The Brief

LACMA’s first Van Gogh isn’t a painting of blue flowers, golden wheat fields or aged faces. It’s of a parked stagecoach, and it’s considered a good example of what made the Dutch painter, and the Impressionist movement he was a part of, so revolutionary.

The painting is called “Tarascon Stagecoach.” It was painted in 1888 and was donated to LACMA earlier this year by the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation.

It’s LACMA’s first Van Gogh painting, and the encyclopedic museum will be showing it off starting Sunday in a show called “Collecting Impressionism at LACMA” that focuses on 100 works from LACMA’s collection. The works are arranged chronologically to show the evolving tastes that have shaped the museum's collection of Impressionist art.

The museum’s acquisition isn’t just a win for the museum. The museum-going public and the region’s teenage and college-age students also will benefit.

“I very much remember seeing Van Gogh in a rotunda space in the [Philadelphia Museum of Art] and finding it to be just so striking because of these luscious, bright colors,” said Summer Sloane-Britt, who saw her first Van Goh during a middle school visit to the museum.

Sloane-Britt now is a professor of art and art history at Occidental College.

“Visual analysis and seeing objects in person is always so core to historical learning and for studio artists as well,” Sloane-Britt said.

And seeing a Van Gogh in person, Sloane-Britt said, and saying you don’t like it is also OK because that signals the work has led you to identify and assert your own aesthetic tastes in art.

Van Gogh road trip in LA. Shotgun!

The LACMA exhibit presents a good opportunity to get on the road for a four-stop Van Gogh road trip without leaving L.A. County.

Van Gogh's "Irises"

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Courtesy Getty Museum

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You can start at LACMA and see “Tarascon Stagecoach,” benefiting from the context of seeing other impressionist works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries.

Hop over to the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where you’ll see “Hospital at Saint-Rémy,” one of three paintings by Van Gogh in the collection.

Then head west on Wilshire Boulevard to the Getty to see “Irises,” one of the paintings that’s made Van Gogh an art star.

"The Mulberry Tree," a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, on display at the Norton Simon Museum

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Courtesy Norton Simon Museum

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End your Van Gogh road trip by heading east to Pasadena to the Norton Simon Museum. The museum’s smaller, more intimate setting is a good place to see the museum’s six, yes six, Van Gogh paintings.

The exhibit also will feature the newly acquired work "The Artist’s Garden, Vétheuil" by Claude Monet.

Have you ever had trouble getting or updating a government ID … like a driver's license or state ID card? Or was it super simple? LAist wants to hear from you.

Proposition 39 is on the ballot this fall, which would require voters to show a government-issued ID when casting a ballot. For mail-in ballots, voters would have to include the last four digits of that ID on the envelope. 

This would be a big change from how voting currently works in California. So we want to know: What will that mean for eligible voters? Tell us, and your answers could help shape our coverage.

Wait, voters don't currently have to show ID?

Currently, California law asks voters to prove their identity when they register to vote, but not when they actually cast a ballot. And the state accepts a wide variety of documents as proof of voter eligibility, including a student ID or bank statement. That would also change under Prop. 39.

What we want to know

How easy, or hard, is it to get a government-issued ID? Have you faced barriers to getting an official ID? What were they?

Go deeper

• A voter ID measure will be on California's November ballot: Here's what you need to know
• A guide to Proposition 39: Take our quiz to weigh the pros and cons
• Voter ID: Initiative gathers enough signatures for the ballot

When Californians voted to reduce drug penalties in 2014, it likely had the unintended consequence of also increasing homelessness in the state, according to a new report.

The report, released Thursday by the Public Policy Institute of California, set out to measure the long-term effects of Proposition 47 — a 2014 ballot measure that lowered some drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. It found that while the measure succeeded in reducing prison overcrowding as intended, it also appears to have contributed to an increase in people living on the street, a rise in overdoses and a drop in the number of people getting drug treatment.

The PPIC researchers determined Prop. 47 likely led to an estimated increase in street homelessness of about 10% between 2015 and 2019. The study suggests the measure increased drug use (as measured by overdose deaths and hospitalizations) by between 7% and 8%. The researchers also found evidence that Prop. 47 led to a 20% reduction in the number of Californians receiving drug treatment, because the courts referred fewer people into treatment programs.

The results come at a time when many Californians are disillusioned with the state’s past efforts to reduce incarceration. Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36 in 2024, which partially undid the 2014 reform by increasing penalties for certain drug and theft crimes. Supporters argued the 2024 measure would reduce drug use and homelessness, though it came with no funding for treatment or housing.

“Ever since Prop. 47 was passed in 2014, there’s been a lot of critics of that particular reform,” said Magnus Lofstrom, the PPIC report’s lead author. “It’s important to have a sense of what are those potential impacts.”

This appears to be the first study to show a direct link between Prop. 47 and homelessness. The findings are sure to add fuel to an already raging debate over the causes and best ways to fight homelessness.

Proponents of a tough-on-crime approach on one side argue that addiction is a primary driver of homelessness and that police should crack down on drug use and encampments. Homeless advocates on the other side argue that the state’s sky-high cost of living is to blame and building more housing is the answer.

The report was met with skepticism by some experts in the field. Ron Hochbaum, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and director of the Buccola Family Homeless Advocacy Clinic, said while the researchers may have found a correlation between Prop. 47 and an increase in homelessness, saying the two were directly linked appears to be a stretch.

“I think it is more likely that two phenomena happened at the same time,” he said.

The study also failed to consider the adverse effects being charged with a drug felony can have on someone’s ability to get out of homelessness, Hochbaum said. That criminal charge could prevent someone from getting a job or being eligible for subsidized housing.

California counties that reduced their homeless counts this year told CalMatters that increased funding for temporary and permanent housing placements was the reason.

That was echoed in the PPIC study: Places with larger increases in permanent housing beds also saw larger decreases in homelessness after the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that the money California poured into homeless housing after the pandemic is working.

Studies have shown the “housing first” model, which prioritizes placing people into housing as quickly as possible without requiring them to first become sober or get mental health treatment, to be an effective way to solve homelessness.

A 2023 report by the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found that while more than a third of homeless respondents reported regularly using drugs, that was not the driving factor of most people’s homelessness. Instead, a loss of income was the most common reason people reported for losing their last housing.

“We know that what drives rates of homelessness in communities are housing costs, but more specifically, the availability of housing for the lowest-income communities,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative and the lead author of the UCSF study.

That study, which was the largest survey of unhoused Californians since the 1990s, is widely cited by policy makers, activists and homeless service providers. It found that 20% of people who regularly used drugs or drank heavily wanted treatment but couldn’t get it.

The state needs to create more treatment resources, not put more people in jail, Kushel said. Voluntary treatment is proven to work better than court-mandated treatment, she said, noting that the PPIC researchers didn’t look into how many of the people who received treatment under Prop. 47 actually stopped or reduced their substance use.

The PPIC researchers stopped far short of blaming the state’s entire homelessness crisis on prison reform.

Prop. 47 likely resulted in an additional 7,000 Californians experiencing “unsheltered” homelessness (sleeping in parks, tent encampments, vehicles, abandoned buildings or other places not meant for habitation) between 2015 and 2019, the researchers estimated. That’s about 20% of the state’s overall increase in unsheltered homelessness during that time, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s unclear how much of that increase in homelessness is tied to increased drug use, and how much instead is because unhoused people who would have been sleeping in jail before Prop. 47 now are sleeping on the street instead. But Lofstrom suspects it’s a bit of both.

“Jails and prisons, they do serve as a source of shelter for people who are experiencing or are at risk of experiencing homelessness,” he said.

Kushel called that “horrifying.”

“I think we can all agree that criminal legal systems were not designed to be places for people to live,” she said. “That’s not their role. That’s not what they’re meant for.”

The PPIC researchers got their results by comparing California to other states that had very similar homelessness trends before Prop. 47 passed, and analyzing how California diverged from its peers after Prop. 47. The researchers also examined whether California counties that had large decreases in drug arrests and big drops in their jail and prison populations after Prop. 47 were more likely to experience larger increases in homelessness and overdoses — and found that they were.

The researchers acknowledged several factors that could have thrown off their calculations. In 2015, California, as did the rest of the country, tried to improve the accuracy of its homeless point-in-time counts — which may have resulted in more people being counted and contributed to a perceived increase in homelessness.

In addition, rent prices increased much more in California between 2014 and 2019 than in other states. The researchers attempted to account for that difference in their calculations, but acknowledged that the outsized increase could have had more of an effect than their models show.

Though the researchers focused on the effect of Prop. 47 on homelessness, they found several other factors that played major roles. For example, in the areas they studied, the researchers found declines in the number of people receiving Social Security benefits correlated to increases in local homelessness.

While the PPIC report found that counties with higher rents and lower vacancies had higher rates of homelessness, changes in an area’s rents or vacancy rates did not lead to changes in their homelessness rates.

The researchers also noted that while prison populations decreased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, those decreases did not lead to an increase in homelessness and drug use. That’s likely because the state and federal government poured money into homelessness programs during that time period, which helped get people off the streets, Kushel said.

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

Rest easy, Southern California, there’s an end in sight to this week’s record-breaking heatwave.

Downtown Los Angeles broke its daily record Monday at 98 degrees, and tied it two other times in the last week.

Woodland Hills hit 111 degrees on Wednesday, breaking its daily record of 109 degrees. Lancaster hit 107 degrees, breaking its record of 106.

Humidity was also unprecedented. The dewpoint, essentially a baseline of how much moisture can be held in the air, reached nearly 73 degrees in downtown L.A. on Thursday. Dewpoints over 70 degrees typically feel uncomfortably humid.

Parts of Southern California farther inland, near the Salton Sea, had some of the highest dewpoints in the country.

Extreme heat warnings from the National Weather Service were scheduled to remain in place for most of the region through Friday evening.

Officials say the conditions pose a high risk of heat-related illness for most people. Sensitive groups are especially susceptible, including people over 65, young children, people without access to air conditioning or those who work outdoors.

Fire danger is also elevated. Red flag warnings are in effect until Friday at 3 p.m. for the inland mountains and foothills of L.A., Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, although there is fire risk across the region.

The good news is forecasters predict a cooldown Saturday.

“We'll drop our high temperatures fairly noticeably each day through the weekend and early next week,” said NWS meteorologist  Rose Schoenfeld. “Early next week we'll end up closer to normal, maybe even a little bit below normal.”

Humidity vs. fire danger

Abnormally high humidity in the region continues to make this week’s heatwave feel even more uncomfortable.

The moisture also brought cloud cover, and in places, even a chance of light showers and thunderstorms.

But there isn’t enough moisture in the air to put a damper on fire conditions. Without significant rain, thunderstorms can create dry lighting, which can spark wildfires.

“Fire and thunderstorms can be linked together, but mostly it's because it's very hot and the atmosphere is primed for plume-dominated fire development,” Schoenfeld said.

More concerning to forecasters is the combination of high temperatures and gusty winds, especially inland and at higher elevations. If a fire does start under those conditions, it can spread quickly.

A 'confluence' of factors

The temperature of the ocean has a lot to do with the heat and humidity.

Normally, the Pacific Ocean acts as air conditioning for Southern California by cooling the air that moves inland.

But waters off the coast of California and Mexico have been experiencing a long-term marine heatwave for more than a year, and warm surface temperatures have reduced the natural cooling effect.

Ocean temperatures are also driving up the humidity. Seawater evaporates faster when it’s warmer, adding moisture to the air.

At the same time, farther away in the Pacific, warming waters closer to the equator are leading to tropical storms and cyclones. As the storms dissipate, they send moisture all the way here.

Scientists say warming in the equatorial Pacific is one of the early impacts of this year’s El Niño.

"It's the confluence of this somewhat unusual weather pattern with these very unusual temperatures off the coast of Baja and Southern California, layered onto a warmer world,” said Alex Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. “That's what's making this such an extreme event.”

Hall said climate change is making heat waves worse by elevating baseline temperatures, which drives longer stretches of uncomfortably or even dangerously hot days, and warmer nights that provide less relief from the heat.

Clownfish clamber around a watery enclosure, a couple of brownbanded bamboo sharks weave between rocks and lines of coral sit in tanks basking under artificial grow lights — all creatures seized from illegal wildlife trafficking and placed at the Aquarium of the Pacific for care and a home.

The Long Beach aquarium took in nearly 1,000 trafficked marine animals over the course of two operations this summer, in which wildlife officials each time intercepted a box truck carrying thousands of confiscated creatures.

Nate Jaros, vice president of animal care at the aquarium, said this is one of the largest hauls the aquarium has handled in years.

The first operation, in June, led authorities to a box truck carrying some 2,000 animals, a mix of reptiles, fish and invertebrates that were being smuggled for sale on the black market.

Aquarium officials received some 500 marine animals from that operation on June 19, taking in an array of fish, sharks, clams, shrimp, prawns and tiny snails. The facility being understaffed that day, employees worked through the night to move the creatures into specialized quarantine areas where they tested their shipping water for pH, dissolved oxy

gen and ammonia levels — the byproducts of the animals’ waste — before slowly acclimating them to their new tanks.

About a quarter of the animals died either upon arrival or within days after, Jaros said.

“It’s just a very careful acclimation process,” Jaros said, adding it can take hours to get the chemistry just right. “We were working till about 1 a.m. There were four of us here, and we could have easily used three more people just kind of streamlining. … It’s a very stressful process.”

Another operation near the end of July brought another 300 marine animals to the aquarium after a brief stay at a federal wildlife center in Torrance.

The seizure was coordinated through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Wildlife Confiscations Network, of which the Aquarium of the Pacific is a founding member. Since joining, the aquarium has taken in more than 3,300 trafficked animals, including axolotls, corals, reptiles and fish. Earlier this year, it received grant funding to expand and upgrade its holding systems in anticipation of future confiscations.

The network, launched in 2023 as a partnership between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, has sought to streamline the placement of animals seized in illegal trafficking so they can be sent to accredited facilities to rehabilitate and rehome the critters.

Southern California, considered an epicenter for trafficked wildlife, sees much of it moving through the region’s ports of entry from Asian countries. Monkeys, tigers, exotic birds destined for the pet trade or as trophies, reptiles and sea cucumbers prized for food and medicine all pass through the region’s airports and border crossings, according to officials with the network.

Without food or a change of water, animals often arrive in a weakened state, ripped from reefs in places like Indonesia, Fiji, Tonga, Australia or the Caribbean — before being packed by the hundreds into small bags of seawater for shipping, they often carry heavy parasite loads that worsen under the stress of captivity.

“These animals are likely from the reef, and that means that all animals that live in nature have some level of parasites,” Jaros said. “And when you bring them into a stressful environment, those parasite loads can start to increase. So they’re kind of vulnerable in that regard. A lot of times, those fish are going to need medical treatment as well, to ensure that we can rid them of parasites that are also compromising their health.”

Among the species rescued were brownbanded bamboo sharks, listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature; Banggai cardinalfish, which are endangered; and ocellaris clownfish, one of the most heavily traded species in the pet industry.

Coral made up a significant share of the intake, and identifying it can be painstaking. “There’s thousands of species. They’re difficult to identify. Some of the cases need a microscope to identify them,” Jaros said, noting the aquarium takes in hundreds of confiscated corals every year arriving via air freight through Los Angeles International Airport.

Given the nature of how these federal anti-trafficking operations are conducted, aquarium officials say they know very little about how these animals got here or where they were headed.

Past a large gate and down a path lined by corrugated metal pipes, many of the fish explore their new home inside two 2,500-gallon tanks covered with a tied-down tarp. More than 40 species swim about in the water. There were yellow longnose butterflyfish, domino damselfish, lemonpeel angelfish, clownfish and powder blue tang.

Between a school of banghai cardinalfish, a single juvenile emperor angelfish cut through — its deep blue scales segmented by white, vein-looking striations. Jaros said this one is still young, and that by the time it’s an adult it’ll be an entirely different-looking fish, yellow and blue striped. That adulthood, unfortunately, must be spent inside a tank like this one.

Experts say these animals cannot return to the wild. Introducing a fish foreign to the region could bring diseases into the water. The fish, having been medicated by this point, would have weakened immune systems unable to protect them against parasites.

Most are instead forced to live inside aquariums or rehabilitation centers for the rest of their lives. Some must also be housed and cared for as evidence — either until charges against a defendant are dismissed or the animals are permanently seized by the government.

Jaros said the aquarium has already found homes for a large share of the animals and expects to send them to other accredited facilities within about two weeks; others will be acclimated into Long Beach’s own exhibits. Which animals stay and which go depends on each species’ size and lifespan, and whether they can coexist with — or might prey on — other fish in the exhibits.

There are at least six Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited aquariums in California that can take part in that placement network.

“Wildlife trafficking disrupts national and global ecosystems and puts animals on the path to extinction,” said Jeff Flocken, the aquarium’s president and chief executive. “We are proud to answer the call to help trafficked wildlife.”