The Brief

A Los Angeles County program that seeks out people at high risk of homelessness and tries to help them stay off the streets and out of shelters is showing early signs of success, according to a study published Thursday.

Launched in 2021, the county's Homelessness Prevention Unit uses artificial intelligence to comb through vast troves of government data, looking for signs that someone is likely to fall into homelessness. Some of the risk factors include frequent hospitalizations, psychiatric holds, welfare program enrollment and past incarceration.

Once the program has a list of high-risk people, outreach workers try to contact them and offer assistance with staying housed. Participants can get help paying overdue rent, signing up for mental health treatment or fixing a car they need to get to work.

The study compared 335 enrollees with 1,285 others who could have enrolled, but were not reachable or were not successfully signed up for help. The average amount of aid enrollees received was about $6,500.

Results from the program’s pilot phase are now published. They show that people who enrolled in the prevention program were 71% less likely to end up in homeless shelters or to be found on the streets by outreach teams, compared with those who did not enroll.

“That's a fairly promising early evaluation result,” said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA and co-author of the study.

Pinpointing those on the edge of homelessness

The study found that 2% of enrollees ended up in shelters or on the streets, compared with 6% of those who did not enroll. The difference may sound small, Rountree said, but it proves this program targets people much more likely to fall into homelessness than Angelenos as a whole.

“Frankly, there are no prevention programs nationally that are enrolling people who are this high risk,” Rountree said. “We were really trying to find those individuals who were months away from entering street outreach services or the shelter. When you do that, you can expect some percentage of those people to end up in those environments, even if they're getting help.”

Prevention enrollees were also less likely to have a mental health crisis or end up in jail. However, researchers said it’s not clear that the program caused those differences, because people who were more likely to enroll were already less likely to experience psychiatric or criminal justice problems than those who were more difficult to enroll.

To get a better understanding of whether the prevention program is actually causing a reduction in overall homelessness, the researchers are in the middle of conducting a randomized control trial that is scheduled to wrap up in 2027.

Outside experts see reasons for hope

Margot Kushel, director of the UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was not involved in the study. She said the program’s effectiveness won’t be fully known until those trial results are released.

For now, she said, this study shows some “incredible” progress.

“They've cracked the code — they've found really high risk people,” Kushel said. “That has never really been done before using administrative data.”

Kushel said she was impressed by the program’s ability to enroll more people over time. At the beginning, only 1 in 5 single adults and 1 in 4 families contacted by the prevention unit were successfully enrolled in the program. A few years later, the success rate increased to 40% for single adults and 49% for families.

People at high risk of homelessness can be hard to reach for many reasons, Kushel said. They are often preoccupied with health or eviction crises. They may not be able to maintain their phone and internet service. Sometimes, they may think the assistance being offered is a scam.

Kushel said enrolling nearly half of the people on the program’s high-risk list was a major accomplishment.

“I would not have guessed they could do that,” she said.

Why the results matter

The L.A. region’s response to the growing number of people living on the streets, in cars and in shelters in recent years has mainly focused on sheltering and housing those who are already homeless. But policy experts say the region will not meaningfully reduce its homelessness numbers until it can also prevent people from losing their housing in the first place.

So far, local homelessness prevention programs have been limited in scope, and they are frequently at risk of losing their funding.

Rountree said this study is not the final word on the effectiveness of the county’s prevention efforts, but it does highlight why efforts like this should continue.

Kushel agreed.

“We won’t know if this works for a couple more years,” she said. “But if I were a betting woman, I would say it will.”

What’s good for Riverside County is good for the whole state: After a pilot to automatically admit high school students into the California State University system in the Inland Empire county took off last fall, lawmakers this year passed a law to greenlight a similar program statewide next fall.

Leaders at the California State University last year launched the pilot to attract more students to the university system and to steer some to campuses that have been struggling with enrollment declines.

The pilot worked like this: University officials and high schools in Riverside County pored over student course completion and grade data to identify every county high school senior who was eligible for admission to the 10 of 22 Cal State campuses chosen for the pilot. Then the students received a brochure in the mail last fall before the Nov. 30 submission deadline, plus digital correspondence, telling them they were provisionally admitted as long as they submitted an application to one or more Cal State campuses, even those not in the pilot, and maintained their high school grades.

Starting next fall, all students in California will be eligible for the automatic admissions program, which will expand the roster of participating Cal State campuses to 16. Cal State will release more information on the program’s implementation in February, its website says.

In justifying the expanded program during a legislative hearing, bill author Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Democrat from Napa, said college should be as seamless a transition from high school as it is for students finishing one grade and advancing to the next. “It's entirely an invention of us, the gap between 12th grade and college. … The same gap does not exist between elementary school and junior high or junior high and high school.”

The legislation, Senate Bill 640, passed without any opposition and was signed into law by the governor. The program doesn’t mean students can enter any major at the campuses they pick. Some majors may require students to show higher high school grades or tougher courses if those programs have fewer openings than student demand. For Californians, the standard minimum GPA for entry is 2.5 in a series of college-preperatory courses.

Students will also be free to apply to the six other over-enrolled Cal State campuses, though admission isn’t guaranteed. Those are Fullerton, Long Beach, Pomona, San Diego, San Jose and San Luis Obispo.

What the Riverside pilot did

High school counselors told CalMatters that the Riverside County pilot encouraged students who never considered attending a university to follow through with the automatic admissions process. Counselors also reached out to some students who were a class or two short of meeting the requirements for Cal State admission to take those, encouraging more students to apply to college who otherwise wouldn’t have. Younger students who were off the college-course taking track might be emboldened to enroll in those tougher high school courses knowing automatic admission is in the cards, the counselors said.

Silvia Morales, a senior at Heritage High School, a public Riverside County high school, got an automatic admissions letter last fall. “I was pretty set on going to community college and then transferring, because I felt like I wasn’t ready for the four-year commitment to a college,” she said. She eventually submitted her forms, encouraged by her high school counselor.

Following the Riverside pilot, Cal State campuses saw roughly 1,500 more applicants and 1,400 more admitted students in 2025 compared to 2024, though just 136 more students enrolled.

The data for Riverside County reviewed by CalMatters suggests that more applicants and admitted students through an automatic admissions policy doesn’t translate into more enrolled students. Colleges closely follow their "yield rates" — the percentage of admitted students who ultimately enroll. In 2024, the Cal State yield rate for Riverside County was about a third. But in 2025, it declined by a few percentage points, meaning a lower share of admitted students selected any Cal State campus.

This suggests that the system will have to work harder to convert admitted students into ones who actually enroll, said Iwunze Ugo, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, particularly with students who would not have applied were it not for the automatic admissions program.

Automatic admissions doesn’t mean automatic enrollment

While admission to a college overcomes a major hurdle to eventually enrolling, there are numerous steps necessary before students sit down for their first college course. Accepted students must submit additional grades, put down a deposit, complete registration forms and actually show up for the fall term. Students who were less engaged in the college-going culture are more likely to “melt” during the process between acceptance and enrollment, some studies show, though researchers say this can be reversed with additional outreach to students at risk of not enrolling.

And even with an automatic admissions program, students must still register online and complete the application, which many students under the Riverside pilot didn’t do. Cal State sent out more than 17,000 automatic admissions notices to students, and just under 12,000 formally applied to at least one Cal State campus. Those who didn’t apply may have chosen another option, such as the often more selective University of California, private campuses, community colleges, or no college at all.

“I think that'll be incumbent on the CSU to pick up some of that slack and encourage students admitted through this path to go through the rest of the process and ultimately end up at a CSU campus,” Ugo said.

Cal State officials also recognize this. “Students who apply independently tend to have stronger self-directed interest, and therefore stronger intent to enroll,” said April Grommo, a senior Cal State official who oversees enrollment management. More direct engagement with students admitted through this program will be necessary, she said.

Some campuses with a recent history of declining enrollment got a tiny pick-up from the pilot. San Francisco State saw 311 more applications from Riverside County in 2025 than in 2024. That translated to 11 more enrolled students, a review of Cal State data shows.

A statewide program may steer more students to attend campuses with enrollment woes, even if the “yield rate” declines. That’s because if the rate of new students enrolling doesn’t rise as quickly as the number of students admitted, the yield rate drops.

Under the expanded statewide program, Grommo said the system anticipates “enrollment growth as well, but not necessarily at the same rate as applications and admits,” she added.

And as the economy shows signs of decay, the prospect of a college degree may compel more high schoolers on the fence to attend Cal State; System data show students from there earn a typical salary of $71,000 five years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. Postsecondary enrollment tends to rise as the number of available jobs decreases, a social science phenomenon in which employers are more selective about who they hire, compelling many job-seekers to hit the books to show they’re more trained.

Of course, souring economies often result in less public funding for colleges as state budgets are beleaguered, which may lead to fewer professors and staff for a growing cadre of students. “But I think generally, having more students is not a problem,” Ugo said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

NEW YORK — A coalition of 19 states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and its inspector general over a declaration that could complicate access to gender-affirming care for young people.

The declaration issued last Thursday called treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries unsafe and ineffective for children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria, or the distress when someone's gender expression doesn't match their sex assigned at birth. It also warned doctors that they could be excluded from federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid if they provide those types of care.

The declaration came as HHS also announced proposed rules meant to further curtail gender-affirming care for young people, although the lawsuit doesn't address those as they are not final.

Tuesday's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Oregon, alleges that the declaration is inaccurate and unlawful and asks the court to block its enforcement. It's the latest in a series of clashes between an administration that's cracking down on transgender health care for children, arguing it can be harmful to them, and advocates who say the care is medically necessary and shouldn't be inhibited.

"Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online, and no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors' offices," New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the lawsuit, said in a statement Tuesday.

The lawsuit alleges that HHS's declaration seeks to coerce providers to stop providing gender-affirming care and circumvent legal requirements for policy changes. It says federal law requires the public to be given notice and an opportunity to comment before substantively changing health policy — neither of which, the suit says, was done before the declaration was issued.

A spokesperson for HHS declined to comment.

HHS's declaration based its conclusions on a peer-reviewed report that the department conducted earlier this year that urged greater reliance on behavioral therapy rather than broad gender-affirming care for youths with gender dysphoria.

The report questioned standards for the treatment of transgender youth issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and raised concerns that adolescents may be too young to give consent to life-changing treatments that could result in future infertility.

Major medical groups and those who treat transgender young people have sharply criticized the report as inaccurate, and most major U.S. medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, continue to oppose restrictions on transgender care and services for young people.

The declaration was announced as part of a multifaceted effort to limit gender-affirming health care for children and teenagers — and built on other Trump administration efforts to target the rights of transgender people nationwide.

HHS on Thursday also unveiled two proposed federal rules — one to cut off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to children, and another to prohibit federal Medicaid dollars from being used for such procedures.

The proposals are not yet final or legally binding and must go through a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment before becoming permanent. But they will nonetheless likely further discourage health care providers from offering gender-affirming care to children.

Several major medical providers already have pulled back on gender-affirming care for young patients since Trump returned to office — even in states where the care is legal and protected by state law.

Medicaid programs in slightly less than half of states currently cover gender-affirming care. At least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the care. The Supreme Court's recent decision upholding Tennessee's ban means most other state laws are likely to remain in place.

Joining James in Tuesday's lawsuit were Democratic attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Washington and the District of Columbia. Pennsylvania's Democratic governor also joined.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A dangerous atmospheric river is poised to deliver “excessive rainfall” across Southern California, raising fears that the rain could unleash a threat that has been lingering in the burn scars of wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles communities in recent years.

Called debris flows, these fast-moving slurries of floodwater and sediment can hurtle down slopes carrying cars, trees and even boulders with them.

They’re like “a flood on steroids,” said Jason Kean, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s landslide hazards program. “It’s really hard to stop these things. The best thing to do is get out of the way.”

Northern California is already reeling from the atmospheric river that unleashed catastrophic flash flooding in Redding over the weekend, killing a 74-year-old man who became trapped in his pickup truck on a flooded roadway.

Now, another storm is expected to reach coastal Northern California this evening, with strong winds and especially heavy rainfall pushing into Southern California.

Forecasters warn that the rain “will cause life-threatening flash flooding, along with landslides, rockfalls, and/or mudslides,” particularly for areas along Southern California’s Transverse Ranges, including the San Bernardino, San Gabriel, and Sierra Madre mountains. “Urban flooding in the greater Los Angeles metro area is likely.”

Burn scars — slicked by fire and stripped of plants — are especially dangerous during heavy rains. A storm after the Thomas Fire in 2018 spurred debris flows in Montecito that killed 23 people. And in February, a debris flow in the Palisades Fire burn zone swept a Los Angeles Fire Department member and his SUV into the Pacific Ocean.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works warns that there’s a risk of moderate debris and mudflows capable of blocking roadways and endangering some structures in the burn scars of more than a dozen fires — including January’s Eaton, Hurst and Palisades fires.

The county has issued evacuation warnings in and around recent burn scars, and urged those who may take longer to evacuate to consider leaving now. Officials also announced some targeted evacuation orders for specific properties “at higher risk for mud and debris flows impacts.”

“Recent burn areas, including those impacted by the January wildfires, remain highly susceptible to mud and debris flows,” county officials warned Monday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday that more than 225 personnel and resources including 45 fire engines, 10 swiftwater rescue teams, helicopters and more have been pre-deployed to a dozen northern and southern California counties.

Meteorologists are discussing it as a “one in every five years type of storm,” said Lisa Phillips with the National Weather Service. “There's going to be problems everywhere. We have a lot of canyon roads and mountain roads, and things will fall down.”

Phillips said she expects to see mudslides, landslides, sinkholes — even after the rains have ended, and urged people to stay off the roads if they can.

“There's going to be issues outside of the burn scars too, and flooding,” Phillips said. “We want everyone to stay at home, stay safe and don't get yourself into any trouble unnecessarily.”

We spoke with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Kean, an expert on debris flows after wildfires, last month about what to expect when storms strike burn scars. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

As this storm really takes hold in L.A. and Southern California, I'm hearing a lot of concern about it hitting areas that burned this past year, including in the Eaton and Palisades fires. Why is this such a big concern? What could happen?

Last January those fires removed much of the vegetation on really steep slopes, and that made those slopes really vulnerable to erosion during intense rainfall. That protective blanket of vegetation is gone, and heavy rain can rapidly make a flash flood. And that flood, in some cases, can pick up material and turn into what we call a debris flow — which is like a flood on steroids.

Damage along Tanoble Drive near Mendocino Street is visible after heavy rainfall triggered multiple mudslides in the Eaton Fire burn scar area in Altadena on Feb. 14, 2025. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters These burn areas are still vulnerable, even though it's now many months after the fire and there have been flows already. There's still plenty of material that could be mobilized. So the threat’s still there. And so we know they're bad actors, and we’re concerned they could be bad actors again.

I’m hearing a lot of different terms: mudslide, debris flows, landslide. What are the differences, and which ones are the burn scars at risk for? 

Landslide is an umbrella term that captures all kinds of mass movements, from rock falls to debris flows — these floods on steroids — to big, slow movers. The type of flow that we're most concerned about in a recent burn area is a debris flow. It's also called a mudslide. But geologists don't like to use the word mudslide as much because it sounds like there's some mud on your driveway — not a big issue, not something that could kill you. And these things, if you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time, they can cause serious damage.

You called it a flood on steroids. What happens in a debris flow? 

Flash floods are bad, and they can cause lots of problems, too. They can get even worse if they pick up enough sediment to turn into the consistency of wet concrete. But it's worse than just concrete, because it can contain boulders the size of cars. And, very close to the mountain front, it can move very quickly — faster than you can run. And when it gets all bulked up with debris, the rocks, the gravel, the mud, trees, the flow can be a lot bigger. It just turns into a different animal.

Now, debris flows pack a bigger punch than floods, but thankfully, they don't have as long of reach. So usually, the debris flows are confined really close to the mountain fronts. That's where they put those debris basins to catch them. But if there isn't one protection like that, then they can travel downslope and impact neighborhoods, and then flooding can extend even further down.

Is there something about Southern California that makes it higher risk?

Southern California's kind of the world capital for these kinds of events. It's got this combination of very steep topography, like the San Gabriel Mountains that just shoot right up, Santa Monica Mountains, Santa Ynez — very steep topography. It burns fairly frequently. And then there are a lot of people living very close to the mountain front, so that's what puts the risk up.

The thing about a burn area is it takes much less rainfall to cause a problem than it would in unburned conditions. So we've now made the slopes really vulnerable. They're extra steep. There's a lot of people there. That's why the risk is so high.

We've seen debris flows in Northern California burn areas as well. It's not just a Southern California problem, and it's not just a California problem.

Is there anything that could have been done to reduce this risk? Anything that should be done now? 

Not long after the fires, in particular the Palisades Fire, (there were) a number of fairly widespread debris flows that disrupted the roads. There were also, in the Eaton fire, floods and debris flows there. Thankfully there's a dense network of LA County debris basins, which are designed to catch the material before it enters neighborhoods, and those largely saved the day.

Planners have planned ahead and put in these debris basins — these big, giant holes in the ground — designed to catch the material. That's the best defense against these. They're not everywhere, but there is a good network of protection. Other than that, it's really hard to stop these things.

What should people who live near the recent burn scars know? What should they do now, as the rain starts? 

The best thing you could do is, if you're really close to a drainage in one of these burn areas, is to get out of the way. You're going to get a heads up from the National Weather Service, who's closely monitoring the rainstorms. They know how much rain it's going to take to cause a problem, and they'll get out warnings, and local authorities will reach out to get people out of the way. So there's a lot of eyes on the situation. And so at this point, the best thing to do is listen to the weather service, listen to local authorities.

If they ask you to get out of the way, take their advice. These things can happen really fast if there is an intense burst of rain, a flash flood, where debris flow can start within minutes.

So there is no escaping a debris flow once it starts? 

It's pretty difficult. If you have a two-story home and you happen to be there at the wrong time, get up to that second floor for sure. Fight like heck if you get trapped in one. But best to be out of the way.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Of everything I saw on TV in 2025, the one show I thought was the very best, and has haunted me ever since, was the four-part Netflix drama Adolescence. It's the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate, and it's told in such a way, emotionally and technically, that I can't and won't forget it. It's the show I recommend most highly, but with a major caveat. It's grim. And it's almost unbearably intense.

Intensity, it turns out, is a common factor among many of my very favorite shows from this year. HBO Max's The Pitt was a medical show with an impressively credible tension factor. So was Netflix's The Diplomat, with its unpredictable, high-stakes plot twists. And so was FX's The Bear, even though it wasn't about life or death, just appetizers and entrees. The Bear even calls itself a comedy, but it's not. Much, much too dramatic for that.

A couple of my other favorite TV dramas, almost equally intense, featured ragtag, mismatched investigative teams thrown together to solve specific crimes. One, HBO's Task, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with lots of emotional baggage, played by Mark Ruffalo. Another, Netflix's Dept. Q, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with even more emotional baggage, played by Matthew Goode.

And maybe it's just me, but this year I definitely gravitated to dramatic shows that made me uneasy. It was another great season for Netflix's Black Mirror, and the end-of-year final episode of another dark Netflix fantasy series, Stranger Things, is eagerly awaited by many. Including me, because I've seen all the new episodes leading up to it, but the finale is being kept under wraps.

Stranger Things has been around since 2016 — almost a decade — but other terrific genre productions were new takes on old ideas. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, on Netflix, was an excellent and very different adaptation. And what Noah Hawley did by reinventing the Alien movie franchise, for the FX TV series Alien: Earth, was thrilling — and, at times, truly scary. And still churning out weekly episodes, brilliant ones, is Pluribus, the new, indescribably original Apple TV sci-fi series from Vince Gilligan.

The comedies I liked best this year? Some were set behind-the-scenes of show biz — like the new Apple TV series The Studio, starring Seth Rogen as a bumbling but well-meaning studio head, and the returning HBO Max series Hacks, starring Jean Smart as a female comic landing a job as a TV talk-show host. The other comedies were lighthearted mysteries benefiting greatly from their veteran cast members: Hulu's Only Murders in the Building and Netflix's A Man on the Inside. Both of those shows made me feel good — which is a lot to ask of any TV show these days.

Nonfiction TV also offered many excellent options this year. Artistic profiles to seek out from 2025 include Apple TV's Mr. Scorsese, about film director Martin Scorsese, and HBO's Pee-wee as Himself, about actor Paul Reubens. Most recently, there's the short but powerful Netflix documentary All the Empty Rooms, about a TV feature reporter and photographer who visit the families of children killed during school shootings, to memorialize the children's empty, but still intact, bedrooms. It's as tough to watch as Adolescence — and, oddly, touches on a similar subject.

Other great documentaries this year included Sunday Best, a new Netflix program about Ed Sullivan's contributions to popularizing Black entertainers; PBS's The American Revolution, the latest and perhaps greatest epic history lesson from Ken Burns and company; and the new installment of The Beatles Anthology, presented by Disney+.

On talk shows, I loved the feisty, topical spirit invoked by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — and especially the well-aimed irreverence of the current season of Comedy Central's South Park. Wow. Many of these shows were attacked or censored by their corporate owners, in well-publicized clashes that exposed, and fought against, the interference. The CBS Late Show franchise is being retired from the schedule — but most of the time this year, the comics and their programs persevered.

Finally, my favorite TV moment of 2025 came courtesy of CNN. Not for a news bulletin, but for televising, live from Broadway, a production of Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney as veteran CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. At the end of the play, Clooney recites Murrow's actual speech to news and TV executives from 1958, urging them to use TV wisely.

In the year 2025, the best of television — from The American Revolution to Adolescence — is living up to Ed Murrow's inspirational ideals. We all just have to find the best that's out there … then find the time to watch it.
Copyright 2025 NPR