In mid-February, a real estate agent, Simon Beardmore, invited me to a showing of a $6.5 million house. I pulled up to a pale gray minimansion with eight bathrooms, ocean views, walnut floors and a “chef’s kitchen.” A few minutes later, Beardmore arrived with the prospective buyers, a married couple and their teenage daughter. They told me I could follow them inside if I didn’t print their names.
They wanted to be anonymous because of the price and the sensitive location of the property. Set on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean, this was one of relatively few houses still standing in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, which had otherwise been leveled by one of the most destructive urban wildfires in United States history. The couple had been planning to close the deal on Jan. 7, the day it ignited. Instead, they started watching the flames.
Facing the water, we could see burned-out lots, studded by chimneys and the odd surviving staircase. But across the street, many houses remained intact. Unevenness was one of the jarring aspects of the fires. On some streets in the Palisades, toxic-debris crews had pulled the batteries out of the skeletons of Teslas, and National Guard soldiers ran checkpoints from 13-ton tactical vehicles. On the next corner over, a Postal Service van might be delivering mail to the addresses that still existed, while a gardener watered the lawn. Beardmore unlocked the door, and we stepped inside to the entryway.
“Smells a little like smoke,” the husband said.
When I asked him what he was thinking, he told me he felt unsettled: The inside looked almost exactly as it did before, but you knew something horrible had happened — you could feel it in the air. He bent down to look at a section of the floor, where a pile of ash had formed. Then he and his wife went down to check out the basement.
Beardmore, an Australian in his mid-50s, stepped outside onto the lawn. In his view, he said, the house would need a lot of work. At a minimum, you’d have to pay for smoke and ash remediation, stripping every surface that the toxic ash had permeated, then replacing it. “You have to take it down to the studs,” Beardmore said. “There’s ash in the ceiling vents. Ash inside the walls.” Real estate agents in the Palisades had coined a word for houses like these. They called them “smokers.”
Remediation could run to $1.5 million — conservatively. Otherwise, you’d have to rip the whole thing down and rebuild. When I asked Beardmore how much that would cost, he estimated $7 million; half a million more than the asking price of the house. These numbers didn’t seem to disturb Beardmore, who has worked in Palisades real estate for 24 years. He seemed relaxed. “This home becomes more valuable in three or four years’ time,” Beardmore said confidently.
The average sale price of a single-family house in the Palisades last year was $5.15 million, according to Anthony Marguleas, the founder of a prominent local brokerage. Now, who knew? Not everyone would pay full price, that was obvious. But the market hadn’t bottomed out, either. In late February, blackened parcels of land were coming on the market at a rate of about two a day. Just before I met him, Beardmore sold a lot on McKendree Street for $3.1 million, only 25 percent below the prefire value of the land — or the “dirt,” as real estate agents call it. By the end of March, more than 130 plots of dirt were listed for sale.
While the husband and wife were inspecting Beardmore’s listing, many other, far more influential people were performing a version of the same calculation: Billionaire developers, private-equity firms on both coasts, politicians and political consultants and former residents were all trying to figure out what the fallout from the fires would be. The land probably wouldn’t burn again for at least 10 years, because the fire had consumed all the brush, grass and structures — all the available fuel. What was less certain was what the neighborhood might look like, how expensive it would be, whether to invest or walk away.
The Palisades was not the only fire in January: More structures had been destroyed and lives lost in the Eaton fire, which struck Altadena, a working- and middle-class community that also had a larger population to begin with. But Los Angeles is a city with two primary sources of power: real estate and celebrity. The Palisades, population 27,000, was in a position to harness both. And so the question of what should happen to this little slip of a neighborhood extended far beyond its borders; it reached into the highest levels of Los Angeles business and government. When the sun set over the burn zone, you could look over the lots, through the silhouettes of the chimneys, and try to make out the shape of the city’s future.
Beardmore and I were talking about all this when the buyer and his wife came back outside. They saw some water in the basement, they said, but no big deal — it seemed rain-related, not fire-related. Then they asked whether Beardmore thought the city would place the power lines underground, to help fireproof the neighborhood. Beardmore’s answer gave a taste of how complicated the rebuilding process would be: He touched on finance, construction logistics, the politics of multiple city agencies and the disparity in real estate values among the various parts of the Palisades. Then he concluded that the whole thing would involve so many interlocking forces, it was just impossible to predict.
The buyer said he’d think about it.
The Palisades was beautiful land, and in a way, that was the problem. The beauty made it easy to live in denial. On days when the wind was blowing especially hard, residents might think about the dry brush and grasses in the canyons above town. “On those days, my wife and I would look at each other and say, ‘I hope the fire doesn’t come,’” said Bill Bruns, a local historian and the former editor of The Palisadian-Post. But as soon as the wind died down, Bruns would go back to feeling safe. “If you stood in the hills and looked down at the canopy of trees that stretched for miles, and the ocean,” he said, “you’d think to yourself, Nothing’s ever going to happen to the Palisades.”
And it was true — again and again, the neighborhood got lucky. A brush fire in 1924 was swiftly contained. The Bel-Air fire of 1961, which burned almost 500 houses, was halted just above the Palisades’ northern edge. In 1978, a power line apparently sparked a fire in a nearby canyon that burned a church and several houses, but firefighters put it out. The Getty fire in 2019, which led to evacuation orders, could have easily gotten out of hand had winds been any higher. It was always a relief to residents when the Palisades avoided a megafire. But there was a flip side. Every year that the mountains didn’t burn, there was more grass and brush — more potential fuel. The danger ticked up.
The real estate values ticked up, too. Founded by a Methodist congregation in 1922, the Palisades attracted middle-class families seeking their slice of the California dream. They settled in the flat part of the neighborhood, a mesa that extended from the bluffs to the base of the hills, where the typical home was a modest, Spanish-style bungalow. But in the hills above town, studio executives and movie stars were building mansions. They chose the Palisades because it looked like Malibu, but with the convenience of being closer to the studios in Hollywood.
In the 1980s, property developers clocked an interesting fact. The original, two-bedroom houses on the mesa were tiny in relation to the lots they occupied: The zoning rules allowed for much bigger houses. A developer could buy an old two-bedroom, tear it down and build a 4,000-square-foot minimansion on the same spot — without asking the city for a variance. Then he could sell to a wealthy buyer, like a Hollywood agent or a financier. Big houses were good business. But they also had a drawback. When you extended all the houses to the edges of their lots, you reduced the space between them. You made it more likely that a fire would run the entire block.
Speculation pushed the prices higher. Ronald Reagan bought in the Palisades in 1956, and commissioned a modern ranch house. Years after he moved to the White House, the ranch wound up in the hands of developers, who replaced it with a 12,000-square foot Spanish Revival mansion featuring a wine cellar and saltwater pool. One bathroom had peacock feathers for wallpaper. In 2017, it went for $22 million. That same winter, there was another reminder of the threat that loomed in the canyons: A wildfire flared up in Bel-Air, destroying six houses. The smoke and ash wafted over to the Palisades.
But the biggest event in Palisades real estate wasn’t a home sale at all. The year after the Bel-Air fire, Rick Caruso, the most prominent developer in Los Angeles, opened his newest shopping mall, the Village. He threw a party to celebrate. The invitations came covered with gold foil. A red carpet was rolled out for A-list guests like Charlize Theron and Scooter Braun. Fireworks went off. John Legend entertained. Giving a toast after dinner, a local rabbi invoked a neighborhood cliché: If you’re rich, you live in Beverly Hills; if you’re famous, you live in Malibu; if you’re lucky, you live in the Palisades. The rabbi was trying to convey that the Palisades was unpretentious, but what he actually showed was how much the neighborhood’s self-image now rested on a little bit of fantasy.
From then on, residents — who call themselves “Palisadians” — would often see Caruso in the evenings, in his trademark navy suit and French cuffs, strolling through the Village with his golden retriever, Hudson. On holidays, it was Caruso Holdings that paid for the large menorah and Christmas tree. People liked the Palisades because it recreated the features of imagined small-town life that — absurdly — are not often found in the wealthiest parts of Westside Los Angeles: walking kids to school, stopping off at a Little League game with your dog, running into someone at the grocery store. If there was a powerful strain of nostalgia in this self-conscious quaintness, that only enhanced the appeal. Cliff Roberts, a producer and talent manager, told me that he liked the annual holiday parade, which passed the Village, because it reminded him of “something from Indiana in the 1950s. Small-town Americana — definitely not Los Angeles.”
This was how the neighborhood looked when the megafire finally came, the fire everyone lived in denial of. Embers the size of pine cones barreled to earth on 40-mile-per-hour winds. On the mesa, flames leaped from one 4,000-square-foot home to the next. Some people left their pets inside when they went to work that morning; the animals burned to death. The high school, two elementary schools and three churches burned, including the old Methodist congregation. But one piece of real estate survived. Rick Caruso had a contract with a private firefighting company, and they were able to save the Village. Every time I visited the burn zone, the image startled me: row after row of burned-out lots, right across the street from a pristine retail center. A yellow dress hung on a clothing rack, in utter stillness.
Caruso seemed to be everywhere in the months after the fires. He appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” where he chastised the city for its failure to adequately prepare. A few weeks later he flew to Austin to tape an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Rogan said the Palisades fire was an example of California liberals being “slapped in the face by the reality” that their leaders were incapable of running a government. Caruso, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2022, agreed. “I wanted you to win,” Rogan said. “I was rooting for you.”
Next came the news that Caruso had launched a nonprofit, Steadfast, named for the 800-pound sculpture of a featureless male figure that stands in the middle of the Village. The statue, whose hand is over its heart, is said to symbolize “immovable and constant love of country.” The purpose of Steadfast was to pressure the city to move quickly to rebuild the Palisades, mostly by slashing red tape. But it also seemed like a way for local business titans to have a hand in the process: Its team included Ted Sarandos and Mike Hopkins, the heads of Netflix and Amazon MGM Studios; Mike McNamara, head of the prefabricated-house company Samara, which announced the donation of 50 houses to wildfire victims; and senior leaders of JP Morgan’s wealth-management division and McKinsey & Company.
Caruso keeps an office at the Grove, one of several enormous shopping centers that have made him a celebrity in Los Angeles. A perfect example of the Caruso aesthetic, the Grove combines small-town nostalgia with over-the-top spectacle. The storefronts are sheathed in a pale, pinkish stone. A 1930s-style trolley car rolls past gushing fountains while midcentury music (Sinatra, big-band) plays from speakers disguised as rocks. Caruso, who has called Walt Disney his idol, gives each of his malls a “story line”; the Grove’s is “an old downtown that has come back to life.” The mall gets more visitors every year than Disneyland.
I walked through double glass doors next to the See’s Candy store, across an atrium and into an elevator. Caruso appeared from a hallway — navy suit, golden retriever — and I followed him to a corner suite, with high ceilings and plush white carpet. A gold lamp illuminated an oil painting of a dancing couple that hung above a darkly varnished bar. If the office had a story line, it would be “the patriarch of a 19th-century family firm.”
Making small talk before the interview, I mentioned that my girlfriend and I had recently taken our 2-year-old son to the zoo. “The L.A. Zoo is a dump,” Caruso said cheerfully. “The L.A. Zoo is a dump” would actually be a fair gloss of Caruso’s politics, and his appeal. It captured the frustration that many voters felt about deteriorating street conditions and city services, a frustration that the fires only intensified. Caruso offered a pleasing alternative. His malls were a sanitized, functional, scaled-down replica of city life. Forbes magazine has pegged Caruso’s net worth at $5.8 billion.
What nobody would have anticipated is that Caruso would also hold a lot of political cards in the wake of a natural disaster. If he pulled out of the Village, he would influence the property values in the Palisades for a generation. So a lot of residents were watching him — almost more carefully than they were watching City Hall — to see what he would decide. On Feb. 11, for example, Scott Budnick, the producer known for the “Hangover” franchise, convened a meeting in this office with a group of his neighbors, including Cliff Roberts, the Google vice president Adam Stewart and the talent agent Ramses Ishak. “If Rick were to leave,” Stewart told me, “that would probably change some people’s opinions about what they will do in the Palisades.” Caruso told them he would stick it out. At the end of the meeting, Budnick asked Caruso what he would run for, mayor or governor. According to Budnick, Caruso said he was keeping his options open.
“I don’t mean this as an arrogant thing,” Caruso told me. “Just look at the difference between how we were prepared to respond to high winds, versus the way the city was prepared.” He was referring to his private fire team. It was the sort of argument he often made: If you left the rebuilding to the government, the neighborhood would take forever to come back. Caruso pointed to Lahaina, the site of Maui’s 2023 wildfire, which had still not been reconstructed. The Palisades could prove as complicated as Lahaina, if not more — a burn zone reachable by narrow, winding roads. Even before the fires, a single kitchen renovation could snarl traffic.
Caruso laid out his vision. In the first place, he said, any restrictions on work hours should be lifted and construction should be going on 24/7 (“you’re not disturbing anybody”). Those who couldn’t afford big houses would get prefab ones, he said, clarifying that these would not be “this little unit that people talked about putting homeless in.” (This seemed to be a reference to Caruso’s widely criticized campaign promise, when he ran for mayor, to solve the homelessness crisis by building thousands of “sleeping pods.”) Finally, with all of the construction underway, you needed to “protect the goddamn place” from theft, Caruso said. “The L.A.P.D. can’t do it. You’re going to have to engage private security.”
If you did all that, Caruso said, then in five years, you’d have a more exclusive, more expensive neighborhood. “Palisades is going to be one of the most desirable, sought-after locations to live and raise a family. Not only does it have an ocean breeze and ocean views, it’s one of the best-situated pieces of real estate in the country. It will have all-new schools, all-new infrastructure, new churches, new synagogues, new parks — new everything.”
This vision would appeal to many Palisadians, I thought. But the person who stood to benefit the most — who owned the biggest slice of this “best-situated” real estate — was, of course, Caruso himself. He was describing an outcome in which the fire didn’t kill off the neighborhood. The fire primed it for even more investment.
Psychologists of natural disasters talk about the “honeymoon period,” a brief, counterintuitive wave of euphoria that a community may experience after a fire or a flood. I thought of this concept in the weeks after the fires when Palisadians told me that they were eager to get access to their lots and start rebuilding right away. But soon it was clear that this optimism would run into reality.
The closer you looked at the puzzle, the more daunting it appeared. The construction industry relies on imports of Canadian lumber and a labor force that is heavily undocumented; President Donald Trump promised mass deportations and tariffs on Canadian goods. It was estimated that more than 100,000 truckloads of rubble would have to be taken down the mountain. Palisadians wanted to put their power lines underground, to prevent them from starting a new fire; this would involve ripping up the streets, which would stop the trucks. “I don’t know if even 10 years is enough time,” Kenyon Harman, a contractor who has worked in the Palisades for more than 30 years, told me. “There aren’t enough contractors in all of Southern California.”
Besides the snarl of logistics, you had the cold fact of money. Almost nobody in the Palisades, even the very rich, carried adequate insurance on their homes. Leo Marmol, an architect whose firm has already met with around 50 homeowners considering rebuilding, told me that “everyone is facing what we’re calling ‘the gap.’” Between the money the insurance company would pay and the money it would require to actually build a new house, there was a difference — sometimes of several million dollars.
In the past five years, the insurance market in California has essentially fallen apart. Big insurers had been asking regulators to allow them to hike rates steeply, to offset the risk from the state’s increasingly ferocious wildfires. When the rate-hike issue became mired in endless back-and-forth, some insurers responded by canceling policies under the flimsiest pretext, or declining to renew them when they expired. Last year, it was reported that State Farm would not renew 1,600 homeowner policies in the Palisades alone. There was a public insurance option, called the FAIR plan, but it capped its residential fire coverage at $3 million. So some of the most expensive houses might be the least well insured. Adam Stewart, the Google V.P., said he was lucky to have good private insurance. “I have neighbors that are on FAIR,” he said.
Serge Lashutka, a retired consultant and glassblower whose house burned down, told me that a loan could help cover the gap, but even then, he wasn’t sure it was worth it. “I’m 78 years old,” he said. Since the fire, Lashutka had received coy inquiries from callers asking to buy his property at a discount. He shared the phone numbers with me. No one picked up the first one. On the second, I reached a woman who described herself as representing “a group of investors,” but wouldn’t share any details. The reason seemed obvious. Calls like this were illegal. Governor Gavin Newsom had issued an executive order outlawing unsolicited offers below market value for the first three months after the fires. When it came to properties that were publicly listed, though, the moratorium didn’t apply: Offers were coming from developers, private-equity firms and wealthy families who wanted to combine lots, or give them to their children.
In this insular neighborhood, there was suddenly a risk of land passing to outside parties. This worried residents for a couple of reasons. “We don’t want to lose the small-town feeling,” Traci Park, who represents the Palisades on the Los Angeles City Council, told me. “We are terrified of the Palisades becoming a playground for developers.” So if the mantra in January was “Palisades strong,” the one in February and March was more mercantile.
Park kicked off a meeting of the community council in February by urging her constituents: “My advice to folks, if you can, is don’t sell. Don’t sell. We’re at the very beginning of a process.” The city’s recovery czar, Steve Soboroff, spoke next. “To briefly summarize what my recommendations are,” he said, “I agree: Do not sell now.” One day I drove through the neighborhood with Anthony Marguleas, the local real estate agent. A man and a woman in white hazmat suits were sifting through their lot. “Don’t sell,” Margulies called brightly through the car window. “I’m telling everybody: We gotta keep our values up.”
Publicly, no resident wanted to admit to considering selling. (Lashutka joked that he wanted me to identify him as a “longtime resident who would never, ever sell.”) One reason was that, if you never planned to return to your home, your insurance might stop paying for your temporary rental. One Palisades resident told me he wouldn’t say on the record that he was seriously considering a move to Manhattan Beach or Malibu because he didn’t want to open himself up to “the whims” of his insurance company.
A few weeks after I met Caruso, I was seated at a conference table across from leaders of Thomas James Homes, a prolific builder of single-family dwellings based in Los Angeles. Thomas James is owned by Oaktree Capital, a private-equity firm that is also headquartered in Los Angeles. Jason Keller, a managing director at Oaktree, sits on the board of Steadfast, alongside Caruso. (Oaktree Capital declined to comment.)
The homebuilder’s basic idea is to knock down “underbuilt dwellings” and replace them with fancy, semistandardized housing in upscale ZIP codes where construction would normally be absurdly expensive. But they can’t offer this service everywhere: They use a proprietary data-analysis tool to identify markets that have the right combination of qualities — places like Seattle, Phoenix and the San Francisco peninsula. The ideal location would have high prices, limited inventory and houses that were too small for their lots, so you could tear them down and build something bigger. The company identified the Palisades as a good market long before the fires.
Buying a home from Thomas James is like buying a made-to-measure suit. You choose from a set of predetermined patterns, but you can add your own flourishes, like countertops and fixtures. No two houses are exactly alike, but they aren’t totally different, either. In exchange for this uniformity, a customer could get a lower-priced house in a shorter amount of time, compared to starting from scratch with an architect. Jamie Mead, Thomas James’s chief executive, estimated that for residents who wanted to stay and rebuild, the cost of construction in the Palisades would go up to $1,200 per square foot. Thomas James, he claimed, could do it for $650.
Mead told me that his goal for this year was to assemble at least 50 Palisades residents who wanted to rebuild on their lots with Thomas James homes. He wanted big numbers because he thought it would give him leverage with the notoriously sticky city bureaucracy. “We’re going to be the ones sitting there with 50 permits ready to go,” he said. “We go to the mayor, we’re ready to go: ‘Hey, we got the World Cup in two years, got the Olympics in three years, we can have houses built.”
Thomas James wants to work at scale, but if too many people signed up for Thomas James, the model could backfire, by making all the homes in the neighborhood look alike. You could have “a series of 4,000-square-foot homes, with nothing to make it look like a real, unique-character neighborhood,” said Steve Kalmbach, Thomas James’s president. He proposed treating it like a planned development, with little variations: pulling one house back from the street, or changing the position of a garage or porch. “Five to seven years from now, that’s when it’s going to really show — what the character or lack of character will be in this community.”
Sue Pascoe, a journalist, moved to the Palisades in 1994. Raised in South Dakota, Pascoe went to New York in her 20s, where she started doing stand-up comedy and married a standup who appeared on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show. (Her bit about the wedding: “You should have seen my bridesmaid dresses, deep red, with slits way up the side. Figured the only way I would look like a virgin is if they look like sluts.”) After he died, at 40, Pascoe spent a few years touring the country, then moved to California with her second husband, a commercial airline pilot. They settled in the Palisades, on the mesa. In 2016, she started a website, CirclingTheNews.com, to cover the issues in the neighborhood.
CirclingTheNews served a mix of commentary and muckraking, written in a confrontational style that clearly resonated with readers, who kept the site afloat with donations. Pascoe’s most controversial stance, in the wake of the fires, had to do with homelessness. “About 28,000 residents are now homeless,” she wrote on Jan. 15, but “unlike the misfits on drugs, the mentally ill and the people who don’t want to follow rules,” she wrote, “we’re a different kind of homeless, we actually pay taxes.” In fact, she wrote, Palisadians should be receiving a portion of the $1.3 billion that the city budgeted last year for services for the homeless.
This was a provocative twist on a widely accepted observation that Pascoe had made many times before: The city wastes lots of money on unaccountable nonprofits while neglecting to take care of the basics. Pascoe said aloud what Palisadians kept to themselves. At the bottom of the page, readers left comments using their real names. “Amazing job”; “Well said!”; “You deserve a Pulitzer”; “Thank you for writing our authentic feelings.”
A majority of Palisadians supported Caruso in the 2022 mayoral election, the one he lost to Karen Bass. That campaign was a referendum, in a way, on authenticity. In Caruso, voters saw a former Republican, and an antiabortion one at that, who had switched his party affiliation for naked political expediency. Despite the fact that he spent $95 million more than his opponent, or maybe also because of it, he never shook the impression of being a rich white phony. Karen Bass, daughter of a letter carrier, beat him by 7 points.
But that was then. The fires tanked Bass’s numbers: A poll published in March found that only 19 percent of Angelenos thought she had done a good job. You couldn’t blame a mayor for a catastrophic weather event like this: It wasn’t as if a Republican could have halted the Santa Ana winds. And in the months since, Bass had taken the situation in hand: cutting regulations for rebuilding, setting up aid centers for people who had lost their jobs, getting the debris cleared ahead of schedule. But she had stumbled right out of the gate, in ways that were hard to forget. It started with her decision to take a long-planned trip to Ghana on the night before the fires started — when the forecasts were already dire — and continued after that.
Bass blamed her fire chief, Lauren Crowley, for the Ghana trip; Crowley hadn’t called to brief her on the weather conditions. Not only that, Crowley failed to stage enough firefighters in the Palisades on Jan. 6. The obvious move was to dismiss her, but Bass hesitated, letting weeks go by. In the meantime, Crowley went on TV and criticized Bass for having cut the budget to her department (a falsehood). By the time Crowley was let go, it looked as if Bass were firing a subordinate for making a legitimate point. (A spokesman for Mayor Bass said that she was focused on the recovery and that “purposeful division has no place in this effort.”)
Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant who specializes in packaging candidates for Latino voters, told me that he saw all this in a larger context. “Bass’s weakness is the same thing that’s underlying Gavin Newson’s weakness, which is the same thing underlying the whole Democratic Party’s weakness,” he said, “which is competency. People don’t believe that they’re able to deliver on the basics anymore.” Madrid argued that wealthy, college-educated white voters — along with working-class Latino voters — were defecting from progressive Democrats, a shift that would affect California politics for a generation. For his part, Madrid has signed on as an adviser for Stephen Cloobeck, the founder of a timeshare conglomerate, who will run for governor as a centrist Democrat in 2026.
If Madrid was looking at the situation as a political consultant, cool and practical, this was not the tone in the rest of the city. The tone in the rest of the city was fury. A popular line of criticism in conservative media was that Crowley, who is a lesbian, had mismanaged the fire department by emphasizing D.E.I. initiatives. The entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, who bankrolled Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, is now a primary funder of an effort to recall Bass. One Palisadian told me that, if Caruso had been mayor, he would have saved the neighborhood. “If he were in power, this would not have happened,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
This all made sense — big natural disaster, get rid of the mayor — until you remembered the one crucial fact of Los Angeles politics. Our mayors don’t have much power. “We have a weak-mayor system on purpose,” Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told me. “You hand out some appointments, you sign the budget and you grab microphones.” What Bass failed at, Levinson argued, was mostly grabbing microphones.
I started to see the fixation on the mayor’s race — a race that hadn’t even started, for which Caruso hadn’t even declared his candidacy — as a kind of container for the fear that was pervasive in the city long before these fires ignited. The fear was that Los Angeles was unstable because it was too unequal, with pockets of entrenched wealth existing next to, but apart from, the reality of a precarious service economy and escalating rents. The Palisades wasn’t the cause of this problem, though it reflected the situation of the city as a whole: Alongside the homeowners, 6,000 people had depended on the Palisades for their jobs, mostly in child care, home health, retail and restaurants. These economic impacts were only starting to reverberate.
For a few weeks after the fire, there was a debate in the Palisades about whether to add more affordable housing. Like most wealthy areas in Los Angeles, the Palisades is zoned predominantly for single-family homes, and homeowners tend to see exclusionary zoning as the force that keeps their home values high. Apartments that burned in the fire might be rebuilt more or less as they were, but proposals for new affordable housing seemed certain to be defeated. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions and comments and concerns about density and rebuilding,” Park told her constituents at a February meeting, “and I just want to be very clear: My plan is to rebuild the Palisades back to the Palisades.” Caruso told me he agreed: “It’s not the time to rezone.”
If there is one issue that has warped Los Angeles politics in the last 10 years, it is the lack of affordable housing, the most extreme manifestation of which is homelessness. The brutal fact of 29,000 people living on the street in one of the richest cities in the country is a constant reminder that government isn’t working, that it cannot take care of its moral and practical responsibilities.
Homelessness was not a daily, visible part of life in the Palisades: In early January, about 80 or 90 homeless people were living in the canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains outside of town. Most of them had arrived in the past 10 years, as the average rents in Los Angeles skyrocketed. A few came up recently, when the City of Santa Monica passed a law in 2024 that banned camping on the sidewalks. From the window of a mansion in the Palisades, you could sometimes catch a glimpse of a tent only a couple of hundred feet away, a triangle of color in the dry grass.
In response, a group of Palisades residents started a task force, which Pascoe joined. They would go out into the canyons and try to steer the people living there into services, like drug treatment or shelters. What motivated them was altruism, but also fear. “One thing the volunteers have done from the beginning,” John Maceri, the head of a nonprofit that works closely with the task force, told me, “is make sure that there aren’t encampment fires.”
Many victims of fires that start in homeless camps are homeless people themselves, but the exceptions always drew attention. In 2021, for example, a homeless man started a wildfire that burned more than 1,200 acres in the Palisades before a crew of 100 firefighters and eight helicopters could contain it. He was arrested and charged with arson; his case is still pending. Federal agents have not determined the cause of the January 2025 fire, and the ignition site, near a place called Skull Rock, is still being investigated. In the absence of any definitive conclusion, conspiracy theories have blamed the homeless.
Palisadians talked about their neighborhood in the same way Caruso talked about his properties, as a throwback to an imagined, better past. The Midwest in the ’50s, the archetypal suburb. But the Palisades had actually been a vision of the future: an exclusive, safe-feeling neighborhood with a mall at the center, patrolled by private security, where everyone lives in dread of a spark.
Read by Robert Petkoff
Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Quinton Kamara
Jesse Barron is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
The post How Do You Rebuild a Place Like the Palisades? appeared first on New York Times.
