For 38 years, Edward Stark called the northwest corner of Merivale and Lachman Lanes home. His house in Pacific Palisades, Calif., was less than two miles from the coast. It had four bedrooms and three baths with a basketball hoop in the backyard.
Today, after the Palisades fire tore through the neighborhood in January, his home is a burned, rubble-strewn lot. The stairs from the street are still there, but they don’t lead anywhere. Only parts of brick walls and the chimney remain. The basketball hoop is charred and mangled.
So Mr. Stark, 75, came to the same quiet crossroads where thousands of his neighbors had found themselves lately — stay and rebuild or sell and move away. It’s as much a financial decision as an emotional one, as much about real estate as about the future soul of the Palisades.
Mr. Stark, a lawyer, decided to sell, with an asking price of $1,899,000. His was one of nearly 200 burned lots in Pacific Palisades that had gone up for sale in recent weeks. Telling his neighbors his decision was one of the hardest things to do.
“I was almost embarrassed,” he said. “It’s like I gave up.”
The burned lots for sale are a fraction of the more than 3,600 single-family homes that were destroyed in the Palisades fire. But the decisions being made in this early stage of rebuilding offer a glimpse of the challenges and questions facing one of the wealthiest and most scenic enclaves in Los Angeles. As of Friday, 164 lots had been listed for sale, with 19 in escrow and 27 sold since Jan. 7, according to real estate listing data.
For Mr. Stark, the choice came down to the waiting.
He loved what he described as the “small-town feel” of the neighborhood, and it was a short drive to his office in Santa Monica. But ultimately, he said, it didn’t make sense financially to stay and spend years waiting for the community to rebuild. Other homeowners who were selling their lots echoed Mr. Stark: They said they didn’t want to embark on a fast rebuild and then live for years in a burned construction zone while the neighborhood caught up and slowly returned to normal.
“Even disregarding the grief that we have to go through,” Mr. Stark said, “we don’t want to spend three years doing this.”
Jill Cannella lived in a bungalow near Palisades Charter High School for almost 30 years. Her initial instinct was to rebuild after her home was destroyed by the fire. “My goal before this fire was to live in that house till I died, and leave it to my kids,” Ms. Cannella said. “That’s all I ever talked about.”
But as Ms. Cannella, a real estate agent, weighed the cost of rebuilding and how long it would take, she decided to move on.
“I don’t want to spend the next five years of my time on planet Earth living in the aftermath of this fire,” Ms. Cannella said. “I just needed to get out.”
The decision-making playing out in the Palisades has been highly personal. Each homeowner is weighing family dynamics, financial concerns, insurance issues, logistical matters. Some plan to stay. Others will leave. And still others remain in a kind of limbo, debating what to do.
After the fire destroyed the Palisades home she bought in 1992, Cinda Rosenberg stayed with a friend in Santa Monica. Then, she found an apartment in Beverly Hills while she planned her future.
Her lot has completed both phases of debris removal — first removing hazardous materials, then clearing debris. That allowed her to move forward with rebuilding. Ms. Rosenberg was leaning toward staying, but uncertainty about the neighborhood made her move slowly and cautiously with her plans.
“I feel like we still don’t know exactly what’s it going to be like up there,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “Everything’s pointing to the neighborhood coming back, but it’s just hard to make these decisions when there’s so many unanswered questions.”
She said the limbo had heightened her unease.
“I feel this like dichotomy in my life, which is that on a day-to-day basis, I’m really fine,” she said. “I have a comfortable place to live. I have clothes to wear.” But on the other hand, she said, she still feels in flux, more than three months after the fires that began on Jan. 7.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Ms. Rosenberg said. “I’m just so up in the air about so much.”
Dan Urbach, a real estate agent who has sold three lots out of the five he’s handling in the Palisades, said that more listings were going up each day, and that so far there were more sellers than buyers.
“The market was basically reset as of Jan. 7,” Mr. Urbach said.
Some residents selling their burned lots are older and don’t want to spend years waiting on the construction of a new home, Mr. Urbach said, while younger families wanted to return to a sense of normalcy and settle their children in schools away from burned areas. A few residents had already been thinking about moving, and the fire was the final push to leave. One issue for many, Mr. Urbach said, has been uncertainty about what the Palisades will be like in five to 10 years.
“The Palisades is going to be one of the biggest construction projects in California,” Mr. Urbach said. “If you start rebuilding, and you’re one of the few that’s lucky enough to rebuild in two and a half years, three years, you’re going to be the one beautiful, brand-new home in the middle of this massive construction project.”
The prices of the five lots that Mr. Urbach currently has up for sale range from $2,195,000 to $3,995,000. “Just for the dirt,” Mr. Urbach added. He expected more lots to have even higher asking prices.
F. Ron Smith, a real estate agent who has five land listings in the Palisades, said that buyers were betting on the long-term future of the Palisades.
“The buying sentiment is if you believe that the Palisades will be bigger and better in the next five to seven years, and you have the ability to build there, you will,” Mr. Smith said.
After Walter Lopes lost his Palisades home, he briefly considered moving back to Brazil, where he’s from. But after discussing it with his family, he decided he wanted to rebuild.
He and his wife “felt like it was important to finish this chapter here,” Mr. Lopes said.
This month, Mr. Lopes broke ground on his future home, becoming one of the first rebuild projects officially underway in the Palisades.
“I wanted to show our kids that even when the storm is above us, you create the light at the end of the tunnel,” Mr. Lopes said, “because just trying to see the light doesn’t really help.”
Mr. Stark, the lawyer who put his lot up for sale, felt differently.
The morning the fire broke out, Mr. Stark left for work as though it were any other day. Weeks later, when he finally returned, he was devastated. “After 38 years, it was more than a home,” Mr. Stark said. “It was like visiting a cremation of a loved one.”
Fighting back tears on what remains of his home, Mr. Stark said he hoped that whoever buys it is able to enjoy it the way he did. It was a comfortable space where he watched his children grow up, but it was time to let go of it.
“There were a lot of hard choices,” Mr. Stark said. “We don’t have crystal balls. We can’t tell you what it’s going to be in three years.”
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
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