The Brief

What came first: America's obsession with Halloween or Party City?

Steve Mandell launched Party City in 1986 as a single store in New Jersey. He sold cups, napkins and other supplies for birthday and holiday get-togethers. But it was the costumes that became the goldmine.

"I never expected Halloween to be anything like it," Mandell says. "After my first year in the business, I said, 'Wow!'"

Fast forward 39 years and Party City is sweeping away the confetti and turning off the lights. Two bankruptcy proceedings have failed to get the chain's finances in order.

"I'm really upset it's closing. Really gonna miss this place," says Sherri Swartz, browsing in a Gaithersburg, Md., location the evening before her grandson's sixth birthday party.

Where will she go next time?

"I guess I'm going to have to be more organized and do it off of Amazon, because now Amazon will own the world," she says with a sigh.

The aisles around her scream up to 75% off candy, placemats, sparkly streamers and Easter baskets. Workers here say they still haven't gotten notice of their exact last day, but a banner blanketing the front window minces no words: "Store closing."

Several Party City franchisees say they plan to stick around and keep a few stores running, including in Hawaii and Virginia. Corporate representatives did not respond to NPR's inquiries. They'd said in December the plan was to liquidate by the end of February. Hundreds of locations have already been auctioned off, many of them to Dollar Tree and Five Below.

Once a juggernaut, Party City is now bankrupt and closing for good.

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The store that decked out memorable moments

The stores became a mainstay after Baby Boomers decided that Halloween was not just for kids, but for adults, too. They raised new generations who love to dress up as movie characters and wrap their homes in ghostly spiderwebs.

Party City had the goods and made the money.

First, Mandell enlarged his original store to include a Halloween warehouse. Then came more stores and a franchise. By the time Mandell left in 1999, Party City was a national chain in the era of category killers — one megastore dominating some facet of shopping. This was the heyday of Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us and for parties, Party City.

Almost 27 years since Theresa Peverly and Tim Cowsert married, they're still working through all the ribbon they'd bought at Party City for their DIY wedding reception.

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"The first and only place we shopped was Party City — that's where you went," says Theresa Peverly of Illinois. In the late '90s, she outfitted her entire backyard wedding reception at Party City.

She remembers this well because, to this day, she uses leftover Party City ribbon she purchased to tie up silverware and napkins.

"I think I bought nine or ten spools. Twenty-six years later, we still have some of these spools of ribbons," Peverly says. She's used them to tie up baby and graduation presents, laughing every time she reaches for the Party City ribbon stash.

The retail chain dressed generations of Americans in scary masks, dramatic capes and vampire teeth. But if you ask people for memories of Party City, shoppers recall meaningful milestones: the 40th birthday bash, a sorority reunion, dad's retirement, mom's last day of chemotherapy, so many birthdays during the pandemic lockdown.

One woman thinks back to the shortage of miniature flags after the Sept. 11 attacks. A teacher describes a 35-foot balloon arch she'd bought for a school run.

"My 6-year-old daughter found her best friend at Party City," says Allie Mushlin of Massachusetts.

The friend was a clearance item on an impromptu visit to Party City: a pink squishy stuffed bunny, now named Cupcake and still the favorite toy two years later.

Keira Mushlin, 6, and her mom Allie Mushlin pose with the most prized Party City purchase: a squishy bunny named Cupcake.

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"We saw on the news that the store was closing," Mushlin says, "and my daughter asked, 'Maybe we should go and see if they have more of Cupcakes in the back.'"

Blowing up the balloon business

Now if you ask workers about Party City memories, they tend to talk about balloons.

"My fingers maybe have a permanent curve in them from doing all these balloons," says Jonathan Darcangelo, who joined Party City in Florida as a stocker in the late '90s and left as a manager in 2003.

He first got the job in high school, like a lot of people did. Party City's teenage employees gave the stores a come-as-you-are vibe, with workers goofing around in Halloween outfits and cracking up about ill-prepared shoppers stuffing a dozen balloons into a two-door car.

"They'd come in a little sedan," says former assistant manager Cali Gordineer, "and it was funny just to watch, like, 'You probably need a bigger car. You're not getting this through the door.'"

Gordineer worked at a Party City in New York from 2011 to 2016, and met her fiancé through the job: a coworker's family friend who saw a Facebook photo of her wearing a Catwoman costume over her work uniform.

At a store in Rockville, Md., cashier Christina Marin remembers the first time someone handed her sealed results of an ultrasound scan, asking for a gender-reveal balloon.

"They came straight from the doctor, and I was the first person to know the gender. It was very special," she says. "I was nervous because the balloons get really big and I didn't want it to pop and all the confetti to come out."

Party City has added 10% to 75% discounts to everything it sells as it prepares to shut down.

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What killed the party

The balloons, wigs and costumes are fun to buy in person, which shielded Party City from online competition for a long time. For years, its stores would install a Halloween picture wall: dozens of photos of every costume in stock. It was like browsing online, but you could try on the stuff right there and then.

In 2012, Party City was bought by private equity in a deal funded with massive debt, which was loaded onto the company. It was manageable — while sales kept growing.

"Unfortunately, with Internet retail, there was no reason to go there except for balloons," says Darcangelo, who is now an infrequent shopper. "And you can't make that much money on balloons, I guess."

In fact, a helium shortage made the balloon business tricky. The debt payment left Party City little leeway to improve its vast network of stores or its online presence. Its prices started rising. Shoppers defected to rival Spirit Halloween, Amazon and Walmart, even Home Depot with its giant skeletons.

Then, the pandemic killed parties. And then, high inflation tightened party budgets. And Party City's debt haunted the chain to death.

Party City first filed for bankruptcy in January 2023, hoping to rein in its $1.7 billion in debt. A few months later it re-emerged, only to end up back in bankruptcy. By December 2024, it was "winding down" for good. Shoppers say they'll now have to recalibrate, turning to grocery stores for balloons, and dollar stores or the Internet for supplies.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that the new congressional maps created by California voters in the fall are legal and should remain in place, handing a win to state Democrats who hope the new districts will swing five congressional seats for their party next year.

The ruling denies a request by California Republicans and the Trump administration for the federal court in Los Angeles to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the maps created by Proposition 50.

In the 117-page ruling, the federal judges rejected GOP arguments that the new maps amounted to racial gerrymandering, which has been prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court. The panel ruled 2-1, with the two Democratic appointees ruling for California and Judge Kenneth K. Lee, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissenting.

In the opinion, Judge Josephine Staton wrote that the panel’s conclusion “probably seems obvious to anyone who followed the news” about Proposition 50 last year. She noted that during the campaign, no one ever described the new maps as racially motivated — including the Republican plaintiffs.

“No one on either side of that debate characterized the map as a racial gerrymander,” the opinion states, noting that the California Republican Party called it a “political power grab to help Democrats retake Congress and impeach Trump,” and Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi deemed it a “redistricting power grab” for political gain.”

The judges also rejected Republican arguments that the voters’ intent did not matter. The majority wrote that voters clearly were endorsing the argument that both sides were making: that this was a partisan power grab, aimed at giving Democrats a leg up in the midterm elections and counteracting what GOP-led states were doing with their own districts.

Democrats celebrated the ruling.

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed. California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Newsom pushed lawmakers to put Proposition 50 on a special statewide ballot after Trump set off a mid-decade redistricting scramble by demanding Texas redraw its maps to benefit Republicans.

In his dissenting opinion, Lee wrote that race “likely played a predominant role in drawing at least one district because the smoking gun is in the hands of Paul Mitchell,” referring to a Democratic consultant who helped draw the new lines.

Lee argued that Mitchell publicly “boasted” about boosting Latino voting power in the 13th Congressional District in theCentral Valley, and that voter intent should not be the only basis for the court’s decision.

“To be sure, California’s main goal was to add more Democratic congressional seats. But that larger political gerrymandering plan does not allow California to smuggle in racially gerrymandered seats,” said Lee, who wrote that Democrats likely wanted to create a Latino majority district “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.”

The ruling could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Congressional candidates have until March 6 to file papers to run for office in the June primary.

Huntington Beach’s controversial former city attorney is running for state attorney general.

Michael Gates officially launched his campaign today and he will be going up against the current Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Gates has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and his policies — and a continuous thorn in the side of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is one of the most prominent critics of the president.

Gates was first elected city attorney in 2014 and easily won re-election twice since then. Over the years, Gates earned plenty of fans and enemies as he filed a barrage of lawsuits against California over state housing mandates and the city’s plans to require voters to show ID to cast a ballot, among other issues.

Gates left the city last year to work in the Trump administration and left his D.C. post in November to return to the beach city. He told LAist he missed Huntington Beach and his family and was hired back at the city as a chief assistant city attorney. The circumstances of his return made headlines.

In a video announcing his campaign, Gates said too many lawmakers in Sacramento spend their time "scheming" for ways to raise tax rates while leaving streets unsafe.

“California has lost its way," he said. "When I am your attorney general, we are going to be toughest on crime. ... We are going to restore public safety, law and order, up and down the state of California."

He said he would also prioritize election integrity and giving local cities (and not Sacramento) final say over construction. You can watch his full statement here:

Rene Lynch also contributed to this story.

Progressive forces in Los Angeles are taking aim at companies with bloated executive pay through a ballot initiative.

On Wednesday, a coalition led by hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11 launched a signature-gathering effort for a ballot proposition they called the "Overpaid CEO Tax." If the proposition makes the November ballot, it will ask voters to impose an additional city business tax on large companies with CEO pay that is exponentially higher than worker pay.

Representatives of some of Los Angeles' most powerful unions, including the Los Angeles teachers union UTLA, gathered in Hollywood to announce the launch. They spoke on the sidewalk outside of the Tesla Diner — a recently opened charging station and restaurant owned by world's richest man Elon Musk.

"A growing and dangerous divide is tearing Los Angeles apart. On the one side, corporate CEOs live in their own world," said Unite Here Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen. "On the other side, workers … juggle two and three jobs, they make impossible choices between medicine and rent."

The initiative takes aim at big corporations. If passed by voters, the executive pay ordinance would impose an additional business tax on companies with at least 1,000 employees whose top executive makes more than 50 times the median worker pay in Los Angeles. Those funds would go toward low-income housing projects, sidewalk repairs and other projects.

The additional tax would be one to 10 times the typical city business tax. According to the city clerk's office, the current city business tax is between 0.1% and 0.425% of gross receipts.

The campaign is part of a bigger political fight over the coming Olympic Games and who will benefit from them.

The executive pay initiative is one of a series of competing ballot propositions launched by union and business interests after the Los Angeles City Council voted last year to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour by 2028.

That vote set off a cascade of responses from the companies it affected. A business group backed by Delta and United Airlines launched a referendum to repeal the wage increase. That effort eventually failed.

The fight around the so-called "Olympic wage" is still playing out. A coalition of business interests has introduced its own ballot initiative to eliminate the city business tax entirely. In December, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced a motion to delay the $30 minimum wage by two years.

Campaigners for the executive pay tax will be on the ground as hype around the Olympics ramps up. Ticket registration opened for fans on Wednesday morning, the same day union leaders gathered in Hollywood.

To land the ballot initiative on the November ballot, campaigners have 120 days to gather around 140,000 signatures from registered voters in the city of Los Angeles.

Facing a loss of state and federal funding and increased costs, Los Angeles County officials are considering cutting homeless services and programs by more than 25% in the next budget year.

If approved next month, the spending plan presented to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday would trim $219 million from homeless services and programs, slashing county street outreach efforts in half and closing most of the sites for the Pathway Home encampment clearing program.

Several supervisors pushed back on aspects of the spending plan and urged county staff to find ways to avoid some of the proposed cuts.

“ I'm not particularly happy with everything that I'm seeing,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said. “I've heard from my providers that their people are disappointed.”

L.A. County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing drafted the spending plan. In a presentation to supervisors, officials said the deep cuts were necessary because of the rising costs of operating existing shelter beds and the loss of tens of millions in temporary state and federal funding.

The proposal comes after county voters approved Measure A in 2024 to increase the sales tax rate and double county dollars dedicated to addressing the homelessness crisis.

“This is really challenging, and we’re making recommendations that nobody wants to be making,” department Director Sarah Mahin told supervisors.

After the department published a draft of the plan in November, authorities changed the proposal to avoid more than $80 million in additional program cuts. They did that by securing $39 million one-time state grants and implementing about $45 million in other cost-saving measures, officials said.

Dozens of homeless service providers on Tuesday thanked county officials for shrinking the initial $303 million shortfall and urged them to avoid further cuts to services.

“We truly appreciate the progress you've made, but now the remaining shortfall is devastating for Los Angeles and for organizations like ours that are already stretched to the limit,” said Georgia Hawley of Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter in Skid Row.

Garrett Lee, of Department of Mental Health's HOME Team, collaborates with LAHSA’s Homeless Engagement Team during outreach in the targeted COVID-19 testing efforts in the homeless community in 2020.

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What’s driving the deficit?

Several factors are driving the budget deficit projected for the fiscal year that begins in July, according to L.A. County’s homelessness department.

• Shelter bed cost increases: The rates L.A. County pays shelter bed operators went up last year. It will now pay 46% more — an increase of $86 million — to maintain the same 6,000 shelter beds, officials said.
  
• Funds expiring: Several temporary funding sources — totaling about $185 million — have ended or will end in the next fiscal year, officials said. That includes $38 million in federal COVID relief and more than $80 million in state funding.
  
• Consumer spending: Sales tax revenue from Measure A is projected to decrease by $14.5 million in the next fiscal year because consumer spending is down.
  
• Carry-over funds: There are fewer one-time funds available from previous budget years that can be rolled into the coming budget year, officials say.  That number is down by $18 million.
  

Measure A looms large

Last year, L.A. County started collecting revenue through Measure A. The additional 0.5% sales tax approved by voters to address homelessness is expected to generate about $1 billion for L.A. County next budget year. That’s double the revenue generated under the county’s previous homelessness sales tax ordinance.

On Tuesday, service providers said the county cuts don’t make sense to voters who approved Measure A.

“This is not what voters intended when they doubled the tax on themselves to address the homelessness crisis,” said Katie Hill, CEO of Union Station Homeless Services, a Pasadena homelessness nonprofit.

Dozens of homeless services employees lined up to echo that message and demanding officials restore the full budget.

" My request is that you please not approve this plan without filling the gap first,” said Erin Thompson of Inner City Law Center, a nonprofit law firm. “Please find the funds.

Deandra Davis, from the homeless service provider HOPICS, said cutting programs doesn't end up saving the county money in the long run. The costs get pushed elsewhere.

“We shift these costs to jails and hospitals," she said.

Under Measure A, about 60% of revenue has to go toward homeless services. That’s about $625 million for next budget year.

Nearly 36%, or $372 million, must go to the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency to support housing development. County homelessness officials said that agency is expected to take on some of the homelessness prevention functions cut from the county’s homeless services budget.

“Measure A has given the overall system more tools to address the homelessness crisis, but fewer of them are held directly by the county,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said Tuesday.

Proposed reductions

L.A. County’s latest homelessness budget proposal includes a $92 million reduction for the county’s Pathway Home program, which moves unhoused Angelenos out of tent encampments by offering them hotel room beds. Pathway Home would be reduced from more than 1,200 beds at 20 project sites to 460 beds at seven sites, officials said.

Fewer beds for the program will mean more tent encampments in areas it serves, officials said.

Solis and fellow Supervisor Holly Mitchell said the program has been crucial for their constituents.

“This continuing attack on Pathway Home is problematic,” Mitchell said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We are clearly heading in a direction where our ability to ultimately resolve homelessness and address encampments and continue to make the progress we've seen in the last couple of years will be severely constrained."

Holly J. Mitchell, an LA County Supervisor who represents the second district.

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The budget plan also includes $127 million in reductions to other programs, including at least 100 frontline worker jobs. Outreach and prevention-related programs would be hit hardest, officials said.

Street outreach-related programs would be reduced by 60% and staffing in those programs would be cut by about half.

Mahin said parts of the county outside the city of Los Angeles will be disproportionately affected by reductions to outreach programs. Her department recommended reductions to certain outreach teams working outside city limits, but not in L.A.

That’s because of legal obligations under a settlement of a major homelessness lawsuit brought against the city and county by The L.A. Alliance for Human Rights.

“There is a requirement due to the L.A. Alliance for the county to maintain a certain level of outreach services in the city of L.A. through next fiscal year,” Mahin told LAist.

Critics of the spending plan urged supervisors to look at other parts of the budget to help save programs still on the chopping block.

Lily Clark of HOPICS told county officials the cuts would hurt her unhoused clients.

"What we can't do is eliminate the programs that prevent homelessness and expect the crisis to improve,” Clark said. “ Every subsidy cut, every outreach program lost, every navigation team dismantled, each one represents a person who will fall through the cracks.”

Next steps

Solis said on Tuesday that she hopes to see changes to outreach spending and other recommendations before approving the plan next month.

“ I know we're gonna have opportunity to try to make some adjustments,” she said.

Mahin told LAist her department has been “turning over couch cushions” looking for other sources of funding to help address the planned cuts and reductions.

“Unless people are bringing other funding solutions to the table,” Mahin said, “My question is: we can make changes, but what would you like to cut instead?”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said local programs are getting cut because state and federal dollars dried up and costs rose, not because L.A. County cut spending.

“ We cannot invent dollars we no longer receive,” Horvath said. “We're the only level of government that has actually increased our investment. Every other level of government has decreased, and we cannot backfill these gaps.”

The board is expected to vote on the proposed budget Feb. 3.