This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One year on from the Eaton Fire, long after the vicious winds that sent embers cascading from the San Gabriel mountains and the flames that swallowed entire streets, a shadow still hangs over Altadena. Construction on new properties is under way, and families whose homes survived the fire have begun to return. But many are grappling with an urgent question: is it safe to be here? The fire upended life in this part of Los Angeles county. By the time firefighters brought it under control, 19 people were dead, tens of thousands displaced and nearly 9,500 structures destroyed, primarily in Altadena but also in Pasadena and Sierra Madre. Guardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. All times are localGuardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. Note: all times are local The flames incinerated many older homes and businesses filled with lead paint and asbestos. They showered the community with toxins, leaving tall piles of ash and unseen traces of heavy metals in the soil and along and inside standing structures. Research has indicated some hazards remain even after properties have undergone remediation, the clean-up process that is supposed to restore homes and ensure they are safe to occupy. As Altadena fights to return, residents—some eager to stay in the community and others who simply can’t afford to go anywhere else—are facing immense challenges while trying to rebuild their lives and come back home. Official information about the health risks was limited early on and those returning often only learned about the dangers as they went. Some people have developed health concerns such as migraines and respiratory issues. Many are still battling their insurance companies to fully cover their costs, and make certain their homes are habitable. Their predicament highlights the increased dangers that come with urban fires, and shows how Altadena has come to serve as a sort of living laboratory with scientists and residents learning in real time. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, and her family moved back into their Altadena home over the summer after their property underwent an extensive cleanup process, but their air purifiers still register high levels of particulate matter, heavy sediment appears when they vacuum and when it rains the distinctive smell from the fire returns. “The toll of displacement was really high on my family. And I just had to move home and try [to] mitigate risk and keep fighting the good fight,” she said. “There’s always that back-of-your-mind concern: Did I make the right choice? But I also don’t have other choices.” Early on in those first careening hours of the fire, as thick smoke and ash fell like snow over her yard, Dawn Fanning was sure her home would not be spared. The wind was blowing from the fire straight to the Spanish bungalow the producer shared with her adult son, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. Dawn Fanning outside her home in Pasadena, California, on December 28 2025. The interior of her home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/Guardian Fanning’s home, miraculously, escaped the flames. But, while the stucco structure was intact—clothes still hanging undisturbed in her closet and her son’s baby photos packed carefully in bins in the garage—it hadn’t been unscathed either. Virtually nothing in Altadena was. “It’s dusty and there’s piles of ash in the windowsills and on the floor. At first glance, it doesn’t look any different,” Fanning said. “Your house looks the same—but it’s not. There’s toxicity in your attic and in your crawlspace and on your mattresses and on all the things.” Confused and frustrated with the local government’s handling of health concerns, Maccalla and Fanning joined other fire survivors to form Eaton Fire Residents United in hopes of ensuring the impacted areas recover safely. The community group is developing testing and remediation guidelines, gathered hygienic testing reports of hundreds of homes, and advocated for fire survivors and workers. > “When she awoke at 3 a.m., the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her > house, and smoke filled the room.” “There [have been] huge threats to the health and safety of residents, children in schools, elderly and immunocompromised, workers that are coming into this area that are being exposed to hazards in the workplace,” Maccalla said. “We’re still trying to work on that and get the protections people need.” Barely 15 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles, Altadena at the start of last year was home to some 43,000 people, many lured by the affordable home prices, proximity to the mountains and bucolic feel. It has long been one of the most diverse cities in the region with a thriving Black community that began to grow during the great migration. In the early evening on January 7 2025, Fanning, who had lived in her home in the area for two decades, had a feeling she couldn’t shake that something could go very wrong. There were treacherous winds that forecasters warned posed a serious fire risk. Already, a fire was spreading rapidly on the other side of the county in the Pacific Palisades, where frantic residents were trying to evacuate and firefighters were clearing the area. Some 35 miles away, Fanning and her son were watching coverage of the unfolding fire while readying their property. Then came an alert—not from officials—but from a local meteorologist who was telling his followers to get out now. Fanning spotted flames several blocks away and she and her son decided it was time to leave. A few miles to the east, Rosa Robles was evacuating with her grandchild in tow, leaving her husband and adult children. She wanted them to go—but they were protecting the home. Armed with garden hoses, they tried to save the residence and the other houses on their block. Sometimes the wind was so strong it blew the water back in their faces, Robles said. Maccalla’s power had gone out that morning, and she and her children were sitting around watching the TV drama Fire Country on an iPad in the dark when they got the call about the fire. It seemed far away at the time, Maccalla recalled, and she felt prepared as a member of a community emergency response team. They got out lamps and began packing in case they needed to leave. She set alarms hourly to monitor the progress of the fire while her children slept. When she awoke at three, the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her house, and smoke filled the room. The family evacuated with their two dogs and two cats. Tamara Artin had returned from work to see chaos on the street, with fierce winds and billowing smoke all around the house she rented with her husband. Artin, who is Armenian by way of Iran and has lived in Los Angeles for about six years, always loved the area. She enjoyed the history and sprawling green parks, and had been excited to live here. Now the pair was quickly abandoning the home they had moved into just three months earlier, heading toward a friend’s house with their bags and passports. Fanning and her son had gone to a friend’s home too. As they stayed up late listening to the police scanner, they heard emergency responders call out addresses where flames were spreading. These were friends’ homes. She waited to hear her own. > “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals > without knowing what it is.” In the first days after the fire began, the risk remained and there was little help available with firefighting resources spread across Los Angeles. Maccalla and her son soon returned to their property to try to protect their home and those of their neighbors. “I was working on removing a bunch of debris that had flown into the yard and all these dry leaves. I didn’t know at the time that I shouldn’t touch any of that,” she said.” The devastation in Altadena, as in the Palisades, was staggering. Many of the 19 people who died were older adults who hadn’t received evacuation warnings for hours after people in other areas of town, if at all. Physically, parts of Altadena were almost unrecognizable. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, bright red flame retardant streaked the hillsides. Off Woodbury Road, not far from where Robles and Artin lived, seemingly unblemished homes stood next to blackened lots where nothing remained but fireplaces and charred rubble—scorched bicycles, collapsed beds and warped ovens. The pungent smell of smoke seemed to embed itself in the nose. Robles would sometimes get lost in the place she had lived her whole life as she tried to navigate streets that had been stripped of any identifiable landmarks. Fire scorched the beloved community garden, the country club, an 80-year-old hardware store, the Bunny Museum and numerous schools and houses of worship. Artin and her husband returned to their home, which still stood, after a single night. They had no family in the area and nowhere else to go—hotels were packed across the county. For nearly two weeks they lived without water or power as they tried to clean up, throwing away most of their furniture and belongings, even shoes, and all of the food in the fridge and freezer. “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals without knowing what it is, but we didn’t have a choice,” Artin recalled. As fires burn through communities, they spread particulate matter far and wide, cause intense smoke damage in standing structures and cars, and release chemicals even miles beyond the burned area. > After one round of remediation, “six out of 10 homes were still coming back > with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds.” When Fanning saw her home for the first time, thick piles of ash covered the floors. She was eager to return, but as she tried to figure out her next steps, reading scientific articles and guides, and joining Zoom calls with other concerned residents, it was clear she needed to learn more about precisely what was in the ash. Asbestos was found in her home, meaning all porous items, clothing and furniture, were completely ruined. “You can’t wash lead and asbestos out of your clothing. I was like, OK, this is real and I need to gather as much evidence [as I can] to find out what’s in my house.” In Altadena, more than 90 percent of homes had been built before 1975 and likely had lead-based paint and toxic asbestos, both of which the EPA has since banned, according to a report from the California Institute of Technology. All sorts of things burned along with the houses, Fanning said: plastic, electric cars, lithium batteries. “The winds were shoving this into our homes,” she said. The roof on Maccalla’s home had to be rebuilt, and significant cleanup was required for the smoke damage and layers of ash that blanketed curtains and beds. Despite these concerns, residents grew increasingly frustrated about what they viewed as a lack of official information about the safety of returning to their homes. Many also encountered pushback from their insurance providers that said additional testing for hazards, or more intensive remediation efforts recommended by experts, were unnecessary and not covered under their policies. So earlier this year a group of residents, including Fanning and Maccalla, formed Eaton Fire Residents United (EFRU). The group includes scientists and people dedicated to educating and supporting the community, ensuring there is data collection to support legislation, and assembling an expert panel to establish protocols for future fires, Fanning said. They’ve published research based on testing reports from hundreds of properties across the affected area, and advocated that homes should receive a comprehensive clearance before residents return. Research released by EFRU and headed by Maccalla, who has a doctorate in education and specializes in research methodology, found that more than half of homes that had been remediated still had levels of lead and/or asbestos that rendered them uninhabitable. “There’s still widespread contamination and that one round of remediation was not sufficient, the majority of the time. Six out of 10 homes were still coming back with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds,” said Maccalla, who serves as EFRU’S director of data science and educational outreach. The interior of Dawn Fanning’s home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/The Guardian Maccalla moved back home in June after what she viewed as a decent remediation process. But she hasn’t been able to get insurance coverage for additional testing, and worries about how many people are having similar experiences. “We’re putting people back in homes without confirming that they’re free of contamination,” she said. “It feels very unethical and a very dangerous game to be playing.” She couldn’t afford not to come home, and the family couldn’t keep commuting two hours a day each way from their temporary residence to work and school or their Altadena property where Maccalla was overseeing construction. But she’s experienced headaches, her daughter’s asthma is more severe, and her pets have become sick. “I don’t think anybody that hasn’t gone through it can really comprehend what [that is like],” she said. “For everything in your environment that was so beloved to now become a threat is mentally a really hard switch,” she said. Robles settled back to the home she’s lived in for years with a few new additions. Seven of her relatives lost their homes, including her daughter who now lives with her. “I thank God there’s a place for them. That’s all that matters to me.” Nicole Maccalla with her dog, Cami, outside her home in Altadena. Stella Kalinina/The Guardian After the fire, she threw away clothes, bed sheets and pillows. The family mopped and washed the walls. Her insurance was helpful, she said, and covered the cleanup work. Robles tries not to think about the toxic contamination and chemicals that spread during the fire. “You know that saying, what you don’t know?” she said, her voice trailing off. Artin said she received some assistance from her renter’s insurance, but that her landlord hadn’t yet undertaken more thorough remediation. She’s still trying to replace some of the furniture she had to throw away. The fire had come after an already difficult year in which her husband had been laid off, and their finances were stretched. > “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” She shudders when she recalls the early aftermath of the fire, a morning sky as dark as night. “It was hell, honestly.” Her rent was set to increase in the new year, and while she fears exposure to unseen dangers, moving isn’t an option. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. We can’t do anything,” Artin said. Fanning has been battling her insurance company to cover the work that is necessary to ensure her house is safely habitable, she said. Her provider is underplaying the amount of work that needs to be done and underbidding the costs, Fanning said. She and her son have been living in a short-term rental since late summer, and she expects they won’t be able to return home before the fall. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll be up to returning at all. Even now, when Fanning drives through the area to come get her mail or check on the house, she gets headaches. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe, no matter all the things that I know and all the things that I’m gonna do. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” In between trying to restore her home, she’s focused on advocacy with EFRU, which has become her primary job, albeit unpaid. “There are so many people that don’t have enough insurance coverage, that don’t speak English, that are renters, that don’t have access like I do … I feel it’s my duty as a human.” There’s much work to do, Fanning said, and it has to be done at every single property. “It’s a long road to recovery. And if we don’t do it right, safely, it’s never gonna be what it was before.”

~ Jon and Simon round off the year with a trip into the weeds talking about reaching the Mark Jenner period in the Spycops saga, Labour’s disgusting joining in on European far-right efforts to undercut human rights laws, the real reasons why housing is under so much pressure, and the latest stories from our newswire. The post Anarchist News Review: What have human rights ever done for us? appeared first on Freedom News.

AFTER FOUR MONTHS OF ARGUMENTS, SPLITS, MONEY GRUBBING, AND SWP EXPULSIONS, WHAT NEXT FOR THE PLUCKY NEW PARTY NOW ESTABLISHED? ~  Simon and Andy also discuss a big downturn in new homes construction, Ofgem’s punting of the energy infrastructure bill to the public, and Labour’s attacks on refugees—which have had exactly the outcome we all predicted.   The post Anarchist News Review: Now that’s what I call Your Party appeared first on Freedom News.

Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump had a surprisingly chummy meeting in the Oval Office last week, especially after Trump had described Mamdani during the New York City mayoral campaign as a “100 percent Communist lunatic,” a “total nut job,” and a “Jew hater.” A reporter asked the mayor-elect, often depicted in the press as a class-baiting socialist, if he thought Trump was really a “fascist.” In the awkward moment that followed, Mamdani had barely time to respond before Trump interrupted in a jovial fashion, assuring him that it was “okay” to call him one. Mamdani acknowledged that he did, while Trump relieved the tension by laughing it off. During the meeting, the two New Yorkers from the polar ends of the political spectrum discussed immigration, real estate and crime, zoning laws, and utility costs, and agreed on one issue that is one of the president’s passions: They both want to build more in New York City. As Trump told reporters while he sat behind his desk, with Mamdani standing behind him, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. We agree on a lot more than I would’ve thought.” New York’s next mayor has made housing the centerpiece of his political identity, promising to unleash the public sector to build affordable homes that the private market has failed to build. Affordable housing is a major problem all over the country, but especially in New York. A controversy over one garden spotlights a broader policy question—whether urban planners can deliver both housing and ecological health in an era of climate stress. Or will New York and other American cities continue to trade one public good for another? Like President Trump in his past as a real estate developer building glass skyscrapers, Mamdani is facing serious opposition to his desire to replace green space with residential housing. Consider his quest to construct public housing for elderly on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden—a whimsical pocket of Manhattan filled with neoclassical statues, pear trees, and rosebushes. In one of his final official acts to block his path, on November 3, after Mayor Eric Adams had already stepped down as a candidate but one day before the election, he quietly designated the garden as parkland “permanently.” Now, Mamdani will need the approval of the State Legislature to construct housing on the site. Building housing for the unhoused was one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. When Adams’ decision came to light, Mamdani expressed his annoyance: “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency.”  Adams countered that his decision was about “protecting his legacy.” Yet, in pursuing this cause, he is doing an about-face. Adams, too, once tried to bulldoze the garden to build housing for low-income seniors. He lost to a fierce coalition of neighborhood activists. It’s easy to see both sides. The city’s affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions—more than 91,133 people sleep in the main New York City shelter system, and 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing. Yet green space, too, has shifted from luxury to necessity. Trees and gardens cool the air, clean the lungs, and soothe the mind. Environmental justice advocates rightly insist that a healthy city requires both roofs and roots. But as real estate prices soar, New York’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. > As real estate prices soar, New York City’s leaders are pressed into what > feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. It doesn’t have to be that way. There was a time when common green spaces were part of everyday urban life. In colonial New England, villagers foraged, grazed animals, and gathered wood on the green and in shared forests. Commons provided the material cornucopia that powered essential common law rights to food, fuel, and shelter. When commoners moved to cities, they brought these practices with them—transforming waste ground and food scraps into fertile soil for small gardens. Shared land served as the foundation for civic infrastructure that we hold dear today. Before it became a jewel of the elite in the 1850s, sections of Central Park were once a patchwork of green shantytowns, built by working people who grew food and raised animals on “wasteland.” The same was true of Hyde Park in London, Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, and the Fenway in Boston.   As a historian, I look to the distant past, but you don’t have to go too far back in time to see the service of urban greenspace. In Washington in 1950, the US Department of Agriculture counted more than 2,000 hogs and 74,000 chickens, long after laws had banned both types of animals from the city. As late as the 1950s, in cities as different as New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis, large numbers of working people relied for subsistence on their backyard gardens and on food grown on roofs and balconies. Home-grown provisions saved people money to pay rents and mortgages. In 1940, some of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, east of the Anacostia River, where 94 percent of the population was Black, had some of the highest rates of homeowner occupancy, second only to the high-income DuPont Circle neighborhood. The green lungs of our cities were born not of wealth, but of necessity. In the decades that followed, regular people, not business or city leaders, held cities together during economic downturns. They cleaned up unregulated dumping and generally kept their neighborhoods from descending into a scene from Planet of the Apes. In the 1970s, as New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, developers abandoned buildings, and landlords torched their properties for insurance money. New Yorkers stepped in to claim the ruins. By 1990, neighbors in all five boroughs, but especially on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, turned vacant lots into an estimated 800 community gardens. (In the 2000s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to auction off many of the garden lots, but protestors saved most of them.) In the same spirit, in 1991, Allan Reiver—a scavenger of forgotten art and architectural fragments—leased several lots on Elizabeth Street to save them from becoming a parking lot. He filled them with plants and sculpture, creating the lush, eccentric sanctuary that stands today. The real question is not whether to preserve one garden, but how to reclaim the idea of the urban commons. For the last 100 years, New York City’s shared spaces have been shaped not by the people who live in them but by the infrastructures built to move them—or exclude them. In the 1940s, Robert Moses, the “master builder” who never held elected office, remade the city for the automobile. His parkways to Long Island’s beaches, deliberately engineered with low overpasses, barred buses and thus working-class visitors. His web of expressways gutted neighborhoods from the Bronx to Red Hook in the name of progress, displacing hundreds of thousands of working poor to house the middle and upper classes. He famously declared that “a city without traffic is a ghost town.” Moses’ ghost lingers in the grid: nearly a quarter of New York’s land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. Each car registered in the city effectively enjoys one and a half parking spaces, while the city’s human residents scramble for housing. Streets and parking lots, devoted to moving and storing cars, are the commons of our age.  > “To change a community, you have to change the soil.” But the era of the city-as-parking-lot is ending. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “Green Streets Program,” encouraging communities to redesign streets with gardens, bioswales, bike paths, and permeable pavement, a green infrastructure that naturally manages stormwater, reduces pollution, and creates more resilient and healthier communities. Mamdani’s proposal for high-speed bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and the transformation of parking lots into public housing promises to turn New York toward a viridescent horizon. As the city is reconfigured with fewer cars, New Yorkers could, as in the past, take it further, transforming the new wastes (pavement) into a blooming bounty. Curbside gardens could replace idling cars. Parking lots could be transformed into orchards and community plots. Major avenues could be reborn as edible forests of fruits, nuts, herbs, and flowers, as the famed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley has been doing in South Central Los Angeles. “To change a community,” Finley says, “you have to change the soil.” Cities in Europe are already showing what that might look like on a large scale. In the past two decades, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has replaced more than 50,000 parking spaces and hundreds of car lanes with parks, bike paths, and tree-lined promenades. The banks of the Seine, once choked with traffic, are now a riverfront park. And Parisians appeared to be fully supportive of the transformation. Earlier this year, they voted to ban cars from an additional 500 streets. Nitrogen dioxide levels that once sat in the red zone have fallen into the green. Amsterdam is doing the same. So is Copenhagen, where a devastating 2011 flood led engineers to rip up asphalt and replace it with wetlands, ponds, and rooftop gardens to absorb the next deluge. London, improbably, is reintroducing beavers to help manage stormwater—and in the process, Londoners are learning how to care for and live with beavers. These European projects configure civic infrastructure differently. Climate infrastructure, equity infrastructure, and survival infrastructure are what students of urban planning study today. The impasse between the former and future mayor over the Elizabeth Street Gardens is a false conflict. Climate adaptation and social justice are not competing priorities. They are two sides of the same project—a new vision of the urban commons visible in Mr. Mamdani’s campaign plan to turn 500 asphalt school yards into 500 neighborhood green spaces. “When we stand up and say that we have an agenda to transform our city schools, to renovate 500 public schools, to build 500 green schoolyards, to create thousands of union jobs, to transform 50 schools into resilience hubs, and to prioritize those that have long been forgotten,” he told a Nation reporter, “that is an agenda we are willing to fight for. That is an agenda we are willing to defend.” Kate Brown is the Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at M.I.T. and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published in February by Norton.

Months before hundreds of federal immigration agents raided a rundown apartment complex in Chicago—some even rappelling onto the roof from Blackhawk helicopters in the early hours of September 30—local law enforcement had repeatedly visited the building to try to remove some immigrants living there, according to a longtime tenant. The immigrants, many from Venezuela, had fallen behind on rent, and the landlord, a real estate investor from Wisconsin, wanted them gone. During multiple visits, officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office locked some of the people out of their units, says Cassandra Murray, 55, a US citizen who lived on the building’s fourth floor for about a decade. The place was in dire need of renovations—mold, mice, broken elevators, and a putrid stench were common—but despite the barely habitable conditions, some of the evicted families returned soon after the deputies left. “I felt sorry for them, especially the women with children, because I could tell these people had nowhere to go,” Murray told me. The raid at 7500 S. South Shore Drive became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s militarized effort to detain and deport immigrants. Nearly 300 federal officers from Border Patrol, the FBI, and other agencies arrested 37 people, forcibly separating children from their parents and pulling residents into vans outside. Afterward, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who criticized the operation, urged state agencies to investigate whether agents had used excessive force against kids in the building or infringed on people’s rights But the story of the raid is not only a story about aggressive agents; it is also a story about the struggles asylum seekers face while seeking safe and affordable housing. Some of the Venezuelans at 7500 S. South Shore were reportedly in the building without a lease; others had moved in with temporary rental assistance from a state program, but that funding ended and city-run shelters for immigrants had closed. “They were all just looking for somewhere to stay,” says Murray. To understand the raid, you need to rewind to 2022, when Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. At the height of Abbott’s political stunt, 12 to 15 busloads of immigrants were arriving in Chicago every day—about 28,000 people by late 2023, and 50,000 by late 2024. Many slept on the floors of police stations or at O’Hare airport, waiting for space in shelters. Resettling the new arrivals was a financial strain: In November 2023, Chicago’s City Council allocated $150 million and the state chipped in another $160 million, on top of the $176 million that had already been given by the city, state, and federal governments. The funding would go toward an intake center and winterized tent shelters that could hold 2,000 migrants for up to six months at a time. But these were temporary solutions: By late 2024, as border crossings from Mexico plummeted, the city prepared to close the shelters in January 2025. Instead, Chicago announced a new “unified” shelter system that would house migrants together with non-migrants experiencing homelessness. “This will help to ensure that we have a single and equitable shelter system for anyone,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said at the time. > “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says a tenant organizer. “Now > you’ve got this horrific thing that happened.” There were downsides: Migrants who had been in the United States for longer than 30 days were no longer eligible for placement in a shelter. And there wouldn’t be enough beds for everyone. “Could this lead to people on the street?” Johnson added. “I don’t want to see anyone lose, right? But the harsh reality is that we can do what we can afford. We’ve been stretched to the limits.” In 2022, the state had also created a program to help transition immigrants from shelters to apartments; the Asylum Seeker Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ASERAP) provided up to six months of rental assistance. But this, too, was temporary. In 2023, six months of rental assistance was reduced to three months, sparking concerns that people might be forced back onto the streets if their immigration cases stalled and they didn’t have work permits yet. Three months “is such a short amount of time,” Charlotte Long, then a housing specialist connecting migrants with apartments, told Block Club Chicago. By mid-2024, ASERAP, which also relied on federal funding, was no longer taking applications. The Illinois Department of Human Services told me that the program assisted more than 6,600 households from 2022 to mid-2024. The state did not track what happened to immigrants after they were placed in apartments and their financial assistance ran out. But some were clearly struggling. In 2024, Injustice Watch reported that Illinois officials had placed recent Venezuelan arrivals in an apartment in Woodlawn that city officials had taken to court over unsafe conditions, such as rats and flooding. Others wound up in the South Shore neighborhood—the “eviction capital” of Chicago, as organizer Dixon Romeo, from the group Southside Together, put it to me. In fact, WBEZ reported that asylum seekers receiving state rental assistance were more likely to end up in the 60649 zip code, which includes South Shore, than anywhere else in the city. Broken and boarded up windows at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Federal agents raided the building during the early morning hours of September 30. Residents were awaken by flash-bang grenades and helicopters.Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty The apartment complex at 7500 S. South Shore was in disarray long before federal agents tore it apart. For years, tenants’ maintenance requests were ignored by management. In 2024, Jonah Karsh of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization started helping residents demand improvements, including having their gas turned on so they could cook. But it was an uphill battle. City lawyers eventually sued the owner’s companies for a long list of code violations, noting in court documents that fire extinguishers were missing and “all stairways are filthy with strong smell of urine.” “It’s difficult to walk through without swallowing a gnat,” reporters for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times wrote after they visited the site. “It’s dimly lit inside and completely dark in some corners. A stray cat roams the second floor, likely hunting the mice or cockroaches that residents say infest the building…Elevators are out of order and filled with garbage…Water pours through the ceiling of one unit, pooling below.” “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says Romeo, the organizer at Southside Together, who has canvassed tenants there. “City, state, county, federal government—everybody has a role in why that building looks like it does. Now you’ve got this horrific thing that happened and there’s a lot of light on the situation,” he adds, “but there are buildings like that in every city in America, whether they’re raided by ICE or not. There are housing issues here.” > According to news reports, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker > from the building photographing units “where the Venezuelans lived.” The 130-unit complex is owned by Trinity Flood, the Wisconsin real estate investor, who purchased it in 2020, along with two other distressed South Side buildings. After the sale, she sued the previous owners, alleging they’d overcharged her and hadn’t informed her about all the renovation needs, or that the apartment required 24-hour security, which Flood claimed would cost $15,000 a month. (The suit was settled in 2023, according to The Real Deal, a real estate news outlet that examined the property’s history of code violations.) The building had failed the past 14 annual inspections, per city records, and in April Wells Fargo sued to foreclose on the building. Both the bank and the city have requested that a court-appointed receiver be put in charge of the complex, but litigation is ongoing. Murray, the fourth-floor tenant, says conditions took a turn for the worse after Flood assigned a firm called Strength in Management to manage the building in 2024. The new company did not hire security for the building prior to the raid, even though the front doors didn’t lock. (Neither Flood nor Strength in Management responded to my requests for comment.) “The building was wide open, like we lived in a barn,” says Murray. Anyone could walk in. As a result, the unhoused population grew, driven in part by immigrants, including some whose rental assistance had run out. Murray estimates there were more squatters in the building than paying tenants. (Some had stopped paying rent in protest of the abysmal conditions.) Strength in Management filed 25 eviction cases in 2024, more than in the prior four years combined; sheriff’s deputies came around multiple times this year, Murray told me, but the squatters kept coming back, or new ones would arrive. “I remember hearing on the news about how the shelters shut down for them,” she adds. (The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment.) In August, a city attorney told a lawyer for Wells Fargo that Strength in Management had been unable to “re-assert control over the building” after it was overrun by “armed occupants.” The Department of Homeland Security, too, claimed its agents targeted the building because it was “known to be frequented” by members and associates of the Tren de Aragua gang; prior to the raid, a 25-year-old resident of the building was charged with murdering someone in the neighborhood. (DHS has since admitted that only 8 of the 37 people arrested in the raid had a criminal record, and only one was a verified Tren de Aragua member.) Murray says her immigrant neighbors weren’t causing trouble, and she never saw any gang activity or other behavior that scared her: “Even though the building was open the way it was, nobody ever bothered nobody—the building was quiet.” When some immigrants first moved in two or three years ago, she says, she felt frustrated that not all of them were taking their trash out, but they were receptive to her complaints and ultimately proved to be friendly neighbors: It was the Venezuelans who put up lights in the dark hallways, she says—not management—and they swept and mopped the floors and cleaned the stains off the stairs.   Debris and personal items belonging to Venezuelan immigrants were strewn in a hallway.Jim Vondruska/Reuters/Redux In the early hours of September 30, while residents were asleep in their beds, hundreds of federal agents stormed the apartment. Rodrick Johnson, a US citizen, told Block Club Chicago that he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents busted through his door. Officers handcuffed occupants with zip ties, then led them outside to vans, where they sat for hours wondering whether they would be arrested. It’s unclear who tipped off the feds for the raid. Chicago officials said they didn’t have advance notice about it or collaborate on the operation. Days earlier, according to WBEZ and the Sun-Times, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker from the building photographing the units “where the Venezuelans lived.” After the raid, reporters found a map crumpled up in the entryway of the apartment that labeled each unit as either “vacant,” “tenant,” or “firearms.” The units designated as “vacant” had been raided—tape was left over their doors, labeled with the letters “PC,” according to a video I was shown of one hallway and a photo from WBEZ. Most units designated as “tenant” appeared to have been left alone, leading to questions: How did federal officers know about the building’s layout and occupancy? Karsh, of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, notes that the landlord or property management would have likely possessed that information. Had federal immigration agents, he wondered, been deployed as an extralegal eviction force? After the raid, a small moving crew told Block Club Chicago that they were clearing out the now-empty units, but they didn’t say who hired them. “Doors were boarded up,” the outlet added. “In one room, there were zip ties and blood stains on the floor next to baby shoes.” As journalists came by, seeking more information, property management informed tenants that it would finally lock the front door and hire armed security. Murray, who just moved out, is frustrated about the timing. “Now they have security because they don’t want them to see the real truth,” she says. “But we have been asking for security for years and couldn’t get it.”

On July 24, President Donald Trump issued an executive order for a nationwide push to involuntarily commit unhoused people to institutions—claiming that roundups would “restore public order,” and demanding the reversal of legal precedents and consent decrees that “impede” the policy, a draconian move that disability rights groups argue violates civil liberties. The resultant crackdown in Washington, DC—where an estimated 5,000 people live without permanent shelter, around 800 on the street—began on August 14. DC’s largest encampment was destroyed on Monday, and although it’s unclear how many people have been civilly committed, the sweep has left unhoused people scrambling to find new places to stay, often losing the few possessions they have. Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who developed the evidence-based Housing First approach Trump has abandoned, spoke to my Reveal colleagues last week about the futility and violence of the White House’s crackdown. “People will get discharged from the hospital. They will get released from the jail. And they’ll be back out on the street and the thing will be going in a circle again,” Tsemberis said. “The only way to end homelessness is to provide housing.” Trump has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with “good genes” and cleanliness, and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place. His encampment sweeps and ramp-up of policing mirror familiar scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an influx of wealth has sparked a major housing crisis, intense economic inequality, and public hostility towards the growing ranks of homeless locals. > “Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse, and a > bottom line for all kinds of oppression.” In fact, there’s a throughline from San Francisco to Trump’s anti-disability, anti-homeless agenda: as far back as 1867, San Francisco was the epicenter of a spate of “Ugly Laws,” a legislative crackdown on poverty and disability that closely parallels the Trump program on housing and institutionalization. Sparked in part by an influx of disabled Civil War veterans, ugly laws fined and enforced the arrest of poor, often disabled people for begging, or just existing, on city streets—often followed by institutionalization in brutal 19th-century facilities that offered little or nothing in the way of treatment. Ugly laws quickly spread across the country, and never entirely went away. Pushes to police, incarcerate, or drive out unhoused and disabled people have been a constant in American life—and hardly just a Republican thing, with high-profile Democratic politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York Mayor Eric Adams prominently endorsing encampment sweeps and forced institutionalization. To understand more about the Ugly Laws and their legacy, I spoke with University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus Susan Schweik, who is also the author of the book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. What societal issues contributed to the first Ugly Law in San Francisco in 1867? Let me first say that we know about this law because of the disability movement in the 1970s. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller were never going to get arrested under this ordinance, which prohibited diseased, maimed, deformed bodies from exposing themselves to public view. It was a status offense. This law was directed against poor people. It’s extremely important to understand it as part of a big cluster of vagrancy laws that were being practiced in the South after the Civil War, and that US northern abolitionists who went down to fight slavery, unfortunately, saw the effectiveness of the vagrancy law in the South was being used to substitute for slavery. Abolitionists brought that back up to the cities in the north, which were under all kinds of pressure. People no longer knew the people they passed on the street. Streets were crowded. Poverty was extreme. There were no safety nets. So it targeted poor people. It targeted poor people who were begging, or who were understood to be begging and disability. Being disabled on the street at all could be construed as begging; whether you were putting a hand out or shaking a cup or saying anything to anyone, it was possible to be understood as asking for people’s pity. What types of punishments did poor, disabled people face under the Ugly Laws?  At some point, I realized that if I could figure out when a city opened its first almshouse or poor house, it was quite likely that the unsightly begging ordinance would happen, because they had a place to sweep people off the street. Once big medicalized institutions for the so-called feeble-minded [were established], then it’s easier for a city to pass a law like this without somehow feeling or seeming heartless. It’s very tied to institutionalization and to shutting people away. People were much more likely to be stuck behind those walls for good when it was understood that they were being kind of medically and charitably helped by being given a place. > “Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down > vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue.” Very often, the law was unenforced. The police were uncomfortable with it. They didn’t want to do it. A huge thing was sorting out the deserving and the undeserving, and so police often didn’t do it. Even if police did do it, very often, courts didn’t sentence anybody. There’s very little evidence that anybody actually was legally penalized at the level of the municipal courts. [But] that didn’t mean it didn’t have major catastrophic effects. I had thought for a long time that there was no record of resistance by disabled people to this oppression, and I was wrong. There was an amazing man who lived on the street named Arthur Franklin Fuller, who became the hero of my book, who traveled from town to town until he got kicked out. He self-published books, and one of them was like a legal treatise on the unconstitutionality of the unsightly beggar ordinances. I couldn’t believe it when I found it. It wasn’t like people didn’t try to organize. They did. There was an attempt to unionize disabled beggars in LA to negotiate with the city as a union. How did the “othering” of disabled people lead to the Ugly Laws not getting the backlash that it should have? I think the ugly laws were part of a variety of systems and structures, most notably institutionalization. They were tied to the development of various kinds of institutions that were eugenic because they very deliberately removed people from the social world where they might have relationships that might lead to childbearing. Discrimination in the US has always justified itself on disability grounds. The great historian Douglas Baynton makes this very clear in the realm of immigration: when groups are excluded from being able to enter the US, there’s always a language of disability. They’re contagious, they’re feeble-minded, they’re weak, they’re going to be a burden on the state. Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse and a bottom line for all kinds of oppression. Women couldn’t vote because they were hysterical and too emotional. Black people were too volatile or cognitively impaired, or whatever term was going to be marshaled at the moment. Donald Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue, and he was absolutely explicit about them being repulsive and unsightly. He has a very long line of operating out of that terrorizing repulsion. Did the fight for disability civil rights help lead to the dismantling of the Ugly Laws?  There was a case in the 1970s in Omaha where a policeman wanted to arrest an unhoused person and didn’t know how—so he goes to the ordinance books, finds this [ugly] law, and he’s like, “Oh, that guy has a scar, so I’ll use this.” He goes to court. The judge was like, What does this mean? If my neighbor’s homely kids ask me for something, they should be arrested? Like, what? What is unsightly? Even though the judge threw it out of court, the DA held a press conference and said [it was] still a good law—and then it [was] reported as “Begging law punishes only the ugly.” Disability activists in Omaha read that headline, and working with disability activists in other Midwestern cities, decided that they were going to make a fuss about that law. An April 21, 1974 article from the Omaha World-Herald.Omaha World-Herald/Newspapers.com Chicago disability activists went to their city council as a form of [political] theater, and said this law is still on the books. Nobody was being arrested under it, [but] nobody had ever cared about removing it, and so poor Chicago got a bad rep for being the site of the ugly law, when it really was the site of the activism. So we know everything we know about these laws because of the disability movement in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It was invoked explicitly in the campaign for the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are books all over the country, city code books, where they’re still sitting. Do you think that Trump’s executive order targeting homeless people with psychiatric disabilities is reminiscent of the Ugly Laws?  Two things that are conjoined in that executive order [are] endemic vagrancy and mental illness, the combination [that] the way in which these unsightly, bigger ordinances got passed after cities had institutions that could be stocked full of people who other people did not want to see on the street. How is endemic vagrancy and unsightly encampment and the presence of what gets called mental illness? How is it going to be tackled by the executive order? It’s going to be tackled by civil commitment, by institutionalization. I think about the important disability advocate and activist Rebecca Cokley, who put out this call and pointed out that people were tending to reduce the possible impact of that executive order to the realm of homelessness or unhoused people or mental health, but that potentially it had a much broader reach. It could target dissent, and that was true of the history of unsightly beggar ordinances. Someone trans could be identified as a mentally ill person. There are so many ways to contain and hurt and banish immigrants, especially Black and brown people, and to disappear them, as Rebecca says. Ugly laws basically disappeared after World War I, because the existence of large numbers of disabled veterans produced rehabilitation and systems that were, at least at in theory, meant to include people in every aspect of society. [But] here we are again. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WHILE ELON MUSK STRUGGLES TO GET HIS AI TO STOP CALLING ITSELF MECHA HITLER, THE LESS TECHY WING OF THE ELITES ARE UP TO OLD TRICKS … Simon and Andy discuss the UK government’s shift to juryless trials and what it means for activism, wildfires and heatwave death toll creep, Grok channelling Goebbels, the Filton 18 and proscription protest arrests, property giants buying off a cartel investigation, and Rishi Sunak going old-school revolving door in record time. The post Anarchist News Review: Grok The Nazi, Rishi’s Return To Banking and Cartel Cash Bungs appeared first on Freedom News.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The federal Weatherization Assistance Program is the oldest and largest energy efficiency initiative in American history. Born from the 1973 oil crisis, it helps low- and moderate-income households make a litany of upgrades to their homes, such as installing insulation, sealing windows, and wrapping water pipes. The program, known as WAP, is often free and saves residents an average of $372 annually on their utility bills.  But a report released today by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that many homes need basic—but expensive—repairs before they can participate, something many residents can’t afford. Those households are placed on a deferral list until those improvements are made. Although some buildings are too damaged to fix up and some people manage to get off the list, the research showed that, in 2023, another 7,000 homes could have been repaired but weren’t due to lack of money. That’s a fifth of the 35,000 homes that the Department of Energy estimates WAP reaches each year. > “People are in really bad situations…There is a very big demand for this > no-cost program.” “We were the first to really figure out what the deferral rates are and why,” said Reuven Sussman, an expert in energy efficiency behavior change at ACEE and an author of the report. “I don’t think this problem is broadly known.” The Department of Energy, which administers the $326 million WAP budget, works with local companies to weatherize qualifying homes. ACEEE surveyed providers in 28 states about their deferrals. The top reason cited was the poor condition of the roof—an issue that undermines improvements such as attic insulation. Floor damage and outdated electric panels were the other leading justifications for deferring homes. The average cost of bringing a home up to WAP standards, the report found, was nearly $14,000.  “If you’re eligible for WAP you likely don’t have enough money to pay for it,” Will Bryan, director of research for the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance. “There are households that are falling through the cracks.” People facing deferrals have a few options, but they are limited and inconsistent. Depending on where these residents live, some public, private, or philanthropic funds are available for critical home repairs. Some states—like Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Vermont—have more specific programs targeting WAP deferrals. Starting in 2022, the federal government also provided money for the Weatherization Readiness Fund (WRF),  though it only backed it with about $15 million.  “The government has experimented with some pre-weathization funding, but that hasn’t happened at the kind of scale that it needs to,” said Bryan. And, he added, President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are trying to pull what little money has become available in recent years. The “big, beautiful” budget bill that the House passed zeros out the budget for both WAP and WRF, as well as related assistance or incentive programs. The details of the Senate version are not yet clear, but the impacts of the rollback could be drastic.  “Elderly people, disabled people, small children—their energy burden is so much higher than other folks because they are on fixed incomes,” said Bryan Burris, vice president of energy conservation programs at projectHOMES, a WAP provider in Richmond, Virginia. The recent influx of state and federal funding has helped his organization cut its deferral rate from around 50 percent to about 20, but that progress is in peril. “People are in really bad situations,” said Burris. “There is a very big demand for this no-cost program.” ACEEE estimates that it would cost about $94 million per year to make the 7,000 preventable deferrals ready for weatherization. If all those homes were able to receive WAP services, it would save 49,236 megawatt-hours of energy annually and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 153,000 metric tons over the lifetime of the measures. WAP projects also often pay for themselves many times over in lower utility bills. Evaluating the effectiveness of weatherization readiness programs is more complex. Although they may save homeowners some money on a monthly basis, the greatest gains of major repairs are often indirect boosts in health and quality of life. For example, fixing a roof could help a senior citizen age in place, rather than go to an assisted living facility. Removing toxic substances, like asbestos, from homes could prevent illnesses in children. “You can potentially save money in the long term by reducing the hazards that people are exposed to,” said Bryan, pointing to a substantial body of research supporting the idea. A 2021 study in the southeastern United States, for example, found that after weatherization, “respondents reported fewer bad days of physical and mental health. Households were better able to pay their energy bills and afford prescriptions.” While that line of inquiry was beyond the scope of the latest ACEEE report, Sussman said the logic makes sense. Avoiding even a minor trip to the hospital or doctor could save programs like Medicaid or Medicare thousands of dollars.  “People live with holes in the roof and asbestos and can’t get assistance,”  said Bryan. “It leads to health issues.”

In 2018, Monica Ruiz and her neighbors found letters from their landlord taped to their doors. They were notifications of rent hikes—in some cases, increases of over 200 percent. Ruiz had lived at Hillside Villa, a large apartment complex overlooking Los Angeles’ gentrifying Chinatown, for more than 20 years. She had raised five children there. Her youngest daughter attended the nearby elementary school, where she had taken Mandarin classes since kindergarten. She didn’t want to give them up or leave her friends. “I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move,’” Ruiz recalled. Ruiz didn’t know if she could find another affordable home anywhere in Los Angeles. And she didn’t want to. She had long tended a community garden in the courtyard of Hillside Villa’s two L-shaped buildings that had become a gathering space for barbecues and quinceañeras, right next to the thriving papaya plants she had nurtured. > “I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to > move.'” The complex had started as a triumph of Reaganomics. President Ronald Reagan demonized public housing as a budgetary blight. Through a series of reforms, his administration instead floated tax credits to incentivize private developers to build low-income housing where rents would be capped, typically for three decades or more. The policy essentially created a network of affordable housing with an expiration date, one that would kick the low-­income housing can down the road to a future generation of politicians. Lawrence Chan, the son of a billionaire Hong Kong developer, began construction on Hillside Villa in 1986 using a combination of those federal tax credits and municipal loans to fund the project. In exchange for the support, when the apartment complex opened in 1989, he agreed to a 30-year covenant with the city of Los Angeles committing to keep rents low. Chan sold Hillside Villa in 2000. When the covenant expired in 2018, the new landlord, Tom Botz, was left with no obligation to provide affordable housing. That’s when Ruiz found the letter on her door. Americans of most income levels and in almost every community are all too familiar with the housing crisis, pushed on by a lack of inventory and rising rents and mortgage costs. But the crisis is particularly acute among low-­income people, who face a shortage of around 7.1 million affordable units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The tenants of Hillside Villa had been part of a sprawling network of over 2.6 million units whose rents are kept affordable by the federal low-income housing tax credit program, according to the National Housing Preservation Database. Over the next decade, 800,000-plus homes are slated to lose the rental restrictions set in place during Reagan’s pivot away from government-run housing. The women of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association before the start of a community meeting.Zaydee Sanchez/Mother Jones Hillside Villa’s residents had been drawn by its low rents and quiet neighborhood. They were immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Vietnam who worked as street vendors, cleaners, and construction workers. Ruiz originally wound up in the complex after being forced out of her home downtown, which was razed to make way for a convention center expansion. Adela Cortez and Rosario Hernandez had similar stories of being displaced by development. They, along with Ruiz and several other Latina women, would prove their mettle as mainstays of the tenant organizers. > “I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re > facing in Los Angeles.” The residents pushed the city and their landlord to enact a 10-year covenant extension that could keep more than 100 low-income tenants housed. One morning, they even showed up outside Botz’s home in Malibu, urging him to sign. But Botz, who declined interview requests, refused, underlining a fundamental problem: When private landlords are called upon to deliver affordable housing, affordability can live and die by a landlord’s whim. Feeling they had no other options, the tenants staged a rent strike. They called Spanish-language television stations. They held sit-ins outside local officials’ offices. They knocked on neighbors’ doors and met regularly with the LA Tenants Union and the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development. With their back rent accumulating, the tenants pushed an unconventional solution: The city could loan itself money to buy Hillside Villa, force a sale through eminent domain, and then transfer ownership to a land trust or nonprofit that would run the complex, keep rents low, and pay the city back. Monica Ruiz and her youngest daughter, Jamie Ruiz, embrace. Zaydee Sanchez Eminent domain—the power of government to seize and redevelop property—has a bad rap, particularly in Los Angeles, where it’s been used to build freeways and stadiums and destroy working-class communities. But, the tenants reasoned, because it is a power the government can exercise in almost any situation, it could be used to save Hillside Villa from Botz and his rent increases. The city’s Housing Department began looking into the proposal and told the city council that eminent domain would be too costly. It instead recommended a deal: The city would give Botz almost $15 million to extend the terms of the covenant for 10 more years. The tenants would pay the five years of back rent they owed, plus up to 3 percent interest, or face eviction. After the tenants said they couldn’t afford to do so, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, Hillside Villa’s local representative, negotiated a six-month repayment grace period and pledged to help fundraise to fill any gap, committing $250,000 from her council office. But the tenants denounced the deal as a giveaway, leaving the standoff in place. Nithya Raman, an LA councilmember who heads its Housing and Homelessness Committee, acknowledges the extension plan is more kicking the can. “I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re facing in Los Angeles,” said Raman, who was elected in 2020 after campaigning on tenant rights and the housing crisis. The deal “is only a 10-year extension,” she explains, “leaving them potentially in this exact same situation a decade later.” Preserving existing affordable housing is just one part of the solution, according to Shane Phillips, a housing expert at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “It’s certainly a big problem that a lot of covenants are expiring,” he said. “It is a much bigger problem because our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just people being born.” Last year, California’s powerful landlord lobby spent over $150 million to shut down a state proposition that would have expanded local governments’ ability to enact rent control. While LA was exploring expanding investments into housing via an existing voter-approved mansion tax last year, Mayor Karen Bass’ latest proposed budget will cut affordable housing funds to help close a $1 billion deficit. > “Our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 > or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just > people being born.” The National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that the shortage cannot be filled by states alone and that “Congress must significantly increase federal investments in programs that both preserve and expand the supply of deeply affordable units and bridge the gaps between incomes and rent.” While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill in 2024 with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) that would have created a federal agency to acquire and maintain apartment buildings for low-income Americans, since then, at least a billion dollars in federal funding for affordable housing has been axed by the Trump administration. Los Angeles’ Chinatown still provides affordable housing options, making it a critical area for low-income residents.Zaydee Sanchez Ruiz, who does not drive, is determined to remain in the home where she raised four children in part because of its access to public transportation.Zaydee Sanchez Last September, a Hillside Villa tenant prevailed in court against Botz, who was trying to evict him and other tenants for their ongoing rent strike; Botz dropped his related eviction cases. None of what the Hillside Villa tenants have accomplished—through the city council or in court—would’ve been possible if they hadn’t organized collectively. Now in the seventh year of their fight, they’re part of a nationally resurgent tenant movement. Last year, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom went to Kentucky to profile the Louisville Tenants Union, which is organizing to protect tenants in a historically segregated city where politicians and developers have targeted historically Black neighborhoods for redevelopment and gentrification. This past spring, a group of Bronx tenants successfully fought their landlord over uninhabitable conditions, prompting New York City to strip his ownership of the building—a first in seven years. Tenants unions have even started to band together. Louisville’s helped launch the Tenant Union Federation, a coalition working to win national protections. Another founder of the federation, KC Tenants of Kansas City, Missouri, began a rent strike in October. When participating members got attention on X for burning late fee notices, the Hillside Villa tenants’ account replied with a similar photo, taken in their leafy courtyard. It showed their own action, with residents wearing their signature red shirts and cheering as an eviction notice was engulfed in flame. “WE LOVE TO SEE IT,” they wrote. This story was produced in partnership with Los Angeles Public Press. Translation and additional reporting by Martín Macías Jr.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.  It began with a lobbyist’s pitch. Tennessee Rep. Rusty Grills says the lobbyist proposed a simple idea: repeal the state’s requirement for reflective roofs on many commercial buildings. In late March, Grills and his fellow lawmakers voted to eliminate the rule, scrapping a measure meant to save energy, lower temperatures, and protect Tennesseans from extreme heat. Grills, a Republican, said he introduced the bill to give consumers more choice. It was another win for a well-organized lobbying campaign led by manufacturers of dark roofing materials. Industry representatives called the rollback in Tennessee a needed correction as more of the state moved into a hotter climate zone, expanding the reach of the state’s cool-roof rule. Critics called it dangerous and “deceptive.”  “The new law will lead to higher energy costs and greater heat-related illnesses and deaths,” state Rep. Harold Love and the Rev. Jon Robinson wrote in a statement.  It will, they warned, make Nashville, Memphis, and other cities hotter—particularly in underserved Black and Latino communities, where many struggle to pay their utility bills. Similar lobbying has played out in Denver, Baltimore, and at the national level.  Industry groups have questioned the decades-old science behind cool roofs, downplayed the benefits and warned of reduced choice and unintended consequences. “A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t consider climate variation across different regions,” wrote Ellen Thorp, the executive director of the EPDM Roofing Association, which represents an industry built primarily on dark materials. But the weight of the scientific evidence is clear: On hot days, light-colored roofs can stay more than 50 degrees cooler than dark ones, helping cut energy use, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. One recent study found that reflective roofs could have saved the lives of more than 240 people who died in London’s 2018 heatwave.  At least eight states—and more than a dozen cities in other states—have adopted cool-roof requirements, according to the Smart Surfaces Coalition, a national group of public health and environmental groups that promote reflective roofs, trees, and other solutions to make cities healthier. Industry representatives lobbied successfully in recent months against expanding cool roof recommendations in national energy efficiency codes—the standards that many cities and states use to set building regulations. The stakes are high. As global temperatures rise and heat waves grow more deadly, the roofs over our heads have become battlefields in a consequential climate war. It’s happening as the Trump administration and Congress move to derail measures designed to make appliances and buildings more energy efficient.  The principle is simple: Light-colored roofs reflect sunlight, so buildings stay cooler. Dark ones absorb heat, driving up temperatures inside buildings and in the surrounding air.  Roofs comprise up to one-fourth of the surface area of major US cities, researchers say, so the color of roofs can make a big difference. Just how hot can dark roofs get? “You can physically burn your hands on these roofs,” said Bill Updike, who used to install solar panels and now works for the Smart Surfaces Coalition.  Study after study has confirmed the benefits of light-colored roofs, which typically cost no more than dark roofs. A study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that a cool roof on a home in central California saved 20 percent in annual energy costs. In a three-story rowhouse in Baltimore, Owen Henry discovered what a difference a cool roof can make. Living in a part of the city with few trees—and where summer temperatures often climb into the 90s—Henry wanted to trim his power bills and stay cooler while working in his third-floor office. So in 2023, he used $100 worth of white reflective roof paint to coat his roof. Henry said he and his wife immediately saw the indoor temperature drop. They reduced their electricity use by 24 percent.  Owen Henry shows off his white roof in Baltimore.Courtesy Owen Henry Known for its durability, a black synthetic rubber known as EPDM once dominated commercial roofing. But in recent years it has been surpassed by TPO, a plastic single-ply material which is typically white and is better suited to meet the growing demand for reflective roofs. Leading EPDM manufacturers—including Johns Manville, Carlisle SynTec, and Elevate, a division of the Swiss multinational company Holcim—have fought against regulations that threaten to further diminish their market share. Kurt Shickman, former executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance, said those companies have the money to hire top-notch lobbyists who know their way around hearing rooms—and who are on a first-name basis with decision makers. The EPDM industry has paid for research that has asserted that the impact of cool-roof mandates is inconclusive, and that insulation plays a bigger role in saving energy than cool roofs.  In an emailed response to Floodlight’s questions, Thorp argued that many of the studies cited to support cool roof mandates leave out important factors, such as local climate variations, roof type, tree canopy, and insulation thickness.  And she pointed to a recent study by Harvard researchers who concluded that white roofs and pavements may reduce precipitation, causing temperatures to unexpectedly increase in surrounding regions. But Haider Taha, a leading expert on urban heat, identified multiple flaws in the Harvard study, stating, “The study’s conclusions fail to provide actionable insights for urban cooling strategies or policymaking.”  When Baltimore debated a cool roof ordinance in 2022, Thorp’s group and the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association (ARMA) lobbied hard against it, arguing that dark roofs are the most efficient choice in “northern climates like Baltimore.” In cold climates, industry representatives note, cool roofs can lead to higher winter heating bills. “Current research does not support the adoption of cool roofs as a measure that will achieve improved energy efficiency or reduced urban heat island,” Thorp wrote in a letter to one council member.  Multiple studies show otherwise. They’ve concluded that reflective roofs do save energy and cool cities by easing the “urban heat island effect”—the extra heat that gets trapped in many city neighborhoods because buildings and pavement soak up the sun.  Researchers have also found that even in most cold North American climates, the energy savings from cool roofs during warmer months outweighs any added heating costs in the winter.  Despite the opposition, Baltimore passed a cool-roof ordinance in 2023. Opponents of cool roof requirements like Baltimore’s say they oversimplify a complex issue. In an email to Floodlight, ARMA Executive Vice President Reed Hitchcock said such rules aren’t a “magic bullet.” He encouraged regulators to consider a “whole building approach”—one that weighs insulation, shading, and climate in addition to roof color to preserve design flexibility and consumer choice. Henry, the Baltimore homeowner, said he thinks the city’s ordinance will help all residents. “Phooey to any manufacturer that’s going to try and stop us from maintaining our community and making it a pleasant place to live,” he said. Elsewhere, the industry’s lobbyists have notched victories. They’ve lobbied successfully against a cool-roof ordinance in Denver and against stricter standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)—a professional organization that creates model standards for city and state regulations. The current ASHRAE standard recommends reflective roofs on commercial buildings in US climate zones 1, 2, and 3—the country’s hottest regions. Those include most of the South, Hawaii, almost all of Texas, areas along the Mexican border and most of California. “We’ve been able to stop all of those…mandates from creeping into climate zone 4 and 5,” Thorp said in a recent interview.  Another group headed by Thorp—the Coalition for Sustainable Roofing—worked with the lobbyist to propose the bill that eliminated Tennessee’s cool-roof requirement.  That rule once applied to commercial buildings in just 14 of the state’s 95 counties, but an update to climate maps in 2021 expanded the requirements to 20 more counties, including its most populous urban area—Nashville. Brian Spear, a homeowner in Tempe, Arizona, has lived in the Phoenix area since the 1980s, back when there were fewer than 30 days a year when the temperature reached 110 degrees. Last year, there were 70 of those days—the highest on record—followed only by 2023, when there were 55 days of 110 degrees plus. These days, summer mornings start out scorching, he says, “and I feel like if you go outside between 10 and 4, it’s dangerous.” Spear says he’ll soon replace the aging roof on an Airbnb home that he owns. After weighing the usual concerns—cost and aesthetics—he has chosen a surface that he believes will help rather than harm: a gray metal roof with a reflective coating.  “If someone told me you couldn’t put a dark roof on your house…I’d understand,” he said. “I’m all about it being for the common good.”