The Brief

At the Sea Castle apartments, just steps from the beach in Santa Monica, a small one-bedroom with an ocean view starts at $2,900 per month. But some tenants pay only about 30% of their income and use Section 8 housing vouchers or other government subsidies to cover the rest.

Moving in was life-changing for Lorenna Taylor, 55.

“It took me a week to get up my nerve to come here and apply,” she said, wearing bike shorts and an animal-rights T-shirt outside the eight-story beachfront building that’s a short walk from Santa Monica Pier.

Taylor moved here about a year ago from a nonprofit-run affordable apartment building in the city that was “nasty” and, she said, management “treated us badly.” But she found a warm welcome at the Sea Castle. Now, she said, “I’m able to live the life I want to live. I’m handling stress better.”

The Housing Choice Voucher program — also known as Section 8 — helps 2.4 million households nationwide who can’t afford market rents to stay housed. It is supposed to give participants a chance to live where they choose, including in communities like Santa Monica, one of the Los Angeles area’s most desirable places to live not only for its sea air and ocean views, but because of the city’s high-achieving schools and plentiful parks and libraries.

But in Los Angeles County, relatively few voucher holders enjoy those amenities. More than two-thirds of Los Angeles County voucher holders live in areas the state considers “low resource,” according to a Capital & Main analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California state housing agencies and the U.S. Census Bureau. Six of the 20 L.A. County census tracts with the most voucher holders also rank among the county’s highest in rates of poverty and racial segregation.

Santa Monica is an outlier in the county, the analysis showed. All of the census tracts in the city, which is home to more than 1,500 voucher holders, are considered “high resource.” Higher resource tracts have higher home values, households with higher incomes and better academic outcomes compared to the rest of the state.

In response to Capital & Main’s findings, California Civil Rights Department spokesperson Rishi Khalsa said his department, which enforces anti-housing discrimination law, “is always interested in identifying any additional potential pattern in discrimination.” Such discrimination “can certainly be one of many factors that might contribute to a higher concentration of voucher holders in low opportunity neighborhoods.”

Marcie Vega, director of Assisted Housing Programs for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, noted that “even with a voucher, low-income renters are competing for a very limited number of available homes.”

Discrimination is also a factor despite laws in California, the District of Columbia and 23 other states that make it illegal for landlords to reject tenants because they rely on housing assistance. A recent Capital & Main investigation found that some of the county’s largest landlords avoid Section 8 renters.

Responding to suspected discrimination

Sea Castle, where low-income tenants live side by side with affluent neighbors, is an example of the program working as intended.

One reason the Section 8 program works well in Santa Monica may be the city’s immediate response to suspected discrimination. Romy Ganschow, a chief deputy city attorney who oversees the program, said that an attorney contacts the landlord — often within a day of receiving a discrimination report — to explain the law and the city’s determination to enforce it.

“By the time the tenant files a lawsuit or gets the authorities involved the unit’s going to be given away to somebody else,” Ganschow said.

Indeed, the state Civil Rights Department, which takes most such complaints, can take more than a year to resolve them. The city’s rapid response turned some 40 refusals to rent into offers to lease between 2015 and 2024, Ganschow said.

Santa Monica’s enforcement system is “extremely unique,” said Michelle Uzeta, executive director of the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for fair housing.

“There’s no other city that does anything like that in California,” Uzeta said. In 2023, she requested public records from 16 cities, including Los Angeles, that had passed local laws prohibiting discrimination against tenants with housing assistance. She asked them to provide data on enforcement efforts and describe them.

“Only one of the municipalities contacted — the City of Santa Monica — had taken any affirmative enforcement action to enforce the source of income protections in their local ordinances,” Uzeta said in an email.

“For people to be able to use their Section 8 vouchers is a major solution to our homelessness crisis,” Ganschow added, noting that housing discrimination is “rampant in areas that don’t have this level of enforcement.”

Sea Castle resident Tom Lang and his disabled dog, Karma, live at the Sea Castle in Santa Monica.

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Jeremy Lindenfeld

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Capital & Main

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Getting into Sea Castle was that kind of solution for 56-year-old Tom Lang, who was homeless and living on the beach 16 years ago. He had a Section 8 voucher but he thought his chance of moving in was almost nil.

“I walked in just to stink up the lobby,” he joked.

At that time, Lang said he had just one more day to find an apartment before his Section 8 voucher expired. Voucher holders usually have between two and six months, or they lose their eligibility — and Lang’s was nearly up.

“You got a Section 8 opening for a bum like me?” he recalled asking a building manager. His timing was right, and the manager said yes.

Lang doesn’t owe his luck to city enforcement; Santa Monica approved its law prohibiting discrimination against housing voucher holders five years after he moved in. But he is pleased with the apartment he shares with Karma, his 15-year-old poodle mix who uses only her front legs and a wheeled contraption to get around. As Lang sat outside the building, several of his neighbors waved or stopped to chat.

“They love me,” he said. “I’m not crazy, and everybody likes my dog.”

Sea Castle tenant Colin Chen was heading home on a recent weekday morning with a canvas Trader Joe’s bag full of groceries slung over his shoulder. He said he had learned from casual conversation in the building that some of his neighbors pay rent with government subsidies.

“We all just commingle,” he said.

Not everyone is so accepting. One tenant grumbled about neighbors who don’t work.

Enforcing housing laws in California

In California, fair housing laws are mostly enforced at the state level by the Civil Rights Department. But its resources are stretched thin. One attorney and three investigators enforce laws that bar discrimination against people who use government housing assistance. Resolving complaints can take a year or more. Spokesperson Rishi Khalsa said the department has an online portal where members of the public can report discriminatory ads, like those that say “No Section 8.” The department also holds regular educational webinars for landlords and tenants on a range of civil rights issues.

“When people do report, our department reviews it and sends a notice to the entity to remind them of their legal obligations,” Khalsa wrote in an email.

Local fair housing enforcement is likely one reason that affluent downtown Santa Monica, where the Sea Castle is located, ranks 12th among L.A. County census tracts with the highest voucher holder populations in the county. Census tracts are small geographic areas of 1,200 to 8,000 people that researchers use to study demographic trends and socioeconomic disparities. Of the 20 L.A. County tracts with the most voucher holders, the tract that includes downtown Santa Monica is the only one that state housing officials categorize as “high-resource,” based on measures such as income, employment and high school graduation rates, Capital & Main’s analysis found.

Wesley Wellman, a founder of ACTION Apartment Association Inc., a Santa Monica landlord group that has often been at odds with the city’s pro-renter policies, praised the city’s fair housing enforcement as “a constructive approach to attempt to resolve discrimination complaints as soon as they arise rather than just defaulting to litigation.”

In the city of Los Angeles, where affordable housing is also a top issue, Ivor Pine, a city attorney’s office spokesperson, said in an email that the office “takes the issue of fair housing and the prevention of housing discrimination for all tenants — including those relying on government subsidies — very seriously.”

Pine didn’t answer Capital & Main’s question about whether the city attorney’s office had considered a more active approach to enforcement, like Santa Monica’s. He noted that the office had sent cease-and-desist letters to landlords whose advertisements said they don’t accept Section 8 tenants, but didn’t respond to follow-up questions about how many such letters were sent, when they were sent and what the results were.

Finding a place to live

In fact, most Section 8 tenants who want to live in more affluent areas of L.A. County lack the backing that Santa Monica tenants have.

When Jennifer St. Jude planned to move from the remote high desert city of Lancaster — 80 miles north of downtown LA — to a neighborhood where she and her two adult daughters could more easily access services for their disabilities, she said it was almost impossible to find a landlord who would accept her Section 8 voucher. The search was even harder, she said, because many landlords charged higher rents than the Los Angeles County Development Authority, the county’s housing authority, was willing to pay.

“You can’t get a house or an apartment or anything, anywhere outside of low income areas,” said St. Jude, who is a graduate student in social work at the University of Southern California. “It was like, nope, nope, nope, nope.”

Just one in five voucher holders in L.A. County live in a census tract that the state ranks as either “high” or “highest resource.”

“Living in a high resource, low poverty neighborhood is really good — especially for kids for long-term life outcomes,” said Martha Galvez, executive director of the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University’s Furman Center, whose research backs up her view.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles is part of a national Community Choice Demonstration project to help voucher holders move to more affluent areas. The few hundred L.A. families who participate are given a coach, move-in expenses and housing search assistance. The Los Angeles housing authority is also among several that offer higher rent ceilings in more expensive ZIP codes to give voucher holders a better shot at living in those areas. Last year, however, the rent ceilings were lowered because of a budget shortfall, and the agency stopped issuing new vouchers to the more than 24,000 people on its already years-long waiting list. In June, HACLA spokesperson Courtney Harris told Capital & Main that the budget picture has improved, but wouldn’t comment on whether rent payment limits would increase or whether the agency would resume issuing new vouchers.

Funding is also uncertain as Congress considers next year’s Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials has raised concerns that House budget proposals would not cover rising Section 8 program costs.

In mid-2024, after an 18-month search, Jennifer St. Jude finally found a house in Castaic, a northern L.A. County suburb the state considers “high resource” based on factors like home values and its residents’ incomes and educational attainment. She and her daughters finally began receiving the support services they needed.

“It was grueling to get to this place, and my heart breaks for all the people that will never be able to fight that battle and get a house,” she said.

Back in Santa Monica, Lorenna Taylor said that her new apartment is “amazing because when you’ve been beat down so long, it’s hard to accept that this can be possible.” Gesturing toward the ocean, she said, “I come out here and I can just let it all go.”

Derek Thomas of Thomas Data Consulting supported the analysis and created the data visualizations for this story.

Copyright Capital & Main 2026

An effort to put a rent control measure on the November ballot in Anaheim has fizzled. That means Santa Ana is likely to remain the only Orange County city with rent control, at least for now.

The group Tenants United Anaheim launched an effort in January to put rent control on the November ballot. The initiative proposed to cap rent increases in the city at 3% annually. It also would have required landlords to pay relocation assistance to tenants forced to move through no fault of their own, such as when an owner takes a rental unit off the market.

Why did it fizzle?

Tenants United Anaheim has yet to release an official statement, but an organizer with the group told LAist the group had decided to suspend signature-gathering in order to improve and strengthen the text of the ballot measure.

This week is the deadline to submit ballot initiatives for the November election in Orange County. The group expects to resume the effort for a future election.

The context

Tenant advocates in Anaheim had hoped to follow in the footsteps of neighboring Santa Ana, which became Orange County’s first city to adopt rent control in 2021. It was upheld by voters in 2024. The efforts in both cities have faced strong opposition from the California Apartment Association, which represents landlords.

What's next

Some cities have had to pare down their protections for renters after negative court rulings. Los Angeles and Pasadena have stopped enforcing mandatory relocation assistance following legal victories by landlord groups.

Tenants United Anaheim's members hope their revised rent control proposal will make it on the ballot in 2028.

Dire water conditions, missed deadlines and uncertainty on the Colorado River are complicating critical water decisions in California.

No single state, water agency or federal official has shown the power, or the will, to break the deadlock among Colorado River basin states over how to share the dwindling supplies.

Years of fraught negotiations have failed to yield consensus even as major reservoir storage plummets to record lows — ratcheting up the tensions, and the stakes, for the states’ negotiators.

Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft.

This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan.

The federal provisions include cuts of up to 40% to the shared supply of California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin. They also allow releases from Lake Powell, which collects flows from the upper basin, to dip low enough that they risk violating a legally required threshold for water deliveries to downstream states.

These dramatic cuts are an upper limit for future operations. The federal government plans to roll out more detailed management plans every two years if the states continue their impasse.

The agency will release the first of those plans any day, imposing cuts in the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada — an estimated 10% cut to California's supply through 2028, or roughly 440,000 acre-feet a year.

No mandatory cuts are expected in the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, according to those involved in negotiations. The Los Angeles Times first reported the split.

It reflects the limits of federal power and political will: The Interior Department can force cuts in the lower basin, but has no comparable authority to impose cuts in the upper basin states — the limits of which the Congressional Research Service said are the subject of “ongoing debate.”

This isn’t the long-term plan that California’s water suppliers were hoping for.

Building anything to store, move or make more water typically takes decades and billions of dollars. Without longer-term certainty about how states will share the river’s water supply among 40 million people, millions of acres of agriculture and two states in Mexico — cities and irrigation providers are struggling to plan how to close the gaps.

“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it. But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years,’” said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan Water District’s manager of Colorado River resources.

“We need to plan for our future. And this deal does not let us do that.”

The future of Southern California’s water 

In California, where the availability of water is never certain, nature-defying engineering keeps dry parts of the state flush with water even when little falls from the sky.

Much of that engineering converges around one Southern California supplier: the Metropolitan Water District. The giant wholesaler imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply cities and other retailers serving 19 million people across six counties.

Metropolitan’s imports are so central to the region that when its Northern California supplies dropped to a trickle during the most recent drought, 6 million Southern Californians faced unprecedented water restrictions in 2022.

Southern California isn’t facing such serious shortfalls again yet. But uncertainty over the Colorado River compounds the risks the next drought will bring.

“There's a good chance it'll be as bad as it's been, and there's a reasonable chance that it'll be worse,” said Hasencamp’s colleague, Keith Nobriga, whose job as an operations manager at Metropolitan is helping the district prepare for the future amid climate change.

The uncertainty also throws a wrench in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration’s water machinations to the north. Metropolitan's board will play an outsized role in deciding the fates of Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel because of the district's water needs and spending power.

Both multibillion-dollar projects, decades in the making, aim to send more of Northern California’s water south. Metropolitan is also planning a large-scale water recycling and reuse program, called Pure Water Southern California, with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

Metropolitan has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Delta tunnel’s planning costs and about $31 million for Sites Reservoir. The board hasn’t committed to receiving water or contributing to construction for either yet, though board votes on whether to approve the tunnel and recycled water project could come as soon as next year.

Subtracting one part of the equation, such as the Colorado River, could change the calculus for the others. But Metropolitan has to know how much water it stands to lose, and for how long.

The consequences of picking the wrong path could leave Southern California thirsty during the next drought, on one hand, or unnecessarily increase water rates, on the other.

Nobriga compares his job to insurance planning. The costs of nudging these water projects along, he says, are like paying an insurance premium.

“We'll keep these projects alive. We'll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we'll … construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. And we don't know which ones yet.”

Agriculture in limbo

California uses the largest share of the Colorado River’s water among the states. And the Imperial Irrigation District uses the largest share of that to supply half a million acres of alfalfa, grasses, winter vegetables and other crops in the southeast corner of the state.

As climate change and a megadrought plunged the Colorado River into its driest decades in over a century, the Biden administration struck a deal with the Imperial Irrigation District, trading more than half a billion federal dollars for short-term water conservation.

Growers cut irrigation to their alfalfa and other forage crops for weeks at a time, and the district conserved enough water to add more than 12 feet to Lake Mead on the Colorado River, according to Tina Shields, water manager for the irrigation district.

Now, those conservation programs are coming to the end of their funding and regulatory lifetimes. Starting new ones would require new plans and approvals to address the environmental impact of reduced irrigation runoff that feeds the Salton Sea.

Seeking those permits and environmental approvals “needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said. “Because it’ll take us at least a year to negotiate, probably longer, the environmental actions necessary to move forward.”

In the meantime, negotiations are ongoing with other California water users about how they’ll share the coming cuts, including who is going to pay for it, Shields said. The district has not yet committed to anything.

“The district's perspective is: We've done a lot. We're doing a lot. It's challenging to do more,” she said.

Art of the deal

Though the U.S. Department of the Interior has not yet released its plan for the river’s next two years, those involved in negotiations expect that it will call for reductions and conservation in California, Arizona and Nevada similar to what the states proposed in May.

The three lower-basin states then must agree among themselves and with the federal government on how to implement it. After that, individual water suppliers in California will seek approvals from their boards for their share of the cuts.

Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation lies on both sides of the Colorado River, compared the plan to a Band-Aid, not a long-term path to sustainability.

“To a large extent,” Weiner said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”

The Trump administration relied on the states reaching consensus rather than imposing terms — an approach that so far hasn't broken the deadlock.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for the federal government to step in and broker a deal. But federal leverage looks different in the upper and lower basins. Lower basin stakeholders say there are other strings the federal government could pull upstream, such as forcing water out of reservoirs, but isn’t. And cloistered negotiations and hardline positions among negotiators have driven an impasse.

Arizona negotiator Tom Buschatzke publicly lambasted the upper basin in The Denver Post for failing to propose “One. Single. Gallon.” of mandatory, verifiable reductions. Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell wrote in The Colorado Sun that had the lower basin states lived within their means, “the reservoirs would not be in crisis today.”

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno said that negotiations have been most productive when participants had strong working relationships. Without clear federal leadership, she said, the same conflicts keep resurfacing.

The fraying relationships, she said, could stem from turnover. But years of constant crisis have also worn people down.

“We have been governing in crisis for a long time, and so every time we meet at the table, there's this big problem to solve,” she said. “The house is on fire.”

While the lower basin may sue the upper over deliveries that dip below a legally required threshold, both sides would risk the uncertain outcomes of litigation.

“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and board member of the Metropolitan Water District.

That paycheck comes due again in two years with the same states, and the same asymmetry of power, still in place. Until then, the interior secretary can still force deeper cuts on the lower basin. No one, right now, is willing to force the upper basin to do the same.

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

A new report from the L.A. County Fire Department and Cal Fire concludes that Southern California Edison equipment sparked the deadly and destructive Eaton Fire last year, but gives little insight into how.

That was the main point raised by Pedro Pizarro, the president and chief executive of the utility’s parent company, Edison International, on AirTalk with Larry Mantle on Wednesday.

“The reality is we don't fully understand what the mechanism was that led to that potential sparking,” Pizarro said. “Not sure we will ever understand.”

Pizarro was referring to the report’s finding that an idle tower and grounded lines attached to it had electricity in them at some points on the evening of Jan. 7, 2025. Sparks are seen falling from that tower into dry brush below, according to multiple witnesses and videos cited in the report.

Pizarro added that the report contains lengthy redactions and more than 20 unreleased attachments, which may provide additional background into the why.

“We would want to be able to analyze those when they become available because there may be more helpful information there,” Pizarro said.

The Fire Department declined to release the attachments after an inquiry from LAist, citing ongoing legal actions and personnel privacy. It also noted ongoing investigations by the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office as a reason for redacting nearly an entire section of the report listing penal code and other possible violations.

Meanwhile, on AirTalk, Pizarro described the leading theories Edison has as to how an idle power line could have sparked the Eaton Fire, which killed at least 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes and businesses.

Much of the theory comes down to “high school physics,” Pizarro said. Active power lines near the idle line could have created an electromagnetic force that caused induction, which in turn may have created an electrical current in the idle, grounded line.

Pizarro also pointed to other factors that made the fire go beyond a spark, including high winds and gas lines. In January, Southern California Edison sued Southern California Gas Co., alleging that the gas utility did not begin widespread shutoffs until days after the fire started, thus worsening the conflagration. SoCal Gas has said Edison is attempting “to deflect responsibility and accountability.”

Ultimately, Pizzarro said, preventing wildfires is not only the responsibility of the power companies.

“We have done a lot of work, as have other utilities in the state, to decrease the risk of heartbreaking catastrophes like this associated with utility equipment,” Pizarro said. “But we also know that, unfortunately, the risk will never be zero.”

Lawsuits and compensation

The company is also facing thousands of lawsuits from survivors of the Eaton Fire.

On AirTalk, Pizarro defended the company’s maintenance record of the vegetation beneath those lines.

“We continue to believe that SCE will be able to make a good faith argument that it was a reasonable operator of the system, that it was prudent, and that's the standard under which we're held under state law,” he said.

Pizarro also defended the company’s decision to keep the idle line itself, which could be used in the future as electricity demand rises. He said the company expects their demand load to double by 2045.