The Brief

Facing a nearly $1 billion deficit, the city of Los Angeles is set to finance much less affordable housing over the next year under a proposed budget released this week by Mayor Karen Bass.

The budget calls for a nearly 80% drop in city financing of new affordable housing units, declining from 770 homes in the current fiscal year to 160 homes in the next fiscal year.

Speaking with reporters Tuesday at a San Fernando Valley car dealership, Bass said economic conditions are increasingly unfavorable to housing development.

“The housing market, period, has been in decline because of interest rates and the general economy,” Bass said. “We have to look for how we cut back everywhere. Obviously, we want to see housing produced citywide, considering the shortage.”

Why such a steep drop? 

The downward projections come at a time when Angelenos continue to struggle with the city’s entrenched housing crisis. Most L.A. residents are renters, and most renters are paying more than 30% of their income on housing costs, a level the federal government deems unaffordable.

Clara Karger, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the decline in the city’s affordable housing financing is the result of the sunsetting of Proposition HHH, passed by voters in 2016. That $1.2 billion bond measure has subsidized the creation of thousands of new permanent supportive housing units.

Measure ULA, the so-called “mansion tax” approved by voters in 2022, created a new source of affordable housing revenue. However, it has not increased the number of low-rent apartments in the city’s pipeline yet, officials said, because the measure continues to face litigation.

For now, they said, the city is taking a wait-and-see approach before committing money from Measure ULA to new affordable housing projects.

Karger said the mayor’s office is working “in coordination with City Council to responsibly allocate the funding for affordable housing.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass discusses her budget proposal at a car dealership in the San Fernando Valley.

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Are there other ways for L.A. to get more affordable housing?

Financing from the city is not the only way affordable housing gets built in L.A. However, projects funded by sources outside the city budget are also facing economic challenges.

Continued high interest rates make it difficult for project financing to pencil out. Housing policy experts say the Trump administration’s emphasis on tariffs and deportations will likely make California’s high cost of housing construction even more expensive. And most of the city’s residential land remains off-limits to new apartments because of single-family zoning, which was left untouched in the city’s latest housing plan update.

Executive Directive 1, signed by Bass during her first week in office to accelerate the approval of 100% affordable housing projects, initially generated a surge of applications from developers eager to capitalize on a smoother path to breaking ground.

Many of those proposals were entirely financed by private capital, with no taxpayer subsidies. But the city went to court to try to kill these projects in single-family neighborhoods, and interest in the program cooled after Bass issued further restrictions on where such projects could be built.

L.A. gets some of its affordable housing from new market-rate apartment buildings. Developers are required by state law to set aside a small percentage of units for low-income renters in exchange for greater density. But a recent study from researchers with RAND and UCLA found that Measure ULA has caused a broad decline in these projects.

The researchers said the 40% decline in new housing permits in L.A. since 2022 has been steeper than in other neighboring cities. They concluded that L.A. would likely have more affordable housing if the “mansion tax” — which applies to sales of properties above $5 million — did not apply to recently constructed apartment buildings.

Other housing changes in the mayor’s budget

Bass’ budget proposal also calls for the elimination of the seven-member Affordable Housing Commission and the merging of its responsibilities into the Rent Adjustment Commission, which oversees the city’s rent control program.

Karger, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the proposal emerged from discussions with the city’s Housing Department.

“This consolidation of two advisory bodies promotes efficiency and reduces the Housing Department's administrative burden,” Karger said.

While the city’s Housing Department is projected to receive a net increase of 74 positions under the mayor’s budget, the Planning Department is slated to lose 114 existing staffers in layoffs. The Planning Department’s budget is set to be reduced from $72 million to $56 million.

A pessimistic outlook for housing growth

The city is contending with aggressive housing goals under state law, including a requirement to plan for about 185,000 new homes by 2029 that are affordable to low-income residents. Currently, the city is falling far short of that goal.

Thousands of Angelenos were displaced by January’s wildfires, and many are now looking for new housing. But the mayor’s budget is not counting on much growth in home sales or construction within the city.

More home-buying and building could help boost city revenues because of higher property tax and documentary transfer tax collection. But with home prices out of reach for the vast majority of Angelenos and interest rates remaining high, city officials are pessimistic about the likelihood of any boom in the housing market.

The budget’s revenue outlook says continued inflation and elevated interest rates will likely end up “hampering any rebound in the real estate market and housing production.”

This month, the U.S. Department of Education began rolling out a new accountability test that most colleges and universities will soon have to pass.

The test itself is simple: If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor's degree.

"If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers," said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent in a recent statement.

But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money?

Some advocates for postsecondary arts education think not.

"Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle," said Lee Ann Scotto Adams, executive director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), a nonprofit that studies the careers of arts graduates.

She and Doug Dempster, the president of SNAAP, worry the new test might lead colleges and universities to preemptively slash low-earning creative arts programs in music, theater, studio art and design. Dempster says that could lead to a further devaluing of jobs that are critical to a well-functioning society.

"We know we need nurses. We know we need journalists. We know we need early childhood educators," he said. "We don't know how many artists we need, but I can guarantee that if you eliminate access, we will impoverish our cultural life nationally."

How the new standard will work

The new earnings test comes courtesy of last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included a slew of big higher education policy changes meant to address rising concerns over the cost and value of college.

Higher education experts across the political spectrum told NPR the test sets a pretty reasonable expectation: In many states, federal data shows, graduates of bachelor programs will have to earn a minimum of about $30,000 and $41,000 a year for their program to pass.

"This is really a very low floor," said Christopher Madaio, a senior adviser at the nonprofit The Institute for College Access & Success. "I mean, high school earnings is not an exceedingly high metric for a program to meet."

Programs fail the test when they don't meet the earnings requirement for two out of three consecutive years.

The current test does not take student loan debt into account, which means there's no way to distinguish between a graduate who is struggling with low pay while being debt-free and a graduate who is struggling with low pay while also paying off tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

The Education Department says it will begin calculating the first year of graduate earnings in early 2027, and "some programs could be designated as low-earning outcome programs beginning in the 2028-2029 [financial aid] award year."

The kinds of programs that are likely to fail

According to Education Department estimates, the vast majority of undergraduate and graduate programs should easily pass the new earnings test.

But more than 800,000 students attend a program that would likely fail the measure, according to department data. Roughly half of those students are enrolled in for-profit schools, which already have a reputation for shortchanging students.

Other takeaways from the department's data:

• About 18% of undergraduate certificate programs, which often bill themselves as career-focused fast tracks, would fail the earnings test. Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
• Two-year associate degree programs have the next highest failure rate, at 6%. Associate programs that train specialized educators, including early childhood educators, are the most likely to fail. 
  
• Most traditional, four-year bachelor programs fare well, with roughly 1% failing the earnings test. When these programs do fail, it's often in areas like theater, music and studio art.
• About 4% of master's degree programs would fail, with the highest failure rates for programs teaching mental and social health services.

For one music teacher, it was "never about the money"

Some of the United States' most prestigious music programs — known for training the country's most talented young musicians — are among the 14% of bachelor music programs predicted to fail the new earnings test, according to Education Department data. That includes The Juilliard School in New York City, the New England Conservatory in Boston and Indiana University Bloomington's Jacobs School of Music.

The undergraduate music program that Cindy Flores attended at Portland State University (PSU) also wouldn't pass. Flores teaches mariachi music to middle and high school students at Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

Cindy Flores smiles as she teaches mariachi to students at McKay High School in Salem, Oregon.

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Eli Imadali

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OPB

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Her path to becoming a full-time music teacher started with studying music education at PSU; then she got an educators license from Western Oregon University — and she used federal student loans to help pay for all of it.

She now holds close to $55,000 in federal student loan debt.

Flores said she wouldn't be where she is now without that access to federal aid.

"If it wasn't for PSU and the loans I could get … I wouldn't be a Mexican American mariachi teacher for my Mexican American students," she said.

But given the new federal test, future PSU music students might not have the same access to federal student loans that Flores did.

She said she feels lucky to have found a job that she's passionate about and that pays a living wage. But, for her, a career in music was about much more than a paycheck.

"It is never about the money," she said. "I realized I wanted to have a career in music when I was in the eighth grade, because every music teacher I had were such good role models in my life and I wanted to be part of that community."

Defining success in the arts

SNAAP's Lee Ann Scotto Adams said the federal government's one-size-fits-all accountability approach doesn't make sense for students graduating from creative arts programs because wages aren't the only measure of success for studio artists, musicians and designers.

"Yes, you need to earn money to make a living, but we see our creative workers want the ability to have independence in their work. They want jobs that are socially conscious. They want to make an impact culturally," Adams said. "These are all metrics that fall outside of just straightforward earnings metrics."

She also takes issue with looking at earnings in the first few years after graduation. Adams points to SNAAP survey data that shows arts graduates often have unpredictable incomes at the beginning of their careers, but their pay tends to stabilize and increase over time.

"Looking at earnings as the sole metric of success is very limited, and that's because artists have nonlinear careers," Adams said. "For the most part, people who graduate from these programs move into careers that they're personally satisfied with."

Students considering any of the at-risk programs won't immediately lose access to federal aid. While the accountability test is being rolled out this month, its implementation will be phased in over the next couple of years.
Copyright 2026 NPR

LONDON — Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.

Tyler died "unexpectedly" in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement on her website. She was hospitalized in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery and was later placed in an induced coma.

"Bonnie's family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for, her family said.

Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 — where she came in 19th — and was awarded an MBE for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023, all largely thanks to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which has had more that 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.

The song spent four weeks at No. 1, the video has surpassed 1 billion views and when Stereogum reevaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an "extinction-level event rendered in musical form."

"It's pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling passion explosion. It's sheer spectacle. It's fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls," the site said.

The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki French in 1995 and the band Westlife in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in 2001's "Bandits," it appeared at a wedding scene in 2003's "Old School" and One Direction sang it in 2010 on a U.K. version of "The X Factor."

Early life

Tyler was born — as Gaynor Hopkins — a coal miner's daughter in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about seven miles outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.

She adored the Beatles and her first album was "A Hard Day's Night." The first song she bought was "Hippy Hippy Shake" by the Swinging Blue Jeans at 13 and watched "Top of the Pops" religiously, according to her memoir, "Straight From the Heart."

She would record "Top of the Pops" on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write down the lyrics of songs she loved. Her favorites were songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.

"I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that's how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing that. Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn't think much of it. I thought everyone's voices were different from each other's," she wrote.

In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving her with that trademark vocal sound. Changing her name to Sherene Davis, she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions. Then she waited for a label until RCA said it was interested.

Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album "The World Starts Tonight" in 1977 contained her first chart hit, "Lost in France," and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the Brits Awards. She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with "It's a Heartache," but soon drifted. She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform "Bat Out of Hell" on the BBC. Impressed, she requested to work with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.

'Total Eclipse of the Heart'

Steinman introduced her to his song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which would become the debut single for her fifth studio album, "Faster Than the Speed of Night." He borrowed one of the song's lyrics — "Turn around, bright eyes" — from his 1969 musical "The Dream Engine" written as a student at Massachusetts' Amherst College. He told her the song was from a prospective musical version of "Nosferatu."

Singer Bonnie Tyler performs her song "Believe in Me" during a rehearsal for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest at the Malmo Arena in Malmo, Sweden on May 17, 2013.

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Alastair Grant

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"Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to," Tyler told The Guardian in 2023. "He gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred take two."

Featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, "Total Eclipse" is a rumination on lost love: "Once upon a time there was light in my life/But now there's only love in the dark," she sings.

The video, a staple of early-days MTV, was shot in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey, where the guard dogs apparently wouldn't set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment. The visuals included slow-motion tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.

"Faster Than the Speed of Night" earned a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance — losing to Pat Benatar's "Love Is a Battlefield" — and Tyler got another nod for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene Cara's "Flashdance — What a Feeling."

After the 'Eclipse'

Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again but stayed current with such movie soundtrack singles as "Holding Out For a Hero" — from 1984's "Footloose" — and "Here She Comes" from "Metropolis" also in 1984.

Her 2019 disc "Between the Earth and the Stars" featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo's Francis Rossi, and she ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.

In 2013, she switched gears to make a country-flavored record in Nashville, "Rocks and Honey," which included the Vince Gill duet "What You Need From Me" and a little ballad called "Believe in Me," written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. "Believe in Me" was picked to represent the United Kingdom at that year's Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.

"It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there," she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. "I was being interviewed every 15, 20 minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just awesome!"

In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas' band DNCE for a performance on the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a "Total Eclipse Cruise." When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan.

Get comfortable with the heat because it's here to stay. The dry weather and windy conditions will continue to make conditions ripe for fire.

The National Weather Service says coastal areas will continue to see cooler weather today with highs in the mid 70s to low 80s, while temps along the inland coast are expected to reach mid 80s to low 90s. In Orange County inland areas will see temperatures from 81 to 90 degrees.

For the valley communities, temperatures there today will reach 89 to 98 degrees again, and up to 99 to 104 degrees more inland.

Coachella Valley will be scorching today with highs from 113 to 118 degrees. Meanwhile, in the Antelope Valley, expect highs from 101 to 110 degrees today, and around 93 to 98 degrees for the cooler hills.

Wind gusts today could reach up to 35 mph but otherwise expect southwest to northwest winds of 10 to 25 mph.

Make sure to stay hydrated and check in on any loved ones who might be vulnerable to the heat!

Need a place to get out of the heat?

You can find cooling centers via the following links:

• L.A. County
• Orange County
• San Bernardino County
• Riverside County

The City Council in Culver City will consider a citywide ban on new drive-thrus after a group of neighbors raised concerns that a proposed In-N-Out could hurt air quality and create safety issues for pedestrians.

 "Density is inevitable, and development is inevitable,” said Vanessa Martin, a city resident organizing support for the drive-thru ban. “We want to be proactive and smart about it.”

Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish, who sits on the city’s mobility subcommittee that voted to recommend staff draft the ban in May, said drive-thrus are fundamentally incompatible with the vision the city set for itself in its general plan. The planning document was adopted by the city in 2024.

“We need to be creating more walkable, bikeable, safer streets for people of all modes, and drive-thrus are the antithesis of that,” Fish said.

Drive-thru bans aren’t unprecedented in California. Culver City already bans drive-thrus in its downtown corridor. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo have had citywide bans for decades. Carlsbad’s citywide ban that began in the late 1990s was recently softened to allow for consideration of new drive-thrus on a case-by-case basis.

Critics of such bans have called drive-thrus an important option for consumers, including people with disabilities and families with children.

In-N-Out did not provide a comment to LAist, saying “as a private, family-owned company, we generally don’t comment publicly on business matters.”

What’s the status of the ban and the In-N-Out?

In early June, the city council passed a 45-day moratorium on approving permits that involve a new drive-thru. In the meantime, city staff is drafting an ordinance banning new drive-thrus. The ordinance will first appear in front of the city’s planning commission for guidance and recommendation before heading to the city council for a vote. Those dates have not yet been set.

If the council approves a citywide ban, the already-existing eight drive-thrus in the city would not be affected — only new businesses. In-N-Out would be the first new drive-thru in Culver City since 1997, according to a city staff report. 

In-N-Out hasn’t yet submitted the formal application for a permit it was preparing when Culver City City Council passed the moratorium, according to city spokesperson Dustin Klemann.

According to a copy of the proposed site plan, the In-N-Out in Culver City would include 61 parking spots and a drive-thru lane that could accommodate 26 vehicles.

Grassroots campaign against In-N-Out drive-thru

After In-N-Out held required community meetings earlier this year about its planned development, Culver City resident Paul Hewitt began distributing flyers calling the project a “terrible idea” to his neighbors.

“I had several people contact me as I was passing out these flyers saying, ‘Hey, I wanna join forces with you,’” Hewitt said. “I gathered up a little ragtag group of neighbors, all different ages, all different backgrounds.”

That group included Martin and her wife Cynthia, who created an online petition urging residents and the city council to oppose the In-N-Out “mega drive-thru” because it would create traffic congestion, worsen local air quality and present safety concerns for pedestrians and cyclists.

The petition has gathered just under 950 signatures in five months.

'Auto-centric' design

Drive-thrus are an element of city planning that urban planners call auto-centric design since it’s a portion of land exclusively devoted to people in cars. Drive-thrus, for example, require breaks in the sidewalk for cars to enter the queue, according to David Morley,  research program manager at the American Planning Association.

Vehicle speed, which is the main factor determining the level of harm to pedestrians during collisions, is less of an issue with drive-thrus. Still, increasing the number of places where a car might interact with pedestrians creates more risk, UCLA’s Madeline Brozen said.

“In a city where we are trying to reduce traffic crashes and fatalities, we need to be very cautious about anything that is going to increase the likelihood for conflicts,” Brozen said.

Drive-thrus don’t necessarily have to come at the expense of walkability and safety, said Jill Bahm, a partner at land consulting firm Giffels Webster.

Bahm said communities could only allow drive-thrus in areas near highway access or where there isn’t a lot of bike or pedestrian traffic. Or they could set drive-thrus behind a building or landscaping to make the business itself more inviting to people not in cars.

Is a ban the right answer?

Jot Condie, the president of the California Restaurant Association, said he sees drive-thru bans as generally “shortsighted.”

“You’re essentially banning quick-service restaurants without specifically stating that,” Condie said.

According to the American Planning Association, 70% of all fast food sales come from customers placing orders at drive-thrus.

When San Diego considered a partial drive-thru ban in 2021, the California Restaurant Association sent a letter saying such a ban would block certain groups, including people with disabilities, access to products and services.

Councilmember Fish said he understands accessibility concerns but thinks there are other ways to make Culver City more accessible, from encouraging walk-up windows, increasing handicap parking and investing in other city services.

How to keep tabs on the city council

The city council meets on the second and fourth Monday of most months in Culver City. Meetings start at 7 p.m.

Here's how you can follow along:

• Attend in person: Mike Balkman Council Chambers, Culver City Hall, 9770 Culver Blvd., Culver City
• Watch the live broadcast or view the archive
• Here's how to submit a comment or contact the council