This week: The New York Times’ editors discover the housing math we’ve been doing for years, UCLA revives everyone’s second-least favorite part of the 1970s (after disco), and California gets homelessness news so good it arrived from the Trump administration just to make everyone uncomfortable. Meanwhile, a dying dam deal gets federal theatrics, coal gets a taxpayer-funded comeback tour, sea turtles colonize a concrete river, and Kingsburg reminds us civic pride can, apparently, be shaped like a coffee pot. We know you’re confused. You’re in California, after all. Keep reading, we’ll help it all make sense…

THE LEAD: THE NY TIMES GOES YIMBY

In a wonderfully interactive editorial featuring an avalanche of tearjerking visuals, the NY Times editorial board weighed in this week on America’s housing crunch. The crisis, the Times argues, is not some mysterious plague visited upon the republic by angry drywall gods. It is arithmetic: demand has skyrocketed while cities, especially rich coastal ones, strangle supply with zoning rules, delays and NIMBY veto points. The result is a country where young adults can see homeownership mostly through museum glass. The board points to Austin, which built far more homes than San Francisco, New York or Boston and saw prices and rents fall even as its population grew. (The cruel irony, of course, being that much of that population increase came from San Franciscans, New Yorkers and Bostonians fleeing their respective coastal enclaves.) The prescription is blunt: loosen single-family zoning, allow apartments, town houses and duplexes, and stop smothering legal projects with procedural theater and affordability mandates so onerous nothing gets built. The editorial dials its message in for a 5th-grade audience: “High prices prevent families from buying homes.” Truer words have never been written.

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🤫 Everything you should know

🙉 UNWELCOME ECONOMIC NEWS FROM UCLA — The June 2026 UCLA Anderson Forecast says the economy has swapped one inflation headache for another: tariffs are fading, but the Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz have shoved oil back into the villain’s chair. About 20% of daily global oil flows are disrupted, pushing CPI toward a projected 4.5% peak while GDP limps along at 2.1% and unemployment edges to 4.5%. As the report puts it, “The 2020s are beginning to look eerily similar to the 1970s,” which is not a vibe anyone ordered. California, naturally, gets the deluxe version of the problem, thanks to its low-emissions fuel rules and energy-hungry economy. Our special gasoline rules, ports, logistics network and housing dysfunction make the shock sharper. Output and income are still beating the U.S., thanks to AI, aerospace and tech investment, but employment remains anemic, with job growth barely twitching and heavily tilted toward health care. The Golden State’s wealth machine keeps humming, just not for everyone standing outside the factory gates. — UCLA Anderson

🌟 GOOD CA HOMELESSNESS NEWS FROM…TRUMP? — New data from the Trump administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development gives Gov. Gavin Newsom a rare political gift: news (and stats) he can use. California posted the nation’s largest reduction in unsheltered homelessness last year, down 8,391 people, or 6.8%, more than twice the national decline. Overall homelessness fell 2.8%, the state’s biggest drop since 2009, while California ranked first in reducing veteran, chronic, youth and young-adult homelessness over the past two years. The state also added 15,013 year-round beds from 2024 to 2025, more than the national net increase, with gains in permanent supportive housing, emergency shelter and permanent housing. Local drops were sharp in Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Riverside, Santa Cruz and elsewhere. Newsom credits the results to housing investments, behavioral health reforms, encampment programs and local accountability, saying, “no one should be left without a safe place to call home.” For a state long treated as America’s open-air case study in policy failure, the numbers give Newsom something sturdier than a talking point: measurable progress on a crisis that has swallowed plenty of slogans and returned very few results. — CA Governor’s Office

💧 DAM. HERE COMES BROOKE ROLLINS. — The Potter Valley Project is the kind of aging California water contraption that inspires lawsuits, tribal claims, farmer panic and, occasionally, electricity — though not lately. Its Eel River dams are sediment-choked, seismically suspect and no longer worth much as power infrastructure. PG&E wants to tear them down, and after years of negotiation, farmers, cities and the Round Valley Indian Tribe reached a compromise: remove the dams, restore the river, and keep some water flowing to agriculture. Then USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins parachuted in with the subtlety of a piano pushed out of a 3rd-story window, recasting a fragile local deal as another “fish over people” melodrama. Her would-be savior is a Southern California water district 500 miles away with no obvious connection to the project and no infrastructure to move the water. “It would be great if this was a fish-versus-farmer problem, because there is a lot of precedent on how to handle those,” one farmer said. “This is more like a town whose bridge is failing.” — Grist

🎙️💬🎧 - ON THE POD: Watersheds West

Western Edition’s fifth season, Watersheds West, wades into the West’s most loaded subject: water, the thing everyone needs and everyone has tried to own. Launching January 2026, the six-part series traces centuries of dams, diversions, conquest and consequences, while foregrounding Indigenous perspectives and asking whether climate catastrophe finally forces a new relationship with the region’s wettest obsession — power itself.— Watersheds West

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🤔 — SWEDE JAIL YOU’VE GOT THERE, KINGSBURG!

Just south of Fresno lies tiny Kingsburg, a Highway 99 pit stop where Swedish flair meets tiny-jail tourism. Come for the peculiar 1920s lockup, stay for the giant coffee-pot water tower looming overhead like caffeine-powered civic pride. Fifteen minutes, maximum weirdness. - California Through My Lens

🏃💨 ✋ FAST FIVE

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1. 📉 San Diego’s mood ring is stuck on red. - A new poll finds 69% of San Diego residents say their city is on the wrong track — a 20-point jump in one year — with housing and affordability as the dominant drivers of frustration. Fifty percent say they'd support higher taxes if they trusted the money would actually do something. That last number should terrify incumbents of every persuasion. - Axios
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2. 🪨 Trump goes to bat for “Beautiful Coal” - The federal government announced plans to pump $700 million into the coal industry — including $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland — invoking a Cold War-era law to justify it as a national security matter. California's clean energy goals just acquired a very expensive federal adversary. - SF Chronicle
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3. ⚖ Not so fast, CIPA hustlers! - California’s latest privacy lawsuit boom just hit a judicial speed bump. An L.A. judge ruled CIPA’s pen-register rules apply to phones, not ordinary website tracking tools, gutting claims against defendant NetScout in a CIPA case. For companies dodging pixel lawsuits, it’s a helpful new shield while a legislative fix remains in flux. - JD Supra
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4. 🐢 There are endangered sea turtles in the San Gabriel river. Really. - Only in Los Angeles could threatened green sea turtles find sanctuary in a concrete flood channel wedged between freeways, power plants and county-line bureaucracy. The San Gabriel River’s warm, grimy waters have become an unlikely spa, buffet and comeback story — proof that nature occasionally reads the zoning code and laughs. - Curated California
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5. 🤖 Rep. Sam Liccardo: AI needs a referee - As AI starts sawing at Silicon Valley’s career ladder, Rep. Sam Liccardo wants tech giants to help build the replacement: training programs tied to real jobs, cleaner power for faster data centers, and an AI “referee” to reward safer models. Less Big Brother, more hall monitor with a federal badge. - Washington Post | San Jose Spotlight

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