The Brief

As President Joe Biden today bowed to the growing chorus of elected Democrats and Democratic voters calling for him to exit the 2024 race, everyone is taking another good hard look at Kamala Harris.

“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala Harris to be the nominee of our party this year, ” Biden wrote in a social media post, calling his selection of Harris to be his vice president “the best decision I’ve made.”

Vice presidents rarely get much attention. What attention Harris has gotten on the job hasn’t been particularly positive. Counter to the reputation she cultivated early on in her career as a pragmatic politician and sharp-minded prosecutor, public opinion on Harris soured in the summer of 2021 and has mostly stayed sour.

That was in part thanks to the White House saddling her with a series of unenviable and intractable tasks. Beyond that her role, like that of most vice presidents, has been high on profile, but low on actual responsibility. It’s a job perhaps best described by fictional Veep Selina Meyer as the political equivalent of being “declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine.”

Nor was Harris faring much better with voters in her home state. Last year 59% of California voters in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll said they would not welcome her on the top of the ticket.

But now that Harris is being considered as the most likely substitute for Biden, more voters seem to be warming to her. A fresh Washington Post poll found that the vast majority of Democratic voters nationwide would be “satisfied” with Harris at the top of the ticket. The same poll found her narrowly beating Trump in a head-to-head election among registered voters.

And so the nation is catching itself back up to speed on all things Harris — and that means catching up on a life of accomplishment and controversy here. More than any other vice president in generations, Kamala Harris’ biography is singularly Californian.

Born in Oakland, bussed to school in Berkeley, tested by San Francisco’s cutthroat municipal politics and propelled onto the national stage as the state’s top law enforcement officer and then its first female senator of color, Harris’ approach to politics and policymaking were honed here.

Now that voters are reconsidering whether Harris has what it takes to be president of the United States — and as Donald Trump and JD Vance train their oppo-machine upon her — we’re resurrecting this look at her California years and career. Here are nine ways that California shaped Kamala Harris, and that Harris shaped California.

A child of Berkeley

In a state full of transplants, Harris is a lifelong Californian.

She was was born in 1964 in Oakland — the hospital a little over a mile from the city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her short-lived 2020 bid for the presidency. Born to immigrant parents who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley, she spent her childhood in Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is from India. The couple split when Harris was 7, and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother, who died in 2009.

In the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Harris famously skewered Joe Biden — then her campaign rival — for his past opposition to federally mandated busing to desegregate public schools. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.”

Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills. This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord.

After the debate dust-up, Harris clarified that she does not support federally mandated busing, a policy stance not so dissimilar from the one she needled Biden over.

Traversing back and forth between different strata of society — black, white and Asian; well-off and working-class — is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography.

“It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.”

Vice President Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986. Her graduating year photo is in the bottom row, second from right.

Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington D.C. but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.

Until her most recent move to Washington, she called California home.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco district attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state attorney general in 2010. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

The influence of king/queen-maker Willie Brown

Former state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of Gov. Gavin Newsom). Harris got a boost from Brown, too.

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” Brown had a reputation for dating much younger women. In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.

Willie Brown and Kamala Harris in 1994.

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico.

The speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards — the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later.

Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. More — much more — poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas and other noble houses of the Bay Area.

But from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability — a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. In the first run to be San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former speaker and mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

As for Brown, he recently told a reporter, regretfully, that he and Harris are no longer in touch.

A lack of clarity

You saw it in the presidential race. You’ve seen it in her as vice president. As the New York Times once put it: “the content of her message remains a work in progress.” We saw it before in California.

While running the California Department of Justice, Harris was often loath to wade into the political battles taking place just a few blocks away in the state Legislature.

There was the bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings. She did not take a formal position (though she did tell a reporter it would be bad policy). The bill died.

There was the proposal to force police departments to gather data on the ethnicity and race of the civilians they stop. Harris also declined to take a position. It passed anyway.

And on the biggest criminal justice overhaul in California in a generation, Harris also kept mum.

Prompted by a judicial decree that the state had to dramatically cut the population of its overcrowded prison system, “realignment” was a package of state policies passed in 2011 that shifted tens of thousands of inmates out of state custody and into county jails or onto the rolls of local probation systems.

Despite in many ways reflecting the lessons described in her book “Smart on Crime,” which argued that non-violent criminals can be redirected into less punitive systems without jeopardizing public safety, Harris, the state’s top law enforcement officer, was silent on the policy.

That earned a rebuke from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, which wrote in its endorsement of her 2016 Senate candidacy that Harris “has been too cautious and unwilling to stake out a position on controversial issues, even when her voice would have been valuable to the debate.”

What some critics call prevarication or flip-floppery, her supporters call pragmatism. Those are just two ways of describing the same quality, said Corey Cook, a political scientist and provost at St. Mary’s College, and a longtime observer of San Francisco politics.

“She’s not an ideologue,” he said, meaning rather than stake out the boldest, ideologically-coherent agenda, she tends to focus on individual fixes to specific problems. Hence the “3am agenda” of her presidential campaign, a collection of policy changes designed to address the problems that keep the average voter up at night.

“The idea that she would have consistent positions on issues informed by ideology isn’t who she is,” said Cook. Harris may appear to pick her battles, he said, because for her “the only lasting solutions are going to be the ones that are able to sustain a majority coalition of support.”

Making a mark: sex crimes, domestic violence, child abuse

Harris has never shied away from the “tough on crime” label when it comes to a certain class of criminals: domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers.

After nearly a decade in Alameda County and a short stint as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco (she left, calling the leadership there “dysfunctional”), in 2000, Harris joined the San Francisco city attorney’s office under Louise Renne.

Renne said she was looking for someone to head the office’s Child and Family Service unit, which investigates child abuse cases. This was not considered a prestigious post. Prosecutors inside the unit had taken to calling it “kiddie law.”

Renne thought Harris, who had focused on child abuse and sexual exploitation cases in Alameda County, would be a good fit.

That instinct was confirmed on Harris’ first day on the job, Renne said, when a number of children who had been separated from their parents were formally adopted into new families.

“She comes into my office and says ‘Come on, Louise, we’ve got to go over to court. There are going to be adoptions today,’ and she had all these teddy bears,” Renne recalled. “She knew the occasion. She knew it was an important one and it should be celebrated.”

Harris’ focus on the victims of abuse and exploitation continued after she was elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney.

“I don’t know what the term ‘teenage prostitute’ means. I have never met a ‘teenage prostitute.’ I have met exploited kids,” Mesloh, then Harris’ communications director, recalls her boss saying at her first all-staff meeting. Harris then ordered her prosecutors not to use the term in court. A year later, Harris sponsored a bill putting the crime of human trafficking into the state criminal code.

Some Democrats say Harris’ prior life as a prosecutor with a focus on sex crimes would be a key advantage in a potential general election contest against Trump, who has been found liable in a civil case for sexual assault and recently became the first former president to be convicted of a felony. In that case, the 34 counts were related to the falsifying of business records in connection to an alleged sexual encounter with a pornographic film actress.

But using the full force of the law to penalize pimps, traffickers and other abusers has earned Harris some criticism from civil libertarians and from advocates for sex workers.

In one of her final acts as California’s attorney general, Harris had the CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, arrested on pimping charges. Backpage was an online classifieds site known for its “adult services” section, which prosecutors had long warned served as a marketplace for sex traffickers.

The arrest was based on a contentious legal argument that pit anti-trafficking fervor against the First Amendment. Since Backpage was merely a platform for ads, its lawyers argued, it was protected by the same law that protects Google from being held liable for illicit websites listed in its search results. A superior court judge agreed and threw out the case, though an amended charge, pursued by Harris’ successor, then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, led Ferrer to plead guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and to the shuttering of the site.

The Harris mantra: ‘Smart on Crime’

One of the reasons Harris became known as a rising-star District Attorney was her focus on prevention, which she explained in her book, Smart on Crime, written in 2009, the year before she ran for attorney general.

“Public health practitioners know that the most beneficial use of resources is to prevent an outbreak, not to treat it,” Harris wrote. “Instead of just reacting to a crime every time it is committed, we have to step back and figure out how to disrupt the routes of infection.”

Kamala Harris as San Francisco District Attorney on June 18, 2004.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez

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Harris’ “Back on Track” program, considered the most successful implementation of this idea, redirected first-time, non-violent drug offenders into supervised education, job training courses, therapy sessions and life skills classes. It was a modest program, but a novel one compared to what most other big city law enforcement officers were doing in 2005.

“In that time period, I think that she was a radical,” said Mesloh. The program has since been emulated by cities around the country. When Harris became attorney general, she launched a similar pilot program for Los Angeles County.

Harris’ focus on prevention produced some of her key accomplishments as district attorney. But in the context of the 2020 presidential primary, some of those same accomplishments struck many critics on the left as overly punitive.

The year after launching Back on Track, Harris introduced an anti-truancy initiative. Based on a statistical correlation that chronic class skippers are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of homicide, Harris’ office began threatening the parents of persistently absent students with prosecution.

Harris has been quick to point out that the “stick” in this carrot and stick approach only came out after a series of escalating interventions, including mandatory meetings with school staff and social workers. No one went to jail under the program, though a handful of parents were fined. Within a few years, city truancy rates fell by a third and Harris took credit.

In 2010 her office sponsored a bill to take the program statewide. In the hands of other district attorneys, the statute was used in at least a handful of cases to put parents behind bars. Critics have said that the policy has been disproportionately wielded against poor parents of color.

In a 2019 interview, Harris said she regretted any “unintended consequences” of the state law.

Harris has (almost) always opposed capital punishment

Her opposition to the death penalty has been one of the most controversial stands in her career, but it’s also an example for those who criticize her lack of consistency.

On April 10, 2004, three months after her inauguration as San Francisco’s new district attorney, 29-year-old police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down by a 21-year-old with an AK-47. Three days later, Harris made good on a campaign promise and vowed not to seek the death penalty for the shooter. David Hill was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The decision engendered a predictably fierce backlash from the police union and rebukes from politicians. “This is not only the definition of tragedy,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at Espinoza’s funeral, “it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The assembled officers cheered while Harris remained seated.

Some of Harris’ critics say she has wavered in tougher political circumstances.

In 2014, when a federal court judge ruled that California’s administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional, Harris appealed the decision as state attorney general, arguing that it was “not supported by the law.”

Harris later said that she was obligated to defend capital punishment as the legal representative of the state. Many have pointed out that she was happy not to defend a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that voters passed in Proposition 8 when it was challenged a year earlier. Harris’ response: She was merely reflecting the position of her client, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

She also explained that the judge’s ruling, which held that the long delays between sentencing and execution in California amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment,” could be used to justify speeding up the state’s system of capital punishment.

Prosecutorial overreach controversies

Both as district attorney and as state attorney general, Harris led offices that criminal justice advocates say was overly aggressive in pursuing convictions and lacked transparency in a way that belies Harris’ brand as a “progressive prosecutor.”

In March 2010, just as Harris was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, San Francisco authorities shut down a police department crime lab in the city’s Hunters Point naval yard. A technician named Deborah Madden was accused of skimming drugs, raising broader questions about the lab’s ability to appropriately handle evidence in criminal cases. (Madden later pleaded guilty).

Harris immediately dismissed 20 drug cases, but the number eventually grew to over 1,500 after documents showed that prosecutors within Harris’ office had known about Madden’s potential unreliability months before the lab was closed, but had neglected to tell defense attorneys.

A superior court judge later excoriated Harris’ office, writing that the violations infringed on the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Afterward, Harris formed a unit to handle the sharing of evidence with criminal defense attorneys. She has also said that she did not know about the problems at the crime lab until after the scandal blew up.

But that hasn’t done much to assuage the concerns of critics who say Harris had a tendency toward prosecutorial overreach, which continued once Harris became the state’s attorney general.

Kamala Harris is sworn in as California’s attorney general on Jan. 6, 2011.

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Office of the Attorney General of California

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In 2015, for example, lawyers for an inmate convicted of murder attempted to have the case thrown out after new evidence suggested that Riverside County prosecutors lied on the stand during the initial trial. Harris’ office, representing the state prison system, resisted, only backing down after footage of one of her deputies being eviscerated by three federal judges went viral.

A spokesperson for her since-abandoned presidential campaign said Harris ordered her office to drop the challenge as soon as “she became aware” of the case.

Critics point to other examples. There was her office’s decision to defend a molestation conviction that local prosecutors had secured with a false confession.

Asked about that case, the spokesperson said that it was “long-standing practice” for prosecutors within the Californian Department of Justice to file legal motions without the express approval of the Attorney General, implying that, again, Harris was not aware that her office was making the argument. But in this case, the spokesperson added, state prosecutors believed “the original case…was valid and that the victim in the case deserved justice.”

Another example: her office’s refusal to take over a 2011 Seal Beach mass shooting case after a judge recused the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office for widespread prosecutorial misconduct. Harris defended her decision: “it was being handled at the local level.”

Such a track record is to be expected of any prosecutor, said Sally Lieber, who worked with Harris on human trafficking legislation while representing Mountain View in the state Assembly.

“It is an adversarial system and so she was filling a particular role, but I think that she was able to do it in a very sophisticated, smart and responsive way,” she said.

As California’s AG: Playing hardball

Harris’ biggest accomplishment while California’s attorney general was to secure a financial settlement with some of the country’s largest banks accused of illegally foreclosing on homeowners.

In September 2011, Harris pulled out of ongoing negotiations between attorneys general from nearly every US state and the five banks, calling the proposed deal of $2-to-$4 billion “crumbs on the table.”

Harris was not the first attorney general to walk away, but the departure of the country’s largest state seemed to have its intended effect.

A few months later, with California back in the mix, a new deal was struck. This time, California got $20.2 billion in debt reductions and direct financial assistance.

Still, some consumer groups and outside experts were critical of the deal, arguing that the banks would have been forced to write off much of that bad debt eventually. “All sizzle, no steak,” is how Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin put it.

But Harris’ willingness to play hardball did result in a bigger settlement, said Rob McKenna, former Washington attorney general who was part of the negotiations.

“It’s possible for states to overstate the impact they had on the final settlement. The former New York Attorney General (Eric Schneiderman) would sometimes make claims about the settlement and improvements he had obtained,” he said. “But it’s fair to say that Attorney General Harris negotiated and obtained some improvement in the settlement for California.”

Kamala the campaigner

Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign high on fanfare and hype, only to flame out less than a year later before even making it to Iowa. It was a historically stark underperformance from a candidate that many Democratic insiders believed would be a formidable contender.

In California, Harris’ electoral track record has been mixed.

Her first spin on the campaign trail was a superlative success. In her 2003 race for San Francisco District Attorney, she pushed out a two-term incumbent and won more votes than any other candidate running for a city-wide office that year.

Harris’ first run for statewide office didn’t go quite smoothly. Her race for Attorney General against Republican Steve Cooley wasn’t called until weeks after Election Day. Yes, Harris won. But she did so by less than a percentage point.

Now, after 18 years in which not a single Republican has won statewide office in California, it’s easy to look back at that nail-biter of an election and see an early sign of Harris’ weakness as a candidate. But at the time, the calculus was a little different. Cooley, a relative moderate, was considered the favorite to win against Harris, a San Francisco liberal. This was 2010, which proved to be a historic landslide election for the GOP. The fact that Harris eked it out despite those headwinds, and as the first woman and person of color to hold that office no less, cemented her status as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris talk as they assess the damage during the Creek Fire at Pine Ridge Elementary on Sept. 15, 2020, in Auberry.

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Gary Kazanjian

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Also rising was Gavin Newsom. The two were San Francisco friends and ran in the same social circles even before their political careers ignited. They share the same political consultants. And when the two most prestigious California elective offices opened up — for governor and U.S. senator — they sidestepped a ballot rivalry when she successfully ran for the Senate, as did he for governor.

Newsom has said — and recently reiterated — that he would not challenge Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. Although Newsom’s name frequently appears on lists of hypothetical Biden replacements, she is already on the ticket and is seen by many as the heir-apparent.

Regardless, both are publicly saying now, again and again, that they are backing Biden.

This story incorporates prior reporting and interviews from CalMatters’ 2020 election coverage.

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump a procedural win in his effort to limit mail-in voting, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a new lawsuit intended to protect the state’s power over how elections are administered.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts on Wednesday, makes good on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pledge to sue again over Trump’s mail-in voting executive order immediately after the Supreme Court decision.

California is able to sue despite the high court’s ruling because of developments that occurred after justices took up the previous case.

The court majority this week essentially ruled that California sued too early over the executive order and it noted that the administration had not yet handed down formal rules that would affect voting.

That changed late last week when the U.S. Postal Service issued final rules requiring states to turn over a list of eligible mail voters, redesign ballot envelopes with the Postal Service’s approval and include new tracking barcodes.

Under Trump’s order, the Postal Service would not deliver ballots to voters who are not in a federal database the administration wants to build, and would not deliver ballots in states that do not comply with its rules.

Bonta called the Postal Service rules a “clear violation of the Constitution,” which designates states as the primary authority over elections.

The Democratic-led states joining with California in the lawsuit argue that because neither the president nor the Postal Service have the constitutional authority to run elections, the latest changes are unlawful and will undermine mail-in voting — including the more than 89% of voters in California who used mail-in ballots in the latest June primary.

“President Trump doesn’t get to rewrite our voting system on a whim,” said Bonta during an online press conference Wednesday. “And the United States Postal Service cannot sidestep the laws that govern the postal service just to carry out the president’s agenda.”

Although Trump uses mail-in voting himself, he is an outspoken critic of the method, citing unsubstantiated claims that it increases voter fraud. Last year he said he wanted to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots.”

Given its challenges in court, it is unclear whether the Postal Service’s new rule will affect the November elections.

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

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who splashed her signature polka dots on paintings, sculptures and museum installations around the world, has died, her studio said Thursday. She was 97.

Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, Yayoi Kusama Studio said.

“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,” the studio’s statement said. “We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”

Kusama, one of Japan’s most respected contemporary artists, was widely exhibited around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Repetitive motifs were her trademark, in various shapes, resembling netting, swirls or worms, but most often dots, dancing proudly on her canvases, or as sparkling balls or dots of light in her installations, in all their vibrant psychedelic glory.

“Polka dots are fabulous,” Kusama said in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press, appearing in her signature orange bobcut wig and polka dot-covered attire.

“I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw,” she said in her childlike but matter-of-fact tone. “I will keep painting until I die.”

Kusama insisted she drew the way she saw the world -- covered with spots, part of the hallucinations she said she had from childhood. She was in and out of psychiatric institution for decades, although her sickness did not hold her back as she was one of the first Japanese women to go to New York to pursue her art, in 1957.

Although soft-spoken and shy in her mannerisms, she was always unabashedly bold in the assertion of her dotty vision, not only in sticking to the style for decades but also in making it accessible to the masses.

In her later years, as the times caught up with her art, she enjoyed fame. She signed on with fashion brands like Louis Vuitton as well as other licensed products like teacups, T-shirts and key chains with her illustrations, including replicas of her likeness that were used in show windows and other marketing.

In 2008, Christie’s auctioned her work for $5.8 million. In 2016, she won the most prestigious award Japan gives its artists, the Order of Culture.

Upon receiving the award, she told reporters she was more determined than ever to pursue her art, stressing that the sincerity and devotion she had demonstrated in her personal life were crucial parts of her artistic legacy.

“I feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art,” she said. “I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead.”

Kusama was called pop, avant-garde, feminist, just to name some of the categories thrown at her, most of which Kusama brushed off as not quite representative of her art.

She was born in a middle-class family but felt misunderstood, as her parents wanted her to simply get married. They wanted to buy her kimono, not paints and brushes. She knew she had to get away. She chose America.

When she arrived in New York, the fad was “action painting,” characterized by dribbles, swooshes and smears, not dots. She suffered years of poverty and obscurity. But she kept painting dots.

She put circles of paper on people’s bodies, and once a horse, in “happening” anti-war performances in the late 1960s, which got some people arrested for obscenity but helped get media attention for her art. While in New York, she befriended artists like Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe and Joseph Cornell, who praised her innovative style.

Over the years, Kusama has made quirky but stunningly celebratory works like “Macaroni Girl,” a female figure plastered with macaroni, which expresses the fear of food; “The Visionary Flowers,” giant sculptures of twisting tulips, and “Mirrored Corridor,” a room with mirrors that delivers an illusion of a field of phallic protrusions speckled with dots.

Kusama, who has also made films and published several novels, said she wasn’t sure where she got her ideas. She just picked up her brush and started drawing. The process was so mysterious sometimes she surprised herself, she told AP.

“I think, ‘Oh, I drew that? I was thinking that,’” she said.

But she appeared happy to have her art be the focus of media attention and praise, reading one of her poems to a reporter or tackling her artworks with gusto for photos.

But she was also a charmingly disarming mix of vulnerability and defiance — at one moment, declaring herself “an artistic revolutionary,” and then the next, mumbling: “I am so afraid, all the time, of everything.”

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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday called for a review of this year’s point-in-time homeless count, citing potential errors, including a possible overcount of unhoused people in some parts of the city and an undercount of people staying in shelters elsewhere.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said during the meeting he believed there were “glaring problems” with homeless count numbers for some parts of his district because they didn’t align with what he and others had observed.

He pointed to one part of South L.A. where the numbers of unhoused residents skyrocketed, according to the agency responsible for the count — the regional L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

LAHSA’s count of unsheltered people in that census tract was more than 10 times higher in 2026 than previous years, and Harris-Dawson says that is not accurate.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said this year’s count did not initially include some people staying at shelters in his district, because of what he described as a “glitch” in how some data was counted.

The council voted unanimously to call for the review.

After the meeting Wednesday, LAHSA told LAist that it would launch an investigation.

Ahmad Chapman, a spokesperson for the agency, said in a statement that the annual count “produces reliable regional-level estimates” of the unhoused people living in the region, but that it would follow the City Council’s directives.

“We recognize the specific concerns raised by the Council, and we will ensure a disciplined evaluation by leveraging the expertise of our Risk Management Department throughout this internal review,” Chapman said. “Our priority is to identify precise operational or technical issues, report our findings back to the City, and make appropriate changes to our process.”

It is not yet clear when the review will be completed or when updated numbers will be released.

Questions about the count

LAHSA conducts the point-in-time count as required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is used by the federal government to determine how millions of dollars in federal grants are distributed and gives local officials an annual snapshot of how many people are unhoused in their districts.

Errors have been found in the count in the past, and observers have questioned its accuracy.

An LAist investigation found that the 2024 count was complicated from policy changes at LAHSA, shifting guidelines and technical problems.

The next year, a report by the RAND Corporation found the count had gotten less accurate and captured just 68% of the unsheltered population in Skid Row, Venice and Hollywood.

Blumenfield said during the Wednesday meeting that he has had issues with the count’s data in his district nearly every year. He noted there had been problems in previous years with the app LAHSA used for the count not working properly. He also claimed LAHSA overcounted RVs.

LAist asked LAHSA about Blumenfield’s comments but the agency’s response did not refer specifically to that particular claim about the RVs.

As for this year, Blumenfield said some people in his district who stayed in shelters that were part of the state’s Project Homekey program were initially excluded from the count because of the aforementioned “glitch.” He did not explain during the meeting how LAHSA had missed the Homekey shelters.

Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she, too, had observed that some numbers from shelters in her district were not reflected in LAHSA’s data.

Blumenfield said LAHSA had been slow to respond previously when confronted with these complaints.

“We approach LAHSA,” he said, “and oftentimes it takes months and months to finally get a resolution.”

An area of concern

The latest count showed homelessness in District 8, covering much of South L.A., increased by 128% from 2025 to 2026.

Harris-Dawson said the rise didn’t align with what he and others in his office had seen on the streets.

In one census tract covering the residential West Park Terrace neighborhood, LAHSA reported that the number of unhoused people observed during the count — not including dwellings like vehicles or encampments — went from fewer than 20 in recent years to 277 in 2026.

“The census tract is in the neighborhood I live in, so I know for a fact that this cannot be the correct number,” Harris-Dawson said during the Wednesday council meeting. “We'd notice 25 new homeless people, much less two hundred and fifty.”

He told LAist he expects a review of the count to provide “a number reflective of the reality on site.”

But some people who live in the area told LAist this week that they do believe homelessness has been on the rise since last year.

 Derrick Johnson told LAist he grew up near the St. Andrews Recreation Center, where for the past six months he has been staying in an RV.

Like others he pointed to who live around him on the same street, he was in permanent supportive housing through a Section 8 voucher until it expired.

He said he felt the services meant to help had failed him and rent was too high, so he decided to spend $4,200 on an RV.

 Derrick Johnson points to his RV he lives in on Aug. 26, 2026. Johnson says his Section 8 permanent supportive housing voucher expired without him knowing, pushing him back to living on the streets.

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Jordan Rynning

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LAist

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“ I did the program . . . I did all that, and you telling me I ain't got no spot?” he said. "F— y'all, I got me an RV now.”

Vincent Benton doesn’t have an RV. He told LAist he doesn’t have a tent or sleeping bag to stay in.

He said he has family nearby who try to help him, but drug use and a criminal record have kept him unhoused for now.

“I blow in the wind, and wherever the wind takes me, you know, I go for broke,” he said.

Vincent Benton sits on a bench at the St. Andrews Recreation Center with his dog, May-Two, on Aug. 26, 2026.

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Jordan Rynning

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LAist

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He said he’s been seeing more unhoused people coming to the area looking for a place to stay.

“ In a minute, all of South Central gonna look like downtown LA,” he said.

Visits to the emergency room spike when it gets really hot, according to public health data. But for many years one of the populations most affected by extreme heat — the unhoused — have been left out of that data.

Now, we know this: Californians experiencing homelessness are 38% more likely to visit the emergency room because of extreme heat, despite accounting for less than half a percentage point of the total population.

That’s according to a new analysis by Tracking California, a program that collects and analyzes data on health hazards across the state.

“We always knew that unhoused individuals were at much higher risk on extreme heat days, and now there is that empirical evidence,” said Shubhayu Saha, executive director of Tracking California.

Their report found that unhoused people were also 11% more likely to visit the hospital for heart and respiratory illness on high heat days, which may reflect how heat can exacerbate preexisting conditions like heart disease, or coincide with air pollution like smog that gets worse during hot days, Saha said.

The solutions, however, are not simple and require addressing entrenched societal problems — a lack of affordable housing, high electricity bills that can force people to keep their A/C off even if they have it, and unequal access to shade and green space outdoors.

Addressing the acute need

Meanwhile, local shelters and doctors have been responding to acute needs.

In the San Bernardino Valley, Dr. Rodney Borger has recently treated unhoused patients for burns, from laying on hot pavement, and severe dehydration.

On Skid Row in L.A., UCLA physician Mary Marfisee has treated more and more patients with severe dehydration, heat rashes and heat exhaustion. Among the chronically unhoused, she said, addiction and mental health issues can also interact with heat in dangerous ways.

Dr. Mary Marfisee conducts a brief breathing check on a woman on Los Angeles' Skid Row last year.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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For NPR

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“The medications for mental illness can affect the hypothalamus, and that's your set point for temperature regulation,” Marfisee said. “Mental illness itself can lead to those temperature regulation difficulties, so they think they're cold, when they're really not.”

Yolanda Breland,  the senior director of community engagement at the Los Angeles Mission, has noticed the increase in homelessness, and more challenges related to the heat.

“ It's too hot for them to be in their tents or under any type of shelter because that just retains the heat,” she said.

Breland also said this week they’ve seen a big increase in people coming to the mission’s lobby and courtyard, where they can access air conditioning, cold water, showers, misters and shade.

ER visits for heat in general on the rise

It’s not just the unhoused — people with housing account for the vast majority of heat-related visits to the ER.

According to publicly available data, emergency room visits have been steadily rising with the heat in July and August across much of Southern California.

In L.A. County, most of the cases involve adults over 65 and people in the hottest areas, said Dr. Nichole Quick,  chief science officer at the county’s Public Health Department.

In Riverside County, meanwhile, the most affected group showing up in the data are men between 18 and 44.

“In the Coachella Valley especially, we have large farm worker populations,” said Dr. Shunling Tsang, the county’s deputy public health officer.

Emergency room visits have been steadily rising during the hotter months, according to L.A. County's public health data dashboard.

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Courtesy L.A. County Department of Public Health

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Having more detailed data can help improve public health responses, since every community is different, said Dr. David Eisenman, who developed ZIP code level data of excess ER visits due to heat from 2008 to 2018.

And as human-caused climate change drives up average temperatures and worsens heat waves, that work will only become more urgent.

In Riverside County, middle-aged men in the Coachella Valley are most impacted by heat illness, likely reflecting the experience of farmworkers.

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Courtesy Riverside University Health System

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“That way city officials, public health departments, emergency planners, also parks and recreation people can make informed decisions about where they want to prioritize putting their resources,” he said.

Still, such data remains limited — community health centers and other clinics that primarily serve low-income households are not part of that public health data, Saha said.

“Just being able to track what is happening in a range of different health facilities,” he said, “would really give us a much better picture of who is at risk and what we can do for them.”