At the very moment a fiery blaze tore over a ridge in Pacific Palisades, threatening houses, my husband and I were six miles southeast, wide-eyed in the entryway of a home we hoped would become our first.
It was a Tuesday morning — a wholly inconvenient time to attend an open house — but my husband saw it enter the market and had a good feeling about this one. We had each been saving aggressively for over a decade for our starter condo and had become the kind of couple who bickered over whether to splurge on an heirloom tomato. The down payment for a fixer-upper was coming together, and this one was ours, we could feel it.
I spent that evening and much of the next 10 days on assignment in the fire zone, whipped with ash by the Santa Ana winds as I spoke with families whose homes had burned. My husband packed a go bag for us as the evacuation order came within blocks of our apartment — all while quietly waiting to hear back on our offer. The guilt of pursuing a home weighed on us.
That modest little condo is — for us, at least — gone, not because of the flames but because of 14 competing offers that had landed by the weekend in the wake of the disaster, an unprecedented new market, even for L.A. We have not yet given ourselves permission to feel disappointed; it seems absurd to desire a home when so many families have lost much more than just dreams of one.
These fires will bring new consequences for our unaffordable city, for those whose homes were destroyed and for those, like us, trying to find a square foot to call our own. Still, I was struck by the words of a mother I met in the fire zone as she sifted through memories of her Palisades house. “After this experience,” she told me, home was redefined. “You can build that little nest anywhere.”
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