The Brief

It may be cold in Los Angeles these days. But as every Angeleno knows, this place gets hot — even life-threateningly hot for some residents.

This week, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors took a step toward requiring cooling measures in rental housing.

Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Hilda Solis put forward a motion to begin crafting regulations and reaching out to tenants, landlords and public health experts about plans to establish a legal maximum indoor temperature in rental housing.

The plans are still in early stages, and it’s not yet clear what exact cooling devices would be required when temperatures rise above the max. The motion passed on a 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Kathryn Barger casting the lone "no" vote against the plan.

In a statement following Tuesday’s vote, Horvath said extreme heat is one of the deadliest consequences of climate change currently facing L.A. residents.

“More frequent, longer and hotter heat waves in L.A. County are a public health emergency,” said Horvath, the board’s only renter. “Setting a maximum temperature for rental units will protect our most vulnerable Angelenos, including older adults and families with young children, who deserve safety and comfort in their own home.”

The county’s Department of Public Health issued a report last year recommending that L.A.’s building code be amended to require indoor temperatures of less than 82 degrees Fahrenheit in housing outfitted with air conditioning.

Currently, L.A. landlords are required to provide their renters with adequate heat. But no such requirement exists for air conditioning.

Final votes months away

Any final vote on requiring air conditioning is still months away, and many questions on implementation have yet to be decided. But local landlord groups have started fighting the idea, saying it would be prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for new cooling measures.

During the Tuesday meeting’s public comment period, Jesus Rojas with the Apartment Association of Greater L.A. said air conditioning “can easily triple [a household’s] existing electricity bill, in addition to the cost of the AC units themselves."

“At a time when both mom-and-pop owners and renters are still struggling financially to recover from the impacts of COVID-19, this motion seems particularly callous and tone-deaf to the needs of L.A. County residents,” Rojas said.

County leaders are considering enacting the cooling measures as a public health requirement, meaning that the final rules would apply to most of L.A. County (excluding cities that maintain their own public health departments, such as Pasadena and Long Beach).

Phoenix and Las Vegas already mandate cool air 

Other lawmakers in California are exploring similar requirements. One proposal is being considered by the L.A. City Council. State lawmakers are expecting recommendations from the California Department of Housing and Community Development by Jan. 1, 2025.

Policy makers say cooling is an urgent concern in a state transformed by climate change. With temperatures steadily rising, state researchers have estimated that extreme heat could kill up to 4,300 Californians per year starting in 2025.

In a letter supporting L.A.’s plans, Jonathan Parfrey with the group Climate Resolve said many L.A. homes “are unprepared for extreme heat.”

If the county’s plans move forward, L.A. would not be the first part of the country to require air conditioning in apartments. Renters in cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas are covered by legal cooling standards.

The Trump administration is pausing all immigration applications such as requests for green cards for people from 19 countries banned from travel earlier this year, as part of sweeping immigration changes in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard troops.

The changes were outlined in a policy memo posted Tuesday on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency tasked with processing and approving all requests for immigration benefits.

The pause puts on hold a wide range of immigration-related decisions such as green card applications or naturalizations for immigrants from those 19 countries that the Trump administration has described as high-risk. It's up to the agency's director, Joseph Edlow, on when to lift the pause, the memo said.

The administration in June banned travel to the U.S. by citizens of 12 countries and restricted access for those from seven others, citing national security concerns.

The ban applied to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen while the restricted access applied to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

At the time, no action was taken against immigrants from those countries who were already in the U.S. before the travel ban went into effect.

But now the news from USCIS means those people already in the U.S. — regardless of when they arrived — will come under extra scrutiny.

The agency said it would conduct a comprehensive review of all "approved benefit requests" for immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration.

The agency cited the shooting of two National Guard troops by a suspect who is an Afghan national as a reason for the pause and heightened scrutiny for people from those countries. One National Guard soldier was killed and another wounded in the Thanksgiving week shooting near the White House.

"In light of identified concerns and the threat to the American people, USCIS has determined that a comprehensive re-review, potential interview, and re-interview of all aliens from high-risk countries of concern who entered the United States on or after January 20, 2021 is necessary," the agency said.

The agency said in the Tuesday memo that within 90 days it would create a prioritized list of immigrants for review and if necessary, referral to immigration enforcement or other law enforcement agencies.

Since the shooting, the administration has announced a flurry of decisions it was taking to scrutinize immigrants already in the country and those seeking to come to the U.S.

Last week, the director of USCIS said in a social media post that his agency would be reexamining green card applications for people from countries "of concern." But the policy directive Tuesday goes further and lays out in more detail the scope of who will be affected.

USCIS also said last week that it was pausing all asylum decisions, and the State Department said it was halting visas for Afghans who assisted the U.S. war effort.

Days before the shooting, USCIS said in a separate memo that the administration would review the cases of all refugees who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.

Critics have said that the Trump administration's actions have amounted to collective punishment for immigrants.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A windy and cool day is in store for the region today. The strongest winds will be along the coast, valleys and some mountain areas.

Highs for L.A. and Orange County coasts will be in the mid to high 60s.

Valley communities will see highs mostly in the low 60s. The eastern San Fernando Valley will see highs of up to 65 degrees.

Inland Empire temperatures will range from 61 to 68 degrees. Coachella Valley temps will rise up to 74 degrees. In the Antelope Valley, high temps will range from 48 to 57 degrees.

Wind advisories

The San Gabriel, Santa Susana, Santa Monica mountains are under wind advisories until 3 p.m. Thursday.

We're looking at wind speeds from 35 to 45 mph with some gusts up to 55 mph.

Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Santa Clarita Valley, Malibu and parts of Ventura County are also under a wind advisory until 3 p.m. Thursday. Wind speeds there will range from 25 to 35 mph, with some gusts up to 45 mph.

Look out for fallen tree limbs. The recently rain-soaked ground could make it easier for entire trees to fall. Some power outages could also occur.

Beach hazards

You'll want to avoid swimming in the ocean because of strong rip currents and breaking waves from high surf. Minor flooding of beach parking lots is possible. These conditions will last until Friday morning for the Orange County coast, and until Saturday morning for L.A. County beaches.

In 2021, Governor Newsom and state leaders set in motion a plan to make a public preschool program — transitional kindergarten — available for all 4-year-olds by this fall. The plan was touted as an effort to improve learning outcomes for lower-income families and break “cycles of intergenerational poverty.”

According to a new report from UC Berkeley, however, more affluent neighborhoods in L.A. County are leading enrollment in transitional kindergarten.

The report found that enrollment growth in the richest quarter of ZIP codes in the county — places that include Palos Verdes and Brentwood — climbed at three times the rate of growth in the poorest parts of the county from 2021 to the spring of 2024.

“We were surprised by the magnitude of that gap, and that raises all sorts of questions,” said Bruce Fuller, professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley and co-author of the report, which is based on state data. “Is TK expansion really going to narrow disparities in young children's early development, or will TK actually exacerbate or reinforce these inequalities?”

The report shows that middle- to upper-income families are gaining the most from transitional kindergarten.

“They were paying through the nose for expensive preschool, and now they have free pre-K for their 4-year-olds,” Fuller said.

A number of publicly funded preschool programs already are options for lower-income families, like Head Start and school district-based early learning centers.

Neighborhoods where TK is growing rapidly also are in school districts that have more resources to renovate their facilities and hire more teachers for TK, Fuller said.

Preschool closures an unintended consequence 

The report also found that the growth of enrollment of 4-year-olds in the public school system correlated to the shrinking number of preschools in the community — areas with the highest growth in TK also had a higher number of preschool closures.

“ We found that as TK was growing, it's actually eroding the vitality of nonprofit, community-based preschools,” Fuller said. “They're hemorrhaging the 4-year-olds.”

Preschools haven’t been able to make the quick pivot to serving younger kids, like infants, to compensate, as state leaders intended in a 2020 roadmap for early education.

Between 2020 and 2024, Berkeley researchers found 167 pre-K centers across L.A. county closed.

Susie Leonard’s preschool in Mar Vista was one of them. The school, A Kid’s Place, closed in August 2023 after 20 years of operating.

“ We were very proud of our school and the families that we were able to help and the kids that we were able to help, so the fact that it was kind of a forced closure, it makes us sad,” Leonard said.

She said the nonprofit school already had been reeling from COVID when TK started expanding. Without the 4-year-olds, she said enrollment dropped from as many as 90 students to around 30.

“It was a double hit,” she said. “We didn't have a huge financial cushion to allow us to ride out a couple of years and to really attempt to get to enroll on the younger side. We were kind of functioning on fumes.”

Can private preschools adjust?

Champa Perera’s preschool, Kidzhaven in Sun Valley, closed in 2021 due to COVID. Now, she’s a professor in early childhood education and consults preschools trying to switch to serve younger children.

“That is where the market is right now,” she said.

But it’s a significant change: Switching to serving children 2 and under requires a different license from the state and also requires a higher adult-to-child ratio. And it can be challenging to find enough teachers, Perera said, which the report echoed. Teachers also are better paid in transitional kindergarten than their peers in private or publicly subsidized preschools.

Fuller said the expansion of transitional kindergarten has created competition in the early childhood landscape as birth rates decline.

“When we have this fragmentation, it sets up this competition for a shrinking number of kids, and that doesn't really serve anybody,” he said.

L.A. County leaders on Tuesday greenlit public transparency about payouts to county executives in response to LAist revealing a secretive $2 million settlement with the county’s CEO.

County supervisors unanimously approved a proposal by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath to have the county proactively inform the public about such settlements once they’re finalized and to look into creating a public website to describe them.

Among other things, the approved motion requires that all future settlements with county executives include language making it clear the agreement will be proactively disclosed to the public.

The backstory

The directive cited coverage by LAist revealing that two months ago, county CEO Fesia Davenport had quietly gotten a $2 million settlement payment from the county. As reported by LAist, Davenport’s settlement deal was labeled “confidential” and was not publicly reported out by the county.

The settlement was in response to her claims the supervisors harmed her reputation and caused her distress by putting a measure before voters — which was approved — that will create an elected county executive position. It’s among multiple reforms to restructure county government under last year’s voter-approved proposition, known as Measure G.

Davenport did not return a message for comment.

‘Public trust’ cited

“Transparency is central to strengthening public trust, without exception,” Horvath said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Since joining the board, I have actively taken steps to ensure the public is included in the work of the county, especially concerning the use of public funds.

“Creating a clear process for department executive settlements is a commonsense action fundamental to good governance.”

David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, commented on the decision, calling transparency the "oxygen of accountability in government."

“There is no reason why the county should not be proactive about posting and disclosing settlements that have been reached, especially with former executives or staff,” Loy said.

Davenport was one of several county executives to receive sizable settlement payouts over the past few years. Four additional county executives received payouts, according to Davenport’s claims that led to her settlement.