Even if you do own land, you might be subject to all kinds of restrictions on the usage of your tiny house, due to aforementioned pesky minimum housing-size requirements. A tiny home with all the trimmings might set you back $100,000 or so — not exactly a small investment. But shortly after the 2008 recession and housing market crash, tiny houses started to look appealing to a generation of young people disillusioned by their parents’ overblown, overmortgaged homes.
Toxic Churn
Farmers are the main reason that California now pumps nearly seven cubic kilometers of groundwater a year, or about as much total water as what’s used by all the homes in Texas. Sucking water from deep underground has caused the surrounding land to settle as the pockets of air between layers of soil collapse, wreaking havoc with bridges and even gravity-fed canals. Though California passed its first-ever groundwater regulations in 2014, water districts won’t be required to limit pumping for at least another four years. We will fill any clean growler.The cleanliness of your growler is extremely important for the health of the beer. We recommend that you rinse your growler several times with hot water immediately following consumption and allow it to dry completely.
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So in 1995, state officials agreed to a deal or, as it has been suggested, a staggering giveaway. The farmers had to relinquish 14 billion gallons of “paper water” — junior water rights that exist only de jure, since there simply isn’t enough rainfall most years to fulfill them. In exchange, they got ownership of the Kern Water Bank, a naturally occurring underground reservoir that lies beneath 32 square miles of Kern County, which sits toward the southern end of the Central Valley. The bank held up to 488 billion gallons of water, and because it sat beneath a floodplain it could be easily recharged in wet years with rainfall and surplus water piped in from the Delta. The Resnicks, who’d given up the most paper water rights, came to hold a majority vote on the bank’s board and the majority of its water. So like other farmers, the Resnicks have turned to the state’s dwindling reserve of groundwater, sinking wells hundreds of feet deep on their land.
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How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil
A 1970 housing condition survey found that many homes had fallen into disrepair, with only six units in sound condition; only 10 percent of the dwellings were worth more than $10,000. It’s been nearly a century since the city zoned the already-established residential barrio of Logan for industrial use. It absorbed the environmental degradation of each era that thrust Logan into modernity. As the neighborhood’s agricultural roots gave way to industry, products like petroleum, aviation gasoline, lead ore, heavy metals, chemicals, herbicides, and pesticides came and went on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroad lines — but a part of them never left. Logan has been described as the Plymouth Rock of Santa Ana, a predominantly Latino city now home to about 335,000 people, because it’s where the city’s earliest Mexican and Mexican American residents settled.
Pistachios are now among the top 10 best-selling salty snack items in the United States, and the Resnicks’ Lost Hills pistachio factory is the world’s largest. To meet robust demand from Europe and Asia, Stewart Resnick last year announced that he wanted to expand nut acreage another 40 percent by 2020. With pistachios netting an astounding $3,519 per acre — 4 times more than tomatoes and 18 times more than cotton — he seemed confident the water would flow uphill to the money. He explained that nationally, two-stroke engines are responsible for 82 percent of PM2.5 from lawn equipment, but in California it’s only 41 percent. Researchers are not exactly sure why the use difference is so stark, but one theory is that California’s history of regulating small engines is paying off. That outsize impact comes because gas-powered lawn equipment runs on different types of engines than passenger cars.
In 2011, Christopher Smith, freshly out of college and starting to imagine the shape his adult life might take, bought a plot of land in “middle-of-nowhere” Colorado with the dream of building a small homestead on it with his own hands. The precipitous costs of meeting building code requirements quickly eroded that vision, and he began to lose faith in ever having enough money to have a home on that land. About a decade ago, L.A.’s current housing authority CEO, Douglas Guthrie, spearheaded a similar process in Chicago. It led to the almost total displacement of a majority-Black public housing complex in favor of “mixed-income” housing. In the meantime, DTSC has removed at least another 1,690 tons of contaminated soil from the area since 2018, and an additional 870 tons have been removed from nearby Jordan High School, according to DTSC’s Hazardous Waste Tracking System.
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That means an introduction of new residents that are making tens of thousands of dollars more annually than those already living in Jordan Downs — a potentially big problem for low-income renters, if the area’s median income starts to rise. In the years since DTSC claimed no further action was needed, community members like Watkins have taken it upon themselves to test the soil using a crowdsourced X-ray fluorescence machine. According to their data, lead levels around both original housing structures and newly-constructed affordable housing buildings are nearly 100 ppm, far below the 2011 readings but still significantly above the state-approved level of 80 ppm. However, DTSC and the city of Los Angeles have declined to take further action, saying that although some test levels are above state limits, lead levels fall below 80 ppm when samples are averaged across the entire property. These perils are exemplified on the corner of Century Boulevard and South Alameda Street. To the east is the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile long freight rail line leading to the port of Los Angeles, carrying 14,000 trains responsible for thousands of tons of air pollution annually.
By the time she was 24, she’d launched her own advertising agency, Lynda Limited, given birth to three children, and gotten divorced. California and Florida ranked highest for carbon dioxide emissions from lawn equipment, while Florida and Texas topped the list of PM2.5 pollution. While one might expect the sheer amount of lawn care in California, the most populous U.S. state, to rank it higher on PM2.5 pollution, it only comes in 29th. Lower two-stroke engine use accounts for the gap between the state’s carbon and particulate emissions, according to Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst at Frontier Group and contributor to the report.
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It’s time, he said, to pass the baton on to the next generation — though what keeps him up at night is wondering who exactly will take over for him and Andrade. “The idea has always been that we’ll try to revert Logan back to purely residential,” Romero told me. Responding to prodding from Stewart Resnick, Feinstein sent a letter to the secretaries of the interior and commerce urging their agencies to reexamine the science behind the Delta environmental protection plan. The agencies spent some $750,000 studying the issue anew — only to have researchers again conclude the 2007 restrictions on Delta pumping were warranted. “I never got the account,” she writes in her memoir, “but I sure got the business.” They were married in 1973.
The majority of these schools are in Los Angeles County, and they represent 13 percent of public schools in the county of 10 million people. Across the state, Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately burdened by the impact of oil and gas drilling on schools — as are students eligible for free and reduced school meals. More than 7 million Californians live within a mile of oil and gas drilling operations. And 84 percent of wells in the state are located in places categorized by the federal government as medically underserved areas or populations — placing a disproportionate public health burden on communities already neglected by the health system.
One of the very early tiny-house adopters, Shafer is sometimes credited with “inventing” the minicottage aesthetic that launched this fantasy. The only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice. Typically, rent prices for public housing residents are fixed at about 30 percent of their personal incomes. However, the new “affordable” units at Jordan Downs will be reserved for households making anywhere between 30 and 80 percent of the area’s median income, and some units won’t have an affordability cap at all.
She dropped out of school in the eighth grade to pick cotton and chased the cotton trail to Lost Hills, where in 1969 she found a job planting pistachio trees instead. The steady work allowed her kids to graduate from high school and move into the middle class. By 2000, Tijerina and her husband had scraped together enough money to qualify for a USDA loan that helped them buy 330 acres of wheat fields a few miles outside town. In the plant’s nut-grading room, a few dozen seasonal employees wearing orange reflective vests and hairnets sat around folding tables evaluating samples from incoming truckloads of pistachios. Suddenly, a boom box started blaring merengue, and everyone stood up and danced.
In 2004, Andrade was taken under the wing of one of Chepa’s long-time fellow activists, Logan native Sam Romero, now 87. Together, Romero and Andrade began mapping and tracking neighborhood businesses that they saw as environmental nuisances, calling on Santa Ana to take a tougher stance against firms that violated city ordinances. For example, they fought to regulate an auto paint shop that operated late into the evening, overwhelming the neighborhood with noxious paint fumes as residents tried to sleep. It’s true that the Golden State’s vast network of dams, reservoirs, and canals has served the state so well over the past 80 years that Californians have come to take it for granted.
The Western States Petroleum Association, or WSPA, an oil industry group, is one of the largest lobbying forces in California by expenditure. 467, and Democratic senators who voted against both bills received thousands of dollars in contributions from the industry. But some Los Angeles County residents tend to live closer to wells than others. This story was produced in collaboration with Capital & Main, a nonprofit media publication focused on inequality, and was made possible with funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
But as long as the toxic dust remains in the earth, and as long as the Santa Ana winds whip through the streets of Logan, Andrade Rodriguez realizes that the only way to return to the cherished barrio of her youth is by letting her imagination carry her to a place that once was. Ultimately, if the transformation of Logan can improve the health of residents, Logan will have won, said Andrade, who has watched generations of Logan residents get cancers and battle heart disease and other health issues. His mother Chepa, who died of a heart attack while undergoing dialysis, was one of them. Romero, who is struggling with health issues, realizes his activist days are nearing their end.
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