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What the Fires Revealed About Los Angeles Culture

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2025 › 01 › los-angeles-wildfires-infrastructure › 681428

When wildfires broke out across Los Angeles earlier this month, many publications began to frame the incalculable tragedy through the lens of celebrity news. As flames engulfed the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood perched along the Pacific Coast Highway, a steady influx of reports announced the growing list of stars who’d lost their homes: Paris Hilton. Billy Crystal. Rosie O’Donnell. These dispatches from celebrity evacuees have broadcast the scale and intractability of the damage, underscoring something most Southern Californians already know to be true: No one, not even the rich and famous, is safe from the danger of wildfires. “This loss is immeasurable,” the TV host Ricki Lake said in an Instagram post about her home burning. “I grieve along with all of those suffering during this apocalyptic event.”

In the most basic sense, the wildfires can be understood as equalizing. An ember doesn’t choose its path based on property value or paparazzi presence, and when one part of Los Angeles burns, foreboding smoke hangs over the whole metro area. Secluded neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades, where multimillion-dollar houses overlook the ocean, typically have far fewer evacuation routes than urban areas do. But as fires continue to ravage the area, the blazes also reflect—and exacerbate—the disparities embedded in the most mundane tenets of L.A. life. In Southern California, sights as common as a crowded freeway help explain why wildfires have become a universal threat—and why some Angelenos are less equipped than others to recover from the devastation those fires cause.

Like other extreme-weather events, wildfires are now more common and more difficult to protect against, because of climate change. The state has made some inroads in addressing greenhouse-gas emissions, which drive extreme temperatures and drought, but one of the greatest accelerants is practically synonymous with California itself. Car culture not only undermines efforts to reduce the toxic pollution that fuels climate change—it also relies on infrastructure that creates and deepens drastic inequalities among the communities that live with the consequences of climate change. Modern Los Angeles depends on cars partly because of its sprawling geography, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban-planning professor and the interim dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, explained to me. Yet these smog-producing cars became so central to Southern California life because of “transportation policy that has quite favored the automobile and given a tremendous amount of investment to build the freeways,” Loukaitou-Sideris said.

[Read: The GoFundMe fires]

In moments of tragedy or upheaval, not all Angelenos can take their freedom of mobility for granted, in part because of how Southern California infrastructure has developed over the past century. The multilane highways that now crisscross the area were first laid out in the late 1930s, not long after the idea of L.A. as “the city built for the automobile” emerged as a political campaign. (In the ’20s, an extensive transit network stretching from Venice well into the Inland Empire was the world’s largest electric-railway system; by the early ’60s, it had been completely dismantled to make room for freeways and buses.) Through the tail end of the 20th century, lawmakers prioritized suburban growth, enabled by car-friendly streets and expressways. Meanwhile, transit systems in urban areas—the ones that connect people in dense locations—received comparatively little funds. In the past decade, more funding has gone toward buses and rail systems, but ridership has decreased—in part because rising housing costs in transit-friendly neighborhoods have pushed out the low-income residents most likely to rely on it.

Beyond favoring only people with cars, these freeway networks created further social stratification. Developers often chose to place major highways in low-income areas because wealthy, and often white, homeowners lobbied against their own neighborhoods being disrupted. In their research, Loukaitou-Sideris and her colleagues traced the historical impacts of several L.A. County and Bay Area freeways built during the 1960s and ’70s. For many Californians, these roads represented freedom of movement. But researchers found that their construction had—and still has—incredibly damaging effects on the (often poor and/or Black) neighborhoods they run through. Californians in communities of color are typically not the most frequent drivers, but they live with the highest concentration of vehicle emissions—and traffic-related pollution compounds the health risks of inhaling wildfire smoke.

Because so many displaced residents need shelter, some landlords and real-estate agents are now attempting to list apartments with sky-high rents, despite state laws against price gouging after disasters. The rise of this illegal exploitation points to a sobering reality: For many Californians, the onset of a destructive wildfire is an economic catastrophe, too. That’s part of why Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental-health scientist and a professor at UC Berkeley, insists that evacuation maps alone don’t tell a complete story. She referred to what she and her colleagues have called “the climate gap”: how extreme-weather events disproportionately affect communities of color and those that are poor, underinsured, and underinvested. One of the most brutal fires hit Altadena, an unincorporated town north of Pasadena where people of color sought refuge from racist housing policies, and where the percentage of Black homeowners eclipses other parts of the metro area. Restoring Altadena, and preserving its Black and Latino residents’ connections to the place where they’ve built a distinct cultural history, will undoubtedly be a complicated task.  

Federal support for California’s efforts to prevent future wildfires is uncertain under the new administration—President Donald Trump has already signed several executive orders that undo climate regulations. During his first term, Trump reportedly refused to give disaster aid to California on partisan grounds—and changed his mind only when informed that a heavily Republican area had been affected by wildfires. Prior to Trump being sworn in for a second term on Monday, the president’s threats to place conditions on federal aid to California were said to be gaining traction, even as the fires continued to obliterate swaths of the state. In his inaugural speech, Trump lamented that the fires are “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country.” Earlier this month, in posts on Truth Social, he cast blame on Governor Gavin Newsom for allegedly failing to deliver basic services to residents. (Newsom’s office disputed Trump’s characterization of the governor’s actions.)

But climate change poses an existential threat to all Californians, regardless of political affiliation, class, or celebrity. As I watch my home state anxiously from afar, checking my text messages constantly for updates from my loved ones, I’ve been heartened by the mutual-aid networks and community-led efforts that have sprung up. Amid so much destruction, the rare moments of hope come from seeing how many Angelenos recognize the stakes of building a different future together. Disaster response doesn’t have to look the way it did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, when vulnerable groups were the slowest to recoup their losses (and, in some cases, never did). As Morello-Frosch put it to me, in order for Angelenos to “return, recover, and rebuild in a way that maybe helps fortify them against the next fire,” the government would need to be invested in the health and safety of all people—and proactively account for the inequities that vulnerable communities face before the next blazes hit.

The Message in the Sky Over Los Angeles

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › science › archive › 2025 › 01 › smog-to-smoke-los-angeles › 681285

For nearly as long as Los Angeles has been a city, the sky above it has changed colors, for short and long spells, at times portending doom. It happened again this week. Winds that would not be out of place in a hurricane roared down the western slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains toward the city. Fires ignited in the eastern chaparral foothills and along the Malibu coast. With blithe cruelty, they sprinted across the landscape, burning through thousands of homes, erasing whole family histories. In some places, they oranged the sky, and in others, they turned it beige-gray. Angelenos have by now become accustomed to spotting smoke and ash overhead during the fire season that runs from summer into fall, but not in January. To see the sun so diminished, so pale and sickly in the midwinter sky, was unnerving. It seemed like a message.

The sky over L.A. has previously contained signs, and people had the good sense to heed them. Before water from the Owens Valley was brought to L.A., and Hollywood studios began to line its boulevards, the city was dominated by more straightforwardly industrial industries. In 1903, the local oil refineries and brickyards poured so much sun-dimming smog into the sky that people thought they were experiencing an unpredicted eclipse. Steel for the Second World War was forged in L.A.’s foundries. New bombers rolled off the city’s assembly lines, and new armadas floated out of its shipyards, toward the Pacific front. People moved there from all across the world, and many bought cars. Gigantic toxic clouds started settling onto the skyline with some regularity. Some reeked of chlorine. One was mistaken for a Japanese chemical attack.

As the mid-20th century wore on, the L.A. sky began to occupy the place in the global imagination that New Delhi’s does today: It became the patch of atmosphere where one could most readily observe modernity’s drawbacks. Its mere name conjured an image of the towers downtown, massed together like giant trees but wreathed in something much less holy than a forest’s mist.

Other cities around the planet had heavy industries and daily traffic jams, but L.A.’s geography furnishes its sky with a long memory. The basin that surrounds the city almost seems designed to trap smoke; it is bordered on three sides by hills and mountains, which corral pollutants. The ocean that runs along its western edge makes things worse by sending cool drafts of air across the landscape: over the freeways, between the skyscrapers downtown, and east into the sprawl. This doesn’t mix well with the warmer air higher up in the atmosphere, and the oil-and-water dividing line between the two forms an invisible ceiling, keeping smog or smoke from drifting easily away.

[Read: It’s time to evacuate. Wait, never mind.]

People like me who grew up in Southern California didn’t like the smog. They didn’t like that it obscured the peaks of the San Gabriels. They didn’t like feeling tears forming in the corners of their eyes when they stepped outside. They didn’t like to breathe it in, and they especially didn’t like running their kids to the hospital during a midnight asthma attack. At one point, local inventors wanted to place enormous fans atop the surrounding peaks to blow it all away.

City officials sensed the public’s discontent. They had begun fighting air pollution, in earnest, in the 1950s. Industries fought them at nearly every turn, but over time, they were able to police the local refineries more closely. Some open-air incinerators stopped operating at the dumps. Lead came out of gasoline. California set the most restrictive national standards for air pollution. Thanks to L.A.’s geography, postwar population boom, and unrepentant embrace of the automobile, the city still ranks among the smoggiest in America, but its sky has become somewhat cleaner than it used to be—so long as a fire isn’t burning nearby.

The wildfire smoke that has hovered above Angelenos all week is as toxic as smog, if not more so. It’s shot through with bits of black carbon, mineral dust, and trace metals. Many of these particulates are 30 times smaller in diameter than a human hair; that’s small enough to penetrate deep into your lungs and into your bloodstream. In part to keep kids from breathing them in, the Los Angeles Unified School District closed all of its schools on Thursday and Friday. Even the Lakers, who had a game scheduled for Thursday night, were told to stay home.

Sky-oranging fires weren’t so alarming when they loomed over L.A. a few decades ago. They were rarer back then, more akin to whims of nature, like earthquakes. They didn’t suggest a new way of living on the landscape. But as human beings have heated up the planet’s atmosphere, the fires have become more regular. They have spilled out of their usual season, undoing many of those hard-fought gains in air quality, not just in California, but up and down the West Coast, and soon maybe farther afield. A message is once again flashing down from L.A.’s sky, but this time, it is one that the whole world must see. This time, it will take more than a few local law changes to clear it away.

When the Flames Come for You

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › when-fires-come › 681261

In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.

L.A.’s Twin Crises Finally Seem Fixable

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › los-angeles-zoning-traffic-reform › 681181

Los Angeles has seen better days. Traffic is terrible, homelessness remains near record highs, and housing costs are among the worst in the country. Several years ago, these factors contributed to an alarming first: L.A.’s population started shrinking.

This is no pandemic hangover. With a few exceptions, the local economy has come roaring back. Many of its major industries proved resistant to remote work—you still can’t film a movie over Zoom—and perfect year-round weather continually drew digital nomads. The quick rebound has had the paradoxical effect of kicking L.A.’s pre-pandemic problems into overdrive, by clogging freeways, eating up limited housing supply, and forcing out residents who couldn’t afford to stay.

The city’s traffic and housing crises date back a century, when Los Angeles first became dependent on the automobile and exclusionary zoning. Ever since, municipalities across the country—from Las Vegas to Miami, and nearly every suburb in between—have followed L.A.’s example, prioritizing cars over public transit and segregating housing by income. Predictably, Los Angeles’s problems have become urban America’s problems.

In recent years, a critical mass of state policy makers, housing reformers, and urban planners understood that L.A.’s problems are reversible, and started to lay out an alternative path for the future. The city has made massive investments in transit and—partly because of pressure from statewide pro-housing laws—experienced a surge of permitting for new homes. Even though rampant NIMBYism remains a barrier, the breadth of the city’s progress is becoming clearer: Los Angeles is gradually revamping America’s most infamous sprawl.

L.A.’s quest to reinvent itself holds national implications. Savvy urban planners and policy makers are watching to see how Los Angeles addresses the issues that are intensifying in many of their own cities. They know that a congested, unaffordable future awaits if they don’t intervene.

It’s often said that Los Angeles was planned around the car. But it was actually built around what was once the largest transit system in the world. In the early 20th century, the Pacific Electric Railway stitched together hundreds of historic town centers from Riverside to Venice. The rest of L.A. was subdivided into one of the largest street grids in history, marshaling growth along a coherent, interconnected pattern.

Only in the 1930s did the city begin to redesign itself for driving. Freeways started carving up the grid, spewing pollution across Los Angeles. The railway closed. Walking and biking became unpleasant and unsafe. This transformation spawned today’s L.A., where car crashes kill more people than violent crime, and the average driver spends 62 hours a year sitting in traffic. It ended up being a model for suburbs across the country; the average American now spends an hour a day driving.

The state of housing is equally bleak. By some measures, Los Angeles has arguably the worst housing-affordability crisis in the country. If a middle-class family ever wants to own a home, they’d better go somewhere else. The median home price in L.A. is over 10 times the median household income—more than double a healthy ratio.

The many Angelenos who are locked out of homeownership are stuck paying some of America’s steepest rents. Most residents spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing; a quarter of residents spend at least half. To curb costs, many renters double or triple up, resulting in the country’s highest overcrowding rate. About 75,000 residents of Los Angeles County go without housing altogether.

The housing shortage is by design: Beginning in the 1960s, policy makers tightened zoning regulations, slashing the city’s capacity by 60 percent. As a matter of law, Los Angeles could not grow. Today, building apartments is still illegal in about three-quarters of residential areas, where most land is effectively reserved for McMansions. The situation is even worse in the suburbs, where zoning allows virtually no new housing at all. The crisis has even spread to once-affordable places like Phoenix, as local growth butts up against restrictive zoning in more and more cities.

Until recently, nearly every development in L.A.-adjacent cities such as Pasadena or Culver City entailed a costly environmental review and endless public hearings, both easily hijacked by NIMBYs. Impact fees increase the cost of a new housing unit by tens of thousands of dollars. For a long time, the number of permits issued across Greater Los Angeles looked more like it does in diminished cities like Detroit than in prosperous peers like Seattle.

The city’s recent population decline might make you think that nobody wants to live there. But, really, Los Angeles hasn’t let anybody in.

After decades of dysfunction, L.A.’s twin crises are starting to look fixable.

Take transit: Los Angeles is currently building one of North America’s most ambitious rail expansions, which will rival the top systems in the country. Thanks in part to Measure M, a half-cent sales-tax increase that voters approved in 2016, the city is scheduled to open rail service to Los Angeles International Airport by the end of the decade, as well as new trains extending from West Los Angeles to East Los Angeles. In 2023, L.A. Metro completed the Regional Connector, which linked two light-rail lines, allowing for transfer-free rides across the metropolis.

All this new rail will soon be supplemented by an expanded network of bus, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. In March, a coalition led by the group Streets for All passed Measure HLA, which will add over 200 miles of bus lanes and protected bicycle lanes, and many hundreds of redesigned, pedestrian-friendly streets in the coming decades. If officials can unlock new revenue through congestion pricing—which will nudge some Angelenos out of their cars—the city might finally be able to tame traffic.

The housing situation is turning around too, if in fits and starts. Recent experience shows that simply easing overly restrictive rules could unlock a lot of new home building. In 2022, Los Angeles issued more permits than it had in any of the previous 36 years. Although the average home price continues to hover around a million dollars, rents have fallen by about 5 percent compared with late 2023.

A range of interventions have made this possible. Since 2017, Los Angeles has permitted nearly 35,000 accessory dwelling units—homes that were largely illegal prior to state intervention in 2017. Thanks to a newly strengthened state “fair share” law, cities across L.A. County will be required to permit thousands of new homes in coming years; Santa Monica, for example, will have to allow some 1,500 new homes over the next few years, more than the city has permitted in decades. A 2022 law green-lighting the construction of affordable housing in commercial zones has prompted Costco to agree to add 800 apartments above a planned storefront in South Los Angeles. Other state laws have eliminated parking mandates, streamlined permitting, and expedited townhouse subdivisions.

Still, fixing the crisis will require much more work. By one state estimate, Greater L.A. must permit 168,000 homes each year to end the housing shortage. Even in the historically productive year of 2022, the region permitted fewer than 60,000. And in a major setback, the city council voted in December to preserve single-family zoning, which bans new apartments in nearly three-quarters of Los Angeles. (Never mind that a city-commissioned report admits that the decision will entrench segregation.)

But reform continues bubbling up locally thanks to a growing YIMBY movement. Ten years ago, the idea of rolling back apartment prohibitions in Los Angeles was unthinkable; now it seems inevitable. The Transit-Oriented Communities program, part of a ballot measure that Angelenos adopted in 2016, has facilitated the construction of tens of thousands of new apartments near transit. When Mayor Karen Bass took office in 2022, she issued Executive Directive 1, speeding up permitting processes. Combined with a generous state incentive program for projects that agree to keep rents low, the initiative has attracted applications for more than 20,000 new homes and counting. At almost any public hearing, expect to bump into an Abundant Housing LA volunteer eager to share the good news.

A century ago, Los Angeles pioneered an urban model that much of America made the mistake of replicating. Now, after many decades of strict zoning and car-centric growth, Los Angeles is figuring out what comes next. The city is starting to treat its dependence on automobiles by reintroducing bus lanes, bike lanes, and rail lines. Neighborhoods that had been locked up for a half century by zoning are finally growing again. Hundreds of urban areas across the country desperately require similar interventions.

If history is a guide, L.A.’s ambitions might once again reshape the American city—this time for the better.