The Brief

As rebuilding from the Palisades and Eaton fires gets under way, some homeowners are choosing to build differently. Instead of the usual wood framing, they’re working with a material typically associated with freeways and skyscrapers: concrete.

Only 7% of homes nationwide are currently built with concrete, according to the National Association of Home Builders. But experts say this hardy, non-combustible material could become more popular in areas with high fire risk, such as the Los Angeles County neighborhoods where thousands of homes were destroyed in January 2025.

While concrete doesn’t make a home totally fire-proof, insurance companies are recognizing its safety benefits by offering homeowners lower premiums. While cost has been a barrier in the past, some homeowners say the expense of concrete now compares favorably with wood.

One recent morning on the Sunset Mesa lot where her home burned down, Karen Martinez adjusted her hard hat and flipped through the blueprints for her new home.

“These are my original chicken scratch drawings, which I love doing,” Martinez said.

Martinez has overseen the building process for many of her previous homes. But this will be her first project using concrete blocks. Technically called insulating composite concrete forms, the bulky gray blocks stacked all over her property are lighter than they appear.

“It's about 87% polystyrene and 13% cement,” said Martinez, who is soft-spoken and self-described as “nutty” about building materials.

“Basically they're non-combustible. So in a fire, you're pretty much safe from the walls burning,” she said.

These blocks, called insulated composite concrete forms, will be used to form the walls of Karen Martinez's new home.

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David Wagner

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LAist

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‘There are better ways to build’

It didn’t take long for Martinez to choose this material after her old wood-framed home was lost in the Palisades Fire.

“It was just probably a day or two of shock,” she said. “When I finally started thinking about, OK, I have to rebuild, obviously, I'm going to be building with something that's non-combustible.”

Martinez said there are other benefits beyond fire safety: she said the material can withstand earthquakes, and it won’t get termites because it contains no wood.

Martinez saw the need to do things differently. The hardest part, she said, was getting others on board. Securing permits from L.A. County, talking her architect into using this kind of concrete, even helping her neighbors with plans for their own concrete homes.

It all took some convincing.

“Most architects and contractors don't know how to use it,” Martinez said. “All they know is wood and maybe steel. It's hard to convince people to change their ways. That's my goal. I'm trying to just educate people and say that there are better ways to build.”

Some insurance companies agree. Victor Joseph, president and chief operating officer of Mercury Insurance, said his company is offering discounts to those who rebuild with fire resistant materials.

“What we're incentivizing with these types of discounts is really some combination of steel, concrete and glass,” Joseph said.

He said homeowners can get up to 50% off the wildfire portion of their premium by rebuilding with materials like concrete.

Why some Palisades rebuilds are going concrete

“In high wildfire areas, that results in a pretty substantial discount,” he said.

Concrete alone doesn’t fire-proof a home

Concrete blocks have been used for decades to build homes in other countries, but they are still an unusual building material in Southern California homes.

Tom Tietz, executive director of the California Nevada Cement Association, said growing awareness of fire risk could help the blocks catch on with more homeowners.

“There's clearly a desire from folks that have lost their homes to make sure that never happens again,” Tietz said.

Concrete homes aren’t automatically fire proof. Embers can still fly in through vents or windows. Steve Hawks, senior director for wildfire with the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, said even concrete homes need strong sealing.

“The structure is only as good as the weakest link,” Hawks said. “If you only address the siding material and don't address the window and the vents and the other components, you still leave the home very vulnerable to these significant, intense wildfires.”

Learning from L.A.’s concrete home history

Though rarely used in single-family homes, concrete does have a long history in Southern California architecture.

Architect R.M. Schindler built L.A.’s first modernist home in 1922 using concrete slabs poured on site and tilted up to form monolithic walls.

The Schindler House in West Hollywood was constructed more than a century ago in what is now West Hollywood, using concrete and redwood as its main building materials.

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“I think there's a perceived kind of coldness with concrete,” said Maeve Atkinson, education and engagement manager for the Schindler House through the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Atkinson said Schindler wanted to use new materials to build a new kind of home, one that was open to the outdoors and designed for not one, but two couples.

“It was about living differently,” Atkinson said. “It was about being much more in tune with the elements and with nature.”

Schindler decided to leave the raw concrete exposed. Its grooves and cracks remain visible, contrasting with the redwood beams that form the rest of the building’s open structure.

Homeowners recovering from January’s fires don’t need to go raw and radical like Schindler. Martinez said her home, covered with stucco, will look much like any other modern L.A. home.

“I'm hoping that this will actually become the future of building,” she said. “I think it's a much, much better way to build, and it's not more expensive. I think actually everybody should be doing it.”

If all goes according to plan, she said, her home should be done before the two year anniversary of the Palisades Fire — and ready to take on whatever comes next.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced an investigation into how and whether Elon Musk’s X and xAI broke the law in the past few weeks by enabling the spread of naked or sexual imagery without consent.

xAI reportedly updated its Grok artificial intelligence tool last month to allow image editing. Users on the social media platform X, which is connected to the tool, began using Grok to remove clothing in pictures of women and children.

“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” Bonta said in a written statement. “This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet. I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further.”

Bonta urged Californians who want to report depictions of them or their children undressed or commiting sexual acts to visit oag.ca.gov/report. In an emailed response, xAI did not address questions about the investigation.

Research obtained by Bloomberg found that X now produces more non-consensual naked or sexual imagery than any other website online. In a posting on X, Musk promised “consequences” for people who made illegal content with the tool. On Friday, Grok limited image editing to paying subscribers.

One potential route for Bonta to prosecute xAI is a law that went into effect just two weeks ago creating legal liability for the creation and distribution of “deepfake” pornography.

X and xAI appear to be violating the provisions of that law, known as AB 621, said Sam Dordulian, who previously worked in the sex crimes unit of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office but today works in private practice as a lawyer for people in cases involving deepfakes or revenge porn.

Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, author of the law, told CalMatters in a statement last week that she reached out to prosecutors, including the attorney general’s office and the city attorney of San Francisco, to remind them that they can act under the law. What's happening on X, Bauer-Kahan said, is what AB 621 was designed to address.

“Real women are having their images manipulated without consent, and the psychological and reputational harm is devastating,” the San Ramon Democrat said in an emailed statement. “Underage children are having their images used to create child sexual abuse material, and these websites are knowingly facilitating it.”

A global concern

Bonta’s inquiry also comes shortly after a call for an investigation by Gov. Gavin Newsom, backlash from regulators in the European Union and India and bans on X in Malaysia, Indonesia, and potentially the United Kingdom. As Grok app downloads rise in Apple and Google app stores, lawmakers and advocates are calling for the smartphone makers to prohibit the application.

Why Grok created the feature the way it did and how it will respond to the controversy around it is unclear, and answers may not be forthcoming, since an analysis recently concluded that it’s the least transparent of major AI systems available today. xAI did not address questions about the investigation from CalMatters.

“The psychological and reputational harm is devastating.”Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Democratic Assemblymember, San RamonEvidence of concrete harm from deepfakes is piling up. In 2024, the FBI warned that use of deepfake tools to extort young people is a growing problem that has led to instances of self harm and suicide. Multiple audits have found that child sexual abuse material is inside the training data of AI models, making them capable of geneating vulgar photos. A 2024 Center for Democracy and Technology survey found that 15% of high school students have heard of or seen sexually explicit imagery of someone they know at school in the past year.

The investigation announced today is the latest action by the attorney general to push AI companies to keep kids safe. Late last year, Bonta endorsed a bill that would have prevented chatbots that talk about self harm and engage in sexually explicit conversations from interacting with people under 18. He also joined attorneys general from 44 other states in sending a letter that questions why companies like Meta and OpenAI allow their chatbots to have sexually inappropriate conversations with minors.

California has passed roughly half a dozen laws since 2019 to protect people from deepfakes. The new law by Bauer-Kahan amends and strengthens a 2019 law, most significantly by allowing district attorneys to bring cases against companies that “recklessly aid and abet” the distribution of deepfakes without the consent of the person depicted nude or committing sexual acts. That means the average person can ask the attorney general or the district attorney where they live to file a case on their behalf. It also increases the maximum amount that a judge can award a person from $150,000 to $250,000. Under the law, a public prosecutor is not required to prove that an individual depictured in an AI generated nude or sexual image suffered actual harm to bring a case to court. Websites that refuse to comply within 30 days can face penalties of $25,000 per violation.

In addition to those measures, two 2024 laws (AB 1831 and SB 1381) expand the state’s definition of child pornography to make possession or distribution of artificially-generated child sexual abuse material illegal. Another required social media platforms to give people an easy way to request the immediate removal of a deepfake, and defines the posting of such material as a form of digital identity theft. A California law limiting the use of deepfakes in elections was signed into law last year but was struck down by a federal judge last summer following a lawsuit by X and Elon Musk.

Future reforms

Every new state law helps give lawyers like Dordulian a new avenue to address harmful uses of deepfakes, but he said more needs to be done to help people protect themselves. He said his clients face challenges proving violation of existing laws since they require distribution of explicit materials, for example with a messaging app or social media platform, for protections to kick in. In his experience, people who use nudify apps typically know each other, so distribution doesn’t always take place, and if it does, it can be hard to prove.

For example, he said, he has a client who works as a nanny who alleges that the father of the kids she takes care of made images of her using photos she posted on Instagram. The nanny found the images on his iPad. This discovery was disturbing for her and caused her emotional trauma, but since he can’t use deepfake laws he has to sue on the basis of negligence or emotional distress and laws that were never created to address deepfakes. Similarly, victims told CNBC last year that the distinction between creating and distributing deepfakes left a gap in the law in a number of U.S. states.

“The law needs to keep up with what’s really happening on the ground and what women are experiencing, which is just the simple act of creation itself is the problem,” Dordulian said.

California is at the forefront of passing laws to protect people from deepfakes, but existing law isn’t meeting the moment, said Jennifer Gibson, cofounder and director of Psst, a group created a little over a year ago that provides pro bono legal services to tech and AI workers interested in whistleblowing. A California law that went into effect Jan. 1 protects whistleblowers inside AI companies but only if they work on catastrophic risk that can kill more than 50 people or cause more than $1 billion in damages. If the law protected people who work on deepfakes, former X employees who detailed witnessing Grok generating illegal sexually explicit material last year to Business Insider would, Gibson said, have had protections if they shared the information with authorities.

“There needs to be a lot more protection for exactly this kind of scenario in which an insider sees that this is foreseeable, knows that this is going to happen, and they need somewhere to go to report to both to keep the company accountable and protect the public.”

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

Los Angeles Metro's new chief of police says collaboration between sworn officers and unarmed responders will ultimately be what "makes or breaks" the public safety agency he is building for one of the nation's largest public transit systems.

“One needs the other to be effective in this model,” said Chief Bill Scott, who joined Metro in May after leading the San Francisco Police Department for eight years.

Scott spoke with LAist on Tuesday, saying the new Metro Department of Public Safety expects to begin hiring police officers this fall.

The interview came the same week Metro announced the establishment of the department’s “care-based services division,” which houses the neon green-clad ambassadors, homeless outreach and an emerging team of behavioral health responders under one central authority. Previously, those teams were spread across departments within the agency.

The background

Metro’s Board of Directors approved a plan in June 2024 to stand up its own in-house public safety department, replacing the decades-old system of outsourcing law enforcement to regional police agencies.

A year after the board approved the public safety overhaul, Scott joined Metro as the agency’s first chief of police and emergency management.

Before his time with the San Francisco Police Department, Scott served with the LAPD for 27 years.

Scott said Metro's Department of Public Safety has secured vendors to help recruit and vet new officers and hopes to have its recruitment strategy solidified by the spring. Scott said the department is working on agreements with police training academies and finalizing training curriculum.

“ There's a lot of moving parts to [our] plan, and we have a lot of foundational things that we have to get done fairly quickly,” Scott said. “Some of those are well on the way.”

Scott added that he supports initiatives that were already in place before he joined Metro, including the installation of taller fare gates and tap-to-exit.

Police recruitment remains a challenge

At some point in 2029, Metro hopes it will have a full force of around 400 sworn officers. As they are incrementally hired, Metro will whittle down the number of regional law enforcement officers it contracts.

Scott acknowledged that since the nationwide reckoning with policing in 2020, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported issues with staffing.

Police agencies with more than 250 sworn officers reported a staffing drop of 6% from 2020 to 2025, according to a survey last year from the Police Executive Research Forum. Though the survey results indicate signs of improvement as large police agencies saw an increase in hiring in 2024 compared to 2023.

“ Our plan is to build enough excitement about what we're doing to get people to apply, and then we're able to pick people that are aligned with our values,” Scott said.

Internal Metro surveys show upward of 500 people already working for the agency, including bus and rail operators and ambassadors, are interested in becoming sworn officers, Scott said.

“If we get even 10% of those employees the first year, that’s a huge boost for what we’re trying to do,” Scott said. “To have that type of interest is really encouraging.”

The ‘care-based services division’

Part of the training sworn officers will receive from Metro includes how to work with the hundreds of unarmed personnel who round out the department.

Metro riders likely will be familiar with some of those teams. They have been working on the system for several years and include the ambassadors, who help with wayfinding and can administer opioid overdose-reversing drugs, and homelessness outreach workers.

One new team Metro is bringing on board will be made up of clinicians who respond to behavioral health episodes on trains and buses.

Once fully set up, Craig Joyce, a Metro executive and social worker who will lead the new care-based services division, said the department will be able to triage calls for help and send out appropriate teams.

“ If [the dispatcher] hears the words ‘mental health,’ perhaps they send out the crisis response team versus an ambassador team or versus a sworn officer set,” said Joyce, who previously worked on the agency’s homeless outreach efforts. “If there's a serious situation that's occurring, where there's a safety issue, but it's also a mental health [issue], a crisis response co-responder team could go out, where there's a clinician, a peer specialist, but also an officer to manage the safety side of things.”

The long-running debate over where to build a final resting place in Irvine for military veterans couldn’t get past the roadblock that has vexed stakeholders for years Tuesday — where to put it?

After about two hours of discussion, the Irvine City Council voted to table the topic after disagreement over even the parameters of how to go about finding a location for a columbarium, or a structure to inter urns carrying ashes, for veterans with ties to the city.

Councilmember James Mai proposed asking officials to develop a plan for a municipal columbarium, including eligibility preference given  to Irvine residents or those with strong ties to the city and those who served at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. He asked staff to consider locations across the city for the structure, including  Bill Barber Memorial Park, Northwood Memorial Park and adjacent to the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum. But he also explicitly called for a 125-acre plot of land that used to be part of the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro to be excluded.

The land, also known as the ARDA site, is now part of Great Park but has long been lobbied for as a location for a veterans cemetery.

Mayor Larry Agran strongly opposed Mai’s proposed exclusion of the ARDA site, calling the idea “offensive.” Instead, he reiterated his longstanding call for a veterans cemetery at the location.

The council eventually voted 4-3 to table the proposal.

Orange County is home to an estimated 130,000 veterans, but the nearest cemetery dedicated to military personnel is the Riverside National Cemetery more than 40 miles away.

It isn’t the first time a final resting place for veterans has stalled in front of the Irvine City Council. Last year, plans for a veterans cemetery or columbarium were shut down on two separate occasions.

So why does it keep coming back?

For veterans in Irvine, the cemetery represents a broken promise.

When the marine base was shuttered in 1999, Irvine’s population was just over 130,000 and the Great Park idea was nonexistent.

Orange County lobbied for an airport. But for veterans and their families, the former marine base seemed like the perfect resting place where they could receive their last rites for service to their country — and some are still holding onto that hope with a staunch ally in Agran.

But in the years since the debates began, Irvine's population has more than doubled to more than 300,000, and Great Park has been transformed into a residential community for young families, with a $1 billion expansion underway that includes an amphitheater, retail and dining options. The area, residents say, has been transformed too much to also include a cemetery.

Also, the site eyed for a potential cemetery is near an elementary school and families — many of whom are immigrants — who live in the area say it’s bad luck.

But what about a resting place for veterans?

There’s political support, including from state leadership, for a cemetery in Orange County. A bill approved in 2014, AB 1453, calls on the state to build and maintain a resting place for veterans in the area.

After efforts to build it at the former marine base stalled over and over again, a group of fed-up veterans finally took their plans to Anaheim’s Gypsum Canyon.

That location quickly won support from city, county, state and federal leaders.

Construction at the Anaheim site is set to begin this year. However, Agran is convinced the cemetery actually will come to fruition in Irvine.