After a frenzied bidding war, a quirky house built on a bridge over a concrete drainage channel in Alhambra has sold for $180,000 over the asking price in what still may be considered a bargain in Southern California’s pricey real estate market.
The unusual location of the house and its comparatively modest $250,000 asking price drew national attention and hundreds of visitors when it hit the market a few weeks ago. Most of the visitors were looky-loos who wanted to get a peek at the small home someone built in 1949 into the side of a bridge owned by the city overlooking the Alhambra Wash.
“This was definitely a unique property, no doubt about it,” said real estate agent Douglas Lee of Compass, who had the listing. “I have never come across anything like this.”
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People were enthralled by what TV tabloid show “Inside Edition” called “the troll house” for its bridge location — more than 155,000 have viewed the show segment about the home posted on YouTube.
Lee declined to identify the buyer who came up with the top bid of $430,000, but Lee said he is a retired Rosemead High School teacher.
The 450-square-foot dwelling on the 1300 block of East Main Street has a terrace that looks over the wash and a rooftop patio that sits next to a road bridge, separated only by a fence. It’s within walking distance of a Vietnamese restaurant and a hair salon but has no designated parking spot.
The house is a one-bedroom, one-bath fixer-upper that once belonged to the parents of one of Lee’s high school friends. Lee said his friend’s parents purchased the home in 2005 for about $72,000. Their plan was to use it as a swanky “man cave,” Lee said, but it sat vacant for nearly two decades according to KTLA5.
The average one-bedroom home in the Alhambra neighborhood costs about $350,000, while the median sale price for an existing single-family house in Southern California is about $785,000.
Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this story.
Minimum-wage workers shouldn’t bother trying to find a two-bedroom apartment — anywhere in the U.S.
According to a new federal report, “in no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at fair market rent by working a standard 40-hour work week.”
The “Out of Reach” report reveals in stark terms the financial challenges facing renters, particularly in California.
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A California renter needs to make $42.25 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental unit, the highest figure in the nation, according to the new study. The mean hourly wage for California renters, by contrast, is only $33.67.
Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Washington were the next four most expensive states after California, with renters needing to make at least $35 hourly to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
In California, Cristian Morales, 33, is an example of the struggle facing hourly wage earners to secure decent housing.
He makes $21 an hour as a laundry attendant at the Hilton Pasadena. The job, which he has held for nearly five years, can be stressful. “We have to be moving all the time and sometimes there’s not time to get our 10-minute breaks,” he said.
The hotel is frequently short-staffed, Morales said, which sometimes means that a 14-story chute gets packed with linens “all the way to the sixth floor” before he can get to it.
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Along with his wife and five children, Morales lived in a rental apartment in North Hills until 2020, when they could no longer afford the apartment. “Rent in L.A. went up, it’s super up. Groceries are up,” he said.
The family moved in with Morales’ in-laws in Baldwin Park, where three of the kids live in the front house, with their grandparents and the rest of the family living in the back house.
“Of course, I want my own place,” Morales said. “It’s not the same living with your father- and mother-in-law.”
The eight most expensive counties for renters in America were all in California, including Santa Barbara and Orange counties in Southern California, according to the report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
In the four most expensive counties — Santa Cruz, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo — a renter needs to make more than $60 an hour to afford a two-bedroom unit.
Santa Cruz County, where the mean renter income was estimated at $22.39 an hour, had the biggest discrepancy between actual income and the income required to afford a two-bedroom. The mean renter only made 34% of the income necessary to afford such a unit, according to the study.
“The affordable housing crisis worsened over the past few years as the COVID-19 pandemic, unusually low housing vacancy rates, skyrocketing rental prices and record-breaking inflation exacerbated the financial insecurity of low-income renters,” the report states.
California is the most renter-heavy state in the country, with 45% of housing units occupied by renters. Within the state, Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, where the rates are 62% and 54%, respectively, stand out.
Apartment owners are also speaking out about rents.
“We have been screaming for years and years that the lack of supply and construction of new housing is leading to this increase,” said Fred Sutton, a spokesperson for the California Apartment Assn., a group representing the rental housing industry.
“The costs of operating housing have skyrocketed over the last several years,” he said, noting that rent control, inflation and operating costs are factors in adjusting rents.
“Housing is becoming more and more scarce in the state, and some of the local municipalities have made it ever-increasingly harder to obtain,” Sutton said. He argued for reduced regulations on housing construction.
In all but three of California’s 58 counties, the mean wage for renters was not enough to afford a two-bedroom rental. The three counties where wages were high enough were all high-rent locales in the Bay Area: San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Mateo.
The report states that “renters are facing the effects of a long-standing trend in which rents have risen faster than wages.” Between 2001 and 2021, according to the report, median rents increased 17.9%, while median household income went up 3.2%.
In Arkansas, the nation’s cheapest state for renters, a renter can afford a two-bedroom unit with an hourly income of $16.27. That’s about one-third of the cost in California.
The Dakotas, Mississippi and West Virginia, all with hourly wages between $16 and $18, rounded out the five least expensive states. Minimum wages in all five states are far below California’s $15.50 rate: Arkansas’ is the highest, at $11, and North Dakota and Mississippi are the lowest, benchmarked to the federal level of $7.25.
For Morales, affordable housing for his family is a pipe dream. “In reality, we checked about a year ago, but it’s too expensive. It’s not like we can move to a single — I’ve got five kids.”
“It’s super hard to even find a place that we can all fit and have a little freedom,” he said.
Higher wages could make a difference. Morales belongs to the Unite Here Local 11 hotel workers’ union, and plans to go on strike this weekend alongside thousands of others, calling for higher wages.
“We’re ready, we’re motivated, and we believe that we deserve what we’re asking for,” he said.
High above the Las Vegas Strip, solar panels blanketed the roof of Mandalay Bay Convention Center — 26,000 of them, rippling across an area larger than 20 football fields.
From this vantage point, the sun-dappled Mandalay Bay and Delano hotels dominated the horizon, emerging like comically large golden scepters from the glittering black panels.Snow-tipped mountains rose to the west.
It was a cold winter morning in the Mojave Desert. But there was plenty of sunlight to supply the solar array.
“This is really an ideal location,” said Michael Gulich, vice president of sustainability at MGM Resorts International.
The same goes for the rest of Las Vegas and its sprawling suburbs.
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Sin City already has more solar panels per person than any major U.S. metropolis outside Hawaii, according to one analysis. And the city is bursting with single-family homes, warehouses and parking lots untouched by solar.
L.A. Times energy reporter Sammy Roth heads to the Las Vegas Valley, where giant solar fields are beginning to carpet the desert. But what is the environmental cost? (Video by Jessica Q. Chen, Maggie Beidelman / Los Angeles Times)
There’s enormous opportunity to lower household utility bills and cut climate pollution — without damaging wildlife habitat or disrupting treasured landscapes.
But that hasn’t stopped corporations from making plans to carpet the desert surrounding Las Vegas with dozens of giant solar fields — some of them designed to supply power to California. The Biden administration has fueled that growth, taking steps to encourage solar and wind energy development across vast stretches of public lands in Nevada and other Western states.
Those energy generators could imperil rare plants and slow-footed tortoises already threatened by rising temperatures.
They could also lessen the death and suffering from the worsening heat waves, fires, droughts and storms of the climate crisis.
Researchers have found there’s not nearly enough space on rooftops to supply all U.S. electricity — especially as more people drive electric cars. Even an analysis funded by rooftop solar advocates and installers found that the most cost-effective route to phasing out fossil fuels involves six times more power from big solar and wind farms than from smaller local solar systems.
But the exact balance has yet to be determined. And Nevada is ground zero for figuring it out.
The outcome could be determined, in part, by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The so-called Oracle of Omaha owns NV Energy, the monopoly utility that supplies electricity to most Nevadans. NV Energy and its investor-owned utility brethren across the country can earn huge amounts of money paving over public lands with solar and wind farms and building long-distance transmission lines to cities.
But by regulatory design, those companies don’t profit off rooftop solar. And in many cases, they’ve fought to limit rooftop solar — which can reduce the need for large-scale infrastructure and result in lower returns for investors.
Mike Troncoso remembers the exact date of Nevada’s rooftop solar reckoning.
It was Dec. 23, 2015, and he was working for SolarCity. The rooftop installer abruptly ceased operations in the Silver State after NV Energy helped persuade officials to slash a program that pays solar customers for energy they send to the power grid.
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“I was out in the field working, and we got a call: ‘Stop everything you’re doing, don’t finish the project, come to the warehouse,’” Troncoso said. “It was right before Christmas, and they said, ‘Hey, guys, unfortunately we’re getting shut down.’”
After a public outcry, Nevada lawmakers partly reversed the reductions to rooftop solar incentives. Since then, NV Energy and the rooftop solar industry have maintained an uneasy political ceasefire. Installations now exceed pre-2015 levels.
Today, Troncoso is Nevada branch manager for Sunrun, the nation’s largest rooftop solar installer. The company has enough work in the state to support a dozen crews, each named for a different casino. On a chilly winter morning before sunrise, they prepared for the day ahead — laying out steel rails, hooking up microinverters and loading panels onto powder-blue trucks.
But even if Sunrun’s business continues to grow, it won’t eliminate the need for large solar farms in the desert.
Some habitat destruction is unavoidable — at least if we want to break our fossil fuel addiction. The key questions are: How many big solar farms are needed, and where should they be built? Can they be engineered to coexist with animals and plants?
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And if not, should Americans be willing to sacrifice a few endangered species in the name of tackling climate change?
To answer those questions, Los Angeles Times journalists spent a week in southern Nevada, touring solar construction sites, hiking up sand dunes and off-roading through the Mojave. We spoke with NV Energy executives, conservation activists battling Buffett’s company and desert rats who don’t want to see their favorite off-highway vehicle trails cut off by solar farms.
Odds are, no one will get everything they want.
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The tortoise in the coal mine
Biologist Bre Moyle easily spotted the small yellow flag affixed to a scraggly creosote bush — one of many hardy plants sprouting from the caliche soil, surrounded by rows of gleaming steel trusses that would soon hoist solar panels toward the sky.
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Moyle leaned down for a closer look, gently pulling aside branches to reveal a football-sized hole in the ground. It was the entrance to a desert tortoise burrow — one of thousands catalogued by her employer, Primergy Solar, during construction of one of the nation’s largest solar farms on public lands outside Las Vegas.
“I wouldn’t stand on this side of it,” Moyle advised us. “If you walk back there, you could collapse it, potentially.”
I’d seen plenty of solar construction sites in my decade reporting on energy. But none like this.
Instead of tearing out every cactus and other plant and leveling the land flat — the “blade and grade” method — Primergy had left much of the native vegetation in place and installed trusses of different heights to match the ground’s natural contours. The company had temporarily relocated more than 1,600 plants to an on-site nursery, with plans to put them back later.
The Oakland-based developer also went to great lengths to safeguard desert tortoises — an iconic reptile protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, and the biggest environmental roadblock to building solar in the Mojave.
Desert tortoises are sensitive to global warming, residential sprawl and other human encroachment on their habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated tortoise populations fell by more than one-third between 2004 and 2014.
Scientists consider much of the Primergy site high-quality tortoise habitat. It also straddles a connectivity corridor that could help the reptiles seek safer haven as hotter weather and more extreme droughts make their current homes increasingly unlivable.
Before Primergy started building, the company scoured the site and removed 167 tortoises, with plans to let them return and live among the solar panels once the heavy lifting is over. Two-thirds of the project site will be repopulated with tortoises.
Workers removed more tortoises during construction. As of January, the company knew of just two tortoises killed — one that may have been hit by a car, and another that may have been entombed in its burrow by roadwork, then eaten by a kit fox.
Primergy Vice President Thomas Regenhard acknowledged the company can’t build solar here without doing any harm to the ecosystem — or spurring opposition from conservation activists. But as he watched union construction workers lift panels onto trusses, he said Primergy is “making the best of the worst-case situation” for solar opponents.
“What we’re trying to do is make it the least impactful on the environment and natural resources,” he said. “What we’re also doing is we’re sharing that knowledge, so that these projects can be built in a better way moving forward.”
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The company isn’t saving tortoises out of the goodness of its profit-seeking heart.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management conditioned its approval of the solar farm, called Gemini, on a long list of environmental protection measures — and only after some bureau staffers seemingly contemplated rejecting the project entirely.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife show the bureau’s Las Vegas field office drafted several versions of a “record of decision” that would have denied the permit application for Gemini. The drafts listed several objections, including harm to desert tortoises, loss of space for off-road vehicle drivers and disturbance of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, which runs through the project site.
Separately, Primergy reached a legal settlement with conservationists — who challenged the project’s federal approval in court — in which the company agreed to additional steps to protect tortoises and a plant known as the three-corner milkvetch.
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The company estimates just 2.5% of the project site will be permanently disturbed — far less than the 33% allowed by Primergy’s federal permit. Regenhard is hopeful the lessons learned here will inform future solar development on public lands.
“This is something new. So we’re refining a lot of the processes,” he said. “We’re not perfect. We’re still learning.”
By the time construction wraps this fall, 1.8 million panels will cover nearly 4,000 football fields’ worth of land, just off the 15 Freeway. They’ll be able to produce 690 megawatts of power — as much as 115,000 typical home solar systems. And they’ll be paired with batteries, to store energy and help NV Energy customers keep running their air conditioners after sundown.
Unlike many solar fields, Gemini is close to the population it will serve — just a few dozen miles from the Strip. And the affected landscape is far from visually stunning, with none of the red-rock majesty found at nearby Valley of Fire State Park.
But desert tortoises don’t care if a place looks cool to humans. They care if it’s good tortoise habitat.
Moyle, Primergy’s environmental services manager, pointed to a small black structure at the bottom of a fence along the site’s edge — a shade shelter for tortoises. Workers installed them every 800 feet, so that if any relocated reptiles try to return to the solar farm too early, they don’t die pacing along the fence in the heat.
“They have a really, really good sense of direction,” Moyle said. “They know where their homes are. They want to come back.”
Primergy will study what happens when tortoises do come back. Will they benefit from the shade of the solar panels? Or will they struggle to survive on the industrialized landscape?
And looming over those uncertainties, a more existential query: With global warming beginning to devastate human and animal life around the world, should we really be slowing or stopping solar development to save a single type of reptile?
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Moyle was ready with an answer: Tortoises are a keystone species. If they’re doing well, it’s a good sign of a healthy ecosystem in which other desert creatures — such as burrowing owls, kit foxes and American badgers — are positioned to thrive, too.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, human survival is inextricably linked with a healthy natural world.
“We take one thing out, we don’t know what sort of disastrous effect it’s going to have on everything else,” Moyle said.
We do, however, know the consequences of relying on fossil fuels: entire towns burning to the ground, Lake Mead three-quarters empty, elderly Americans baking to death in their overheated homes. With worse to come.
The shifting sands of time
A few miles south, another solar project was rising in the desert. This one looked different.
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A fleet of bulldozers, scrapers, excavators and graders was nearly done flattening the land — a beige moonscape devoid of cacti and creosote. The solar panel support trusses were all the same height, forming an eerily rigid silver sea.
When I asked Carl Glass — construction manager for DEPCOM Power, the contractor building this project for Buffett’s NV Energy — why workers couldn’t leave vegetation in place like at Gemini, he offered a simple answer: drainage. Allowing the land to retain its natural contours, he said, would make it difficult to move stormwater off the site during summer monsoons.
Safety was another consideration, said Dani Strain, NV Energy’s senior manager for the project. Blading and grading the land meant workers wouldn’t have to carry solar panels and equipment across ground studded with tripping hazards.
“It’s nicer for the environment not to do it,” Strain said. “But it creates other problems. You can’t have everything.”
This kind of solar project has typified development in the Mojave Desert.
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And it helps explain why the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly has fought so hard to limit that development.
The morning after touring the solar construction sites, we joined Donnelly for a hike up Big Dune, a giant pile of sand covering five square miles and towering 500 feet above the desert floor, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The sun was just beginning its ascent over the Mojave, bathing the sand in a smooth umber glow beneath pockets of wispy cloud.
On weekends, Donnelly said, the dune can be overrun by thousands of off-road vehicles. But on this day, it was quiet.
Energy companies have proposed more than a dozen solar farms on public lands surrounding Big Dune — some with overlapping footprints. Donnelly doesn’t oppose all of them. But he thinks federal agencies should limit solar to the least ecologically sensitive parts of Nevada, instead of letting companies pitch projects almost anywhere they choose.
“Developers are looking at this as low-hanging fruit,” he said. “The idea is, this is where California can build all of its solar.”
We trekked slowly up the dune, our bodies casting long shadows in the early morning light. When we took a breather and looked back down, a trail of footprints marked our path. Donnelly assured us a windy day would wipe them away.
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“This is why I live here, man,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, in my mind.”
Donnelly broke his back in a rock-climbing accident, so he used a walking stick to scale the dune. He lives not far from here, at the edge of Death Valley National Park, and works as the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin director.
As we resumed our journey, the wind blowing hard, I asked Donnelly to rank the top human threats to the Mojave. He was quick to answer: The climate crisis was No. 1, followed by housing sprawl, solar development and off-road vehicles.
“There’s no good solar project in the desert. But there’s less bad,” he said. “And we’re at a point now where we have to settle for less bad, because the alternatives are more bad: more coal, more gas, climate apocalypse.”
That hasn’t stopped Donnelly and his colleagues from fighting renewable energy projects they fear would wipe out entire species — even little-known plants and animals with tiny ranges, such as Tiehm’s buckwheat and the Dixie Valley toad.
“I’m not a religious guy,” Donnelly said. “But all God’s creatures great and small.”
After a steep stretch of sand, we stopped along a ridge with sweeping views. To our west were the Funeral Mountains, across the California state line in Death Valley National Park — and far beyond them Mt. Whitney, its snow-covered facade just barely visible. To our east was Highway 95, cutting across the Amargosa Valley en route from Las Vegas to Reno.
It’s along this highway that so many developers want to build.
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“We would be in a sea of solar right now,” Donnelly said.
Having heard plenty of rural residents say they don’t want to look at such a sea, I asked Donnelly if this was a bad spot for solar because it would ruin the glorious views. He told me he never makes that argument, “because honestly, views aren’t really the primary concern at this moment. The primary concern is stopping the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis.”
“There are certain places where we shouldn’t put solar because it’s a wild and undisturbed landscape,” he said.
As far as he’s concerned, though, the Amargosa Valley isn’t one of those landscapes, what with Highway 95 running through it. The same goes for Dry Lake Valley, where NV Energy’s solar construction site is already surrounded by energy infrastructure.
What Donnelly would like to see is better planning.
He pointed to California, where state and federal officials spent eight years crafting a desert conservation plan that allows solar and wind farms across a few hundred thousand acres while setting aside millions more for protection. He thinks a similar process is crucial in Nevada, where four-fifths of the land area is owned by the federal government — more than any other state.
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If Donnelly had his way, regulators would put the kibosh on solar farms immediately adjacent to Big Dune. He’s worried they could alter the movement of sand across the desert floor, affecting several rare beetles that call the dune home.
But if the feds want to allow solar projects along the highway to the south, near the Area 51 Alien Center?
“Might not be the end the world,” Donnelly said.
He shot me a grin.
“You know, one thing I like to do …”
Without warning, he took off racing down the dune, carried by momentum and love for the desert. He laughed as he reached a natural stopping point, calling for us to join him. His voice sounded free and full of possibility.
Some solar panels on the horizon wouldn’t have changed that.
Shout it from the rooftops
Laura Cunningham and Kevin Emmerich were a match made in Mojave Desert heaven.
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Cunningham was a wildlife biologist, Emmerich a park ranger when they met nearly 30 years ago at Death Valley. She studied tortoises for government agencies and later a private contractor. He worked with bighorn sheep and gave interpretive talks. They got married, bought property along the Amargosa River and started their own conservation group, Basin and Range Watch.
And they’ve been fighting solar development ever since.
That’s how we ended up in the back of their SUV, pulling open a rickety cattle gate off Highway 95 and driving past wild burros on a dirt road through Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
They had told us Sarcobatus Flat was stunning, but I was still surprised by how stunning. I got my first look as we crested a ridge. The gently sloping valley spilled down toward Death Valley National Park, whose snowy mountain peaks towered over a landscape dotted with thousands of Joshua trees.
“Everything we’re looking at is proposed for solar development,” Cunningham said.
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Most environmentalists agree we need at least some large solar farms. Cunningham and Emmerich are different. They’re at the vanguard of a harder-core desert protection movement that sees all large-scale solar farms on public lands as bad news.
Why had so many companies converged on Sarcobatus Flat?
The main answer is transmission. NV Energy is seeking federal approval to build the 358-mile Greenlink West electric line, which would carry thousands of megawatts of renewable power between Reno and Las Vegas along the Highway 95 corridor.
The dirt road curved around a small hill, and suddenly we found ourselves on the valley floor, surrounded by Joshua trees. Some looked healthy; others had bark that had been chewed by rodents seeking water, a sign of drought stress. Scientists estimate the Joshua tree’s western subspecies could lose 90% of its range as the world gets hotter and droughts get more intense.
But asked whether climate change or solar posed a bigger threat to Sarcobatus Flat, Cunningham didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, solar development hands down,” she said.
Nearly 20 years ago, she said, she helped relocate desert tortoises to make way for a test track in California. One of them tried to return home, walking 20 miles before hitting a fence. It paced back and forth and eventually died of heat exhaustion.
Solar farms, she said, pose a similar threat to tortoises. And at Sarcobatus Flat, they would cover a high-elevation area that could otherwise serve as a climate refuge for Joshua trees, giving them a relatively cool place to reproduce as the planet heats up.
“It makes no sense to me that we’re going to bulldoze them down and throw them into trash piles. It’s just crazy,” she said.
In Cunningham and Emmerich’s view, every sun-baked parking lot in L.A. and Vegas and Phoenix should have a solar canopy, every warehouse and single-family home a solar roof. It’s a common argument among desert defenders: Why sacrifice sensitive ecosystems when there’s an easy alternative for fighting climate change? Especially when rooftop solar can reduce strain on an overtaxed electric grid and — when paired with batteries — help people keep their lights on during blackouts?
The answer isn’t especially satisfying to conservationists.
For all the virtues of rooftop solar, it’s an expensive way to generate clean power — and keeping energy costs low is crucial to ensure that lower-income families can afford electric cars, another key climate solution. A recent report from investment bank Lazard pegged the cost of rooftop solar at 11.7 cents per kilowatt-hour on the low end, compared with 2.4 cents for utility solar.
Even when factoring in pricey long-distance electric lines, utility-scale solar is typically cheaper, several experts told me.
“It’s three to six times more expensive to put solar on your roof than to put it in a large-scale project,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University. “There may be some added value to having solar in the Los Angeles Basin instead of the middle of the Mojave Desert. But is it 300% to 600% more value? Probably not. It’s probably not even close.”
There’s a practical challenge, too.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated U.S. rooftops could generate 1,432 terawatt-hours of electricity per year — just 13% of the power America will need to replace most of its coal, oil and gas, according to research led by Jenkins.
Add in parking lots and other areas within cities, and urban solar systems might conceivably supply one-quarter or even one-third of U.S. power, several experts told The Times — in an unlikely scenario where they’re installed in every suitable spot.
Energy researcher Chris Clack’s consulting firm has found that dramatic growth in rooftop and other small-scale solar installations could reduce the costs of slashing climate pollution by half a trillion dollars. But even Clack said rooftops alone won’t cut it.
“Realistically, 80% is going to end up being utility grid no matter what,” he said.
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All those industrial renewable energy projects will have to go somewhere.
Sarcobatus Flat may not be the answer. Federal officials classified all three solar proposals there as “low priority,” citing their proximity to Death Valley and potential harm to tortoise habitat. One developer withdrew its application last year.
Before leaving the area, Cunningham pointed to a wooden marker, one of at least half a dozen stretching out in a line. I walked over to take a closer look and discovered it was a mining claim for lithium — a main ingredient in electric-car batteries.
If solar development didn’t upend this valley, lithium extraction might.
On the beaten track
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The four-wheeler jerked violently as Erica Muxlow pressed her foot to the gas, sending us flying down a rough dirt road with no end in sight but the distant mountains. Five-point safety straps were the only things stopping us from flying out of our seats, the vehicle leaping through the air as we reached speeds of 40 mph, then 50 mph, the wind whipping our faces.
It was like riding Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds — just without the Yeti.
Ahead of us, Muxlow’s neighbor Jimmy Lewis led the way on an electric blue motorcycle, kicking up a stream of sand. He wanted us to see thousands of acres of public lands outside his adopted hometown of Pahrump, in Nevada’s Nye County, that could soon be blocked by solar projects — cutting off access to off-highway vehicle enthusiasts such as himself.
“You could build an apartment complex or a shopping mall here, and it would be the same thing to me,” he said.
To progressive-minded Angelenos or San Franciscans, preserving large chunks of public land for gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive dirt bikes might sound like a terrible reason not to build solar farms that would lessen the climate crisis.
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But here’s the reality: Rural Westerners such as Lewis will play a key role in determining how much clean energy gets built.
Not long before our Nevada trip, Nye County placed a six-month pause on new renewable energy projects, citing local concerns about loss of off-road vehicle trails. Similar fears have stymied development across the U.S., with rural residents attacking solar and wind farms as industrial intrusions on their way of life — and local governments throwing up roadblocks.
For Lewis, the conflict is deeply personal.
He moved here from Southern California more than a decade ago, trading life by the beach for a five-acre plot where he runs an off-roading school and test-drives motorcycles for manufacturers. His warehouse was packed with dozens of dirt bikes.
“This is my life. Motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles,” he said, laughing.
Lewis has worked to stir up opposition to three local solar farm proposals. So far, his efforts have been in vain.
One project is already under construction. Peering through a fence, we saw row after row of trusses, waiting for their photovoltaic panels. It’s called Yellow Pine, and it’s being built by Florida-based NextEra Energy to supply power to California.
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Lewis learned about Yellow Pine when he was riding one of his favorite trails and was surprised to find it cut off. He compared the experience to riding the best roller-coaster at a theme park, only to have it grind to a halt three-quarters of the way through.
“I don’t want my playground taken away from me,” he said.
“Me neither!” a voice called out from behind us.
We turned and were greeted by Shannon Salter, an activist who had previously spent nine months camping near the Yellow Pine site to protest the habitat destruction. She and Lewis had never met, but they quickly realized they had common cause.
“It’s the opposite of green!” Salter said.
“On my roof, not my backyard,” Lewis agreed.
Never mind that conservationists have long decried the ecological damage from desert off-roading. Salter and Lewis both cared about these lands. Neither wanted to see the solar industry lay claim to them. They talked about staying in touch.
It’s easy to imagine similar alliances forming across the West, the clean energy transition bringing together environmentalists and rural residents in a battle to defend their lifestyles, their landscapes and animals that can’t fight for themselves.
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It’s also easy to imagine major cities that badly need lots of solar and wind power — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix — brushing off those complaints as insignificant compared with the climate emergency, or as fueled by right-wing misinformation.
But many of concerns raised by critics are legitimate. And their voices are only getting louder.
As night fell over the Mojave, Lewis shared his idea that any city buying electricity from a desert solar farm should be required to install a certain amount of rooftop solar back home first — on government buildings, at least. It only seemed fair.
“Some people see the desert as just a wasteland,” Lewis said. “I think it’s beautiful.”
The view from Black Mountain
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So how do we build enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuels without destroying too many ecosystems, or stoking too much political opposition from rural towns, or moving too slowly to save the planet?
Few people could do more to ease those tensions than Buffett.
Our conversation kept returning to the legendary investor as we hiked Black Mountain, just outside Vegas, on our last morning in the Silver State. We were joined by Jaina Moan, director of external affairs for the Nature Conservancy’s Nevada chapter. She had promised a view of massive solar fields from the peak — but only after a 3.5-mile trek with 2,000 feet of elevation gain.
“It’ll be a little StairMaster at the end,” she warned us.
The homes and hotels and casinos of the Las Vegas Valley retreated behind us as we climbed, looking ever smaller and more insignificant against the vast open desert. It was an illusion that will prove increasingly difficult to maintain as Sin City and its suburbs continue their march into the Mojave. Nevada politicians from both parties are pushing for legislation that would let federal officials auction off additional public lands for residential and commercial development.
Vegas and other Western cities could limit the need for more suburbs — and sprawling solar farms — by growing smarter, Moan said. Urban areas could embrace density, to help people drive fewer miles and reduce the demand for new power supplies to fuel electric vehicles. They could invest in electric buses and trains — and use less water, which would save a lot of energy.
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“As our spaces become more crowded, we’re going to have to come up with more creative ideas,” Moan said.
That’s where Buffett could make things easier.
The billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway company owns electric utilities that serve millions of people, from California to Nevada to Illinois. Those utilities, Moan said, could buck the industry trend of urging policymakers to reduce financial incentives for rooftop solar and instead encourage the technology — along with other small-scale clean energy solutions, such as local microgrids.
That would limit the need for big solar farms — at least somewhat.
Berkshire and other energy giants could also build solar on lands already altered by humans, such as abandoned mines, toxic Superfund sites, reservoirs, landfills, agricultural areas, highway corridors and canals that carry water to farms and cities.
The costs are typically higher than building on undisturbed public lands. And in many cases there are technical challenges yet to be resolved. But those kinds of “creative solutions” could at least lessen the loss of biodiversity, Moan said.
“There’s money to be made there, and there’s good to be done,” she said.
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It’s hard to know what Buffett thinks. A Berkshire spokesperson declined my request to interview him.
Tony Sanchez, NV Energy’s executive vice president for business development and external relations, was more forthcoming.
“The problem for us with rooftop solar,” he said, is that it’s “not controlled at all by us.” As a result, NV Energy can’t decide when and how rooftop solar power is used — and can’t rely on that power to help balance supply and demand on the grid.
Over time, Sanchez predicted, a lot more rooftop solar will get built. But he couldn’t say how much.
Rooftop solar faces a similarly uncertain future in California, where state officials voted last year to slash incentive payments, calling them an unfair subsidy. Industry leaders have warned of a dramatic decline in installations.
As we neared the top of Black Mountain, the solar farms on the other side came into view. They stretched across the Eldorado Valley far below — black rectangles that could help save life on Earth while also destroying bits and pieces of it.
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Moan believes the key to balancing clean energy and conservation is “go slow to go fast.” Government agencies, she said, should work with conservation activists, small-town residents and Native American tribes to study and map out the best places for clean energy, then reward companies that agree to build in those areas with faster approvals. Solar and wind development would slow down in the short term but speed up in the long run, with quicker environmental reviews and less risk of lawsuits.
It’s a tantalizing concept — but I confessed to Moan that I worried it would backfire.
What if the sparring factions couldn’t agree on the best spots to build solar and wind farms, and instead wasted years arguing? Or what if they did manage to hammer out some compromises, only for a handful of unhappy people or groups to take them to court, gumming up the works? Couldn’t “go slow to go fast” end up becoming “go slow to go slow”?
In other words, should we really bet our collective future on human beings working together, rather than fighting?
Moan was sympathetic to my fears. She also didn’t see another way forward.
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“We really need to think holistically about saving everything,” she said.
The sad truth is, not everything can be saved. Not if we want to keep the world livable for people and animals alike.
Some beloved landscapes will be left unrecognizable. Some families will be stuck paying high energy bills to monopoly utilities, even as some utility investors make less money. Some tortoises will probably die, pacing along fences in the heat.
The alternative is worse.
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A common pitch for accessory dwelling units is that building one will add a lot of value to your property.
How much, though, is a bit of a mystery. And that can pose a problem for homeowners looking to build one.
An ADU isn’t just extra square footage — it’s a complete home, with its own kitchen, bathroom and utilities. You can use it to house family members, caregivers, tenants or even yourself, if you decide to downsize and rent out your current home.
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But here’s where things get tricky. You can’t sell your ADU separately, at least not under current state law; instead, it’s just another improvement on your lot, like your main home. If you sell your house, the ADU goes with it.
And when the sale is made, there’s no line in the contract indicating how much the buyer is paying for the ADU. There’s one sale amount for the entire property.
Appraisers say that they estimate the value of an ADU by comparing sales of houses with an accessory unit to other sales in recent months involving houses of similar size, condition and location that don’t have ADUs. But even though ADUs have boomed since the state made it easier to get permits for them in 2017 — more than 20,600 ADUs were built last year alone — there haven’t been many homes with legal ADUs sold. That means appraisers don’t have as much data about comparable sales that they typically have to determine the property value.
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For example, according to Zillow, 642 houses with about 2,000 square feet of living space sold in Los Angeles over the last three months, but only 106 of the listings included an ADU.
That’s why there are different ways to estimate the value of an ADU — one used by property tax officials, others by lenders and home buyers. And for some homeowners, the former will be higher than the latter.
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ADUs and property taxes
Adding an ADU to your lot will raise your property tax bill. Your house won’t be reassessed, tax officials say, but the value of the ADU will be added to the value of the improvements on your lot.
Stephen R. Whitmore, the public information officer for the L.A. County assessor, said the process of determining the ADU’s value is straightforward: “Our staff will determine the cost to build it.” That cost will be tacked onto your property’s current assessment and taxed annually; the county taxes property at a rate of 1%, and local parcel taxes and other levies increase the toll by roughly 0.25%.
So if you have a house valued at $1 million and spend $200,000 to add an ADU, your annual tax bill will increase by about $2,500, from roughly $12,500 to roughly $15,000.
Loans for an ADU
But what is the value of an ADU that hasn’t been built yet? Lenders need a good estimate for this because it affects the size of the loan they’ll be willing to make.
For example, a Federal Housing Administration-backed renovation loan can be up to 97.75% of the value of property after the ADU is finished, and Fannie Mae supports refinances that cover up to 97% of the post-construction value. Other ways to borrow money for an ADU, such as a home equity loan or line of credit, typically set lower loan-to-value limits, but some go up to 90% of the property value with the ADU.
Lenders rely on professional appraisers to estimate the value added by an ADU. And although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have issued guidelines for appraising properties with ADUs, they seem more applicable to existing ADUs than planned ones.
Appraisers typically look at comparable sales when valuing homes, as well as rental income when the properties are rented out. For ADUs, though, real estate pros say there’s no standard approach, at least not yet.
“If we had one or two comparables with ADUs … our life would be easy,” said Denis DeSaix of Metrocal Appraisal in Livermore. “Finding that one or two comps is challenging because there hasn’t been enough time for the ADUs to work into the regular transaction flow. Ten years from now, we’ll see a lot of them.”
Meredith Stowers, a loan officer at CrossCountry Mortgage in San Diego, said she’s seen an appraiser assign a value of $0 to a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom ADU. Appraisals can be adjusted to reflect the marketability of the property, she said, “but you’ve got to ask Realtors [for input] and do some extra research.”
Anthony Dedousis of Revival Homes, a Los Angeles-based firm that helps homeowners find financing and contractors for their ADU projects, said his company takes a big-data approach to overcome the shortage of ADU sales in individual communities. It collected sales data for single-family homes with ADUs across L.A. County since 2017, then compared it with sales of about 90,000 homes without ADUs. After controlling for factors such as lot size, main house size and ZIP Code, he said, “we find that the typical ADU adds 24% (about $250,000) to the sale price of a single-family home in L.A. County,” with values ranging from 18% to 35% depending on the ADU’s size.
The company uses this statistical model to project the value of a home after an ADU project is completed, which is factored into its lending partner’s calculation of how large a loan to offer. This approach, Dedousis said, makes ADU projects far more feasible for newer homeowners, whose lack of home equity limits their borrowing.
Mortgage Vintage in Newport Beach offers ADU construction loans financed by investors, not traditional lenders, which gives the company more flexibility in its approach to appraisals. Still, its appraisers look at the same things that most appraisers do when valuing property, Chief Executive Sandy MacDougall said: comparable sales, construction costs and potential rental income.
Evolving approaches
As Stowers noted, the shortage of data has led to some conservative appraisals of ADUs. For example, in a discussion about ADU values in Los Angeles on a BiggerPockets forum in 2020 and 2021, real estate pros said appraisals were coming in well below the cost of building an ADU. “Based on conversations I’ve had with loan officers, for every dollar you spend on an ADU, about 55% (55 cents) goes to the appraisal value,” one investor wrote in 2021.
Stowers said she had two clients who purchased a house in Burbank for $1.3 million, then added a $200,000 ADU. After construction, she said, one appraiser valued the property at $1.4 million — essentially, discounting the ADU’s value by 50%. “My appraisers gave it a value of $1.9 million because of the incredible marketability and rental income” that the ADU offered, Stower said, adding that the property was three blocks from Warner Bros. Studios.
“Having said all that,” she added, “usually my appraisers give dollar-for-dollar value” — in other words, they value ADUs according to their construction cost, the same way the county assessor does.
Jun Ho Lee, an appraiser based in San Gabriel, said he typically finds that ADUs add 10% to 20% to a property’s value. But location affects what an ADU is worth, he said.
“Even if it’s the same quality, same materials, same size,” Lee said, “you cannot give the same value to the ADU located in Beverly Hills and located in Compton.”
Like the government agencies that buy mortgages, the lenders that issue them have a lot of control over how ADUs will be valued. And in DeSaix’s view, lenders are becoming increasingly open to alternative ways to demonstrate value and demand.
Real estate agents and brokers are an excellent source of information, he said, because “they are in the market, in the trenches, buying and selling day in and day out.” Their views may be subjective, but if an appraiser talks to enough of them, they’ll probably get “a pretty reliable idea of a value range” for an ADU.
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About The Times Utility Journalism Team
This article is from The Times’ Utility Journalism Team. Our mission is to be essential to the lives of Southern Californians by publishing information that solves problems, answers questions and helps with decision making. We serve audiences in and around Los Angeles — including current Times subscribers and diverse communities that haven’t historically had their needs met by our coverage.
How can we be useful to you and your community? Email utility (at) latimes.com or one of our journalists: Matt Ballinger, Jon Healey, Ada Tseng, Jessica Roy and Karen Garcia.
A slew of ambitious housing legislation has emerged recently in states as varied as Maine, Utah and Washington. Many of the proposals aim to loosen zoning restrictions with the goal of addressing housing shortages. Perhaps not surprisingly, California is mentioned in many of the resulting conversations and debates, and not in a positive light.
Policymakers and advocates elsewhere have invoked the Golden State as a warning: We must pass pro-housing policies to avoid ending up like California. One think tank in Montana went so far as to advocate repealing “California-style zoning” to make starter homes more feasible.
At the same time, however, California has become a national model among many of the same housing advocates for its recent efforts to fix past mistakes. Since 2016, state legislators have passed more than 100 housing-related laws with the intent of encouraging the construction of more affordable and market-rate homes. These laws have fundamentally changed the landscape of housing rules and regulations throughout the state and helped inspire similar reforms in other places.
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A new law to allow accessory dwelling units in Maine draws on California’s example, and pending legislation in Oregon would create local housing targets similar to California’s goals for regions and cities. But even as advocates and lawmakers around the country echo our reforms, a key question remains: Are California’s new laws actually producing more housing here?
The short answer is no. In the aggregate, despite the deluge of legislation, annual building permits have remained stubbornly stagnant at just over 100,000 homes annually for the last few years — well below the 180,000 a year state officials say we need to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, homelessness has only increased statewide, and rents and home prices remain at historic highs.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. And in fact, many of the recently passed laws have had a clear, positive effect.
Reforms to ease restrictions on accessory dwelling units — so-called granny flats, backyard cottages and other secondary dwellings — have led to a significant increase in this type of housing. Just six years ago, such units made up an insignificant share of home building; today, they account for 1 in 5 building permits.
Similarly, legislation streamlining California’s notoriously lengthy approval processes has helped get more housing built faster, particularly affordable and mixed-income developments. Enhancements to the state’s density bonus programs, which allow developers to add more units to a project if some are designated as below market rate, have also helped.
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Other changes are setting the table for significant new home construction in (we hope) the near future. Specifically, technical but critical changes to the arcane California laws and regulations that govern local housing production, such as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the Housing Element Law and the Housing Accountability Act, have forced cities to plan for substantially more housing in more realistic ways. These reforms have also taken away many of the tools used to delay and block approval and construction of housing.
While not necessarily headline-grabbing, all these changes signal an important shift in the ways cities and counties do their part to plan for and actively encourage new home building — as evidenced by the Los Angeles City Council’s vote this week to zone for 135,000 more units in Hollywood and downtown. And some cities have embraced this shift, treating state-level requirements as a floor, not a ceiling. San Diego, for example, has expanded on baseline accessory dwelling unit and density bonus requirements while empowering staff to embrace a culture of “yes” when it comes to getting housing approved.
California’s housing crisis should indeed serve as a cautionary tale for other states, a warning to actively increase supply before it’s too late. Despite the recent reforms, broader challenges still threaten to stymie California’s apparent progress, among them stubbornly high construction costs and uncertain economic conditions.
But even if it takes some time to realize tangible results, the important work of creating a new housing paradigm in California should not be discounted. We are finally moving in the right direction, and policymakers in other states can learn from our successes as well as our struggles.
David Garcia is the policy director of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Bill Fulton is a Terner Center fellow and a former San Diego planning director.
Would readers take a gondola to Dodger Stadium from Union Station?
Several hundred people weighed in on a potential new way to reach Dodgers games, first proposed by then-owner Frank McCourt in 2018 and still alive, now shepherded by an environmental organization that hopes to take cars off the streets and keep pollutants out of the air. We asked readers if they would or would not use the gondola, or if they were not sure.
By just a few votes, “yes” received the most responses. Here are the areas that readers cited the most as factors in their decisions:
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Is Union Station easier than Dodger Stadium lots?
A common theme among respondents: Is the Union Station-to-Dodger Stadium route more convenient? Does it save time? For many, the answer was a resounding no. But many people said they’d use it for a variety of reasons.
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If I arrive at the boarding station at a reasonable time before first pitch, what guarantee do I have that I will not be stuck in line rather than in the stadium 30 minutes later? And, after the game, the last of those fans won’t be boarding their ride back until 60-plus minutes postgame … standing in line. And that’s just to get back to the station.
The Stadium needs better access — I can afford to go to games, in decent seats, but I choose not to because the traffic is ludicrous. The stadium desperately needs multiple accesses.
And … today’s environment also demands better security. Good luck to them in resolving their dilemma.
Answer: No
Chip Ossman, Altadena
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If improvements in total commute time and total price were a net positive I would definitely take it. If I have to Uber to the Expo Line to take it to Union Station and then get on the gondola, that sounds like a lot of work and the costs add up. Especially if we have a group.
Answer: Not sure
Patrick Pennel, Los Angeles
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I already park blocks away from the stadium and walk there because I detest the lot so much. It’s easy to get into but a nightmare after the games are over. A gondola would make going and leaving much easier and take less time.
Answer: Yes
Joe Kornbrodt, Los Angeles
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How long is the line going to be? The line for the current Union Station buses makes them impractical.
By my math and the numbers in the article (24 people every 23 seconds), it would take almost three hours to move the 10,000 fans the article talks about. Something doesn’t add up.
Fwiw, I’ve shared season tickets with others since 1992 and go to about 15 games a year.
Answer: Not sure
Wesley Monroe, Pasadena
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We need more public transportation in Los Angeles. How fun and easy. Train to gondola to stadium. I would go see a concert there if it were that easy.
Answer: Yes
Tamra Davis, Malibu
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I could take the train to L.A. from Ventura and not worry about traffic. I would definitely come to more games.
Answer: Yes
Anita Guerrini, Ventura
More Frank McCourt?
Frank McCourt did not sell the Dodger Stadium parking lots when he sold the Dodgers for a billion-dollar profit in 2012. Instead, winning bidder Guggenheim Baseball Management formed a joint venture with a McCourt entity to control the parking lots. Though Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ chairman and controlling owner, said McCourt can’t develop anything on the property without Guggenheim’s consent, McCourt’s name was a cause for concern for readers who offered their thoughts.
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I drink beer before getting into the stadium, my bladder couldn’t hold it in for the seven minute (estimated ride time) and that’s including the wait times lol ….besides, I hate that McCourt would somehow be involved with this …can’t stand the dude, for the way he treated our Dodgers….anyway just my opinion ✌️
Answer: Not sure
Tony Perez, Los Angeles
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It would be an adventure and add to the excitement of game day, like going to Philippe’s before the game. I’m not thrilled about a ton of development there. I also can’t think of a single person who likes the idea of giving so much as a penny to Frank McCourt.
Answer: Yes
Dan McCarrel, Diamond Bar
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Parking is not a pleasant experience at Dodger Stadium. I go to 20-plus games a year and park in Chinatown to avoid the hassle. It’s a walk of slightly more than a mile each way and after the game it’s downhill! A side bonus is not paying McCourt any money for parking. I would hate to support anything that benefits the guy who tried to destroy the home team.
Answer: Not sure
Deborah Vogel, South Pasadena
Is it really better for the area?
It is repulsive to me to have a gondola rising above the people and houses of the community who are near Dodger Stadium. That community has had to endure traffic through the streets and now a gondola above them is horrible. The cons outweighs the pros. This is another example of the rich exploiting the poor.
Answer: No
Susie Chow, Monterey Park
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I’m a resident in the community and NO, I would not set foot on the gondola. Residents like me would boycott and protest the gondola if it were built. This is not an iconic tourist attraction or innovative green transit solution. This is an ill-conceived boondoggle that is being pushed on us with a bunch of lies. If built, this gondola would be a monument to the exploitation and marginalization of our communities.
Besides, what good is a seven-minute ride if you have to stand in line for an hour to board the gondola? And where would everyone who drives to the gondola park? What good is it if the traffic is just redirected into our neighborhoods instead of into Dodger Stadium? This gondola will be a toy for a select few. Does anyone really believe that the tickets will remain free, that they won’t eventually jack up prices or charge an exorbitant membership fee for people to jump the long lines at the gondola stations? Nothing about this project adds up.
Answer: No
Phyllis Ling, Los Angeles
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People will either keep driving to the Dodger Stadium parking lots, or they will drive to Chinatown in order to hop on the gondola. This will turn the neighborhood of Chinatown into the Dodger Stadium parking lot, which means Chinatown will take on even more of the automobile traffic, noise, trash and public urination from beer-imbibing Dodger fans, and its residents will find all of their street parking disappear on game days. Meanwhile, these gondola cabins are proposed to be flying overhead (and not very high overhead either) every 30 seconds or so all year long? In service fewer than 100 game days and concert days? At a ticket price which remains unknown?
The stakeholders of Chinatown/Olvera Street were never asked if we wanted this — instead, we were told that this was already in the works and then asked if we thought the renderings were pretty. People assume that the gondola cabins will soar high in the sky over Los Angeles, but they will mostly be barely 30-40 feet above the pavement and above homes in some instances. They will cut down a swath of mature trees at the L.A. State Historic Park in order to make room for the new station and the flight path. This is information you can only access if you read through the thousands of pages of the DEIR (Draft Environmental Impact Report).
Answer: No
Tany Ling, Los Angeles
A matter of trust
Would need to park and ride, easier and faster to just drive to Dodger Stadium.
Also, many leave the stadium drunk or amped up, I would not like to share a small gondola, especially when with family.
Answer: No
Russ Randall, Santa Clarita
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My concerns about the gondola include earthquakes and power outages. What would happen to passengers in either case? Also how many homes or businesses would displaced? Dodger Stadium already has a tainted history in that regard.
Answer: Not sure
Lisa Babilonia, Nev.
More development?
I could take Metro and skip the traffic completely. It’s the only way I’d consider going to see a game — especially if there are bars and restaurants making it more of an entertainment destination all year. It’s well past time for residents and visitors to the area to be able to visit major destinations without needing to drive in the (world famous!) bad traffic.
Answer: Yes
David Swift, Pasadena
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The gondola would be a world-class attraction for L.A.!! Quit worrying about who may profit. I don’t like Frank any more than you do, but having shopping, dining, and apartments near the ballpark makes sense. Look at how Anaheim has created an entire apartment village around their ballpark. It’s attracted thousands of young people who never would have considered Anaheim. We need more housing. Everyone opposes urban sprawl and building in fire-prone areas outside the city … everyone opposes building inside the city … that’s why there is so much corruption for getting buildings approved through city hall. Is it any surprise we have a housing shortage?!!! Include some affordable housing so some of the stadium workers live nearby.
Answer: Yes
Dave Schafer, Torrance ::
Parking is expensive and difficult. Plus, the gondola also serves Cornfields Park and the restaurants in that neighborhood for before/after game fun.
I also support redeveloping these parking lots into something far more useful than black asphalt. It’s a disgraceful waste of land when there’s an opportunity for the city to broker a win-win-win scenario (more parkland, less surface parking, centrally located housing, and more attractive shops/businesses/restaurants). There’s also a chance to build an entire community from a clean slate that incorporates today’s best practices for sustainability, walkability, etc.
Adele did not go easy on Sylvester Stallone when she purchased his Beverly Park mansion for $58 million last year.
The “Rocky” and “Creed” star revealed Monday in the Wall Street Journal that the “Hello” singer agreed to buy the property on one unique condition: She insisted that his bronze statue of Rocky Balboa remain at the house.
Stallone admitted that he wanted to take the poolside sculpture of the fictional boxing champion punching the air with him, but Adele said, “That’s a no deal. That’s gonna blow the whole deal.”
“She wanted the statue,” the “Tulsa King” actor added.
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When the Oscar nominee sold the luxurious 21,000-square-foot home to the Grammy winner in February 2022, it marked the priciest Southern California transaction of the year up to that point. And Adele apparently bought it for a steal after Stallone originally listed the estate in January 2021 for $110 million.
At the time of the sale, the mansion — which sits on 3.5 acres of land with views of the city below — boasted eight bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, a two-story foyer, a pool, a putting green, multiple patios and terraces, a movie theater, a custom bar, a gym and a cigar room with an air-filtration system. Adele has since made some renovations — and the previous owner approves.
“I like what she’s doing,” Stallone told the Wall Street Journal, “she’s making it gorgeous.”
During a 2021 interview with Vogue, the “30” artist shared that she is a big fan of the “Rocky” movies that Stallone wrote and starred in, which could explain her affinity for the statue. In May 2022, she posted a photo of herself and her rumored fiancé, Rich Paul, posing in front of their new digs.
The “Rolling in the Deep” hitmaker, 35, and the sports agent, 41, sparked engagement rumors in winter 2022 after dating less than a year. But Adele, who divorced philanthropist Simon Konecki in March 2021, has refused to confirm or deny that she and Paul are betrothed.
“If I was [engaged], would I ever tell anyone if I was or wasn’t?” she told Irish talk-show host Graham Norton in February 2022.
But that doesn’t mean she’s opposed to oversharing.
Over the weekend, the singer returned to the stage as part of her Las Vegas residency and disclosed an uncomfortable side effect of performing for hours every weekend under a burning spotlight.
“When I do my shows, I wear Spanx,” she told the crowd. “And I sweat a lot, but it doesn’t go anywhere, so I’m basically just sitting in my own sweat. So my doctor gave me jock itch [cream]. Do you guys know what that is?”
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She proceeded to joke that the physician’s diagnosis makes her “an athlete, basically,” before acknowledging (too late) that sharing her personal hygiene woes might qualify as TMI.
“I have to squirt it on myself,” she continued. “I don’t know why the f— I just told you guys that.”
Times staff writer Jack Flemming contributed to this report.
Even as California’s population took a hit during the pandemic, new data show the state experienced a boom in home building the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Recession.
The rise in new construction — including increases in multiunit dwellings in some areas — comes as California faces a housing crisis that has sparked a push at the city and state levels to build more homes.
Experts say that although the ramped-up construction has helped, it is not enough — at least yet — to seriously reduce high rents and housing prices.
The data from the California Department of Finance show statewide housing production in 2022 increased 0.85%, the highest figure since 2008. That growth could eventually help combat the high cost of housing in California, demographic experts say, and plug the population drain.
Home construction rose in 2020 and 2021 but really took off in 2022, showing the biggest jump since 2008.
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Though 2008 — the year a housing-driven financial crisis plunged the United States into the Great Recession — may be an ominous comparison, lawmakers have stated that additional housing is key to solving the state’s affordability crisis, with Gov. Gavin Newsom pledging when he first entered office in 2019 that 3.5 million new homes would be built by 2025.
“When it takes a decade of really massive economic growth in this state for housing production to catch up to the prerecession levels, that says as much about the depths of our production crisis as it does about some kind of recent victory,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA.
Lens did point to some policy changes, including those governing accessory dwelling units, as positive steps. “Some of this is the result of smarter policy,” he said, “but it’s also a really slow rebound.”
A Times analysis of county-level data showed that between 2021 and 2022, Central and Northern California counties saw the biggest housing growth. Placer, Yuba, Butte, San Joaquin, Merced and San Benito counties led the state in growth, all above 3%.
“That’s not what we would hope,” Lens said of more rural areas adding the most housing, as Central California is “not where housing is most expensive” and “not the most economically productive area of the state.”
“The battle that we’re facing on a land-use front,” he said, is the prevalence of “overly restrictive coastal areas.”
“We still haven’t found a way to make San Francisco and the surrounding areas, and Los Angeles and its surrounding areas, build more housing more quickly,” said Lens, adding that the housing crunch has driven population loss.
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Unaffordability and the pandemic have driven several years of population loss in California, a trend that continued in 2022, when the state lost around 138,400 people, a 0.35% loss. The decline was less than in the prior years, a slowdown partially attributable to skyrocketing foreign immigration.
During the pandemic, foreign immigration plummeted, but 2022 saw levels recover to near pre-pandemic rates. California had a net gain from immigration of 90,300 people last year, almost three times the total of 31,300 the year before.
The increase in immigration, however, was not enough to stop California’s three largest counties from experiencing population loss yet again.
Los Angeles County’s population declined by 73,293 people, or 0.75%, San Diego County’s by 5,680 people, or 0.2%, and Orange County’s by 14,782 people, or 0.5%, according to the state Department of Finance report.
Overall, 46 of California’s 58 counties lost population last year. Of 482 cities counted, 356 lost population, or 74%.
“Hundreds of thousands more people would desire to live in the Bay Area — if not millions — and Southern California, if we made it easier to accommodate those people through more housing units and presumably more affordable housing,” Lens said.
A Times analysis showed that after rising steadily in the 2010s, the number of people per household dropped significantly in 2020 and has stayed low.
Overcrowding, which may have contributed to the high 2010s numbers, is “a predictable byproduct of very expensive housing,” according to Lens.
“A lot of the declines in the pandemic had to do with people needing to separate from multigenerational living,” he said, and may not reflect better housing outcomes for people overall.
While losing population, major cities built the majority of new multifamily housing, the data show. Los Angeles added 12,074 multifamily units, which accounted for 62% of net housing growth, and San Diego added 4,568 such units for 65% of net growth.
Oakland and San Francisco skewed even more toward multifamily development, adding 3,880 and 2,573 units, respectively, which accounted for 97% and 91% of growth.
Suburban cities, on the other hand, often prioritized single-family housing. All of the development — 100% — in Roseville and Santa Clarita was single-family housing, the report says. In Fresno, the figure was 92%, and in Irvine, 71%.
The housing crunch was exemplified by a boom in the production of accessory dwelling units. ADU production increased by 61% in 2022 as the state added more than 20,000 units.
In all, the state netted 123,350 housing units in 2022, the most in nearly 15 years.
The state still has a long way to go to meet its housing needs. A Times review found that although Newsom has prioritized housing issues more than his predecessors in office, he’s fallen far short of his goals.
New state-level oversight seeks to ensure that “the total number of housing units that every region is expected to build is rising,” Lens said, as well as enforcing better distribution region by region. Beverly Hills should absorb people, he said, not just the Coachella Valley.
“We expect more equitable and more productive housing construction over the next decade,” Lens said, “but it’s going to take some time and take some diligence on the part of the state.”
Robert Lawrence woke up on May 8 and found an eviction notice plastered on the door of the rent-stabilized apartment he has lived in since 2021.
“120 DAY NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF TENANCY,” it said.
Owners of the Barrington Plaza said it would evict all residents in the 712-unit complex in West Los Angeles so that it could add fire sprinklers and safety upgrades following two significant fires in 10 years.
Lawrence and many of his neighbors in the complex jumped into organizing to stop what would be one of the largest evictions in the city in years.
On Monday, the Barrington Plaza Tenants Assn. sued the complex’s owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., accusing the company of misusing a California law that allows landlords to evict tenants if they exit the rental market. Lawyers and advocates involved in the case warn that if the owners follow through with the eviction of over 500 tenants, landlords of other affordable apartments may do the same — and have in the past.
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“It’s a devastating joke for a lot of people who have managed to strike gold with being able to get an affordable home in Los Angeles,” said Nima Farahani, a lawyer representing the Barrington Plaza Tenants Assn.
The Ellis Act was created in 1985 to enable landlords to exit the rental business, often to convert apartments into condominiums. Landlords in Los Angeles have evicted tenants using the Ellis Act from over 28,000 units since 2001, according to data gathered from the city Housing Department by the Coalition for Economic Survival, a grassroots policy organization involved in the lawsuit.
Advocates have routinely accused landlords of abusing the act to transform older buildings — including rent-controlled units — into luxury apartments.
“They don’t need to make this many people homeless for an updating project,” Farahani said, noting the building has over 150 vacant units.
Eric Rose, a public relations representative for Douglas Emmett, said Barrington Plaza’s owner is unsure how it will use the apartments after renovations.
“To the extent that the units were brought back onto the rental market, the owner would follow all obligations relative to former tenants as provided in those state and local rules,” Rose said in an email to the L.A. Times.
Landlords must compensate tenants if they rent out an apartment after two years of evicting residents with the Ellis Act, but their liability decreases with time.
Lawrence works in entertainment and described his fellow residents — including hairdressers, dog walkers, waiters and an Uber driver — as people who “work in service industries for our more affluent neighbors.”
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Advocates like Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, say that Douglas Emmett will likely reopen the units after renovation and jack up rents. Gross said this will open the “floodgates” for other landlords to follow suit.
“If we do not prevail, this literally puts a bull’s-eye on the back of every rent-controlled tenant in the city and state, who now will be vulnerable to landlords like this filing bogus Ellis evictions to get them out to raise rent,” Gross said.
Gross notes that Douglas Emmett donated $50,000 to fight Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax, which voters ultimately passed and generates funding for affordable housing and homeless prevention.
In the coming weeks, Farahani said that lawyers plan to ask the court to stop all evictions until the lawsuit is resolved.
On the day of the eviction announcement, tenants found what Lawrence called the “iconic” Barrington Plaza sign painted over in black.
A 20-year battle over the fate of a rugged, verdant hillside in Los Angeles is barreling toward an epic conclusion as developers move forward with plans to construct a luxury housing project in the Verdugo Mountains, above the Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood.
The Canyon Hills development project, approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 2005, is awaiting one final rubber stamp before crews can begin clearing hundreds of acres to make way for 221 homes.
Nevada-based developer Whitebird Inc. says it is within its rights to proceed with the project, which was granted a 20-year window of completion when it was initially approved nearly two decades ago.
But community members, neighborhood officials and other opponents say a lot has changed since then, and insist the development will harm wildlife in the area and put residents in the path of worsening wildfires. They’re calling for the project to be halted — or at least delayed — until a new environmental impact report can be conducted.
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“I just think 20 years is a long time in terms of climate conversations and environmental concerns,” said Emma Kemp, a Tujunga resident and co-founder of the group No Canyon Hills, which began a campaign opposing the project. A petition it started in February has more than 165,000 signatures.
“Before you start chopping down this mountain based on a report that was conducted in 2003, can we just reassess so we can make sure that we are taking really responsible precautions?” she asked. “You know, once you cut it up, you can’t go back.”
The project site runs north of the 210 Freeway and offers sweeping vistas of Los Angeles. On a recent hike around the area, the landscape was alive and buzzing with insects and green vegetation fueled by this year’s wet winter.
Adam Gelbart and Devon Christian, two amateur naturalists who regularly comb the hills there, have spotted a number of plants and critters they say would be threatened by the project, including live oak trees, rare bumble bees and lizards, and the critically imperiled Davidson’s bush mallow plant, which grows only along the Central Coast and in the hills around Tujunga.
“These are the last crumbs of a much larger ecosystem,” Christian said as he swished through chaparral and knee-high brush. “These ecosystems support a myriad of life — not only insects but also birds, larger carnivores. It’s all tied together, and if you see it within the larger context of biodiversity loss across the planet, we really need to fight to protect any last scrap of biodiversity that’s out there.”
Residents have also spotted mountain lions in the area, which alone should be enough to warrant a new environmental impact report, opponents say. Southern California’s mountain lions have reached a critical threshold in recent years as human development squeezes the landscape and leaves lions in the path of speeding cars.
The environmental impact report, finalized in 2004, found no evidence of mountain lions or bobcats at the time. And while the city’s development agreement acknowledges that “significant and unavoidable impacts will result from implementation of the project,” it concludes that “the benefits outweigh and override” such impacts.
Cited benefits include providing a substantial amount of high-quality housing to accommodate population growth in the area, as well as the creation of hundreds of construction jobs. The agreement also states that the project will replace old oak trees with new plantings that will benefit the habitat, and will decrease fire risk in the area by introducing fuel modification zones.
But in the nearly two decades since that agreement was approved, at least three wildfires have seared the area, including the La Tuna fire of 2017, which burned about 7,200 acres and destroyed five homes. The remnants of charred trees and structures can still be seen in the hills today.
The community was also threatened by the Station fire of 2009 and the Sand fire of 2016, both of which prompted the evacuations of thousands of people. Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council President Lydia Grant said she fears the project will leave more residents in harm’s way.
“Our community is a high fire danger area, and we do everything we can to keep the building off the hillsides because it’s just not safe,” she said. The Los Angeles Fire Department ranks the area as a very high fire hazard severity zone.
Grant said adding more homes and people to the wildland-urban interface could also put pressure on the community during an evacuation. The two major arteries in the area, Foothill Boulevard and La Tuna Canyon Road, have both been “road-dieted” from two lanes to one in recent years, she said.
“Now you’re adding that onto one lane in a high fire danger area. … This is just adding gasoline to a fire,” Grant said.
Such conditions are not unlike those that spurred a judge to pause a luxury development project in Lake County last year until further assessments of wildfire evacuation routes could be completed. Judges in recent years have also halted developments in a fire-prone part of San Diego County and the Tehachapi Mountains in Los Angeles County due to fire risk.
Grant said she has not heard from any community members in favor of the development. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who represents the area, declined to speak with The Times about the project.
Jack Rubens, an attorney for the developer, rejected the claims about fire danger, saying the project will in fact reduce the wildfire risk for existing residents to the north and east of the site by providing a new southern evacuation route to La Tuna Canyon Road and the freeway.
The project will also include a new million-gallon water tank close to the existing neighborhoods, which can be used by firefighters “who will have far superior access to the hillside after the project’s road system is constructed,” Rubens said. He added that future residents of the development will also be protected by a 200-foot-wide fuel modification zone that includes about 100 acres of land.
Rubens said concerns about mountain lions are similarly unfounded and noted that the original environmental impact report determined that the project would not interfere with local or regional movement of the animal. Should such movement occur, it would be outside of the development area, he said.
He added that in the wake of the initial approval, Whitebird and developer Rick Percell agreed to eliminate a portion of the project site south of the 210 Freeway, donating about 600 acres of land to an affiliate of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for permanent preservation, so “the public has therefore already received an enormous public benefit,” he said.
Paul Edelman, deputy director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, said developing the remaining acres would still amount to a considerable ecological loss.
“As a mountain range, [the Verdugos] are big enough to sustain subpopulations of all the animals we’re concerned about, and that is the key, because they’re just big enough to do that,” he said.
“As you start to take big chunks out of it, it degrades the whole system — you don’t have enough critical mass for one or two mountain lions or a healthy bobcat population,” he said. “It’s already so small that taking a big chunk out of it hurts a lot more than, say, if the equivalent-sized development happened in the Santa Monica Mountains.”
He and other opponents of the project acknowledged that the city’s hands are probably tied by the agreement, especially in this eleventh hour.
Whitebird recently pulled a grading permit that would allow it to begin leveling the pads for properties as soon as it’s approved. City officials could face a lawsuit from the developer should they try to intervene.
Under the agreement, additional environmental clearance could be required under the California Environmental Quality Act if there are substantial changes in the project, including new information showing that the project will have “new or more severe significant effects” than those described in the original environmental impact report.
Rubens said that’s a moot point. A second report cannot be lawfully required as the project is “fully entitled and doesn’t require any further discretionary approval simply because its development has been delayed,” he said.
“The project was approved after a five-year administrative process with significant community involvement and, by the way, those approvals were not challenged in court,” he added.
Dean Wallraff, an attorney who has been fighting the development for decades, said the city probably will agree. But it’s possible some elements of the grading permit could contain enough modifications to trigger a new report.
“Twenty years ago, they approved this project that has now all kinds of extra environmental effects, and it’s in this kind of sensitive area in the middle of the city, and if this goes forward now without anybody looking at it again — that doesn’t make sense,” said Wallraff, executive director of Advocates for the Environment.
The Verdugo Mountains and surrounding areas were originally home to the Chumash, Gabrielino/Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam tribes, and some members have spoken against the project.
“We believe in protecting the last remaining open spaces of L.A. County,” said Nathan Nuñez, Gabrielino Indigenous cultural keeper. “These places are important to our people, but they’re also important to the broader community. We have to do the work that we can do now to protect these places before they get lost to development.”
He worried about the potential presence of archaeological artifacts in the area because the hills and nearby areas once served as transportation corridors, campsites and places for gathering, hunting and ceremonies for the tribe.
His father, cultural bearer Kevin Nuñez, said he understands that the situation is complicated, but hoped politicians and decision makers would “pump the brakes.”
“I think there are options, but it takes some diligence, it takes some intestinal fortitude, to step up and say hold on, we’re going to vet this well,” he said.
Kemp, of the No Canyon Hills group, said the average lot size for the planned homes is about 17,000 square feet, with some as large as 100,000 square feet. It’s an equity issue as much as it is an environmental one, she said.
“Tujunga is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in and around urban L.A., and it is more rural and it’s definitely more working class … so how can you justify putting in a gated community of luxury mansions in this area?” she said. “What is the benefit to our community?”
However, she said she does not see the group expressing NIMBYism, an anti-development stance that stands for “not in my backyard.”
“I do understand that this developer has his project approved, and he wants to proceed with his plan. I do understand that,” she said. “It just feels that we have this very slim opportunity to do better by the environment, by current community members, by plants, animals and other species, and just to ensure that this is a viable and responsible and worthy project.
“And if things need to change about it,” she added, “then we can make those changes and find a position that works for everyone.”
Hiking through the brush, Gelbart and Christian, the naturalists, said California’s climate conditions are changing so rapidly that it’s difficult for even ecological experts to keep up — much less developers. The pair recently found a massive hollyleaf cherry tree growing in the hills that they hadn’t seen before.
“The land has value beyond what humans use it for,” Gelbart said as he surveyed the view. “And once this is gone, you can never put it back together.”