Business
Eastern Sierra housing crunch: With all this open land, why are so many workers living in vans?
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.”
“During COVID, I was showering in the creek,” Emily Markstein says of van life. “Right now, I rotate through my friends’ houses to get my weekly shower.”
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 captures the scenery in Buttermilk Country 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.
With all its wide-open spaces, there’s still essentially nowhere to live in the Eastern Sierra because of the vast portion of land owned by goverment agencies.
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 would be like Santa Monica,” if the city had room to grow, Mayor Jose Garcia says of his town. “People would come from all over because of the beauty of this place.”
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 City of Los Angeles private property sign wards off would-be campers outside Bishop.
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.
Homes to the right, grazing land to the left, and the wide open spaces beyond in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.
“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.”
Working as a tree trimmer, Emily Markstein saw second homes and Airbnbs sitting empty. That was “frustrating” for someone working her butt off, living in a van, she said.
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.”
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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