Iranian LA Councilman Says Attacks Leave Questions About Iran's Future

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, March 3, 2026

• Across California, many Iranian-Americans are still in disbelief following the US-Israeli military strikes in Iran. Some are overjoyed with the death of the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but others are concerned about the safety of friends and loved ones in the region. The greater Los Angeles area has a huge concentration of Iranians. That includes LA city councilman Adrin Nazarian. He was born in Iran, but he and his family fled in 1981.
• As a way to tackle California’s notoriously high rents and home prices, state lawmakers have set their sights on bringing down the cost of construction. One idea: building it in factories. 
• The US Supreme Court has blocked a California law that banned school employees from outing transgender students.

LA councilmember, a native Iranian, provides unique perspective on war with Iran

The intensifying conflict in Iran is leaving many Iranian Americans conflicted. On one hand, they’re celebrating the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But there’s also concern about the safety of friends and family who are still in the region.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian was born in Iran before he and his family fled the country in 1981. He says he’s conflicted. “Obviously, it’s critically important and vital that this regime in Iran goes. Obviously it has its supporters in Iran, but anyone who is abroad, there’s a reason for their displacement similar to my family’s,” Nazarian said. “But at what human cost the military actions come is what concerns me. The way this was carried out raises more questions than it does provide solutions. Whether it’s endangering U.S. personnel lives and not really demonstrating what the end game of this is. ”

To that point, Nazarian says the coming days and months will be vital in ensuring a potential regime change. “My fear is, if it’s not done appropriately, who’s gonna step in? Is there gonna be someone even more conservative, more hard-lined than Ali Khamenei? The void is now going to create a situation where we don’t know exactly where Iran is going to go,” he said. ” And what concerns me is that at the end of the day, it’s innocent individuals that are paying the price while international forces and the regime itself of Iran, current regime are playing this dance with one another. It’s the everyday Iranians that are suffering most.”

It’s expensive to build housing. CA lawmakers say factory-built is the future

As the cost of living continues to pinch Californians, state lawmakers have a new focus: bringing down the cost of housing construction to get more homes built quickly.

Their solution, so far, is to industrialize the building process by facilitating prefab, modular and manufactured housing. Earlier this year, a group of California lawmakers held a series of hearings as part of the Select Committee on Housing Construction Innovation to understand what barriers stand in the way of scaling up factory-built construction.

It comes after lawmakers last year passed a series of bills that streamlined environmental reviews for housing developments and transformed the way housing is built near transit. “A key piece of making housing more affordable is bringing down the cost of construction,” Committee Chair and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Berkeley, said in a statement to KQED. “Factory-built housing is not a silver bullet, but it can be part of the solution to our housing crisis.”

A report, published Monday, from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, found factory-built housing, also known as prefab and manufactured housing, could cut costs by up to 20% and slash building timelines in half — a key innovation needed to ramp up construction and meet the state’s goal of building 2.5 million homes by 2030. However, these projects face big hurdles in securing financing and overcoming a patchwork of regulatory approvals that can vary by jurisdiction.

Following the committee’s Construction Innovation hearings, state lawmakers now plan to introduce their own package of bills aiming to streamline the process. Those efforts will dovetail with legislation at the federal level, where lawmakers are also trying to solve the nation’s growing housing affordability crisis, caused in part by a construction slump. Federal legislators are currently working on two separate bill packages taking aim at red tape and outdated safety standards, which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle argue have prevented factories from churning out housing for decades.

Supreme Court blocks law against schools outing transgender students to their parents in California

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for California schools to tell parents if their children identify as transgender without getting the student’s approval, granting an emergency appeal from a conservative legal group.

The order blocks for now a state law that bans automatic parental notification requirements if students change their pronouns or gender expression at school.

The split decision comes after religious parents and educators challenged California school policies aimed at preventing schools from outing students to their families. Two sets of Catholic parents represented by the Thomas More Society say it caused schools to mislead them and secretly facilitate the children’s social transition despite their objections. California, on the other hand, argued that students have the right to privacy about their gender expression, especially if they fear rejection from their families. The state said that school policies and state law are aimed at striking a balance with parents’ rights.

The high court majority, though, sided with the parents and reinstated a lower-court order blocking the law and school policies while the case continues to play out. “The parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs. California’s policies violate those beliefs,” and burden the free exercise of religion, the majority wrote in an unsigned order.