Quincy "Pastor Blue" Brown, co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a half-block long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles' Skid Row, speaks to a video blogger as he gets ready for his monthly birthday celebration for his community.
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Topline:
Health experts say overdose prevention centers can save lives, but are illegal in most of the U.S. On Los Angeles’ Skid Row, those in need have built their own.
The backstory: A sidewalk sanctuary in Skid Row meets a need served elsewhere by overdose prevention centers, which are common in European cities but rare in the United States. With overdose deaths rocketing upward, public health officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have called for legalizing such centers, saying there’s now an abundance of evidence that they save lives. But the political will to heed that advice has not materialized.
Read on ... for the perspective of "Pastor Blue" of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary. half-block-long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where more than 4,400 unhoused people live.
“Come on, kick back,” invites Quincy Brown, co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a half-block-long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where more than 4,400 unhoused people live.
Four years ago, Brown began serving barbecue here out of the back of his van. He propped up a handful of tents and canopies to shade visitors from the intense sun. Now there are folding chairs and tables where men and women play dominoes, chess and checkers, and enjoy snacks and bottled water donated by local organizations and community members who pass by.
Amid the visitors hanging out and catching up, some smoke crack cocaine, meth or marijuana, sitting on chairs in the sanctuary’s central area. The nonjudgmental environment for drug consumption is on-mission for the sanctuary. Brown, 50, was ordained as a pastor in 2005 and is known by most as Pastor Blue. He started the community space to save lives: whether through food, prayer or prevention of overdose deaths. Here, anyone can obtain free clean pipes and Naloxone (commonly known by its brand name, Narcan), a nasal spray medication with the ability to reverse overdoses. While injection drugs are less commonly used at the sanctuary, free clean needles are available.
“First and foremost, I want people to live,” says Pastor Blue. By creating a hygienic environment with lifesaving medicine at hand, he hopes to prevent overdose deaths, which over the last few years have risen sharply in Skid Row and across the country.
Pastor Blue’s sidewalk sanctuary meets a need served elsewhere by overdose prevention centers, which are common in European cities but rare in the United States. With overdose deaths rocketing upward, public health officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have called for legalizing such centers, saying there’s now an abundance of evidence that they save lives. But the political will to heed that advice has not materialized.
At Blue Hollywood, anyone can obtain free clean pipes and naloxone (commonly known by the brand name Narcan), a nasal spray medication that can reverse overdoses. While injection drugs are less commonly used at the sanctuary, free clean needles are available.
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Darren Willett, director of Skid Row’s Center for Harm Reduction, operated by the nonprofit Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, said the lack of overdose prevention centers in Los Angeles is “infuriating.” If officials approved them, “we could do it tomorrow. And yet, here we are watching people die,” said Willett.
Pastor Blue estimates there have been 20 overdoses at Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary over the last two years — yet not one fatality.
To achieve this, monitoring is crucial. The sanctuary operates with an “I’m gonna watch over you while you use, you watch over me” approach, Pastor Blue says. “I’m constantly walking through, so if somebody sleeps too long, we’re gonna get you up.”
Illicit fentanyl has been the greatest cause of overdose. By weight, the synthetic opioid is about 50 times stronger than heroin. Even small amounts can cause respiratory difficulty, and in some cases death. Fentanyl’s potency and low production cost have led to its increasing use as an additive to other drugs.
In 2021, 2,741 people in Los Angeles County died from an accidental drug overdose, according to the Department of Public Health — more than double the number of lives lost to overdose in 2016. Fentanyl was involved in 109 deaths in 2016 and 1,504 deaths in 2021.
As fentanyl-related deaths in Skid Row began to soar, the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and other health officials called for the establishment of official consumption centers to prevent overdoses.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health released a report late last year on fentanyl overdoses that included a call for official prevention centers and other harm reduction measures, such as access to Naloxone and fentanyl test strips. At the same time, Barbara Ferrer and Gary Tsai, director of L.A. County Department of Public Health and director of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control, respectively, endorsed the centers, saying it was time for “bold action.”
“We do not tell people with diabetes that they can’t be eligible for treatment unless they comply with diet restrictions 100% of the time, or that people with heart disease can’t receive care unless they exercise,” Ferrer and Tsai wrote in a Daily News op-ed. “Overdose prevention centers … send a subtle but important message that we want to bring people who use drugs out from the corners of our communities and that they deserve unconditional and nonjudgmental services.”
Despite support from health experts and local officials, federal law bans overdose prevention centers due to the “crack house statute” — a 1986 law that prevents individuals and organizations from maintaining or opening places for the purpose of using a controlled substance. Only New York City, which has two prevention centers, has bucked that law so far, though Rhode Island, Colorado and New Mexico are taking steps to open them.
A nonprofit center operated in San Francisco for one year in 2022 as part of the mayor’s emergency plan to address the overdose crisis, though it has since closed. In recent months, other unsanctioned sites have popped up in the city to address the urgent issue of drug overdose. Like in Los Angeles, the future of prevention centers in San Francisco is uncertain.
Last summer, Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) authored a bill to open pilot overdose prevention centers in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco. But Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying that more planning was needed. He expressed concern the centers could open “a world of unintended consequences.”
Newsom was likely hoping to stave off “the largely GOP-driven narrative of California as a needle-infested, drug-overrun dystopia,” CalMatters stated on its website.
Men and women play dominoes and enjoy snacks and bottled water. Photo: Barbara Davidson.
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While Los Angeles has seen a groundswell of support for overdose prevention centers, with local leaders and community nonprofits calling for them to be legalized, none have opened.
So Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary operates as a real-world example of the paradoxes brought about by the nation’s 52-year war on drugs. Worldwide, 16 countries have established more than 120 official overdose prevention centers where people can use drugs in a supervised environment, with staff ready to respond if they overdose. While such official centers are illegal in the U.S., Pastor Blue’s sidewalk setup serves as a one-man version of such a space.
On one summer evening, while people at Blue Hollywood were playing dominoes and hanging out, a resident who frequents the sanctuary accidentally overdosed. After smoking crack in a pipe, he began to have trouble breathing.
Pastor Blue called an ambulance, administered four doses of Narcan and performed CPR. Moments before paramedics arrived, “we revived him,” Pastor Blue said. “We had Narcan, thank god.”
Pastor Blue is fighting a problem that “does not seem to be going anywhere in the near future,” he said. “We have loved ones, we have friends, we have people that are suffering with different addictions. I’m here to meet people right where they are.”
Here on Skid Row, Blue Hollywood is an example of a community-created oasis, said Soma Snakeoil, director and co-founder of the Sidewalk Project, a harm reduction nonprofit in the neighborhood.
The sanctuary receives supplies such as clean needles, pipes and Narcan from local nonprofits like the Sidewalk Project, as well as chairs, tents, food and water from Los Angeles Mission and donors who drop by.
“For the most part, it’s a community,” says Pastor Blue, who resides near Skid Row. “I really want to preserve community, because there’s so many people who have been detached from their biological community.”
The sanctuary offers immediate support, whether it’s a tent for shelter or a freshly cooked lunch.
“By him putting this here, I think he saved a lot of people,” said Rico Solomon, a longtime sanctuary member. Born and raised in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, Solomon lived in a tent on Skid Row for four years before moving to an apartment in La Puente, 20 miles east of downtown. Even though it can mean three bus rides for more than an hour and a half, he returns to Blue Hollywood regularly.
A group bible class.
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Solomon says the community keeps him coming back. “It’s a bit of a commute, especially when I’m catching the bus. But I have my habits, you know. So I don’t take this stuff home with me,” he said of the drugs he consumes and the pipe he uses to smoke. “I come out here and do it. Then, when I get ready to go home, I leave it all here.”
Solomon said he’s seen four overdoses at the sanctuary and has called 911 himself to assist people experiencing an overdose, so they are able “to live to see another day.”
“People are dropping like flies around here,” said Anthony Willis, 60, who lives in an apartment in Skid Row. Born and raised in L.A., he is a father and grandfather.
Nearly a year ago, Willis accidentally overdosed. While looking to smoke crack cocaine, he borrowed a pipe. Before smoking the pipe, he asked if it contained fentanyl and was told no.
The pipe turned out to be laced with it. “I panicked,” Willis said. “I couldn’t breathe.” Emergency services arrived, though he was able to regain his breathing on his own.
Consuming drugs less frequently is one of Willis’ goals. In the meantime, treating those who consume with dignity is imperative. “We’re all human,” he said. “Don’t judge people.”
According to Willett, the Center for Harm Reduction director, a nonjudgmental approach is key.
“There’s a lot of things you can do to help people improve [their] health without stopping using drugs,” he said. Too often, he said, organizations approach the problem by focusing on abstinence. “For many people, that’s a deal breaker,” he added.
Using a harm reduction — as opposed to an abstinence — approach allows the center to engage with 95% of clients who use drugs, Willett said.
While the U.S. is now five decades deep into the war on drugs, the stigma and criminalization of drug use is a relatively new phenomenon. “In the late 1800s, you could buy cocaine and a syringe for $1.50 in the Sears catalog,” Willett said.
“There’s a direct lineage straight from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and the war on drugs,” said Willett, adding that all were tools used by the system of white supremacy to maintain control over Black people. He points out that the supposed end of Jim Crow laws in the late 1960s coincided neatly with the start of the war on drugs in 1971, which resulted in a dramatic increase in prison populations. It has cost the U.S. roughly $1 trillion to police, arrest and incarcerate people for drug-related charges, and spiked rates of overdose and death.
Brown sweeps the street with one of the sanctuary's regulars.
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If you ask Willett, the war on drugs has neither met its stated goals nor alleviated the most pressing health issues: It hasn’t reduced overdose rates, soft tissue infection, infectious disease or violence related to drug trafficking. Instead, it has “devastated communities of color through reincarceration, ripping families apart for minor drug offenses and confiscating people’s homes for being associated with illicit drug trade.”
The problem isn’t drug use itself, Willett believes. It’s the way society punishes people for using drugs — targeting Black people, communities of color and low-income people in particular, despite similar rates of drug consumption and sales across racial and economic lines.
“We cannot continue doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in an email, speaking to the history of criminalizing drug use and the rise in overdose deaths.
“It’s a reality that people are gonna use,” said Pastor Blue. “So on behalf of trying to keep an atmosphere where they’re at peace … safe consumption sites are very important.”
Countries with overdose prevention centers (the first opened in Switzerland in 1986) show significantly lower rates of overdose than those without. In 2020, 91,799 people died from overdose in the United States — about 58 times more than in Germany, where 1,581 people died from overdose (the U.S. population is only four times larger than Germany’s).
Jeannette Zanipatin, California director for the national advocacy group the Drug Policy Alliance, says these overdose prevention centers are not a substitute for treatment. The centers, which commonly connect clients to other services such as mental and physical health care, “keep individuals alive so that when they are ready to access treatment those linkages can be made for the individual,” Zanipatin said in an email.
In the U.S., critics from both parties have questioned their success. “Enabling those suffering from addiction to go to the brink of death is a dubious treatment,” wrote U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, a President Trump appointee, in a 2020 opinion in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a state measure to open a pilot prevention center in San Francisco, saying, “Fundamentally I do not believe that enabling illegal drug use in government sponsored injection centers — with no corresponding requirement that the user undergo treatment — will reduce drug addiction.” Such sentiments linger today.
In 2022, the American Medical Association called for more funding for pilot prevention centers. And recently the National Institutes of Health announced it will fund a four-year study to investigate the impact of prevention centers on both individual clients and neighborhoods — as well as estimate potential costs and savings for local medical and criminal justice systems.
NIMBYism is also an obstacle to opening prevention centers, said Zanipatin, with some fearing a center would negatively impact their community. Yet “crime rates have been reduced, syringe litter is reduced, and open drug use is reduced in places where centers are co-located in communities,” she wrote in an email.
A study of one unofficial overdose prevention center in the U.S. found that in the five years since its opening, crime decreased in the surrounding area. A review of government-sponsored prevention centers in Vancouver, Canada, found no increases in drug-related crimes or public nuisance.
As part of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles in Skid Row, a trained overdose response team of staff and clients canvasses the neighborhood in golf carts seven days a week. They are armed with a broad range of tools, including Naloxone injections, concentrated oxygen, artificial breathing masks, pulse oximeters and automated external defibrillators.
Still, one crucial service is missing: providing a safe environment for clients to consume drugs on-site.
In 2016, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles formed a partnership with The Men’s Home in Copenhagen, which operates two overdose prevention centers, and has been sending staff to Denmark to learn from these centers ever since.
Street Food Cinema puts on Boo-ze, Bites & Frights two weekends in a row.
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In this edition:
A witch walk through Beverly Hills, Come From Away at a Noise Within, Street Food Cinema and more of the best things to do this week.
Highlights:
Bring your pointy hat and broomstick, then join your coven for a witchy walk through the spooky (but also… sun-spackled) streets of Beverly Hills. Hosted by women’s walking group Los Angelistas, the walk features historical landmarks like the Spadena House and wraps with 30% off treats at Sweet Angeles Bakery.
Spooky season is upon us, and the next two weekends you can get your fill of scary movies and bites to go with them at Street Food Cinema's fourth annual immersive Halloween experience, Boo-ze, Bites and Frights at the historic village of Heritage Square Museum. They'll be screening horror classics old and new, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Sinners and Blade.
Come From Away is one of the best musicals of the 2010s, with a heartfelt score and a story that has stood the test of time through runs on Broadway and in the West End, plus a successful filmed version on Apple TV. The show follows the story of the town of Gander, which played host to passengers stranded when flights were shut down mid-path following the attacks on Sept. 11.
We’re getting pretty close to the midterm election, so get ready to fill out your ballot. If you’re a mail-in voter, you should be receiving your ballot soon if it hasn’t come already (mine showed up last week). As usual, there are many complicated props to read through, but we’ve got you covered with our L.A. and O.C. voter guides. After all that hard work, you’ll need to get out and do something fun.
Elsewhere on LAist, you can get a preview of Saturday’s Taste of Soul festival in South L.A.; check out an inside view of an event we’ve featured here before, the Sh*tty Movie Club; and Dave Grohl talks to us about the Soundstage of Hope fundraiser.
Saturday, Oct. 17, 9:30 a.m. 503 N. Palm Drive, Beverly Hills COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Love Beverly Hills
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Bring your pointy hat and broomstick, then join your coven for a witchy walk through the spooky (but also… sun-spackled) streets of Beverly Hills. Hosted by women’s walking group Los Angelistas, the walk features historical landmarks like the Spadena House and wraps with 30% off treats at Sweet Angeles Bakery.
An Evening on Journalism & Public Safety in Los Angeles
Monday, Oct. 19, 6 p.m. L.A. Press Club 2535 W Temple St., Downtown L.A. COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Los Angeles Reporting Collective
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Los Angeles Reporting Collective (LARC) and the Association of Gun Violence Reporters (AGVR) host a discussion about journalism and public safety at the L.A. Press Club. Join reporters from The Trace, The Guardian, LA Local and Southern California News Group for the talk, preceded by a screening of the short documentary about surveillance, Flock Walk.
No Fest
Saturday, Oct. 17, 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Beyond Baroque 681 Venice Blvd., Venice COST: FROM $21.99; MORE INFO
Save poetry in L.A.! No Fest features an open mic, poetry readings, art, music and local vendors, all in support of Beyond Baroque, the historic Venice space that has supported poetry in Los Angeles since its founding in 1968. The event will also be streamed on YouTube.
Cynthia Erivo: 'Let Me Sing to You'
Thursday, Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m. Hollywood Bowl 2301 Highland Ave., Hollywood COST: FROM $33.39; MORE INFO
Cynthia Erivo returns to the Hollywood Bowl.
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AFP via Getty Images
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When Wicked star Cynthia Erivo last took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, she was playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, and she received a minutes-long standing ovation in the middle of the second act after “Gethsemane.” It was — I am not exaggerating — one of the most astonishing performances I’ve ever seen at the Bowl or anywhere else. Relive the magic with her solo show, featuring favorites from Wicked and much more.
Street Food Cinema: Boo-ze, Bite and Frights
Friday and Saturday, Oct. 16-17; 23-24. Heritage Square Museum 3800 Homer St., Montecito Heights COST: FROM $53; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Street Food Cinema
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Spooky season is upon us, and the next two weekends you can get your fill of scary movies and bites to go with them at Street Food Cinema's fourth annual immersive Halloween experience, Boo-ze, Bites and Frights at the historic village of Heritage Square Museum. They'll be screening horror classics old and new, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Sinners and Blade.
Come From Away
Through Sunday, Nov. 8 A Noise Within 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena COST: FROM $52.75; MORE INFO
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Craig Schwartz
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A Noise Within
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Come From Away is one of the best musicals of the 2010s, with a heartfelt score and a story that has stood the test of time through runs on Broadway and in the West End, plus a successful filmed version on Apple TV. The show follows the story of the town of Gander, which played host to passengers stranded when flights were shut down mid-path following the attacks on Sept. 11.
Narsiso Martinez
Through Saturday, Nov. 7 Charlie James Gallery 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Narsiso Martinez
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Charlie James Gallery
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I first saw Narsiso Martinez’s work when he won the Frieze LA Impact Prize in 2023. Since then, his stirring portraits of migrant workers emblazoned on CSA boxes and Whole Foods bags have been showing up everywhere, from the Hammer to the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Don’t miss this solo show at Charlie James, where Martinez explores the stories of farmworkers and California kitchens across a variety of mixed media.
The Peterson Show
Through Monday, Oct. 26 Echo Theatre Company Atwater Village Theater 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village COST: $46.90; MORE INFO
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Cooper Bates
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Lucy Pollack Public Relations
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I heard about The Peterson Show from one of my favorite L.A. newsletters, Tasbeeh Herwees’s No Bad Days, which spoke to writer Janine Nabors about her new play. It takes inspiration from '80s sitcoms and is loosely based on the Bill Cosby scandal, reuniting five former child stars when the legacy of their TV dad goes bust. It’s only on through Oct. 26, so don’t miss it.
This is about the time of year when the country engages in the Great American Biennial Polling Freakout.
What's happening: A few weeks before an election, lots of people start to really engage. They read headlines showing this candidate or that candidate leading a race. People wonder who's going to win and whether the polls are right or wrong. And it all often leads to a blend of anticipation mixed with confusion and anxiety.
What it means: Polls are not meant to be predictive. They are snapshots in time of when those surveys were conducted. They're also not as precise and specific as people want them to be. Remember: Polls have margins of error. So when someone has a 2-point lead, that's not a lead at all. If a poll has a 3 percentage-point margin of error, this means that candidate could have a 5-point lead or be losing by a point.
This is about the time of year when the country engages in the Great American Biennial Polling Freakout.
A few weeks before an election, lots of people start to really engage. They read headlines showing this candidate or that candidate leading a race. People wonder who's going to win and whether the polls are right or wrong. And it all often leads to a blend of anticipation mixed with confusion and anxiety.
Stop and breathe. All that needs to be known from the polls at this point is that over the last several months, the compass needle has moved more in Democrats' direction. That's it. They are the favorites to win the House and are within striking distance of winning the Senate, something that was seen as a long shot when this election cycle began.
That's based not just on the polls but on conversations with campaigns and on-the-ground reporting. But here are some tips and things to remember as the deluge of polls comes your way:
1. Polls are not meant to be predictive.
They are snapshots in time of when those surveys were conducted.
2. They're also not as precise and specific as people want them to be.
They're more like fuzzy targets. Remember: Polls have margins of error. So when someone has a 2-point lead, that's not a lead at all. If a poll has a 3 percentage-point margin of error, this means that candidate could have a 5-point lead or be losing by a point.
3. Look for transparency.
There has been a proliferation of not-so-great polls this cycle, some driven by AI, others without long track records and even a pollster exposed to be fake. Good pollsters show their work with detailed methodology pages. If you can't find a methodology, that's a red flag.
4. The quality of state-level polling is not very good.
With the decline of local journalism, there has been a decline in well-conducted, rigorous and frequent state polls. There is less money for those local outlets to pay for polling, which can be very expensive. So take those state poll averages with a grain of salt.
5. Go beyond the top lines.
Horse-race polling isn't the best use of polls. Polls are best when measuring attitudes over time to help inform us of how Americans are feeling and thinking about key issues. There is so much more underneath those top-line numbers, from job approval ratings and who is most motivated to vote, to which party is more trusted to handle the issues people care about most — and so much more.
The fact is that many of these races are expected to be close. Millions of votes are not yet cast, and anyone professing to know exactly what's going to happen is lying.
When you're looking at who's up and who's down, just remember that horse-race polling is like sprinkles on top of a bowl of ice cream. Lots of people like sprinkles, but if all you eat is the sprinkles, you just wind up with a mouth full of wax without ever getting to the good stuff.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Topline:
Many Californians probably think about the state insurance commissioner once every four years, when the job is on the ballot, if they think about it at all. But the race for that this November has new relevance for Angelenos. It comes after the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated thousands of people — and at a time when California’s home insurance market has been showing strain for years.
Why it matters: Ensuring that Californians have access to affordable insurance falls to the elected insurance commissioner. The commissioner regulates the companies that provide fire, home and auto coverage in the Golden State. Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis,” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market.
The context: Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm.
What's next: Whoever wins in November — a state senator who represents the Palisades and other coastal communities, or a former San Francisco supervisor with a bold vision for the future of insurance — will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state and other upheaval.
Read on ... to learn about how California's insurance market got to where it is and the candidates who want to try to fix it.
Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it worked for Lynn McIntyre.
About this article
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with LAist.
Jake Bittle is a staff writer at Grist, covering climate change, energy, and natural disasters.
When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.
After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.
Lynn McIntyre stands in front of her damaged home in the Alphabet Streets. McIntyre’s home suffered extensive smoke damage during the Palisades Fire, but the California FAIR Plan offered her almost no rebuilding assistance.
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McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.
It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.
“The next time a fire comes through, I'm just going to light it on fire, because I'm not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.
An aerial view of reconstruction efforts underway in Pacific Palisades after the Palisades Fire. Many residents of the community lost insurance coverage before the fire, forcing them to enroll in the California FAIR Plan.
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Qian Weizhong
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Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.
Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.
Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.
The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.
“There's something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just ride roughshod right on over all of us.”
The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year, and average premiums could rise by 16% this year. The trend is now spreading out of the most flammable zones, and many homeowners even in low-risk areas are struggling to get insurance.
The outcome of the November election could determine the trajectory of insurance bills for millions of Californians and decide the fate of fire-prone areas around the state. The election will also serve as a bellwether for how voters in the United States want to approach the expensive and difficult process of adapting to a warming world, and whoever wins will have to turn that mandate into a policy that can offer short-term relief. This would be a daunting job under the best of times, and these are not the best of times.
A sign in front of a State Farm insurance office in Pinole, California. State Farm is one of several insurance companies that dropped policies in risky areas following California’s spate of large wildfires.
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Justin Sullivan
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Getty Images via Grist
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The roots of the insurance crisis
The current insurance crisis is new, but its origins are very old. Over the last century, California has built millions of homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the flammable zone outside the state’s major cities. Developers rushed out into the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the desert hills east of San Diego and built without any thought for fire mitigation, throwing up homes with wooden sidings and flammable fences on crowded lots. These are the areas that are burning up in the state’s recent wildfires, and the areas that insurers are dropping en masse.
This history of unwise development has created a bizarre situation that the scholar Carolyn Kousky has dubbed “a tale of two markets.” Prices ticked up in places that weren’t risky, like wet San Francisco and low-lying Fresno, but the market went haywire in risky areas like Malibu and the High Sierras. Nearly half of all households in high-fire-risk areas lost their insurance between 2018 and 2024. The California FAIR Plan, which was intended as a fringe supplement, became the only option for thousands of homeowners. Since 2018, it has swallowed up a huge share of policies in risky areas, growing from less than 1 to 5% of the market today. In some places, it reached 80% of market share.
In theory, California voters have some influence over their haywire insurance market. Every state has an insurance commissioner, but California is one of around a dozen states where that is an elected position. The fact that it’s elected at all is a testament to the strength of the state’s pro-consumer slant — in 1988, voters who were incensed about high car insurance prices passed a measure that turned it from an appointed position into an elected one.
In practice, this is a job no one should want. The commissioner has the power to approve or deny rate increases, and to police the industry’s compliance with state law. They also oversee the FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurer, which offers limited and expensive coverage to people like McIntyre who can’t get it on the private market. But the commissioner can’t do much else to make private insurers offer coverage or to reduce overall fire risk in wildland areas.
“The insurance commissioner has a lot of power and authority himself or herself that they should use, but the insurance commissioner alone cannot address these challenges,” said Dave Jones, who served as commissioner between 2010 and 2019.
California’s incumbent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, right, talks with homeowner Bruce Breslau following a 2024 public hearing in Los Angeles. Lara has faced criticism for failing to prevent private insurance companies from pulling out of risky areas.
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Robert Gauthier
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist
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The outgoing commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has been in office for almost the entirety of the state’s fire-induced market collapse. Lara vacillated between cozying up with the insurers or clamping down on them and running the risk that they might flee the state. First he pledged to reject all insurance industry campaign money, then accepted some of that money, then appeared to cover for it by stalling on rate increases, which led insurers like State Farm to drop more policies.
Lara’s attempt at resolving the crisis was to strike a deal with the companies. He allowed them to pass on the cost of their reinsurance (or insurance for insurance companies) to customers, and he also allowed them to use forward-looking catastrophe models to predict future risk, something every other state had already allowed. That would translate to higher rates, and in return the insurers had to commit to writing more policies in the risky fire areas they wanted to abandon. But the deal turned out to be full of loopholes — insurers can meet their mandate without returning to the riskiest areas, and the state FAIR Plan has kept absorbing more market share after the Los Angeles fires in 2025. Lara said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year that the industry had “bullied” him. (His office declined interview requests, and representatives for the FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment.)
The next insurance commissioner
Despite the entrenched nature of the state’s insurance problems, a dozen candidates piled into the election to replace Lara. This led to a crowded primary between four Democrats, five Republicans and two independents; none of the candidates had the funding to run a full statewide campaign, and there was limited public polling. The results were surprising even to the candidates. The top two candidates who advanced to the November runoff were Democrats. In first place with around 27% was Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and Bernie Sanders ally who had pitched a government-run single-payer program for disaster insurance. In second place was Allen, the state senator who represents the Palisades and is one of the legislature’s foremost experts on insurance.
Allen and Kim agree on a lot. They both believe in simplifying typical insurance policies and forcing companies to be transparent about their spending and investment in fossil fuels. They both believe in beefing up the FAIR Plan so it would cover smoke and other damages, which would have saved McIntyre from months of confusion and delay. They have both vowed to crack down on insurers who delay and nitpick claim payments after disasters. And they have both rejected campaign contributions from the insurance industry.
Where they differ is on the question of how to get people off the FAIR Plan and stabilize the market — in other words, on the fundamental question of the state’s insurance system. Allen believes that if the state allows insurers to raise rates on risky homes, invests to harden homes in vulnerable areas, and takes a data-driven approach to measuring wildfire risk, it can entice insurers back and restore a healthy market. Kim would prefer to discard the market altogether. She proposes creating a state-run public insurance program for all homes and all disasters, replacing private companies and the FAIR Plan. Rather than doling out profits to investors, this program would spend its excess revenue to harden old homes against wildfire. Private insurance companies could still write coverage for burglary and other perils, but the state government would collect all fire insurance and pay out all claims, a model based on similar programs in New Zealand and France.
The philosophical debate in the election is much deeper than a question of state policies or affordability — it’s about whether the private market can protect us against climate change at all.
State Senator Ben Allen hosts a discussion with local leaders and residents to mark 100 days since the Palisades Fire.
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Carlin Stiehl
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist
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Allen believes it can. He decided to run for commissioner after the Palisades Fire scorched a good portion of his district, plunging many of his close friends and acquaintances into a hell of displacement and insurance litigation. (Indeed, many of the Palisades homeowners I met knew him on a first-name basis, including McIntyre, who is supporting him in the election.) Even before that, he had already spent several years leading state legislative committees on insurance, energy, and wildfire risk, making him arguably the most qualified person in the state for the commissioner job.
“I think we need someone in this office who really understands climate science, who understands the markets, who understands the legislature,” he said. The Palisades Fire, he said, gave him a “level of understanding from going through the experience that is just different” — he heard about friends trying to itemize vaporized dining room furniture and saw phosphate pollution harming marine mammals in the water off his home in Santa Monica.
Rather than use the insurance commissioner post to push for a major statutory change like Kim’s public fund, Allen speaks about the commissioner as having a poder de convocatoria, a Spanish phrase that translates to “convening power.” He wants to bring together the state agencies and the insurance industry to have a real conversation about reducing fire risk and cajole the state’s market back into existence. He has just passed a bill that offers low-interest loans to homeowners who want to fire-harden their homes. He wants to pursue a sort of grand bargain with the industry, speeding up rate increase decisions while also disciplining the insurers who delay and deny claims.
Kim’s audacious proposal may be gaining more traction than Allen’s proposed compromise. She outperformed Allen in the primary in almost every county, including in his home county of Los Angeles, and given her progressive background, she did fairly well in the rural and red parts of the state. She admits her strong performance is partially “a mystery to me,” but attributes it to the fact that many voters are fed up with the insurance industry.
California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim speaks to reporters during a rally in San Francisco. Kim is pitching a single-payer disaster insurance model that would replace the private market for wildfire coverage.
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Stephen Lam
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San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images via Grist
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“There's this sense of immense unfairness, and once we articulate the problem, and then on top of that, actually propose big policy ideas, I think that that resonates,” she told me. We were speaking at a home in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where Kim was attending a fundraiser for the radical climate activism group Climate Defiance.
Some experts are skeptical of a government takeover in the style Kim is proposing. Jones, the former insurance commissioner, said the program has two key flaws. First, Kim’s promise to keep insurance affordable could mean keeping prices too low on mansions in fire-prone areas, where homeowners may currently pay premiums that are inadequate to their risk. Second, insurers in California are required to have tens of billions of dollars in extra cash to pay during big loss events, and Kim’s new fund would have to find that money in a state whose public budget is already strained.
“Not only does she not come clean as to where the money's going to come from, if her thought is that it's going to come from the general fund of the state of California, good luck,” said Jones. He pointed out that the model Kim cites in New Zealand is far smaller than California’s, has low coverage limits, and doesn’t cover fires. (Allen described the proposal as “red meat, sugar rush stuff,” and said taxpayers would end up footing the bill if the public plan lost money.)
Kim allows that the legislature might not jump for her public insurance fund, but she has a compromise in her back pocket — one not dissimilar from Allen’s own agenda. Instead of creating a single-payer insurance program that would use profits to fund fire resilience, the commissioner could turn the FAIR Plan into such a program. The plan already pools money from all the state’s big insurers, and Kim could force them to pay an extra fee that would fund hardening for FAIR Plan homes. She returned to this theme when she delivered a stump speech to the activists in the Presidio Heights living room, saying that private companies would never act on their own to reduce the state’s fire risk.
“What the insurance industry does is that they price risk, but they don't actually address it,” she said. If that’s the case, she argues, then the industry shouldn’t be the one charged with keeping Californians safe from climate disasters.
For all their other points of alignment, this question represents the major philosophical disagreement between Allen and Kim. Allen agrees that the industry has not yet acted to reduce California’s enormous fire risk, but he believes that it can fill that role — and he can be the one to make that happen.
“The insurance commissioner is uniquely positioned to bring the insurance to the table … and actually say to the insurance industry, ‘OK, guys, you've got to be a part of the solution here,’” Allen said.
A daunting challenge
The problem for both Kim and Allen is that reducing risk is very difficult.
Take the case of Tony Byers. He is a retired electric utility worker and a longtime resident of Placerville, an old mining town high in the forest-covered hills east of Sacramento. He bought insurance from AAA for years, but the company dropped him after a 2022 fire burned a nearby stretch of the Sierras. State Farm gave him a quote, but then rejected him because it claimed he didn’t have a fire hydrant near his house, even though he did. Byers ended up going with Lemonade, the online insurer, and even paid to have some flammable trees removed at the company’s request, but last year they told him they were leaving California. He ended up on the FAIR Plan, and he now pays $3,400 a year for fire insurance alone, triple what he used to pay. Byers lives at the end of a narrow mountain road, and if he wants to get back on a private insurance plan, he’d likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit his property, which is a lot more than he can afford on a retiree’s budget.
The only people who can opt out of this gauntlet of risk reduction are those who can pay for elite coverage. That was the case for Kevin Roberts, a retired golf course owner who lives in Huntington Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the edge of the Palisades Fire burn scar. Roberts likely couldn’t get fire coverage for his two-story Spanish colonial from bigger insurers like State Farm, but years ago a former fraternity brother told him about a company called Chubb that offered boutique insurance at high prices. The company now charges him more than $30,000 a year for his coverage on a “surplus lines” policy that isn’t subject to state regulations. It’s an eye-watering payment, but the company came through with a $2.65 million payout for smoke damage after the fire. Many of the state’s wealthiest homeowners are already on this unregulated market: the number of surplus lines policies in California has doubled over the last four years to around 1.3 million.
“You'll pay more, but if you need them, they'll deliver,” said Roberts.
Neither Byers nor Roberts expressed strong feelings about the insurance commissioner’s election, and indeed, both candidates will face tremendous barriers before they can address the issues that someone like Byers faces in Placerville. That’s because scaling California’s efforts to reduce more than a century of fire risk is one of the most daunting adaptation efforts faced by any place in the United States. The challenge is not just in finding the money to help homeowners who can’t do it themselves, but in figuring out how to reduce risk for millions of old and ill-built homes.
The day after Kim’s fundraiser, I met two employees from North Coast Opportunities, a poverty-fighting organization that serves Lake County, north of San Francisco. The organization is the first to receive money from a $117 million state grant program designed to retrofit whole communities against wildfire. The organization chose to focus on a tight-packed community called Kelseyville, where hundreds of homes cluster on small lots against the side of a windy mountain ridge. As the employees from North Coast drove me through the area, it became clear just how hard it will be to achieve the scaled-up resilience that both Allen and Kim want.
Lake County has an urgent need for this. The mountainous area is among the state’s most vulnerable to wildfire — some 85% of its land area has burned since the turn of the century — and it is also one of its poorest counties. Insurers have abandoned the area en masse, forcing many people onto the FAIR Plan, or causing older homeowners to go without insurance altogether.
The state program is the exact kind of intervention that insurers have long said will induce them to offer more coverage and stop raising rates. The nonprofit can give each participating home in Kelseyville about $70,000 to fund easy tweaks that will stop ignitions — such as removing trees from around homes, replacing vinyl siding with fiber cement, and deconstructing flammable wooden decks. The mitigated houses don’t look much different from the old ones, except for the emptier yards and fresh paint, but even these tiny fireproofing changes required painstaking work. North Coast has had to ask contractors to redo flawed retrofits and cajole local hardware stores into selling fireproof equipment. Many homeowners aren’t interested in participating at all.
“What creates an insurable community is for the whole community to have buy-in,” said Deanna Fernweh, the program manager. “It's changing the mentality, because they're like, ‘Well, we've always done it this way.’” She said she’s cautiously optimistic that companies will come back — insurers have been reaching out to learn more about her work, but they’ve also pushed for full neighborhoods to meet the strictest fire standards.
The project underscores the scale of the challenge the next commissioner will face in reducing fire risk. The project only touches around 300 of the 1,200 eligible homes in the neighborhood, and the grant typically isn’t even enough to do full mitigation on each home. The funding came from the federal government after years of delay. The best possible result is to bring insurers back to just a few streets, a fraction of the risk in Lake County alone. For millions of homeowners who don’t have access to grant funding, resilience is still out of reach.
“A home is only as strong as the weakest link,” said Steve Hawks, a longtime California fire official who is now the director of wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which develops standards for fire hardening. “If you leave a weak link on the table, a fire of [significant] magnitude can exploit any vulnerability.”
Hawks describes the challenge as “daunting,” and that may be an understatement. Retrofitting a home for fire can cost several times as much as building a new fire-resilient home, and the bill for hardening the millions of homes in California’s fire zones would run to the double-digit billions at least. This money has to come from somewhere, and Allen and Kim both acknowledged that their biggest challenge is to find out where.
This is the irony of the fact that both candidates are appealing to voters by talking about “affordability.” No matter which path one takes through the maze, one arrives at the same conclusion — to fix this crisis will take money, and much of that money will come from the people of California. As Allen says, “risk doesn't disappear, it gets allocated.” The “affordability” challenge in this case is not to help voters keep up with inflation but to pay down a massive debt of risky development that has been accumulating for decades. The challenge is to remake a society that was not designed to be remade.
“I think we’re still at the beginning,” said Holly Sacks, the director of underwriting for Mercury, a California-based insurance company that has committed to remain in the state and to help incentivize risk mitigation. The company is selling in burned places like Paradise and Altadena, but only for hardened homes, and Sacks says it’s one of the only companies doing so. “We are out there, and we don't hear about a lot of other carriers getting out there,” she said. “I think there's still a ways to go … to really make the market more stable.”
The scale of this work is enormous, but the stakes are even larger. When we purchase insurance, we purchase not only the privilege of owning a home or driving a car, but also the privilege of belonging to a community in which all support all. Insurance, as Kim likes to say, is a prerequisite for participating in the economy. A healthy insurance market is also an indication that society can still hold together, that there is no home so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the rest of the community can’t afford to protect it.
Of all the things that climate change may take from us, this guarantee might be the most dear.
Here are three takeaways from the hour-long NBC4 and Telemundo 52 debate in Universal City. Each candidate was given about a minute to answer a question, with another 30 seconds each for rebuttals and follow-ups.
What did the candidates say about homelessness?
Bass has repeatedly pointed to a drop in homelessness under her tenure — a trend that faltered this past year, according to the results of the annual homeless count. After two years of declines, homelessness jumped 3.4% in the city of Los Angeles.
During the debate, she acknowledged the recent increase, but pointed to several council districts where homelessness dropped, including Raman’s.
“ The main reason homelessness went down is because our efforts with Inside Safe,” Bass said, crediting the program for removing three large encampments from Raman’s district. Raman represents Council District 4, which stretches from parts of Silver Lake to the Hollywood Hills and Reseda.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took shots at her challenger, at one point describing City Councilmember Nithya Raman as " contemptuous of her constituents."
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Courtesy NBC4 and Telemundo 52
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Inside Safe is Bass’ signature homelessness program that moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing. Raman has criticized the program, arguing it has wasted money and its approach had not changed since it launched nearly four years ago.
“ Under this mayor's leadership, we have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an incredibly expensive program, Inside Safe, which has been unaccountable to the public, for which she has refused audits," she said. " And it looks exactly the same as it did on day one.”
Both candidates seemed to agree that there needs to be more transparency in the city’s homelessness system.
Bass said the city needs to be in complete control: “ No more joint working with the county.”
Raman said every homelessness dollar needs to be monitored and every service performance tracked to actually respond to Angelenos’ needs.
What did the candidates say about policing?
Raman confirmed during the debate that she wants to replace Jim McDonnell as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, saying he had lost the trust of Angelenos, especially in response to federal immigration raids.
Asked whether she would replace McDonnell before the 2028 Olympics, Raman didn’t give a timeline. She said it would depend on other factors and decision makers, such as the Police Commission and L.A. City Council.
“ I promise you, Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger,” Raman said. “Everything will be done with care, and with the advice of all of the people that are involved in making sure that you are safe as these Olympics approach.”
L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass' signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, and her administration's response to major fires.
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Courtesy NBC4 and Telemundo 52
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Bass pressed Raman on the issue, saying the council member doesn’t have “any idea” what it takes to pick a police chief.
“ We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you're gonna find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray by doing that,” Bass said.
Both candidates weighed in on the LAPD’s use of Automated License Plate Readers, otherwise known as ALPRs.
Raman said she’s been “very skeptical” of these kinds of mass surveillance technologies and would want to see hard proof that the data would not be shared with ICE.
Bass said she thinks ALPR’s have a place in crime prevention, but she does not support a renewed contract with Flock, describing the company as “completely uncooperative.”
What did the candidates say about emergency response?
Bass has been heavily criticized for her administration’s response to last year’s Palisades Fire, and she apologized during the debate for not being in L.A. “when my city needed me.” Bass was in Ghana when the fires ignited as part of a Biden administration delegation for the inauguration of the country’s new president.
Bass said the city would be ready to respond to the next catastrophic wildfire, in part under new leadership from Fire Chief Jaime Moore.
“ As a matter of fact, we're preparing for what is a potential Red Flag daythis Thursday,” Bass said. “He has already reached out to the state for additional resources. He is planning to pre-deploy in the Palisades and other high-risk fire areas.”
Raman honed in the Palisades Fire, as well as this summer’s Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, describing both as a “failure” of leadership from the mayor. Raman said she would have handled the Lineage fire differently.
“ I will make sure that our community is met with resources, evacuation support and the information they need in the languages that they need, which this community did not get during these fires,” she said.
