Ojai, Avalon also has its own firework show at night, but the ferries back to land run until 11:15 p.m. and last about an hour. Sadly, all of the late ferries are currently booked, but if staying overnight is an option, you’re unlikely to hear any illegal fireworks in fire-prone Avalon, let alone the rest of Catalina Island.

Anywhere in the desert

Even the Salton Sea, pictured here in 2025, can be a great place to avoid firework sounds.

(

Kevin Tidmarsh/LAist

)

Generations of Southern Californians have gone to the desert to find peace and quiet. And if you’re just looking for a respite from fireworks, you can even get it at places like the Salton Sea. Just brace yourself for those 85+ degree nighttime temperatures.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this Saturday.

If you’re looking for a way to join the festivities in Inglewood and South L.A., we’ve got you covered.

Inglewood events

Music fest

Inglewood is hosting its 4th Annual Music Festival on Saturday, July 4 at Darby Park (3400 W. Arbor Vitae St.) from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Doors open at 10 a.m. and KJLH radio personality Adai Lamar will host the show. Performers include Cameo and Klymaxx featuring Cheryl Cooley. Tickets are free.

Pool party

DJ Starboy is hosting his annual pool party on Saturday, July 4 at 9321 South Van Ness Ave. in Inglewood from 4 p.m. to midnight. There’ll be food and drinks for sale, games and activities, and multiple DJs bringing the Afrobeats, dancehall and hip-hop vibes. Tickets are $17.85 each. The event is for those age 21 and older.

South L.A. events

Benefit show

America 250 will host a July 4 Benefit Show at the LA Memorial Coliseum on Saturday, July 4. Gates open at 3 p.m. and the show starts at 6 p.m. Queen Latifah is hosting and performers include Chris Stapleton and The Smashing Pumpkins. Legendary singer Chaka Khan will also be a special guest at the show. Tickets are $17.76 and 5,000 complimentary tickets will be donated for first responders, veterans and service members, organizers say.

Fan zone

LA County is hosting free World Cup watch parties on Saturday, July 4 and Sunday, July 5 at Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park (12552 Avalon Blvd.) in South L.A., from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The fan event will feature live music, food trucks, a community marketplace, resources and family fun.