The Brief

For the record: We have updated the headline of this article to better reflect what happened to displaced participants in the HOPICS rapid rehousing program. We use the terms “eviction” and “evicted” in the article and a Dec. 12, 2023 newsletter based on the common understanding of the word. However, HOPICS’ middlemen were those legally evicted. The clients were displaced from their homes as a result of the evictions. We regret if that was not clear to readers. 

HOPICS used middlemen to help facilitate the program. The middlemen rented from property owners, becoming the property owners’ tenants. The middlemen then subleased to HOPICS participants. HOPICS subsidized participants’ rent through payment to the middlemen, who were then to pay property owners. As the article describes, when rent was not paid on a timely basis, property owners began eviction proceedings against middlemen. Participants then faced imminent displacement, which we refer to as “eviction.” Legal eviction proceedings were against the middlemen, not the HOPICS clients. As the article also describes, HOPICS arranged for new permanent housing or shelters for most of the tenants facing imminent displacement, however HOPICS could not account for dozens more.

Jesus Mares got a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to rental support from one of Los Angeles’ leading homelessness agencies, he had a roof over his head.

He had been bouncing between sleeping in his car and hotel rooms. The taxpayer-subsidized room in a South L.A. duplex provided stability until he could get back on his feet, he’d hoped.

It went well for a while, he said. Then Mares quickly noticed things were amiss with the nonprofit, known as HOPICS. He went through several case managers who Mares said didn’t come to see him.

Then came the eviction notice. HOPICS, which has received about $140 million in Los Angeles city, county, state and federal funding over the last three years for a program known as rapid re-housing, was months behind on paying his rent, according to Mares and his former landlord.

“They basically told us to get out of the building and they locked the building up,” Mares said.

All together 306 people lost taxpayer-funded homes in South Los Angeles as a result of HOPICS’ failure to pay rent on time, the nonprofit said. While more than half were then placed in permanent housing or sent to temporary sites, HOPICS and Los Angeles housing authorities did not say what happened to 119 people.

A CalMatters review of the program, based on hundreds of pages of documents and dozens of interviews, shows that the prominent Los Angeles nonprofit repeatedly ignored explicit eviction warnings from some landlords, did little to vet the middlemen it entrusted to execute the program, and took on far more clients than its case managers could serve.

CalMatters interviewed three participants who landlords said were evicted from HOPICS-funded houses, and they reported ending up back on the streets or living in their cars.

Brenda Wyatt outside of her temporary housing location in Los Angeles on Oct. 4, 2023.

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The eviction mess underscores weaknesses in California’s strategy for addressing its biggest crisis, homelessness. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has allocated more than $20 billion to fight homelessness, but the state’s homeless population surpassed 170,000 people in 2022. Like HOPICS, many government-funded services provide only temporary housing, depend on too few case workers and must compete for units in an already-tight rental market.

Leaders of the nonprofit, whose formal name is Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System, say they were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of emergency COVID money during the pandemic to run what’s known as rapid re-housing, a popular local rental assistance program.

To execute the program, HOPICS used middlemen – many of which were newly created nonprofits – to rent out rooms to the unhoused. However, HOPICS’ leaders often didn’t pay those brokers on time, they say, because they needed to review and approve rent bills sent by the very landlords they had chosen to work with. Some of the invoices, they say, had questionable charges.

“We didn’t have the habit of Google searching everybody’s names, and probably that’s a simple fix,” said HOPICS deputy director and former U.S. Rep. Katie Hill. “This is a lot of money that has gone towards a program that has shown that it can house a lot of people. It’s not perfect in any way, shape, or form, and it’s evolving, and we’re learning as we go.”

The federal government sent $100 million in emergency aid to Los Angeles County to address the homelessness crisis during the pandemic, along with another $220 million to six cities in the region including L.A. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority then turned to organizations like HOPICS, which is a division of a larger LA nonprofit, Special Service for Groups, to carry out the programs. Between 2019 and 2023, HOPICS placed 3,100 homeless people into permanent housing through rapid rehousing programs, according to the nonprofit.

Annual revenues at Special Service for Groups surged from $84 million in 2018 before the pandemic to $149.1 million in 2022. It also gets rapid re-housing funding from Measure H, the 2017 Los Angeles County sales tax and a mix of federal, state and city funds.

While the rush of COVID funding has ended, HOPICS continues to deal with the fallout of the evictions. It still hasn’t paid all of the rent the landlords claim they are owed, it acknowledges. And, separately, three Los Angeles motels sued HOPICS and its parent late last year, alleging it stopped paying rent for clients who were living at the motels. The nonprofit settled the case early this year, though the terms weren’t disclosed.

HOPICS Director Veronica Lewis said her organization can be late with payments because of its efforts to verify that its clients are actually living in the units.

“The notion that we just don’t pay, it’s just absurd,” she said. “We want to be good stewards of public funds.”

CalMatters sent the Los Angeles homeless authority questions about how it funds and oversees HOPICS. The homeless services agency’s spokesperson issued a statement that didn’t answer several questions, including how many clients got into rapid rehousing programs as a result of pandemic funding and how many have returned to homelessness after leaving rapid rehousing programs. The agency also did not comment on whether it’s a common practice for homeless services nonprofits to pay rent late.

The authority’s “role is to ensure service providers receive the funds necessary to bring our unhoused neighbors home … ensure the program is performing efficiently, and work with the provider to identify any performance concerns,” the spokesperson said.

“It’s about time somebody stepped up and exposed what HOPICS is doing,” said Demario Swait, a 59-year-old who was evicted. The nonprofit gets a grant “to make sure that people are housed, and people are not being housed. And I’m one of them.”

Swait and Mares said they are still trying to pick up the pieces from the HOPICS evictions. Swait is now in temporary housing with a different agency, looking for permanent housing, he said.

Demario Swait at Leimert Park in Los Angeles on Sept. 28, 2023. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

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Mares packed his things and went back to living in his car, he said. “Right now, I’m at my family’s house trying to get it together, trying to find a new spot.”

Why HOPICS turned to middlemen

A Vietnam veteran who had slept on Skid Row founded HOPICS in the 1980s as a one-man operation working to find housing and services for homeless people.

Today it’s one of the county’s largest homeless services organizations with a contract from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority to coordinate shelter placements and other services in South L.A. To lead the organization, Lewis was paid $261,000 last year, according to the organization’s tax records. She also sits on the state council on homelessness, which Gov. Newsom has charged with developing policies to prevent and end homelessness in California.

HOPICS is supposed to help unhoused people find a place to live, pay a portion of the rent for up to two years and provide a wide range of social services, like employment training and assistance applying for public benefits, according to its contract with Los Angeles County.

Ideally, clients gradually contribute more toward rent until they’re able to stay housed on their own, according to the Los Angeles County Homeless Services Authority.

Landlords are often reluctant to rent their properties to people receiving government rental assistance, whether due to bias or an aversion to red tape.

Property owners who wanted to help house the homeless “don’t necessarily want to be landlords to our population,” Lewis said, and many didn’t want to handle multiple leases for clients sharing one house.

So, instead, HOPICS turned to middlemen. These brokers would rent properties and then sublease rooms in those properties to participants.

Housing 1BY1 Co-Founders Dejon Dixon and Norris Jones in Los Angeles on Sept. 28, 2023. Dixon and Jones say a Los Angeles-based nonprofit owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent for formerly homeless people.

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CalMatters interviewed five brokers who got into business with HOPICS by renting homes from a large property management group called Ocean Properties, Inc. Ocean Properties describes itself as a development company that flips “small inadequate homes” into larger duplexes. It sells the multi-unit houses to investors and often remains as property manager, renting out more than 2,000 affordable housing units across South L.A.

HOPICS does not lease houses from Ocean Properties directly.

Instead, it goes through people like Norris Jones. He created the nonprofit Housing 1By1 in August 2020, to help with Los Angeles’ housing and homelessness crisis, he said. A month later he welcomed his first HOPICS tenant. Jones and his partner, Dejon Dixon, sublet more than a dozen units, housing more than 80 people for about $950 a month for a private room. They charged $2,800 as a security deposit, according to several signed lease agreements.

Jones and three other brokers said HOPICS would go months without paying rent, causing them to fall behind on paying the property owners. As a result, he says he owes Ocean Properties more than $200,000 in rent and fees. He said he doesn’t understand how a company getting paid by the government “got us in a position where we can’t pay the rent for the people they house in our homes.”

HOPICS officials say Jones has overstated how much it owes him and, in some cases, said he’s submitted invoices far too late to get reimbursed. Still, in a February email to Jones, HOPICS acknowledged owing him $135,000 for 2022 and “upwards of $90k” for 2023.

Now, Jones said HOPICS has paid him some of the unpaid rent. He’s in talks to settle with the agency over the rest of the money he says he’s owed.

“I spent all my money to do this,” Jones said.

In the rush of new funding, HOPICS acknowledged it went into business with some brokers without doing so much as a Google search. For instance, the agency leased 24 locations from Donye Mitchell of LA Supportive Housing. CalMatters found that Mitchell left federal prison in 2014 after serving a sentence for defrauding California’s Employment Development Department.

A property owner in June filed a lawsuit against Mitchell and his business partner in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging they owe more than $77,000 in back rent for a site his nonprofit used to house homeless people, court records show. Neither party has responded to the suit.

One of several properties managed by Norris Jones and Dejon Dixon, co-founders of Housing 1BY1, in Los Angeles on Sept. 28, 2023. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

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Mitchell did not respond to voice messages left with his business partner or emails from CalMatters for this story.

HOPICS officials said some landlords shuffled residents around the units against program rules, and failed to tell the agency about impending evictions until the last minute.

Herbert Hatanaka, executive director of Special Service for Groups, Inc., is personally investigating some of the claims from the brokers.

“There’s missing information,” he said. “We have evidence, for example, clear evidence that there were individuals that were not living in some of those facilities for the time that (the landlords are) billing us for. ”

Overwhelmed L.A. homeless caseworkers

Vetting and paying rent invoices wasn’t the only holdup for HOPICS clients. A persistent shortage of caseworkers contributed as well, former employees told CalMatters.

To have rent paid, rapid rehousing clients must meet with their case managers at least once a month. HOPICS tenants, landlords and former employees told CalMatters that just didn’t happen.

One employee said the agency was badly understaffed because of high turnover and unable to keep up with the number of tenants it was supposed to serve. Los Angeles County requires each case manager to work with up to 25 clients.

“When I signed my acceptance letter, it was for 20 clients, and within 30 days, I had 60,” said Neal Glasgow, a former caseworker for HOPICS who said he left in 2022 after about a year. “I was playing catch-up every month.”

The caseworkers verify that tenants are still living in the units, set tenants’ rent contributions and connect tenants with services.

Glasgow said landlords called him so often about unpaid invoices that some of them became his friends. HOPICS’ leaders acknowledged they didn’t meet the caseworker ratio, citing understaffing in the social services industry.

Several former tenants said they went months without contact from a caseworker, leaving them feeling stranded in temporary placements. Brokers who visited the homes also said their tenants didn’t receive visits from case workers and complained that instead of getting help to become financially stable or get treatment, the clients languished in the houses, sometimes using drugs and having mental breakdowns.

In Los Angeles Superior Court claims, three tenants have said they’d seen 15 or 20 different caseworkers in the two years they were allotted in the rapid rehousing program and still hadn’t gotten permanent housing. A judge ruled in May and June that the agency did not owe them any money for emotional distress and dismissed the case.

The current rapid rehousing system of cost-sharing rent for a couple of years doesn’t make sense to some of the people who once ran it.

“It’s setting (the unhoused) up for failure,” Glasgow said. “You put them in a room that they can’t afford and after the program, they’re gonna end up back homeless, and that’s a lot of money wasted.”

HOPICS officials say they now lease some houses directly from property owners. That practice, known as master-leasing, is a strategy agencies including the L.A. Homeless Services Agency, are increasingly considering.

“It’s basically eliminating that middleman that has too much opportunity for problems,” said Hill, the HOPICS deputy director.

An eviction letter posted in one of the residences where Vincent Osby housed formerly homeless people in Los Angeles on Sept. 28, 2023.

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But they also still house clients in units run by brokers. The nonprofit’s officials said they’re doing more to vet landlords before placing clients in their units, including requiring all future and current landlords to sign stricter, clearer program requirements and asking for references.

“We’re asking more questions now,” Lewis said.

Brenda Wyatt, 58, was kicked out of her room on Sept. 4, she said. Her landlord, Vincent Osby, hadn’t been paying the property owner. He confirmed he couldn’t keep up with the rent but declined further comment.

Osby, who played two seasons of professional football for the San Diego Chargers in the 1980s, leased more than a dozen units to HOPICS clients, HOPICS officials said.

The landlord moved Wyatt to another shared house after he fell behind on rent. She said it was unclear whether HOPICS or Osby was at fault for the late rent payments.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, excuse my French,” Wyatt said. “That leaves us in limbo. We don’t know what to do. We worry about getting kicked back out on the streets.”

A room on the second floor of a Camarillo building is quickly filling with smoke. From the far end of the room, flames start to shoot across the ceiling.

While the flames and smoke are real, the danger is not.

This is the Ventura County Fire Department’s new Live Fire Training Complex. A firefighter is controlling the flames and smoke with what looks like a TV remote control.

The $32 million project includes live fire training buildings, a dedicated ladder training prop, and other facilities designed to give firefighters hands-on experience.

"This complex has a 'Class A' combustible burn building, which we are standing in now," said Ventura County Fire Department Training Chief Casey Rosdaile. "The 'Class B' building is propane-fed. This building allows us to train in real fire conditions and real fire behavior. That building (the 'Class B' building) allows us to do a lot more of the operational steps. There's always a gap between the simulated thing and a real thing, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible. That way, when someone trains, they aren't going to be the real thing and say that it's nothing like they practiced."

The buildings are made of concrete, so they won't be affected by the flames and smoke. The smoke kind that's used on movie shoots, so it doesn't leave clothing with the smoky smell like you get from a brush fire.

He added that the new facilities can help train firefighters, as well as other first responders, on ways to deal with a number of emergencies.

"These buildings can host anything from sheriff's operations to (simulated) structure fires, to search and rescue," said Rosdaile. "There are a million things you can do in here. You can train 50 to 60 firefighters at a time, so it really gives us a lot of flexibility."

The two new buildings are just part of the fire department’s fire training complex. It covers 22 acres of land on the southeast side of Camarillo Airport. There are nearly 18,000 square feet of indoor training space, with 32 training rooms.

The dedicated live fire training buildings give firefighters experience with scenarios that were often difficult and time-consuming to create.

"We would light the materials, and let the fire conditions and environment build, to create a realistic training environment, and then send the folks in to extinguish it," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "Then, we would have to clean it all out, and reset it, and start again. We would get a couple of burns a day done. Now, we're getting multiple burns an hour."

Gardner said it's a complex they've sought to create for years.

"This facility allows us to close the gap between training and reality. This allows us to expose our firefighters to as realistic an environment as we can repetitively, and under safe conditions."

Among the props at the facility is a vehicle chassis equipped with gas lines, which can be ignited, so firefighters can practice fighting those types of fires.

"This is our vehicle prop, and it lets us simulate fire. We can push the fire to different parts of the vehicle, so we can set it in the interior, in the cab, the wheel well, as well as the engine compartment," said Ventura County Fire Department Quartermaster Jake Finley. "It creates a good learning environment, with teachable moments. You can see in the background some of the old vehicles (we used to burn salvaged vehicles), and it was a really intensive process. We couldn't repeat it as quickly."

While the Ventura County Fire Department owns and operates the facility, the goal is for it to be used to train first responders from throughout the region. It’s already hosted firefighters from a number of other agencies in the county, as well as teams from neighboring counties.

When the war with Iran started, one of the top economic concerns globally was the slowdown of oil shipments. But there was another critical export that got stuck in the region when hostilities began: fertilizer.

Before the war, around one-third of the world's fertilizer transported by sea passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to UN Trade and Development. The waterway has become a shipping chokepoint in recent months.

With the strait closed, fertilizer shipments from the Persian Gulf slumped and prices rose, affecting countries all around the world that import fertilizer. The war also created a global shortage of natural gas, a key component in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

It caused a massive headache for U.S. farmers who were hit with higher fertilizer prices and limited availability just as they were deciding what to plant for the upcoming growing season.

But the costs borne by farmers don't necessarily get passed on to consumers, and food system experts say they're unlikely to have a major impact on the retail prices of fruit and vegetables.

"Consumers are going to see higher food prices come September to January, once harvests start coming in, and the few months thereafter," said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Very little of that is going to be directly attributable to fertilizer."

That's because food inflation is generally driven by larger factors affecting multiple parts of the food supply chain, such as fewer workers and high fuel costs.

US farmers are rethinking their plans

About one-third of the fertilizer used by U.S. farmers is imported, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group. TFI Vice President of Public Affairs Christopher Glen said little of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

"But we get impacted in a big way because the fertilizer market is global," Glen said over email. "Even if those tons from the Mideast aren't coming to the US, they are still tons that have been removed from the market and need to be made up elsewhere. That's where the pressure comes from."

An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released in April reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this season.

Some farmers are more vulnerable to price swings than others. Producers of corn and wheat, which rely heavily on fertilizer, can spend around a third of their operating costs on fertilizer alone. Half of the farmers who responded to a survey released by the National Corn Growers Association in early April said they wouldn't apply the full amount of fertilizer to their corn crop this year, due largely to higher costs and limited availability.

Because farmers often secure their fertilizer stores well before a growing season begins, some weren't seriously affected by the price swings created by the war in Iran. (Iran said it closed the Strait of Hormuz shortly after it was attacked by the U.S. and Israel at the end of February. U.S. corn growing season typically begins in April.) But they are worried about the future: corn growers who responded to the survey were twice as concerned about the 2027 corn crop as they were about this year's.

This season, some farmers may opt to plant crops that require less nitrogen fertilizer than corn, such as soy beans, in response to rising costs.

According to USDA data, farmers are expected to plant 95.3 million acres of corn this year, down from 98.8 million acres last year. But the total acreage of soybeans is predicted to rise to 85.4 million acres this year from 81.2 million acres last year.

US grocery prices probably won't take a huge hit

If higher fertilizer costs lead to smaller harvests, that could contribute to modest retail price hikes. A TD Economics analysis estimated that a 2-5% production shortfall in North America could grow food inflation by around 0.1-0.5 percentage points in 2027.

Sponsor MessageBut experts say the costs of the fertilizer shortage will be largely shouldered by farmers.

The amount a farmer spends on fertilizer is a small fraction of the total cost to grow food and get it to grocery store shelves. Just 12 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on food goes to farms, while the rest is received by transportation companies, processors, wholesalers and grocery stores, according to the USDA. And the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service reported that U.S. farms spent around 7% of their budgets on fertilizer, lime and soil conditioners in 2024 (though farmers growing crops more reliant on fertilizer such as corn would spend more).

Additionally, farmers don't have much bargaining power to negotiate with wholesalers for higher crop prices when their operating costs rise, according to Rob Vos, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Those buyers will go to other farmers to try and get it cheaper," he said.

But there are factors other than the fertilizer crunch that are more likely to cause food prices to jump. Barrett said the global food industry is facing a "really unpleasant layer cake" of pressures, from tariffs and extreme weather to higher prices on labor, fuel and fertilizer.

"No one of those by itself is especially painful," he said. "But when you add them all up, they become quite painful together."

In parts of Africa and Asia, the effects of the fertilizer shortage could be far worse. Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services, said in April that the reduction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz may prove "very significant and severe" for poorer countries. Less-developed countries that rely heavily on fertilizer from the Persian Gulf include Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Somalia.

The fertilizer industry is recovering — and may adapt in the process

Some fertilizer prices have begun to fall again in recent weeks, after the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last month.

The Trump administration has also taken steps to lower fertilizer costs for American farmers. This week, Trump temporarily suspended "countervailing duties" on certain phosphate imports, which are added to some imported goods to cancel out subsidies provided by foreign governments.

Still, it will be a while before the fertilizer sector returns to normal. Vos estimated that it could take weeks or months for fertilizer manufacturing plants to come back online and return to previous production levels. If high prices stick around, that could snarl the plans of U.S. farmers preparing to plant cool-season crops this autumn, he added.

Barrett said the trouble with the fertilizer industry has also gotten farmers thinking about how they can protect themselves from these kinds of supply-chain disruptions in the future and looking for other ways to replenish their soil, such as manure, compost and cover crops.

"Just like we're seeing more people interested in electric vehicles because the price of gasoline and diesel has gone up, you see more farmers interested in other ways of replenishing soil nutrients as the price of fertilizer has gone up," he said.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea's place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America's colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn't the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America's fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here's what to know about America's early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn't the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government's passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It's why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father's now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

Historians say it's hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

"There is a vast amount of smuggling," says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. "So they're not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They're probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean."

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren't always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. "I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company," she posits someone of the era saying. "But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee."

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas 

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

"Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities," Pendergrast says: "because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything." The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

"There's a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it's because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather," historian McDonald says. "That's where they heard about the economics of the day."

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers' horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could "riotously drink together" in taverns, coffeehouses often didn't allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

"The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal," she says. "Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled."

Still, she says, the lines between the two "weren't completely clear."

The cost of America's revolutionary drink 

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. "Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities," says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. "They're both becoming affordable luxuries," Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

"These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff," says Chaplin. "The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world."

There's a dark side to coffee's history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that "all men are created equal," but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America's fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

"Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought," Pendergrast says. "But it was also grown by slaves."

Wearing gloves and a KN95 mask, Emmanuel Carrera Ruedas hunkered down near a storm drain, just steps away from the smoldering Lineage warehouse fire, as he filmed himself pointing to what he described as insulation and foam flowing into the drain.

“The thing about this water is that it all gets dumped straight into the L.A. River,” Carrera Ruedas, of Cudahy, told his Instagram followers in a June 22 reel.

In the past two weeks, Carrera Ruedas has spent evenings gathering water samples outside Lineage and from the L.A. River as he and other community scientists are partnering with experts from UCLA and Columbia University to learn what’s in the runoff. Samples will soon be sent to a lab in New York.

“For far too long, the river has just been a drainage, a dumping site for companies,” said Carrera Ruedas, 27, who often encounters toads, birds and fish inhabiting its ecosystem.

“There is life in there,” he told Boyle Heights Beat. “We’re all in proximity to the river, and that’s kind of the vein that runs through the city that really connects us all.”

Community-led testing

Since the Lineage fire ignited June 17 in Boyle Heights, residents, environmental advocates and researchers have taken it upon themselves to find out what’s in the air and water. They’ve launched their own sampling efforts, seeking answers about what people have been breathing and contaminants that may have entered the L.A. River.

The community-led testing comes as residents have reported eye irritation, nausea and headaches while questioning whether the government has done enough to capture the fire’s environmental and public health impacts.

Those concerns are especially alarming in Boyle Heights, East L.A. and neighboring Southeast L.A. communities, where neighbors have long faced disproportionate pollution burdens.

Crews navigate around piles of debris and puddles of water on the eastern edge of the Lineage warehouse as they begin cleanup efforts on June 25, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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An estimated 31,700 workers, about 81% of whom are Latino, live in the county and city zones where a smoke advisory was issued, according to new data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. They work in health care, manufacturing and food service industries. About half of the workers earn $3,333 or less a month, below L.A. County’s “very low income” threshold.

The area also experiences diesel pollution levels three times the county average, as well as higher rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease-related emergency department visits, according to UCLA. Nearly 10,000 households in the area lack air conditioning.

“This is not only an air quality emergency but also a worker and environmental justice issue,” UCLA said.

Behind the push for environmental justice

For years, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos on the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East L.A. oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the L.A. River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.

“Something I’ve told many people over a long period of time is, ‘We’re not polar bears. We’re not whales.’ Nobody is coming to save us. We have to step up and defend ourselves,” said mark! Lopez with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Antonia Castillo, 73, helps her grandson Aiden Velez put on a mask near their Boyle Heights home.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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East Yard members opted to take air samples themselves, dissatisfied with the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s assessment of the fire’s air-quality impacts. They placed sorbent tubes, which Lopez described as passive air monitors, outside nearby homes for about seven days. Soon, they’ll send the findings to a Columbia University lab with the help of UC Irvine.

What officials have done so far

South Coast AQMD said it conducted “mobile monitoring” during the first two days of the fire that found “significantly elevated concentrations” of particulate matter. The agency then deployed particulate matter monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School that provide “near-real time exposure information.” AQMD noted that the L.A. Fire Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted their own monitoring, while third-party contractor Onterris has continued monitoring during the cleanup phase.

AQMD also observed smoke impacts throughout the region, issuing a particle pollution advisory in English and Spanish that remained in effect through June 24.

What's next and lingering questions

Meanwhile, Lopez said more sampling is necessary, and he questioned the effectiveness of efforts by Lineage, AQMD and LAFD. He and other advocates criticized public statements from officials, including Mayor Karen Bass’ assurances that “the air is not dangerous,” even as residents were reporting feeling sick. He also took aim at LAFD Chief Jaime Moore’s statements that ammonia was not toxic to individuals unless they had respiratory issues or came in direct contact with it. East Yard also called for evacuations in the area.

“It feels like at the city and county level they don’t currently have the capacity to really handle this situation,” Lopez added. “I think it really requires state and federal intervention to make sure that the cleanup and restoration isn’t mismanaged.”

Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the Lineage fire is exposing how little is done to “respond to public health emergencies and disasters” in communities like Boyle Heights and East L.A., areas “that have so often been referred to as environmental injustice communities.”

Residents and community organizations like East Yard, Ornelas Van Horne said, “are always the ones having to respond.”

“They’re relying on each other. They’re relying on their networks and their organizing power to be able to do that on the ground sampling.”

Ornelas Van Horne reached out to colleagues at Columbia’s Multi-Element Trace Analysis Laboratory in New York after she learned of the sampling taking place and of community concerns about the runoff making its way down to the L.A. River.

Those samples will be analyzed for heavy metals like cadmium, lead and arsenic, she said.

The L.A. County Public Works Department, according to the Los Angeles Times, deployed three containment booms on the L.A. River and continued to monitor the water as it made its way to the ocean.

Carrera Ruedas began collecting water samples on the third day of the fire. He said he took the first sample from the L.A. River, about 100 meters from the spout where it spilled out. The second was taken from outside Lineage. He has amassed dozens of samples since then.

Cudahy sits alongside the lower L.A. River, and after the fire, Carrera Ruedas recalled a “heavy stench that affected people in our community.” The trash he saw in the river was the foam and insulation that came from Lineage, he said.

“It really pissed me off, just to see all this trash go in there and nobody doing anything about it,” said Carrera Ruedas, who also serves as the parks and environmental justice commissioner for Cudahy.

The L.A. River, Carrera Ruedas said, is “part of our ecosystem.”

“This is not just affecting me. This affects everybody else around me. This affects people who love the beach, people who just want our water systems clean,” he said.