Still not sure why editors in NYC were more traumatized by the LA fires than those of us in LA were...

I kid, of course. 

I know exactly why we've seen such ghoulish displays of mock concern. It's a doomed Los Angeles story (always a favorite). The victims are disproportionately rich and famous (at least the ones you hear about. The New Yorker recently ran an epic hour-long read on the plight of the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades. The middle class and far more devastated Altadena was mentioned twice). The story fits nicely with narratives pushed by conservative media, particularly about Mayor Bass and her responsibility for the empty reservoir that had been drained years before she took office. 

Now that we're starting to see titles like "The Day L.A. Burned," you might want to check out some of our posts from shortly after the smoke cleared.

 

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Mundane Monday

I had lunch outside on Monday. Airnow.gov said that the air quality was good so I took the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine and walk down to a neighborhood restaurant not far from my place with a nice patio facing the sidewalk. It was a beautiful, chilly day. Things felt back to normal.

People I encounter are still talking about the fires, of course. They compare notes on the damage wrought by the windstorm and what the air quality was like in the days after, conversations of people who shared and interesting adventure, the sort you hear after a typical Los Angeles earthquake. There is a small amount of anxiety about the next fire – – conditions in Southern California remain very dangerous – – but no sense of trauma, certainly nothing like what the coverage would suggest.

There are two essential pieces of context absent from the stories that have been dominating the news. The first is the sheer scale of this place. Los Angeles County (and, as is usually the case, county is the appropriate unit here) has over 10 million people and covers over 4000 square miles. A considerable portion of that is forested. For those living next to those wooded areas, or worse yet nestled in them like Pacific Palisades or La Cañada Flintridge, these fires can present a serious and immediate danger and there have been some real tragedies, but for the vast majority of us the impact of the past few days has been limited to wind damage and smoke.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Journalists love talking about the travails of the rich and famous; they love showing pictures of desolate wreckage and burned out buildings. The past week has given them lots of the sort of things they look for and has made for some very happy editors, but the picture that the rest of the country has gotten has been wildly inaccurate.

Tuesday afternoon a week ago I watched heavy metal lawn furniture get picked up and thrown in a pool. That night the power went out, perhaps due to the huge tree that came down half a block from my apartment, the trunk of which I had to climb over to get to the one isolated restaurant that still had the lights on. (I have no idea how they still had power. Everything else was dark for miles.) For about four days after that the air had that distinctive orange-brown-purple bruised color. Other than some drives to the store, I stayed inside my apartment, occasionally checking to make sure that nothing unlikely had happened with the evacuation zones.

It was an interesting week, representative of the recent experiences of most Angelenos, but fallen trees and smoky air are not the sort of footage that goes national, which is why I also spent the week fielding calls from friends and family seeing how I was doing.

I'm fine. It is still too dry, still too windy, and the next fire might be closer, but for the moment I am doing just fine.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Every picture tells a story

 A bit of context. Substantially more people died in the Eaton fire than in the Palisades fire. Far more people were left homeless in Altadena than in Pacific Palisades. In terms of the rest of LA, it was Eaton that came dangerously close to highly populated areas and could have racked up a horrific death toll had things gone differently. 

What happened in Altadena was many times more newsworthy than what happened in Pacific Palisades. There was only one reason to talk mainly about the latter: that neighborhood was where the rich and famous people lived.

 

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025

How can we possibly hope to rebuild after losing more than one half of a percent of our housing?

 Two months later and the Wall Street Journal is still pushing the drama (not to mention a couple of its favorite narratives).

Rebuilding Los Angeles Is California’s Economic Moment of Truth

As I've said before, I don't want to minimize the loss and personal tragedy experienced by the residents of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, but this has just gotten silly.

This is not San Francisco after the earthquake. The combined population of the unincorporated L.A. County community of Altadena and the L.A. City neighborhood of Pacific Palisades was somewhere around 65,000, with about two-thirds of them living in the Altadena. That's a lot of people experiencing a great deal of human suffering, but we have to keep some sense of proportion. Los Angeles County has around 10 million people. 

Other than four or so days of bad air and some admittedly scary reporting around the possibility of things spreading into much more densely populated areas, the fires had no direct impact on the vast majority of Angelenos. Other than some burn scars on some of the mountains, most of us haven't even seen any signs of the fires. To say that life goes on would be a massive understatement.

It would take some work to check, but it certainly seems like the press forgot about Hurricane Helene faster than they forgot about the L.A. fires, despite that storm killing hundreds and leaving hundreds of thousands displaced, though, in defense of the editors and reporters covering that other story, almost none of those houses belonged to movie stars.