Business

Eastern Sierra housing crunch: With all this open land, why are so many workers living in vans?

Published

1 year ago

October 24, 2024

Eastern Sierra housing crunch: With all this open land, why are so many workers living in vans?

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. —

Emily Markstein, a sinewy rock climber and skier who has spent seven years living and working in the Sierra resort town of Mammoth Lakes, opens a large sliding door and welcomes a stranger into her home.

One of the gleaming multimillion-dollar mansions nestled among towering pine trees and granite peaks in this exclusive mountain enclave? Not exactly.

Markstein, who has a master’s degree in historic preservation and has coached skiing, taught yoga, trimmed trees and waited tables at one of the fanciest restaurants in town, lives in a 2006 GMC van.

A rare sign for new home sales in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.

Like countless other adventure seekers drawn to California’s rugged and remote Eastern Sierra, Markstein, 31, initially embraced “van life” after scrolling through social media posts that made it look carefree and glamorous. She continues because she genuinely likes it, she said, but also because, even in this big, beckoning land full of wide-open spaces, there’s almost nowhere else for working people to live.

Official statistics are hard to come by, but Markstein spitballs the percentage of hourly workers in Mammoth Lakes who are living in cars and vans as “less than 50 but more than 20.” In every place she’s worked since moving here, she said, “there have been at least two of us living in our vans.”

Like so many others, she tries to hide that uncomfortable truth from tourists so as not to shatter their fantasy about escaping to an untroubled mountain paradise. But it takes effort.

“I had to play the part of the fine dining expert, like, I know my wines and I know good food,” she said with an easy, infectious grin. “But you haven’t showered in a week and a half and you’re putting deodorant on, and all these sprays, trying to make yourself look like you don’t live in your car.”

Emily Markstein, with a dog she is sitting for a friend, outside her van in the Inyo National Forest.

The notion of an acute housing shortage in this wild and sparsely populated region — there are about four people per square mile in Mono County and fewer than two per square mile in neighboring Inyo County — can be hard to wrap your head around.

It’s due, in large part, to the fact that more than 90 percent of the land is owned by conservation-minded government agencies: the U.S. Forest Service, the federal Bureau of Land Management and, most controversially, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Those large, distant bureaucracies have little interest in making land available to the fast-growing ranks of outdoor enthusiasts — hikers, climbers, skiers, anglers with fly rods — flocking to this mostly unspoiled part of California near the Nevada border.

So when any sliver of private land or an already existing home hits the market, there’s usually a long line of well-to-do professionals and would-be Airbnb investors from coastal cities ready to drive the price out of reach for even the most industrious working people. As a result, essential workers are left out in the cold.

“That has always been a problem here,” said Mammoth Lakes Mayor Pro Tem Chris Bubser. But it has become noticeably worse since the pandemic, when so many well-paid professionals discovered they could work from anywhere, and so many long-term rental units became Airbnbs to accommodate them.

An artist draws the scenery in the Inyo National Forest.

Now, Bubser said, the lack of affordable housing is a full-blown crisis making it almost impossible for hourly workers, and even some salaried professionals, to keep a traditional roof over their heads.

Last year, the schools made job offers to four teachers, but three had to say no because they couldn’t find anywhere to live, Bubser said.

“Our community is hollowing out, and it’s going to be catastrophic down the line,” Bubser said. “We want people to come and raise a family in this amazing place. It feels terrible that it’s not for everybody.”

The economics of resort towns, where tourists go to play and most everyone local hustles to get by, have been hard on working people for decades. It’s the same in ski towns throughout the American West: Lake Tahoe, Vail, Aspen, Park City.

But the Eastern Sierra’s housing crunch stretches well beyond the confines of Mammoth Lakes.

Grazing land at the foot of a mountain in Bishop.

A 40-minute drive south on U.S. 395 descends more than 3,000 vertical feet to the floor of the Owens Valley and fills your windshield with one of the most sweeping and expansive views in the country. Snowy peaks tumble down to steep granite walls. The walls descend to lush green pastures. The pastures give way to high desert that stretches toward the horizon.

The most breathtaking part? In all of that wide open space, there’s still essentially nowhere to live.

“It’s just insane,” said Jose Garcia, mayor of Bishop, a dusty crossroads of about 3,800 people at the bottom of the hill.

Garcia has lived in Bishop for 35 years and has watched the once-sleepy ranching outpost explode in popularity with adventure-loving tourists: hikers and climbers in the summer, anglers and leaf-peepers in the fall, skiers in the winter. Tourism is by far the biggest industry, he said.

Bishop Mayor Jose Garcia sits on a sidewalk along Main Street in Bishop.

But in all his time there, “the city has not grown at all,” Garcia said.

That’s because almost all of the land in and around Bishop is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Garcia said.

More than a century ago, when it became clear the booming metropolis 300 miles to the south would very quickly dry up its own meager water supplies, its agents fanned out across the Owens Valley, buying up every acre they could find to secure rights to the precious snowmelt that flows down from the mountains each spring.

Today, the DWP owns about 250,000 acres in Inyo County, where Bishop is located.

“We are basically landlocked,” said an exasperated Garcia over coffee earlier this month, as soft morning light bathed the mountains in every direction.

California has a dozen summits higher than 14,000 feet; the trailheads leading to 11 of them are within about an hour of where he sat.

“Bishop would be like Santa Monica” if the city had room to grow, he said. “People would come from all over because of the beauty of this place.”

A private property sign in a brushy area.

Adam Perez, the DWP’s top manager in the Owens Valley, said it’s easy to point the finger at his agency and blame it for the stagnation. But the DWP manages the land responsibly, he said. The overarching mission remains what it always was — to send the water down to Los Angeles — but the department works hard to be more than just “bullies that are trying to push people around,” he said.

The agency allows hiking, hunting, fishing and camping on most of its land, he pointed out.

And if you’re lucky enough to own one of the existing houses, he said, you might like the fact that your view across that incredible landscape is never going to be marred by “a big housing tract” plunked down in the middle of it.

“You’re always going to have a protected view,” Perez said.

If Perez is at the top of the local pecking order, the young climbers who flock to Bishop from around the globe to train on world-class crags in Buttermilk Country and the Owens River Gorge are near the bottom.

The Mammoth Gear Exchange, a secondhand sporting goods shop on a corner of Bishop’s main intersection, is a local landmark and regular haunt for climbers. On a recent weekday morning, a handful of the shop’s employees agreed with at least some of what Perez said: They love that Bishop remains so remote and that it hasn’t succumbed to suburban sprawl as have climbing meccas near Denver and Boulder.

But all of them have spent long stretches living out of their vans, even after they decided to give up the itinerant life of a hard-core traveling climber and tried to put down roots.

One, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Peter, to avoid attracting attention from parking enforcement, said he had been living in a van since making the trek from Ohio to California 2½ years ago. His girlfriend lives with him.

They’re in no rush to start paying rent, he said, but it didn’t take much prompting to get him to rattle off a long list of the difficulties.

A street separates open grazing land from a tree-covered neighborhood.

“When you’ve lived in a house your whole life, you don’t realize how much you value your own space,” he said, choosing his words carefully. Forget about getting anything delivered from Amazon.

“It seems like the whole system is set up” for people who live in houses, he said, “like, you’re supposed to have a permanent address.”

He sounded almost mystical when his thoughts turned to the comforts of indoor plumbing. “Just having warm water to wash your hands on demand,” he said. “Like, you just turn the dial.”

Back up the hill in Mammoth, Markstein’s description of van life also frequently circled back to the issue of plumbing.

“During COVID, I was showering in the creek,” she said, because social distancing requirements made invitations to use indoor bathrooms hard to come by. “Right now, I rotate through my friends’ houses to get my weekly shower.”

Then, realizing how that might sound to an audience of the uninitiated, she added: “For many people that’s pretty gross, but for people living in a van it’s kind of normal.”

During her stint as a tree trimmer, she guessed about 70% of the properties she worked on sat empty because they were either second homes or unoccupied Airbnbs. That was immensely “frustrating” for someone working her butt off, living in a van, she said.

But maybe nothing is as frustrating for van lifers, or occupies as big a chunk of their daily bandwidth, as the question of where to find a toilet.

At one point, a few of her friends worked at an organic coffee shop on Main St. called Stellar Brew. It had a comfortable, welcoming vibe. Word spread quickly. Before long, Markstein said, she’d go there in the morning and see “10 vans lined up” in the parking lot.

The inside joke was: “Have a stellar poo at Stellar Brew.”

Emily Markstein laughs sitting on a mattress inside her van.

The shop’s general manager, Nikki Lee, had nothing but sympathy and praise for the van lifers.

The housing situation is so precarious for working people in Mammoth, Lee said, she actually prefers job candidates who live in their vans. Their lives are more stable than people engaged in the almost always losing battle of trying to hold on to an apartment in a town where rent is often upward of $4,000 a month and constantly rising.

A current full-time baker at the shop, who used to be a kindergarten teacher, lives in his van, Lee said.

“I don’t ever let that be a deterrent for hiring,” Lee said, “because I know that the folks that live in their van, they can make the commitment to stay.”

Business

The rise and fall of the Sprinkles empire that made cupcakes cool

Published

2 hours ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

The rise and fall of the Sprinkles empire that made cupcakes cool

After the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, Candace Nelson reevaluated her career. She had just been laid off from a boutique investment banking firm in San Francisco’s tech startup scene, and realized she wanted a change.

From her home, she launched a custom cake service that soon morphed into an idea for a cupcake-focused bakery. Nelson and her husband — whom she met at the Bay Area firm where she had worked — then pooled their savings, moved to Southern California and together opened Sprinkles Cupcakes from a 600-square-foot Beverly Hills storefront.

The store quickly sold out on opening day in 2005, and over the next two decades, the Sprinkles brand exploded across the country, opening dozens of locations of its specialty bakeries as well as mall kiosks and its signature around-the-clock cupcake ATMs in several states.

“It was an unproven concept and a big risk,” Nelson told the Times in 2013, at which point the business had 400 employees at 14 locations and dispensed upward of a thousand cupcakes a day from its Beverly Hills ATM alone.

But now, the iconic cupcake brand is no longer.

Sprinkles abruptly shut down all of its locations on Dec. 31, leaving hundreds of retail employees across Arizona; California; Washington, D.C.; Florida; Nevada; Texas; and Utah in a lurch with little notice, no severance and scrambling to fulfill a surge of orders from customers clamoring to get their last tastes.

Candace Nelson, the founder of Sprinkles cupcakes, in Beverly Hills in 2018.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Although Nelson long ago exited the company, having sold it to private equity firm KarpReilly LLC in 2012, she shared her disappointment with its fate on social media.

“As many of you know, I started Sprinkles in 2005 with a KitchenAid mixer and a big idea,” Nelson said in the post. “It’s surreal to see this chapter come to a close — and it’s not how I imagined the story would unfold.”

The company, now headquartered in Austin, Texas, made no formal announcement regarding the closures and Nelson has not said more than what she posted online. The company did share a comment with KTLA, saying “After thoughtful consideration, we’ve made the very difficult decision to transition away from operating company-owned Sprinkles bakeries.” Neither Nelson nor representatives of Sprinkles and KarpReilly responded to The Times’ requests for comment.

Sprinkles’ demise comes at a tough time for the food and beverage industry. At brick-and-mortar food retail locations, the non-negotiable ingredient and labor costs can be high. And shifting consumer sentiments away from sugar-filled sweets and toward more healthy and functional options, strained pocketbooks, as well as pushes by federal and state governments to nix artificial colors and flavoring, are creating uncertainties for businesses, those in the food industry said.

A 24-hour cupcake ATM at Sprinkles Cupcakes in Beverly Hills in 2012.

“Over the last 10 years the consumer has wizened up tremendously and is looking at the back of the label and choosing where to spend their sweets,” said David Jacobowitz, founder of Austin-based Nebula Snacks, an online food retailer.

At the same time, it’s also not uncommon for businesses owned by private-equity firms to close on a whim, where relentlessly profit-driven decisions might be made simply to pursue more lucrative projects. In recent years, private-equity deals have been seen to milk businesses for profit by slashing costs and quality, and have appeared to play a role in the breakup of some legacy retail brands, including Toys ‘R’ Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays and fabrics chain JoAnn Inc. On the flip side, private equity can help infuse much-needed cash into a business and extend its life.

Stevie León and her co-workers received a text the night before New Year’s Eve informing them the franchise Sprinkles location in Sarasota, Fla., where they worked would close permanently after their shifts the next day.

León, 33, said her position as a scratch baker mixing batter and frosting cupcakes overnight had been a dream job, since she had been searching for ways to develop baking skills without paying for expensive schooling.

“I really thought it was my forever job and it was taken away literally in a day,” she said. “I’m just taking it one day at a time.”

Ivy Hernandez, 27, the general manager at the Sarasota store, said that after the news was delivered to her boss, the franchise owner, they rushed to learn their options to keep the store afloat but quickly learned it could be legally precarious to continue operating. The store had been open less than a year.

A nearby corporate store, Hernandez said, had been in disarray for months, with employees contending with broken fridges and lapsed ingredient shipments, as managers implored higher-ups to pay the bills so the business could operate properly.

“It really felt like they were trying to do everything they could to screw everyone over as hard as possible until the end,” Hernandez said.

Sprinkles did not respond to questions about the franchise program or allegations of mismanagement in the lead-up to the closure.

A person walks by Sprinkles on the Upper East Side in New York City in 2020.

The obsession with tiny cakes in paper cups traces back to an episode of “Sex and the City” aired in 2000 showing Miranda and Carrie savoring cupcakes on a bench outside a West Village bakery called Magnolia’s Cupcakes.

“Big wasn’t a crush, he was a crash,” Carrie says to Miranda as she peels down the wrapper on a cupcake topped with bright pink buttercream frosting. She punctuates the quip by taking a big bite, leaving a glob of frosting on her face.

The scene sparked a tourism phenomenon for the bakery — which went on to create a “Carrie” line of cupcakes — and helped propel the burgeoning cupcake industry and companies like Sprinkles Cupcakes, Crumbs Bake Shop and Baked by Melissa to new heights.

Within a decade there was already talk of a “Cupcake Bubble,” coined by writer Daniel Gross in a 2009 Slate article where he argued that the 2008 economic recession laid the groundwork for a proliferation of cupcake stores across America, because a lot of people could figure out how to make tasty cupcakes cheaply and scale up without a huge capital investment.

Amid the decimation of many other local retail businesses, one could take over storefronts in heavily trafficked areas for cheap. As a result, “casual baking turned into an urban industry,” Gross said.

The cupcake fervor hit its peak when Crumbs, which had started as a single bakery on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2003, went public in a reverse merger worth $66 million in 2011. The wildly popular mini-cakes were selling at $4.50 a pop. But it became clear very quickly that it had grown too large, too fast. It closed in 2014 after it lost its stock listing on Nasdaq and defaulted on about $14.3 million in financing.

Analysts at the time said consumers were cooling on opulent desserts and suggested tougher times were ahead for bakeries that focused solely on cupcakes.

But Baked by Melissa has thus far proved those analysts wrong. The company has remained privately owned, and according to its founder, is focused on nationwide e-commerce operations — and on expanding the brand beyond sweets. Founder Melissa Ben-Ishay has gained a following on social media by sharing recipes for nutritious, easy-to-make meals.

“Businesses that prioritize quick value increases to get acquired often crash,” Ben-Ishay told Forbes last year. “We’re committed to maintaining product quality and steady, long-term growth.”

Before its unceremonious and sudden closure, Spinkles company leadership had pushed to diversify its business as part of a strategy to recover from a pandemic-era lull.

Chief Executive Dan Mesches told trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News in 2021 that comparable sales had grown since pre-pandemic years. He said the company had ramped up its direct-to-consumer and off-premises offerings and created a line of chocolates made to look like the tops of their cupcakes. The company also introduced a new franchise program with the goal of opening some 200 locations in the U.S. and abroad over three years.

“Innovation is everything for us,” Mesches said.

Sprinkles was known for, among other things, inventive and somewhat corny methods of customer delivery. Besides the trademark ATMs, the company’s vending machines found at many airports made loud, attention-drawing jingles, drawing dramatic complaints and jokes from TikTok travelers. In the 2010s, the company debuted a custom-built truck — “the Sprinklesmobile” — to deliver cupcakes to cities without physical locations.

Frances Hughes, co-founder of online wholesale marketplace Starch, said there’s no question that gourmet sweet treats are still in vogue. But brick-and-mortar locations are much more risky, with more unpredictability. Having large fixed costs makes a business “extremely sensitive to small changes in traffic or frequency,” while online or e-commerce models can be more flexible.

“I think cupcakes as a product still have demand. But the novelty paths that support that rapid retail expansion have passed,” Hughes said.

When Nelson, the Sprinkles founder, posted her somber message about the closure, she asked people to share memories of the company. Many offered heartfelt responses, her comments flooded with stories, for example, of poor college students making the trek to the Beverly Hills location for a limited number of first-come, first-served free cupcakes.

But many of the comments also criticized Nelson’s sale to private equity.

“You sold it to PE and expected it to not close?? What planet are you living on? I don’t begrudge you for selling as that’s entirely your choice but to think any PE firm cares about a company in the slightest is insanity,” one Instagram user said.

Nicole Rucker, an L.A.-based pastry chef and owner of Fat+Flour Pie Shop, said she didn’t observe a decline in the quality of the product after the private-equity takeover. She has been a longtime admirer of the company, driving up from San Diego to sample the cupcakes when its store opened. The simple attractiveness of the box and the logo, and the consistency in the way cupcakes were decorated, “was inspiring,” she said.

“It had a strong hold on people for years,” Rucker said.

Rucker said however that when a private-equity-owned business shutters, she doesn’t feel sadness: “I would rather give my money to a fellow small-business owner, because I would rather know that every dollar and every sale matters.”

Michelle Wainwright, the owner and founder of Indiana-based bakery Cute as a Cupcake! said that although the niche cupcake industry may no longer be in its heyday — with “Sex and the City” no longer airing and competitive baking show “Cupcake Wars” (which Candace Nelson served as a judge on) now canceled — they are still versatile treats, with great potential for creativity.

And they are sentimental to her, because she uses her grandmother’s recipe.

“Cupcakes are still a winner,” Wainwright said. “It’s my belief that a life with out cupcakes is a life without love.”

Business

Bay Area semiconductor testing company to lay off more than 200 workers

Published

14 hours ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

Bay Area semiconductor testing company to lay off more than 200 workers

Semiconductor testing equipment company FormFactor is laying off more than 200 workers and closing manufacturing facilities as it seeks to cut costs after being hit by higher import taxes.

The Livermore, Calif.,-based company plans to shutter its Baldwin Park facility and cut 113 jobs there on Jan. 30, according to a layoff notice sent to the California Employment Development Department this week. Its facility in Carlsbad is scheduled to close in mid-December later this year, which will result in 107 job losses, according to an earlier notice.

Technicians, engineers, managers, assemblers and other workers are among those expected to lose their jobs, according to the notices.

The company offers semiconductor testing equipment, including probe cards, and other products. The industry has been benefiting from increased AI chip adoption and infrastructure spending.

FormFactor is among the employers that have been shedding workers amid more economic uncertainty.

Companies have cited various reasons for workforce reductions, including restructuring, closures, tariffs, market conditions and artificial intelligence, which can help automate repetitive tasks or generate text, images and code.

The tech industry — a key part of California’s economy — has been hit hard by job losses after the pandemic, which spurred more hiring, and amid the rise of AI tools that are reshaping its workforce.

As tech companies and startups compete fiercely to dominate the AI race, they’ve also cut middle management and other workers as they move faster to release more AI-powered products. They’re also investing billions of dollars into data centers that house computing equipment used to process the massive troves of information needed to train and maintain AI systems.

Companies such as chipmaker Nvidia and ChatGPT maker OpenAI have benefited from the AI boom, while legacy tech companies such as Intel are fighting to keep up.

FormFactor’s cuts are part of restructuring plans that “are intended to better align cost structure and support gross margin improvement to the Company’s target financial model,” the company said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week.

The company plans to consolidate its facilities in Baldwin Park and Carlsbad, the filing said.

FormFactor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

FormFactor has been impacted by tariffs and seen its growth slow. The company employs more than 2,000 people and has been aiming to improve its profit margins.

In October, the company reported $202.7 million in third-quarter revenue, down 2.5% from the third quarter of fiscal 2024. The company’s net income was $15.7 million in the third quarter of 2025, down from $18.7 million in the same quarter of the previous year.

FormFactor’s stock has been up 16% since January, surpassing more than $67 per share on Friday.

Business

In-N-Out Burger outlets in Southern California hit by counterfeit bill scam

Published

1 day ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

In-N-Out Burger outlets in Southern California hit by counterfeit bill scam

Two people allegedly used $100 counterfeit bills at dozens of In-N-Out Burger restaurants in Southern California in a wide-reaching scam.

Glendale Police officials said in a statement Friday that 26-year-old Tatiyanna Foster of Long Beach was taken into custody last month. Another suspect, 24-year-old Auriona Lewis, also of Long Beach, was arrested in October.

Police released images of $100 bills used to purchase a $2.53 order of fries and a $5.93 order of a Flying Dutchman.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Lewis with felony counterfeiting and grand theft in November.

Elizabeth Megan Lashley-Haynes, Lewis’s public defender, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Glendale police said that Lewis was arrested in Palmdale in an operation involving the U.S. Marshals Task Force. Foster is expected in court later this month, officials said.

”Lewis was found to be in possession of counterfeit bills matching those used in the Glendale incident, along with numerous gift cards and transaction receipts believed to be connected to similar fraudulent activity,” according to a police statement.

A representative for In-N-Out Burger told KTLA-TV that restaurants in Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties were also targeted by the alleged scam.

“Their dedication and expertise resulted in the identification and apprehension of the suspects, helping to protect our business and our communities,” In-N-Out’s Chief Operations Officer Denny Warnick said. “We greatly value the support of law enforcement and appreciate the vital role they play in making our communities stronger and safer places to live.”

The company, opened in 1948 in Baldwin Park, has restaurants in nine states.

An Oakland location closed in 2024, with the owner blaming crime and slow police response times.

Company chief executive Lynsi Snyder announced last year that she planned to relocate her family to Tennessee, although the burger chain’s headquarters will remain in California.