Home Care In Pioneer, LA

The investment will finance the acquisition of Edify as well as provide new equity to advance two ready-to-build integrated solar and battery storage projects totalling 900 MW / 3,600 MWh, with offtake agreements already secured with Rio Tinto and the Commonwealth of Australia. Additional capital will support Edify’s development pipeline of more than 11 GW of hybrid and storage projects.

Founded in 2015 by John Cole, Edify has grown into a key player in Australia’s clean energy sector. The company pioneered the nation’s first utility-scale solar and battery hybrid in 2018 and has since delivered 11 projects across New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, totalling more than 1.1 GW of capacity.

John Cole, Founder and Executive Chairman of Edify, said: “The agreement with La Caisse is a pivotal moment for Edify, providing balance sheet strength to seriously ramp up Edify’s speed of execution of firm dispatchable green generators. I am so very proud of the business that Edify has become and the exceptional team that creates and delivers the solutions to meet and exceed the needs of our customers and the grid. In La Caisse, we have found the perfect owner to supercharge the business and take Edify’s enviable market position to the next level.”

Emmanuel Jaclot, Executive Vice-President and Head of Infrastructure and Sustainability at La Caisse, added: “Our acquisition of Edify highlights the track record and expertise of its team and a commitment to Australia’s clean energy future. With our long-term capital and sustainability expertise, Edify will accelerate the delivery of large-scale renewable and storage projects that strengthen the grid and advance decarbonisation.”

The deal remains subject to customary regulatory and change-of-control approvals. Advisers include ICA Partners and Clifford Chance for La Caisse, and Lazard Australia and Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer for Edify.

If completed, the transaction will represent one of the largest private equity-led clean energy deals in Australia this year, reinforcing private capital’s role in driving the global energy transition.

If you think we missed any important news, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected].

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The sun had just begun its descent when the Mane Street Band took the stage for their weekly Honky Tonk Sunday set at Pioneertown’s Red Dog Saloon. Young adults in hiking gear sipped beers beneath chandeliers shaped like wagon wheels as old timers with gray ponytails and cowboy hats chatted with a tattooed bartender. Outside, a group of parents sat around long picnic tables, ignoring their kids who were messing around in the dirt.

It wasn’t easy to tell who was local and who was just visiting the high desert town founded nearly 80 years ago as a permanent movie set for western films. The warm, neighborly scene felt like further proof of what locals had been telling me all weekend: The fake western town that Hollywood built has finally morphed into an actual western town with an identity of its own.

“This is not Knott’s Berry Farm,” said JoAnne Gosen, a local shopkeeper and goat farmer who moved to the area 21 years ago. “This is a real town and it’s our town.”

After years of upheaval that included skyrocketing home prices, a pandemic-fueled Airbnb boom, a failed proposal for a multi-use event space and a false claim by a reality TV star that she singlehandedly owned the town, residents of this small unincorporated community say Pioneertown is settling into a new equilibrium. The tumultuous era at the town’s landmark roadhouse and concert venue Pappy and Harriet’s appears to have ended as new management repairs relations with the surrounding community. Established businesses like the Red Dog Saloon and the Pioneertown Motel are offering stable employment to locals and transplants alike and more buildings on Pioneertown’s western-themed “Mane St.” are being converted to small, locally run shops.

Visitors will also find there’s much more to do than wait two hours for a table at Pappy and Harriet’s. Weekend tourists can grab a taco at the Red Dog Saloon, browse locally made natural bath products at Xeba Botanica, bowl in a historic bowling alley or explore the Berber-meets-cowboy store Soukie Modern. If you’re there on a Sunday morning, you can even pick up a dozen hand-boiled New York-style bagels if you order ahead.

“It can be difficult for us old-timers to see all the changes,” said Gosen, who spins goat fiber into yarn outside her soap shop on Mane Street most weekends. “I don’t love all the Airbnbs and the residents who can’t afford housing. But at the same time, we’re here on the farm by ourselves most of the week and on the weekend we’re fortunate enough to go into town and meet the most amazing people from all over the world.”

Pioneertown has always been a strange, hybrid place: half fake, half real.

The community was founded in the mid-1940s by a consortium of entertainers that included Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and the Sons of the Pioneers, a popular singing group at the time that lent the town their name. It was conceived and led in its early years by Dick Curtis, a 6-foot-3 actor who appeared in more than 230 movies and television shows in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Curtis dreamed of creating a permanent western movie set against the rugged backdrop of the Sawtooth Mountains that would also function as a working town with businesses that catered to film crews and residents. The Pioneertown Corp. broke ground in 1946. Among its first buildings were a land office, a beauty parlor, a motel, two restaurants and a feed store — all with Old West facades.

Filming in town mostly stopped in the 1950s, but the area continues to offer visitors and residents a unique mix of fantasy and function decades later. Some buildings like the General Store, the Saddlery and the Post Office house businesses. Others, like the jail, the livery and a barber shop are just facades — great for selfies but little else.

Over the years, people with big dreams and limited understanding of the challenges of building in this particular stretch of desert have tried and failed to bring major developments to the town, which today has about 600 residents. In the ‘60s, a car salesman from Ohio bought the Pioneertown Corp. and proposed plans to create a massive desert resort with townhomes, apartments, lakes and golf courses. He predicted it would eventually draw a population of 35,000. (The business went bankrupt instead.) During the pandemic, a mountain guide and supervising producer for Red Bull Media scared locals with a plan to convert 350 acres into an event space with residences, a recording studio, and an amphitheater that would hold up to 3,000 people. The project was eventually downgraded to a and by the time it was completed, he was no longer part of it.

Curt Sautter, who helps curate Pioneertown’s small film history museum, believes the town has been protected from major development by what he calls the Curtis Curse. “You can be successful in Pioneertown, but if you get greedy or you try to do something that messes with the environment or the community itself you will fail,” he said.

Locals know that growth in Pioneertown is inevitable, but they also point to its limitations: the meager local water supply, the lack of a fire department and that there is only one road into and out of town.

“The community wants slow growth that preserves the western character of the town and is compatible with the desert environment,” said Ben Loescher, an architect and president of Friends of Pioneertown, a nonprofit that supports the community.

Today you’ll find signs of measured growth everywhere you look in Pioneertown, making now a great time to visit. , a perfectly preserved 1946 vintage bowling alley with the original murals by a Hollywood set designer on its walls, has just resurfaced its lanes and extended its hours. It’s now open from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. A game will cost you $25 and is first come, first served. It used to be impossible to find breakfast in town, but now you’ll find breakfast burritos, tacos and quesadillas at the , which opens everyday at 10 a.m. On Sundays from 8:30 am to 9:30 a.m., Richard Lee of delivers his fresh baked bagels to those who ordered them in advance outside the . (The cinnamon-date bagels are especially recommended).

Kids and selfie seekers will enjoy the where $10 will buy you 20 minutes with chickens, turkeys and a small horse. There is also a little history museum to explore and two old western reenactment groups — and — who seem to be entertaining themselves as much as they are the audience. (Check their websites for up to date show times.) If you plan ahead, you can also book a hike with goats with for $95 a person.

Visitors might also consider subscribing to the , a free weekly newsletter that Pioneertown Motel co-owner Mike French began publishing online in 2023. In it he compiles listings for dozens of concerts, performances, yoga classes and other events happening across the high desert. A personal favorite is at the Red Dog Saloon 6:30 p.m. on Monday nights, where locals, visitors and transplants gather for a good-natured, foul-mouthed bingo game with a live DJ. One bingo board will cost you $10 and the proceeds benefit a local charity.

Whether you’re planning to visit for an afternoon or considering moving to the area, you’ll find that this Hollywood movie set, turned ghost town, turned tourist curiosity, turned actual western town offers more to entertain locals and visitors than it has in decades, without sacrificing the western vibe that drew its founders to the area nearly 80 years ago.

“It’s the landscape, and that weird western mythology,” said Loescher. “It’s always been full of individuals who are a little iconoclastic and don’t do things the normal way.”

And no matter how many people come along who dream of changing Pioneertown, the challenging desert environment — and the Curtis Curse — will likely keep it that way.

There are certain first names that are also businesses that tap into the Angeleno collective unconsciousness and bring a smile of familiarity even to those who’ve never patronized the place.

Tommy’s Burgers, especially. Frederick’s of Hollywood. Phillippe the Original. Nate’n Al’s. Lupe’s and Lucy’s.

And, of course, Leonardo’s.

The nightclub chain with five spots across Southern California has entertained patrons since 1972. Its cumbia nights, Mexican regional music performances and a general air of puro pinche parri bridged the gap in the cultural life of Latino L.A. between the days of the Million Dollar Theater and today’s corrido tumbado stars.

Its namesake, Leonardo Lopez, came to Santa Monica from Mexico in the late 1960s, at age 17, to work as a dishwasher and proceeded to create a cultural empire.

On Friday, the Los Angeles City Council honored him in a celebration that reflected the joy and diversity — but especially the resilience — of Latino LA.

His family members count at least 40 businesses among them, including restaurants, banquet halls, concert venues, equestrian sports teams, political firms that work Southern California’s corridors of power, and the Pico Rivera Sports Arena, Southern California’s cathedral of Mexican horse culture. They were one of the main forces in the 2023 fight that carved out exemptions for traditional Mexican horse competitions such as charrería and escaramuza when the L.A. City Council banned rodeos.

“Our family is like a pyramid, with every person supporting each other at every level,” said Leonardo’s son, Fernando. “And my dad is at the very top.”

He and about 40 other relatives went to Friday’s City Council meeting to see their patriarch recognized. They strode through City Hall’s august corridors in charro outfits and Stetsons, berets and hipster glasses, leopard-print blouses and sharp ties — the diversity of the Mexican American experience in an era where too many people want to demonize them.

Leonardo was the most resplendent of them all, sporting an outfit with his initials embroidered on his sleeves and his back. A silver cross on his billowing red necktie gleamed as much as his smile.

“You work and work and work to hope you do something good, and it’s a blessing when others recognize you for it,” Lopez told me in Spanish as we waited in a packed conference room for the council meeting to start. He gestured to everyone. “But this is the true blessing in my life.”

Sitting at the head of a long table, Lopez doted on his grandson but also greeted well-wishers like Esbardo Carreño. He’s a historian who works for the government of Durango, the state where Lopez was born in 1950.

“Don Leonardo came with a bigger vision than others,” Carreño said in Spanish. “But he never left his people back home,” noting how Lopez has funded restoration projects in Durango’s eponymous capital, a welcome arch at the entrance to the entrepreneur’s hometown of La Noria and more.

“My tío and dad and my other tíos made it in L.A. because there was no Plan B,” said Lopez’s nephew, Lalo Lopez. He was shepherding guests toward his uncle while also talking up a fundraiser later that evening at the Sports Arena for L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath. “That’s a lesson all us kids learned fast.”

Spanish-language reporters pulled Don Leonardo into the City Hall press room for an impromptu conference, where he talked about his career and offered child-rearing advice.

“Get them busy early,” he joked, “so they don’t have that free time to do bad things.”

Lopez motioned to Fernando and his son Fernando Jr. — both wearing charro suits — to join him at the podium.

“I got them to follow me” to be proud of their Mexican heritage. “Today, it’s the reverse — now I follow them!”

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez then grabbed Lopez. The meeting was about to start.

Always the sharpest-dressed member of the council, Rodriguez didn’t disappoint with a taupe-toned tejana that perfectly complemented her gray-streaked hair, black-framed glasses and white outfit.

Her introduction of Lopez was even better.

“His spaces have created a place where we [Latinos] can be authentically who we are,” said Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley. She praised Lopez’s life’s work as an important balm and corrective “at a time especially when our community is under attack.”

“I want to thank you, Don Leonardo, for being that example of how we can really be the force of resilience and strength in the wake of adversity,” the council member concluded. “It’s a reminder to everyone who’s feeling down that we will persevere.”

Lopez offered a few words of thanks in English, tipping his sombrero to council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who had previously honored him in 2017 when each council member recognized an immigrant entrepreneur in their district.

Harris-Dawson returned the respect.

“You are such angels in this city — L.A. is not L.A. without the Lopez family,” he said, noting how two Leonardo’s stood in his South L.A. district and “y’all never left” even as other live music venues did. Harris-Dawson told attendees how the Lopez family had long catered jazz festivals and youth sports leagues without ever asking for anything in return.

“The only time I’ve seen you closed was that weekend of the terrible ICE raids,” Harris-Dawson said. “And you all were back the next week ready to go and you had security out. ... Thank you all for treating us like family.”

The Lopez clan gathered around their jefe at the podium for one final photo op. Doctors and contractors, retirees and high schoolers: an all-American family and as Angeleno as they come. See ustedes soon at — where else? — Leonardo’s.

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