Just when you thought you had heard it all… Los Angeles public officials are attempting to throttle housing construction by rebranding apartment buildings near transit as a costly public safety issue. Elsewhere, water is somehow priceless, free, and extravagantly expensive all at once; Portland leaves San Francisco in its housing construction dust; and San Diego quietly demonstrates that homelessness is, in fact, a math problem you can improve if you try. Add a reminder that California invented motels, the web, and legislative alcoholism, and you’ve got a state still allergic to boredom — and occasionally progress.

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Editor’s note: We’ll be taking a break for the holidays (as should you!). We’ll be back in your inbox on January 9, 2026. 

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YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING — Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is mounting a rear-guard action against SB 79, a law designed to legalize the obvious: more homes where the transit is. Unable to kill the bill in Sacramento, LA City Hall is now shopping a reimbursement claim to the obscure Commission on State Mandates, (seriously) arguing denser housing will saddle LA with billions in costs. The strategy is openly political: frame housing abundance as a public-safety crisis and hope the price tag scares lawmakers into renegotiating the law. As her deputy admitted, it’s a savvier message to fight the law on public safety grounds: “Politically… it is an easier process to explain when you’re talking to a skeptical media.” Translation: zoning lost, so now it’s fiscal theater. Feldstein Soto presented her strategy this week to a virtual meeting of “Our Neighborhood Voices,” a statewide organization formed in opposition to recent state laws promoting denser housing construction. Step back for a second and drink in the milieu: Recalcitrant city officials, the Commission on State Mandates, and Our Neighborhood Voices, a NIMBY activist group. A mixologist couldn’t concoct a more noxious California cocktail.

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🤫 Everything you should know

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🚰  - THE MYSTERIOUS PRICE OF WATER — A new UCLA–NRDC report delivers an awkward truth Western water managers prefer to mumble past: water is priceless, except when it’s free, and priced like it’s endless. After a year digging through contracts and ledgers, researchers found wildly inconsistent water prices across California, Arizona and Nevada — often bearing no relation to scarcity. Cities pay dearly, farmers often don’t, and some of the biggest agricultural districts pay nothing at all for Colorado River water. As lead author Noah Garrison put it, “We’re dealing with a river system in absolute crisis, and yet we’re still treating this as if it’s an abundant, limitless resource.” The result is a system that rewards waste, discourages conservation, and pretends collapse is someone else’s problem.  —  CalMatters

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🏗️ - PORTLAND ≠ SAN FRANCISCO

Portland built the homes San Francisco keeps promising. Thanks to a blunt, by-right upzoning experiment called RIP, Portland has quietly cranked out more than 2,200 “missing middle” homes since 2021—townhomes, duplexes, cottage clusters—giving first-time buyers like Alana Moore a way into homeownership at $400,000 instead of $600,000. San Francisco, armed with SB 9 and good intentions, produced about a sixth as many homes, then buried them under owner-occupancy rules, hearings, fees, and procedural quicksand. The lesson isn’t subtle: policy design, political will, and cultural tolerance for change matter. As Tina Kotek, Oregon’s former Speaker of the state House of Representatives, once put it, Portland was “just trying not to become San Francisco.” Mission accomplished! Now, maybe we can get San Francisco to take some notes from the Rose City? — SF Chronicle

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👏 - SAN DIEGO CLOSING HOMELESS GAP:  — San Diego’s homelessness math is finally inching toward something resembling balance. New data from the Regional Task Force on Homelessness shows the gap between people falling into homelessness and those moving into housing nearly vanished last year: 13,622 newly homeless, 13,410 housed, a difference of just 212 people. That’s a sharp turnaround, driven by fewer people entering homelessness and more exits into housing. Task Force CEO Tamera Kohler credits aggressive use of diversion — small, targeted financial help that keeps people from ever entering the system — and a focused push on veterans, who are now being housed at twice the rate they fall into homelessness. It’s progress, not victory. The pipeline is still crowded, but for once, it’s not overflowing. — Voice of San Diego

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🎙️ 💬 🎧 - ON THE POD: THE OTHER CALIFORNIA

KVPR’s The Other California, hosted by Alice Daniel, tours the San Joaquin Valley’s overlooked towns — places most Californians treat as freeway scenery. Each episode mixes history, economy, and identity: farms, oil, prisons, immigration, and the people holding communities together. It’s California without the coastal filter: complicated, resilient, and wildly under-Instagrammed too. — The Other California

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👴🏽 📜 ⌛  - THIS WEEK IN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

Image: Google Gemini

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• Dec 15, 1849 — “Legislature of a Thousand Drinks”: California’s first legislature convened in rain-soaked San Jose — only 20 of 52 made it on time, and the work was apparently conducted via the rigorous parliamentary procedure known as hanging out at the saloon.

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• Dec 15, 1881 — The Poetic Bandit: While the legislature was in San Jose getting lubed up on rye and grandpa’s ole’ cough medicine, Black Bart pulled off his 19th stagecoach robbery near Dobbins in Yuba County. Sadly, he didn’t leave a poem as he did at his 4th and 5th heists.

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• Dec 12, 1925 — Motel, Invented Here: San Luis Obispo’s Milestone Mo-Tel opened, smashing “motor” and “hotel” together and effectively launching America’s long, proud tradition of sleeping ten feet from a parking spot on Highway 101.

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• Dec 19, 1970 — SoCal Snowpocalypse: A freak storm dumped nearly 25 inches near Quail Lake, shut down the Grapevine with 8-foot drifts, and stranded 1,000 motorists—proof the I-5 corridor can fail in any weather, with gusto.

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• Dec 12, 1991 — The Web lands in the U.S.: Stanford’s SLAC installed the first web server outside Europe—America officially logged on, and the rest is pop-ups, doomscrolling, and group chats that never die.

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🏃‍♂️ 💨 ✋ FAST FIVE

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1. 🤩 These homes start at $50K and arrive in months. (video) LAist
2. 🎥 28 new film projects coming to state due to film tax credit program. Cal Chamber
3. 🫁 Heart attacks, lung conditions jumped after LA wildfires. Wall Street Journal
4. 🌧️ Monster atmospheric river steaming toward Golden State. The Weather Channel
5. ☀️ Full-court press to install solar in CA before Trump-imposed deadline. SFGate

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