When I start to talk about routes and Southwestern highways is what my East Coast friend Taylor calls “California Talk.” A language of it’s own that we slip into easily, discussing hilltops and freeways, passages and landmarks.
This recent spate of wildfires has left me speechless. While the media cycle has begun to move on, Los Angeles is still on fire. This past week there is and has been an incredible amount of misinformation that proliferated online about the wildfires last week, about Los Angeles, and about California. And nothing grinds my gears than easterners getting California absolutely wrong!!!
Here are a few points to clear some of it up, though much of it is still unfolding and won't be resolved for a few months.
To be honest, I think I'm still in shock—I can feel nothing but anger and watchfulness, which I guess is how I cope with inconceivable loss.
“Everyone in Los Angeles is rich.” — I wish! I wouldn’t live here if that were true. If your only idea of Los Angeles is Malibu, then sure, but even Malibu and the Palisades have regular-degular working class/middle class folks. In fact, many of the businesses that burned down during the Palisades Fire (which is still going), were mom-and-pops. Not everyone here is tan, has veneers, and drinks green juice on their way to Erewhon. I’ve lived in LA on and off for six years and I’ve never stepped foot inside Erewhon, or even Lassen’s.
Many Palisades homes were generational or bought in a time when property was much cheaper—it was only until the 1990s and 2000s that Malibu became a luxury real estate destination. The Palisades/Malibu also had a sprawling trailer culture. But I think this story about nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers who have lost their livelihoods overnight with the loss of their clients' homes gives crucial insight into the overall loss of the Palisades.
Landlords are actively price gouging. While collecting some data, I came across a property in Santa Monica that was listed for $2,800 a month a week before the fire, and relisted for $28,000 by the 11th of January. Read more about gouging, the city council's failure to ban it, and the folks and organizations keeping these landlords accountable. Even Selling Sunset's Jason Oppenheim emerged as an unexpected working class hero and brought landlord price gouging to mainstream media. Comrade Oppenheim, I was unaware of your game.
Altadena is a historically Black neighborhood. Many artists lived in the area as well. There are so many excellent reported stories on families in Altadena, including this story, this one about a man's massive model train set, this one about an artist's squat, and these two stories about restaurant workers in Altadena and Black Los Angeles. “‘It’s an opportunity to still erase some of that redlining,’ she said. ‘That could really be a change if things really started to move toward being more equal.’”
Here is a list of over 500 GFM's for Black families who lost their homes and are very much in need. Send CASH in addition to prayers.
“Kim K. used up all the water.” — Actually, look into Stewart and Lynda Resnick who OWN a big chunk of water in Los Angeles, while simultaneously funding the IOF in “Israel” who just, took a quick break from blowing up children and demolishing generations’ of homes in Gaza and the West Bank. A handful of newsish sites including the Penske media owned ArtNews, have some tepid, revisionist takes on the Resnicks but it's likely because they are art patrons and it’s gouache to alienate the folks paying our bills. But to be fair, Kim K. and other celebs, including the entire town of Beverly Hills, definitely use way too much water. Y’all need to switch to clover or drought-resistant lawns over there. Also no one should own water, a literal earth element.
Mayor Bass cut the LAFD budget — The LAFD budget stuff is complicated BUT yes, the LAFD budget was cut by Mayor Bass by $17m not $23m, and firefighters were given salary increases by $53m total. Listen, the point is that she didn’t need to give the famously corrupt LAPD ‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾$2.14b☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙ to shoot at wildfires and ticket abandoned cars of evacuees.
Also, the reason the LAFD doesn't use salt water or ocean water is because it would harm the existing ecosystems and their equipment. They did briefly because they had do. If you want fresh water, talk to the Resnicks!!!
Mayor Bass, who's done a particularly bad job, in general and in response to this disaster, has appointed a real estate tycoon as our Wildfire clean-up czar. Developers are frothing, while landlords are gouging. City Council recently delayed a proposal on an immediate a rent freeze and eviction moratorium. We are living in a Mike Davis essay and no, I don't like it, especially without him here to explain it back to me.
Everyone’s going to New York—This one is interesting…so many people in LA also live in NY, with second homes or city apartments in Manhattan. I wonder which percentage of people are from there already? I can’t imagine a life-time Angeleno moving to New York; a transplant, of course. I think many folks have had their last straw. Wildfires are so traumatic and even worse, routine.
A TMZ video of a real estate agent reports that many Palisades residents who have lost homes have sold their dirt (his words) and are moving to Newport Beach.
“What about North Carolina? What about Maui?”—North Carolina, Maui, and Los Angeles all deserve coverage; what will happen in the coming days: the price gouging, the exploitative land grabbing, the collective amnesia and lack of compassion, the lull in the news cycle, is what I plan to pay attention to.
In the mutual aid networks I know of, this is called the ☼ SHEET OF SHEETS ☼ as it has, and attempts to have, every resource, GFM, donation list, art benefit, and event, past and future for Wildfire relief effort, all in one place. Pass it around and I repeat, send cash!
To send you off: a beautiful story about the history, personal and otherwise, of Altadena. And one last thorn in my side, a palm frond on my windshield, about the well-meaning but ultimately flat references to Octavia Butler and Joan Didion and Mike Davis— on Los Angeles and it’s legacy of end times-like literature, the constricting mythology—a cringey little plea to stop projecting stale narratives on California and let Angelenos describe Los Angeles:
“For Butler, this represented one possible future for Los Angeles. We shouldn’t read it as predictive. Rather, it reflects her finely tuned sensitivities to this place. Prescience, Lex McMenamin wrote recently in Teen Vogue, is ‘a concept Butler resisted, even before reality hewed ever-closer to her expectations. She wasn’t clairvoyant; she was a student of history.’”
Pray for rain and the people of Los Angeles and Palestine. ☼
Brilliant. I love the use of vintage photographs/postcards to tell the story. I second the frustration with people on the East Coast getting LA all wrong.