Wind and Fire: California Communities Begin Rebuild [OVERVIEW]

Tourism never stops in the City of Angels. Awe-struck travelers pass by Santa Monica Pier, mouths hanging open at the flashing fluorescent lights in the night sky as waves crash by below. 

The pier sits off of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, a route of legend, pinned between the rolling waves of the Pacific and the steep and flowing Santa Monica Mountains. A taste of California is no more perfectly defined as riding this highway, wind in your hair as the sunset fades behind the mountains, where blues drift into orange, then into red, then purple, finally plunging into the darkness overhead. 

Yet follow this highway just mere miles from the sightseeing hotspot of the pier, and you’ll run into massive military jeeps cutting off the route, guarding the treasures and horrors that lie beyond. 

Flame, ash, decimation. 

Traveling further inland, as a heavy morning fog drifts over, the horrors only multiply. Row upon row upon row of houses sit destroyed. Neighborhoods are flattened, with little worth salvaging but for the kid’s soccer ball resting on the green grass in the afternoon sun, or the rope swing that still dangles from a broad oak tree, or the birds that still sing and flutter past as if all was normal.

Yet it’s not.

Ashes pile into rolling hills and small mountains. Rusted water pipes and steel beams jut out, settling on a concrete foundation, the one part of each house that survived, except, of course, the chimney.

Now faded red brick with grout bulging out, chimneys across the neighborhood stand tall and proud, and yet utterly alone, surrounded only by the charred carcasses of blackened wood once called walls, shattered glass once called windows, a plot of land once called home.

But the eye-candy images that circulate on the internet don’t tell the story of the tears that drip down into the dusty ash. The global cameras now gaze elsewhere, forgetting about the staggering, stumbling, and painfully slow recovery that now awaits each resident.

“The media loves the initial disaster—the dramatic footage of flames, helicopters dropping water,” said Peter Lamden, a resident. “Once the fire is out, they move on. They’re not covering the people who lost everything and now have nowhere to go.”

But now, without the voyeurism of global communication channels circulating through small-town streets, each family makes the pilgrimage back to the burn scar of all they once knew. Their resistance to melancholy starts with little things, exchanging waves with a neighbor, walking over to offer a hug and a shoulder to cry on; even while you know that your possessions are now but a memory, the community of Palisades will hold strong. While a seemingly insurmountable reconstruction, Palisades will persevere. It strives to be the community it once was, never the same, now wounded by scars, yet different in some distinct way, stronger.

The Palisades Fire was one of four major fires that have struck in the Los Angeles area already this year, along with Eaton, Kenneth, and Hughes. Both Palisades and Eaton started on Jan. 7 and scorched deep into the heart of communities, decimating a combined 37,469 acres. The blaze melted through 16,251 structures and killed 29. Eaton became the second and Palisades the third most destructive wildfires in California history.

The flames burned for over three weeks, consuming national media attention until their containment on Jan. 31. The national telescope converged on the small towns of Pacific Palisades of 23,000 people and Altadena of 42,000 people. The highlights included investigations into the start of the fires, politicization amid a presidential inauguration, and conflict between the mayor and the fire department.

Yet locals feel abandoned by national media, insurance companies, and government agencies, who they feel have forgotten the heart of the community and the mountain of struggle that awaits each person. But months after, the question remains, how will they move forward?

Seven University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student journalists traveled to California a month after the fire to understand these issues more deeply. They spoke to everyone from local business owners to local officials and scientific experts to find out what makes these communities so special and how they can be supported.

They all echoed one sentiment: these communities feel like home, and they don’t plan to leave without a fight.

Mom-and-Pop Shops

Little life remains in the ghost town of Pacific Palisades, but underneath the engine roars of cleanup crews that trudge through the wasteland sits a small row of food trucks. Once the bustling heart of downtown, Sunset Boulevard now clings dearly to the little life it can get. Four food trucks and a ministry relief truck with a blue tent pitched out front now comprise the busy epicenter of Palisades.

Government contractors and members of the National Guard weave their way through, exchanging gracias as they pick up their food and stop to eat.

“I always feel like restaurants are always the first to step up because they have the food, the supplies, and what people need immediately as soon as possible,” said Esther Tseng, a local food journalist.

In a parallel parking lot, construction workers dressed in stained gray t-shirts and neon green and orange safety vests hang out of a rusty and tattered maroon car. One construction worker sits on the hood eating a torta while his friend tells him a joke. His laughter silences, if only for a moment, the dull tone of confusion and desolation that surrounds the town.

Business provides a small lifeline for the community, a leaping ground off of which to rebuild. But of the 1,863 small businesses and 11,438 jobs within the fire’s burn zones, owners are unsure what comes next.

Global markets don’t stop for local fires. Money still circulates even when disaster strikes. However, many are discovering that money that once when through the small community has snaked its way around it, leaving even owners of businesses still standing yearning for relief.

Just down the street from what was once a hardware store, now collapsed, sunken, and destroyed, sits Ms. Dragon Print & Copy in Altadena. Owner Debbie Collins was one of the few lucky business owners on the street because while flames burned heat bubbles into paint from the back of her small shop, her business is one of the few that remains standing on Mariposa Street. Nonetheless, her business remains stunted in a marred community.

“All I can do is try. I mean, half my customers are gone,” Collins said. “I actually started across the street, which is now gone. In fact, every house I was connected to, or any building, is gone.”

She founded the local store 35 years ago as an escape from a failed relationship and has since become a staple in the local community. It’s this connection that inspired her resilience in opening less than a month after the fire.

“I was really trying to get the doors open here. I wanted people to have a place that felt and looked exactly the same,” she said. “People have been coming in, some people coming just to cry, need a hug, and you know, just hang out.”

But not all business owners were quite so lucky.

Teddy Leonard owned Malibu Reel Inn, an “iconic” seafood restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway that now sits destroyed. The lot is fenced off to those trudging the Pacific Coast Highway, as Leonard says it is now a toxic waste dumping site for fire cleanup crews.

The beachfront restaurant prided itself on the freshness of each ingredient, drawing those from all over the world to the small eatery. The quirky restaurant with surfboards and Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, with wooden benched tables adorning red and white checkered tablecloths was what the LA Times called a “seafood institution.”

“We would have surfers in line with actors, in line with homeless people, in line with movie executives, you had families, you had everybody. Everybody stood in line,” Leonard said.

There has been little recovery. Leonard is unsure if rebuilding will be possible but has started a GoFundMe to raise the lost wages for the staff.

And as with everything, there are those caught in between. Joe D’Amore owns D’Amore’s Pizza on the Pacific Coast Highway. The Boston native opened his first restaurant in 1987, using his grandma’s recipes, who hailed from Naples, Italy. He takes pride in his imported Italian flour and commitment to authentic flavors, which has drawn everyone from local Pepperdine University students to actor Mark Hamill.

His Malibu shop sits tucked away in the corner of a modern two-story shopping mall, which once had rooftop dining just a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. What once acted as an advantage, being settled on the Pacific Coast Highway, now acts as a curse as the fire burned through the roadway. Checkpoints on the route only allow residents and necessary workers, which has left less and less people able to reach his “world-famous pizza.”

“One lady parked her car by the liquor store there, walked here, got a pizza and a salad, and walked back to her car. That’s how bad she needed to eat,” D’Amore said. “They change their mind almost daily, so there’s no way to run a business.”

D’Amore’s family owns locations around the southern California area, but the shops have slowly dwindled because of the rebuilding costs of previous fires and catching up sales because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said he spent $500,000 out of pocket striving to keep one location open, but it eventually fell. He longs for each day to keep the business afloat, but the road ahead remains rocky.

“Every day changes, because I can’t have a strategy when I’m dictated by other forces. I don’t know what’s happening from one day to the next,” D’Amore said.

Others have trudged forward slowly. Elizabeth Lamont owns an interior design shop in downtown Pacific Palisades which survived the fires but has remained closed since. She’s been forced to cut five of her 11 workers off of full-time salaries, but trickles in enough through online business and opening via appointment.

Elvis Sandoval immigrated from Mexico in 2001 and now owns a landscaping business in Pacific Palisades. The fires have forced him to lay off some of his workers, who are also largely immigrants, already suffering from the fear of recent heightened immigration security. He said he also feels the loss of the homes and customers “like a family.”

Businesses trudge forward, hoping to survive while propping up others in their local community as well. The fight is tough and rarely linear, but most locals say they feel intertwined with these spaces and longing for the return of the towns they know and the people they love.

‘It’s a way of life; it’s a community’

Sheriff’s Captain Jennifer Seetoo has seen a lot of Malibu, including multiple fires that have ravaged the community, but her eyes still water and her face rushes with pride as she talks about the community she calls home.

“[Malibu] is very special,” she said. “when bad things happen, I know this community is going to survive and be resilient because this community is made of up just the most incredible people I’ve ever met.”

The Franklin Fire burned through Malibu began just a month before Palisades and Eaton, starting on Dec. 9, 2024. The fire could’ve simply been taken as a foreshadowing of the horrors to come if it didn’t also do vast damage of its own.

According to LAFD, the fire engulfed 4,037 acres, destroying 20 structures and damaging another 28. It also scorched through parts of the Pacific Coast Highway. Because of the proximity in timing and location, Malibu has faced similar delays in insurance and clean-up as victims of the other fires.

But Seetoo feels optimistic about local communities and believes that Malibu will rebuild. Others echoed similar sentiments.

“I grew up in Connecticut in a small town and this is the most like that anywhere in Southern California and we really want to keep it that way,” said Elizabeth Lamont, a Pacific Palisades business owner since 1990. The phrase echoed by both was that these are “tight-knit communities.”

This framework of friendships and small-town feel has served Malibu and Pacific Palisades well, encouraging community organizers to slow the bleeding.

The Palisades YMCA has become another institution of refuge for this recovery effort, headed by Jim Kirtley, who had little time to grieve the loss of his YMCA.

“All of our YMCAs immediately turned into donation centers and distribution centers at the beginning of the emergency,” he said. “We’re just trying to give as much support as we can to those who have been displaced.”

The efforts included free memberships, childcare and mental health services. They’ve additionally relocated fitness classes and community programs to other LA locations.

Even small businesses pitched in. Elizabeth Lamont, who owns an interior design shop, and Peter Lamden, who owns a salon, have utilized their business specialties to provide services to the community.

Lamont lost her Malibu home and while her business wasn’t destroyed, it remains blocked off to customers for the time being. Her business has been there for displaced community members.  She said they’ve helped families fully furnish temporary rental houses at deeply discounted costs. The business is also working with local contractors to help with interior design for houses made in the rebuilding process.

Nonetheless, Lamont misses the Pacific Palisades community she’s “ensconced” in.

“Our customers aren’t only just customers; they’re friends and clients that have become friends, and not to mention my amazing team of people working here,” Lamont said.

Even while Lamden’s salon remains without potable water, he’s helped gather donations of thousands of dollars worth of hair care, shampoo, and blow dryers.

“I reached out to every brand I’ve ever had a relationship with in this industry,” Lamden said. “We’ve probably given out over 100 bags so far. The majority of those bags have been picked up by strangers who just heard what we were doing and reached out.”

Lamden’s salon embodies the California lifestyle, with sleeves of tattoos on each arm, sporting a mustache, scuffed white Converse and a pair of skinny jeans, so when his house was threatened, Lamden knew he couldn’t lose the place he loved. He and a friend stayed to protect his house during the fires.

“I knew that if I left, there was no guarantee my house would still be standing when I got back. So I stayed. I had a dirt bike ready in case I needed to get out,” Lamden said. “A firefighter gave me some pointers, and eventually, they left. After that, it was just me and a friend, taking turns on the shovel and the hose for hours.”

While much of the official clean-up work has dragged along, the vastly strong and complex webs that made up these small communities are doing what they can to pull together and stay “Palisades Strong.”

There’s No Smoke Without Fire

While the dust has now settled, horror still rages on in the minds of those who witnessed the fire as it greedily devoured each house, each tree and each car in its path. Yet the sight was not as linear as one might expect. Few houses still remain, but those that do, stick out like a sore thumb. Pulverized houses sit neighborly to homes that remain, as if a hand reached from the sky, plucking each house one by one by one, stopping by sheer happenstance, skipping a house, and moving on to the next.

All the while, the blazes rampaged on, fading from the hottest blues at the center, outward into orange, red, and finally, the consuming black smoke, which wreathed the entire city of LA in a haze for weeks. As this smoke drifted its way ever so peacefully into the atmosphere, debates stormed on, deliberating climate change, both as a factoring cause of the issue and the further issues that might result from this devastation.

Altadena Business owner Debbie Collins recounted the horrors of the Eaton Fire most clearly.

“I look up at the mountain, and I’ve seen a lot of fires in my life, but the entire mountain is red. It’s just solid red. I’m like ‘Wait a minute you guys,’” she said. “I told [a friend] to get a suitcase, and the minute I said that the entire room went black. She could’ve been standing in front of me and I couldn’t see her.”

Collins safely escaped with the help of local departments, but it left her neighborhood ruined. According to University of Wisconsin Assistant Professor Dr. Mayra Oyola-Merced, who studies climate change and previously researched in California, the accelerated intensity of wind patterns and a long cycle of drought in California made these fires especially intense.

The context also needs the complex climate of Southern California. Oyola-Merced explained that most of California is situated in the desert region, making it prone to drought. This has exacerbated cycles of extreme “atmospheric rivers,” where one year, rainfall will be extremely high, followed by a year of extreme drought. This year happened to be an extreme drought year for California.

“It’s a cycle of dryness, no precipitation for months, you get the right ingredients with brush, heat, and also, in the particular case of Southern California, you get the Santa Ana Winds,” Oyola-Merced said.

The Santa Ana Winds are a pattern of strong winds in Southern California, which locals often refer to as “devil winds” because of the destruction they bring. They are typically hot and dry.

While a spark may start a fire, it is the Santa Ana Winds that truly stoke the fire to be the mass catastrophe that it has become. Many residents expressed shock at the speed of the winds they saw during the fires.

“The winds were insane—30 to 40 miles per hour. It was ridiculous. Once the fire started, it just spread like crazy,” Ezra Franks, a local musician, said.

Others added this was the worst they’ve seen in their time living in Los Angeles. Oyola-Merced says this is not just happenstance, but a changing pattern resulting from global warming.

She explained the wind pattern exists because of the stark temperature difference between the cold currents of the Pacific Ocean and the hot desert climate inland. As ocean water rises to one side of California’s mountains, there becomes a strong contrast in climate depending on the side of the mountain. However, as the globe slowly gets warmer, the contrast in these climates become more distinct, making the winds faster. This has also meant the pattern is coming later.

“Especially over the last decade or so, [the Santa Ana Winds] have been increasing,” Oyola-Merced said. “It’s not only the increase of the problem, but also the change in season, so the season has been coming later and later in the year, and it’s also extending a little bit.”

But when a match strikes, these winds aren’t only carrying fire, but toxic smoke that researchers have said can cause health issues. Sean Boland, a PhD candidate at Colorado State University studies these health effects associated with wildfire smoke. He says that particulate matter is often the most concerning with wildfire smoke, but it’s categorized by size. He added when the particles get below 2.5 microns, hence the term PM2.5, they can get into the lungs and the bloodstream, causing long-term health effects.

“Generally, within wildfire smoke, there’s going to be various gases. Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxide, things of that nature,” Boland said. “If you’re having infrastructure burning too, that’ll also go out into smoke, so any type of infrastructure material could be lead, it could be formaldehyde, anything like that can now be in the smoke.”

Burning these gasses and materials into the air is not without expense.

“People are having issues with blood circulation, blood pressure, different abnormalities in heartbeats and breathing. There’s definitely a lot of issues there,” Boland said.

Boland recommended wearing N95 masks and air purifiers, because while not perfect, they try to mitigate the risk. But even a month after the fire, most locals had grown tired of wearing masks as they shuffled past the ash-filled rubble of their old neighborhoods. Most didn’t wear masks, even the construction contractors who spent all day in it. Only federal hazard examiners who had to tromp through large piles of ash wore hazmat suits.

However, the runoff smoke doesn’t simply stop at city limits. Oyola-Merced added that this smoke can affect regional weather patterns.

“When [smoke] travels far, it can either heat up or cool down portions of the atmosphere,” she said. “When you do that, you’re changing the conditions for weather formation.”

Creators and Cultivators

It’s a foggy Wednesday morning in downtown Santa Monica. Skinny palm trees squiggle into the sky next to shorter, wider palm trees, which still tower over the people below. A once car-filled street now sits arranged with rows of multicolor tents hosting local vendors. A buzz of chatting between old friends and new ones lights up this hazy morning as they connect over fresh fruits and veggies.

But this community is not without suffering. Each and every shopper and owner feels interwoven with the drastic fires that devastated communities less than four miles away. Yet as they indulge in sweet slices of citrusy orange and pass by local musicians who serenade the soft sounds of a saxophone, the community longs and fights back to recover just a month after the fires faded.

“I’ve had a customer that I’ve sometimes not seen eye to eye with, and she came right up and said ‘thank you for being here,’ so she was really happy to be in kind of her community space,” said Jaclyn Rivera-Krouse, the market’s organizer.

Artistry, expression, and growth are interwoven throughout the most biodiverse state in the US, yet farmers’ market owners and artists alike have worn the impact of the fires and the subsequent issues. One of the stand owners, Sarah, runs the market front for a farm in Pasa Robles, stationed in the countryside halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“It’s surprising how many regulars make it a point to come every Wednesday to shop,” she said. “Customers I know by name now, and like, they have my phone number, they were calling me, checking in on me.”

Another market owner, Abigail, said the farm she works for, an hour north in Moorpark, has had ashes falling on crops and had to evacuate farmers for poor air quality. This has affected her as well as the stand-operator at this weekly market.

“I lost four days of work that would usually be on my paycheck,” she said. “We make a decent amount of our weekly profit at this market because it is one of the biggest ones that we go to. So it was a big impact, and I think we’re still seeing the effects, honestly – even [one month after], because there’s so many customers displaced.”

Even behind the scenes of these beautiful plants and biodiversity lies an economic infrastructure of struggling business people. Elvis Sandoval, who immigrated to the US over 20 years ago, runs a landscaping business in Pacific Palisades which once sprouted out of cement cracks but now faces struggle with many homes destroyed and homeowners gone.

“We lost a lot of work,” Sandoval said. “It’s something difficult laying off employees because they have their families. Some had to move.”

He said his company had to lay off groups of employees while the rest had begun working in Beverly Hills. He knew many of the homeowners who are now with nothing, saying he felt the loss like family.

This loss in work comes at a volatile time in the Hispanic community, as many, including Sandoval, are feeling fears about possible deportations under the new administration.

“We want more Latinos with careers,” Sandoval said. “Us as Latinos need to focus on our population.”

Teddy Leonard, who owns Malibu Reel Inn, felt similarly, as many of her workers were immigrants.

“These are the people that grow your food. They’re the people that pick your food. The people that cook your food, they’re the people that serve your food. They’re also the people that are in the hotel and the hospitality industry, from top to bottom,” Leonard said. “When you talk about construction and building the labor force, the backbone of our labor force is immigrant.”

Yet the ability to create beauty and strength out of nothingness is not limited to those with a green thumb, but also artists who have planted the seeds of imagination and cultivated the aching hearts of residents. For photographer and artist Joshua Simpson, the connection between his pain and need for community has been expressed through his artwork. He is part of an art exhibition called “Out of the Ashes,” where he’s used his photography skills to capture the pain suffered by so many.

“I had years of negatives and prints of my work; I lost that. I lost a lot of family pictures,” Simpson said. “The thing I think about a lot is I had my grandfather’s and grandmother’s bibles, like their bibles they had for the last twenty years of their lives. These aged, thumbed bibles, those were really precious. It was a big deal for my family, they really wanted me to have them. That’s the one thing I probably think about the most.”

His piece titled “I forgot to think about death today” perfectly encapsulates the slow burn yet overwhelming pain felt by Altadena’s residents. The picture shows a black and white book titled “Altedena’s Golden Years,” and is tinted with burnt yellow as the top of the cover shrivels from scorched burn marks. It can be viewed here.

Art has been cathartic for many, in fact, “Out of the Ashes” featured 41 artists. Local musician Ezra Franks expressed his struggles with the fires as well. Franks lives in North Hollywood but lost his water, gas, and power, and was impacted by the surge of thefts immediately after.

“A lot of people were breaking into cars and homes because they thought people had evacuated,” Franks said. “I lost my laptop, my headphones, my interface—everything I need to work. It’s been brutal.”

He’s been preparing for an upcoming tour, but his stolen equipment set him back. He even went so far as to make a diss track for the fires on SoundCloud to “make light of a shitty situation.”

But even as fires wipe out the well-tended crops and ravish through a once cohesive community, the flames plant new seeds of creativity and unity.

Assurance or Insurance?

John Denuccio has spent a month living in and out of his truck. The 63-year-old caretaker for a wealthy French family in Pacific Palisades now resides in his black pickup truck with his dog Calla. He still wears a muddied green jumpsuit and a lived-in Notre Dame baseball cap.

“Everything I own is in this chest. Like three bags of clothes and a blanket. Everything I own is in that white chest and these two buckets in my back seat. Couldn’t save nothing,” Denuccio said.

He was born in the San Fernando Valley and has lived and worked in Palisades for 15 years, but he feels increasingly abandoned in the community he calls home. He has been supported by FEMA, but the dividends weren’t even enough to pay his health insurance. He has additionally received government support for a hotel room, still having to bargain with hotel owners for cheaper prices.

“A lot of people here in Palisades, they have wealth, but not everybody,” Denuccio said. “I’m working on a property for 15 years, and they give me a little place to live in with very, very cheap reduced rent. So I work paycheck to paycheck. Now it’s all burned down. The first night, my dog and I, we slept in the truck.”

He said FEMA gave him $13,000 for his house, which he said costs what he estimated to be worth between $100,000 and $150,000. He added he longs for showers, a bathroom, and a temporary tent to lay his head in until he’s able to get back on his feet. Denuccio hopes this would be provided by the federal government as the Red Cross temporary setup got “real disgusting after about two weeks.”

“You know, get mad, you feel angry, but the best medicine is laughter. But that doesn’t help you with a place to stay,” Denuccio said.

Yet Denuccio wasn’t the only one to feel abandoned by insurance companies, in fact, the phenomenon was widespread. CBS News and others reported that about 1,600 policyholders in Pacific Palisades alone had their policies dropped before the fires.

“It’s been very difficult working with the insurance companies getting anything that resembles replacement value for what we’ve had,” said Elizabeth Lamont, a Pacific Palisades business owner who is $1 million short on her house insurance. “We’re not insurance brokers, so we don’t really know when someone tells you to insure yourself for this, if that’s really accurate, clearly was not.”

Dr. John Collier, a professor at UC-Berkeley who researches insurance and climate change, said this has been a common phenomenon not just in California but across many catastrophe-prone states and has crept into other ones more recently.

“The way that regulation has worked is that it controls pricing, but not underwriting,” Collier explained. “It controls premiums in various aspects of the policy, but it doesn’t tell insurers that you have to write in a particular area.”

Determining where insurers write is determined by the companies themselves, and when the conditions of California’s winds or droughts become too great of a risk, they must pull out of a neighborhood.

But Collier explained that this is an extremely complex issue and that insurance companies are not designed for mass catastrophes like this. They are more typically designed for single-house fires or destruction, which can be cushioned by the policies of other homeowners. However, when a disaster like this strikes, costing an estimated $250 billion in damages, insurers are stuck pulling from money they don’t have.

They also need to regulate the prices of insurance premiums, which means in order to get an affordable premium, they must drop coverage prices underneath the cost of a rebuild.

“There is a tension between affordability and availability,” Collier said. “If you have regulated rates that are cheap enough for people to afford, the insurers won’t want to be in the market because they won’t be able to collect enough premiums for the risk. If you let them increase rates, then people won’t be able to afford the rates.”

California has tried to fix these policy abandonment issues through the FAIR plan, which is not funded by taxpayer dollars but rather a pool of money provided by licensed insurers. It was established by state statute in 1968. It is offered to anyone who is unable to get home insurance on the private market. Unfortunately, Collier says this model can be quite problematic.

“Everyone on the FAIR Plan is someone who couldn’t get a private policy which means it’s just a bunch of people with very bad risks in fire-prone areas,” Collier said.

This means a single disastrous event, like the Palisades Fires, and the reserves of the plan are spent.

So the concern remains what people will do now, which Collier is unsure about, but tied it to 2018’s Paradise Fire. He said while many upper class may rebuild, those who can’t afford it will sell their lots to large development companies who will rebuild homes while original community members will likely move elsewhere.

“My expectation would be that ultimately, these places are close enough to the LA area, it’s a hot enough property market, that you’re going to see rebuilding,” Collier said. “But the big question is who rebuilds and who lives there afterward?… It’s clear in Altadena that there is going to be a lot of displacement.”

Peter Lamden, a local business owner said he’s watched as his friends have struggled with these issues.

“I have a friend who lost his home. His parents bought it in the ‘70s, and the home was paid off,” Lamden explained. “If he had sold it before the fire, he would have gotten $3.5 million. Now, his insurance gave him $700,000. And we’re getting quotes of $1,000 per square foot to rebuild.”

He said he’s already seen lots for sale for 20% under market value.

Collier likened it to two communities hit by the 2018 fire, Santa Rosa and Paradise. He said after seven years, Santa Rosa, whose average household income hits almost $100,000, stands almost completely rebuilt. Paradise, whose average household income sits $10,000 below the national average, remains only 1/3^rd rebuilt.

Unfortunately, like many, this issue may come down to capital and influence.

Moving Forward

As the swirling firestorm of national media has painted this story in the minds of hundreds of millions who have read about it, Los Angeles searches for fixes to the problems that exacerbated these fires. Many residents had stark opinions on what happens next, but most agreed that national media didn’t do it justice.

“People think, ‘Oh, they’ll be fine, they have insurance, they have another home,'” said salon owner Peter Lamden. “That’s not the reality for a lot of people. Some families have lived here for decades and will never be able to come back.”

Many reiterated that they felt the fires were unnecessarily politicized by public figures pointing fingers. Nonetheless, those on the ground still had political convictions.

“[Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass shorted the budget for the fire department with [$17.6 million]; they’re bickering about that. There’s no water in the reservoir for over a year,” said Pacific Palisades resident John Denuccio. “Somebody’s a*s needs to get reamed for that. This is unbelievable. That is just poor city management – that lays on the mayor, Karen Bass. She should be fired.”

Bass has been heavily criticized, even drawing comments from current President Donald Trump. However, Denuccio’s claim about the reservoir was widely circulated, yet reported by the Associated Press as misinformation, as a wide-ranging swath of misinformation surrounded the fires.

Another point of attack for citizens was insurance companies, many of whom cancelled insurance claims shortly before the fire.

“Ninety days before the fire, the insurance became void,” local business owner Joe D’Amore explained. “They did it to everybody. If they took it away 30 days before, they’d still be responsible.”

But this isn’t just an insurance problem. Dr. Stephen Collier said there is simply too much disaster risk in the insurance system to make it viable. California Environmental writer Ray Ford seconded these concerns.

“You take 40 years plus of houses built with no fire codes, insurance isn’t necessarily geared towards fires,” Ford said. “Now when these homes get destroyed, due to property value skyrocketing, they may not even be able to rebuild.”

But minimizing this risk is an issue that is still debated.

“The problem with fire as opposed to flood or other natural disasters is we don’t actually know that much about the impact of mitigation measures,” Collier said.

Collier brought up the idea of “home-hardening,” which means doing things to help minimize fire risk within individual homes. He explained this includes things like having double-paned windows and fire-resistant siding. He added this could also include creating a “zero zone” around the house, meaning five feet around the house is all non-flammable material.

This home-hardening remains a little-researched subject, but could become more common by implementing regulations, being enforced by Homeowner Associations, or by insurance companies offering benefits to those who follow them, Collier said.

The vast disaster remains a problem that will take years to recover from, leaving scars on the small communities surrounding Los Angeles.

“I think the government is trying, but its just too much. Even if they pitched a perfect game, they can’t solve all these problems as quickly as people might want them to be solved,” said artist Joshua Simpson. “Time will tell how this all plays out and what the mistakes are, and what gets done right. I think it’s too soon to start thinking about the mistakes because everything is moving so fast, these fires moved so fast.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into the 2025 California wildfires. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.