The Brief

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The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido, north San Diego County.

But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.

National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.

Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.

“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.

The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.

This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.

Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.

Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”

Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.

“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there's a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.

The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.

There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.

Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.

“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”

A fireproof home?

Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.

Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”

Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.

In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home.

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A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.

Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.

There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.

Pilots and programs

The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.

The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.

The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.

The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.

Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.

This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.

An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.

That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.

“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”

The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.

Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.

“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”

Locals step up

Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening program, some cities are trying to fill the gaps.

In 2020, Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention program. The program shells out roughly $20 million each year on individualized home safety assessments, home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation route clearing operations.

In the city of Novato, the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town. Homeowners can apply for matching grants — up $1,500 for home hardening and $1,000 for brush clearing.

Sometimes that’s enough to cover the cost of the work. Vent screens aren’t expensive, and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves.

Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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But often the grants aren’t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work. In Novato at least, a financial nudge is often all that people need, said Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood. According to data collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year, the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects; homeowners spend four times that amount.

“(Novato homeowners) are getting pressure from the insurance companies, they’re seeing, year after year, major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes,” Osgood said. “They are highly motivated.”

Where Marin County is offering carrots, other cities are using sticks. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley just passed its own “zone zero” regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants, wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends. The new policy will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines.

That’s a few years ahead of the rest of the state. Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific “zone zero” regulations for all high hazard areas, something a state law directed them to do by 2023. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to “accelerate” its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year. The most recent draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply.

'Do this or you’re done'

Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.

“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.

But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.

Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.

A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.

California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.

That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.

An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.

“It's a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”

The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.

The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.

“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.

Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.

“Part of what we're trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”

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

Black people were “grossly overrepresented” in the overall total of those targeted by hate crimes last year in Los Angeles County and made up 51% of racial hate crime victims, according to a new report from the county Commission on Human Relations.

The annual Hate Crime Report, released Thursday, found there were 345 anti-Black crimes recorded in 2024 — the highest number ever recorded since the commission started reporting on hate crimes in 1980.

Last year also saw the largest number of anti-transgender crimes ever documented in the area — 102 — of which “a staggering” 95% were violent, the report states.

In all, there were 1,355 hate crimes reported in 2024, the second highest number of cases ever recorded, following the highest number of hate crimes the previous year prior.

“These numbers remain unprecedented, reflecting both the alarming persistence of hate and the Commission’s ongoing efforts to respond and take action against hate,” the report states.

Hate crimes and incidents

The report has numerous examples of hate crimes.

In one documented case, a trans woman was standing outside her home with her boyfriend when an unknown assailant approached them and called them transphobic and homophobic insults, according to the report. The situation escalated when the attacker struck the victim with a rock on the neck, head and arms.

“Unfortunately, we live in a society where there is a lot of ignorance and a lot of resistance to accepting the fact that transpeople exist in this world,” said Bamby Salcedo, who is with the Trans Latin@Coalition.

She attended the news conference where the report was released.

“We also have a current administration that has been dedicated to targeting our community directly,” said Salcedo, referring to the Trump administration.

In another case, a school principal reported that a classroom was vandalized and ransacked. Inside the classroom, walls, ceilings and equipment were defaced with the word “NAZI” and the N-word racial slur written in pink marker, according to the report.

Second to Black people, the largest group targeted was the LGBT community. The report found 255 crimes motivated by sexual orientation, with nearly three quarters targeting gay men.

Religious groups were the third most commonly targeted by hate crimes. While religious crimes decreased 13%, they still accounted for nearly 260 incidents. Jewish people were the largest religious group to be targeted by far. They accounted for 80% of all victims.

In one case in the West San Fernando Valley, a 15-year-old girl at a high school got into a verbal altercation with a male classmate. He called her a religious slur and punched her multiple times, according to the report.

More on the data

Last year had the highest numeric increase of violent crimes in L.A. County from 464 to 508 — a 9% increase. Seventy-five percent of racial crimes were of a violent nature, according to the report.

The most common criminal offense was simple assault followed by vandalism, aggravated assault and intimidation.

Crimes in which anti-immigrant slurs and taunts were used decreased 31% to 85 last year, the report states. It does not capture hate crimes for this year, when the region saw widespread immigration raids and heightened anti-Latino rhetoric by President Donald Trump and others.

Officials predicted an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Latino crimes this year.

“We’re probably, unfortunately, going to come out higher for Latino-based hate crimes in relation to the immigration issue that’s going on right now in the region,” LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said at the news conference.

Other takeaways from the report:

• Anti-Latino crimes decreased by 1% to 143.
  
• Crimes targeting Middle Eastern people sharply increased from 22 to 48, the highest count ever in this report.
  
• Crimes with evidence of white supremacist ideology decreased 42% to 123, comprising 9% of all hate crimes.
  
• Reported hate crimes taking place at schools grew 6% from 139 to 147. This is the highest count ever documented in the report. These hate crimes included those taking place in K-12 schools, as well as college and university campuses.
  
• Anti-woman crimes grew 75% from 20 to 35.
  

The Department of Justice has instructed inspectors to stop evaluating prisons and jails using standards designed to protect transgender, intersex and gender-nonconforming people from sexual violence, according to an internal memo obtained by NPR.

This population is uniquely vulnerable to attacks while incarcerated, data shows, and advocates say the change will put such people in even more danger.

The memo explains that DOJ is in the process of revising federal standards related to the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in order to align with President Trump's executive order on "gender ideology extremism." The Jan. 20 executive order asserts that the United States recognizes only two sexes: male and female.

According to the DOJ memo, while the revision process is underway, detention centers that undergo PREA audits will no longer be inspected using standards specifically designed to keep LGBTQ and intersex people safe. The facilities include federal prisons, state prisons and jails, juvenile detention centers and immigration detention centers. These inspectors, referred to as auditors, are not employed by the DOJ, but are hired by corrections agencies or by individual facilities. The DOJ certifies the auditors and can decertify them.

The DOJ did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the memo. But this is the latest policy move by the Trump administration that removes legal protections for trans people — particularly those who are incarcerated. In his first few days in office, Trump upended long-standing federal policies that would allow incarcerated trans women to be housed in a facility that aligns with their gender identity. Trump has also signed an executive order banning transgender troops from serving openly in the military and another restricting gender-affirming care for minors. These orders have faced a host of legal challenges and are still being fought in court.

PREA mandates regular audits for prisons and jails. Those audits are among the few oversight tools for evaluating whether detention centers follow laws meant to stop rape, harassment and retaliation.

Auditors visit facilities regularly to ensure the staff and officials are doing everything they are supposed to under PREA to prevent sexual abuse and harassment. They interview staff and inmates, tour the facilities and check existing procedures.

Linda McFarlane, executive director of Just Detention International, said this rollback "will immediately put people in danger." JDI is a human rights group dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention. McFarlane also was involved in advocating for the passage of PREA in 2003.

"It's going to make people less safe," she said. "And when facilities are less safe for the most vulnerable and marginalized, they're less safe for everybody."

In practice, the memo says auditors will no longer review whether facilities house transgender people based on their gender identity and on a case-by-case basis. Among other changes, the memo also says auditors should no longer consider whether sexual assaults were motivated by gender-identity bias.

A major 2015 survey from the criminal justice group Black and Pink found that LGBTQ prisoners were over six times as likely to be sexually assaulted as the general prison population. This is based on survey responses from more than 1,110 inmates. According to Brenda Smith, a professor at American University Washington College of Law and director of The Project on Addressing Prison Rape, the available data doesn't show the whole picture and that rate could be higher.

(In 2003, Smith was appointed to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which helped develop these very standards.)

She said the current changes laid out in the memo ignore this grim reality.

In the spring, the DOJ made massive funding cuts to crime-victim advocacy programs across the nation, including the National PREA Resource Center — the organization that trains auditors, tracks the outcomes of investigations and provides resources to victims and auditors. More than 360 grants were cut in April, but funding was reinstated for many of them following media reports of the cuts.

The DOJ at the time told NPR that it was "focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off of the streets, and protecting American institutions from toxic DEI and sanctuary city policies. Discretionary funds that are no longer aligned with the administration's priorities are subject to review and reallocation."

The standards designed to protect inmates from sexual violence were developed after years of bipartisan work. They were created in response to overwhelming data, anecdotal evidence and a landmark Human Rights Watch report that showed sexual violence was, and continues to be, a serious problem behind bars.

The most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in 2020, correctional administrators reported 36,264 allegations of sexual victimization in prisons, jails and other adult correctional facilities. The allegations included incidents of sexual violence, harassment and misconduct carried out by inmates against other inmates and by staff members against inmates. The report said 2,351 of those allegations — a rate of 1.2 incidents per 1,000 inmates — were substantiated after investigation.

Lingering confusion

McFarlane's group, Just Detention International, says the DOJ memo lays out the government's plan to permanently revise the PREA standards and marks the first time the administration has publicly indicated what requirements it aims to remove.

But until the revisions are finalized through the ongoing rulemaking process, the memo instructs auditors to mark those standards as "not applicable" during audits — even though the rules technically remain in effect, according to the memo.

In a statement, the National Association of PREA Coordinators, a professional organization for coordinators who ensure agencies' compliance with the law, said that since the DOJ has not finalized any new regulations related to PREA, the current standards remain unchanged.

In the absence of a separate state or municipal law, the statement said, the DOJ memo allows each corrections agency or detention facility "to continue following the regulation or, if they choose, to ignore it."

The memo allows the DOJ "to implement the President's policy while allowing state and local governments to determine how to best meet the needs of incarcerated people who are transgender and gender diverse," according to the statement.

"Whether a system adopts a binary sex approach or one that recognizes a spectrum of gender, we cannot forsake our primary responsibility to keep the most vulnerable individuals in our care safe from those who present a threat of sexual abuse or sexual harassment," the statement said.

It's unclear how the DOJ plans to enforce the memo, and it's already sparked some confusion for at least one auditor.

Kenneth L. James, a PREA auditor for detention centers in multiple states, told NPR in an email that the memo makes the auditors' jobs "both more confusing and more difficult."

He said it will affect how the auditors are trained. "Some auditors have been auditing for over 10 years and conduct audits systematically," James said. "By removing these elements, auditors will have to reevaluate how they are auditing and may miscalculate compliance due to these unexpected changes."

But because PREA has been in place for more than 20 years and the prevalence of sexual abuse within the prison system is well-known, James said, "I believe and trust" that facilities "will do what is best for the incarcerated population."
Copyright 2025 NPR

The concert-promoting agency Sid the Cat has become a key part of Los Angeles’s indie music scene over the last 10 years. Their shows often aren’t in full-time concert spaces, but in historic buildings and other unorthodox places.

Keeping with that tradition, the Sid the Cat Auditorium, which holds its first show Thursday night, is in an old South Pasadena elementary school built in 1931.

About Sid the Cat

Music fans may know Sid the Cat’s place in the independent music ecosystem, but if you don’t, here’s just one anecdote: Pasadena’s own Phoebe Bridgers met her future collaborator Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes after cofounder Kyle Wilkerson put the two of them on the same bill before Bridgers became nationally known.

Sid the Cat books shows in venues of all sizes, from the tiny Permanent Records Roadhouse all the way to the Hollywood Bowl — and they book artists big and small to fill them.

“ Me, as the booker, I try to remain curious to new sounds and new music and new songwriters,” Wilkerson said. “It's the same when we come into a space. We get geeked on putting on an event that maybe nobody has ever done a show in this room.”

Wilkerson said the new auditorium reminds the team most of the midsized venues, including Highland Park Ebell Club, where they booked some of their first ever shows.

This bar area next to the Sid the Cat Auditorium will be open even on nights when there aren't any shows.

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The new venue

The venue has two main spaces, a main auditorium and a side bar area. The bar will host DJs nightly, even when there’s no main concert going on.

Besides being concert promoters, the Sid the Cat team are history buffs. A case in the bar area shows off historical documents from the building and mementos from the 10 years of Sid the Cat concerts.

One of the many mementos Sid the Cat has given out over the years.

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“ Our dream was always to have a trophy case and to celebrate art, the way that people celebrate sports and other, other major events,” Sid the Cat cofounder Brandon Gonzalez said.

Another thing that’s on display in the main room: four murals from Lucile Lloyd, a prominent 20th century decorative artist. Wilkerson had a hunch based on historical documents that her art was somewhere in the elementary school, but couldn’t corroborate it even after consulting with the University of California, Santa Barbara, which hosts her collections.

These murals, the only surviving Lucile Lloyd murals on this site, were originally covered when the Sid the Cat team bought the venue.

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It was a lucky rainstorm that partially revealed the murals under some paneling in the rafters, Wilkerson said. The murals are now on display, along with a plaque commemorating Lloyd.

The venue has a few modern touches, too, including a new sound system and a pickleball court on the floor with the Sid the Cat logo in the middle. They even have a net for staff and artists to play during off hours.

The Sid the Cat team said they long dreamed of a basketball court with their logo in the middle, but due to space issues they settled on a pickleball court.

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“I hope people show up”

Concertgoers might notice a couple slogans around the venue. One is "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," a nod to the motto of Wilkerson’s grandfather’s bottling company. The other one is, “I hope people show up.”

Sid the Cat's cofounders.

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Gonzalez said that’s because in the live music industry, it’s never guaranteed people will come out on any given night.

“ It truly is hard for people to show up and when they do, it's really beautiful and it's powerful,” Gonzalez said. “I love that uniqueness about each night that we put on shows and if it's raining or there's something going on, it's like, we truly don't know if people are gonna show up.”

Upcoming shows

The venue’s first show, featuring the L.A. bands Peel Dream Magazine and Goon, is Thursday, Dec. 4.

You can see the full upcoming lineup on Sid the Cat’s website.