The Brief

Floyd Howard Jr. calls it his comfort zone — a canopy-covered courtyard in the heart of Skid Row where he can charge his phone, smoke a cigarette and catch up with friends.

It's also the centerpiece of what Los Angeles County administrators say is the nation's first community-designed homeless services campus.

The Skid Row Care Campus opened in May on a 36,000-square-foot site in downtown Los Angeles. It’s the first county program to formally incorporate input from people living in Skid Row, according to officials, including so-called “harm-reduction” programs that focus on keeping drug users safe and alive.

“It was imperative that the plan be designed by the community to repair the harm done by decades of plans that did not involve people who live in Skid Row,” said Molly Rysman with L.A. County’s Department of Health Services.

The care campus is funded with nearly $26 million a year in local, state, federal and private dollars over the next two years. About 2,000 people visit the new campus each day, according to Homeless Healthcare L.A., the main nonprofit staffing the campus.

Although it's only been open a few months, the center appears popular with unhoused Angelenos who desperately need a place to rest. Last month, one woman visited the campus for her first shower in months, she said, after receiving a buprenorphine injection to help her stop using fentanyl.

But some nearby business owners complain of more drug activity on the street since the facility opened.

Howard, a longtime Skid Row resident, said he visits the campus often to pick up the testing strips he uses to check his crystal methamphetamine supply for fentanyl.

Sometimes, he drops by for art classes or acupuncture treatment.

“It’s like a safe haven,” he said.

Centering the community

The site, at 422 S. Crocker St., provides a range of services, including showers, laundry, medical care and housing referrals. Booths line the south side of the plaza, where a rotating cast of representatives from the county’s three health departments provide pop-up services to connect people with addiction treatment or case management.

The primary clientele are the more than 1,800 unsheltered people living on the neighborhood’s streets who — despite the large concentration of homeless programs in the area — have access to few public restrooms and public gathering spaces.

The campus is the result of an initiative called the Skid Row Action Plan, a $280 million effort to expand services and housing funded by L.A. County, the city of L.A. and the state.

L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis launched the initiative in 2022 to address historic racism and disinvestment in the neighborhood, where the majority of the unhoused population is Black.

“Engaging the community was not just important; it was essential,” said Solis, whose district includes Skid Row. “Their voices must guide the path forward. Real transformation can only be led by those who live this reality every day.”

A committee of 10 current and former Skid Row residents collaborated with government agencies in 2023 to come up with recommendations for the plan in 2023. That group, known as the Skid Row Action Plan Resident Advisory Committee, recommended the new campus.

They said they wanted a fun community space where they could connect with services and a place where drug users can pick up harm reduction supplies, such as clean needles or pipes, overdose reversal medication and drug testing strips.

As a member of the advisory committee, Skid Row activist General Dogon said he pushed for the campus entrance to be staffed by “community ambassadors,” rather than private security guards.

“Uniforms don't go good with homeless people,” said Dogon, an organizer with the L.A. Community Action Network. “We want everyday faces to be at the door, not some G.I. Joe in a uniform.”

General Dogon observes an encampment sweep along a block of Skid Row.

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L.A. County officials said input from members of the unhoused community is sometimes ignored, and they are not properly compensated for their efforts. So authorities said they wanted to take a different approach at the care campus.

After the Skid Row Action plan started taking shape, the county hired an additional eight unhoused or formerly unhoused people to serve on resident councils for the Skid Row Care Campus. Each is paid a $10,000 consulting stipend and tasked with surveying other community members about what’s working and what isn’t. They also provide training and technical assistance for the campus’ programs.

“I like the fact that it's focused from the ground up and not the top down,” said Dwight Wilson, a member of a resident council. “It wants to  incorporate the actual feeling of the people in the community that need the resources.”

Even the name, “Skid Row Care Campus,” came from the community. It was suggested by Henriëtte Brouwers, associate director of the L.A. Poverty Department, a nonprofit arts organization and theater group that’s been in Skid Row since 1985.

“ People often talk about Skid Row like it's a bad place; they don’t care to find out why it’s here,” Brouwers said. “But people recover when they build relationships, and you build relationships when you care about somebody.

“I think if we want to end homelessness, we need to actually care.”

An estimated 3,593 homeless people live in Skid Row, including those in homeless shelters, according to the region’s latest count. While the overall unhoused population in the neighborhood has declined by 27% since 2022, the remaining population faces greater health risks, according to survey data.

About 41% of the people in Skid Row’s unhoused population have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or post traumatic stress disorder. Roughly 31% deal with substance use disorder, and 26% claim a physical disability.

To meet some of those needs at the Skid Row Care Campus, the nonprofit health agency John Wesley Community Health Institute runs an on-site clinic and a 48-bed board-and-care facility, which provides permanent housing to people who need help with basic activities like dressing or eating. It’s moving in residents this week, according to county officials.

In several months, Skid Row’s first-ever methadone clinic will open here.

Case workers from the county’s three health departments, LAHSA and other departments rotate through booths within the main courtyard of the Skid Row Care campus.

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People can check in at the medical wing, which includes a clinic, a harm reduction dispensary and dozens of respite beds. The first methadone clinic in Skid Row is expected to open there this year.

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Harm reduction 

Many programs at the facility focus on harm reduction, a public health approach that recognizes addiction is a health condition and that some people aren’t going to immediately quit using drugs.

Harm reduction interventions typically focus on minimizing the negative health effects of drug use.

Public health officials and addiction experts say there is ample evidence these approaches not only save lives, but can also help people get into treatment or sobriety, connect them with other services or get them off the street.

But harm reduction remains controversial. Some view these approaches as enabling illegal behavior.

Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order encouraging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to give priority for housing grants to local agencies that enforce laws against open illicit drug use.

Trump’s order directs his attorney general to ensure that federal substance use disorder grants do not fund harm reduction programs. It also directs HUD to require people with substance use disorders or serious mental illness to seek treatment before they participate in federal housing and homelessness assistance programs.

Days before the executive order, a Trump-appointed HUD administrator told L.A. County officials at a meeting that he believed the region wasn’t doing enough enforcement and was critical of providing housing subsidies to people who use drugs, according to local officials who were there. L.A. County officials said it’s too early to tell what the actual effects of the new order will be.

Drug overdose is the leading cause of death for unhoused Angelenos, according to the county Public Health Department. Skid Row is home to the largest homeless population in L.A. and the highest rates of drug overdose mortality.

There are no designated safe-consumption sites — where people are allowed to use drugs under supervision — in California, although some exist in other parts of the country. A few years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a state bill that would have allowed them.

On the street outside the Skid Row Care Campus, there are many signs that people are using illicit drugs. But they can’t use them inside the facility. The staff won’t allow it.

Last month, when one woman hit her meth pipe while lounging on the patio, a staff member tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to put it away. She complied.

The Skid Row Care Campus’ main harm reduction provider is Homeless Healthcare L.A., best known for its overdose response teams who roll through Skid Row in Jeeps to pass out supplies like clean smoking kits and naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug.

“Harm reduction was created by people who use drugs,” said the nonprofit’s Aurora Morales. “And everything that we do reflects what they need.”

On a recent afternoon, Floyd Howard Jr. folded squares of clean tin foil to be packed into kits for fentanyl smokers, as part of a campus work program.

“People that smoke fentanyl, they use the foil to put their drug on and smoke it,” Howard said. “So it's safer to get this from them than to just use some off the ground or something that's not clean.”

Howard added that he’s seen supplies like these save countless lives, including his own.

“If it wasn't for these people, a lot of people would be dead,” he said. “I have a whole lot of people that I met downtown here that passed from overdose.”

An unhoused couple who go by “Porkchop” and “Angel” prepare to visit the Skid Row Care Campus to take their first showers in months. Both had recently taken long-acting injectable doses of buprenorphine to quit using fentanyl, after years of daily use.

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Building community

The care campus sits beside the Umeya Apartments, a 175-unit supportive housing complex managed by the nonprofit Little Tokyo Service Center. Representatives say tenants will start moving in this month.

Most of the site’s neighbors are also homeless services providers. But some business owners complain of increased loitering and drug use outside the campus gates.

“ A lot of people don't want to come here anymore just because the street is so bad and they're scared,” said one representative from a nearby business, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. “ They should be helping people get off drugs instead of helping them do drugs.”

Morales of Homeless Healthcare L.A. said she’s working on partnerships with local businesses, including sending work program participants to clean up debris in alleyways.

Many unhoused Skid Row residents say they’re frequently denied service and restroom access at local businesses. Some go days without a proper meal and weeks or even months without a shower.

That’s why the care campus is a refuge.

“ They cater to everybody, and they're not biased about anything,” said Lisa Parizo, a formerly unhoused Skid Row resident who visits the space daily. “If you come in with a dirty shirt, dirty pants, they don't care. They're not gonna give you any less attention.”

It’s too early to tell how the care campus may transform this section of Skid Row.

Months after opening, most people living on Skid Row’s streets still haven’t heard of the campus, said resident councilmember Dwight Wilson, whose responsibilities include evangelizing for the site.

“I haven't run into too many people that have actually been there,” said Wilson. “I'm usually letting them know for the first time.”

Wilson has been living in transitional housing in Skid Row for the past year, since getting out of prison. He saw a listing for this opportunity a few months ago and applied.

He said he’s learned a lot about his neighborhood during the last few months on the job.

“When I was sent down here, I was really upset,” Wilson said. “But actually being down here has been a very humbling experience for me. What I learned is that it is actually a community.”

Hackers stole personal and demographic information about millions of California public school students in a data breach revealed Friday by the California Department of Education.

Hackers allegedly accessed the information through the company ETS, which conducts standardized testing, including the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress tests that start in third grade. Between May 22 and Sept. 18, 2026, an “unauthorized party” copied student information files, according to the CDE website.

However, ETS’ investigation did not find that the information has been made public.

What information was taken?

The breach exposed the information of 5.7 million students currently enrolled in transitional kindergarten through high school and those enrolled since 2023. Students who have left California since 2006 without notifying the state that they transferred to another school are also affected. That information could include:

• Student names, birthdays, addresses and schools
• Statewide student ID numbers (SSID)
• Demographic information, including race or ethnicity, gender, country of origin and English learner status
• A student’s disability and related academic support 
• Whether a student is low-income or unhoused 
• Statewide testing results

The breach is not reported to include:

• Parent or guardian information 
• Social Security or driver’s license numbers
• Financial information

ETS is working with cybersecurity experts and law enforcement and is monitoring whether the students’ information appears publicly.

The California Department of Education is also collaborating with state cybersecurity experts and reviewing whether ETS complied with data security and requirements included in its contract with the state. The state has also set up a website with more information.

How to get help

ETS is emailing and sending letters to affected students and families to notify them of the breach and offer two years of free identity protection services. Separate services are available for minors and adults — both have a March 19, 2027 deadline to apply.

It’s important to know that not getting notified does not necessarily mean a student’s data is safe. Families can call a dedicated helpline, 833-931-8488, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Twenty-eight immigrants from across California are facing federal charges alleging they illegally registered to vote or voted in California elections, federal prosecutors announced Monday in the Trump administration’s latest effort to imply California election rolls are riddled with fraudulent voters.

The charges come days after federal authorities filed a lawsuit against state and Los Angeles County election officials that seeks to force elections officials not to count up to 20,000 registered voters’ ballots because federal prosecutors suspect those voters could be non-citizens.

“Today’s charges demonstrate why that lawsuit is so important,” Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters. “It’s about preventing voter fraud that cancels out the votes of U.S. citizens. Enforcing federal law increases the integrity of elections.”

McCotter said federal prosecutors filed a motion urging the judge overseeing the lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles to order state officials to segregate the ballots that prosecutors suspect may have already been mailed to noncitizens.

State officials have brushed off the allegations.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week called the Trump administration’s voter fraud hunt “a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”

He said the prosecutors’ request to throw out ballots “should scare the hell out of every American.”

“We will continue to carry out free and fair elections in the Golden State — and call out this authoritarian as he tries every play in the dictator’s playbook,” Newsom said in a statement.

The announcement comes just 15 days before the Nov. 3 election in which Californians are already deciding on a new governor, 14 statewide ballot measures and several competitive races that will be key to which party controls Congress.

It’s part of a national push by the Trump administration to find examples of noncitizens voting illegally in elections. Independent experts and state election officials say that voter fraud is exceedingly rare, despite claims from President Donald Trump and his allies that it happens on such a massive scale as to sway elections in Democrats’ favor.

Federal prosecutors said all of the 28 foreign nationals who face charges are lawful permanent residents, otherwise known as green card holders. That means they are legally allowed to stay in the country but they are not citizens and are not allowed to vote in elections.

The defendants live in cities around the state from Los Angeles County to Sacramento. Of them, 22 are accused of voting in at least one election including as recently as the June primary; five only registered to vote and one submitted a provisional ballot in 2020, prosecutors say.

Essayli said that in the last two months, federal prosecutors have charged around 113 noncitizens in 20 states with illegal voting and registration offenses.

The arrests represent just a miniscule fraction of registered voters. For example, more than 9.4 million Californians cast ballots in the June primary election.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who oversees prosecutors in Los Angeles, said the federal government may charge state election officials with crimes if they allowed noncitizens to vote.

“They are being complicit in noncitizens voting in our elections,” Essayli said. “And as they were warned last week, not only is it a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences for that conduct if they knowingly process ballots from noncitizens once we've informed them who the noncitizens are.”

The charges come weeks after federal investigators issued grand jury subpoenas to Los Angeles elections officials seeking information on registered voters.

Federal prosecutors also sought information on registered voters in San Diego County, the news outlet inewsource reported, as well as Orange County, according to records obtained last week by CalMatters.

The Department of Homeland Security recently claimed that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls; they sent the state the names of only 185 voters. Nevada officials confirmed they were all U.S. citizens.

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

Joey Quiñones grew up in East Los Angeles, , where cumbia, punk and oldies soul could all be heard within two blocks. That mix shaped the sound he's built with his band, Thee Sinseers, and on his own. This year, he's out with two very different albums — the band's Love Stories and his solo album, Inna Soul Steady Situation. And most recently, he brought it all back with hometown shows at The Wiltern this past Saturday and Pacific Electric on Sunday.

Quiñones says the sounds of East L.A. are baked into his music.

"You wake up in the morning, and your mom would be cleaning to cumbia, and you'd hear it blasting from the other yards," Quiñones says. "You'd hear the local neighborhood band practicing their punk rock songs. Then you get to the street, and you hear all the oldies with the lowriders on Whittier Boulevard. It's everywhere. We can't sit down and not write a song that doesn't incorporate stuff like that, whether it be the singing or the horn section or the guitar playing. It's always gonna be subliminally in there." 

Quiñones says  Thee Sinseers came together almost by accident, when he accepted a dare to sing. But he knew the band had potential when they started getting paid.

"When we made $100. There was a time when that's really what it was," Quiñones says. "The community of musicians that we have has always supported each other in anything. So to be able to kind of do something where we were able to support our families and support each other was the key thing to really take it seriously. When you don't owe money, then you're doing something.”

The band's new album includes a song called "Let's Fall in Love Again," in which Quiñones admits past mistakes. He says that kind of honesty is the key to his songwriting.

“Life has been the teacher in all this,” Quiñones says. “Sitting down and honestly writing honesty, that's the key to, I don't wanna say soul music, but just good music and just music in general. When you make anything, you put honesty in it, because people know when you're kinda full of it. That's the biggest thing: being able to sit down and reflect and admit faults and admit to the life-changing and getting used to it and adjusting to it.”

Ahead of this past weekend's homecoming, Quiñones admitted that it was a little nerve-racking after touring the world.

"I was really excited about it months ago," he said. "But now it's getting closer and I just want things to be perfect. We're all so excited to play for our families and our friends, so coming home and being able to do that properly is the focus right now for all of us."

Stephen Richer no longer runs elections in the fourth-largest county in the country.

But for the rest of his life, he'll remember the feeling when polls closed on an election night.

More than a million ballots staring at him and his staff. Every moment that passes without them fully counted means another conspiracy theory sprouting online.

"Those days, those were hell for me," said Richer, a Republican who served as the clerk and recorder for Arizona's Maricopa County. "You'd have a limited number of workers, and you'd have a limited amount of space, and you'd be doing everything that you possibly could. … And yet you have everyone blowing up your phone, everyone saying that you're incompetent or corrupt or worse."

This midterm year, election officials in competitive congressional districts will face that same pressure.

But they will also face a hard reality: that those races might not be called until days after Election Day.

Here's an FAQ on why that is, and what it could mean this year.

Why do we know the results immediately in some places, and in others it takes days or weeks?

It comes down to the margin of victory.

Which sounds strange, since who wins an election and by how much shouldn't impact how long it takes election officials to count ballots.

But the reality is what most Americans think of as "election results" — the winners announced on election nights across TV networks and social media — are not the result of all ballots being counted, but rather, races being called by news organizations that determine the winners based on a state or district's demographics and initial returns. (NPR relies on The Associated Press for its race calls.)

Those determinations come a lot faster when races aren't close.

"Margins matter," said Richer, who noted that in recent elections, there has been a lot less scrutiny on Utah than there has been on his home state of Arizona, or certain contests in California, despite the states counting votes at similar speeds.

"In Utah you can call all the races very quickly because the Republicans there have high margins," Richer said.

That gives the illusion of elections there being complete, but no state is done counting ballots on election night, even if it seems that way because notable races are called early.

So you're saying the timing of results isn't at all tied to vote-counting speed?

Not exactly.

The closer the race, the more election analysts need to see before they can make a call. So the faster states count ballots, the faster those determinations can be made.

This is why the longest wait times every election usually come from places that have competitive races and which also count slowly.

Like, California?

Exactly. California has become the poster child for long results times because of both those factors: a bevy of competitive congressional districts, which help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House, and a vote count that's been among the slowest in the nation.

Add in that President Trump, the most prominent purveyor of election misinformation in the country, has long targeted the liberal California, and experts see a perfect storm for false voting narratives.

"It's progressive, it likes mail ballots, it gets [postmarked] mail ballots after Election Day," Richer said. "It just all adds up to a fairly incendiary situation."

Charles Stewart, an elections expert at MIT, put it more simply.

"California just has a big target on its back," said Stewart.

California's slow vote counting caused a lot of conspiracy theorizing during the state's June primary. Is this fall going to be a rerun?

Kim Alexander is cautiously optimistic that won't be the case.

She runs the California Voter Foundation, which has been advocating for ways to speed up California's vote tally without giving up the state's generous voting access policies, like mailing every active registered voter a ballot.

"We have all these amazing rights and opportunities that we give to our voters, and the price we're paying is a longer vote count," Alexander told NPR. "But that doesn't mean that it has to be this long."

An election worker processes ballots for the California state primary at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on June 5.

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The single biggest cause for California's slow count comes from a phenomenon Alexander calls "the pig in the python" problem: a logjam of millions of vote-by-mail ballots getting returned on Election Day that need to be processed.

Those ballots take longer to count than in-person votes, as officials need to deal with envelopes and verify signatures to make sure mail ballots are cast by the people they're supposed to be cast by.

Some counties see up to 50% of their vote-by-mail ballots turned in on Election Day, Alexander said, which means processing work doesn't even begin until later in the week.

"I can't tell you how many people who are informed and engaged and … when I tell them that the cause for the long vote count is voters holding on to their ballots to Election Day and turning them in, they look at me and they're like, 'That's what I do,'" Alexander said. "And I'm like, 'I know! You're part of the problem!'"

The state allocated $40 million to speeding up its counting this year, and part of that money is going to voter education.

Alexander is optimistic that once voters learn they can play a role in speeding up the process by voting earlier, or by utilizing other voting methods that allow for quicker counting, they will respond.

"California has been beaten up by this president for over a decade over our election process, and it's gotten pretty worrisome," Alexander said. "I think that California voters, if they feel they can do something to respond to that, many will take action."

To that point, research conducted earlier this year found that when voters in California's San Joaquin County received postcards urging them to vote earlier, they were more likely to meet the recommended deadline that allowed for election-night counting.

Alexander noted one more change that could mean less spotlight on California this year: fewer competitive House districts.

Ahead of the 2022 elections, the state had nine districts that the Cook Political Report considered competitive. But this year, in part because voters approved a mid-cycle gerrymander to respond to gerrymanders in Republican-controlled states, the state has just three.

That makes it less likely the entire country will be waiting on California to know who controls the House.

OK, anywhere else we should be watching when it comes to results speed?

Using the formula discussed earlier (competitive races + slow vote counting), it's impossible not to look at Alaska.

According to data from the MIT Election Lab, Alaska was the last state in 2024 to reach 95% of its ballots counted.

Election Day was Nov. 5 that year, but the state's lone House race — which Republican Nicholas Begich won by fewer than 10,000 votes — wasn't called by the AP until Nov. 20.

This year, polling shows a tight Alaska Senate race. That means, if results fall a certain way in other states, the entire country could be waiting weeks to know which party will control the U.S. Senate next year.
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