Good morning.
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Across Los Angeles, they sleep in tents, under tarps or out in the open air, and their numbers are growing. Last year the population of homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles increased 23 percent, and officials believe the numbers have continued to rise.
This week the city will start to find out just how much.
Starting Tuesday night in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and San Gabriel Valleys, thousands of volunteers fanned out to neighborhoods to count the homeless, an annual three-day exercise that in recent years has confirmed an alarming crisis in Los Angeles County.
The count, along with demographic surveys, will help policymakers decide how to spend public money: $355 million per year raised by Los Angeles county from a special sales tax, and a $1.2 billion city bond issue to build housing for the homeless.
Once mostly associated with Skid Row, the vast tent encampment in downtown Los Angeles, the homeless are now spread out across the city, setting up tents under highway overpasses and moving into affluent neighborhoods like Bel-Air, where a wildfire that threatened the area’s mega-mansions was sparked last year by a cooking fire at a homeless encampment.
As the homeless population has grown, the old stereotypes — of single men, mentally ill or addicted — have been upended. Now the crisis, not just in Los Angeles but across California, is closely connected with another of state’s challenges: an overheated housing market. Many of those who have recently fallen into homelessness have jobs, but have been pushed to the streets by skyrocketing rents.
“I think the causes are pretty clear and explicit,” said Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. “Los Angeles is absolutely at the center of a crisis of housing affordability.”
So far, officials say 7,500 people have signed up as volunteers. But they want a few more, and hope to have roughly 8,000 people participate, the same number as last year. There is still time, they say, to join the effort on Wednesday night, in East and West L.A. and South Bay/Harbor Cities, and Thursday, in Metro and South L.A. and in the Antelope Valley.
Are you one of the volunteers? Or, if you did you not participate, do you have an experience to share about your interactions with the homeless? We’d like to hear from you at CAtoday@nytimes.com
California Online
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Dipayan Ghosh at New America, a Washington think tank. He and Ben Scott, both members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign team, contend in a new report that the profit model of digital advertising also promotes disinformation.CreditAndrew Mangum for The New York Times• A growing number of Democrats are becoming disillusioned with Silicon Valley, fearing that sites like Facebook have become a conduit for disinformation campaigns directed at our democracy. [The New York Times]
• Oprah for… county supervisor? Forget running for president, the columnist Joe Mathews advises Oprah Winfrey. Instead, her own community in Santa Barbara, ravaged by fires and mudslides, needs her more Mr. Mathews writes. [Zocalo Public Square]
• “The eerie thing about these nights in Montecito has to do with absence,” writes the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle for The New Yorker. [The New Yorker]
• Civic pride: With Lady Bird, the coming-of-age drama set in Sacramento, capturing five Oscar nominations, a writer wonders if the movie’s success will lead to more filmmaking in the capital and its environs. [The Sacramento Bee]
• An American immigrant story. She was born in Arizona in 1925, but as a child her family was sent back to Mexico. She came back to America, settled in Los Angeles, built up a successful tortilla business, founded a bank and went on to become the top Mexican-American in the Nixon Administration. Romana Acosta Banuelos died on Jan. 15 in Redondo Beach. She was 92. [Los Angeles Times]
• Democrats are beginning to line up to boycott President Trump’s State of the Union speech. Among them: Representative Maxine Waters of California. (Roll Call)
• The California state payroll increased by $1 billion last year, twice the rate of growth of the previous year. This reflects labor agreements that gave state workers substantial raises. [Sacramento Bee]
• 40 Days of Devastation. The Thomas Fire blazed through 280,000 acres of Santa Barbara and Venture counties, becoming the state’s largest wildfire on record. To tell the scope of that story, the Los Angeles Times produced an interactive 3D map. [Los Angeles Times]
• The Olympics begin Feb. 9, and from bobsled to figure skating to skiing, California will be well represented. [The Sacramento Bee]
A rendering of a proposed spacecraft for Moon Express, one of the Lunar X Prize competitors that will not be ready to launch before the March 31 deadline.CreditMoon Express• Google won’t be helping to send someone to the moon anytime soon. The company said Tuesday it would cancel its Lunar X Prize competition, which had sought to launch the first privately funded mission to the moon, because none of the entrants could make the deadline in March. [The New York Times]
• Pam MacKinnon, a Tony-winning director, is the next leader of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. [The New York Times]
• San Francisco has a new interim mayor: Mark Farrell, a city supervisor and former venture capitalist will run the city until a special election in June. The replacement of London Breed, an African American woman, stirred charges of racism from Ms. Breed’s supporters. [San Francisco Chronicle]
And Finally ...
A surfer during the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, Calif., in August.CreditMark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe recently asked you what you thought about a bill that was introduced recently by two state lawmakers from Los Angeles to name surfing the state’s official sport.
You had plenty to say.
“Ridiculous.”
“Absurd.”
“Great.”
“All for it.”
There was no consensus, clearly, but the question stirred passions.
Some said that surfing, even though it is closely identified with California culture, is not reflective of the state’s diversity, both in matters of ethnicity and race and geography. “Surfing — a white man’s sport,” one reader wrote. Another wrote that surfing is, “characterized by young whites, mainly males, mainly from middle-class to affluent backgrounds in coastal areas. Let’s try again folks.”
Arguing in favor, one writer, of the “early Boomer generation,” said that surfing is already the state’s unofficial sport. “Bringing this phenomenon into ‘official’ status will celebrate exactly what we Californians already know. Hang ten!”
A skateboarder in Venice Beach, Calif.CreditMark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome offered up alternatives, saying they were more democratic. Sports like soccer, hiking, biking, skateboarding and skiing. Others said they were fine with it if doing so would give California more ability to protect the oceans, and push back on a Trump administration plan to open coastal areas to offshore drilling.
Still others thought the question was simply a waste of time, for lawmakers and readers, and wondered why we were having the discussion in the first place. As one reader put it, “Why not leave it as it is, with no state sport, that way people will not be angry about something that is so unimportant?”
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
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