The Brief

In much of the country, a six-figure salary is a benchmark for success. That sixth digit tends to symbolize professional achievement and a degree of financial security.

But in Orange County, individuals earning up to $104,200 now qualify as “low income.”

California’s Department of Housing and Community Development released its official state income limits for 2026 on May 29. These thresholds determine who is eligible for income-restricted apartments and other housing assistance programs.

Under the new limits, one-person households in Orange County earning $104,200 per year or less qualify for low-income housing. Last year, the cut-off was $94,750.

“It just feels so crazy to me,” said Megan Junanto, a 23-year-old actuary living in Irvine. She recently received a raise putting her above the low-income threshold. But last year, she would have qualified.

“I felt like one of the most well off compared to people in my age group, and I am near low income, and last year I was low income,” Junanto said.

Housing policy experts say the ever-rising goalposts for financial stability make it hard for Orange County to retain teachers, nurses and other middle-income workers, who are needed to make a local economy function.

Despite earning relatively high incomes, some young residents feel they need to give up on the idea of buying a home in Orange County.

Junanto is able to rent an apartment with her boyfriend. But she said homeownership feels out of reach. Her immigrant parents bought a house in Garden Grove in the early 2000s on her father’s wages alone, she said. Now, the same home would cost at least $1 million.

“Those jokes about how you should have bought a house as a fetus, that definitely resonates,” Junanto said. “How hard do we have to work in order to attain that?”

High-income workers still far from achieving homeownership

According to a recent report from the California Association of Realtors, only about 16% of Orange County households earn the minimum annual income of $350,400 needed to afford the region’s median home price of $1,442,930.

Advocates for increased housing production blame local elected leaders for failing to address the region’s affordability crisis.

“By choosing to not allow new housing development, we effectively force people into being poor,” said Elizabeth Hansburg, director of People for Housing OC.

UC Irvine conducted a survey in 2024 that found 51% of residents have considered leaving Orange County. They cited the cost of housing as their most common concern.

Hansburg said if cities don’t update zoning and permitting rules to let developers build more apartments, townhomes and condos, workers earning around $100,000 per year will choose to look for cheaper housing elsewhere.

“They're the most likely to move out of Orange County, because those are the people whose quality of life will be most improved by lower housing costs,” Hansburg said.

What about workers earning even less?

According to a recent report from the California Housing Partnership, Orange County renters need to earn about $56 per hour, or about $116,000 on a full-time salary, in order to afford the region’s average monthly asking rent of $2,913.

Many low-income workers earn nowhere near that amount. Full-time minimum wage workers earn about a third of the county’s new $104,200 low-income limit.

Cesar Covarrubias is executive director of The Kennedy Commission, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing in the region. He said many workers typically can’t pay for rent on their own.

“People have to double up, overcrowd, have two or three families live together,” Covarrubias said.

“That burden is heavier on the low-income families,” Covarrubias said. “The higher-income families, yes, a lot of their money is going towards housing. But their income is still helping them move on and be able to survive.”

College graduates move back home 

Some young professionals are continuing to live in their childhood homes.

Joe Silva, a 26-year-old client billing analyst at an investment management company, lives with his mother and two younger brothers in a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Ana.

Silva said despite earning around $85,000 per year, his income isn’t enough to move the family into a larger two-bedroom unit.

“They want you making around two-and-a-half times whatever the rent is,” said Silva, a Claremont McKenna College graduate. “You have to make close to $110,000 to get a place.”

Silva said he worked hard in college and has progressed in his career. But he still feels behind on keeping up with Orange County housing costs.

“If you ask anyone my age, I don't think most people are even looking at owning a home at this point,” Silva said. “That's how bad it's gotten.”

Digging deeper into the data

In Orange County, workers can qualify as “low-income” while still earning more than most other workers in the county. Because of a quirk in the way the thresholds are calculated, the low-income limit is higher than the county’s median income of $97,000 for individuals.

That’s because officials weigh income data against local housing costs. When housing costs are exceptionally high, officials increase the income limits to give more people access to assistance.

“Even if you have an income that seems high by national standards, you're very likely to find housing extremely unaffordable” in Orange County, said Nicholas Marantz, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine.

Marantz said the rules behind the government calculations account for this imbalance between wages and housing costs, which “results in these situations that seem, to many people, somewhat absurd.”

How OC stacks up to other counties

The state’s income limits vary depending on household size and location. A family of four is low income in Orange County if it earns $148,850 per year or less. In neighboring Los Angeles County, the cut-offs are lower: $93,300 for individuals and $133,250 for families of four.

Individuals earning six-figure salaries also qualify as low income in Santa Barbara County, as well as in many parts in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, such as Marin County, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, Santa Cruz County and San Francisco County.

Adam Sampsell said he earns about $108,000 as a mechanical engineer. He splits rent with a roommate in the city of Orange. He said he’s earning more than many of his peers, but still feels burdened by the region’s housing costs.

“It is quite disheartening,” Sampsell said. “Even though I have this high salary, and I'll probably continue to increase my salary as I get more experience in my job, there's a very high likelihood that without marrying somebody soon, I will never be able to afford a house.”

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Why it matters: Owner Barbara Burrell has spent three decades building Sky's into a paragon of Black ownership on a stretch that's lost several other Black-owned institutions in recent years, including Roscoe's House of Chicken 'N Waffles' Pico location in 2023 and My 2 Cents last summer. Burrell cited rising rent and utility costs, diminished foot traffic and competition from ghost kitchens, per reporting from the L.A. Times and Eater L.A.

Food writer Bill Esparza called Sky's "the pinnacle of the Black taco in Los Angeles." He told LAist the lasting influence of Sky's, which helped define a genre, will now be felt in a new wave of Black-owned taco vendors and pop-ups.

"It's like we're losing the Caesar's Restaurant of the Black taco scene," he said, comparing it to the Tijuana restaurant credited with inventing the Caesar salad.

Why now: The business will remain family-run, according to Eater L.A., with Burrell's son and daughter-in-law continuing to lead operations as the focus shifts to catering.

The backstory: Burrell opened Sky's in 1992, building her own "Mexican with a splash of soul" approach — tacos dressed with cheese, lettuce and sour cream over seasoned meats — into a defining thread in Black Angeleno food culture. That approach would later be echoed at spots like Worldwide Tacos and Taco Mell.

Esparza said that type of cuisine represents a connection between Black and Mexican styles of cooking dating back to the Hot Tamale Trail of the Mississippi Delta, where tamale-making took hold in Black Southern communities generations before migrating west. Nearby, Stevie's Creole Cafe and CJ's Cafe remain open, anchoring what's left of Mid-City's Black-owned restaurant row.

The fast-moving Dove Fire near a Yosemite gateway town jolted California out of a relatively quiet fire summer, forcing road closures and the evacuations of hundreds of homes.

Former U.S. Forest Service firefighter John Buckley wasn’t surprised to see the fire taking off last Sunday. Driving through the area in the Central Sierra foothills earlier that day, he remembers telling his wife those fuels looked ready to burn.

“We drive back, and they're burning over at the city of Sonora,” said Buckley, now the executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “The fuels are now quite primed for burning, and they're only going to get drier.”

Firefighters have gained the upper hand against the 226-acre blaze, which Cal Fire suspects was set by a reckless 30-year-old man. But high temperatures are looming — and new research puts numbers to the intuitive follow-on: with heat, comes fire.

It’s far too early in California’s fire year to make any conclusions or predictions. But with fires devouring millions of acres in the Western U.S., Canada, and Europe, California stands out for what has been, so far, a below-average summer.

To date, roughly 4,030 wildfires have burned a little over 208,000 acres in the state — down from a five-year average of nearly 5,300 fires burning more than 300,000 acres at this point, according to Cal Fire data.

Still, Cal Fire Battalion Chief David Acuña says he avoids the word ‘quiet.’

“There is a superstition that when you use words like ‘quiet, slow, bored’ in the fire station, that just means that you're about to get hit with an amazingly busy shift,” he said.

California has benefited from lucky weather conditions so far, despite a low snowpack and blistering March, according to John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced.

That’s about to change. “Now, of course,” he said, “we have a heat wave on our doorstep.”

National Weather Service offices across the state are warning of soaring temperatures starting later this week. The Los Angeles/Oxnard office said conditions will shift to “dangerously hot” by Friday.

That combination — heat waves and fire activity — is a common feature of western wildfires, Abatzoglou’s team found in a recent study published in the journal Science Advances and led by scientist Dmitri Kalashnikov. 

The paper found that just under half of the burned area in warm-season months from 2001 to 2024 occurred during or in the wake of a heatwave, particularly in forests.

Heatwaves, defined as at least three days in a row with temperatures soaring past the 90th percentile, make up 15% or less of the warm season. But climate change is fueling an increase.

Abatzoglou pointed to a few reasons for the link. Heatwaves create chronic conditions that lead to drier, more flammable fuels. They also mean hotter nights, which previous research found increases nighttime fire intensity, shuttering a critical window for fire suppression. The researchers found that heatwaves can also prime conditions for lightning, which has sparked some of California’s biggest blazes.

“And then it’s off to the races in terms of fire activity,” Abatzoglou said.

The paper’s findings don’t mean all heatwaves will bring an uptick in fire activity, he added. That still requires ignitions in the right place, at the right time.

Acuña cautioned Californians against creating those sparks. That means mowing before 10 a.m. on hot days or skipping the yard work during a red flag warning. It also means securing tow chains so they don’t drag and spark against the road, and not parking hot cars on dry grass.

California sought and received federal funding assistance related to the Dove Fire within hours. But a separate, monthslong fight between Sacramento and Washington continues over slower-moving wildfire recovery funds — including hundreds of millions in aid tied to last year's L.A. fires that Gov. Gavin Newsom said in May FEMA was still sitting on.

As for predictions for the season ahead, Acuña likes to make them about as much as he likes the word ‘quiet.’

“It depends on what the weather brings us,” he said. “If it brings us hot, windy, red flag warning conditions, then that could certainly be a problem. If it brings us rain, well, that brings us a totally different concern. We are ready to respond.”

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

A SoCal land trust has officially purchased nearly 63 acres of land near Big Bear’s famous bald eagle nest for permanent preservation.

Friends of Big Bear Valley and the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust successfully raised more than $10 million in less than six months through thousands of small donations and one big check, the groups announced last week. A surge in donations came amid public interest in the fate of Jackie, who continues to recuperate after getting into an altercation with other eagles.

There are several signs that the eagle receiving care is Jackie, but we’ve cautioned that we can’t be 100% certain it’s her since Jackie isn’t banded. However, Friends of Big Bear Valley believes it to be the famed raptor, which is why you’ll see us refer to the rescued eagle as Jackie in this story.

The land, tucked away along the north shore of Big Bear Lake, was supposed to be turned into a housing project called Moon Camp — at least until now.

The tree-lined acres will remain largely untouched for the rare plants and wildlife who live in the area, including Jackie and Shadow and the chicks they raise during nesting seasons, according to officials.

Jenny Voisard, Friends of Big Bear Valley spokesperson, told LAist the land is important for all wildlife as it’s an “ecological corridor” that connects the lake to the forest.

“The environment is getting increasingly fragmented and being able to preserve that does so much,” she said. “It helps the flying squirrels, it helps the 17 acres of rare and endemic plants that exist nowhere else in the world. It gives a passageway for wildlife.”

How we got here

The “Save Moon Camp” fundraiser was a historic effort for Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the popular YouTube livestream of Jackie and Shadow’s nest.

Fans from around the world sent more than 25,000 small donations, including California elementary school classes who raised money for the eagles and a $20,000 gift that arrived with a handwritten letter of support. Those donations made up about half of the total fundraising goal.

“The kids especially — they get it,” she said, adding that they’ve been moved to tears by notes from parents and teachers. “And they have just been amazing.”

The other roughly $5.5 million came from Anna and Greg Brockman, the latter of which is the president and co-founder of OpenAI. Anna Brockman is a huge fan of the eagle livestream and loves watching Jackie and Shadow, according to Voisard.

“We are so appreciative of the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust and everyone who came together to preserve this incredible ecosystem, the life it will help sustain, and the forest that will be protected for generations to come,” Anna Brockman said in a statement last week.

Preserving the land has been decades in the making. Sandy Steers, the late executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley, pushed back against the proposed housing development for years, including in court and to county officials. Steers died the week before the fundraiser launched, which officials said was now being held in her honor.

What happens next?

The plan is no longer to have the acres be protected under the U.S. Forest Service, as Friends of Big Bear Valley initially hoped. Some fans shared concerns about the state of the agency under President Donald Trump. Specifically, Voisard said there was a recent change to the Endangered Species Act that could affect how habitats are protected.

“The Land Trust and Friends of Big Bear Valley didn't feel that it made sense to transfer the land over to the USFS at that point,” she said.

The acres will instead be protected by the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust for perpetuity. It’s no stranger to the preservation process, having helped conserve more than 15,000 acres of land since it was founded in 1995, according to the organization.

The proposed project site can be seen from the nest livestream.

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Friends of Big Bear Valley

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Access to the area around Jackie and Shadow's nest is restricted in Big Bear Valley on June 13, 2026.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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According to Friends of Big Bear Valley, the Moon Camp site is the last undisturbed shoreline left on the lake, and preserving it helps protect Jackie and Shadow, as well as the more than 250 other bird species flying through the Big Bear area.

That could be especially important if, or when, Jackie is ready to return to the nest.

“She gets to come back and it won't be different, they won't be starting construction on anything,” she said. “Provided she gets to come back to Shadow and us.”

When wildfires tore through the Sierra Nevada in 2020 and 2021, they burned thousands of giant sequoias at rates not seen for millennia.

But the destruction would have been far worse had the trees not undergone prescribed burns, according to a new UC Davis study published in Nature Communications.

“We estimate that giant sequoias with those prescribed burn treatments within the last 10 years ended up being about four times more likely to survive,” said Dan Dixon, who led the study as a UC Davis postdoctoral researcher.

In addition to being beloved namesakes of a popular national park, California's sequoias can store significant amounts of carbon, absorbing it from the atmosphere and making the trees a positive force in a changing climate. Climate change, however, is driving the kinds of fires and other threats that could reduce their numbers further.

The study

Using airborne sensing and satellites, the researchers gathered images of around 26,400 of the trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks before and after the fires. They then used neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence, to identify whether the trees were living or dead.

Dixon said the neural networks allowed the researchers to detect whether giant sequoias had survived based on factors like how green they were and what the canopy looked like. The neural network was trained on data collected from over 1,000 giant sequoias visited by researchers on the ground.

“This is kind of the future of this field, linking work like this: using imagery, but then also validating it on the ground,” said Ashley Grupenhoff, a fire ecologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who was not involved in the study.

Hundreds of beloved giant sequoias survived wildfire because of prescribed burns, according to a new paper.

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UC Davis

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With researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service, the team compared the images with areas with prescribed fire and found that the burns saved about 1,900 giant sequoias in the 2020 and 2021 wildfires. An additional 3,900 would have survived if all the trees had been treated, the study found.

“I think it did something that few other studies have, which is really looking at that individual tree level and mak[ing] causal inferences that really show the importance of prescribed fire,” Grupenhoff said.

The future of prescribed fire

Giant sequoias are adapted to resist low-intensity fires. But the study notes that with climate change increasing the frequency and ferocity of large fires, even these resilient trees are becoming more vulnerable. Setting more low-intensity fires could be integral to saving these trees from catastrophic wildfires, experts said.

Prescribed fire “burns off the susceptible material that wants to burn in a wildfire scenario when it’s hotter and drier and the winds are blowing faster,” said Jeffrey Stackhouse, an advisor at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources who was not involved in the study. “It makes trees a lot more resilient.”

In California, more than 120,000 acres are treated every year with prescribed burning conducted by Cal Fire and partner agencies, and controlled burning has been a longstanding tradition for some Indigenous tribes.

The 2020 Castle Fire in Sequoia National Park killed thousands of the park's namesake giant trees, some of which may have been more than 2,000 years old.

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Anthony Caprio

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National Park Service

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The study comes at a time when community-led efforts to conduct prescribed fires are increasing, experts said.

“A lot of communities are tired of waiting for someone to come do it for them,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of the UC ANR Fire Network who was not involved in the study.

In 2017, Quinn-Davidson and Stackhouse started the first prescribed fire association in California. Today, dozens of volunteers conduct prescribed fires to clean up dry wood, leaves and other fuel as part of a “big social movement” around controlled burning, Quinn-Davidson said.

“It’s a big moment in time for this work,” Quinn-Davidson said.