THE SPOOK HUNTERS

Updated December 4, 2025 6:52 AM PST

The Ghost Gang That Built White Los Angeles — And Then Erased Itself From the Story

Spook Hunters Gang
Years Active 1930s-1960s

Criminal Activity
vandalism
fire bombings
assaults
hate crimes
battery

Allies
Other White Racist gangs

Rivals
African Americans & Mexican Americans

Territory
South Gate, Compton, Huntington Park, Watts, Downey, Lynwood, and Inglewood.

THE SPOOK HUNTERS: THE GHOST GANG THAT BUILT WHITE LOS ANGELES

There’s a story white Los Angeles tells about itself. It’s the one where the suburbs were peaceful, the streets were safe, and the neighborhood was “nice” back when people “knew how to behave.” It’s a myth preserved in real-estate listings and Facebook nostalgia groups , and it collapses the moment you mention the Spook Hunters.

In the 1940s and 50s, long before “white flight” became an official demographic trend, the Spook Hunters patrolled places like South Gate, Huntington Park, Lynwood, and Compton, not as a “street gang” in the modern sense, but as a racist youth militia. Their mission was simple: keep Black people out through intimidation, assault, and terror. These weren’t rebels. They were the unofficial foot soldiers of segregation, policing racial boundaries that banks and zoning commissions had already drawn on paper.

They wore varsity jackets. They carried pipes and chains. They hunted, literally, for Black families who dared walk into neighborhoods federal housing policy had already redlined. They chased kids from pools. They ambushed teenagers walking home. They enforced sundown-town rules in cities that pretended they never had them.

And here’s what polite Los Angeles never says out loud, White gangs existed first. Not Black gangs. Not Mexican-American gangs. White gangs, violent, organized, and ideologically driven. The Spook Hunters were not an anomaly. They were a blueprint.

People Think this is in the past and it doesn’t matter anymore. It isn’t and it does matter. When people talk about Compton becoming “Black” in the 1960s and “Latino” later, they skip the part where white mobs enforced invisible borders with violence before any demographic shift. LA County’s segregation wasn’t just written into covenants,  it was enforced with fists. It was teenagers doing the dirty work of racial maintenance.

They saw themselves as guardians. Guardians of whiteness, property, and the mythology of “good neighborhoods.” They grew up, bought homes, joined unions, ran for office, and built wealth.
And the families they terrorized were pushed into underfunded, excluded cities. That gap is structural inheritance, not coincidence.

It was this violence, white teenagers patrolling neighborhoods and attacking Black and Mexican American youth, that pushed those communities to form their own groups for protection. The earliest Black and Latino street organizations weren’t born from chaos, they were born from survival.

Spoke Hunters Gang

The Afterlife of a Gang Has No Archive — Only Evidence
There’s no museum dedicated to the Spook Hunters. No Hollywood documentary. No true-crime series. But their imprint is everywhere. Cities like South Gate and Huntington Park are now over 90% Latino and nearly 0% Black, the demographic scar of mid-century racial violence. Residents still say “that area changed” like it’s a crime scene, never mentioning who created that “change.” City councils across the county still weaponize “property values” as coded language for who belongs. Neighborhoods built on segregation now disguise it as “local character” and “preserving community.”

But Drive east, to Pomona. Not because the Spook Hunters operated there, they didn’t, but because the ideology migrated. White fear didn’t disappear when neighborhoods integrated. It moved. It rebranded. White flight wasn’t an escape. It was a strategy, a redistribution of whiteness across Los Angeles County. Pomona absorbed the aftershock. Panic over apartments, nostalgia policing, and the quiet assumption that safety is a racial commodity.

Everyone in Southern California understands the stereotype, gang violence is Latino. Or Black. Reporters treat it like weather, predictable, racialized, inevitable. But where are the white gangs? Where are the documentaries? Where are the police panels? Where’s the moral panic? They existed.
They were documented. They shaped entire cities.

And yet, white gangs were never branded as public-safety threats. They were “rowdy boys,” “kids protecting their neighborhoods,” “teenage antics.” Their violence was allowed to age into respectability.

The Spook Hunters got memory-holed into polite euphemisms like:

• “changing demographics”

• “the neighborhood went downhill”

• “we moved for the kids”

And the white gangs in and around Pomona, the ones who fought Mexican-American youth in the 1950s–70ss, vanished entirely from the official record. It wasn’t simply forgotten. It was left out. Because acknowledging white gangs requires saying the part LA has spent 70 years avoiding.

California Eagle News Paper
Los Angeles, California • Thu, Apr 7, 1960Page 4

California Eagle News Paper
Los Angeles, California • Thu, Apr 7, 1960Page 4

The California Eagle documented Spook Hunter violence in real time, Black teenagers beaten, chased, and ambushed when they crossed into “white” areas, while police openly ignored the gang’s attacks. One Eagle report noted that officers stopped Black kids “to tell them to go back to their side of town,” yet “the Spook-Hunters come into Negro territory and are not molested by police.” Meanwhile, white officials publicly insisted the gang was “only rumor,” claiming they could find “no evidence” despite widespread community testimony. It was the perfect blueprint for how white violence gets erased: the attacks were real, the victims were real, but the archive was sanitized. The denial wasn’t ignorance, it was strategy.

White people didn’t flee the gangs, they were the gangs. And they got to grow up, buy property, and write the history.

The Erased White Gangs of Pomona Pomona’s gang history gets told like only Latino or Black neighborhoods ever existed. The lists are always the same. Lavarne, 12th Street, Cherryville, HTR, Sin Town, and Ghost Town, the usual shorthand. But older Mexican American families remember something else. White kids patrolling streets. White male youth starting fights. Groups of white youth that looked, acted, and operated like gangs, even if the city refused to call them that.

There are scattered oral histories describing white youth groups in mid century Pomona, informal collection, most likely with comb-overs hair cuts who clashed with Mexican-American teens long before the city’s modern gang narratives took shape. These groups never received names in police reports, never appeared in gang injunctions, and were eventually folded into suburbia as the city changed. Hollywood even captured this kind of racial conflict in Gang Boy (1954), a film centered on a white gang and a Chicano gang, a reflection of the era’s tensions that Pomona and many nearby cities quietly absorbed but never officially documented.

White violence gets written out. Latino violence gets written in. And that editorial choice becomes public memory. Here’s where the relevance snaps into focus. The Spook Hunters didn’t create modern white nationalism. But they were an early, local expression of the same instinct: protect whiteness through space, fear, and force.

The names change, segregationist mobs, neighborhood-defense gangs, suburban anti-housing groups, the alt-right, but the impulse remains, claim the street, define who belongs, punish intrusion.

Today the weapons look different. It’s HOAs policing renters, anti-housing coalitions defending “neighborhood character”, Nextdoor app panics about “suspicious Black or Brown teens” Facebook patriot groups rehearsing vigilante fantasies, and Zoning meetings that sound like coded segregation meeting.

The Spook Hunters didn’t disappear. They were promoted. Their grandchildren aren’t carrying chains, they’re carrying out voting blocs, school-board takeovers, and anti-housing crusades. The violence evolved. The logic didn’t.

The Generational Lineage: From Silent Generation Fists to Boomer Policy

The Spook Hunters weren’t Baby Boomers, they were their parents. Most Spook Hunters were teenagers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, part of the Silent Generation, the friends and their ally’s that enforced segregation with fists while the country pretended to be “postwar and peaceful.” They patrolled streets, defended racial lines, and punished intrusion. Then they grew up, bought homes, and entered civic life just as their children, the Baby Boomers, were coming of age.

And this is where the violence shapeshifts. The Silent Generation used pipes and chains.
The Boomers used zoning meetings, PTA boards, and real estate law. The children of the Spook Hunters didn’t need to swing anything. They inherited safe neighborhoods, rising property values, and the political language to keep it all intact. “Good schools,” “quiet streets,” “neighborhood character,” “property values,” “keeping things the way they used to be”. They were the polite vocabulary of the same racial boundaries their parents enforced with brute force.

One generation patrolled the block. The next one codified the block into law. The ideology never died.
It just got a mortgage and grandchildren.

People imagine white nationalism as a Southern export with hoods, crosses, Confederate ghosts drifting through the smog and bad air the further you go inland. But lets not forget California has its own lineage, a state shaped by pro-Confederate settlers, suburban borders that appear polite, but come with a territorial instinct that is on full blatant display on the Nextdoor apps and community Facebook groups across America.

The South had the Klan. Los Angeles had white teenagers in letterman jackets swinging pipes at Black kids walking home from school. The most dangerous thing about the Spook Hunters is not that they existed.
It’s that they were never interrogated.

Their violence was absorbed as, neighborhood pride, “good schools, and safe communities. I would call this segregation with manners.

The Past Isn’t Past — It’s Policy

When people say “those days are over,” remind them, zoning still enforces racial boundaries
HOAs still police who belongs, neighborhoods still weaponize, “safety”, and housing policy still protects whiteness.

The Spook Hunters never needed to join the Proud Boys. They didn’t need tiki torches or swastikas. They won when the system adopted their logic.

The ghost of the gang is still here. Some of them show up in the comments, tossing out racist tropes on Nextdoor. Others sit on city councils and state senates, some serve as commissioners, and plenty call themselves Democrats or Republicans depending on what helps their political agenda.

Unless people name it, plainly, we’ll keep pretending the only gangs that shaped Los Angeles were the ones easy to criminalize. The truth is simpler and uglier. One gang grew up and inherited the city. And we’re still living inside its territory and their reality.

History doesn’t disappear. It just waits for someone to name it again.

LAist — Mentions Spook Hunters as the first major white gang terrorizing Black and Latino families.
Saving Places — Documents white youth patrols and Spook Hunter activity in Compton and South Gate.
California Eagle (1950s) — Black newspaper reporting assaults, intimidation, and white mobs.
LA Civil + Human Rights Dept. — Notes white youth gangs predating Black gangs.
StreetGangs.com — Frames Spook Hunters as the racist predecessor to modern Black gangs.
Cornerstone Journal (UCR) — Academic documentation of white youth gang violence.
Gang Boy (1954) — Rare depiction of white vs. Chicano gang rivalry.

TIMELINE

1930s–1940s — White-only covenants dominate LA.
1940–1955 — Spook Hunters patrol South Gate, Lynwood, Huntington Park, Compton.
1954 — Gang Boy (white vs. Chicano gangs) released.
1960s — White flight expands east into Whittier, Claremont, Pomona, Covina.
1970–2000 — White gangs disappear from public memory; Latino/Black gangs dominate headlines.
2010s–2020s — The ideology resurfaces as alt-right suburbia, anti-housing politics, and racialized “neighborhood watch” culture.

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SOURCE NOTES
California Eagle archives
LAist, “How Compton Became the Violent City of Straight Outta Compton”
National Trust for Historic Preservation, “Recognizing Compton’s Historic Legacy”
LA Civil Rights Dept., “African American Experiences in Los Angeles”
StreetGangs.com (Alex Alonso)
Cornerstone Journal, UCR
Gang Boy (1954)

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Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

Pomona City Council Quietly Reverses Course on Rent Cap Ordinance

Updated 10/31/2025 6:11 am PST

Illustration by Julian Lucas

A week after the Pomona City Council quietly rejected a second reading of the city’s rent-stabilization ordinance, residents are still waiting for an explanation. The Oct. 20 vote, taken by computer, without discussion, blocked a measure that would have made Pomona’s temporary rent cap permanent.

Four councilmembers voted with property, not with people.

Pomona’s housing fight came to a head again Monday night. The City Council voted 3–4 to reject the second reading of Ordinance No. 4359, a measure that would have made the city’s temporary rent-stabilization law permanent.

According to city of Pomona archived city council meeting video review by The Pomonan, the council voted 3–4 on October 20 to reject the ordinance. Official minutes have not yet been released by the City Clerk.

Mayor Tim Sandoval, along with council members Victor Preciado and Nora Garcia, voted yes.

Debra Martin, Elizabeth Ontiveros-Cole, Steve Lustro, and Lorraine Canales voted no, blocking the ordinance.

The measure would have given renters long-term stability in a city where nearly half of all households rent. Instead, Pomona remains under the temporary protections first passed in 2022.

Sandoval says he plans to bring the ordinance back, without the rental-registry component. Not out of appeasement, but because he’s searching for a version that can survive a council split between homeowners and the renters they represent. But good intentions don’t outvote a class majority.

In past debates, opponents called rent control ‘too costly’ and ‘too bureaucratic,’ pointing to the $82,000 cost of the city’s rental-registry software. There was no discussion this time, just a quiet, digital vote that said enough.

This wasn’t about software. It was about priorities.

All four “no” votes came from those who have other property or lean in the favor of landlords.
This is class alignment.

Debra Martin is part of Pomona’s old guard, a returning councilmember whose politics protect property values over people. Public reporting indicates she owns property in Pomona.

Steve Lustro, a longtime city planner, speaks in procedure, but votes to keep things as they are.

Elizabeth Ontiveros-Cole often frames herself as an advocate for small landlords, repeating the same government overreach lines that have echoed through city politics for decades.

Lorraine Canales, newer to the council, leans conservative and votes like it — protect property, stall change, calls it caution, a pattern visible in her recent votes.

Lets not forget, California’s Proposition 13 already handed home and property owners a permanent tax break while draining public revenue from schools, housing, and city services. Renters have been paying the difference ever since. Monday night was another reminder of how that story plays out locally, how policy, comfort, and silence all work together to keep things exactly as they are.

Pomona doesn’t need another temporary fix.
The city needs honesty and courage, and a new council willing to take risks, not the old guard, or the new guards clinging to old ideas.

Update October 31, 2025

The Pomona City Council is set to revisit rent stabilization on Monday, November 3. The revised ordinance maintains the 5 percent annual rent cap but removes the rental-registry system that would have tracked increases and ensured compliance. It also adds a December 2026 sunset clause, meaning protections will expire unless renewed by future council action.

The new draft also expands landlord exemptions and broadens the definition of “nuisance,” which tenant observers warn could make the law harder to enforce and easier to evade. Critics argue that, without a registry and permanent timeline, the ordinance keeps the cap in name only—leaving renters to police the system themselves.

Read the proposed ordinance and staff presentation:

• Proposed Ordinance (Pomona Legistar)

• Staff Presentation (Pomona Legistar)

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The Pomonan editorial board consists of opinion journalists whose perspectives are shaped by their expertise, research, discussions, and established principles. This board operates independently from the newsroom.

The Concrete Classroom: Why Marginalized Public School Kids Got Asphalt Instead of Grass

Walk onto almost any public schools in historically disinvested neighborhoods in Southern California and you’ll see the same thing, blacktop with a few painted circles, heat bouncing off every inch of it. No trees. No softness. Just the sound of kids playing on the pavement and the smell of tar in the hot sun.

This isn’t a coincidence. This has happened because that’s how schools for marginalized kids have been built, cheap, easy to maintain, and disconnected from nature.

Studies show that the pattern is national, not local. Across the United States, public schools in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods are far more likely to have asphalt yards and little to no tree canopy. The Guardian reported that 36 percent of U.S. students attend school in urban heat islands, with the worst conditions concentrated in poorer districts.

Moving from the South Side of Chicago to Inglewood in 1980, we played “throw up tackle,” basically rugby we just didn’t know the formal name. Either way, it was on asphalt. When the school took the balls away, because of fear we would get hurt, we just saved the foil covering from our lunches and combined them large enough to make a ball. That was recess, heat, concrete, and a kind of creativity born out of neglect.

Forty years later, the paint is brighter, new murals appear on school walls calling it progress, but the ground never changed.

Heat that Literally Burns

The UCLA Luskin Center conducted a study showing how hot playground surface can get. School playgrounds could reach up to 160 °F, hot enough to burn skin in seconds. On a 90 degree day, grass stays around 95 °F, asphalt hits 150, and rubber turf can climb to 165. The EPA has also recorded conventional asphalt at 152 °F by midday.

That’s the reality for thousands of students in public schools in working class districts, mostly Black and Latino, whose schools double as heat islands. The same schools that can’t afford air conditioning are hard boiling kids from the ground.

What Greening Really Means

People talk about “greening” schoolyards like it’s a beautification project. It’s not. It’s called infrastructure, and it’s long overdue.

Sharon Gamson Danks of Green Schoolyards America says it plainly, “This is a long term infrastructure problem. It’s actual infrastructure, on par with highway building.”

Green Schoolyards America explains why this work matters:

“Living school grounds are richly layered outdoor environments that strengthen local ecological systems while providing place based, hands-on learning resources for children and youth of all ages.” Read More

Their mission is simple, but radical in its implications:

“All children have daily access to nature on their school grounds, supporting dynamic hands-on learning across the curriculum and grade levels, child directed play, student health and well being, and a positive social environment.” Read More

And she’s right. We have built highways through Black neighborhoods but never bothered to plant shade trees where their children learn. Read More

Now, a few places are trying to fix that.

Buchanan Elementary in Highland Park: North East Trees tore out 400 tons of asphalt and planted 150 trees, fruit bearing, shade casting, humanizing.

Washington STEM Magnet in Pasadena: Amigos de los Ríos turned a bare yard into an outdoor classroom with pollinator gardens and bioswales. “Green space doesn’t just support childhood development, it supercharges it,” said Arbor Day Foundation CEO Dan Lambe.

Even Pasadena school board member Tina Fredericks once made the point clear with a thermometer, asphalt at 157 °F, grass under an oak at 82. California has finally put money on the table, $150 million for “schoolyard forests.” LAUSD has a goal of 30 percent tree canopy by 2035. It’s late, but it’s something.

Cities like Pomona, where Measure Y now sets aside funds for youth programs, could follow suit. Greening a campus isn’t about landscaping, it’s about equity, safety, and pride of place.

Because what these spaces reveal isn’t just bad design, it’s a hierarchy of who gets nature and who doesn’t.

The concrete classroom was built to last

And it did, too well. It taught generations of kids to adapt to heat, to fall on pavement, to accept that the world around them would always be hard.

Every patch of asphalt replaced with soil is a small act of correction. Every tree planted is proof that children deserve more than durability, they deserve beauty, shade, and care.

We’ve paved enough. The next generation should learn on ground that breathes back.

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Sources

Tina Fredericks, Pasadena Unified School Board
“Guest Opinion: Yes on Measure R + Measure EE; Yes to Greener, Cooler, Safe Schools and Competitive Salaries.” Pasadena Now, 2024.

Segregation By Design
Los Angeles: Sugar Hill

Green Schoolyards America
“Living School Grounds.”

“Our Mission.”
https://www.greenschoolyards.org/mission

UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation
“Action Area 3: Protecting Students from Heat Outdoors.” 2023.

CalMatters
“Outdoor Shade: California Schools Face Heat Risks.” 2024.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
“Using Cool Pavements to Reduce Heat Islands.” 2024.

The Guardian
“Asphalt Schoolyards Remade into Green Oases — in Pictures.” 2022.

Governing Magazine
“Reimagining Schoolyards to Improve Health and Learning.” 2024.

Environmental Health News
“Schools Across the U.S. Are Removing Asphalt to Reduce Heat Risks.” 2023.

Planetizen
“Green Schoolyards Gain Momentum Across Southern California.” 2025.

Arbor Day Foundation / The Guardian
“LA Schools Are Turning Blacktop into Green Spaces.” 2025.

Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

Photo Essay: No Kings in Claremont

The calm streets of Claremont filled with a different kind of energy this past Saturday. What began as a national call to reject authoritarianism found its own pulse here, among students, professors, longtime residents, and neighbors from surrounding cities.

Claremonters showed up not with anger but with wit, a peaceful rebellion rendered in cardboard, paint, ink, and marker. The air was calm, the day impossibly clear, but something electric moved through it, an intelligence, a rhythm. The signs were sharp, funny, precise. Each one landed like a line from a book you wish you had written.

There was laughter between the chants, not the laughter of mockery, but of recognition. You could feel people connecting through humor, through fatigue, through the strange joy of finally saying what everyone already knows.

Claremont, often referred to as “Squaremont” or “Clareville,” being defined by its manners and memory, showed another face that afternoon, unafraid to speak, to joke, to challenge the tone of power itself, finally. The photos tell that story, intellect meeting conscience on a sunny boulevard, a protest that sounded like thought made visible.

Take a stand, Claremont, you’ve earned a couple of protest stripes.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

Country Clubs Get Breaks, Families Sleep in Cars

In my last article, California’s Housing Crisis Isn’t Just Scarcity, I argued that California’s housing crisis is not simply about scarcity, and that scarcity did not appear by accident but was manufactured through decades of policy choices like Proposition 13, privatization, and racial exclusion. If we want to understand why housing is unaffordable today, we need to look closely at who those policies have advantaged.

Proposition 13, passed in 1978, was sold as a way to shield homeowners from rising property taxes. But more than four decades later, the biggest winners are not retirees like my mom trying to hold onto their homes. They are elite institutions like country clubs. The Los Angeles Country Club, sitting on land valued at more than $8 billion, continues to pay property taxes based on 1970s assessments (Los Angeles Times). While affordable housing funds dry up, California still subsidizes golf courses for the wealthy.

When Prop 13 passed, the city of Pomona had its own fire department, so fire costs remained the city’s responsibility through its general fund. Later, when Pomona contracted with LA County Fire, the bill still had to be paid directly from that general fund, the same budget that also covers parks, libraries, and housing. Wealthier cities that had county fire service before Prop 13 saw those costs absorbed into property tax revenues, while cities like Pomona, Commerce, and San Fernando were left paying out of already stretched city budgets. That’s how arbitrary the winners and losers of Prop 13 have always been (Los Angeles County Fire Department, Los Angeles Times, 1986).

Whenever inequities are raised, some people are immediately turned off. Others will say, “But Prop 13 helped me,” as if that ends the conversation. I get it, my mom benefited, and as a retiree with a fixed income she’s able to hold onto her home. But personal benefit doesn’t erase the bigger picture. The same protections that gave her stability also gave billion-dollar country clubs and corporations a windfall, while younger families and renters were left to pay the real costs. We can hold both truths at once: Prop 13 helped some, but it hardened the divide for everyone else.

It doesn’t end there. In 2020, voters passed Proposition 19, pitched as a fix to Prop 13. It closed one loophole on inherited vacation homes but left others wide open. Proposition 19 does allow a primary residence to be transferred from parent to child without reassessment, but only if the child makes it their primary residence and the market value stays under an assessed-base-plus-$1 million cap (adjusted for inflation). Transfers exceeding that cap, or where the child doesn’t move in, face reassessment.

Trusts shelter properties, freezing tax bills while Californians face rising costs that widen the wealth gap.

This is neoliberalism at its finest, a model embraced by both parties since the late 1970s, where public resources are drained to protect private wealth and market solutions are treated as the only answers. Prop 13 was never neutral; it redistributed wealth upward and starved local governments. Prop 19 did not change that dynamic.

The same logic extends to corporate ownership of housing. Since 2018, corporations and investors have been buying up a growing share of homes. By early 2022, investors accounted for 28% of all single-family home purchases nationwide (Washington University Law Review). In the first quarter of 2025, investors were behind nearly 27% of all home purchases, a five-year high (Associated Press).

California’s overall numbers are smaller — large institutional investors own less than 2% of the state’s single-family housing stock (CalMatters). But a small share doesn’t mean small impact. When investors control the margins of the market, outbidding families with cash offers and locking in Prop 13 protections, they tilt the system in their favor.

Conventional buyers have also been sidelined. With mortgage rates high and home prices out of reach, many families are forced to wait, reducing competition. That opened the door for smaller investors with cash on hand to move quickly, outbidding households and gaining the same advantage.

For decades, California has chosen privatization over public responsibility. We abandoned public housing, slashed affordable housing budgets, and outsourced solutions to private developers and politically connected nonprofits. Prop 13 locked in low taxes for those who already had property. Prop 19 tinkered at the edges while protecting inheritance loopholes. And now corporate landlords are consolidating ownership and squeezing families.

Some argue the solution is deregulation. But California proves otherwise. Deregulation without deeper reform only benefits those already in power: developers, country clubs, and corporations. It does not address who reaps the rewards and who is locked out.

If California is serious about equity, the next chapter must look different. That means reassessing Prop 13’s protections for country clubs. It means closing inheritance and trust loopholes left intact by Prop 19. It means limiting corporate ownership of single-family housing and bulk purchases that push families aside. And it means reinvesting revenue into public and social housing, so homes are treated as places to live, not commodities to flip.

We are becoming a sharecropper nation, families paying more each year just to stay housed, while ownership and wealth are locked away by outdated tax protections and corporate landlords.

California has land and wealth. What it lacks is the will to stop protecting country clubs and corporations at the expense of families. Until we confront that reality, scarcity will remain less a fact than a choice. The real choice is whether we finally invest in public and social housing, or continue to protect country clubs while families sleep in cars.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

A Conversation Between “What is the Role of the Academic During Genocide?” and “On the Need to Organize Against Professionalization and Co-Optation in the Academy"

UCLA pro-Palestinian Protest May 1, 2024
Photography ©Julian Lucas

Noor Harmoush

Since Israel escalated its military offensive against Gaza in October 2023, university students across the United States have grappled with their role amid this harrowing moment of genocide. The veil has been lifted, and we are painfully aware of the contradiction in our own position as university students. We pay to attend institutions that use our money to financially support the very systems of violence and oppression that we are fighting against. We devote hours to reading and writing about postcolonial theory and critical discourse, while our universities are materially invested in colonial projects and racist endorsements. And when we speak out about the moral and material inconsistencies we see in our faculty and administration, we are met with apathy–or worse, we are punished. 

Historically, university campuses have served as sites of resistance, embodying both material and ideological forms of protest. Practices such as encampments, boycotts, and hunger strikes are part of a long-standing tradition of academic insurgency, situated within a legacy of reclaiming institutional space to demand social and political accountability. Scholars like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky played pivotal roles in the intellectual resistance against hegemonic narratives. Their work challenged colonial epistemologies, interrogated the ways in which institutional powers dominate our cultural and political spheres, and deconstructed the media’s role in manufacturing public consent. It is through their radical scholarship that the Humanities evolved not as a neutral field, but as a site of contestation–a space where we rigorously question and reclaim. It is in this historic spirit of radical resistance that I anchor myself as an “academic” during this time of genocide. 

Yet, we are living in a moment of the devolution of the academic. 

While academics of the past reimagined the world order and fueled political movements through their scholarship, today, academics have become ambivalent, or even disconnected from their radical origins. Today, academics make vague statements of solidarity with justice and freedom, but these statements rarely come with any real sacrifice. Quite the contrary–the academic remains comfortably embedded in institutional systems that perpetuate cycles of violence and oppression. The academic may engage in “dialogue” about said system, but will lean into “nuance” and “complexity” to appear more palatable or intellectually rigorous. The academic sidesteps accountability for their harmful role within these systems. In fact, the academic often benefits from upholding the status quo of these systems–say, by a very coveted bullet point on their CV. 

What is the role of the academic during genocide if not to accurately identify it as such? What is the role of the academic during genocide if not to critique the distractions that obfuscate the reality of genocide? What is the purpose of research, publications, and conferences if we are merely regurgitating discourse, lacking any synthesis of our reality? 

Conferences like the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) are a perfect example of the tragedy of the pontificating academic. A proposed “special panel” for the 2025 conference, titled “A Duel Between Memories: Israel and Palestine,” highlights this problem. 

I wrote a letter to the panel’s presiding officers and the Executive Director of PAMLA (linked here) outlining my concerns about this panel. My main argument is that the panel’s description diverts attention from the genocide in Gaza, misconstrues the aggressive nature of the Israeli colonial project, and ultimately causes more harm to the Palestinian plight for liberation. At the time that I wrote the letter, Israel’s starvation campaign against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip was well underway. Since then, the situation has become even more inhumane and dystopian. I argue that the panel is not only ideologically dishonest but also incredibly inappropriate, insensitive, and irresponsible–that is, to encourage a sort of “dialogue” about “opposing memories” while Gaza’s extermination is being captured live, through videos, photographs, and testimonials. 

One must ask: What academic merit, or moral value, is there in discussing “opposing memories” or “both sides” when hundreds of Palestinians are being murdered by Israeli forces each day? As Mohammed El-Kurd puts it, how can there be room for debate in the presence of burning flesh?

Moreover, how can an organization like PAMLA, whose statement on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity outlines their commitment to “anti-racist and anti-prejudicial” scholarship, host a panel that normalizes Zionism through an exploration of “Israeli memory” in juxtaposition to “Palestinian memory”? It is absolutely absurd to champion a “postcolonial” slogan and its associated buzzwords while also platforming discourse that obstructs the reality of modern-day colonialism. Israel is a settler-colonial regime that is built on an ethno-national ideology of extermination and land theft, which, by any contemporary standards, is very racist and very prejudiced. 

How are we, academics, missing the mark this badly? The ideological framework of the Humanities has been corrupted, be it by neo-liberal agendas, a whitewashing of anticolonial theory, or covert (sometimes overt?) complicity in systems of racism and imperialism. PAMLA, like many other academic organizations across the country, is an example of how liberatory theory is strategically co-opted to advance the rhetoric–and often the agenda–of dominant and oppressive power structures. Academics have devolved into agents of the academic machine and its institutional powers. We’ve not only lost our moral compass, but we clearly lack an understanding of ideology and its connection to the material world. 

I requested that the panel be removed from the 2025 conference, or at the very least, be reframed to critique Zionist media and narratives from the perspectives of Israelis and Palestinians. 

After sending the letter and a petition with signatures of support from colleagues in the academic community, I received a response from the Executive Director, nearly three weeks after I had sent my initial letter:

“The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) has received your request to remove a panel from our PAMLA 2025 Conference schedule.

We have carefully reviewed your request and determined that, in consonance with our Code of Conduct, we will continue to host the panel at PAMLA 2025.” 

This lack of thoughtful engagement from PAMLA’s leadership and the panel officers reflects a bad-faith approach to academic integrity. I did not merely request the removal of the panel; my letter sought to highlight a serious mistake we are making as academics–using our positions and resources to promote “both sides” rhetoric at a time of historic and monumental failure to distinguish right from wrong and humanity from insanity. PAMLA arrogantly missed an opportunity to foster “ongoing introspection and continual striving” that they proudly spout in their Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity statement, illustrating, yet again, the ways in which social justice jargon is thrown around for the sake of theatre. 

Is this really all we can expect from the academic? A mere puppet, spouting empty rhetoric? The failure is a collective one. We’ve forfeited our credibility in the fight for liberation, made a mockery of our discipline and its predecessors, and, most importantly, we’ve let down those who are the most vulnerable among us.

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Pomona College pro-Palestinian Protest May 24, 2024
Photography ©Julian Lucas

Gilbert Aguirre

This PAMLA boycott is a model for other academics attempting to navigate institutions with the kind of false liberal morality that permits a panel titled “A Duel Between Memories: Israel and Palestine” during an ongoing genocide, alongside panels supporting Palestinian liberation, or in a more abstract vein, “post-colonial studies” generally. We can’t let academia start and stop at rhetoric, to be, in the words of Gayatri Spivak, just “willy-nilly an idea producing machine.” It is our responsibility as academics to course correct. This means uniting the moral and political intentions of our scholarship with the political work we do in the real world. Thus, from the institutions and organizations that platform our work as scholars, we must be uncompromising and demand that their ethos stay true to our own. If we were to present papers against normalization at the same conference actively normalizing genocidal rhetoric, we would have no legitimacy– there is no abstracting this fact, and we can not fall victim to trying to find excuses under another word: nuance.

The ability of academic institutions to co-opt movements and theories rooted in liberatory struggles can not be overlooked. If the question is, how do we combat the ability of academia to co-opt our work, the answer from us willing to resist co-optation becomes; we need to demand ideological consistency and material transparency from the organizations we use to advance our careers. 

We were proven wrong to assume that an organization tied closely to the liberal politics of the Humanities would stand against genocide. We found an inconsistency, pointed it out, and the façade unraveled. In response to thoughtful emails from members of the CSUSB cohort withdrawing their academic work from the conference, PAMLA’s director Craig Svonkin callously responded with some variation of “I’ve removed you from the program per your request” to us all. This response is qualified as callous because its bare reaction to our articulated disappointment with the PAMLA organization reveals little reflection or understanding of the collective effort and the weight of the decision we made to withdraw our work from the conference. Up to the writing of this document, PAMLA’s lead organizers have not met our good-faith critiques with any substantive response. Instead, we have received sanitized, PR speak emails that skirt around any stated position, other than continuing to stand by their Zionist panel. By skirting around a direct stance, their amoral stance was revealed. PAMLA is another toothless, ‘apolitical’ organization, whose lack of stance is a vehicle for co-optation and normalization.

We have heard that PAMLA, internally, gave greater consideration to our complaints than their emails let on– the rumor is that they will be raising the bar for entry on who is able to propose panels, because the student who proposed the panel is getting their undergraduate degree in philosophy– not a Master's student. If the rumor about raising the qualifications for panel proposals is true, we again see the academic machine finding their own rationale for deniability; The student proposing the panel is the problem, an MA student would moreso understand the audience and political context than an undergraduate. That, however, is bullshit. The student who proposed the panel, our pontificating academic Sebastian Prieto-Keith, is a symptom of the academy operating in a purely ideological world, where genocide is reduced to narrative, and liberatory theory is reduced to a lens of analysis. Raising the bar for submission in the future does not guarantee more academically rigorous panels, or even reduce the likelihood of pro- genocide discourse at PAMLA. Instead, it obfuscates PAMLA’s responsibility, making the Zionist panel the responsibility of the person who proposed it. This does not mean that the mass of pontificating academics who are comfortable arguing about the merits of genocide on stage are not worthy of shame and ridicule. Rather, our frustration cannot stop at these CV-hungry careerists; we must also address the institutions that create and reward these amoral opportunists by giving them panels and calling them scholars–a diluting move which, in turn, delegitimizes those of us who are doing political work in and outside of the academy. The reality is, PAMLA’s organizers accepted this panel, and are standing by its academic merit, on the basis of nuance, which we have discussed is how the pontificating academic can consider the representation of Israelis in Palestinian textbooks in the same room where bodies are being burned. 

PAMLA’s response to our good-faith concerns about their Zionist panel has taught us a lesson; from these organizations we depend on for aspects of our own professionalization, we must demand ideological consistency and accountability. To keep this statement from being empty, liberal sloganeering, we need to emphasize that from our class position–the mass of academics whose donations, participation, and scholarship these organizations completely depend on– if we boycott these organizations whose actions do not align with our values, we can make them fail. Instead of allowing their ideological inconsistencies to delegitimize our scholarship, we can use our scholarship to delegitimize the organizations that feign solidarity but ultimately stand for nothing.

We must fight against academia’s power to co-opt our political work and place it in a field so abstract it becomes toothless– a place so safe from action that work against genocide is placed beside excuses for genocide– a place for pontification; a conference hall. The canonized scholars who have been mentioned, Fanon, Said, Chomsky, Freire, Rodney (the list goes on) stood firmly against academic minutia– if we want to stand against the institutional machine, we must do the same. This means uniting as scholars against the institutions that depend on our labor, loyalty, and funding while speaking from both sides of their mouths. This is the legacy of academic boycotts: a refusal to legitimize institutions complicit in racist, genocidal, and nationalistic violence. Unfortunately, PAMLA is now on our list of unreputable organizations. We are sounding the alarm to dissuade other academics from legitimizing an organization that has revealed itself to be part of academia’s co-opting machine; a machine intent on delegitimizing the work of principled scholars, because the academy has material interests of its own–material interests that are kept safe when our work remains entirely ideological.

We are of the opinion that raising awareness about Israel’s genocide in Gaza has not been enough. As academics, we must bring action back into our field & stand against inaction and normalization. This is a call to all other academics unwilling to gain a CV bump from the institutions that perform solidarity while platforming genocidal rhetoric. All members of the CSUSB English cohort have withdrawn our accepted papers, and we urge other graduate students to stand with us in creating a united front as academics, conscious of our role during genocide, in pushing the institutions around us away from theatre and into action; instead of letting them push us from action into theatre.

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Noor Harmoush and Gilbert Aguirre are graduate students in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino. Harmoush focuses on Composition and Rhetoric, while Aguirre specializes in Literary Studies. Both ground their academic work in anti-colonial epistemologies, challenging dominant narratives and exploring knowledge systems shaped by resistance and liberation.

YIMBY Grassroots or Astroturf?

Who are the YIMBYs? How did they come to amass so much power? And do they have the right ‘fix’ for our enormous affordability housing problem?

Illustration Julian Lucas

Updated 10/02/25 2:06 pm PST

YIMBY *grassroots or astro-turf . . . or both ?

[*astro-turf - an organization that appears to be grassroots, but is in fact funded by multi-millionaires]

This past California legislative season California YIMBY had an inordinate influence on housing legislation. This is not just my opinion, but an opinion shared by major media outlets and YIMBYs themselves who are planning a big victory party at the end of October to celebrate their legislative wins. (Tickets start at $100, going up to $10,000 for sponsors.)

So . . . who or what are YIMBYs?  

YIMBY, the catchy acronym for “Yes, in my backyard!”, has recently notched some big legislative wins. Major outlets like Yahoo News, LAist, and the Los Angeles Times have all reported on the passage of SB 79, a bill that overrides local zoning to promote dense housing near transit hubs. CalMatters called it a landmark shift, while Yahoo framed it as YIMBYs achieving their “holy grail.” The movement itself even celebrated with a victory party.

And so, YIMBYs have self-defined as the ‘good guys’ in a binary fight between good v. evil. The fight is much more nuanced than that, but YIMBYs have gained traction by keeping the conversation about housing simple. Their solution is simply to build more - market rate or affordable housing - it doesn’t really matter.  They figure that if we simply build more, housing will eventually ‘trickle down’ to become more affordable for more people. And the secret to building more? Upzone, that is, override local zoning ordinances. Eliminate local processes at the city level. Bypass community involvement in favor of state-run bureaucracy. Remove environmental review. 

Early on, YIMBYs gained traction with high tech executives and the real estate developers who donated large amounts of money to get the YIMBY movement up and running. According to a 2018 article in Dollars and Sense, “California YIMBY, the first political YIMBY group, was founded with the funding of Bay Area tech executives and companies. Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook, Asana) and his wife Cari Tuna donated $500,000 via their Open Philanthropy foundation; Nat Friedman (Xamarin, GitHub) and Zack Rosen (Pantheon Systems) donated another $500,000. Another $1 million donation came from the online payments company Stripe.” See More

Early on, high tech executives recognized that lack of housing was preventing them from recruiting and retaining the labor force they needed. They also recognized that jumping on board demanding housing deflected attention from their complicity in the housing crisis in the first place. Their high tech workers were rapidly displacing longtime residents, lower income residents and people of color, and the optics were not good. High tech could have invested in workforce housing, but it was cheaper to donate to activist groups like YIMBY. 

And it is not hard to imagine why real estate developers have also donated large sums of money. Deregulation smooths the way for them to build more and grow their profits. 

Deregulation used to be the purview of the conservative right, but the neo-liberals and the libertarians have come to embrace the ideology. They call themselves supply-side progressives - and believe that simply by increasing the amount of essential goods and services - in this case, housing - will automatically achieve progressive outcomes. 

The YIMBYs recently received a big, national boost for their philosophy when New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein and Altantic writer Derek Thompson just released their book this spring, titled, Abundance. The abundance ideology is based upon the precepts of ‘build, baby, build,’ and deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, and that with abundance, affordability will follow. 

The logic of both the Abundance movement and the YIMBYs goes something like this: what’s great for landlords, developers, and the financial institutions has to be great for the rest of us too — at least, that is the YIMBYs’ story, and they are sticking to it.

The beauty (and terror) of supply side progressivism is that it poses a solution to a big complex and difficult problem without disrupting capitalism - in fact, it advantages the venture capitalist who operates in high tech and real estate. And this is exactly how the YIMBYs have managed to amass so much power. They have secured large amounts of money (and organization skills) from their wealthy benefactors.. A simple google search of YIMBY donors yields a plethora of names of CEOs and other high-ranking executives. 

Many - myself included - have been inclined, to think of YIMBY as a grassroots movement, but in fact, YIMBY is actually a shell-game of many richly endowed nonprofit organizations, a syndicate as it were, who lobbies - and lobbies hard - on housing laws aimed at streamlining the development process.

For a start, in California,  the YIMBYs are Yes in My Backyard, California YIMBY, California YIMBY Action, California YIMBY Victory Fund, YIMBY Law, YIMBY Education Fund.

Yes in My Backyard trains people to advocate for more housing in their neighborhoods. Tax-exempt revenue reported for Yes In My Back Yard for 2023, was $2.14M.

Yes In My Backyard is linked to YIMBY Law which reviews public records to identify cities that may be violating housing laws. They inform cities of possible violations and file litigation to ensure cities follow the law and housing is built.

In 2021, YIMBY Law filed its first lawsuit against Simi Valley. Since then, they have filed additional lawsuits in places like Cupertino, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sausalito, Redondo Beach, Burbank, Burlingame, Culver City, Fairfax, Lafayette, Millbrae, Newport Beach, Santa Monica. YIMBY detractors and supporters alike have called their strategy “sue the suburbs.” YIMBYs have even filed a lawsuit against California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). Launching lawsuits costs money. 

Yes In My Back Yard also partners with YIMBY Action to create and disseminate resources. YIMBY Action reported revenue for 2023 of $1,592,988 with assets of $1,022,696.

ProPublica: YIMBY Action financials

Then there’s California YIMBY which works with housing policy experts, elected officials, and grassroots organizations across California to craft and pass legislation at the state and local level that will accelerate home building and upzoning.

California YIMBY, tax-exempt, reported $4.49 million in revenue for 2023. Its total assets for that year were $6.89 million.

California YIMBY’s top people make a very good salary. In 2023, President and CEO Brian Hanlon made $335,815; Senior VP Melissa Breach, $224,939; Directors Matthew M. Lewis, $152,330; Robyn Leslie, $138,762; Konstantin A. Hatcher, $137,190; and Edward S. Resnikoff, Robert Cruickshank, Matthew N. Gray, made between $123,091 and $109,973. All actually earned additional income from the nonprofit, amounting to between $17,667 and $6,803 in 2023.

California Yimby is linked to the California YIMBY Victory Fund, a state Political Action Committee (PAC) that supports candidates for elected offices in California. The California YIMBY Victory Fund spends a great deal of money contributing to candidate campaigns - a strategy that appears to be working for them.

California YIMBY Education Fund features reports, maps, ongoing projects, and an extensive research catalog. In 2023, the California YIMBY Education Fund reported over $8 million worth of assets.

There are also any number of local splinter groups. The YIMBY Action website lists 19 in California and many, many more across the US. See here

Not all of the YIMBY organizations have YIMBY in their name. For instance, Streets For All is a fiscally-sponsored project of the California YIMBY Education Fund. And California YIMBY’s President and CEO Brian Hanlon co-founded the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund (CaRLA) in 2015. Abundant Housing LA works in conjunction with the Abundant Housing LA Education Fund to represent the YIMBY movement in Los Angeles.

Taken together, YIMBY nonprofit lobbying organizations in California post assets of likely more than 20 million dollars.

There can be no better indication that YIMBY’s sphere of influence is rising than the fact that a Congressional Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) Caucus, a bipartisan US congressional caucus, was founded in November 2024.

Currently, State Senator Scott Wiener (SF), YIMBY’s champion in the state senate, is making his own bid to move up to the national level. He recently opened a campaign committee to run for San Francisco’s congressional seat currently held by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Wiener is perhaps the singular California elected official who is most closely aligned with the YIMBY effort to build more housing and upzone through deregulation, streamlining, and loss of local control.

YIMBYs and this California legislative season
This year and in the last few years, the YIMBYs have lobbied for a large number of bills in California, and this year, their crowning achievement, among other achievements, was the passage of two anti-environmental bills (AB 130 and SB 131) in June, and the probable passage of a Transit-Oriented Development bill (SB 79) that is sitting on Governor Newsom’s desk, right now, awaiting his signing by October 12. All three bills were authored and sponsored by YIMBY-endorsed State Senator Scott Wiener (SF).

The Transit-Oriented Development bill (SB 79) comes as the third part of a one-two-three punch. Governor Newsom essentially paved the way for the passage of SB 79 when he strong-armed our state legislators in June of this bill to pass two anti-CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) bills by tying them to the approval of our state budget. These bills waived the need for environmental reviews on infill housing projects in our cities. Governor Newsom lauded the passage of these anti-environmental bills, saying it "the most consequential housing reform that we’ve seen in modern history in the state of California.”Scott Wiener on “the most consequential housing reform” – LA Times
Environmental groups outraged by Newsom CEQA overhaul – LA Times

Which brings us to California Senate Bill 79: Housing development: transit-oriented development also known as the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act.

SB79 will upzone and override local zoning to allow for the construction of greater height (5, 6, 7, 8, 9-stories) and density (up to 38,000 units in a 1/2 mile radius) near train stops and Metro light rail stations in 8 out of 58 of California’s counties - including Los Angeles.

Mapping the potential impact of SB79

The Potential (Negative) Impacts of SB 79: Transit Oriented Development
While locating housing developments near transit stops encourages people to get out of their cars and encouraging development away from our fire hazard severity zones is necessary, SB 79 brings with it plenty of negatives. 

Primarily, there is the issue of affordability. Basically, only about 10% of the transit-oriented housing will be affordable, the remainder will be offered at market rate.

In addition, if Governor Newsom signs this bill in the next couple of weeks, local residents will no longer have the ability to weigh-in on such matters as setbacks and parking, open space, trees and environmental review, facades, architectural design, traffic and safety for new development for these new developments within a half mile of a train stop. The approvals for development will now come from a centralized intelligence - our state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). SB79 is basically undemocratic. With SB79, local communities lose their ability to make their city anything but cookie-cutter. As it turns out there is a whole lot more to planning and re-planning a neighborhood than simply drawing a circle on a map.

In a quarter to a half mile radius from a city’s train stop, apartment houses and multi-family housing will receive some protection from demolition - at least until 2030, when the state’s rental stabilization law sunsets - but there will be no protections for single family housing, housing with an ADU, two-on-a-lot, or duplexes.

Historical buildings and neighborhoods will not be adequately protected from demolition. Only 10% of historical buildings on the local registry will be protected. And protecting one building while surrounding it by 5, 6, 7, 8, 9-story buildings is really no protection at all. Housing advocates, including YIMBYs, are often dismissive of the need to preserve historic districts. “Our cities are not museums,” one State Senator said. But the truth is that conserving our historic districts is neither ineffective or irrelevant. As it turns out, our historic districts are not the enemies of diversity, density and affordability, rather, they are often the places that are already meeting these important and legitimate public goals.

 In addition, the waiving of environmental reviews should be deeply concerning to all of us. In the so-called olden days, railway stops were the places for light and heavy industry where workers poured contaminants in the soil, and in some places, these have leached into our water systems. It’s hard to believe that our state government feels that the imperative to build outweighs our need for basic testing and clean-up.

My story, my hometown, my legislators
I only found out about SB 79 and the many ways it could negatively impact my hometown of Claremont, some 35 miles away from Los Angeles in early July - and I definitely came late to the ‘party.’

Unbeknownst to me, all four of the regional elected officials (two of them recently elected) that I spoke with before the vote in early September, had accepted campaign finance money from the California YIMBY Victory Fund.

Claremont City Councilman, Jed Leano received $5,500 for his unsuccessful bid for the Assembly, and Assemblymembers John Harabedian (Altadena to Pasadena to Upland) and Mike Fong (Alhambra to Temple City to Monterey Park) accepted $1,500 and $1,000 respectively. Newly-elected Senator Sasha Renée Pérez (Alhambra to Rancho Cucamonga) accepted $2,500.

Before the California Democratic Club’s Executive Board endorsed SB 79 in mid-August, they accepted $3,500 from the California YIMBY Victory Fund.

California campaign contributions – 2023
California campaign contributions – 2025

Two of my elected representatives, Councilman Leano and State Senator Pérez, endorsed SB 79 on the floor of the state legislatures. Council member Leano spoke before two Assembly Committees in July as Senator Scott Wiener’s ‘right hand’ man; and Senator Pérez endorsed SB 79 on the Senate floor in September right before the State Senate voted in support.

There is an old joke that our elected officials, like Nascar racers, should wear the patches of their sponsors on their coats. If only my representatives had been wearing their YIMBY patches when I met with them, our conversations would have been so much clearer.

On the local scene, on August 18, 2025, Claremont City Councilman Leano wrote an opinion piece for Pasadena Now, promoting SB 79, titled “The Real Reason California Housing Costs Are Outrageous: A Claremont city councilman explains how wealthy residents control housing decisions.” His talking points are basically YIMBY talking points - California YIMBY posted his op-ed on their website and circulated it on their Instagram account.

In it, he blamed the housing shortage on “older, male, longtime-resident homeowners” who he said “dominate” the town meetings in places like Claremont. Interestingly enough, Leano chose not to post his op-ed in his own local newspaper, but in Pasadena, some thirty miles away.

Undeniably, Councilman Leano is right. Whites, historically, are the reason for our segregated California neighborhoods. It happened over the centuries that red-lining, real estate covenants, sundowner towns, the California Native American genocide, Mexican repatriation of 1929 -39, and Japanese Internment of WWII, among other actions, effectively carved out ‘white’ neighborhoods in California.

However, there are definite questions about what is the correct ‘fix’ to systematic injustice. Here, Councilman Leano, by vilifying the very people who participate in his town’s government, is dismissive of the efforts of legions of people who have worked very hard serving on local commissions and committees, building local businesses, maintaining non-profits, in order to create a highly livable, walkable city with trees and parks where people want to live.

Claremont is not really the best example of NIMBYism - though, of course, it certainly exists.. In 2021, Claremont approved its own 25 acre transit-oriented development project (with height, density, historical preservation and open space) after an intense public process. Unfortunately, it has stalled out -for now - not due to local resistance or regulations, but due to problems with property owners and financing. 

While Leano leans heavily on the stereotype of the white boomer NIMBY as the villain of the housing affordability crisis, in truth, there are many factors that interfere with housing construction, including rising material and construction costs, financing problems, private ownership, labor shortages, high interest rates, insufficient public funding for affordable housing, institutional investors buying up large amounts of housing, the failure to develop state-sanctioned development plans with nearby existing airports, along with all the infrastructure, planning, and costs that accompany rapid growth. In the meantime, Claremont is not quite the all-white city that Leano describes. According to the 2020 census, Claremont is now a minority-majority city, with less than half - 47% - self-describing as white.

Claremont, California – Wikipedia
Map of Los Angeles Metro Area (Claremont marked)

Elsewhere, in Councilman Leano’s op-ed, he declares that, “new homes are nearly impossible to build” - a statement that is both hyperbolic and inaccurate. Claremont sits on the edge of the Inland Empire that is experiencing a building boom - with 4-story or higher apartment houses going up all over the region.

According to the Inland Empire Multi-family Market Report, August 2025:

“Supply growth was on track to reach a new peak, with 2,864 units delivered during the first half of the year, while the pipeline remained robust with 9,549 units underway.”

And Cal State San Bernardino’s Housing & Transportation Report – CSUSB:

“Over the past 30 years, Southern California’s Inland Empire (IE), encompassing Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, has experienced rapid growth and economic change. As of December 2023, the region’s population reached approximately 4.7 million residents, making it the thirteenth most populous metropolitan area in the United States and the third largest in California (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). The region has tripled in population and positioned itself as one of the nation’s fastest-growing areas . . . In 2022, the Inland Empire was identified as the fifth fastest-growing region in Southern California.”

Even in Councilman Leano’s own jurisdiction of Claremont, there are a multitude of development projects underway. Listed on the Claremont City website are: Old School House Development (OSH); La Puerta Development; Clara Oaks Development; Village South Specific Plan (VSSP); Residence Inn by Marriott (formerly Knights Inn); City Ventures Indian Hill Project; TCCS Student Services Building; Olson Housing Project - Descanso Walk; 365 West San Jose Condominium Project; and Larkin Place Permanent Supportive Housing Project.

Just on the other side of the Councilman Leano’s city borders - in Upland, Montclair, Pomona, LaVerne - multi-family apartment housing projects are springing up with astonishing speed. Driving on the 210 from Claremont to Fontana, there are giant swaths of new homes, roof to roof.

So . . . maybe the conversations that we need to have is what California could do to create the housing that people can actually afford. 

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Pamela Nagler Pamela Nagler is finishing her book, Unceded Land, Indigenous California and the Foreign Invasions: Spanish, Mexican, Russian, US  1769-1869.

Pomona Considers Flipping the Script on Fire Protection — But At What Cost?

Pomona’s leaders are in talks to do something almost unheard of. They’re discussing handing the city’s fire and emergency services to a smaller suburb. The council calls this a financial decision. For residents, it isn’t abstract. It’s about whether shaving costs matters more than saving lives.

City leaders are now brainstorming either outsourcing services or creating a new joint fire district with La Verne, a smaller suburb one-fifth Pomona’s size, but either path raises the same concerns about costs, accountability, and capacity.

Across the country, the pattern is clear. Large departments absorb smaller ones, or cities pool resources through county fire authorities. Boise covers Garden City. Kansas City covers nearby villages. Bellevue covers Clyde Hill. The current runs one way. Rarely does a city of nearly 150,000 people outsource its most critical service to a neighbor of 30,000. That mismatch alone should give Pomona pause.

Pomona is a working class city. Here, fire and EMS calls aren’t just about putting out fire — though Pomona has a track record of unwanted buildings being burned down. They’re also about chest pains, overdoses, unhoused encampments catching fire, car crashes on Towne and Holt, and the everyday emergencies of families priced out of healthcare. For many residents, firefighters and paramedics are the first responders in every sense of the word.

La Verne doesn’t live that reality. Its fire department has never been responsible for a city Pomona’s size or scale. To imagine it suddenly covering Pomona is to flip the natural order of public safety upside down. It isn’t about whether La Verne has good firefighters, it’s about whether the entire system was ever built for the demands Pomona puts on its first responders every day.

This debate doesn’t exist in isolation. Just two years ago, Pomona’s City Council pushed Measure PG, a tax increase sold as the way to protect essential services. Yard signs sprouted across the city, some with councilmembers’ names. The pitch was clear enough: pay a little more in sales tax and your police and fire services would stay strong.

Councilmember Debra Martin even called Measure Y the “elephant in the room.” It’s a familiar move, most of the council opposed it when voters approved it, and now they’re looking for ways to scapegoat youth funding for the city’s financial troubles. But Measure Y didn’t create this crisis. Decades of quick fixes and mismanagement did.

Voters did their part. They trusted those promises. Now, some of the same leaders are contemplating outsourcing fire protection to a smaller, wealthier suburb which is simply unheard of. It’s understandable Los Angeles County Fire has increased their services, due to inflation, but this would mean the leaders and staff have to be creative in how to continue services with LA County Fire. Isn’t lives more important than money?

Council members talk about savings, but the numbers don’t add up. Here are the unanswered questions Pomona residents deserve clear answers to:

• Will La Verne use the existing Fire Departments in the city?
  

• Will La Verne need to hire? Pomona generates far more calls. La Verne will need to expand its workforce, buy new trucks, and grow its command staff. Will Pomona have to bankroll this contract and expansion?
  

• What about equipment? Fire engines cost about $150,000. Over 1 million for ladder trucks etc. Ambulances, radios, protective gear, medical kits, all of it adds up. Will Pomona inherit some county gear, replacement costs will fall on Pomona’s side of the ledger?
  

• What about pensions? This is the hidden bill. Will Pomona still owe its share of LA County Fire’s unfunded pension liabilities, even while paying into La Verne’s pension system? Does that mean double obligations: paying for the old system while building the new one.
  

And now residents are being told the joint Pomona and La Verne plan could require a parcel tax, an added property tax on top of everything else. That flips the story completely. Instead of saving money, Pomona homeowners may be asked to pay more to bankroll a smaller suburb’s fire expansion. A tax increase wasn’t part of the sales pitch, but it’s quickly becoming the fine print.

Then there was Mr. Sandoval. Once again, he used his seat on the dais to rebut residents during public comment. When one speaker suggested the proposal was political, he dismissed it as “nonsense.” He went further, telling another speaker they were “out of line.

Would this be considered a Brown Act violation? Under California’s Brown Act, officials may thank speakers, make brief professional clarification, or ask staff to follow up. City leaders are not supposed to single anyone out or scold residents from the dais. Public comment exists so people can address their leaders without being shut down in real time. Using the microphone to correct or chastise speakers may not only cross a legal line, it undermines the spirit of open government.

Pomona has driven down this road before. It appears that Pomona has always chased the quick fixes, patching holes, and kicking costs into the future, and the result has always been the same, long term debt and broken promises.

The choice before the city isn’t just about contracts, pensions, or budgets. It’s about whose lives are worth protecting, and whose voices count when decisions are made. Working-class families, renters, immigrant, the people who dial 911 most often are the ones who stand to lose the most if this gamble goes wrong.6

Fire protection isn’t just a line item on an agenda. Fire protection is a covenant between a city and the people who live in it. And no city should ever force its residents to choose between saving money and saving lives.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

UPDATE: Is Senate Bill 79 good for Claremont?

In the next three days our State Assembly and State Senate will vote on SB 79, a Housing development bill.

SB 79 was recently amended, and what this now means for Claremont is that if SB 79 passes, the bill would upzone these areas from our train station in downtown Claremont to the following heights and densities:

• Within 1/4 mile – 65 feet (6 stories), 100 units per acre, Floor Area Ratio of 3.0 which means the total built-up area of the building can be up to 3 times the size of the land plot.

• Within 1/2 mile – 55 feet, (5 stories), 80 units per acre, Floor Area Ratio of 2.5 which means the total built-up area of the building can be up to 2.5 times the size of the land plot.

In addition, SB 79 allows for buildings immediately adjacent to our train station to be 8 stories high, with commensurate increase in density.

The proposed Village South development, just south of the train tracks on the west side of Indian Hill to Arrow Highway is 24 acres. Excluding streets, this could mean that the state would allow something like 1500 to 2,000 units at Village South. SB 79 disallows the City of Claremont from modifying that amount of units, providing green space or anything else. The density will be determined by the state, with no local input.

Under SB 79, only 10% of our historic buildings and neighborhoods with that half mile radius can be protected - the rest can be sacrificed.

Yes! to height and density by our train stations. But tell your state senator and assembly member we want to build a better bill.

We can build housing AND preserve historic communities, too.

Senator Sasha Renée Pérez Phone: (916) 651-4025

Assembly member John Harabedian Phone: (626) 351-1917

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Pamela Casey Nagler is currently finishing her book, A Century of Disgrace: The Removal, Enslavement, and Massacre of California’s Indigenous People 1769 - 1869.

California’s State Bill 79 and What it Means for Claremont

The Bill That Wants to Turn Claremont Into Anywhere, USA

Illustration Julian Lucas ©2025

Powering through our State Legislatures is a big, highly-contentious housing bill, authored by San Francisco’s Senator Scott Wiener. If passed, it could have big ramifications for Claremont.

What is California State Bill 79?
SB 79: Housing Development: Transit-oriented Development is a bill that would “up zone” or override our cities’ local ordinances in order to fast-track development one-half mile from our transit center(s). If passed, it would bring more height and density to our cities accompanied by less control over design standards like setbacks, facades, landscaping, trees, roads, parking and open space. Read full bill text here

The bill has not yet been signed into law, but it has already crossed over from our State Senate to our State Assembly, and will be subjected to a floor vote sometime before September 12th. If passed in both the Senate and Assembly, the Governor will either sign it into law or veto it.

SB 79 is being amended as we speak, so there is still time to voice concerns - but the clock is ticking. Assembly Committee meetings are being conducted throughout August.


What would SB 79 mean for Claremont?
This bill could make quite an impact on Claremont’s downtown. If passed, it dictates that within a quarter mile of our train or metro station, a developer could build 5-story buildings, and within a half-mile, 4-story buildings. In addition, Claremont could be subjected to an “adjacency intensifier” which would mean that developments directly adjacent to the transit stop could be 7-stories. SB79 also allows Transit agencies to develop their own properties. In Claremont, that would mean that Metrolink could develop its parking lot on First Street.

This is an approximation of the area in Claremont that would be affected by the passage of SB 79. Within this half-mile radius, the state would allow a developer to put up 4, 5, 7 story buildings with no public input. 

Arguments in favor of SB 79:

California needs more housing and more affordable housing. And it is good for the environment to locate this housing by our transit centers where people have access to public transportation.

Arguments against SB 79:

1. SB79 does not provide preservation for historic buildings which is part of downtown Claremont’s economic model.

SB 79 does not protect historic buildings and neighborhoods from the bulldozer. In Claremont - north to Eighth Street; west to the Claremont Colleges’ wash; south to below Peppertree Square; and east to Rosa Torrez Park - a developer could raze any single-family or multi-family dwelling within a half-mile radius from the transit stop to put up 4 or 5 story buildings. Though Senator Wiener recently amended SB 79 to provide protections for multi-family dwellings, this amendment only applies to cities with rental stabilization laws - and Claremont has none.

Claremont’s downtown economy was built on more than a century’s worth of town-and-gown planning. Historically, Claremont has sustained itself by attracting students to its colleges from all over the world - and by attracting day-tourists who come for our Farmer’s Market, restaurants, shops, art museums, movie theater, college events.

Claremont’s historical society, Claremont Heritage, states that 75% of the people who come to downtown Claremont on the weekend come from someplace else. If we do not continue to develop our downtown with some kind of historical preservation in mind, then we are likely to mess with the formulas that have made Claremont’s downtown successful and sustainable. Losing local control means losing control over our economic model.

Many neighborhoods who oppose SB 79 are neighborhoods of the historically-disenfranchised - like Leimert Park, South Central, Larchmont and Boyle Heights. Los Angeles City Council member Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, where almost the entirety of the neighborhood would be subject to ‘upzoning,’ stated her opposition to SB 79, by saying, “I'm not willing to gamble losing Boyle Heights.” The state legislator who represents South Central maintains that SB 79 would result in gentrification. She says that it would price longtime residents out, forcing them to relocate in more affordable regions inland. Read LAist coverage here | More from CalMatters

2. SB 79 does not have enough environmental protections for developing on land that was previously designated for light industry.

SB 79 poses big environmental concerns. This bill comes right on the heels of recent state decisions to weaken environmental standards for new development. In June of this year, Governor Newsom signed two bills that weaken environmental review standards in order to speed up the construction of housing in California. As a result, urban ‘infill” housing developments — housing built in and around existing development — are no longer subject to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Read LA Times coverage | CalMatters analysis

When Newsom signed the two anti-environmental law bills into law, he called it the “most consequential housing reform that we’ve seen in modern history in the state of California.” And SB79’s author, San Francisco’s Senator Scott Wiener lauded the action saying that passing these bills was “the most consequential housing reform we’ve seen in modern history”
Read here

As a result of relaxing environmental standards, there is legitimate concern that there will not be adequate environmental review for soil and water chemical contamination. Historically, the areas near railways have been the location for machine and used car shops, body repair shops, light and heavy industry - and ‘back in the day,’ it was not uncommon for businesses to dump toxic chemicals directly into the soil. In some cases, these contaminants have leached into our water systems. With weakened environmental standards, many fear that SB79 will allow developers to bypass toxic clean-up, putting public health at risk - not just for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children.

3. SB 79 shuts down the public process in favor of developers’ interests.

SB 79 is undemocratic. If passed, the community will lose their ability to voice their concerns on traffic and safety issues, parking issues, ingress and egress for evacuation purposes, environmental impacts, the effect on existing infrastructure - or anything else. All of the power goes to the developer in their pursuit of a profit margin. With SB 79, community needs are sacrificed to developers’ interests.

The League of California Cities has reiterated a common refrain among the more-than-150 cities that oppose the Bill, and that refrain is that the state is mandating development without regard to the community’s needs, environmental review, or public input. On Tuesday, August 19, the City of Los Angeles voted to oppose SB 79. On August 20, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed on saying she also opposed SB 79 “unless it is amended to exempt cities with a state-approved and compliant Housing Element.”

Understanding the full scope of SB 79 is difficult because there have been countless rewrites and multiple amendments. The League of California Cities recently published a breakdown, warning that the bill is rapidly changing and challenging for cities to keep up with.

One big problem with the bill is that, seemingly, the state legislators are for it, while the cities are largely against it. Los Angeles’ City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, in her letter opposing SB 79, states that “the bill’s provisions impermissibly impose billions of dollars of costs on Los Angeles and other local jurisdictions, undermine local governance, circumvent local decision-making processes, and impose unintended burdens on communities.” She argues that it would cost the city billions to upgrade infrastructure such as sewage and electrical systems to handle an influx of residents. Mayor Karen Bass has also gone on record with concerns, noting in a recent statement that she opposes SB 79 unless amended.

Alhambra’s Mayor, Katherine Lee, in her letter opposing SB 79, adds that even if a city qualifies for one of the bill’s so-called exceptions, it is still required to meet the same requirements for density, whether or not these “make sense for the community.” She questions whether California will ever be able to meet its housing needs through SB 79’s state-driven, top-down, one-size-fits-all approval process, and suggests that what is needed instead is “a sustainable state investment that matches the scale of this decades-in-the-making process.”

Though Claremont City Council member and Senior Policy Advisor of Inner City Law Center, Jed Leano, has spoken twice at Assembly Council meetings in support of SB 79 — as one of only two speakers backing up the bill’s author — the City of Claremont itself has yet to weigh in officially.

Senator Wiener’s team has gone so far as to promise “Paris-style density” for California by eliminating local ordinances — a deeply ironic framing, since Paris is one of the most heavily planned cities in the world. More likely, the Senator is evoking the postcard-friendly tourist districts rather than the congested suburbs struggling with many of the same challenges Southern California faces. LAist recently explored this framing.

If you have your own concerns about SB 79, you can call or write Assemblymember John Harabedian at (626) 351-1917. or a41.asmdc.org/contact. 

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Pamela Casey Nagler is currently finishing her book, A Century of Disgrace: The Removal, Enslavement, and Massacre of California’s Indigenous People 1769 - 1869.

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SOURCES

• LegiScan: Full bill text of SB 79

• LAist: Los Angeles City Council votes to oppose SB 79

• CalMatters Digital Democracy: Bill tracker: SB 79

• Los Angeles Times: Newsom pushes major housing reform through Legislature (June 30, 2025)

• CalMatters: Analysis: CEQA changes and urban infill housing (June 2025)

• Los Angeles Times: Scott Wiener on 'the most consequential housing reform' (July 2, 2025)

Pomona Saves the Sign, but Kills the Soul

Illustration Julian Lucas ©2025

Googie architecture thrived in the Atomic Age, when America’s imagination was fueled by the space race, roadside culture, and the Jetsons’ gleaming optimism. Rooflines tilted like rocket fins, signs shouted in neon, and every design choice insisted the future wasn’t something to fear but something to be built, loudly, unapologetically, and in public view. To erase that is to chip away at a time when boldness was the default, not a risk.

But new age politicians aren’t interested in bold, they’re interested in streamlining culture until it’s flat enough to fit inside a marketing brochure. They sand down the edges, cut the neon, and sell the past back to you as a caricature of itself. To ignore Googie is to say history never mattered here, and maybe never will.

Pomona has a talent for missing the point. On July 21, the City Council proved it again, voting to preserve the old milk bottle sign on Indian Hill while ignoring the building it belongs to. The Historic Preservation Commission, which exists precisely to weigh in on such matters, had already said the building was historic. The Council didn’t listen. They listened to staff instead.

The result is a familiar scene in Pomona politics, history is flattened into set dressing for a city that can’t tell a story. History preserved only as kitsch. The sign gets to stay, floating in the air like a detached mascot, while the building, a rare piece of mid-century Googie architecture, is left to the mercy of demolition or gut-job redevelopment. It’s a decision rooted not in vision but in small-bore bureaucracy, the kind that confuses preservation with tokenism.

And what’s going up instead? Supposedly, a three-story housing block, cheek to jowl with a strip mall that’s already a hodgepodge of half-dead businesses, including, naturally, a liquor store. Because nothing says urban planning like stacking new apartments beside an outdated strip mall with a discount smoke shop and a nail salon, a barber because we don’t have enough barbers in the city.

The Council will say, they don’t want to override their commission and they care about economic development. They’ll say they’re making room for the future. But anyone with an imagination could see the future sitting right there, in that building, with its drive-thru bones and road-trip nostalgia. The problem isn’t that Pomona can’t innovate, it’s that its leadership can’t imagine innovation outside of the cookie-cutter apartments with “luxury” in the marketing brochure although “affordable” is usually the buzzword that comes before luxury.

Cities with ambition know how to work with their history. They repurpose. They reimagine. They keep the soul of a place alive even as they refresh its face. In Pomona, we get the opposite, leaders who treat their own historic commission like an advisory speed bump.

The milk bottle will stay, smiling down from its lonely perch. The building will likely vanish. And once again, Pomona will trade the possibility of a landmark for the safety of a signpost.

The tragedy isn’t that they can’t see the value. It’s that they never even tried. And that, more than anything, is why this city has gotten to be so corny.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

Trumps Politics of Erecting Power

On flags, thrones, and the cult that mistakes domination for salvation.

Updated 08/06/2025 2:04PM PST

Illustration Julian Lucas ©2025

Eight months after the election and I saw someone was still wearing that hat. Not the classic red this time, but white, pristine, like it had just been unboxed. The stitching was crisp. No sun-bleach, no sweat stains. It hadn’t been worn into belief, it had been purchased like one buys a fresh Bible. Most likely made in China, but that’s never mattered. He wasn’t alone either, he was with a group. The kind that looks like they think patriotism is a big raised truck with a big American Flag flying out the back of it. You know the folks that don’t believe in growing their own food, but have allegiance to industrialized farming, and shop at big box grocery stores, unconsciously. When they left, he swapped the hat for something louder. An all-over-print tank top that made the American flag look like a tactical vest. Stars on his pecs, stripes stretching across his gut. He didn’t just wear the flag. He deployed it.

I didn’t say anything to him. I didn't need to. The outfit wasn’t meant for conversation, it was a broadcast. A wearable sermon to the faithful. Because that’s what this is now. It’s not politics. It’s postering and it lacks substance. The flag isn’t a symbol, it’s a uniform. The hat isn’t about making anything great, it’s their off the rack veil, a flyer from a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, whether they’ve made the trip or not. Mr. Trump isn’t a candidate anymore. He’s a belief system. A messiah that possibly has a lifetime subscription in spray tan oil. And the people who follow him? They’re not undecided. They’re converted to the religion of Trumpanity, where faith is less about reading the Bible, or reading in general, forgiveness, and attending church, but more about followers.

They say they’re Christian. But do they question a man who campaigns not on faith, but vengeance? Who promises retribution over redemption? When was the last time they fact checked their faith? When was the last time they read a Bible? Trump could vow to outlaw Mondays or baptize his tax returns in soda, and still they’d cheer. Why? Because belief doesn’t require logic, just faith and loyalty. And somehow, Mr. Trump has turned that loyalty into something else entirely, an identity. 

Erica Groshen gave the country good news, jobs increased. So Trump canned her. Not because the numbers were wrong, but because they weren’t flattering to Mr. Trumps liking. In this regime, the truth is punished. And the statisticians? They’re just the next political prisoners, sentenced for honesty.

Is it still politics when you live by a man’s tweets? When you recite his slogans more than scripture? Are they voting for a president, or submitting to a prophet? Because this no longer feels like civic duty. It feels like devotion. To a man who insists only he can save you from the world he helped set on fire. And maybe, in the end, it’s not even about saving. Maybe it’s just about who he hates. And whether that hate feels familiar.

Mr. Trump doesn’t just ask for their vote. He demands their obedience. They do so, willingly. Not because he offers them answers, but because he names their enemies. Because he hates out loud. And in a country that still hasn’t repented for its original sins, hatred passes for clarity. So they follow, not out of hope, but out of ritual. Have they traded in the gospel for grievance, scripture for slogans, and wrap the American flag so tightly around their eyes they can’t see nor comprehend who’s robbing them.

They don’t want policy. They want punishment. They don’t read platforms, they moan for retribution. Mr. Trump could staple his name to the Bible and they’d bend over and beg for chapter and verse. This isn’t about governance. It’s about submission. They want a flag they can hump, a strongman who spits when he talks and promises to make the libs cry. They don’t crave democracy, they get off on domination. Strip away the slogans, and all that’s left is a base that wants to be owned, and a man more than willing to fuck the country to prove he can.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

Pomona Lost. Free Speech Won. And I Took the Pictures

Photography Julian Lucas
©Pomona, 2020

Updated July 15, 2025 8:50pm PST

When the City of Pomona cited Gente Organizada for the artwork on their own building, they weren’t just enforcing code. They were enforcing silence. 

The mural, born from the George Floyd protest Gente led through the streets of Pomona, wasn’t illegal. It was inconvenient. It didn’t flatter city hall or traffic in vague unity slogans. It remembered names. It is named systems. It refused to let grief be buried under press releases.

So the city cited them, censorship disguised as code.

The photo that ended up in the ACLU lawsuit? That was mine. I took it at that protest, camera raised as hundreds marched through a city still pretending nothing was wrong.  The ACLU described the mural as “imitating a roll of film.”  It didn’t imitate film, because it was shot on film. Shot on 35mm. Developed by me, by hand, and printed in the darkroom. Because even protest deserves process.

The city called it a signage issue. A permitting violation. A matter of process. But the real violation was against the truth.

Let’s not pretend this was neutral. If the mural had featured oranges, the Pomona goddess, or a heartwarming quote about God and community, it would’ve been up on the city’s Instagram. But because it showed resistance, because it echoed the chants from the street, it got cited.

This is the same city that has no issue with neon signs yelling “CASH” or hideous ‘Gucci’ purses painted across pawn shop windows, or liquor stores advertising booze, but exhibiting something historical, political, and Brown and or Black led? Suddenly it’s a code violation.

The photo was taken during the George Floyd protest in Pomona. Black Lives Matter signs, held up by youth, shouted through masks, all captured on film. Two years later it was installed as public art on the wall of Gente Organizada’s building.

Then cited by the City of Pomona, after a year of being displayed.

The mural was central to a 2023 lawsuit filed by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, after the city issued citations and attempted to enforce sign code regulations to suppress Gente’s political speech.

“Pomona attempted to block our right to free speech and weaponized city code so that we could not exercise our right to artistic expression.” Ivan Hernandez, Gente Organizada

“The city’s actions violated the First Amendment” Jonathan Markovitz, ACLU SoCal

Gente took them to court, and won. That win forced real change.

The City of Pomona was forced to revise its sign code, waive all citations, and grant Gente five years of protection for future public art without permit. A legal victory. A First Amendment victory.

But that didn’t stop the erasure.

It was stolen. Taken in silence. No answers. No outrage. Just gone. But Pomona’s leaders, and those that stand abreast to their favor, will still try to sell you a story, that this city champions art, celebrates culture, uplifts youth voices.

Only if it’s quiet.
Only if it flatters them.
Only if it forgets.

You don’t need to burn anything even though that’s Pomona’s MO. Just take it down, late at night, and act like it never existed. But here’s the thing about truth, once it’s photographed, it lives.

Additionally not a single city official spoke up. Pomona’s Mayor Sandoval is silent. Nora Garcia, Victor Preciado, Steve Lustro, nothing. Every self declared “progressive” on council who loves to retweet youth-led organizing when it’s created by them, filtered, friendly, or ran by cops, vanished when those same youth were fined for speaking.

Pomona talks a lot about equity. But equity doesn’t look like citations. Equity doesn’t look like using city code to control narrative. Equity doesn’t look like silence.

So Gente sued. And they won.

The city waived the fines. Revised the code. Granted a five year window for new artwork without permit. But don’t confuse compliance with conscience. They only backed off when forced. They didn’t protect free speech. They got caught violating it.

The mural remains. The lawsuit is now public record. And the photo, my photo, stands as a witness.

Pomona didn’t just try to censor a wall. They tried to punish memory. But some things can’t be erased. They can only be exposed.

The mural remains in the public memory, but not on the wall.

They cited it. They stalled it. And when that didn’t work, someone took it. What Pomona couldn’t erase through fines, someone erased through theft.

So let’s stop pretending this was ever about signage. It was always about control. About power. About keeping the city’s story curated and quiet. But they lost. And even though the mural’s gone, the image remains. The lawsuit remains.  And we remain, watching, documenting, remembering. You can steal a painting.

Photo by Julian Lucas ©2022
Printed in the darkroom at the University of La Verne
Artists-in-Residence Program

You can issue citations, you can even steal the art off the wall, but you can’t erase what people saw and will continue to see.

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Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop and gallery dedicated to photography, artists’ books, and cultural critique. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.

If you use the word “illegal”, do you also say the N word?

Language changes, but the hate does not.

Illustration Julian Lucas

Language, erasure, and the violence we’ve agreed not to be bothered by.

It doesn’t even begin with a knock.

It’s more like the so-called smash and grab, only this time, it’s not teenagers,
Its federal agents in black vests,
doing their own harm to the community.
A pull-up-and-grab, not for sneakers, but for members of the community.
All of this sanctioned by Trump; State violence with a MAGA stamp of approval.

The only time kidnapping awakens patriotism is when the bodies being taken don’t look like theirs.

Why don’t the same people  screaming about shoplifters at CVS also scream out about people being kidnapped in broad daylight. Surely a crying child, as she sees her mother taken away, would elicit screams of injustice.

Let’s talk about masks.

When Palestinian protesters cover their faces, they are labeled terrorists.
When students wear keffiyehs, they’re accused of inciting violence.
When brown kids march, they’re “terrorists and thugs”.

But when ICE pulls up masked,  armed, no badge, no official vehicle, no warning, no accountability, that’s cheered on, that's ok?

People are  vanishing  in real time. No one is exactly sure about where they are taken.

We’ve been here before. 

1954: When a Slur Became Federal Policy

Operation Wetback

Operation Wetback was the real - and very derogatory and racist - name (used in official memos and press releases) of the campaign to remove Mexicans from the country by President Eisenhower. It was executed by armed agents and celebrated in newspapers and by some Americans. Sound familiar?  In the 1920s, when the economy was booming and white Americans wouldn’t pick beets, lay track, or clean hotel kitchens, the U.S. actively recruited Mexican laborers to fill the gap. Railroads, farms, and factories sent agents across the border to bring workers in, cheap, fast, and exploitable.

When the stock market crashed and unemployment surged, those same workers became scapegoats. No hearings. No charges. Just buses, trains, and public silence. In 1942, there was a  U.S. Mexican Farm Labor Program, which was also known as Operation Bracero. This  program brought Mexicans into the United States with the promise of decent wages and good treatment. During Operation Wetback as many as 1.3 million Mexicans, some of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up at gunpoint, dragged from fruit stands and factory floors. They were shipped off in overcrowded trains, ships, buses, often to places in Mexico that were unfamiliar to them. Sound familiar? 

There’s a plaque in downtown Los Angeles now. It admits what was done. But it doesn’t tell the whole story, that the people expelled were first invited, then blamed. Welcomed as labor and then removed as a threat.

And It Didn’t Start There

Hundreds of Mexicans at a Los Angeles train station awaiting deportation

Before Operation Wetback, there was the so called Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s.

These people have been scapegoated for unemployment, blamed for taking jobs from “real” Americans’. Sound familiar? 

It was racialized economic panic then and its racialized economic panic now.

The Invention of “Illegal”

In the decades since, we’ve gotten more careful with our words. The slurs are less acceptable. The harm and hate is still palpable.

The politicians have switched to something that sounds neutral: Illegal. People who intentionally use it must know how cruel it is. They must know the harm it causes?

You hear it when you watch the news, check in on Facebook or Nextdoor, or talk to a conservative media consumer. The word illegal is offensive and crass and it strips away at identity and says “you don’t belong here” to people who do, in fact, belong.

“Illegal” is not a status. It’s a whole sentence.

So I’ll ask again, do the same people who say “illegal” also use the N word?

Is the word “Illegal” like the N word? The origin and tone are different, but the use feels the same.

Both words serve the same social/political function: to dehumanize, disappear, insult and to say you don’t belong. 

Calling someone “Illegal” makes it easier to justify the harm and  ignore the trauma being inflicted.

This country doesn’t just deport people. It deports memory.

Are conservative commentators aware of the similarity? How about the  Latinos for Trump conservatives who scream the loudest. It is easy to forget where your roots first took hold and to dismiss the fearful people who look just like you. 

Ken Light. 6/2/1985 San Ysidro, California.

The question is avoided because facing it means facing the fact that the legal system is just a polished machine for disappearance.

The Myth the Right Way

Immigration done “right way” is expensive and fraught with confusion. People say this, like that path actually exists for everyone. But for many, it’s unaffordable, takes decades, and still ends in rejection. If your child’s life is at risk, you don’t wait for paperwork, you run. The “right way” is often just a privilege people mistake for a moral high ground. But don’t be surprised when the “right way” shifts again and you’re suddenly on the wrong side of the line.

Citizenship has always been a moving goalpost. Ask any Black American. Ask any Indigenous person. Ask any second generation kid watching their uncle being snatch-and-grab into detention while white coworkers joke about tacos and plan the next taco Tuesday.

What Does Language Allow?

“Illegal” doesn’t just erase the person.

It erases the context.

It erases the war, the drought, the cartel, the IMF, the colonial border drawn across someone’s ancestral land.

It erases the U.S. policies that created the very migration it now punishes. A simple google search can tell you what US policies lead to migrants leaving their homelands in search of a better future.

“Illegal” asks no questions about cause.

It just gives permission to punish the effect.

This country never apologized for the deportations of the 1930s. It never apologized for Operation Wetback. This country likes to pretend it forgot.

The state of California did issue a quiet apology in 2012, installing a plaque at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes to acknowledge the forced removal of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. It recognized that 400,000 Californians, many U.S. citizens, were deported, part of a repatriation of up to 2 million people. 

But did anyone notice?
No national headlines. No prime time apology. No reparations. No shared reckoning.

And the raids happening now? Don’t hold your breath waiting for acknowledgement or atonement.

Maybe one day there will be a monument. A footnote in a textbook. A documentary narrated by someone who mispronounces our names.

But by then, how many lives will have vanished?

So I’ll ask one last time, and this time, I want you to actually sit with it:

Is “illegal” like the N word?

Are we just too polite, too white, too complicit, too satisfied, to say what we really mean?

Final note. The term “Illegal” isn’t even accurate. It’s not a crime to exist without papers. It’s a word people use to ignore the reasons someone came, war, poverty, policy.

You can call the system broken, but don’t call the person illegal. That’s not law, that’s a choice.

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LINKS

Operation Wetback (1954) – U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Operation Wetback: A Policy of Mass Deportation – Smithsonian Magazine
The Mexican Repatriation Was a Human Rights Disaster – LA Times
PBS Timeline: The Mexican Repatriation
ICE and Border Patrol Abuses – ACLU
What We Know About the Effects of Separating Families – NPR
Drop the I-Word Campaign – Race Forward
The Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Is Dehumanizing – The Atlantic
ICE Arrests Highlight Due Process Concerns – Human Rights Watch
Inside Trump’s ICE Raids – The Guardian
Dehumanization of Migrants – Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies
Language and Hate – Southern Poverty Law Center
Los Angeles Apologizes for their Role in Massive Deportations - Huffington Post

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Julian Lucas is the editor of The Pomonan. He writes about power, memory, and the parts of America that would rather forget.

Centennial of a Prophet: Malcolm X and America’s Enduring Denial

Malcolm X turns 100 today. That sentence alone should crack the sky. Not because we’ve come so far, but because we haven’t, at all.

A century later, the very system he warned us about still thrives. The police still kill with impunity. The media still gaslights. Our cities and schools still dilute. Gaza bleeds in real time. Prisons burst with the impoverished. And Malcolm? He’s still considered too much. Too Muslim. Too radical. Too honest. Too Black.

Meanwhile, America keeps stroking its chin and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. as if that’s the cure for everything, although America assassinated King too. But only certain parts of King make the cut, such as the dreamy lines about the content of our character, but never the hard hitting sermons condemning capitalism, militarism, and white moderation. King gets murals and recognizes in school curriculum. Malcolm doesn’t make the murals, or the curriculum.

So let’s celebrate Malcolm X’s centennial by saying the things that still scare people.

Let’s celebrate him by telling the truth. Malcolm X didn’t die because he was wrong. He died because he was dangerous to the structure of lies. He didn’t believe in asking the system to love us. He believed in power rooted in unity, not permission. So when white America defaults to Dr. King, it’s not about reverence, it’s about control. King is safer. He fits into a narrative of redemption. Malcolm forces confrontation. He didn’t beg for inclusion. He demanded power. And conservative Black communities, especially those clinging to respectability, too often go along with this, embracing King as the “correct” way to protest: quiet, suited, and church-approved.

But seriously, if Malcolm X makes you uncomfortable, it’s not because of his methods. It’s because he names the game.

And the game hasn’t changed.

Since the post Reconstruction era, Black Americans have owned roughly 1% to 3% of the nation’s wealth, despite over a century of so called progress. Meanwhile, white Americans consistently hold over 85% to 90% of the country’s total wealth. The gap isn’t closing. It’s calcified. This isn’t a flaw in the system, it is the system. One that was never designed for equity, only maintenance of dominance.

On a local level for example, if we take a walk through Martin Luther King Jr. Park in the city of Pomona. There’s a mural, bright, sprawling, reverent. It features Dr. King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis… and even Gandhi, who once referred to Africans as “savages.” But Malcolm? Not a glimpse. Not a shadow.

This isn’t just an oversight. It’s a curriculum. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Curriculums can be rewritten. Walls can be repainted. And public memory, when reclaimed, becomes public power.

And where are some of the many Black organizations? The ones with grant money, or participate in gala dinners, and have “equity” in their mission statements? Why aren’t they celebrating Malcolm? Why isn’t there a single event, vigil, panel, or youth program in his name this week? The same groups that show up for MLK breakfasts and Juneteenth gatherings for photo ops go suspiciously quiet when it comes to Brother Malcolm. Maybe it’s because he didn’t smile for the donors. He didn’t dance around discomfort. He didn’t preach patience. And for many Black institutions desperate to seem “neutral” to gatekeepers, that makes him a liability, not a legacy.

But the truth is, Malcolm doesn’t need to be feared. He needs to be understood. He spoke out of love, tough love, yes, but love all the same. A love that demanded more for us than survival. A love that still waits for us to catch up. And maybe that’s the opportunity, not to shame those who’ve stayed silent, but to invite them to speak louder. To remember more fully. To honor him not just in words, but in action. There’s still time.

On a local level, Pomona suffers from selective remembrance. Mention Malcolm’s absence and you’ll be met with deflections. It’s easy to imagine city officials raising eyebrows, hesitating to greenlight a figure who still makes America uncomfortable.

That’s how erasure happens, not through censorship, but through cautious approvals, quiet committees, and unwritten rules about who’s “appropriate” for public celebration. But rules can be broken. Stories can be restored. And the absence of Malcolm today can become a presence tomorrow, if we’re bold enough to name what was left out.

The absence isn’t accidental. It’s strategic. And it says more about the institutions than it ever could about the artists.

But this isn’t about paint. It’s about principle.

Malcolm X challenged power. He called out liberal complicity. He said things that made white allies uncomfortable. And Pomona, like the rest of America, edits that kind of truth out of murals—and textbooks.

This mural isn’t neutral. It’s curated. But curation is a choice. And the next generation doesn’t have to inherit a version of history stripped of its sharpest truths. We can still choose to honor the full legacy, not the comfortable one, but the courageous one.

And when Malcolm X is left off the wall, we’re telling an entire generation:

Be grateful. Be quiet. Be like him, not him.

We’re living in an era of mass forgetting. The kind that turns revolutionaries into mascots and protests into brunch talking points.

Malcolm X, if he’s remembered at all, is reduced to a quote without context. A fire without heat.

But he saw it all coming:

The co-opted movements.

The liberal betrayal.

The Black faces in high places selling out the very people they claimed to uplift.

And he said so loudly.

Malcolm X turns 100 this year.

He’s not just a relic.

He’s a mirror.

And it’s long past time we stopped looking away.

And yet, there’s still time to get it right.

History isn’t fixed, it’s something we revise, remember, and rebuild. We can still teach our children the full truth, honor the voices that challenged us, and create public spaces where Malcolm’s name isn’t feared, but welcomed.

Because if we want justice, we can’t keep choosing comfort over clarity.

And if we want change, we’ll have to follow those who dared to say:

We didn’t come here to be liked. We came here to be free.

Happy 100th, Malcolm. We’re still listening.

And this time, we won’t forget.

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Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, or any other events because he will charge you a ton of money you couldn’t even make payments on.

Stop Blaming Leftists for Liberal Bullshit

How Neoliberalism Masquerades as Pragmatism, and Why It’s Failing Everyone Except the Donors

If you want to see neoliberalism in action, look no further than Pomona. From homelessness to land use to public-private partnerships, the city’s policies are a case study in how neoliberalism masquerades as pragmatic governance. As Part 1 explained, the real snake isn’t liberalism but neoliberalism, a corporate-friendly ideology embraced by both Democrats and Republicans for decades. But thanks to slick political branding, liberals are taking the heat for policies that were never meant to help regular people in the first place.

Homelessness isn’t a failure of the system. It’s a feature. Pomona’s entire governance model is a masterclass in shifting responsibility away from the state and onto nonprofits, private contractors, and ultimately, the residents themselves. And just a few blocks north, Claremont offers a quieter version of the same playbook—one that hides its exclusions behind college-town charm and progressive aesthetics.

The Neoliberal Blueprint: From Homelessness to Land Use

Homelessness: Managing Symptoms, Not Causes

Pomona’s approach to homelessness mirrors neoliberal strategies at the national level: decentralize responsibility, privatize services, and make sure the state doesn’t have to foot the bill. The city leans heavily on regional partnerships, outsourcing key services to nonprofits and faith-based organizations like the Tri City Mental Health Center and the Pomona Continuum of Care Coalition.

These partnerships might make services look efficient, but they’re really just a way to manage homelessness without addressing its root causes. In 2023, Pomona’s Point-in-Time Homeless Count showed a 14 percent increase in unsheltered individuals, exposing the limits of these stopgap solutions. Meanwhile, affordable housing construction continues to lag, with the city falling short of its Regional Housing Needs Assessment targets for very low-income units.

It’s a familiar move: rebrand cuts and outsourcing as innovation while ignoring the structural causes like rent hikes, wage stagnation, and the commodification of housing. And it’s not just Pomona. Claremont has consistently failed to meet its affordable housing goals as well, despite having more money, more land per resident, and far fewer excuses. Where Pomona outsources services to underfunded nonprofits, Claremont keeps poverty out of sight altogether through restrictive zoning, token planning efforts, and the quiet preservation of exclusivity.

Land Use: Privatization and Profit Over People

Neoliberalism isn’t just about outsourcing services. It’s about reshaping cities to serve private interests. Pomona’s land use policies are a textbook example. The city has prioritized commercial developments—parking lots, strip malls, and luxury housing—over public spaces or affordable housing. Community spaces that could serve the public good are instead converted into profit-driven developments, fueling gentrification and displacement.

This isn’t just bad planning. It’s a deliberate strategy to maximize profits for developers and private interests, often at the expense of the very residents who need housing the most. By treating land as a commodity rather than a shared resource, Pomona’s policies reflect the logic of deregulation and speculation.

Claremont’s version is subtler but just as damaging. Its charm is built on decades of exclusionary zoning and aesthetic preservation that keeps dense or affordable housing from entering the market. That’s not an accident—it’s policy. While Pomona gets blamed for visible poverty, Claremont’s affluence depends on limiting who gets to live there in the first place.

Public-Private Partnerships: Outsourcing Accountability

Pomona’s reliance on public-private partnerships extends beyond homelessness services. Essential public functions like fire protection and animal control are increasingly managed through private contracts rather than directly by the city. While this might look like efficiency on paper, it’s really about offloading responsibility and reducing public accountability.

The City Manager’s role now centers on contract oversight rather than public service. It’s a management style that treats residents as customers and government as a business. The result is a patchwork of services, each with different standards, limited oversight, and no one to blame when things go wrong.

And again, Claremont is not exempt. It outsources sanitation, contracts out landscaping, and delegates housing policy through technical consultants and planning workshops designed more to check boxes than build equity. Even when it has the power to lead, it prefers to manage from a distance. Both cities rely on the same operating system. They just wear different skins.

The Influence of Private Interests in Local Politics

If you want to know who really runs Pomona, follow the money. Campaign contributions from developers, contractors, and business associations shape local elections and drive the city’s priorities. Time and again, decisions favor commercial projects and privatized services over public goods.

This isn’t just a local trend. It reflects the national pattern of corporate influence in politics, where elected officials are forced to choose between their constituents and their donors, and the donors usually win. These policies are then rebranded as centrist compromises, when in reality, they are market-driven decisions that offload risk onto the public.

In Claremont, campaign donations are less obvious but just as decisive. Political caution, donor class preferences, and homeowner associations act as quiet enforcers of the same agenda. Protect property values. Avoid controversy. Keep things the way they are. Even progressive candidates learn quickly which fights they’re allowed to pick.

The Consequences: Fighting the Wrong Battles

Blaming leftists—or liberals—for Pomona’s policy failures is exactly what the real culprits want. It keeps the conversation focused on tone, rhetoric, and personalities while the underlying system continues to funnel resources upward. The same people who rail against government waste are often the first to privatize public services into oblivion. And the same voices who mock social programs are perfectly fine with taxpayers funding bloated contracts for private firms.

Meanwhile, the people advocating for real solutions—affordable housing, living wages, and public services that aren’t siphoned off by middlemen—are dismissed as naive or unrealistic. That’s the hustle. Any demand for systemic change is labeled radical, while business as usual gets to parade around as common sense.

Name the Real Enemy

Pomona’s policies are not mistakes. They are predictable outcomes of a political system designed to offload risk, shrink public responsibility, and transfer wealth into private hands. Claremont plays the same game with different aesthetics. Both cities are symptoms of a broader crisis.

The first step to fixing it is naming it. This is neoliberal governance, not liberal failure. And until we call it what it is, the same cycle will repeat: nonprofits stretched thin, contractors cashing in, and cities treating their residents like liabilities instead of people.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way. We already know what works. Cities that invest directly in housing, pay people living wages, and provide services without middlemen are not utopias—they’re just places where policy follows need instead of donors. It takes will. It takes organizing. And yes, it takes the guts to stop pretending that tinkering around the edges will fix what’s broken at the core.

Real solutions exist. We don’t need more blueprints. We need the courage to build.

Because if we don’t, the billionaires won’t just keep laughing. They’ll keep winning.

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REFERENCES

Foundational Texts on Neoliberalism
Wendy Brown — Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
David Harvey — A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Thomas Frank — Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

A scathing look at how Democrats embraced meritocracy and markets while abandoning working-class politics.

Adolph Reed Jr. — “The Limits of Anti-Racism” (essay)

Argues that elite liberalism uses symbolic politics to dodge material redistribution.
Lester Spence — Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, or any other events because he will charge you a ton of money you couldn’t even make payments on.

Claremont Might Legalize Airbnb Rentals. Lets be Honest, the Ban Never Really Existed Anyway.

The Claremont City Council is set to vote tomorrow, Tuesday, April 22, on whether to lift the city’s so-called ban on short-term rentals.

If Claremont’s leadership was actually honest, we would understand the ban was never real.

According to the city’s own 2024 staff report, there are currently 81 short-term rentals operating in Claremont, despite the official ban prohibiting rentals under 30 days. Nearly 80 percent are entire homes, and 88 percent are single-family properties—meaning they’re not just spare bedrooms, they’re full residences pulled off the long-term market. All are operating illegally, and the city knows it.

Enforcement has been nearly nonexistent.Since 2020, only 23 properties have received citations, and just 38 code violation cases have been opened in total. That’s not meaningful enforcement, that’s a quiet shrug from a city unwilling to confront a problem it’s already surrendered to.

The city relies on complaints, not active monitoring. There is no dedicated enforcement division, and platforms like Airbnb don’t check legality before publishing a listing. If a host gets caught, the fine is just $100 to $500. That’s just slap on the wrist - it’s less than they make in a weekend.

So now, instead of cracking down, the city is preparing to legalize what has quietly become the norm.

The proposed ordinance would create a permitting process, require proof of primary residence, ban commercial events like weddings, and limit where short-term rentals can operate. It’s being sold as regulation but let’s be clear, it is a retroactive permission slip for people who broke the rules and got away with it.

And the cost? Housing.

Short-term rentals take away homes out of the long-term rental pool. They reduce available housing, inflate rents, and create a fake “market rate” shaped by tourism demand instead of local need. STRs turn stable neighborhoods into rotating hotels. They profit the few while displacing the many.

This vote isn’t just about zoning. It’s about whether Claremont continues to chip away at its livability, one Airbnb at a time.

IS ANYONE ON THE DAIS WILLING TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD?

Legalizing STRs is just another case of the city privatizing public interest under the banner of “efficiency.” It is housing policy through a utilitarian lens, which is typical for politicians. Instead of looking through the lens of morality, this particular housing policy prioritizes whoever can extract the most profit, not who needs a place to live. This is the same logic that gutted public transit, hollowed out social housing, and turned basic needs into speculative assets. Airbnb is just the latest mask on an old face: commodification in the guise of choice.

If we keep designing cities for tourists instead of residents, we’re not just getting priced out, we’re watching it happen in real time.

The meeting is tomorrow at 6:30 PM at 225 W. Second Street. Public comments are due by 3 PM at CityClerk@claremontca.gov.

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LINKS
Claremont Courier
City of Claremont

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, or any other events because he will charge you a ton of money you couldn’t even make payments on.

Prop 13 Is Killing California, But We’re Too Nostalgic to Admit It

There’s no polite way to say it, but proposition 13 has slowly killed California, gutted our schools, choked out our housing market, and shielded corporations from paying their fair share. But try bringing that up in a room full of California homeowners and you’ll be met with something between a hiss and a heart attack, especially from those in burbs.

Prop 13 has become a sacred cow, sold to us as the measure that saved homeowners from being taxed out of their properties. And while it may have once served a purpose, today it’s a policy zombie, dead logic still roaming the halls of Sacramento, kept alive by nostalgia, fear, and misinformation.

Let’s break the myth: Prop 13 doesn’t protect the working class, it protects those who bought early and big. The system punishes new homeowners and renters, locks in generational inequality, and grants absurd tax breaks to corporations that haven’t had their properties reassessed since the late 1970s [1].

While you’re paying market rate for a one-bedroom in Pomona, Chevron is sitting on commercial land taxed like it’s 1982. Is that fairness? Is that equity? No, it’s a long con dressed up as property rights.

And let’s not forget how Prop 13 gutted funding for public schools and local services. Before 1978, California ranked among the top states for education funding. Now? We’re lucky if schools have working HVAC systems. That isn’t accidental. That’s what happens when you starve local governments for decades and expect them to run on fumes and bake sales [2].

Prop 13 was a political coup wrapped in populist language. It passed with bipartisan support, but its legacy is bipartisan failure. Even Jerry Brown, who was governor when it passed, embraced it after the fact. No one wanted to touch the “third rail” of California politics, even as the damage became obvious.

SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

We stop pretending this policy is sacred. We start telling the truth about who it protects and who it punishes. That means having the courage to:

Close the commercial loopholes. It’s obscene that Disneyland and Chevron are taxed like it’s still 1978 while working families pay full freight. The 2020 attempt (Prop 15) to fix this nearly passed. With better organizing and clearer messaging, it could pass next time [3].

Introduce a progressive reassessment structure. We can protect elderly and low-income homeowners while still updating the assessed value of properties, especially investment homes and land banking schemes that drive up rent and displacement.

Use the additional revenue to reinvest locally. Public schools, housing, transit, and healthcare have all been starved for decades under Prop 13. Restoring local funding would actually make California livable again—not just for the wealthy, but for working people who built this state.

This isn’t about punishing success, it’s about undoing structural protections for inherited wealth and corporate hoarding that are actively destroying access to opportunity for everyone else.

And yes, the governor matters. And yes, so do state policies. But let’s stop blaming every problem in California on whoever’s in office and start calling out the policies that have quietly driven this crisis for decades.

Because while we’re yelling at governors, blaming immigrants, and pointing fingers at social programs, the real culprit has been quietly sitting there for decades, untouched and untouchable.

But maybe it’s not untouchable anymore.

Maybe The Pomonan just touched it.

This is your sacred cow. Consider it tipped.

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REFERENCES

1.CalMatters - How Prop 13 gave California’s richest corporations a multibillion-dollar tax break they didn’t want.

2. KPCC/LAist – Did Prop 13 cause LA’s housing crisis?
3. KPBS – Prop 15 would close corporate tax loophole. Here’s how.

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Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, because he will charge you a ton of money.

Stop Blaming Liberals for Neoliberalism Bullshit

How the Two-Party System Protects the Rich and Leaves You Behind

Let’s cut the crap, if you think “liberals” are to blame for the economic hellscape we’re living in, you’ve been conned. The real snake is neoliberalism, a corporate friendly ideology that both Democrats and Republicans have been shoving down our throats for decades. But thanks to some corny slick ass political branding and media twist, liberals are the ones being blamed while the actual offenders walk right past you.

Conservatives love to blame liberals for everything, (especially suburbia) from skyrocketing rents to wage stagnation, but here’s the kicker: those are the direct results of free market policies championed by the right and center left Democrats. Meanwhile, disillusioned Democrats are all pissy, fighting amongst their own party members for selling out to Wall Street and calling it “progress.”

So let’s sort through the shit and figure out why liberals are getting blamed for neoliberalism’s mess, and why that’s exactly what the real culprits want.

The Bait-and-Switch: Liberalism vs. Neoliberalism

First, a little context. When we talk about “liberals” in America, we’re usually talking about people who want a stronger social safety net, higher taxes on the rich, and regulations to keep corporate assholes in check. Think FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society.

Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. It’s about slashing regulations, cutting taxes for corporations, and letting the free market solve everything, even when it screws over working  people. This isn’t some fringe theory; it’s been mainstream U.S. policy since at least the 1980s.

The problem is, the line between these two ideologies has been intentionally blurred. Neoliberalism got branded as “centrist” or even “progressive,” which is like putting lipstick on a pig and calling it a prom queen. Both parties ran with it, but liberals, especially the ones who still believe in social safety nets and fair wages, got stuck with the blame.

How Both Parties Sold Us Out

The love affair with neoliberalism started with Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes for the rich, gutted regulations, and kicked unions in the teeth. But it didn’t stop there. The real betrayal came in the 1990s when Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party hopped on the neoliberal bandwagon. Here’s what that looked like:

• NAFTA: Clinton’s free trade deal was sold as a win for American workers. In reality, it was a gift-wrapped handout to corporations that offshored jobs faster than you can say “outsourcing.” Manufacturing towns across the U.S. are still paying the price.
  

• Welfare Reform: The 1996 welfare reform law gutted federal aid programs and left millions of low-income Americans screwed. Clinton called it “ending welfare as we know it,” but what he really did was kick people while they were down.
  

• Financial Deregulation: Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 gave Wall Street the green light to gamble with the entire economy. Less than a decade later, the 2008 financial crisis proved just how much of a disaster that was.

Obama didn’t help much, either. Sure, he passed the Affordable Care Act, but he also cozied up to Wall Street, bailed out the banks, and pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another neoliberal trade deal that would’ve screwed American workers even more if it hadn’t died in Congress.

So Why Do Liberals Get the Blame?

If both parties embraced neoliberalism, why do liberals get most of the heat? Here’s the brutal truth: it’s part political strategy, part betrayal, and part sheer stupidity.

1. Betrayal of Expectations

• People expect Republicans to carry water for corporations, that’s not news. But liberals are supposed to stand up for the working class, regulate Wall Street, and actually care about inequality. When Democratic leaders started pushing neoliberal policies, it felt like a knife in the back.

2. Conservative Bullshit Tactics

• Conservatives have spent decades turning “liberal” into a catch-all insult for anything they don’t like. By branding neoliberal policies like deregulation and welfare cuts as “liberal failures,” they managed to deflect blame from their own free-market fanaticism. It’s a slick con, and it worked.

3. The Leftist Roast Session

• The loudest critics of neoliberalism aren’t conservatives, they’re people on the left. When Bernie Sanders and groups like Occupy Wall Street called out the Democratic Party for selling out, they ended up reinforcing the idea that “liberals” were to blame for everything. That’s not what they meant, but that’s how it landed.

4. Media Brainwashing

• The mainstream media loves to blur the lines between liberalism and neoliberalism, mostly because they’re owned by the same corporate interests that profit from keeping us confused. By presenting neoliberal policies as “centrist” or even “progressive,” they’ve made it damn near impossible for most people to tell the difference.

The Consequences: Fighting the Wrong Battles

Blaming liberals for neoliberalism is a waste of time, and it’s exactly what the real culprits want. While we’re busy throwing punches at each other, corporate power is getting stronger, inequality is getting worse, and the same policies that got us into this mess are still running the show.

If you’re a conservative who actually gives a damn about economic fairness, you should be just as pissed at corporate power as any leftist. And if you’re a Democrat who’s sick of getting screwed by your own party, it’s time to stop settling for candidates who just slap a rainbow sticker on neoliberal policies and call it a day.

What Needs to Happen Now

Step one is getting our definitions straight. If you think “liberal” means deregulation and free-market worship, congratulations, you’ve been played. Neoliberalism is the real enemy, and both parties are guilty.

Step two is demanding more from our so-called leaders. For Republicans, that means actually standing up to corporate power instead of just whining about “woke” culture. For Democrats, it means ditching the Wall Street cash and going back to actual liberal values, like protecting workers, regulating corporations, and making sure regular people can afford to live.

If we can’t do that, we might as well just roll out the red carpet for the billionaires and get used to living in a corporate-owned dystopia.

The bottom line is this: blaming liberals for neoliberalism’s failures is not just wrong, it’s exactly what the people in power want. By keeping us confused and divided, they get to keep raking in profits while we fight each other over scraps.

So let’s call out the real villains: the politicians in both parties who sold us out for campaign donations and boardroom gigs. Let’s stop pretending that liberals and neoliberals are the same thing, and start holding the real culprits accountable, for once.

Because if we don’t figure this out soon, we’re going to keep blaming the wrong people while the billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.

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Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, because he will charge you a ton of money.

What Would Pomona Be Without Cronyism? A Better City, Probably

Ah, the cost of political integrity in Pomona. Just $400, give or take a technicality. In the grand bazaar of campaign finance violations, it was reported that our very own City Council woman, Elizabeth Ontiveros Cole has been fined yet again by the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). And let’s be honest, if campaign violations were a sport, Pomona officials would be perennial champions, because they usually go unchecked and are not held accountable, unless, of course, it’s by La Nueva Voz, the small, biased paper that proudly calls itself “Pomona’s Only Local Newspaper,” yet refuses to play fair.

For those keeping score at home, which we know rarely happens in Pomona, Cole’s latest fine landed her on an exclusive “short list” of Los Angeles County public officials with FPPC violations. That’s right, out of the entire county, she managed to make the cut. An achievement worthy of a plaque or at least a participation trophy.

But let's get into the allegations. The FPPC dinged Councilwoman Cole for failing to disclose campaign contributions in a timely manner. Basically, she took money but forgot to tell the public about it until after it mattered. But don’t worry, it was all just a tiny misunderstanding. You know, the kind that regularly happens when people in power are caught being less than forthcoming.

Even better, there was an investigation into whether she accepted money from a business with a financial interest in something she voted on. What the rest of us would call a “conflict of interest” and what elected officials and their gatekeepers in Pomona just call Tuesday. But in a shocking turn of events, the FPPC concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue further action. It’s the political equivalent of saying, “We know you did something sketch, but we can’t quite prove it, so… carry on.”

Now, in a city with a rich history of the usual “coincidental” decision making that just happens to favor well connected donors, Cole is in good company. Cronyism in Pomona is less of a scandal and more of a municipal tradition. Without it, what would we have left? Honest governance? Public accountability? A city council that works for its residents instead of its benefactor? How boring. 

But let’s entertain a radical idea for a moment, and yes it’s understood, many Pomonans don’t like anything radical, although their Jesus was a radical. Anyway, what would Pomona be without cronyism? Well, for starters, public projects might actually serve the public instead of well connected developers, even the local ones that make attempts at pushing statutes through committees and commissions. The city’s budget might prioritize the needs of residents instead of padding the pockets of those with the right political connections. Imagine a Pomona where small businesses get the same opportunities as the ones owned by campaign donors and beyond. Where votes on city contracts and zoning laws aren’t quietly influenced by backdoor deals.

A Pomona without cronyism might have a city council that actually debates policies based on what’s best for the community, rather than what’s best for their next campaign fundraiser. Maybe residents would feel like they had a real say in local government, instead of watching from mid court as the usual political regulars cut deals behind closed doors. Maybe, just maybe, people would trust their local government.

But let’s be fair, why should Cole be singled out when she’s simply playing the game the way it’s always been played? If anything, Pomona should start awarding trophies for this stuff. “Most Creative Use of Loopholes,” “Best Performance in a Conflict of Interest Investigation,” or my personal favorite, “Excellence in Pretending Not to Know.”

Of course, if we did decide to flip the script, let’s try a revolutionary concept. How about we stop electing people who treat campaign finance laws like optional side quests? What if, and hear me out, we demanded transparency from the officials who claim to serve us? I know, I know, it’s a radical idea. But hey, if Cole can make the FPPC’s “short list,” maybe Pomona voters can make a “short list” of politicians who actually deserve their support.

Crazy thought, right?

Lastly, while La Nueva Voz has gone to impressive lengths to detail every check, contributor, and technical filing misstep tied to Ontiveros-Cole, it’s worth asking: where is this energy when others in City Hall face questions of accountability? Selective scrutiny isn’t journalism, it’s just an obvious attempt to play watchdog while wagging the tail for their favorites. 

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Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, because he will charge you a ton of money.