The Brief

One of the biggest landlords in Los Angeles has been turning away people seeking apartments under the Section 8 housing assistance program in many of its buildings, in apparent violation of state law, a Capital & Main investigation found.

Jamison, a group of family-run real estate companies, has been lauded for its civically active CEO and its efforts to turn underused office space into housing. But Jamison stands out among other large L.A.-area landlords Capital & Main investigated for its near nonparticipation in the Section 8 program, the largest housing assistance program in the country, the investigation found.

In a statement, a Jamison company spokesperson said “the management companies overseeing Jamison’s portfolio accept and welcome tenants utilizing Section 8 vouchers.”

Section 8 is a powerful tool for fighting homelessness and the housing crisis across the nation. But it is especially needed in L.A. County, where wages haven’t kept pace with rising rents. Housing Choice Vouchers, as they’re officially known, subsidize rent for about 85,000 households in L.A. County that don’t earn enough to afford a market-rate rental.

At its best, Section 8 and its federally funded assistance vouchers offer a way out of poverty for low-income residents — affordable rent in a community of their choice.

But too often the program fails to deliver on its promises. Four in 10 voucher holders in the U.S. never find housing at all, even after years on Section 8 waiting lists, according to a 2021 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Terri Reynolds, who oversees programs at the nonprofit Asian American Drug Abuse Program to help clients in the L.A. area find housing, said they’re “so happy” to obtain rental assistance. But they are often disappointed, she said, “because landlords don’t want to mess with Section 8.”

The reluctance of landlords to participate is one of the Section 8 program’s biggest problems, even though a state law bars them from rejecting tenants because they use vouchers.

Dan Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, said red tape and hard-to-understand rules make Section 8 “an administrative nightmare” for some of his members, who are mostly mom-and-pop landlords.

Capital & Main investigated seven of L.A. County’s largest landlords to determine whether they open their doors to Section 8 tenants. Unlike smaller landlords who might be unfamiliar with the rules, these multifamily real estate giants have abundant administrative resources to interpret and comply with state law.

Capital & Main’s findings are based on data collected by testers hired by the news organization to pose as Section 8 voucher holders. From late 2024 to early 2025 the testers contacted leasing agents to ask about available apartments in 65 buildings owned or operated by Jamison, Equity Residential, Essex Property Trust, AvalonBay Communities, G.H. Palmer Associates, Prime Residential and Greystar. The tests were limited to buildings where advertised rents were low enough for Section 8 recipients to be able to move in. Testers asked leasing staff at each building if they accepted Section 8 vouchers, and if so, what income and creditworthiness criteria each used to qualify applicants.

Jamison buildings were the only ones where leasing agents said they could not rent to Section 8 tenants. Of 21 properties that testers contacted, agents at 15 said they could not accept vouchers. At one property, an agent described income requirements that would automatically exclude voucher holders. Agents initially said they would accept Section 8 at five of the properties, but either described minimum credit scores that would exclude many voucher holders, or did not respond to follow-up inquiries.

Capital & Main contacted Jamison with its key findings and a list of questions. In its statement earlier this month, the company spokesperson said many of the issues raised were “completely wrong and/or misleading” but did not comment on many of the specific problems the reporting found.

Last fall, a tester called to inquire about an apartment at Jamison’s Atlas House in L.A.’s Koreatown with some attractive amenities, including state-of-the-art appliances, a swimming pool and hot tub. But they were told the building was not accepting Section 8 vouchers. “We are actively seeking approval to begin accepting Section 8 vouchers, and when that approval goes through, we will publicly make an announcement,” the representative said.

But the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has no such approval or inspection process, said its Section 8 director, Carlos Van Natter. “We would not inspect the whole building,” Van Natter said, adding that the agency only inspects individual apartments to ensure habitability after a landlord has accepted a tenant’s rental application.

At the Sienna on Serrano and the Roya, both relatively new Koreatown buildings that offer features like modern kitchens, gyms, pool decks and even a karaoke room, leasing agents also said they were awaiting city approvals for their Section 8 participation, which they said they expected within a few months.

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The cold shoulder for Section 8 voucher holders clashes with company CEO Jaime Lee’s community-spirited reputation. Last year the Los Angeles Times featured Lee on its L.A. Influential list and named her one of the “bosses, elected officials and A-list names calling the shots from the seats of power” alongside Gov. Gavin Newsom and Archbishop José Gomez.

And in public comments, Lee has bemoaned the city’s housing shortage and positioned her family’s company as part of the solution. Lee, who is a member of the LA28 Olympic organizing committee and was appointed to the powerful California Coastal Commission by Gov. Newsom in September, has said the company offers apartments for people at a wide range of income levels.

What Jamison appears to lack is Section 8 tenants, who are among the lowest earners and the hardest to house; in Los Angeles, for example, most make less than $53,000 per year for a single person. Section 8 tenants pay about 30% of their incomes in rent and the government covers the rest.

Between 2021 and 2024, only one Section 8 tenant moved into a Jamison property, according to records Capital & Main obtained from the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles under the California Public Records Act.

The Jamison spokesperson’s statement did not address the lack of Section 8 tenants in its properties, but said that the management companies overseeing its portfolio “take proactive steps, including engaging a broker and non-profits, to help identify individuals and families who hold vouchers or qualify for income-restricted Affordable Housing units.”.

But the findings raised concerns for L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who, as a state senator, authored the 2020 state law that makes it illegal to reject tenants because they pay rent with government assistance.

“It’s disappointing because the law is the law,” Mitchell said.

Jamison’s three dozen or so residential buildings in the L.A. area were built since 2013, and thus too new to be covered by local rent control laws or the state’s maximum 10% per year limit on rent increases. Under the Section 8 program, however, the company would be required to get housing authority approval for annual rent hikes.

Jay Lybik, a real estate expert who until recently was the CoStar Group’s National Director of Multifamily Analytics, said that given state and local rent caps, Jamison may exclude voucher holders so that it can freely raise rents on its units.

Lybik, who now directs market research for Continental Properties, said Jamison “most likely needs to hit certain return hurdles for their investors and will need to be squeezing every percentage of rent growth. Thus, they don’t want to be hampered by the lower yearly increases allowed.”

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Jamison is one of the fastest-growing multifamily developers in Los Angeles. In just 12 years, the company has accumulated a residential portfolio that includes more than 6,000 units — including both ground-up construction and office-to-residential conversions. At least 2,500 additional units are either planned or under construction.

The company has benefited from L.A.’s lucrative apartment market with its low vacancy rate and through-the-roof home purchase prices that send highly paid workers into the rental market. Jamison has also been able to maximize profits by participating in the city of L.A.’s builder incentives. Under these programs, developers can include more apartments in a building than the zoning code allows or get waivers from parking or open space requirements. In exchange, developers set aside a small percentage of apartments for lower-income renters. The company has built some 250 affordable units.

Another reason for the company’s rapid-fire growth in residential real estate: a stockpile of aging Koreatown office buildings Lee’s father, David Lee, amassed beginning in the 1990s — before the area became a destination for nightlife, dining and traditional Korean spas.

“They were lucky,” said Johnny Choi, a first vice president at commercial real estate firm CBRE and an expert in the Koreatown market. “They were able to purchase property at a time when prices were a lot lower.”

Among David Lee’s acquisitions were the former headquarters of iconic U.S. corporations that pulled up stakes after once-prestigious Wilshire Boulevard lost its luster in the 1990s. The former Texaco Oil and U.S. Borax buildings are now the Crosby Apartments and the Westmore, respectively. Jaime Lee has said these conversions and the company’s other residential developments help address L.A.’s housing shortage.

But the city’s largest unmet need — according to records from California’s state housing agency — is for housing that L.A.’s poorest people can afford. Section 8 is the only program that meets those needs on a large scale.

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Capital & Main conducted additional tests a few months later to see if the Roya, Sienna, Atlas House and other Jamison buildings had begun accepting vouchers as some leasing agents had previously said.

In a March 2025 call, a representative initially told a tester that the Jamison buildings she inquired about would accept Section 8, but only if tenants earned at least two-and-a-half times the monthly rent. When the tester said those income requirements would disqualify her as a Section 8 participant, the representative promised to double check on the company’s rental criteria and call her back, but she didn’t. Capital & Main’s tester continued trying to get an answer. When she finally reached another agent, she said that none of the 15 Jamison buildings the tester inquired about were accepting Section 8 vouchers, offering the same reason as before: They were awaiting “inspections” and “city approvals.”

Leasing representatives for five other Jamison buildings said they accepted Section 8 vouchers. But three insisted all applicants, including voucher holders, meet specific credit scores. Two didn’t respond to follow-up calls. That requirement appeared to run afoul of another state housing law. Since January 2024, it has been illegal for landlords to reject Section 8 applicants solely based on their credit history. Landlords must also consider pay stubs or other verifiable evidence of their ability to pay their share of rent.

If a large landlord turns Section 8 tenants away, “it would be a major resource that our folks can’t access,” said Section 8 director Van Natter.

Jamison proved to be an outlier among the seven companies Capital & Main tested. It was the only big landlord that categorically rejected voucher holders in many of its buildings.

At the six other companies, agents at all 44 properties said they accepted Section 8, but 22 said they would reject voucher holders for poor credit. Four would not say whether poor credit history would exclude Section 8 applicants and two others didn’t respond to follow-up calls about income and credit criteria.

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On the other end of the spectrum was G.H. Palmer Associates, which appeared to roll out the welcome mat for Section 8 tenants, despite owner Geoffrey Palmer’s Scrooge-like reputation and long-documented resistance to government mandates. A 2022 Forbes magazine profile called Palmer “the real estate billionaire who hates affordable housing.” But in Capital & Main’s tests, only one Palmer leasing agent out of seven properties contacted would not accept alternative evidence of ability to pay rent in lieu of credit history, the highest rate of compliance among the seven companies investigated.

Palmer owns thousands of apartments in the Santa Clarita Valley and the Inland Empire, and is perhaps best known for a collection of hulking faux Italianate apartment buildings in downtown L.A., some of them hugging busy freeways. In contrast to other companies whose leasing agents couldn’t immediately respond to testers’ questions about Section 8, G.H. Palmer’s were knowledgeable and responsive.

Palmer, a prolific donor to Republican Party candidates, earned his anti-affordable housing bona fides by winning a court battle against the city of L.A. over a requirement that developers in downtown L.A.’s Central City West area include affordable apartments in their market-rate buildings. The California Court of Appeal ruled in Palmer’s favor in 2009.

But more Section 8 tenants moved into Palmer buildings in Los Angeles between 2021 and 2024 than any of the six other companies Capital & Main investigated, even those with far more units, city housing authority records show. And in other areas of L.A. County, G.H. Palmer had more Section 8 renters in its buildings than the other six companies, according to county housing authority records covering the same years.

Palmer did not respond to Capital & Main’s questions about the company’s participation in the Section 8 program. “He’s not going to talk to you,” said a staffer at Palmer’s Beverly Hills office.

Palmer’s Section 8 stance may be a straightforward case of scrupulous adherence to the law. But it could also be a matter of economics. Unlike Jamison with its portfolio of newer buildings, many of Palmer’s buildings are older and covered by state rent caps. So the need to obtain housing authority approval for annual rent hikes might not threaten the company’s bottom line. It could be that tenant stability and on-time rent payments are a greater priority for Palmer’s business model. Lybik, the real estate expert, noted that Section 8 tenants tend to stay in their apartments longer than unsubsidized renters. And the lion’s share of their rent is reliably paid by the federal government.

Whatever the reason, Palmer’s welcoming response to Section 8 applicants was unusual among the large property owners Capital & Main investigated.

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The typical experience for tenants is far more frustrating and obstacle-ridden, according to housing authority data that shows it is difficult for Section 8 voucher holders to find landlords who will accept their vouchers.

“I had so much discrimination,” said Jennifer St. Jude, a Section 8 voucher holder and social work student at the University of Southern California, who finally landed a four-bedroom house in the Santa Clarita Valley with her two adult daughters. “It took me a year and a half, and I not only got lucky, I killed myself to get this house,” St. Jude said.

In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, Van Natter of the L.A. city housing authority reported that about 40% of Section 8 voucher holders failed to find housing before their subsidies expired — even after languishing for years on waiting lists. The program gives participants 180 days to find a landlord who will accept their vouchers before they must return them to the housing authority.

Yukelson with the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles argued that part of the problem is landlords have a hard time getting rent increases approved and with customer service at some local housing authorities.

“You need to be like a dog with a bone. You need to be aggressive,” he said.

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City and housing authority officials have tried to increase Section 8 usage with financial incentives for landlord participation and regular informational seminars.

Last year, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass met with property owners to urge them to give the program a try. “We have so many people on our streets with vouchers in their hands,” she said at the public event. “They just need somebody willing to give them a chance.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Bass had no comment on Capital & Main’s findings and did not respond to an interview request.

But Kevin Kish, who heads the California Civil Rights Department, the state’s fair housing enforcement agency, said Capital & Main’s findings “highlight a need for more education, more outreach and more enforcement”. Statewide, a single attorney and three investigators enforce anti-discrimination laws that protect people who use rental assistance, Kish noted.

“I think that we’re using all of the tools available to us,” Kish said. He added: “That’s the hard limit on what we can do. Those are the resources we have to conduct enforcement.”

But as Capital & Main’s testers learned through dozens of calls, emails and texts, housing laws on paper don’t necessarily make it easier for Section 8 tenants to get to yes, especially when it’s in big landlords’ financial interest to say no.

This reporting was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Annakai Hayakawa Geshlider, Arlen Levy, Jeremy Lindenfeld, Maison Tran, Emily Elena Dugdale and Lita Martinez contributed to this story. 
Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.

The Orange County Registrar of Voters is sending teams to emergency shelters to make sure people can still can vote in the June 2 primary even if they are under evacuation orders because of the Garden Grove chemical spill threat.

The backstory

Some 40,000-50,000 people in and around Garden Grove were ordered to evacuate last Friday after a tank holding thousands of gallons of a toxic, highly flammable chemical threatened to explode. The evacuation area was sharply reduced Monday evening after public safety officials discovered pressure in the tank had been relieved.

But many Garden Grove and Stanton residents in the immediate vicinity of the tank, owned by the aerospace company GKN, are still under evacuation orders. Some fled their homes without even the bare essentials, much less their mail-in ballots for next week’s election.

How evacuees can vote

If you left your mail-in ballot at home, you can go to any of Orange County’s 38 vote centers and request a replacement ballot. You can find the locations of those centers here.

The O.C. Registrar on Tuesday also sent two teams to the emergency shelters in nearby Fountain Valley — at Freedom Hall and Los Amigos High School — to print replacement ballots for evacuees who need them. Those ballots can be mailed, dropped off at a vote center or placed in one of the county’s official ballot drop boxes. You can find the locations of those drop boxes here.

The drop box at Chapman Sports Park, which is within the evacuation zone, is unavailable. Registrar Bob Page said ballots were collected from the box when evacuations were first ordered. Page said his office has resumed retrieving ballots from two other drop boxes that were within the initial evacuation zone.

Conductor Daniel Harding will take over as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director next year, the organization announced Tuesday.

The appointment follows three years of intense speculation about who would succeed Gustavo Dudamel to oversee the influential orchestra, including concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, The Ford and with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.

Harding’s tenure starts in the 2027-28 L.A. Phil season. The Oxford-born conductor is currently music director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Italy and is well-known in L.A. as a guest conductor.

“ Daniel is a musician favorite during his last couple of times here during that Hollywood Bowl,” Kim Noltemy, L.A. Phil president and CEO, told LAist’s AirTalk Tuesday. “ He's a brilliant musician. He is absolutely committed to the idea of music education and helping develop the audiences of the future.”

Harding said in a statement Tuesday that making music with LA Phil musicians is a thrill and inspiration.

“So many great artists have found possibilities here that don’t exist anywhere else, and I come to California full of excitement for what we will discover and create together,” Harding said.

Harding will be the creative lead behind a team of acclaimed musicians, according to the L.A. Phil.

“This is gonna be the ultimate dream team,” Noltemy told AirTalk.

Esa-Pekka Salonen introduces Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, then 26, back in 2007 as his successor.

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Al Seib

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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That includes Dudamel, who has led the orchestra since 2009 and will make his debut as the director of the New York Philharmonic this year. He was appointed last week as LA Phil’s artistic and cultural laureate.

It also includes LA Phil creative director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was the Phil's music director for 17 years between 1992 and 2009, conductor-in-residence Anna Handler, creative chair John Adams and others.

“We are taking a non-traditional approach to all of the artistic strategy — essentially by having a team of brilliant people working together to create a season that really inspires people and meets various audiences where they are,” Noltemy said.

Harding will conduct eight weeks of programming in his inaugural 2027-28 season, according to the LA Phil. That will increase to 12 weeks of programming in the seasons to follow.

Listen to the interview

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, or President Donald Trump.

Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners, and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy.

The behemoth — it reported $12.3 billion in profit last year — took the spotlight last month when an interviewer asked leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra about Chevron’s contributions to his campaign. The former state attorney general and Biden-era health secretary gave what seemed to be a candid response:

“Chevron, that’s the problem with politics. They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s — that’s their prerogative.”

The phrase “I need Chevron” soon appeared in anti-Becerra videos by the likes of climate hawk Jane Fonda, implying that the candidate was saying he needs Chevron to get elected. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, Becerra’s lead Democratic opponent, urged him to return the contribution and said he is “doing [the] bidding” of Big Oil. Representative Katie Porter, another leading Democrat, said in a statement that she “hasn’t made millions off Big Oil or taken their checks.”

Becerra is not entirely wrong. California consumes around 13 billion gallons of gasoline annually, all of it specifically formulated to meet the state’s stringent clean air standards. Most of it comes from just six refineries, and Chevron owns two that account for one-third of the state’s production. That gives the company and its peers tremendous leverage. But California’s gas consumption has declined by about 15% from a peak in 2004 due to improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles and growing adoption of electric vehicles. It could fall by half over the next two decades.

The primary is June 2. The challenge for the next governor will be to continue the energy transition while retaining the infrastructure needed to move and refine oil. This has never been accomplished in a place as large as California, which was the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2025. The risks are tremendous: If the state moves too quickly, it could create shortages and price spikes for drivers already paying the highest prices in the country. If it moves too slowly, it could lock in decades of air pollution and hinder global climate progress.

“It’s messy,” said Emily Grubert. She is a civil engineer and sociologist at Notre Dame who has studied fossil fuel transitions and advised the state government on oil infrastructure. “As soon as you realize that actually transitioning away from fossil fuels means you have to close things, people get really freaked out.”

Newsom spent much of his governorship going after Big Oil, an effort that included a series of executive actions to restrict fracking in Kern County oil fields. When the war in Ukraine sent gas prices surging, Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature passed a series of bills to stop what he called “price gouging.” These laws empowered a new oil-focused watchdog agency, created a tool that could impose refinery price caps, and required refineries to maintain certain storage reserves, all of which cut profit margins for Chevron and others. The new refinery rules added to multiple carbon taxes that make selling gasoline in California more expensive.

However, there is some evidence refiners have overcharged Californians. Even after accounting for state taxes, environmental fees, and production costs, a gap remains between gas prices in the Golden State and everywhere else. This gap appeared in 2015 after a refinery fire in Torrance and has come to be known as the “mystery gasoline surcharge.” It now averages about $1. Last fall, a state regulator concluded that refiners’ monopoly power may be the reason for the price spikes.

Oil companies accused Newsom of trying to regulate them out of existence, and many threatened to leave. Two major refiners, Wilmington and Benicia, announced last year that they would close their operations, forcing a state that already imports about 60 percent of its oil to rely on imports of gasoline refined in Asia. Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco suburb of San Ramon to Houston in 2024, and it has delivered a series of ominous warnings this year as climate regulators have revised the state’s almost 15-year-old carbon tax.

“The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the state’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry,” Andy Walls, the president of Chevron’s refinery business, wrote in an open letter to Newsom in March. The implication was clear: unless you relax your regulations, we will leave the state and strand you without gasoline. That would mean paying Asian refiners to produce more of the state’s specific blend, at significant cost.

The Newsom administration spent much of 2025 trying to work out a grand bargain with the industry. The Legislature eased rules governing drilling in Kern County oil fields, helping maintain a stable supply of crude to refineries, It also delayed implementing a refinery profit cap, and allowed the temporary sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol. The state’s climate regulator has also suggested giving refineries free allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system, even if it means less money for big projects like high-speed rail and sustainable housing. The idea is to give investors enough certainty that they’re willing to remain in California even as the state uses less gasoline.

Experts believe it will take a lot more than that to manage inevitable changes.

“You actually can’t have a smooth and safe and effective transition without some form of coordinating function for that decline,” said Grubert. She believes a degree of state ownership of refineries will be necessary to keep facilities open if they stop being profitable. The wrong approach, she says, would be to respond to each potential a refinery closure with ad hoc subsidies and state support, since that would allow refiners to extort the state one by one. 

That point was reinforced this month by a report from the California Energy Commission that has not received much notice. The analysis of the state’s shaky fuel system found that “California cannot sustainably manage this transition through repeated crisis interventions at an asset-by-asset level.” It suggested options that included “legal obligations to operate,” “centralized planning of closures,” and “direct state management or ownership of assets.”

The Iran war will accelerate a decline in both the supply of, and demand for, oil. Gas retailers like Chevron are already struggling to find additional imports of refined fuel, and some experts predict shortages if the Strait of Hormuz does not open within weeks. Meanwhile, electric vehicles continue gaining market share, and Newsom plans to roll out subsidies for them this year. Wider adoption of these vehicles, and hybrids, will further crimp demand, making any remaining refineries more likely to shutter.

Chevron’s Kern River Oil Field near Bakersfield is one of the largest oil fields in California. The state’s climate policies have helped reduce gasoline demand by more than 15 percent over the past decade.

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Mark Ralston

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AFP via Getty Images

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All of this helps explain the showdown between the leading Democrats in the governor’s race, who are each trying to find a lane in a field that at one time included more than 50 candidates.

Becerra has given lip service to clean energy, but many public statements suggest a friendliness toward oil producers. As attorney general, he initiated a few lawsuits against petroleum companies, and supported other state climate lawsuits, but punted on major investigations. He has focused his gubernatorial campaign on vows to fight Donald Trump and protect healthcare, and has made controversial promises to freeze utility and insurance rates. On decarbonization, he has noted that “climate action only succeeds if it is affordable, reliable, and fair.”

After the chaos of the early primary, many oil producers have decided that Becerra is their candidate. Chevron last month contributed the maximum allowable amount of $39,200 to his campaign, the first time in a decade it has backed a gubernatorial candidate. Last week, the company contributed another $500,000 to an independent political committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest driller, also gave $500,000 to a Becerra committee. And gas companies like Sempra are among the donors to an anti-Steyer political committee that has raised more than $24 million.

Steyer, meanwhile, has made attacking Big Oil the focus of his campaign, as it was during his 2020 presidential run. He says he would lower gas prices by activating the refining profit cap that Newsom has declined to use, investigating what is causing high gas prices (something the state has already done), and taxing private jet fuel. When refineries “inevitably” close, he says he will stockpile an oil reserve and import more refined fuel for as long as California needs it.

Steyer has also had to address his own fossil fuel ties. The hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital, remains a major player in coal power finance abroad, including in Indonesia and Australia. Steyer still holds a stake in the firm, which he left in 2012, but his campaign says he no longer receives dividends from its fossil fuel investments.

California uses a “jungle primary” in which the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. The latest poll shows Becerra essentially tied with former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, with Steyer trailing at around 15 percent. The most likely outcome is that one of Becerra or Steyer will make it to the general election. (The other Democrats, including Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, trail behind in the double digits.)

Railing against Big Oil has long proven to be good politics in California. But in the wake of Trump’s second election victory, Democrats have sought to downplay climate issues and focus instead on affordability. The question in the governor’s race is how best to achieve that in the long run. Is it better to use a bully pulpit against companies like Chevron in an effort to break their market power, or conciliate them in the hope that they don’t flee?

Mike Madrid, a veteran California political operative, believes Becerra’s approach will resonate more with the young and Latinos, both of whom often decide statewide elections.

“This attack on Chevron, it works for the base Steyer already has,” he said. “Young Latino working-class men are the demographic most affected by gas prices. Do you think they’re saying we need to get rid of Chevron? Of course not.”

Steyer’s campaign may not get him over the line in the primary, but he has at least been consistent. In a 2013 blog post for this very publication, he celebrated the result of the Virginia governor’s race, where a climate-focused Democrat beat a fossil-fuel friendly Republican with help from Steyer’s own war chest.

“A new political dynamic is emerging,” he wrote at the time. “Climate change is a winner, not a loser,” and is “no longer electoral Kryptonite.”

If Chevron has its way, next week’s primary results will prove otherwise.

California foster youth and children who have lost a parent to COVID can now apply for a trust fund to help them begin their adult lives.

The Hope, Opportunity, Perseverance and Empowerment (HOPE) program, created by the state Legislature in 2022, will invest $3,000 per child in a trust fund that they can access when they are 18. About 56,000 children could benefit from this program, according to a state press release.

“For California’s most vulnerable children, early financial support can help counter the long-term impacts of poverty and instability, and create a foundation for long-term financial security,” said California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who serves as chair of HOPE. “HOPE is designed to provide that equitable access and make a lasting impact.”

Children who have spent at least 18 months in foster care or have had family reunification services terminated, and children who have lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID can apply for funds at hopeaccount.ca.gov.

For more information, contact HopeForChildren@treasurer.ca.gov.