Good morning. It’s Wednesday, March 1.
- Home prices and sales are falling across the state.
- L.A. County to pay $28.85 million to Vanessa Bryant.
- And the hardest-to-book campground in California.
Statewide
1.
A blizzard pummeled the Sierra Nevada with blinding wind and snow on Tuesday, burying homes and closing roads, schools, and ski lifts. An estimated 3 feet of snow fell in 24 hours in Tahoe communities, reports said. Still, some motorists ventured out and got stuck. On the eastern side of the Sierra, the Mono County Sheriff’s Office posted to social media with barely concealed frustration: “The roads are closed. All of them. There is no alternate route, back way, or secret route. It’s a blizzard, people.” S.F. Chronicle | SFGATE
- Yosemite said Tuesday that it would stay closed indefinitely after snow piled up 15 feet in places. The park shared pictures. 👉 @YosemiteNPS
- Snow levels were expected to drop as low as 1,500 feet in Southern California Wednesday, again blanketing the foothills. The predicted snow totals. 👉 @NWSLosAngeles
2.
California on Tuesday officially lifted its Covid state of emergency, 1,091 days after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared it on March 4, 2020. The declaration gave Newsom broad powers to protect Californians from the virus, and he used it to issue more than 70 executive orders that locked down businesses, paused evictions, and mandated masking. Little will change upon the end of the emergency, however, since nearly all of the orders have already been rolled back. S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
3.
Dispatches from California’s cooling housing market:
- For the first time in a decade homes in the Bay Area are selling, on average, below asking price, data showed. Homes are staying on the market significantly longer and prices are down about 30% from their all-time high in May. Mercury News
- Southern California home sales in January fell to their lowest number in records going back 35 years. Just 9,938 sales were closed; about 17,000 is average. Prices have been falling for eight straight months. L.A. Daily News
Northern California
4.
When San Francisco’s reparations task force recommended giving qualifying Black residents $5 million each in December, the proposal drew intense backlash from conservatives. But even some within the reparations movement have scoffed. The number should be “somewhat realistic,” the economist William A. Darity Jr. said. “Calling for $5 million payout by a local government undercuts the credibility of the reparations effort.” Washington Post
5.
During the boom years, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff told employees they were bound together like family. Now he is laying off thousands of them. After an executive retreat in February, he proposed keeping metrics on workers and routinely firing the bottom 5%. The company abandoned its wellness retreat, Trailblazer Ranch. Monthly “well-being days,” essentially a day off, ended in January. The firings are unfortunate, Benioff said, but “ultimately, the success of the business has to be paramount.” Wall Street Journal
6.
San Francisco is the only city in California that allows people to appeal building permits even after they have navigated the arduous path to approval through a planning department. The tactic is currently being used to delay 90 units of affordable housing in a neighborhood by Golden Gate Park. Assembly Member Matt Haney just introduced a bill to eliminate the appeals, which he likened to the wedding tradition of asking if any guest has objections. “Your crazy uncle doesn’t get to actually stop the wedding,” he said, “but in this case they do.” S.F. Chronicle
7.
The San Francisco columnist Joe Eskenazi tore into a New York Times op-ed diagnosing his hometown’s political dysfunction. Its author, venture capitalist Michael Moritz, bemoaned that San Francisco is a one-party town. “San Francisco’s problem is not liberalism,” Eskenazi wrote. “It’s incompetence. It’s sloth. It’s poor governance, dysfunctional bureaucracy, and casual corruption enabled by vast and steady torrents of wealth.” Mission Local
8.
Camping surged during the pandemic, making popular destinations next to impossible to reserve. The Dyrt, a popular camping app, analyzed reservation data to rank the country’s hardest-to-book campgrounds, a fairly good proxy for how beautiful they are. The most coveted in California: Twin Lakes Campground near Mammoth Lakes, which was fully booked 97% of the time in 2022. It’s easy to see why:
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Tom Stienstra, the quintessential California outdoors writer, once gave his picks for the top 10 prettiest California campgrounds. PRweb.com
Southern California
9.
Los Angeles County agreed to pay the family of Vanessa Bryant, the widow of Kobe Bryant, $28.85 million after fire officials and sheriff’s deputies shared graphic photos of the 2020 helicopter crash that killed her husband, one of their daughters, and seven others. The debacle has been deeply embarrassing for the county and costly for taxpayers. In addition to the Bryants’ payout, the county previously awarded nearly $20 million to Chris Chester, whose wife and daughter were killed in the crash, and $1.25 million each for two other families. L.A. Times | A.P.
10.
Linda Kasabian died on Jan. 21. Kasabian stood lookout on the night of the Los Angeles bloodbath in 1969 that became known around the world as the Tate-LaBianca murders. But she was given immunity after serving as the star witness at the murder trial of Charles Manson and other members of his clan. While her associates went to prison for life, Kasabian moved back to her hometown in New Hampshire, changed her name, worked as a short-order cook, and raised four children. She was 73. Washington Post | N.Y. Times
11.
Just off the highway 20 miles up the coast from Los Angeles is the largest cannabis greenhouse complex in the country. Glass House Farms in Camarillo is more than 114 acres, the equivalent of about 86 football fields. It amounts to a huge bet on marijuana becoming legal nationally, said Graham Farrar, a co-founder. “And when that happens,” he said, “this farm goes from feeling really big to really small.” Washington Post
12.
In 2006, a group of artists had the hare-brained idea to convert an airplane hangar at a decommission military base in Orange County into a colossal pinhole camera. They papered the walls in 24,000 square feet of black plastic sheeting to block out the light and punched a quarter-inch pinhole into the wall. The resulting print showed a rather bland scene of scrubby California land. But its awesome size — 31 feet by 111 feet — makes it the world’s largest photograph taken on the world’s largest camera. “The Great Picture” is now on display at Irvine’s Great Park through May. Petapixel | O.C. Register
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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