The Brief

If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:

• How many unhoused people is the city moving into housing? 
• How many of those people are staying housed?
• How has this changed from the number of people housed last year?

For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.

For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.

We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.

Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:

• The data collection process for some housing programs left room for many errors and missing information, and there wasn’t a system in place to ensure accuracy.
• Data on people entering housing was collected separately by program, so it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was among people moving between programs or cycling in and out.  

Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.

We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.

The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.

Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.

L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

Tracking programs, not people's overall path

There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.

The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.

Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.

At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.

The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.

Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.

Program-oriented data answers questions like:

• How many times did people enter a particular housing program?
• How many times did people leave?
• What do numbers look like at specific shelters?

This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.

But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:

• How many people moved into housing across all programs this year?
• How many moved from one program to another? 
• How many returned to encampments? 
• How many left for other housing alternatives not provided by the government? 

Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.

“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”

The numbers themselves were often inaccurate

In fact, there were many data points we couldn’t get at all — and neither could the City Council for nearly the first half of the year. As we reported in April, the Bass administration said the numbers couldn’t be trusted.

For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.

The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.

Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.

According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.

When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.

Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.

Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”

Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.

The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown, one of the sites used as temporary housing for Inside Safe.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.

For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.

That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.

The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.

It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.

We're finally getting some clarity

Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.

Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.

They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.

As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.

They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.

But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.

There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.

However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.

What we know today

Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:

How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?

At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.

How many of those people are staying housed?

A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.

How has this changed from 2022?

The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:

• 21,694 people moved into temporary housing in 2023, up from 16,931 the year before
• 7,717 people moved into housing using vouchers in 2023, up from 5,223 the year before
• 3,551 people moved into new permanent housing units in 2023, up from approximately 1,361 the year before

This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.

Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:

• How many people are being moved from temporary housing into permanent housing, especially in Inside Safe?
• What is the retention rate and how does it compare to retention for 2023?

Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.

A room on the second floor of a Camarillo building is quickly filling with smoke. From the far end of the room, flames start to shoot across the ceiling.

While the flames and smoke are real, the danger is not.

This is the Ventura County Fire Department’s new Live Fire Training Complex. A firefighter is controlling the flames and smoke with what looks like a TV remote control.

The $32 million project includes live fire training buildings, a dedicated ladder training prop, and other facilities designed to give firefighters hands-on experience.

"This complex has a 'Class A' combustible burn building, which we are standing in now," said Ventura County Fire Department Training Chief Casey Rosdaile. "The 'Class B' building is propane-fed. This building allows us to train in real fire conditions and real fire behavior. That building (the 'Class B' building) allows us to do a lot more of the operational steps. There's always a gap between the simulated thing and a real thing, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible. That way, when someone trains, they aren't going to be the real thing and say that it's nothing like they practiced."

The buildings are made of concrete, so they won't be affected by the flames and smoke. The smoke kind that's used on movie shoots, so it doesn't leave clothing with the smoky smell like you get from a brush fire.

He added that the new facilities can help train firefighters, as well as other first responders, on ways to deal with a number of emergencies.

"These buildings can host anything from sheriff's operations to (simulated) structure fires, to search and rescue," said Rosdaile. "There are a million things you can do in here. You can train 50 to 60 firefighters at a time, so it really gives us a lot of flexibility."

The two new buildings are just part of the fire department’s fire training complex. It covers 22 acres of land on the southeast side of Camarillo Airport. There are nearly 18,000 square feet of indoor training space, with 32 training rooms.

The dedicated live fire training buildings give firefighters experience with scenarios that were often difficult and time-consuming to create.

"We would light the materials, and let the fire conditions and environment build, to create a realistic training environment, and then send the folks in to extinguish it," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "Then, we would have to clean it all out, and reset it, and start again. We would get a couple of burns a day done. Now, we're getting multiple burns an hour."

Gardner said it's a complex they've sought to create for years.

"This facility allows us to close the gap between training and reality. This allows us to expose our firefighters to as realistic an environment as we can repetitively, and under safe conditions."

Among the props at the facility is a vehicle chassis equipped with gas lines, which can be ignited, so firefighters can practice fighting those types of fires.

"This is our vehicle prop, and it lets us simulate fire. We can push the fire to different parts of the vehicle, so we can set it in the interior, in the cab, the wheel well, as well as the engine compartment," said Ventura County Fire Department Quartermaster Jake Finley. "It creates a good learning environment, with teachable moments. You can see in the background some of the old vehicles (we used to burn salvaged vehicles), and it was a really intensive process. We couldn't repeat it as quickly."

While the Ventura County Fire Department owns and operates the facility, the goal is for it to be used to train first responders from throughout the region. It’s already hosted firefighters from a number of other agencies in the county, as well as teams from neighboring counties.

When the war with Iran started, one of the top economic concerns globally was the slowdown of oil shipments. But there was another critical export that got stuck in the region when hostilities began: fertilizer.

Before the war, around one-third of the world's fertilizer transported by sea passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to UN Trade and Development. The waterway has become a shipping chokepoint in recent months.

With the strait closed, fertilizer shipments from the Persian Gulf slumped and prices rose, affecting countries all around the world that import fertilizer. The war also created a global shortage of natural gas, a key component in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

It caused a massive headache for U.S. farmers who were hit with higher fertilizer prices and limited availability just as they were deciding what to plant for the upcoming growing season.

But the costs borne by farmers don't necessarily get passed on to consumers, and food system experts say they're unlikely to have a major impact on the retail prices of fruit and vegetables.

"Consumers are going to see higher food prices come September to January, once harvests start coming in, and the few months thereafter," said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Very little of that is going to be directly attributable to fertilizer."

That's because food inflation is generally driven by larger factors affecting multiple parts of the food supply chain, such as fewer workers and high fuel costs.

US farmers are rethinking their plans

About one-third of the fertilizer used by U.S. farmers is imported, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group. TFI Vice President of Public Affairs Christopher Glen said little of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

"But we get impacted in a big way because the fertilizer market is global," Glen said over email. "Even if those tons from the Mideast aren't coming to the US, they are still tons that have been removed from the market and need to be made up elsewhere. That's where the pressure comes from."

An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released in April reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this season.

Some farmers are more vulnerable to price swings than others. Producers of corn and wheat, which rely heavily on fertilizer, can spend around a third of their operating costs on fertilizer alone. Half of the farmers who responded to a survey released by the National Corn Growers Association in early April said they wouldn't apply the full amount of fertilizer to their corn crop this year, due largely to higher costs and limited availability.

Because farmers often secure their fertilizer stores well before a growing season begins, some weren't seriously affected by the price swings created by the war in Iran. (Iran said it closed the Strait of Hormuz shortly after it was attacked by the U.S. and Israel at the end of February. U.S. corn growing season typically begins in April.) But they are worried about the future: corn growers who responded to the survey were twice as concerned about the 2027 corn crop as they were about this year's.

This season, some farmers may opt to plant crops that require less nitrogen fertilizer than corn, such as soy beans, in response to rising costs.

According to USDA data, farmers are expected to plant 95.3 million acres of corn this year, down from 98.8 million acres last year. But the total acreage of soybeans is predicted to rise to 85.4 million acres this year from 81.2 million acres last year.

US grocery prices probably won't take a huge hit

If higher fertilizer costs lead to smaller harvests, that could contribute to modest retail price hikes. A TD Economics analysis estimated that a 2-5% production shortfall in North America could grow food inflation by around 0.1-0.5 percentage points in 2027.

Sponsor MessageBut experts say the costs of the fertilizer shortage will be largely shouldered by farmers.

The amount a farmer spends on fertilizer is a small fraction of the total cost to grow food and get it to grocery store shelves. Just 12 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on food goes to farms, while the rest is received by transportation companies, processors, wholesalers and grocery stores, according to the USDA. And the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service reported that U.S. farms spent around 7% of their budgets on fertilizer, lime and soil conditioners in 2024 (though farmers growing crops more reliant on fertilizer such as corn would spend more).

Additionally, farmers don't have much bargaining power to negotiate with wholesalers for higher crop prices when their operating costs rise, according to Rob Vos, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Those buyers will go to other farmers to try and get it cheaper," he said.

But there are factors other than the fertilizer crunch that are more likely to cause food prices to jump. Barrett said the global food industry is facing a "really unpleasant layer cake" of pressures, from tariffs and extreme weather to higher prices on labor, fuel and fertilizer.

"No one of those by itself is especially painful," he said. "But when you add them all up, they become quite painful together."

In parts of Africa and Asia, the effects of the fertilizer shortage could be far worse. Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services, said in April that the reduction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz may prove "very significant and severe" for poorer countries. Less-developed countries that rely heavily on fertilizer from the Persian Gulf include Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Somalia.

The fertilizer industry is recovering — and may adapt in the process

Some fertilizer prices have begun to fall again in recent weeks, after the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last month.

The Trump administration has also taken steps to lower fertilizer costs for American farmers. This week, Trump temporarily suspended "countervailing duties" on certain phosphate imports, which are added to some imported goods to cancel out subsidies provided by foreign governments.

Still, it will be a while before the fertilizer sector returns to normal. Vos estimated that it could take weeks or months for fertilizer manufacturing plants to come back online and return to previous production levels. If high prices stick around, that could snarl the plans of U.S. farmers preparing to plant cool-season crops this autumn, he added.

Barrett said the trouble with the fertilizer industry has also gotten farmers thinking about how they can protect themselves from these kinds of supply-chain disruptions in the future and looking for other ways to replenish their soil, such as manure, compost and cover crops.

"Just like we're seeing more people interested in electric vehicles because the price of gasoline and diesel has gone up, you see more farmers interested in other ways of replenishing soil nutrients as the price of fertilizer has gone up," he said.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea's place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America's colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn't the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America's fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here's what to know about America's early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn't the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government's passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It's why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father's now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

Historians say it's hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

"There is a vast amount of smuggling," says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. "So they're not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They're probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean."

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren't always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. "I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company," she posits someone of the era saying. "But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee."

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas 

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

"Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities," Pendergrast says: "because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything." The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

"There's a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it's because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather," historian McDonald says. "That's where they heard about the economics of the day."

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers' horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could "riotously drink together" in taverns, coffeehouses often didn't allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

"The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal," she says. "Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled."

Still, she says, the lines between the two "weren't completely clear."

The cost of America's revolutionary drink 

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. "Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities," says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. "They're both becoming affordable luxuries," Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

"These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff," says Chaplin. "The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world."

There's a dark side to coffee's history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that "all men are created equal," but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America's fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

"Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought," Pendergrast says. "But it was also grown by slaves."

Wearing gloves and a KN95 mask, Emmanuel Carrera Ruedas hunkered down near a storm drain, just steps away from the smoldering Lineage warehouse fire, as he filmed himself pointing to what he described as insulation and foam flowing into the drain.

“The thing about this water is that it all gets dumped straight into the L.A. River,” Carrera Ruedas, of Cudahy, told his Instagram followers in a June 22 reel.

In the past two weeks, Carrera Ruedas has spent evenings gathering water samples outside Lineage and from the L.A. River as he and other community scientists are partnering with experts from UCLA and Columbia University to learn what’s in the runoff. Samples will soon be sent to a lab in New York.

“For far too long, the river has just been a drainage, a dumping site for companies,” said Carrera Ruedas, 27, who often encounters toads, birds and fish inhabiting its ecosystem.

“There is life in there,” he told Boyle Heights Beat. “We’re all in proximity to the river, and that’s kind of the vein that runs through the city that really connects us all.”

Community-led testing

Since the Lineage fire ignited June 17 in Boyle Heights, residents, environmental advocates and researchers have taken it upon themselves to find out what’s in the air and water. They’ve launched their own sampling efforts, seeking answers about what people have been breathing and contaminants that may have entered the L.A. River.

The community-led testing comes as residents have reported eye irritation, nausea and headaches while questioning whether the government has done enough to capture the fire’s environmental and public health impacts.

Those concerns are especially alarming in Boyle Heights, East L.A. and neighboring Southeast L.A. communities, where neighbors have long faced disproportionate pollution burdens.

Crews navigate around piles of debris and puddles of water on the eastern edge of the Lineage warehouse as they begin cleanup efforts on June 25, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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An estimated 31,700 workers, about 81% of whom are Latino, live in the county and city zones where a smoke advisory was issued, according to new data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. They work in health care, manufacturing and food service industries. About half of the workers earn $3,333 or less a month, below L.A. County’s “very low income” threshold.

The area also experiences diesel pollution levels three times the county average, as well as higher rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease-related emergency department visits, according to UCLA. Nearly 10,000 households in the area lack air conditioning.

“This is not only an air quality emergency but also a worker and environmental justice issue,” UCLA said.

Behind the push for environmental justice

For years, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos on the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East L.A. oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the L.A. River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.

“Something I’ve told many people over a long period of time is, ‘We’re not polar bears. We’re not whales.’ Nobody is coming to save us. We have to step up and defend ourselves,” said mark! Lopez with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Antonia Castillo, 73, helps her grandson Aiden Velez put on a mask near their Boyle Heights home.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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East Yard members opted to take air samples themselves, dissatisfied with the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s assessment of the fire’s air-quality impacts. They placed sorbent tubes, which Lopez described as passive air monitors, outside nearby homes for about seven days. Soon, they’ll send the findings to a Columbia University lab with the help of UC Irvine.

What officials have done so far

South Coast AQMD said it conducted “mobile monitoring” during the first two days of the fire that found “significantly elevated concentrations” of particulate matter. The agency then deployed particulate matter monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School that provide “near-real time exposure information.” AQMD noted that the L.A. Fire Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted their own monitoring, while third-party contractor Onterris has continued monitoring during the cleanup phase.

AQMD also observed smoke impacts throughout the region, issuing a particle pollution advisory in English and Spanish that remained in effect through June 24.

What's next and lingering questions

Meanwhile, Lopez said more sampling is necessary, and he questioned the effectiveness of efforts by Lineage, AQMD and LAFD. He and other advocates criticized public statements from officials, including Mayor Karen Bass’ assurances that “the air is not dangerous,” even as residents were reporting feeling sick. He also took aim at LAFD Chief Jaime Moore’s statements that ammonia was not toxic to individuals unless they had respiratory issues or came in direct contact with it. East Yard also called for evacuations in the area.

“It feels like at the city and county level they don’t currently have the capacity to really handle this situation,” Lopez added. “I think it really requires state and federal intervention to make sure that the cleanup and restoration isn’t mismanaged.”

Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the Lineage fire is exposing how little is done to “respond to public health emergencies and disasters” in communities like Boyle Heights and East L.A., areas “that have so often been referred to as environmental injustice communities.”

Residents and community organizations like East Yard, Ornelas Van Horne said, “are always the ones having to respond.”

“They’re relying on each other. They’re relying on their networks and their organizing power to be able to do that on the ground sampling.”

Ornelas Van Horne reached out to colleagues at Columbia’s Multi-Element Trace Analysis Laboratory in New York after she learned of the sampling taking place and of community concerns about the runoff making its way down to the L.A. River.

Those samples will be analyzed for heavy metals like cadmium, lead and arsenic, she said.

The L.A. County Public Works Department, according to the Los Angeles Times, deployed three containment booms on the L.A. River and continued to monitor the water as it made its way to the ocean.

Carrera Ruedas began collecting water samples on the third day of the fire. He said he took the first sample from the L.A. River, about 100 meters from the spout where it spilled out. The second was taken from outside Lineage. He has amassed dozens of samples since then.

Cudahy sits alongside the lower L.A. River, and after the fire, Carrera Ruedas recalled a “heavy stench that affected people in our community.” The trash he saw in the river was the foam and insulation that came from Lineage, he said.

“It really pissed me off, just to see all this trash go in there and nobody doing anything about it,” said Carrera Ruedas, who also serves as the parks and environmental justice commissioner for Cudahy.

The L.A. River, Carrera Ruedas said, is “part of our ecosystem.”

“This is not just affecting me. This affects everybody else around me. This affects people who love the beach, people who just want our water systems clean,” he said.