The Palisades Fire burned its way through Jennifer Champion’s life. It started in the hills where her family liked to hike and moved along the roads she took with her daughters to Elysse’s high school (burned), Annabelle’s middle school (partially burned), and Charlise’s day care (too damaged to use). Nearby, her husband owned three sober-living facilities (one burned; the other two are now uninhabitable, surrounded by rubble). The roof and front wall collapsed at the grocery store where Charlise would get free sprinkle cookies; the one down the street is a pile of warped steel. Champion’s family had lived in the Palisades for about 16 years and, two years ago, leased a house they’d hoped to stay in long-term. That home burned. So did most of the other ones on their street.
Now they are living about 45 minutes away, in Manhattan Beach, where some other Palisades friends relocated too. “Is it convenient for all of us? None of us,” Champion told me, but they wanted to stay together. Elysse transferred to a high school in Santa Monica, about an hour away in traffic, with Palisades friends; Annabelle’s school found a temporary location there too. Champion’s job at Pepperdine University can be nearly two hours away. But she isn’t sure she will be able to keep it anyway, especially now that they don’t have child care for Charlise. 
They are past the first days of the fire—evacuating, securing temporary housing—and the first few weeks—finding a long-term rental, furnishing it with donations from a friend, buying pillows and cutlery. But “none of us know what to do next,” Champion said. Her Palisades friends talk: Do they stay where they are and make Manhattan Beach their home? Rebuilding the Palisades will take years. But right now, they all want to go back if they can.
In January, I drove through Altadena, the other neighborhood destroyed by that month’s fires, with Frank Bigelow, Cal Fire’s deputy director of wildfire preparedness. At lot after lot after lot, the only bit of house still standing was the chimney. The air was acrid and quiet. To Bigelow, the scene recalled an image from a 1961 fire that razed Bel Air, about five miles from the Palisades. (Local legend in Malibu holds that the town’s flock of colorful parrots is descended from pets that escaped Bel Air’s burning homes.)
The L.A. Fire Department produced a documentary postmortem a year later about all the ways the city had built itself flammable. That old film, he told me, “speaks to every one of the issues we saw” in January—a brush fire that quickly became an urban one; clogged evacuation routes; hydrants running dry; houses built on steep hillsides, where flames travel fastest. Bigelow rewatches it every few years. At the end, over black-and-white footage of a rubble neighborhood, the narrator intones: “Now fireplaces stand as tombstones over row upon row of dead homes on dead streets.” As we drove, Bigelow pointed to the chimneys. “Tombstones,” he said.
After the 1961 fire, people kept building in Bel Air and into the hills. My father grew up one neighborhood over and, in the 1970s, bought a plot of land in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, overlooking Malibu, where I grew up. And all of the ignition points that humans brought in—power lines, heavy equipment, cars, cigarette butts—started more fires than the land was adapted to handle. Southern California’s chaparral needs fire to regenerate, but historically, it burned only every 30 to 100 years, Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute, told me. More frequent fires meant it no longer had enough time to recover between burns, so non-native grasses—far more flammable—filled the gaps. Over time, the landscape has become more and more fit to burn. When a wildfire came through my neighborhood in 1993, it traced a similar path to a fire from 1970, and traveled through burn scars from seven other fires. That 1993 conflagration lapped at the windows of my childhood home; the Palisades Fire finally burned it down.
California has tried to build for the inevitable. After the Bel Air fire, Los Angeles updated its building codes, outlawing wood-shingled roofs and mandating that homeowners clear the brush around their house. Since 2008, the state has required that new homes in extremely fire-prone areas—such as my childhood neighborhood and much of the Palisades—have fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, and ember-resistant eves and vents. Many homes in the Palisades were constructed long before 2008 and, when they’re rebuilt, will be brought up to those standards. Fire can consume even the most defensible house, but if everyone designs less flammably, the whole neighborhood is less likely to go, Emily Schlickman, a fire-resiliency researcher at UC Davis, told me. In her ideal world, high-risk communities would have a ring of cleared land around them as a firebreak, robbing the flames of fuel. The local government in Paradise, California, which was destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire, is trying to buy up land around the community to do precisely that. But many vulnerable places forgo such measures because they could do everything right and burn anyway.
Los Angeles is still trying to decide how to remake its destroyed neighborhoods. A commission of volunteer experts will give the county recommendations on reconstructing (and retrofitting) the area for future disasters. Steve Soboroff, the real-estate developer whom Mayor Karen Bass appointed chief recovery officer, has promised that the Palisades will be rebuilt resiliently (and, also, somehow have their Fourth of July parade this year). And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently pledged to put all of the Palisades’ power lines underground. In the days after the fire, some Angelenos and experts also advocated for dramatically remaking the Palisades—to be denser, for instance, with firebreaks around the community—but those notions may already be more or less moot. Many residents simply want to get home as quickly as possible, and the city and state have waived certain permitting requirements for those who want to rebuild essentially their same house on the same lot.
Every time these fires wreak this level of damage, people look at the melted cars, curled stucco, and thousands of displaced residents and ask: Should human beings return to these places at all? “When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade,” Mike Davis wrote in his famous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” (You can tell what he thought of our whole shrubland coastal-living experiment.) Taxpayer dollars helped rebuild these areas, many occupied by rich people, again and again and again. Why not just accept that this coastline is kindling and move on?
But abandoning these landscapes altogether just isn’t realistic, researchers told me. Almost a third of all housing in the continental U.S. is already in places where settlements and wilderness intermix. All those people can’t just move. And abandonment isn’t always the best way to manage fires, either. Move everyone out of these half-wild places, and you may have taken away the people who were clearing brush and otherwise reducing the fire risk for the city nearby, Miriam Greenberg, a disaster researcher at UC Santa Cruz who studies the wildland-urban interface, told me. Leaving these areas untouched, Greenberg said, means “the potential for future disasters increases significantly for those adjacent urban areas, which is most of California.”
People have chosen to live here, with fire, for generations. My classmate and her father attended the same middle school; my friends’ parents and grandparents have been in Malibu for decades. A friend recently walked me through his home, which was severely smoke-damaged in the Palisades Fire and which, he told me, was a rebuild: The house had burned down in the 1993 fire. I asked if he’d ever leave, and he laughed: “When I die, I guess.”
Most displaced residents I spoke with want to come home. Ginny Wiley, now in her 80s, grew up in her grandfather’s store, a wooden shack called Wiley’s Bait and Tackle, and took it over decades later. She used to live behind the shop, in what had once been a cottage-style motel for the construction workers who built the Pacific Coast Highway. When the state bought the bungalows to preserve as a historic site, Wiley moved into an apartment in the Pacific Palisades. The fire leveled Wiley’s Bait, the bungalows, and her apartment; she lived in her car for a month and then in a temporary Airbnb. She told me she hopes to rebuild: “I’m going to stay with the store as long as I can.”
Insurance helps. But in my community, the difference between “good” and “okay” coverage is already determining people’s futures. Lisa Machenberg and her husband are going to rent nearby while building a home with enough room for future grandchildren; the Amirani family, whose daughter I used to play softball with, hope to live in a trailer on their burned lot, if they can afford to rebuild. Their private insurer dropped them a few years ago—one of the many companies that stopped writing policies in California—and the Amiranis estimate that their coverage will foot only about half the cost of construction.
Renters like Jennifer Champion and her family have no guarantee that they can return to the neighborhood. The Champions asked their landlord if they could purchase his burned lot, but he doesn’t plan to sell. Jennifer’s eldest daughter reminds her that, by the time the Palisades take form again, she will be away at college. Still, the Champions have added themselves to a directory, Protect Pali, that matches people looking to live in the Palisades with residents who want to sell their land.
Because not everyone wants to come back. Jane Warden refuses to rebuild. In 2018, when the Woolsey Fire came through the western half of Malibu (spared by the Palisades Fire this year), it burned down the home where she’d raised her children and spent 10 years growing a garden of eucalyptus, palm trees, and pine trees—highly flammable plants that are everywhere in this part of California. Nick Tinoco, a sociologist at UCLA, followed people in Woolsey’s aftermath and told me that most people he’d spoken with had initially planned to rebuild. But only about 40 percent of the homes lost in that fire have been. The reality, Tinoco found, “was two-plus years of them trying to rebuild and then reaching a point where it was either better for them financially or psychically to let go and move on,” even if only to the next town over. (Trees in the canyons are still black from Woolsey; my prom date’s house is now an overgrown lot of mustard and jimson weed.) People tend to think climate migration is driven by the desire to flee a hazardous place, Tinoco said, but really, it is a by-product of “the long process of trying to stay.”
Warden had originally planned to rebuild too, but she got so fed up with permitting that she sold her lot; the buyer quickly built a giant house, and sold it for four times what Warden had paid for the original, she told me. She moved to a neighborhood on the other side of Malibu so her kids could stay in the same school. She started a new garden of less flammable native plants and made a five-foot hardscape perimeter of sand and gravel around her home. The Palisades Fire burned down her house again anyway, and most of her neighborhood.
Her HOA is talking about using factory-built homes when their community rebuilds. “It makes sense, right? Because then you can replace your house easily, if we start thinking of housing as more semipermanent,” she told me. But she personally plans never to live in Malibu again. Losing a house to fire “twice is okay, but three times starts to feel like carelessness,” she said. She will replace her Christmas ornaments for the second time, but she has given up on keeping a personal library and has been leaving books wherever she finishes them. She and her husband are considering moving to the East Coast or to nearby Santa Monica, where the fire risk is generally lower (although portions of it were evacuated in January).
Fire is a brutal sorting mechanism, deciding who can actually afford to live in a place and who can’t. More money generally enters an area after a fire, because they tend to happen in coveted landscapes, Kathryn McConnell, a disaster sociologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Five years after Northern California’s Camp Fire, home prices in Paradise have gone up, and so has the number of houses sold that were built on spec, according to a study published last month. Only about five of the area’s 30 mobile-home parks have been rebuilt. The Palisades and Malibu are already extraordinarily expensive places to live; the fires will likely make them more so. The median home price in the Palisades is north of $4 million, and the median income is a little less than $200,000. Some people have been living in the homes their grandparents bought years ago or, like my parents, in mobile-home parks (two of which burned in the Palisades). But after a fire, rebuilding an old house can be financially impossible, especially if it was underinsured, and mobile-home parks might never reopen if the owners decide to sell and move on.
So far, investors have been the earliest buyers of the burnt lots that people have put on the market. The first one sold in the Palisades belonged to an art teacher, who asked for $999,000 and got about $1.2 million. Richard Schulman, the real-estate agent who brokered the deal, told me that the buyer is a real-estate investor who plans to either build a spec home to sell or just sit on the land for a few years until more people move back and the property values rise.
Schulman is bullish on the Palisades. “This is very valuable land to be on,” he said—secluded yet convenient, with ocean views and a sea breeze. Last month, I stood with him in a leveled townhouse complex along the road where, during the fire, evacuating residents abandoned their vehicles and ran. A mudslide had since closed the lower half of it. “I’m 99 percent sure this is the unit here,” Schulman said, indicating some undulating stucco indistinguishable from the other undulating stucco. He told me that this particular pile was a condo he’d recently listed—a great buy, he said, for a highly speculative investor.
A small patch of grass on the burnt hillside was still alive. Schulman pointed at the unburnt bit: “If you look at it the right way, it’s like, This is beautiful. There’s trees; there’s green.” The air smelled of eucalyptus and dead fish, which were lying on the walkway beside us. They had survived the fire, only for the recent rains to wash them out of the community pond. Schulman made a picture frame out of his thumbs and forefingers and held it toward the hill. “If you ignore the burnt hillside back there,” he said, “this is a great place to live.”
