The Brief

The Santa Ana City Council recently extended a moratorium on permits for industrial developments near two of the city’s oldest but historically marginalized neighborhoods, but residents and activists fear the protections will raise already high rents.

Proponents, though, say the move will have lasting environmental and health benefits.

Patricia Flores Yrarrázaval, the executive director at Orange County Environmental Justice, welcomed the move as there has been “an incredible amount of air pollution that's negatively been impacting the health of our families here.”

What does the moratorium entail?

The moratorium suspends new industrial activity and hits pause on any existing expansion projects until March of 2025 in the neighborhoods of Logan and Lacy.

Over 130 businesses across 450 acres will be affected by the moratorium. During the pause in industrial activity, city staffers will track calls to law enforcement and the fire department and work with other agencies to determine the health risks to the neighborhoods from having these businesses in close proximity.

In 2022, the Orange County Fire Authority received 66 calls for life threatening health emergencies, with 29 of those calls specifically for respiratory issues. In 2023, the number of calls increased by 7%.

Yrarrázaval, who grew up in Santa Ana knows first hand about the health impacts.

“My mom, without being an environmental expert, knew that she had to walk through the Logan, Lacey, Del High neighborhoods to get to work and that that exposure to industrial air pollution is probably what gave me and my siblings asthma,” she said.

A Grist report last year highlighted how even though the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory shows the presence of 99 sites where hazardous material could have been released in Santa Ana, state business records noted 300 active industrial sites as recently as 2014. Some of these sites were not documented by the EPA because the federal agency does not require small businesses to report emissions bypassing oversight.

Neighborhood changes

With the moratorium, Yrarrázaval worries that the pause on industrial activities would result in home prices and rental prices skyrocketing in the area.

Yrarrázaval was instrumental in pushing for policies in the densely populated Logan and Lacy neighborhoods to address lead contamination. They are two of the oldest neighborhoods in the city whose residents are predominantly Latino. In pushing for the environmental policies, she also pushed for the inclusion of a clause to prevent rent hikes so residents can stay in their homes.

Idalia Rios, who lives in the Lacy neighborhood, said some of the zoning changes are not always designed for residents in the neighborhood and some of the shifts have resulted in residents leaving the city and even the county. In the building she lives in, she said, around 70% of the neighbors are new because long term residents have since moved.

She says there used to be a Northgate Gonzalez Market close to the Lacy neighborhood but some zoning changes resulted in the market being torn down and replaced with a luxury project.

“A luxury project, it doesn't benefit the low or extremely low income residents that we have in that area,” she said.

Gema Suarez, works at El Centro Cultural de Mexico which aims to create alternative spaces connecting residents with communities in Mexico. Suarez said the city, especially the downtown area, is a “sanctuary in terms of culture.” When developers removed a long standing carousel popular with local families in downtown’s Fiesta Marketplace, it resulted in Mexican run businesses moving out of the area.

“We want to make sure that those developments are made for the people who live here,” she said.

Richard Marx knows how to write a pop hit.

His first seven singles all reached the top five of the Billboard Hot 100, with hits like "Satisfied" and "Right Here Waiting." His writing credits include Luther Vandross' "Dance With My Father."

But his latest album is showcasing a different side of him.

After Hours blends Great American Songbook standards with original songs that Marx wrote in that classic style. There's also a five-song EP, After Hours: Live From the Grammy Museum, which came from his August performance there.

Marx will bring the album to the Yaamava’ Theater at Yaamava’ Resort & Casino in Highland on Sunday, Nov. 1.

From backup singer to hitmaker

Marx's journey started when he arrived in Los Angeles at 18.

"The first door opened for me kind of immediately," Marx said in an interview with LAist Morning Edition Host Austin Cross. "The first job I had right out of the gate was singing background vocals for Lionel Richie on his first solo album."

That connection allowed Marx to meet Kenny Rogers, with whom he wrote the No. 1 country song "Crazy." But it would still take years before Marx would find his own success as an artist.

"I remember when I started having success as a songwriter and singing on all these other people's hit records," Marx said. "I really thought that would be the fuel, but every record company rejected me for several years. I got rejected time and time again on songs that became massive hits. So, you have to just believe in yourself and wait for that right opportunity to come around."

Writing like it's 1948

Marx's new album is a real departure from the music that made him a star. Initially, he didn't think he was ready to record these types of songs.

"It was a delusion on my part that I wasn't old enough," Marx said. "I thought, 'I'm not old enough to sing those old standards.' Then it dawned on me that I'm 63 years old."

Marx decided not to just record American classics. He also wrote original music in that same style.

"When I realized that I could create something special in writing half the album, it all started to make sense to me," Marx said. "And I have to say that the writing of this album was the most challenging and enjoyable songwriting I think I've ever done."

The first song Marx wrote for the album was called "All I Ever Needed," which features a trumpet solo by Chris Botti.

"I pretended that I was a young, struggling songwriter in 1948, trying to get Sinatra to cut one of my songs," Marx said. "I took a long walk, and I thought whatever comes into my mind, I'm gonna go with it. An hour later, when I came back home, that whole song was written."

For another song called "Magic Hour," Marx got an assist from his wife, Daisy Fuentes.

"It's my favorite song on the album," Marx said. "The lyrics plagued me for a while. So [Fuentes] and I sat down and had a martini, and she just kept talking and telling me this story, and I turned it into lyrics."

Another highlight on After Hours is Marx's duet with Rod Stewart on the song "Young at Heart."

"Rod was just such a hero my whole life," Marx said. "We just kind of accidentally became great friends over the last four years. And in that process, it was Rod who suggested that we do a duet."

Marx is now looking for new goals.

"I'm in the process now of building my new bucket list, and there's really nothing on it so far," Marx said. "I wanna keep making music that makes me feel the way this album made me feel."

See him live

Tickets for Marx's upcoming show at the Yaamava’ Theater at Yaamava’ Resort & Casino in Highland on Sunday, Nov. 1, are available through AXS.

Actor Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov, the youthful Russian navigator on the “ Star Trek ” television series and several movies, has died. He was 90.

Koenig died Monday at his home in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, talent agent Zachery McGinnis said in a statement.

In “Star Trek,” Ensign Chekov was the sole Communist-bloc member of the spaceship Enterprise bridge staff. His friendly, supportive presence showed how the rival nations (in the far-off future in which the show was set) were capable of working together.

Speaking heavily Russian-accented English, Chekov embodied stereotypical Russian personality traits, including fierce pride, love of poetry and blind loyalty.

“Star Trek” ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and has had an almost unprecedented afterlife as fans, or Trekkies, kept interest in the show alive.

“My heart is heavy,” Koenig's castmate, George Takei, said in a post on the social platform X. “Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend.”

“Walter’s legacy extends far beyond the screen. Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it,” McGinnis said. “Thank you, Walter, for the memories, the inspiration, and for boldly going where few have gone before.”

McGinnis said Koenig died surrounded by his daughter and niece.

Koenig played Chekov in seven “Star Trek” movies starting in 1979, as well as innumerable other spinoffs, including writing a “Star Trek” book, “Chekov's Enterprise,” in 1980. The TV show has also inspired two spinoff TV series with new casts, and conventions that draw thousands of fans.

He returned to the science fiction genre with occasional appearances in the syndicated 1990s TV series “Babylon 5.”

For nearly a decade, California’s Yes In My Backyard activists and other pro-development advocates have wanted to overhaul California’s signature environmental law to clear the way for more housing construction.

Now Proposition 45 is on the ballot. Supporters say it would, among other things, overhaul that law, known as the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, to clear the way for — you guessed it — more housing construction.

So why are YIMBYs divided?

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and one of the movement's most stalwart champions in the Legislature, is for it. So is the bulk of the building industry, including many major for- and non-profit developers.

Bay Area pro-housing advocates Eastbay for Everyone and the Greenbelt Alliance, two typical allies of Wicks, are emphatically against it.

In the uncommitted middle lies the lion’s share of California YIMBYism: Abundant Housing Los Angeles, SPUR, and both California YIMBY and YIMBY Action — the movement’s two flagship advocacy organizations — have all taken neutral positions.

“It’s been a weird campaign so far,” said Ali Sapirman, advocacy manager at the Housing Action Coalition, an urban building industry group that supports the measure. “The housing community has been a little bit fractured.”

Those fissures aren't over whether more homes should be built across California. Instead, it mostly boils down to a question of where.

“The central question here is how you feel about sprawl,” Max Dubler of California YIMBY wrote in the group’s non-endorsement statement, referring to low-density housing development at the edge of metro areas. Though some exurban growth “will necessarily be part of solving our housing shortage,” he expressed concern about making it easier to build “car-dependent sprawl housing and the freeways and water infrastructure necessary to serve that sprawl.”

To sprawl or not to sprawl

For nearly a decade, the Legislature has been on a tear, passing “streamlining” bills aimed at speeding up the regulatory approval of new construction. Almost all of those laws have only applied to projects in places where homes and other infrastructure already exist.

Prioritizing so-called infill development helped wrangle together a coalition of developers and construction labor unions, but also a diverse swath of Democratic-leaning advocates whose interest in seeing more apartments and condos goes beyond the cause of affordability alone. That includes climate activists who want to see less commuter car traffic; transit, bicycle and pedestrian advocates who want more riders and walkers and urbanists who want Los Angeles to more closely resemble Barcelona.

In breaking from that urban focus, Prop. 45 is driving a wedge inside that coalition.

If passed, the measure would speed up the review process required under CEQA (pronounced “see-kwah”) for all types of housing projects. That includes transit-adjacent downtown condo towers, but also freshly paved subdivisions at the metropolitan fringe.

The measure is “a doubling down on essentially 75 years of land-use patterns that we know haven't worked,” said Jordan Grimes, legislative director with Greenbelt Alliance, which opposes the measure. “It's a return to the sprawl era.”

Not everyone in the movement necessarily sees that as a bad thing. Among those who want California to build its way out of its current housing shortage, opinions differ over whether more environmentally-friendly infill development alone is up to the task.

“I'm an ‘all of the above’ person when it comes to housing,” said Wicks, explaining her support of the measure. “I think we need housing of all different types, shapes, and sizes.”

An earlier version of this rift first emerged earlier this decade when a handful of Bay Area tech investors announced plans to build a brand new city on Solano County farmland in 2023 under the banner of California Forever. Some YIMBY commentators applauded the plan as a welcome injection of much-needed supply. Others decried it as sprawl dressed in urbanist clothing.

With Prop. 45, that regional debate is now playing out at a statewide scale.

Housing front and center 

Prop. 45 is about much more than housing policy.

CEQA requires public agencies to review the possible environmental consequences of the decisions they make, including the permitting of private projects. For decades industry groups, developers and, more recently, housing supply boosters have said the law makes it too easy for project opponents to jam up worthwhile projects by repeatedly demanding additional analysis.

“The clock is endless and the number of people and entities who can challenge you are also endless,” said Linda Mandolini of Eden Housing, an affordable housing developer.

Prop. 45 would not exempt any projects from environmental review outright. But for projects deemed "essential," it would narrow the focus of these reviews and require them to wrap up within 365 business days. Any resulting litigation would also face a shot clock; Judges would have 270 business days to resolve them. Such lawsuits would also be made harder to sustain in court. Aside from housing, essential projects include roads, hospitals, schools, clean energy projects, water and broadband infrastructure.

But housing has loomed large in the electoral debate. The Yes on 45 campaign has touted the support of affordable housing developers and housing advocates, while pointing to housing affordability concerns as the initial impetus for the measure.

It’s easy to see why. Environmental challenges to often innocuous-seeming housing projects have regularly generated headlines for years, helping to cement the idea among lawmakers and many voters that CEQA is a major cause of the state’s housing woes.

Environmental justice groups and their allies have spent years fighting against that argument in the Legislature. Though Prop. 45 does not exempt “essential” projects from environmental review outright — it just shortens and hems in the process — these groups have now lined up to oppose it for much the same reason: They reject the premise that CEQA needs fixing.

But for opponents like Grimes, who supported many recent streamlining bills, the argument that the law is holding up desperately needed residential construction is a year out of date. Last year, the governor signed Assembly Bill 130, a Wicks-authored measure that exempted most infill housing from the CEQA.

Since becoming law in July 2025, developers have used it to entitle 17,913 units of housing, according to the Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, a state agency.

“When you look at what’s left to do on urban housing, there are absolutely still barriers,” said Grimes, whose organization applauded last year’s exemption. “CEQA just isn't one of them.”

The task of the No on 45 campaign, he said, is to convince enough voters that “we’ve actually solved this problem.”

Are we done here?

Many developers and affordable housing advocates, even those working in urban areas, dispute that CEQA is no longer a major obstacle.

Last year’s exemption does not exempt projects larger than 20 acres, which means supersized urban redevelopment projects are still subject to the old process.

Prop. 45 also applies shot clocks to other permits issued later in the development process and which regularly slow a project more than environmental review.

And while state laws like last year’s infill carveout may grant certain developers the right to ignore CEQA, there is nothing to stop a deep-pocketed opponent from suing anyway. Putting time limits on those lawsuits could be the difference between a project succeeding and being delayed to death, said Mandolini.

She points to the planned 130-unit affordable housing project that Eden Housing has been trying to and failing to build in the Bay Area suburb of Livermore since 2018 as an example. In 2021, a nonprofit funded by a handful of well-heeled Livermore residents sued the city, arguing that it hadn’t done enough environmental analysis on a housing development that would be built on a former grocery store parking lot behind a row of downtown restaurants. A lower court ruled that the group’s CEQA arguments were “almost utterly without merit.” An appellate court agreed. The state Supreme Court allowed that ruling to stand.

But by then two years had passed.

“Every year you lose in litigation is real money for real projects and another year that 130 families don't get to live in that housing,” said Mandolini. “It’s a great way to kill a project.”

Even an infill project.

But among some pro-housing supporters of the proposition, the infill versus sprawl debate isn’t much of a debate at all.

“We’re not an urbanist organization,” said Mahdi Manji with the Inner City Law Center, a legal aid provider and housing advocacy group in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. The group supports Prop. 45 and doesn’t mind the concept of more housing far from the city’s core. “To the extent it results in housing that is a little more affordable in Lancaster and Palmdale, a lot of our clients live out in Lancaster and Palmdale.”

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