Less than a month before fires began to ravage my hometown, State Farm sent me a bill. The oracles of risk foresaw an apocalypse in Los Angeles’s future. So they raised my home insurance premium by nearly 18 percent, even though I haven’t made a single claim in the quarter century I’ve lived in my neighborhood, Mount Washington.
Last Tuesday night, the apocalypse arrived, but not on our doorstep. My son and I stood on our Northeast Los Angeles hillside at dusk, looking west through a bronze-colored haze as flames raced through Pacific Palisades, 17 miles away. After nightfall, we looked to the northeast and saw another fire burning near Pasadena and Altadena, just six miles away.
Los Angeles is suffering through what might look, from a distance, like one of those disaster flicks Hollywood is famous for, movies filled with explosions, flames and fleeing multitudes whose ranks include the wealthy and the unhoused. But there is another drama unfolding here, one with a woman tied to the train tracks as a doom driven locomotive speeds toward her. The name of this movie’s imperiled heroine is “The Los Angeles Middle Class.”
This winter’s conflagration will accelerate Los Angeles’s long-running crisis of unaffordability. There is a shortage of homes in the metro area. The impact of so many displaced renters and owners seeking shelter — not to mention the time it will take to rebuild — will strain the already-tight rental market.
According to an analysis of census data by the Latino Data Hub, “half of all individuals in Los Angeles County lived in a rented home,” and more than half of renters in the county pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income for rent and utilities. As The New York Times reported on Friday, certain unscrupulous landlords started raising rents by as much as 20 percent even as the fires continued to spread, despite laws banning price gouging during a declared emergency.
Uncertainty over what insurance will cover only adds to the sense of precarity.
There are few affordable necessities left in Los Angeles these days. In a county as sprawling as Los Angeles, you can still find them — and not just in places like Altadena where the Eaton fire is burning. But they don’t stay affordable for very long.
The home I bought in 1998, making monthly mortgage payments of $1,497, is now estimated to be worth more than four times its original value. My adult children have limited options for owning a home in this neighborhood; they could try to earn six-figure salaries and marry someone who has one too, or they could win the California lottery. Or I could bequeath them the home I’m living in when I die.
In a quarter century, I’ve gone from the middle class to being a member of the landed gentry. The bungalows and clapboard houses of Altadena and west Pasadena were still occupied by solidly middle-class Angelenos on Tuesday night as the fires bore down upon them. An integrated mix of Black, Latino, Asian and white families lived there. They were people with Old World holocausts, Jim Crow segregation, the Japanese internment and the economic catastrophes of Mexico and the American Rust Belt in their family histories.
They treasured their homes with their vegetable gardens and fruit trees, and their palms and birds of paradise. My friend Pablo Miralles grew up there and documented the well-funded, integrated schools of his Pasadena youth in a beautiful film about John Muir High School. On Tuesday night, his home burned down.
The novelist Octavia Butler also attended John Muir High. She saw the train of economic doom rushing toward us decades ago and wrote a novel about it, a 1993 sci-fi classic called “Parable of the Sower.” Butler imagined a fictional community of Black and brown people where on Feb. 1, 2025, a small fire strikes. The neighbors band together to put it out with hoses. They don’t call the fire department, so as to avoid “the fire service fees” of a dystopian California where even “the water wasted on putting out the fire was going to be hard enough to pay for.”
For President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters, the fires are a parable of liberal ineffectiveness. And the villains are Democratic politicians like the feckless mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, who had left town just as the National Weather Service issued warnings about the increased dangers of the approaching winds.
But the edging out of the Los Angeles middle class has been a long-running, bipartisan project. Today, the budget-slashing values of Ronald Reagan and the taxpayer revolt remain woven, by law, into the fabric of California life.
In Pasadena, homeowners have watched as speculators drive up housing prices and hire homeless people to guard their vacant properties while they wait to sell or flip them, as Francesa Mari reported in The New Yorker in 2020.
In Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Altadena and elsewhere, many of the homeowners ravaged by this month’s fires could take their insurance money and plant stakes elsewhere. When they move, the Bohemian heart of their neighborhoods, their family pizzerias and their funky taco stands, will leave with them.
Recovering from a disaster requires patience. And many working people — especially those whose wealth is tied up in their homes — might reconsider remaining in a place that has grown this hard to live in. Those who do choose to rebuild will most likely live alongside the homeless, as many of us members of the landed gentry of Los Angeles do now.
One of my neighbors, a man who once resided in a home a block away, recently fell into a personal crisis and now lives on an unoccupied portion of our hillside, near the spot where other unhoused people make camps and park their R.V.s.
I recently saw him at the bottom of the hill, pushing the shopping cart that contains his possessions. He was cleaning up the detritus of the wind storm and fire, removing tree branches from the street, a black strip of asphalt that he sweeps assiduously, like a homeowner tending to his front yard.
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