The California Fires

Letter from Los Angeles

The California Fires

I'm writing this from Santa Monica, California, where I'm staying, about a mile from where the fires are (were) still burning. Ash and smoke is everywhere. One strong upturn in the wind and another whole neighborhood could be gone. Strong winds are expected again tomorrow night.

That first night of the fires, I drove a few miles down to Venice Beach for a recording session. All the restaurants were full. Typical for Los Angeles, life goes on, fires, earthquakes, Rodney King riots, OJ Simpson police chases, droughts, mudslides happen, and yet life goes on.

After the studio , we went to a Mexican restaurant. There was a birthday party going on. They won't be leaving L.A., fires or not. Their family, their jobs are here, this is home. In Altadena and Pacific Palisades, it's another story. It's like a war zone. This is where I raised my children. It's all gone now, the house, the schools, the supermarkets, all of it. It's not a simple matter of "we will rebuild." Many were uninsured. Fire insurance, if available at all, will be prohibitively expensive. Developers are already making deals. The old "Mayberry" cozy village will not be coming back.

Many people I'm close with have lost their homes. This will be a trauma that lasts for the rest of their lives, however they manage to recover and move on. On a simply practical level, finding a place to rent, close to what was formerly home, and work, is almost impossible at this time. This is not an inexpensive place to live, on a good day.

I don't know the complete history of Altadena but I do know very well about The Palisades. My Uber driver asked me to explain it to him. For starters, it has clearly defined geographical borders. The ocean to the west, the Santa Monica Mountains to the East, and basically only one road in and out, Sunset Boulevard. It helped keep it a sleepy town that was nicknamed Mayberry after the 60s TV show. It was slow living with no night life. If you wanted a Hollywood bohemian lifestyle you went to Venice, or Hollywood.

Before I moved to New York, I looked at renting a house there. It was inexpensive and a lovely small town overlooking the ocean. That was not what I wanted. But when I became a parent, around a time many others also became parents, it turned into the perfect family neighborhood.

The original houses here tended to be cape cod-ish houses called 2 + 1s, that is, 2 bedrooms and one bath, also stucco versions of something similar. Garages got turned into an extra room and rooms got added on. They were probably somewhere in the $25,000 value quite some time ago and then they moved into what might have seemed exorbitant, the 2 hundred thousand dollars zone. This inflated to maybe $700,000, then a million dollars, and then they were torn down to build 4 million dollar homes with modern kitchens and swimming pools, which became four to six million dollar properties, and those were the modest Palisades homes. So, when 10,000 homes at $6 million plus, burn down in one night, that qualifies as a historical disaster. These are loose numbers I'm discussing here. There were some houses and apartment condos that were somewhat less than the prices I mention, and celebrity homes that were worth $10, 20, 50 million dollars.

A few years ago, Los Angeles developer and mayor candidate Rick Caruso bought the downtown of Pacific Palisades and built an upscale shopping area, with high-end clothing stores, restaurants, a movie theater, etc. It did not burn down, even though the houses across the street are in ruins. Caruso brought in his own private firefighting team with 3000 gallon water trucks and saved his property. The water hydrants in the Palisades had run out of water. Welcome to the new reality in California. The city and state can only do so much. You may need your own private firefighting team and to protect your home.

This is a developing story. Each person suffered their own personal losses. There was a lot of expensive art in the Palisades that was destroyed. Insurers expect this to be the largest insurance payout for lost art in American history.

I'm not sure what the grand overview is here. Material objects are fragile and fleeting. Life can change in a moment, overnight. Love is all that matters, but then that is easy to say when your day to day reality has not been upended like this.

Hope and love and renewal to all.