News & Commentary

When the City of Lancaster and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department banished J. to the Mojave Desert, she came close to paying with her life.

Let’s get one thing clear: property taxes are a race issue.

During a lull one afternoon when I was a high school student selling Black Panther Party newspapers on the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., in 1971, I sat down on the curb and opened the tabloid to the 10-point program, “What We Want; What We Believe.” The graphic assertion of “Point Number 3” particularly grabbed me:

For most of us, Governor Newsom's order to stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic is a potentially life-saving inconvenience. For people who are unhoused, it could be deadly, especially when local officials are massively expanding shelters and forcing people into them.

After she became homeless, Callie Rutter entered Bridges at Kraemer Place, an emergency shelter that promises to "connect participants to housing as quickly as possible." For her, however, the shelter has been a bridge to nowhere.

Living in California is already expensive enough for working families — paying rent, paying for childcare, putting food on the table, etc. — without also having to pay to retrieve a towed car. But every year, California local governments push countless families that are struggling to make ends meet deeper into poverty by towing their legally parked cars. Hundreds of thousands of cars are towed each year for non-safety reasons and to collect minor debts.

Erica Smith was making a fresh start. After being forced out of her home by domestic violence, she had spent the last three years cycling between homelessness and jail for petty offenses. But with the help of reentry organization Starting Over Inc., she finally secured stable housing and a job helping women who had experienced challenges like hers. She found community support in the Riverside chapter of All of Us or None. She was building a better life for herself and her daughter.

We are two months away from the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in what would become the United States of America. It is time to renew the public discussion about reparations to descendants of Africans who were enslaved as our country was forming and growing rich.

When the ACLU of Southern California released a report revealing horrific living conditions in three Orange County-funded emergency shelters, the world paid attention.