The Brief

When Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last month that would have supported sober homeless housing, his reason left many scratching their heads.

Newsom said Assembly Bill 255, which would have allowed cities to use up to 10% of their state funds to pay for “recovery housing,” was unnecessary. That’s because using state funds for sober housing is already allowed, the governor said. He said “recent guidance” makes that clear.

That was a big surprise to Assemblymember Matt Haney, who had spent the past two years working on the bill Newsom was now saying had been moot all along. Haney had been under the impression that California’s “housing first” rule — which dictates that homelessness programs offer housing to people regardless of their sobriety, mental health, employment, etc. — meant sober housing wasn’t eligible for state funds.

When CalMatters asked about the “recent guidance” that allows the state to fund sober housing, the governor’s office sent a link to a 20-page document. No one CalMatters spoke to had ever seen that document before. Neither had Haney, anyone in his office, or the other stakeholders involved in his bill, including the service providers trying to build more sober housing, he said.

While the document was dated July, 2025, it wasn’t published online until Oct. 2 — the day after Newsom’s veto.

“I think it’s a terrible bureaucratic failure,” Haney said of the lack of communication. Having the state and the Legislature work together, rather than on separate parallel policies, would have saved everyone time and resources, he said.

“Why didn’t anybody say anything over the course of two years,” Haney asked, “not just to me, but to the cities, counties and providers who desperately wanted to open these beds?”

The California Interagency Council on Homelessness, which has been working on the document since late 2024, put the blame on Haney’s office for not reaching out. A preliminary draft was publicly available earlier this year as part of a February council meeting, said Executive Officer Meghan Marshall.

The new sober housing guidelines come at a time when the state is facing political pressure from some facets to shift its approach to homeless housing – both to embrace drug-free housing and to turn at least some of its focus from permanent housing that accepts everyone to temporary shelter that may come with strings attached.

A group of legislators, city housing staffers and nonprofits recently took a trip to San Antonio, Texas to tour a massive homeless shelter there, and returned with ideas on how to beef up California’s shelter capacity — which some on the trip say has been neglected as a casualty of California’s strict preference for long-term housing. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s administration has signalled that it will shift federal money away from permanent housing and into temporary shelter, while also imposing conditions such as sobriety. California might have to get on board with that agenda, or risk losing federal funds.

While few California Democrats are supportive of anything Trump does, the continued prevalence of encampments on the streets has convinced some that the state should change its tactics.

“We need to break the logjam of the dogma that says that only permanent housing is acceptable,” said Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas. “Because what we’re de facto saying is that people are going to stay on the streets until we’ve built enough permanent housing or market-rate housing, and neither is on track to meet the need anywhere in the near term.”

But that push has some service providers worried that, in an environment where homelessness funding keeps getting cut, focusing on sober housing and temporary housing will mean less money for the permanent housing that ends people’s homelessness.

“The current trend shifts away from solving the actual lack of a home and focuses on some people’s associated issues,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination Home.

The debate over sober, temporary, or permanent housing doesn’t address the underlying income inequality that causes many Californians to lose housing in the first place and prevents their being able to afford housing afterward.

The deal with sober housing

California has required state-funded homeless housing be “housing first” since 2016, meaning it gets people into a permanent home as quickly as possible without forcing them to jump through additional hoops. The idea is that once someone is safely housed, it becomes much easier for them to get sober, find a job or take care of other issues.

Haney argues the model prevented the state from funding sober housing, which he said could be lifesaving for people who are overcoming an addiction and don’t want to live next to neighbors using drugs.

The new state guidance says sober housing can be housing first, if it’s done right. It must be the client’s choice to get sober and live in recovery housing, and they must have other local options that don’t require sobriety. In addition, sober housing providers can’t evict someone for relapsing. If a client decides they no longer want to live in sober housing, the provider must connect them to another housing option.

The guidance is more permissive than Haney’s bill. While the bill would have capped state funding on sober housing at 10%, the state guidance has no limit. But Haney worries it’s too strict in other ways. If housing providers can’t evict someone for using drugs or alcohol, they can’t run effective sober housing, Haney said.

“There are some questions as to whether anyone is actually going to step up and do this under the guidelines as written,” he said.

The state guidelines come with no money to open new sober housing beds.

Without extra funding, as more money goes to sober housing, that means less money for low-barrier housing, said Loving, who worries that shift will move the state backward. Sober housing and drug testing were the norm in the 1980s and 1990s, but people still overdosed in those environments, she said.

“Drugs were always present, even in sober living environments,” Loving said. “And that did not increase our housing outcomes. What increased our housing outcomes was the availability of actual houses for people to transition into.”

Temporary or permanent housing?

Several dozen California legislators, city housing workers and nonprofit providers traveled to Texas last month to visit a massive homeless shelter in San Antonio. Haven for Hope fits about 1,500 people on one 22-acre campus — meaning that almost anyone in the city who wants to can sleep indoors. Most of those people are required to stay sober in order to keep their spot, and healthcare, counseling and other services are offered on site.

That program is a sharp contrast from the “discouraging results” of California’s homelessness strategy, said Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from San Jose who went on the trip. He’s frustrated with what he sees as California’s neglect of temporary shelter. New programs such as Newsom’s Homekey only fund permanent housing. So did the Measure A affordable housing bond in Santa Clara County.

Long-term housing is the only way to resolve someone’s homelessness, which is why it has been the gold standard in the state. But it can take years to build, and voters aren’t always patient.

“If you push all your chips to the middle of the table on permanent supportive housing, you start to lose your constituency because constituents are coming by in their cars every day and seeing more tents and more illegal encampments,” Cortese said. “And their thought process is, ‘I thought we just put a billion dollars into eradicating homelessness. What’s going on? Why is it getting worse?’”

An illustration is displayed at The Salvation Army Silicon Valley groundbreaking ceremony for their HOPE Community Safe and Sober Overnight and Transitional Housing program in San Jose on Nov. 3, 2025.

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Land is scarce and expensive in California, which would make it hard to replicate a shelter as large as Haven for Hope. But city staff in San Jose are looking into whether some version of it can be done there, said Housing Director Erik Soliván, who was on the Texas trip.

While it may seem unusual for the Golden State to look to Texas in search of advice on social services, Californians have been awed by Haven for Hope for years. CalMatters wrote about the phenomenon in 2023.

The Texas shelter has made some changes since then. About 1,600 people slept in the shelter in 2023, and the facility served 85% of the city’s homeless population.

But even that giant facility couldn’t hold everyone. The space was overcrowded, with hundreds of people sleeping on the floor on mats inches apart. Haven for Hope had to pause enrollments and put new rules in place to limit who can come in. In the last fiscal year, the population was down to an average of 1,453 people per night. About 60% of those are in a program that regularly conducts drug and breathalyzer tests.

California will have to do more to embrace that style of shelter if it doesn’t want to get left behind by the federal administration, said Elizabeth Funk, founder and CEO of shelter provider DignityMoves, who went on the Texas trip.

The Trump administration appears poised to divert money away from permanent housing and into temporary housing that comes with sobriety and other requirements. But we won’t know the extent of that change until the government shutdown ends.

“The federal government is going to come down with a bunch of money for things that don’t allow drug use,” Funk said, “and that needs to fit in our system.”

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

This story first appeared first on LA Local.

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels. 

The beloved skating rink shuttered in 2021 as part of a downward trend in places where you can groove on four wheels under luminescent disco balls and hot tunes. 

“I also was at Skate Land in Northridge on its last day, and I went to Skate Depot in Cerritos on its last day,” Joseph told The LA Local. 

The closing of these skate hubs struck a nerve for Joseph, who grew up in San Diego and is the son of two professional skaters — Maureen Joseph and Timothy Carter — from the disco skating heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. 

It’s no wonder he felt a desire to open the Sunshine Skate Center in Inglewood to fill this void. His journey to open Sunshine, named after his parents’ old skating team, took three long years of hurdles and obstacles until finally opened on Sept. 4, 2025. 

A year of serving Inglewood

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.

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The rink celebrated its one-year anniversary this month.

 “Skating for a lot of people is their therapy. It’s their way that they cope with things. It’s the way that they navigate through things,” Joseph said, adding that he understood how these places once served as third spaces for Black L.A.

“I think it’s more than just skating,” he said. “I really understand skating as a place for community.”

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.

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On a Friday night this past summer, Joseph’s ethos was seen in action. 

Looking around the rink, the range of skaters varied widely in ability — from folks dance-skating to rolling backward, along with beginners using tools to help them on their first journey on wheels. Some were there with their families. Others were there with their friends. Spectators were delighted as they watched from outside the rink and the surrounding seating. 

The unapologetic free flow of joy was palpable. Joseph said that when he sees the impact on Inglewood’s youngest residents, the three years it took him to open the rink feels worth it.

“You have a lot of kids that are not physically active,” he explained. “We’re able to engage kids [to] have them off their phones for certain periods of time when they’re skating.”

The debate over the potential benefits and safety risks of accelerating artificial intelligence development reached a crescendo this month, as supporters and critics of the technology clashed over warnings that increasingly powerful AI could pose existential risks to humanity.

On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher-turned-whistleblower, publicly resigned from major AI firm Anthropic after a previous stint at OpenAI, accusing the companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon's claims supercharged an ongoing debate over the potential damage AI could wreak on society and prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI CEOs to call for a slowdown in AI development.

Over the past two months, companies including OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed multiple incidents in which their AI agents accessed the internet when they weren't supposed to and carried out unapproved activities. In OpenAI's case, swarms of agents worked together to hack the open-source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself, without alerting humans.

The debate over the safety of AI and whether and how it should be regulated is not a simple clash between two opposing sides. There are multiple factions with a variety of goals and assessments about the technology's promise, dangers and how it should be governed. Here are the main arguments shaping that debate.

Effective accelerationists and the tech right

Those who have an aggressively optimistic worldview of AI are often referred to as effective accelerationists (sometimes shortened to e/acc) — a term reflecting their belief that AI should be rapidly advanced.

People belonging to the faction are emphatically optimistic about AI and its future benefits to society. They believe that the technology can propel medical advancements, boost economic productivity, increase living standards and automate dangerous or undesirable work. To achieve this, they argue that AI development should be accelerated, not restricted.

Effective accelerationists' ideology overlaps with that of the "tech right" in that both camps wholeheartedly believe in accelerating AI development and deployment and minimize critics' concerns over safety and security.

However, the tech right takes a more nationalistic stance, championing U.S. dominance in the global AI race. Like effective accelerationists, they believe that AI research and deployment should be unencumbered by regulation, arguing that could slow innovation or allow adversarial governments such as China to overtake the U.S. in the AI race.

Venture capitalist David Sacks is one of the leading accelerationist voices in the AI safety debate and was President Trump's AI and cryptocurrency advisor.

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The tech right's philosophy is represented by figures such as former White House AI and cryptocurrency advisor David Sacks, whose views remain influential with the Trump administration. Other significant players include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The three founded the Leading the Future super PAC to support pro-AI political candidates, and campaign against those who advocate for regulation.

Andreessen also penned a 2023 widely-read blog post titled "Why AI Will Save the World," in which he claimed that fears of AI triggering mass unemployment are overstated. He argued that previous waves of automation ultimately created more jobs and economic activity than they eliminated, and the fears of existential risk are overblown.

Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are used by most AI companies, has emerged as one of the industry's leading voices pushing back against calls for a slowdown and urging a light regulatory approach.

Populist right

AI has exposed an ideological split within President Trump's political coalition. While Trump and his advisers overwhelmingly favor accelerating AI, parts of his MAGA base believe the powerful corporations he has aligned himself with could undermine the U.S. economy.

Figures including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have been vocal about potential job losses, the tech industry's political power, child safety and threats to traditional social and religious values.

This month, Bannon formed an unlikely partnership with independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to call for significant restrictions on AI development, government oversight and corporate accountability at the Pro-Human Assembly conference in Washington, D.C.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has sharply broken with the Trump administration around AI policy.

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Still, the two have differing stances on what any of those measures should look like. Sanders called for an immediate pause on AI development until clear safety rules are established by scientists, a permanent ban on the development of artificial "superintelligence" (AI systems that are more intelligent than humans in all domains), and an international treaty with China in an effort to avoid an AI arms race. Bannon, meanwhile, argued for slowing the pace of AI development, the formation of a national regulatory organization and cutting off China from U.S. AI technology.

"So why are we letting the Chinese Communist Party drive us? Oh, we have to do this or China wins," said Bannon in his speech at the event in Washington. "We should quarantine now every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party today. We should cut them off."

Safetyists

Safetyists are primarily concerned with the potential risks of the rapid advancement of AI. Their worries center on the possibility of catastrophic or existential outcomes, such as the death of humanity at the hands of autonomous machines.

High-profile members of the safetyist community include Geoffrey Hinton, who is commonly referred to as the "Godfather of AI" because of his pioneering work in deep learning that helped launch the modern era of AI. In recent years, Hinton, who previously worked at Google, has issued a series of warnings about existential risks associated with AI, particularly if an AI model surpasses human intelligence and becomes autonomous.

Another vocal AI safetyist is Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-author of AI 2027, a paper published last year that discusses how super-intelligent AI could lead to human extinction by the mid-2030s.

Effective altruists

Effective altruists (often shortened to "EA") generally believe in maximizing humanity's long-term welfare. The movement originally focused on material ways to reduce global poverty. But more recently, many EA thinkers have focused their concerns on the possibility of existential risks from advanced AI and other potential societal-scale disasters such as nuclear war, climate change and pandemics. They particularly worry about the consequences for future generations. People from the EA camp prioritize AI safety, alignment — which is the science of making sure AI systems behave in a way that is reflective of human values and in line with safety rules — and reducing the probability of catastrophic outcomes.

The key difference between EAs and safetyists is that EAs generally provide funding for AI safety research and risk mitigation, whereas safetyists are researchers and advocates undertaking AI safety work and publicly calling for regulation.

Other AI factions often derisively describe effective altruists as so-called "AI Doomers." EA has also become a focus of criticism from the Trump administration since Coxon's resignation from Anthropic.

"Americanism, not effective altruism. The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!" said one Defense Department post this month.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is associated with the effective altruists and argues for stronger regulations on AI.

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Well-known people in the EA movement include Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematical approaches to making advanced AI systems safe. He is also the author of Harry Potter fan fiction that helped popularize ideas associated with EA. Holden Karnofsky, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), an organization that funds causes central to the EA mission, including AI and biosecurity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is considered to be aligned with effective altruism. Karnofsky also works at Anthropic and is married to Daniela Amodei, who is a co-founder of Anthropic and the sister of Dario Amodei, the CEO.

Another high-profile supporter of the EA movement is Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded major cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In 2023, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the misuse of customer and investor funds and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

AI ethics

The AI ethics camp argues that society should focus on the harms AI is already causing, rather than on hypothetical existential risks. Some proponents contend that emphasizing existential threats from a hypothetical future superintelligence can serve as a distraction from the more immediate harms and accountability issues surrounding AI today.

AI ethicists' concerns include how AI systems can be biased due to the content of their training data, for example, the ways in which AI facial recognition or job application systems might perpetuate existing societal biases. They are also concerned with how AI could be used to exploit workers and to enable mass surveillance, as well as about the environmental costs of data centers, autonomous weapons and the concentration of power among technology companies.

A notable voice of the AI ethics faction is Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Gebru left the company in 2020 because of a dispute with the company over a research paper she wrote exposing problems with large language models (LLMs), including their tendency to generate harmful or misleading language.

AI as a normal technology

People belonging to the "AI as a Normal Technology" group reject both the utopian and dystopian narratives about AI. Instead, this faction sees AI as a powerful but ultimately normal technology, comparable to the internet or electricity. They believe the focus should be on understanding and regulating specific applications and harms instead of treating AI as an unprecedented threat or as a path to inevitable superintelligence.

Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. She and others in her faction argue that AI is more like a typical technology than others in the field believe.

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Notable people associated with this worldview include Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Li is famous for creating ImageNet, a vastly large dataset of images which provided the training data for large neural networks, which led to several major developments in AI.

Katie McQue's reporting is supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which is a grantee of Coefficient Giving. Neither Tarbell nor Coefficient have any editorial input into her work.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Angelenos looking up Saturday may have noticed a particularly striking sight — a vibrant sunset framed by clouds.

Tropical moisture coming in from far off the coast could explain it.

“One thing that might have played a role in making it look awfully nice yesterday was those high clouds that were moving in,” Robert Munroe, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. “The way the sun was hitting the high clouds made some bright yellows and oranges in the sky. That moisture is actually related to probably mostly Odalys.”

An early sunset at yesterday's "Be The Light" 5K event in Valencia last night.

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Odalys is the hurricane (since downgraded to a tropical storm) churning off the coast of Mexico, along with Hurricane Polo.

Neither is expected to make landfall here, but they're forecast to bring high surf, dangerous rip tides and potential flooding to coastlines already battered this month by Hurricane Marie.

The bright side is Munroe said those high clouds from yesterday will be sticking around through at least today, which could make for another pretty sunset this evening.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6 struck off the South Bay at about 8:40 a.m. and was reported as being felt as far as Oxnard.

The U.S. Geological Survey says it was centered about four miles west-southwest of Hermosa Beach. More than 1,500 people reported feeling it within the first hour after it struck. [You can report what you felt to the USGS.]

No significant damage has been reported, which is typical at this low of a magnitude.

The quake was below the threshold of 4.0 magnitude that triggers an alert on the ShakeAlert app.

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We have earthquake resources

We don't want to scare you, but the Big One is coming. We don't know when, but we know it'll be at least 44 times stronger than Northridge and 11 times stronger than the Ridgecrest quakes in 2019. To help you get prepared, we've compiled a handy reading list:

• Your guide to surviving the Big One
• For earthquakes, forget the 'go-bag.' Here's how to prepare
• How to not get life-threatening diarrhea after a major earthquake
• 10 earthquake-related questions to ask your landlord immediately
• How to prepare for an earthquake if you have a disability

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