folk

Bob Anderson — physician, pilot, executive — is nothing if not a perfectionist.

He’s owned his fair share of recreational vehicles and disliked each of them uniquely. There was the Earth Roamer (anemic axles, in his opinion), the $350,000 Newmar land yacht (complex emissions technology) and a 25-foot Airstream trailer (lots of propane). Yet Anderson, 81, keeps buying camping rigs. And he’s hoping the next one will be his last.

This fall, he’ll take delivery of a Lightship AE.1 Cosmos, an RV as similar to an Airstream as a Tesla Roadster is to a Pontiac Firebird.

What separates the Lightship from the rest of Anderson’s letdowns is its propulsion system and design: The rig has two electric motors, so it can drive itself while hitched to the vehicle towing it, and the entire top half tucks down for better aerodynamics while underway. With these two hacks, the vehicle towing the Lightship will feel virtually no weight most of the time. On the interstate, Anderson’s hybrid pickup truck will theoretically get its standard 27 miles per gallon, rather than the 12.5 miles it manages with the Airstream behind it.

“It’s going to change everything in the RV world,” Anderson says.

This year may well be an inflection point for the RV industry, when serious alternatives are emerging to the gas-guzzling rigs chugging between national parks.

In addition to the Lightship, the Pebble Flow — another towable camper with an electric drivetrain — will hit the road. Meanwhile, a host of electric vans will finally be stamped out in high volumes, most notably Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz , the latest iteration of the brand’s storied bus. Even incumbent Thor Inc., which is to RVs what Apple is to smartphones, is putting the final touches on its first hybrid rig.

“It’s certainly a huge milestone,” says McKay Featherstone, head of global innovation at Thor Inc. “People can finally go and buy these things and experience this technology.”

Last year, Americans bought 637,000 RVs, many of which burned a gallon of gas every six to 15 miles traveled. These rigs will stay on the road for about 200,000 miles, belching copious amounts of carbon dioxide.

Electric RVs promise to make the summer road trip vastly cleaner, more convenient and quiet.

Among other things, electric models will help the RV industry shake off what the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association refers to as a “Covid hangover.” The group is forecasting a slight increase in total US sales this year, in part because of the growing number of electric options.

“The vibes, if you will, are good,” says spokeswoman Monika Geraci. “And there does seem to be an appetite there.”

In a Venn diagram of folks who love camping and folks who are climate-concerned, there’s quite a bit of overlap. That may partially explain why, of the roughly 58 million American households that go camping every year, only 12 million of them own an RV.

Yet it’s not like RV drivers don’t care about the climate. “Obviously, these people love the outdoors,” explains Featherstone at Thor, “and that does translate into people who want a lighter footprint.”

In fact, some of the same people who long avoided camping rigs and their sizable clouds of emissions are now at the helm of RV startups. These folks could never find a camper green enough for their liking, so they set out to make one.

Lightship was launched by two Tesla alumni after a disappointing RV journey. Co-founder Toby Kraus says the company is getting plenty of interest from RV newbies who strive to keep a low carbon footprint, but the company has been surprised at the number of orders from everyday drivers and who don’t care about the climate benefits.

Anderson is one of the latter: He pays little mind to his personal carbon footprint. What thrills him is the idea of spending less money on gas and having an RV that doesn’t have to churn a combustion engine to run the air conditioning and refrigerator.

In that regard, Lightspeed is borrowing a page from the Tesla playbook.

“The reason Tesla was successful is not because it was sustainable,” Kraus explains. “It’s because the product was awesome. It was clean tech by Trojan Horse.”

With the glow of ambient light tucked behind ceiling fabric, the interior of the Lightship Ae.1 feels like the first-class cabin of a commercial jet. An induction cooktop is built into the counter, a heat pump quietly cycles air and everything on the rig is controlled by an app. Lightship plans to eventually sell smaller, more affordable models, but its launch vehicle costs a heady $250,000.

The Pebble Flow parks a little further down market with its founders edition priced at $175,000. Co-founder Bingrui Yang spent much of his career working at Apple on the iPhone and, aesthetically, the rig travels the same lane. With a bed that folds up against the wall and Starlink internet service, the interior is geared for Zoom calls as much as napping in nature, reflecting the rise of remote work.

“This is the right time for this product,” Yang says.

The market is also shifting in ways that may further favor electric models. Since 2021, the average age of US RV customers has dropped from 53 to 49, while the share of the market making more than $100,000 a year climbed from 29% to 33%.

“It’s not your grandma and grandpa anymore,” Geraci says. “It’s a different consumer, and they’re looking for more technology.”

While expensive, the new electric towables change the standard RV economics; because they can propel themselves much of the time, they can be towed with less horsepower and pair nicely with electric vehicles, machines for which towing has been Kryptonite due to range issues.

There are also alternatives on the horizon to the hulking, three-bedroom motor coach. These vehicles make up one out of every 10 RVs sold, yet they get some of the worst gas mileage of any non-commercial vehicle, hoovering up a gallon of gas every six or seven miles.

Thor is putting the finishing touches on a hybrid vehicle — dubbed simply “Test Vehicle” — that doesn’t look markedly different from its gas-burning products. But refinements in design make it about 20% more aerodynamic. The 210 kilowatt-hours of battery power under the hood along with a gas generator for charging give it somewhere around 500 miles of range.

On long trips, it will burn roughly half as much fuel as a similar-sized internal combustion rig and offer even better range on short jaunts. Thor will start taking orders in the fall and producing the vehicles by year-end.

Still, there’s a huge chunk of the camper market for whom even a towable is too much. Last year, Americans bought 8,300 camper vans as well as an untold number converted minivans and commercial vans to handle s’mores and sleeping duty.

These folks also have a bevy of new choices. In the first half of the year, Americans bought 2,500 ID.Buzzes. Many of those rigs will be pressed into minimalist camping service, and aftermarket shops are helping kit them out.

That includes Peace Vans in Seattle, which counts both Macklemore and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron as clients. For the Buzz, the company built three different camping configurations. Owner Harley Stitner expects to complete about 1,000 retrofits in the next few years.

Sam Shapiro launched Grounded RVs after six months on the road in 2020 en route to a job at SpaceX. “Before that, I don’t think I’d ever even been in an RV,” he says. “There’s this irony of having this experience to embrace nature, yet you’re sitting there at a campground running a combustion engine, creating exhaust, making noise.”

At its factory in Detroit, Grounded is essentially taking the chassis of an electric General Motors BrightDrop van, topping it with the shell of a Class B motorhome and adding its own solar array and battery management software. The rigs can travel about 300 miles on a charge. As with other electric campers, buyers will pay a premium: $195,000, nearly double what a gas-burning rig of the same size runs.

Last year, Grounded shipped 15 of its machines; this year, it’s aiming for 50. Roughly half of Grounded customers are RV rookies.

“They’ve been waiting for something like this to come along,” Shapiro says. “So many of our customers have said they never want to own a gas-powered vehicle again.”

Stock writes for Bloomberg.

Choreographer and California Hall of Fame inductee Alonzo King brings his San Francisco-based contemporary ballet company to Long Beach for an evening of dance immersed in the spiritually rooted, avant-garde jazz stylings of Alice Coltrane, including her seminal album “Journey in Satchidananda.” In addition to this tribute to one of America’s only jazz harpists, the company will present a fresh take on Maurice Ravel’s suite of Mother Goose fairy tales, “Ma mère l’Oye,” which was originally written as a piano duet in 1910.

Where: Carpenter Performing Arts Center
When: Nov. 8, 8 p.m.
Price: Starting at $38.75

To hear our national leaders tell it, Los Angeles is in chaos and our governor and mayor are out to lunch with the police, blissfully ignoring reality as the city burns.

“These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED,” President Trump wrote on social media, shortly after ordering the National Guard onto our streets.

“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” he wrote in a memo Saturday, authorizing 2,000 National Guard troops to be deployed in L.A. for at least 60 days.

Put down your matcha lattes and trade in your Birkenstocks for boots, folks. We are the revolution, apparently, so dangerous only a seasoned military can stop us. The only problem, of course, is that Los Angeles is not in chaos on this particular sunny Sunday and the vast majority of Angelenos are just trying to enjoy the weekend without becoming a federal prisoner.

Trump’s memo will go into the history books as a moment when presidential power expanded to put under his control a military force aimed at U.S. civilians. Although not unprecedented, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, said it was “stunning.”

All the more so because the deployment is based on a lie. Yes, there has been some violence in the last few days as federal immigration authorities round up criminals and regular folks alike in deportation sweeps. If you keep the camera angle tight on those protests, as many media outlets have done, it does look dire.

Rocks being thrown, even Molotov cocktails. Masked protesters hammering at concrete pillars outside a downtown federal building. Cars on fire.

All of this is terrible and those responsible should be arrested — by our local police and sheriffs, who are more than up to the job of handling a few hundred protesters.

But 99% of this city is business as usual, with brunches and beach walks and church and yoga classes. And even in those few pockets where the protests are happening, such as a march downtown Sunday, this is Los Angeles — I’ve seen more chaos after a Lakers game.

Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told my colleague Seema Mehta that although it’s extremely unusual for a president to take federal control of troops, it’s not unprecedented and maybe not illegal. It happened in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict.

“One of the exceptions is when there is violence and the inability of the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Levinson said. “And that is exactly what the president is arguing is happening.”

My intrepid colleagues at this paper have been on the ground since the first protests began, and, as their reporting shows, the majority of what is happening is peaceful and isolated.

Even the cops agree. And seriously, when the cops are agreeing there’s no riot — there is no riot.

“Demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly,” the LAPD wrote in a statement Saturday night.

Still, by Sunday morning, those troops, in full military gear with guns in hand (presumably with less lethal ammo, I hope), were arriving. The U.S. Northern Command tweeted that the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team has some members on the ground in Los Angeles, with more to come.

“These operations are essential to halting and reversing the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States. In the wake of this violence, California’s feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, further explained before they arrived.

Also, as you plan your week, there is now a dress code — at least for civilians, not the authorities intent on hiding their identities.

“(F)rom now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why???” Trump wrote.

All this, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, is “not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.”

He’s right — Los Angeles has landed a starring role in Trump’s war on brown people. It makes sense. We are a city of immigrants, of all colors, and a Democratic — and democratic — one at that. What’s not to hate?

Mayor Karen Bass told my colleague Rachel Uranga that her office had tried to talk to the White House to tell them “there was absolutely no need to have troops on the ground,” but got nowhere.

“This is posturing,” Bass said.

“They want violence,” Newsom added in a Sunday email. “Don’t give them the spectacle they want.”

I’m not sure that’s possible. There will always be the bad actors, the violent ones, at any protest. And again — they should be arrested.

But Trump is going to laser-focus on those few to make an example of this city, and to increase his own power.

Because although this “insurrection” is a fantasy, his dream of more power seems all too real.

Three years ago, an armed young man entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers. Hundreds of law enforcement officials reportedly stood around the school campus for more than an hour without approaching the shooter.

In the midst of the inaction, one mom — Angeli Rose Gomez — pleaded with officers to take action or let her go in to get her two children and nephew. She was apprehended and handcuffed, but ultimately talked her way out of arrest before she sprinted inside the school to grab the kids.

Videos on social media captured the moments that Gomez brought her sons and nephew out of the school. The Texas field worker and mother of two was quickly dubbed a hero in national and local publications for her courage.

The new documentary film “Uvalde Mom” follows Gomez after becoming nationally recognized — while examining the forces at play in the Uvalde community which allowed for the shooting to take place, as well as the aftermath of such a tragedy.

“All I wanted that day was my kids to come out of the school alive, and that’s what I got,” Gomez says in one pivotal moment in the film. “I don’t want to be called a hero. I don’t want to be looked at as the hero because the only job that I did that day was being a mom.”

The feature’s director Anayansi Prado was “moved” and “horrified” by what had happened and felt motivated to make a film about the event after seeing members of the affected families on TV.

“I saw that there were Latinos, they were Mexican American, that it was a border town, that it was an agricultural farming town, and that really resonated with me and with communities I’ve done film work with before,” Prado told The Times.

Prado began reaching out to people in Uvalde shortly after the shooting, but didn’t hear back from anyone for over two months due to the inundation of media requests everyone in the city was receiving. The only person to reply to her was Gomez.

Ahead of the film’s screening Saturday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Prado spoke with The Times about the process and the challenges of making her documentary.

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

Was the idea always for this project to be a feature-length film? Or were there talks of making it a short or a series?

I’ve always thought about it as a feature because I really wanted to dive in and understand Uvalde as a character. I wanted to understand the history of the criminal justice system, the educational system. I knew I wanted to make something that was going to be of a longer form rather than just a piece that was about Angeli or something. And a few people told me this would make a great short, but as I uncovered more about Uvalde, I was like, “No, Uvalde itself has its own history, just like a person.”

When it came to choosing Angeli, was she the first and only person who responded to your outreach?

I think the people in town were oversaturated with media coverage, and Angeli was the one that got back to me. What was really interesting is that I learned on that first trip [to Uvalde] about her backstory and I learned about how the criminal justice system had failed her. I saw a parallel there of how the system failed the community the day of the shooting and how it was failing this woman also individually. I wanted to play with those two stories, the macro and the personal. Once I learned who she was, beyond the mom who ran into the school, I was like, “I have to tell this woman’s story.”

How did you go about balancing her personal stuff and the failures that happened on a larger scale?

So much of the way the film is structured is reflective of my own experience as a filmmaker. It was a sort of surreal world, these two worlds were going on: what was happening to Angeli and then what was going on outside with the lack of accountability and the cover-up. So that informed the way that I wanted to structure the film.

In terms of the personal, it was a journey to gain Angeli’s trust. At some point at the beginning, she wasn’t sure she wanted to participate in the film, and so I told her, “You don’t owe me anything. I’m a stranger, but all I ask is that you give me a chance to earn your trust.” And she was like, “OK.” From there on, she opened up and, pretty quickly, we became close and she trusted me. I was very cognizant [of] her legal past and even the way she’s perceived by some folks. I also didn’t want Angeli to come off as a victim and people to feel sorry for her, but I still wanted to tell her story in a way where you get mad at the system for failing her.

What kind of struggles did you have trying to get in communication with some of the officials of the city?

We used a lot of news [archives] to represent that part of the story. The [authorities] weren’t giving any interviews, they were just holding press conferences. So access was limited, but also the majority of the time that we were filming, we were very low-key about the production — because Angeli was on probation and there was retaliation for her speaking to the media. We tried to keep it under wraps that we were filming, so not a lot of people knew about it [besides] her family. Obviously other folks in town [were] part of the film, like her friend Tina and family members. Outside of that, it was too risky to let other people in town know what was going on.

Ultimately I wanted to make [“Uvalde Mome”] a personal portrait. I was just very selective on the people that we absolutely needed to interview. I’m happy with Tina, who’s an activist in town, and Arnie, a survivor of the shooting and a school teacher, [plus] Angeli’s legal team. I felt like those were people we needed to tell a fuller story. But we just couldn’t be out in the open making a film about her and let people know.

What kind of reception have you gotten from people of Uvalde that have seen the film?

We had our premiere at South by Southwest, which was great. A lot of folks came from Uvalde and spoke about how, almost three years later, a lot of this stuff is still going on. Every time Gov. Greg Abbott came on-screen, people would scream, “Loser!” It was really moving to have those screenings.

As was expected from the folks who are not fans of Angeli, there was some backlash. It’s the same narrative you see in the film of, “She’s a criminal, don’t believe her.” It’s a town that is an open wound. I just try to have compassion for people. Ultimately, Angeli’s story is the story of one person in Uvalde of many that need to continue to be told. And I hope that other filmmakers, journalists and other storytellers continue to tell the story there, especially with the lack of closure and accountability. I’m happy that the film is putting Uvalde back into the headlines in some way; that way we don’t forget about it.

Had you ever spent an extended amount of time in Texas before?

I had been to Texas, but I hadn’t done a project in Texas. Because I’m an outsider, it was very important for me to hire a 100% local Texas crew for this film. My crew was entirely Texas-based, from our PAs to our sound to our DPs. I also wanted to have a majority Texas-born Mexican American crew so that they could guide me. We began production in September of 2022 and the atmosphere was very tense.

This is a story that is deeply rooted in the Latino community and the tension about the law enforcement in Uvalde. What was it like dealing with that tension and how did you personally feel that when you went into the town?

When I got to Uvalde, I saw that the majority of the Latino community had been there for several generations. You would think a town with that kind of Mexican American history, and them being the majority, that they’d be pretty cemented and represented, right? It was really eye-opening to see [how] these folks are still considered second-class citizens. A lot of them are being repressed. And then you have folks that get in positions of power, but they’re whitewashed in line with the white conservative agenda. So even those that are able to get into positions of power don’t lean towards the community. They turn their back on it.

I heard from folks that the history of neglect was what led to the response that day at Robb Elementary. And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s what happens on that side of town. You call the cops, they don’t come. Our schools are run-down.” You really see the disparity. This was a Mexican American community that had been there for a long time. It’s fascinating how the conservative white community, even if they’re the smaller part of the population, they can still hold the power.

Homeless encampments are dirty. And ugly. And seem, to those who venture near them and even to some who live there, unsafe.

They are also — sadly, wrongly — places of last resort for those whose second, third and even fourth chances haven’t panned out, sometimes through their own mistakes, sometimes because they’re so far down just staying alive is a battle. Though we tend to toss homelessness in the soup pot along with mental illness and drug use, the terrifying fact is that nearly half of the folks living on our streets are over the age of 50 and wound up there because a bit of bad luck left them unable to pay the rent.

“At the end of the day, we have a homelessness crisis because we don’t have enough housing,” Margot Kushel said. She’s a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. There’s really no one in the state who understands encampments and their residents better.

Which is why I am deeply disheartened by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push Monday to encourage cities and counties to outlaw encampments — even providing a handy-dandy boilerplate ordinance for local governments to pass. It moves California one step closer to criminalizing homelessness, no matter how softly or deftly he packages that truth.

Or how politically expedient it may be.

“It is time to take back the streets. It’s time to take back the sidewalks. It’s time to take these encampments and provide alternatives,” Newsom said. “It simply cannot continue. It cannot be a way of life living out on the streets, in sidewalks, in what almost become permanent structures, impeding foot traffic, impeding our ability for our kids to walk the streets and strollers, or seniors with disabilities and wheelchairs, even navigating their sidewalks. We cannot allow that to continue.”

From a political perspective, that tirade is spot on. The clock is already ticking on the 2026 midterms, which coincide with the end of his tenure as California’s leader. Not only is Newsom eyeing the horizon for his next move, presidential or not, but Democrats are eyeing the condition of California and whether Trump and his supporters will be able to once again use it as the example of everything that’s wrong with America, as they did in both 2020 and 2024.

Even Kushel, who near daily hears the heartbreaking reasons people are homeless, knows encampments aren’t the answer.

“I do think the encampments are a disaster,” she said. “I want them gone too.”

But, not at the cost of making things worse, which is what breaking them down without a place to put people does. Newsom’s draft ordinance makes nice talk about not criminalizing folks, but also doesn’t require more than “every reasonable effort” to provide shelter to those being displaced — knowing full well that we don’t have enough shelter beds.

It also talks nice about not throwing out people’s belongings, unless maybe they have bugs or feces on them — which, let’s be real, they might — in which case, the dumpster it is, even if that bundle may contain your identification or medications.

That constant loss, constant movement, not only sets people back even more, it also breaks trust and pushes people further out of sight and out of society. So by the time there are shelter beds or treatment centers, you’ve lost cooperation from the people you want to help. Homelessness becomes even more dystopian, if more invisible.

“I actually worry that making people move every day, threatening them with arrest, all of those things make the problem worse and not better,” Kushel said.

Some might recall that this new age of compassionate crackdowns began last year after the Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass vs. Johnson that it wasn’t cruel or unusual punishment to outlaw camping in public spaces — allowing municipalities to cite or arrest those who did. Newsom’s office took the side of the city of Grants Pass, Ore., filing a brief in support of more enforcement powers. Since then, Newsom — sometimes personally with camera crews in tow — has cleared more than 16,000 encampments on state lands.

Some cities have followed suit with tough laws of their own, including San José. But other cities have resisted, much to Newsom’s dismay.

In Grants Pass, things didn’t go exactly as planned. There’s currently an injunction against its enforcement on camping laws after Disability Rights Oregon sued the city. Tom Stenson, the group’s deputy legal director, told me that the organization has seen how the anti-camping laws have been hard on folks with physical or mental impairments, many of whom are older.

As the housing crunch hit that state, the low-rent places where his plaintiffs lived “disappeared, and then there is just nowhere for them to go, and it just forces them right into homelessness,” he said.

California’s struggle around homelessness has been a black eye and a contentious soft spot for years, and even the most sympathetic of Californians are tired of the squalor and pain. A recent poll by Politico and the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at UC Berkeley found that about 37% of voters support arresting folks if they refuse to accept shelter, and that number jumped for male voters and Republicans.

Homelessness is, without a doubt, “the issue that defines more anger and frustration of Californians than any other,” as Newsom put it.

On the same day Newsom put out his legal template for clearing encampments, he also announced $3.3 billion in funding for 124 mental health facilities around the state. It’s money from last year’s Proposition 1, passed by voters, that will add 5,000 residential treatment beds and more than 21,000 outpatient slots to our struggling system of mental health and substance abuse treatment.

The grants include $65 million for Los Angeles to refurbish the Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk into a psychiatric subacute facility for transitional-age youths, a big and glaring need for the region.

To steal from the history lesson Newsom gave, in 1959 this state had 37,000 mental health beds in locked facilities, the kind that inspired “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Not ideal.

So the state did away with them, through a series of necessary reforms. But it never built the community-based system that was promised. California is now down to 5,500 locked beds and a bunch of overcrowded, understaffed, outdated jails and prisons that have become our de facto mental health treatment centers, along with the streets. Not ideal.

This investment in a robust community care system that provides both substance abuse and mental health treatment in one place is a huge win for all Californians, and will be a game changer — in about 10 years. Newsom optimistically showed pretty renderings of facilities that will be built with the funds, one even expected to open next year. But folks, building takes time.

Still, Newsom should receive all credit due for taking on a problem ignored for decades and doing something meaningful around it. I’ve seen him act thoughtfully, carefully and forcefully on the issue of homelessness.

Which makes this encampment right-wing swing all the more obviously political, and unworthy of our policy.

Despite those encampments, homelessness in California is actually getting better, though you have to wade through the numbers to see it. There were 187,000 people living without homes in the state last year, according to federal data, a record. About 70% of those people were living unsheltered, more than 45,000 in the city of Los Angeles.

Although the sheer number of people living without homes is overwhelming, it represented an increase of about 3% — compared with an increase of about 18% nationally. Across the country, but not in California, families were the group with the largest single-year increase.

So what we are doing, with policies that prioritize housing and meeting people where they are, is working. What Newsom has done to build a community care system is overdue and revolutionary.

But the fact remains that California does not have enough housing. Clearing encampments may be a political solution to an ugly problem.

But without a place to move people, it’s just optics.