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UC Berkeley professor Susan Shaheen has sent over a dozen students to the Education Symposium, a two-day conference that exposes college juniors and seniors in California to careers in transportation. 

During the event, students learn about the transportation industry, get matched with a mentor, meet with practitioners in the field and participate in a competition. At the end, they’re eligible to apply for three Education Symposium scholarships to enter the industry.

The symposium is organized by the California Transportation Foundation, a non-profit started by Heinz Heckeroth, a former deputy director for the California Department of Transportation. The foundation works to make students interested in transportation careers, offering dozens of scholarships to students to enter the field, among other things. 

“My perception has been that a lot of people who go to it are very inspired,” Shaheen, who is on the board for the foundation, said. “You’re hearing from people who are really senior in the field, and they’re talking to you, they’re focused on you, they’re answering your questions, and working side-by-side with you on a project for the symposium.”

As part of this year’s symposium, held in Fresno in November, students participated in a mock grant competition, designing proposals to address sustainable transportation. 

“Transportation is not necessarily the sexiest career choice,” said Marnie Primmer, the executive director for the foundation.  “It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that maybe some other career choices open to students,  but that’s why our education symposium is such a great opportunity, because it introduces students to what it’s really like to be a transportation professional.”

Part of what makes the program successful is the type of mentors it’s able to recruit, according to Primmer and Shaheen. These include people working in both the public and private sectors and academia. They range from engineers to planners to policymakers and many of them are high-ranking in their sphere, with several former directors of Caltrans serving as mentors.

A key challenge Primmer faces with courting students is helping them understand exactly what jobs there are in the transportation industry: everything from the engineers that design highways to the policymakers that plan public transit systems to the maintenance workers who keep the systems functioning.

In the past few years, the industry has seen a dip in students interested in transportation, Primmer said. For example, engineering students have opted for careers in software engineering instead of civil engineering. However, this is changing as students seek more hands-on careers, she said. 

“If you work on a highway project, or you work on a new transit system, you actually get to see the fruits of your labor and the impact that it makes on your community,” she said. “With many students who are interested in passion projects, and in connecting their purpose with their career, civil engineering becomes a much more attractive opportunity, because you’re actually seeing the results of the work you put in.”

Many of Shaheen’s students are interested in sustainable transportation, particularly since she directs the Innovative Mobility Research lab at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at Berkeley. “With any transition, the jobs do change,” she said. “When we go from horse and carriage to car, there’s major changes. And when you make changes to electronics, to the sensing systems, or the propulsion systems and how they’re fueled, that involves education and workforce development.” 

Another major shift in the industry, perhaps the biggest one, is self-driving cars, Primmer said. Google, Apple, Ford, Mercedes, Tesla, Honda, Toyota and more are all working on self-driving programs. 

“I think that technology is advancing in a way that will be transformative for transportation in the next 5 to 10 years,” she said. “But I do think that opens up new opportunities for students who are tech savvy and who are willing to be the bridge between how we’ve always done things, and how we’re going to do things in the future.”

Primmer says one of the most important ways to attract students to the industry is storytelling, which helps them put it in perspective. 

“It’s the foundation of everything we do,” she said. “You can’t get to your dentist appointment, you couldn’t get there if you didn’t have a good transportation network. Your access to education, your access to good paying jobs, your access to amenities in your community, is all dependent on a functioning transportation network.”

People living in the northernmost reaches of California refer to their community as the “Redwood Curtain,” a nod to the region’s abundance of redwoods and natural beauty — but also its remoteness.

With a combined population of less than half a million people scattered across Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc, Humboldt, Trinity, Shasta and Lassen counties, the area faces relatively lower wages, extremist politics and brain drain, and fewer educational opportunities compared to other parts of the state.

Most of the seven northernmost counties have seen decreasing or stagnant population trends in recent years, U.S. Census Bureau data show, along with the outmigration of working-age young people. 

But workforce development boards, local officials and employers are looking to shift that narrative, using one-on-one mentoring, paid training in growing industries, and inclusive recruitment practices to help young Californians find — and keep — jobs in the region they grew up in.

“Young people in our counties are looking at either leaving the area, or not. That’s the first choice they make,” said Heather Chavez, director of workforce programs at the NorTEC Workforce Development Board. “It’s unpopular if you’re not leaving high school to go to a four-year college. There’s definitely a stigma around that — it’s students, it’s teachers, it’s parents, it’s employers, it’s everyone.”

Within that landscape, part of Chavez’s mission is to find “great, great, great jobs” for young people who can’t afford to leave their hometowns, or who find themselves without a high school or higher education degree. 

Funded largely by the federal Department of Labor, NorTEC, which stands for the Northern Rural Training and Employment Consortium, aims to improve education, employment and upward mobility across 11 northern counties.

NorTEC provides one-on-one intensive mentoring — plus financial support for bus passes, interview and work clothes, or supplies required by a training program — to those between 16 and 24 who aren’t in school. Last year, 267 people were enrolled in the program; twelve months later, 77% were still employed in industries ranging from food service, hospitality, tourism, seasonal forestry or recreation-related jobs, manufacturing and food processing and health care, Chavez said.

The region’s data is mixed when it comes to population dropoff among young people. Between 2017 and 2022, northwestern Del Norte County lost up to 1.2% of its population in every age bracket between 15 and 59, while Humboldt, Lassen, Siskiyou and Trinity also saw losses among young workers, according to state Employment Development Department data. Shasta County, however — home to the roughly 93,000-person city of Redding and Shasta-Trinity National Forest — made gains among those between 15 and 44. 

California overall has seen a declining population in the last few years, a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, low birth rates and relatively low levels of immigration, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

In the far north, these trends are expected to increase the demand for health care, even as those jobs remain difficult to fill, according to Randall Weaver, a labor market researcher at the state employment department. In Modoc, for instance, about 30% of the county’s 8,500 residents are over the age of 65.

Five of the region’s top 10 employers were health care-related in the past year, Weaver said, while the industry also accounted for about 50% of the top 10 occupations with the most online advertisements. But lower wages and stereotypes of rural living — along with fewer resources for cutting-edge medical infrastructure — make it tough to compete with “larger institutions with deeper pockets” in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.

“There’s clearly demand,” Weaver said. “The question is whether some of the limitations have a dampening effect on the market, and keep the positions from getting filled.”

Employers want to grow the hiring pool by finding and nurturing local talent. Earlier this year, Lassen Community College in Susanville launched a registered nursing program, which the program director described as “strategically designed to meet the escalating demand” for nurses locally and across California. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Workforce Development, one of three services providers contracted by NoRTEC in the region, is helping to grow three in-house training programs with Lassen and Modoc health providers, which provide free, paid training for entry-level health care roles such as certified medical or nursing assistantships.

The idea is not only to receive an education locally, but to “get jobs here, locally, that pay well,” said Kim Keith, the alliance’s director of youth programs. This autumn, a cohort of about a dozen students attended a $17 hourly certified nursing assistant training program, performing their clinical hours in-house at the Lassen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Of course, not all of California’s far north is dealing with the same challenges. Coastal Humboldt, which has a relatively larger labor force and a four-year university, has attracted major recent investments in two offshore wind farms, along with a yellowtail kingfish farm, that officials hope will spawn permanent jobs.

But the county — which has the highest poverty rate of about 18% compared to the other six — is still “scraping and clawing” to recruit people into certain industries, including lawyers, engineers and law enforcement, said Zachary O’Hanen, the county’s director of human resources.

To combat that, O’Hanen’s team has spearheaded efforts to embrace “belongingness” and inclusivity in its recruitment tactics for the public sector, looking to attract the best talent in a county that is rapidly diversifying. The approach has shown anecdotal success in terms of a jump in applications to county positions and recent diverse hires, O’Hanen said.

And while the “Redwood Curtain” stereotypes may persist, the region has a way of pulling people back in: After moving away to Oregon, O’Hanen returned to Humboldt, craving access to nature, the snow, the coast, and the slower pace of life.

“You leave, because you want to see the world, and then you go, ‘Well, maybe the grass wasn’t greener,’” O’Hanen said.

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People who have spent time in jail can learn how to repair and sell bikes if they get into a cohort program for Community Cycles of California, a San Jose-based non-profit that helps people who typically face barriers to employment develop business skills. 

The non-profit gives 10 people who are “justice-involved” the opportunity to learn how to run a business. Many of the participants are also veterans or have been homeless in their past, according to Colin Bruce, who co-founded the non-profit with a friend, Cindy Ahola. 

Participants spend about 40% of their time in the classroom completing various workshops and trainings and 60% of their time rotating jobs within the shop, such as marketing, accounting, office management, retail, bike repairs and building bikes. 

What’s new about the program, Bruce says, is it’s able to offer a 40-hour work week for the six months it runs. This is different from similar workforce development efforts, which typically offer 20-hour or so gigs or limited services, such as resume help. When Bruce and Ahola first started Community Cycles in 2017, they partnered with outside organizations who had a similar part-time model. But around 80% of  participants left the program for full-time jobs.

“These are people that need every penny they can get to keep the roof over their head and pay for food,” he said. “They left to go be short order cooks or a security guard or something like that. And rightly so, because they were working part-time in these programs, they were often, ‘Hey I can’t come in tomorrow, I’ve got to go to my other part-time job.’ They needed two or three part-time jobs just to survive.”

Bruce and Ahola decided to focus the non-profit on bicycles because of his personal passion for bikes. It also gives people who can’t afford a car more independence over their transportation options. 

“The first and last mile are critical,” Bruce said. “Just getting to a bus or train or things like that, bikes are one of the best ways to do it. And commuting less than five miles or so is pretty common around the San Jose area.”

Community Cycles was able to fund its cohort members $23 per hour for 40 hours of work in large part because of a grant from the Breaking Barriers to Employment Initiative, a California state program that awards money to help people who face significant barriers to employment, such as those recently out of jail, get jobs.

Breaking Barriers has completed just one round of funding so far and is in the middle of its second round. In the first and second rounds, it has spent about $27 million on 53 organizations, almost all of them community-based, according to Leti Shafer, a manager in the workforce development department of the Foundation for California Community Colleges, who administers the Breaking Barriers grant program. 

Other examples of grantees include Homeward Bound of Marin and St. John’s for Real Change, which assist people without housing. These organizations offer support services for participants, such as childcare and job preparation. Homeward Bound also provides six months of employment in different types of businesses, such as how to make and sell dog treats. 

Like all grant programs, Breaking Barriers is “as stable as the budget,” Joelle Ball, deputy director of the California Workforce Development Board, said. The initiative “hardly got anything” this past year, for example. Ball said the budget operates on a 10-year cycle, and in years where the California Legislature has more pressing payments, there’s not much money leftover for grants. 

“It’s reliant on the Legislature putting that earmark for the program into the budget,” Ball said. “This is how it is for all of our grant programs. “We don’t have any control over it. We can’t lobby, we can’t ask the Legislature for money, we can’t do any of that. What we do advocate for is if you want to put money into workforce programs with us, put it into our programs that exist.”

On a typical day, childcare workers play with children, read books, prepare meals, change diapers, supervise art projects, introduce vocabulary, monitor children’s emotional and developmental progress, plan curricula and keep records.

For these tasks, childcare workers in the Inland Empire earn a median rate of $18.55 per hour, or about $38,000 per year for a full-time position, according to the California Economic Development Department. By comparison, public school teachers earned an average of $95,160 in 2022-23, the California Department of Education reported.

Given the complexity of the job and its importance to families, childcare workers should be recognized and paid as teachers, advocates argued at a Zócalo Public Square forum in Redlands earlier this month.

“Childcare is early education,” said Maisha Cole, executive director of the Berkeley-based Child Care Law Center. “So all childcare work should be seen as a profession.”

The forum asked “What is a Good Job Now?” in childcare. The answers weren’t surprising: fair pay, decent benefits and recognition of the work.

“There are sectors of childcare where there are no benefits,” said Lisa Wilkin, executive director of the Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles. “There’s no time off. The wages are low. The working conditions are challenging … It’s such hard work for so little reward.”

But low wages for caregivers doesn’t translate into low rates for parents. Parents in California pay an average of $16,000 per year for home-based infant care and $19,500 per year at daycare centers, according to the First Five Years Fund.

Inadequate childcare causes workers to miss shifts and leads many women to cut back work hours or leave their jobs entirely.

High quality childcare is not only expensive, but it’s unavailable to many families. There aren’t enough spaces for kids who need care. Speakers said training more workers won’t help unless there are stable, well-paid jobs for them.

“It’s not a workforce shortage; it’s a shortage of good-paying jobs,” said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “Until we raise the wages and offer better conditions … no amount of training will help.”

To ensure good jobs and affordable childcare there needs to be public investment in the system, much as there is for K-12 and higher education, speakers argued.

“Childcare doesn’t have a dedicated funding source,” Cole said. “K-12 and colleges get money from the state, whereas childcare has to fight every year to keep funding or increase funding.”

Why isn’t childcare a higher priority? Speakers said lack of information about early childhood development plays a part. When people see kids playing with blocks, they may not know the children are developing spatial abilities, math knowledge and social skills, for example.

“A lot of times we don’t do a good job of communicating what they’re learning while they’re playing,” Wilkin said.

Childcare providers need to tell their stories to elected officials, from mayors and city councils to state lawmakers and Congress members, speakers said.

“The more calls, the more memorable the stories are, the more this gets prioritized,” Poo said, adding that paying living wages for childcare jobs is a “triple dignity investment, about the dignity of the worker, children and parents.”

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Federal immigration authorities are looking for a potential new detention center in Northern California, an effort that alarms advocates and some Democratic state lawmakers as President-elect Donald Trump gears up to unleash his mass deportation plan. 

In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a request for information to identify additional detention bed space in the state as other federal agencies intensified border enforcement. The effort began in the wake of the Biden administration’s sweeping asylum ban, implemented in June, for migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border outside designated entry points. Under the ban, border agents can deport such migrants within hours or days without considering their asylum claims.

Advocates say an expansion of detention space would give Trump a runway to carry out more mass deportations in California. Immigrants in counties with more detention space are more likely to be arrested and detained, according to research by advocacy groups. 

Unlike in Texas, where state officials are offering up land to the Trump administration to facilitate mass deportations, California tried to ban new federal immigrant detention centers from opening during the first Trump administration. The court blocked that, ruling that the state was unconstitutionally overstepping on federal immigration enforcement.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta told CalMatters that the state may be powerless to stop the possibility of a new facility.

ICE’s expansion plans 

Federal documents show ICE issued the request for information on Aug. 14. Such requests can pave the way for federal contracts, in this case to obtain “available detention facilities for single adult populations (male and female)” in Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, and California. Its request says the facilities should each have from 850 to 950 detention beds and “may be publicly or privately owned and publicly or privately operated.”

One of the facilities should be within a two-hour drive of the San Francisco field office, the documents state. The request also seeks facilities near field offices in Phoenix, El Paso, and Seattle.

“ICE has identified a need for immigration detention services within the Western U.S. area of responsibility,” ICE spokesman Richard Beam wrote in an email to CalMatters. “The proposed services are part of ICE’s effort to continually review its detention requirements and explore options that will afford ICE the operational flexibility needed to house the full range of detainees in the agency’s custody.”

Currently, ICE detains roughly 38,000 people every day in about 120 immigration jails across the country. In California, that number is just under 3,000 detainees each day, held in six facilities, according to the most recently available immigration data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

That’s the third-largest population of detained immigrants in the country. 

While ICE, the federal agency responsible for immigration enforcement, owns and operates a very small number of facilities nationwide, it mostly contracts with private prison operators such as CoreCivic, GEO Group, and Management and Training Corp. Their detention facilities house 80% of ICE’s detainees. Stock for CoreCivic and GEO Group soared upon Trump’s win last month. 

In California, private, for-profit prison companies run all six ICE detention facilities – the Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde detention facilities in Kern County; the Adelanto Detention Facility and Desert View Annex, both in San Bernardino County; the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County; and the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Imperial County. 

Across all six, the federal government has the capacity to detain up to 7,188 people statewide. 

State Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said she was concerned about the potential economic impacts of ICE having an increased capacity for detention and, therefore, deportations. 

“The expansion of detention in California concerns everyone in our state. Expanding detention correlates with increased ICE raids and family separation, all of which has devastating social and economic impacts for California,” she said. “In addition, these facilities are run by private for-profit companies that consistently place their bottom-line profit above the health and safety of those who work in or are detained in these facilities.”

Advocates argue that detention expansions lead to human rights abuses and undermine community safety. 

“An expansion of ICE detention operations within the Bay Area and Northern California is going to be part of a reign of terror on our communities the Trump administration is threatening,” said Bree Bernwanger, a senior staff attorney on the Immigrants’ Rights team at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “We already know from existing facilities within California that ICE does not and cannot maintain safe and or healthy standards of confinement for people inside.”

The ACLU is suing to learn more about the federal agency’s expanded detention plans. 

Bernwanger was referring to issues like complaints of sexually abusive patdowns. Also, in 2023, ICE allegedly retaliated against hunger strikers by storming into their cells, violently dragging them, threatening them with forced feedings, and then providing food that was not appropriate for breaking a 21-day fast, prompting a medical condition in at least one inmate, according to a claim filed by the inmate, who was represented by two advocacy groups. 

In August, the civil liberties organization released a 34-page report detailing 485 grievances filed by detainees across six immigration detention facilities in California between 2023 and June 2024. Those grievances included allegations of hazardous facilities, inhumane treatment, medical neglect, and retaliation. 

ICE declined to comment on the report. 

California failed to ban for-profit federal detention centers

In December 2019, California passed a law that would have banned private immigration detention centers. It was part of a wave of resistance by California Democrats to the first Trump administration. It also prohibited the state from using for-profit prisons for any inmates starting in 2028. The for-profit facilities “contribute to over-incarceration” and “do not reflect our values,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement when signing the bill. 

Days before the law was set to go into effect, ICE signed new contracts for its facilities in California. The federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned the state’s ban on private prisons. 

Bonta, who wrote the unsuccessful ban as an Oakland assemblymember, told CalMatters in November that the state might not be able to stop ICE from opening another detention facility outside of San Francisco. 

“It’s a matter of federal jurisdiction,” Bonta said. “It’s federal. I disagree, but my office’s disagreement was considered, and the court determined that it was a federal issue.” 

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If you’ve hunted for apartments recently and felt like all the rents were equally high, you’re not crazy: Many landlords now use a single company’s software — which uses an algorithm based on proprietary lease information — to help set rent prices.

Federal prosecutors say the practice amounts to “an unlawful information-sharing scheme” and some lawmakers throughout California are moving to curb it. San Diego’s city council president is the latest to do so, proposing to prevent local apartment owners from using the pricing software, which he maintains is driving up housing costs.

San Diego’s proposed ordinance, now being drafted by the city attorney, comes after San Francisco supervisors in July enacted a similar, first-in-the-nation ban on “the sale or use of algorithmic devices to set rents or manage occupancy levels” for residences. San Jose is considering a similar approach. 

And California and seven other states have also joined the federal prosecutors’ antitrust suit, which targets the leading rental pricing platform, Texas-based RealPage. The complaint alleges that “RealPage is an algorithmic intermediary that collects, combines, and exploits landlords’ competitively sensitive information. And in so doing, it enriches itself and compliant landlords at the expense of renters who pay inflated prices…”

But state lawmakers this year failed to advance legislation by Bakersfield Democratic Sen. Melissa Hurtado that would have banned the use of any pricing algorithms based on nonpublic data provided by competing companies. She said she plans to bring the bill back during the next legislative session because of what she described as ongoing harms from such algorithms. 

“We’ve got to make sure the economy is fair and … that every individual who wants a shot at creating a business has a shot without being destroyed along the way, and that we’re also protecting consumers because it is hurting the pocketbooks of everybody in one way or another,” said Hurtado. 

RealPage has been a major impetus for all of the actions. The company counts as its customers landlords with thousands of apartment units across California. Some officials accuse the company of thwarting competition that would otherwise drive rents down, exacerbating the state’s housing shortage and driving up rents in the process.

“Every day, millions of Californians worry about keeping a roof over their head and RealPage has directly made it more difficult to do so,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a written statement. 

A RealPage spokesperson, Jennifer Bowcock, told CalMatters that a lack of housing supply, not the company’s technology, is the real problem — and that its technology benefits residents, property managers, and others associated with the rental market. The spokesperson later wrote that a “ misplaced focus on nonpublic information is a distraction… that will only make San Francisco and San Diego’s historical problems worse.” 

As for the federal lawsuit, the company called the claims in it “devoid of merit” and said it plans to “vigorously defend ourselves against these accusations.”  

“We are disappointed that, after multiple years of education and cooperation on the antitrust matters concerning RealPage, the (Justice Department) has chosen this moment to pursue a lawsuit that seeks to scapegoat pro-competitive technology that has been used responsibly for years,” the company’s statement read in part. “RealPage’s revenue management software is purposely built to be legally compliant, and we have a long history of working constructively with the (department) to show that.”

The company’s challenges will only grow if pricing software becomes another instance in which California lawmakers lead the nation. Following San Francisco’s ban, the Philadelphia City Council passed a ban on algorithmic rental price-fixing with a veto-proof vote last month. New Jersey has been considering its own ban.

Is it price fixing — or coaching landlords?

According to federal prosecutors, RealPage controls 80% of the market for commercial revenue management software. Its product is called YieldStar, and its successor is AI Revenue Management, which uses much of the same codebase as YieldStar, but has more precise forecasting. RealPage told CalMatters it serves only 10% of the rental markets in both San Francisco and San Diego, across its three revenue management software products. 

Here’s how it works: 

In order to use YieldStar and AIRM, landlords have historically provided RealPage with their own private data from their rental applications, rent prices, executed new leases, renewal offers and acceptances, and estimates of future occupancy, although a recent change allows landlords to choose to share only public data. This information from all participating landlords in an area is then pooled and run through mathematical forecasting to generate pricing recommendations for the landlords and for their competitors. 

The San Diego council president, Sean Elo-Rivera, explained it like this: 

“In the simplest terms, what this platform is doing is providing what we think of as that dark, smoky room for big companies to get together and set prices,” he said. “The technology is being used as a way of keeping an arm’s length from one big company to the other. But that’s an illusion.”

In the company’s own words, from company documents included in the lawsuit, RealPage “ensures that (landlords) are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.” The company also said in the documents that it “helps curb (landlords’) instincts to respond to down-market conditions by either dramatically lowering price or by holding price.”

Providing rent guidance isn’t the only service RealPage has offered landlords. In 2020, a Markup and New York Times investigation found that RealPage, alongside other companies, used faulty computer algorithms to do automated background checks on tenants. As a result, tenants were associated with criminal charges they never faced, and denied homes.

Impact on tenants

Thirty-one-year-old Navy veteran Alan Pickens and his wife move nearly every year “because the rent goes up, it gets unaffordable, so we look for a new place to stay,” he said. The northeastern San Diego apartment complex where they just relocated has two-bedroom apartments advertised for between $2,995 and $3,215. 

They live in an area of San Diego where the U.S. Justice Department says information-sharing agreements between landlords and RealPage have harmed or are likely to harm renters. 

The department in August filed its antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, alleging the company, through its legacy YieldStar software, engaged in an “unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing”. The complaint names specific areas where rents are artificially high. Beyond the part of San Diego where Pickens lives, those areas include South Orange County, Rancho Cucamonga, Temecula, and Murrieta and northeastern San Diego. 

In the second quarter of 2020, the average rent in San Diego County was $1,926, reflecting a  26% increase over three years, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Rents have since risen even more in the city of San Diego, to $2,336 per month as of November 2024 – up 21% from 2020, according to RentCafe and the Tribune. That’s 50% higher than the national average rent.

The attorneys general of eight states, including California, joined the Justice Department’s antitrust suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

The California Justice Department contends RealPage artificially inflated prices to keep them above a certain minimum level, said department spokesperson Elissa Perez. This was particularly harmful given the high cost of housing in the state, she added. “The illegally maintained profits that result from these price alignment schemes come out of the pockets of the people that can least afford it.”

Renters make up a larger share of households in California than in the rest of the country —  44% here compared to 35% nationwide. The Golden State also has a higher percentage of renters than any state other than New York, according to the latest U.S. Census data. 

San Diego has the fourth-highest percentage of renters of any major city in the nation. 

The recent ranks of California legislators, however, have included few renters: As of 2019, CalMatters could find only one state lawmaker who did not own a home — and found that more than a quarter of legislators at the time were landlords.

Studies show that low-income residents are more heavily impacted by rising rents. Nationally between 2000 and 2017, Americans without a college degree spent a higher percentage of their income on rent. That percentage ballooned from 30% to 42%. For college graduates, that percentage increased from 26% to 34%.

“In my estimation, the only winners in this situation are the richest companies who are either using this technology or creating this technology,” said Elo-Rivera. “There couldn’t be a more clear example of the rich getting richer while the rest of us are struggling to get by.”

The state has invested in RealPage

Private equity giant Thoma Bravo acquired RealPage in January 2021 through two funds that have hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from California public pension funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the Regents of the University of California and the Los Angeles police and fire pension funds, according to Private Equity Stakeholder Project. 

“They’re invested in things that are directly hurting their pensioners,” said K Agbebiyi, a senior housing campaign coordinator with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit private equity watchdog that produced a report about corporate landlords’ impact on rental hikes in San Diego. 

RealPage argues that landlords are free to reject the price recommendations generated by its software. But the U.S. Justice Department alleges that trying to do so requires a series of steps, including a conversation with a RealPage pricing adviser. The advisers try to “stop property managers from acting on emotions,” according to the department’s lawsuit.  

If a property manager disagrees with the price the algorithm suggests and wants to decrease rent rather than increase it, a pricing advisor will “escalate the dispute to the manager’s superior,” prosecutors allege in the suit.

In San Diego, the Pickenses, who are expecting their first child, have given up their gym memberships and downsized their cars to remain in the area. They’ve considered moving to Denver.  

“All the extras pretty much have to go,” said Pickens. “I mean, we love San Diego, but it’s getting hard to live here.”  

“My wife is an attorney and I served in the Navy for 10 years and now work at Qualcomm,” he said. “Why are we struggling? Why are we struggling?”  

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed 31 felony charges of wage theft and tax evasion against a construction company that he said cost the state and the company’s workers $2.6 million, he announced today.

Bonta filed the criminal complaint on Aug. 26 alleging that US Framing West dodged more than $2.5 million in state payroll taxes and underpaid workers on a public housing project in Cathedral City, in Riverside County. The company, which builds wood framing for such projects as hotels, apartments and housing developments, shorted workers at least $40,000 when it failed to pay the prevailing wage, Bonta said.

“For some reason US Framing West seems to think it can operate outside the prevailing wage laws of California,” Bonta said in a press conference in Los Angeles today. “I’m here with a simple message: They cannot. No company can.”

Cal Matters contacted officials with US Framing West named on its website but did not receive a response.

Bonta charged the company and two of its officials, Thomas Gregory English and Amelia Frazier Krebs, with wage and tax violations in Riverside, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.

Political observers expect Bonta to announce a run for governor, so publicizing a high-profile labor case may help him build support from unions. Most wage theft cases brought by the state are handled administratively or in civil court. 

Between 2018 and 2022, US Framing West hired unlicensed subcontractors and underreported its payroll to the state Employment Development Department, Bonta said. He accused the company of grand theft, payroll tax evasion, prevailing wage theft, and filing false documents with the state.

US Framing West also skipped personal income tax withholding and premiums for state unemployment and disability insurance, Bonta said, and it filed false payroll records for workers on Veterans Village, the Cathedral City project. The facility opened in 2022, offering 60 housing units and services for veterans. 

The complaint says the company stole wages from 19 workers in Riverside County in 2021 and 2022. Under California’s penal code, employers can face grand theft charges for stealing more than $950 in wages or tips from one employee or a total of $2,350 from two or more employees within a year. 

The Northern California Carpenters Regional Council tipped off the state Department of Justice to potential wage theft violations at an Oakland construction project in 2019, Bonta said. The department subsequently looked into US Framing West’s other projects across the state. 

The office filed charges in August, and the two named defendants surrendered and were arraigned this month.

Subsidizing crime

California’s prevailing wage requirements apply to most projects built with public funding, said  Matthew Miller, senior field representative for labor compliance for Nor Cal Carpenters Union. He said US Framing West was working on at least four housing projects financed with tax credits.

“California taxpayers are subsidizing criminal activity in the affordable housing industry,” Miller said.

He added that developers should avoid doing business with companies that skirt employment and tax laws. 

Wage theft can take various forms — employers don’t pay employees for all hours worked, don’t pay the minimum wage, skip overtime pay or don’t allow legally required breaks. In California, workers lose about $2 billion a year to wage theft, Bonta’s office said, and workers in low-wage industries are the most affected. In 2020 and 2021, workers filed claims for more than $300 million in stolen wages each year.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, called wage theft “the number one crime” in the burglary and theft category and said businesses should not be able to pay their way out of wage theft violations. 

This story was made possible in part by a grant from the CIELO Fund of the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

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When he was 18, Chanthon Bun recalled, he was the lookout during a Los Angeles robbery in which no one was hurt. He sentenced to 50 years in state prison. 

Incarcerated for 23 years, he was paroled in 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic. 

Bun had come to the United States as a refugee at age 6. He was born during the Cambodian Genocide, when millions of people were put into work camps, separated from their families, and killed by the communist Khmer Rouge.

Although he’s a legal permanent resident of the United States, the 46-year-old is among the thousands of Californians who live in constant fear of deportation because of a past criminal conviction. That threat became even more serious earlier this month when Donald Trump was re-elected. The president-elect has vowed to launch the biggest militarized mass deportation in U.S. history, and his team has since doubled down on those threats. 

“I worry about what’s going to happen to my kids,” Bun said. “It’s like you’re not even here. Your mind is in such fear that you can’t even enjoy breathing.” 

Immigration experts warn of an indiscriminate dragnet that could put almost anyone at risk, but some are in more immediate jeopardy than others. Those include non-citizens who have had contact with the criminal justice system; some 1.3 million people nationwide who have already received final orders of removal, and undocumented people who may live or work in close proximity to the other two groups. 

“Folks who have had contact with the criminal legal system will be of high priority,” said Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the left-leaning Washington think tank American Immigration Council. “Under current immigration law, that includes people who might have convictions from decades prior. There’s no statute of limitations on when the government can remove someone.”  

Communities closer to the border may be at greater risk early in the next Trump administration because that’s where more Customs and Border Protection agents and Border Patrol officials are located. Trump has said he plans to use those agencies to carry out his mass deportation plan.  

For months, advocates have been planning ways to fight back.

“He doesn’t own our states,” said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. “And our states will be the frontline in the defense of our civil liberties and our civil rights.” 

California, which has the country’s largest immigrant population, already has strong state laws to protect immigrant communities from mass deportations, although not as strong as Oregon and Illinois, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Those two states have comprehensive laws restricting transfers of people to ICE, whereas California state prison employees regularly contact the federal immigration enforcement agency about inmates in their custody, including United States citizens, public records show. Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national nonprofit that provides legal training and does pro-immigrant policy work in California and Texas, estimates 70 to 75% of ICE arrests in the interior of the U.S. are handoffs from another law enforcement agency, such as local jails or state or federal prisons. 

During Trump’s first term, California led in resisting federal deportation of undocumented immigrants by becoming the first ‘sanctuary state’ that curbed local agencies’ cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But before that law was signed, it was weakened to allow state prisons to continue their coordination with ICE and to give federal immigration agents access to interview people in prisons and jails. Protections that limited police agencies sharing data with ICE were also weakened to allow for information to be provided if a person has been convicted of one of some 800 crimes.  

The day after Trump’s second election, Gov. Gavin Newsom summoned the Legislature, dominated by his fellow Democrats, to a special session starting Dec. 2 — vowing to “protect California values” as the state braces for renewed clashes with the incoming administration. 

Trump’s political ascent was fueled by racist and xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants:  At a December 2023 campaign rally in New Hampshire, for instance, he said they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He’s promised to expend massive federal resources on raids and sweeps in immigrant communities, especially in ‘sanctuary cities.’ One goal: to discourage future illegal immigration.

“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice,” he recently told NBC. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

A majority of registered voters – 56% – agree with enforcing mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally, according to the Pew Research Center. In a separate survey by Data for Progress, 67% of voters say they supported deporting an undocumented person who has a criminal record for a non-violent offense. 

In California, immigrant advocates want the state to step up again.   

“We’re looking to California to provide leadership,” said Alex Mensing with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. “We fully expect California to stand up to ICE’s terror as a state. We fully expect the state to put as much creativity and as many resources as possible toward supporting a response that defends immigrants.”  

In an interview with CalMatters, Attorney General Rob Bonta said Friday his office is preparing legal challenges and bracing for “a full frontal assault on our immigrant communities.”

“We are ready to file,” he added. “We have been thinking about and preparing and readying ourselves for the possibility of this moment for months.”

Bonta said his office has been carefully watching and listening to what the president-elect and his team say they are planning, “and, thankfully, he’s telling us what he’s going to do.” 

“The Trump administration 1.0 told us one thing: that Trump is unable to not break the law. It’s his brand. He does what he wants to do, when he wants to and how he wants to, regardless of the Constitution or federal law. And by doing that, he breaks the law,” Bonta said. “That’s why our job is so important to be there when he does and to stop him from doing it.”

The state’s attorney general office spent about $10 million a year in legal expenses fighting Trump during the last administration, Bonta acknowledged, but “you can’t put a price on freedom, on rights, on democracy. It is always the right time and the right thing to protect those rights.” During the last Trump administration, California’s attorneys successfully defended protections for people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, for example. 

For years, the Golden State has been increasing protections for immigrants. 

This year, California passed a law that will allow county health workers to inspect inside federal immigration detention centers where there has been a long documented history of medical neglect and worker safety violations. In 2023, the state fined the for-profit prison operator Geo Group $100,000 for six workplace violations, including lacking a plan to control COVID-19 spread and failure to provide information and training on hazardous chemicals.    

Advocates say more could be done, such as strengthening data protections in local police agencies and preventing state prison staff from coordinating with ICE. 

The governor could pardon immigrants with old criminal records, shielding them from deportation. Newsom has done it when certain refugees faced removal due to old cases, like Bun’s, but Newsom’s clemency rate has been lower than that of other governors. 

“Governor Newsom has pardoned far fewer people than Governor Brown,” said Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney of the San Francisco public defender’s office. “Thus far, in his six years in office, Governor Newsom has granted 186 pardons, an average of 31 pardons a year. By contrast, Governor Brown issued 1,332 pardons during his third and fourth terms as governor, an average of 166 pardons per year.”

There are limits to what California can do. Lots of legal issues remain unresolved and will be battled out in court. Most sanctuary laws have a caveat that says local law enforcement cannot cooperate with immigration authorities “unless required by a valid court order.” Experts said what constitutes a valid court order might become an issue for the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court let California’s sanctuary law stand in 2020 by not hearing a Trump challenge to it.

The state also can’t do much about military troops entering California. The president can federalize the National Guard. In 2018, Trump sent nearly 6,000 active-duty service members to the border, authorizing them to perform “military protective activities.” 

“It’s going to have to be fought out in the courts,” said Shawn VanDiver, a national security expert.

Some of the avenues Trump is exploring to deploy the military, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, would require an invasion by a foreign government, some lawyers say. Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who argued challenges to immigration restrictions during Trump’s first term, said the president-elect’s plan to use the military is illegal, and the civil liberties organization was already preparing legal challenges. 

“Trump is going to do everything that he can get away with,” said Mensing. 

But there are limits to what Trump can do too, particularly based on the resources he’d need to deliver on some of his campaign promises. 

The president-elect has said he plans to carry out a million deportations a year. The highest number of deportations in a single fiscal year in recent history was fiscal year 2012 – during the Obama administration – with 407,821 deportations across the United States. During Trump’s first term, he was only able to carry out several hundred thousand removals a year, about on par with other presidents, at least partly because of California and other states’ new sanctuary laws.

According to the American Immigration Council, the long-term cost of deporting one million people annually could average $88 billion annually, which would be higher than the Department of Homeland Security’s $62 billion budget in fiscal year 2025. It would also require massive expansions of federal immigration court systems and detention facilities.  

Deportations from California have reached record lows in recent years following the changes in state law and policy about ICE pick-ups and new federal regulations about COVID testing before pick-ups at state prisons, public records show.

Advocates are emphasizing the need for community preparedness and organization to combat the anticipated crackdown on immigrants in California. 

“There are a lot of people actively preparing, and I think community members should take heart in that and also participate,” said Mensing. “Ultimately, that is what is going to prevent Trump from getting what he wants, which is to terrorize people.”   

In immigrant communities across the state, advocates are helping those at risk of detention and deportation make emergency plans, including who will pick up their children from school and how to protect their assets in the United States. ‘Know your rights’ workshops are being organized, and neighbors are helping each other get informed. 

“Power not panic” is a mantra Mensing and others often repeat. “Trump is going to attack sanctuary cities and sanctuary states because he is vindictive. Our main tools are to be organized and to be informed,” he said.   

Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, a Quaker organization, said even people with some form of legal status and protection are concerned. 

“The amount of worry and the amount of uncertainty that people have is just tremendous and what I tell people is to find a supportive community and to not be alone at this time,” said Rios. He said he was asked to talk to a 6-year-old child “because what he had been hearing in his school terrified him.” 

Bun said his phone has also been ringing nonstop with urgent calls from fellow Cambodian refugees across the country. Meanwhile, he’s been trying to figure out how to tell his own 3-year-old son that there might be a knock on the door and he’ll be gone forever. 

“This is like planning a life sentence,” he said. “How could you plan for that?” 

Journalism engineer Mohamed Al Elew contributed to this report.

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After flood waters from heavy rainstorms deluged two small farmworker towns in early 2023, California set aside $20 million each for the communities to rebuild. 

Nearly two years since the floods, four-fifths of that aid has not yet been distributed to flood victims of Planada in Merced County, and even less has been distributed in Pajaro in Monterey County.

While county officials and non-profit workers say the slow pace stems from a deliberative planning process and state rules requiring verification of recipients’ residency and losses, a new atmospheric river soaking Northern California is causing anxiety for locals who saw their neighborhoods destroyed once before.

Winter storms caused waterways to overflow in the two communities, hitting many residents with a triple whammy: displaced from their homes, their possessions destroyed, their work hours in the field cut. State lawmakers granted the relief funds in the fall of 2023. The counties divided them into various pots to cover reimbursement for belongings and wages, home repair, business losses, and infrastructure improvements to prepare for the next storm.

As of this month, about $4 million of the $20 million in state aid designated for Planada had been spent, the bulk of that in direct payments to families, Merced County spokesperson Mike North said.

In Pajaro, county officials working with nonprofits have handed out about $1.3 million of its $20 million share: $450,000 in grocery gift cards to residents whose food spoiled during the flooding, plus about another $800,000 to people and businesses with larger losses not covered by federal disaster aid or private insurance.

Angela DiNovella, the executive director of Catholic Charities Diocese of Monterey – one of two organizations contracted with Monterey County to help Pajaro residents apply for the funds – said her organization’s three case workers were distributing an average of $30,000 per week to families.

One of the main challenges, she said, was verifying eligibility for families who lacked a permanent address or lived in overcrowded conditions, such as when three families share a single apartment. Some people also struggled to document how much they had lost, so caseworkers were doing the painstaking labor of reviewing photographs and trying to estimate the dollar value of each item.

“The reality is this is state funding that comes with a lot of requirements,” she said. “Our work is to be creative with the families and be on their side but even that takes time.”

Monterey County set up an assistance center in a community park this past spring to help residents apply for the aid, DiNovella said. But Danielle Rivera, an environmental planning professor at UC Berkeley who conducts fieldwork in the area, said many community members remain confused about where the state aid is going and how to benefit. And some, she said, may have moved away before they got any help.

“People were displaced from the floods – they were renting and the landlord said ‘This unit’s out of commission.’ Then that household tries to find housing somewhere else and maybe they came back to Pajaro, maybe they went to Watsonville, maybe they just left the Pajaro Valley entirely,” she said.

Residents in both communities who were undocumented could also qualify for a statewide Storm Assistance for Immigrants program, aimed at helping California flood victims who were ineligible for federal emergency assistance. The $95 million statewide program for storm victims offered a flat stipend of $1,500 per qualifying adult. 

Millions in additional aid from philanthropic groups, private insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has also poured into Pajaro since the floods, county officials said — though residents’ ability to access that help varied based on whether they were homeowners or legal U.S. residents.

In Planada, North said the county had nearly completed distributing funds for replacement of lost vehicles, personal property and business assets, and was moving on to help with home repair. That work “takes more time as it’s dependent upon certain detailed inspections for issues like mold, foundation damage, asbestos testing, and could require structural engineering in some cases,” he said by email. 

Infrastructure projects are also moving forward, North said, though more slowly. The county has replaced a backup generator for the local community services district that failed during the floods, and is commissioning a study on how to prevent future inundations.

Half of Pajaro’s $20 million is earmarked for infrastructure and emergency preparedness projects, and Monterey County spokesperson Nick Pasculli said the county had requested bids for about half the projects.

DiNovella, whose organization also worked with families displaced by the 2020 fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains, said that communities often take years to recover from disasters and that the pace of aid in Pajaro, while slow, is sadly par for the course. The most recent batch of aid, while delayed, will give families a boost during the slow winter season when many farmworkers are barely scraping by, she said.

One Pajaro resident who got state help is Jesús Padilla, who’s lived in the town for 25 years, working the strawberry and blackberry harvests. When the floods hit, he and his family just had time to grab the three children’s birth certificates and run. They lost everything – furniture, clothes, kitchenware.

Now, he worries most about his family’s physical and mental health. Every time it rains, his children ask him, “If it keeps raining more, where will we go?”

His family had already replaced many of their belongings, but the state grant that Catholic Charities helped him obtain reimbursed some of their expenses. He has friends who are still waiting for help.

He tells them to be patient – “It seems like the process is working. Just slowly.”

For the record: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the storms that flooded Planada and Pajaro.