Among the countless tragic stories that have emerged from the aftermath of last month’s fires, surely the most poignant is that of the Black community in Altadena. One of the last remaining historically Black communities in LA County, Altadena has been a center of LA’s Black culture since the 60’s. Octavia Butler, Sidney Poitier, and Eldridge Cleaver lived there. But last month the Eaton fire destroyed almost half of the Black households in Altadena, nearly 1,400 homes. Altogether, over 6,000 houses in Altadena burned.

One heartbreaking part of this story is how systemic racism pushed Black residents into the path of the fire. Although it started east of town, the fire burned more of Altadena west of Lake Ave. - the heart of the Black community. It’s no coincidence that more Black folks lived west of Lake – in the mid-20^th century, the racist practice of redlining and the enduring racism of real estate agents made West Altadena (yellow on map) their only option. Then last month, the brutal whims of nature targeted them once again.

Another injustice came on the night of the fire. In what one can only hope is a cruel coincidence, residents living east of Lake got an alert to evacuate within half an hour of the fire breaking out on their side of town, while West Altadena did not receive an evacuation alert until nearly five hours after the flames first crossed Lake. All 17 people who died in Altadena were west of Lake.

What do we owe Black Altadena? While there are plenty of questions about whether neighborhoods in risky areas should be rebuilt at all, it seems to me that if there is a community that deserves to be rebuilt, Altadena is it. How can it be done in a way that preserves the Black community instead of upending it? One of the politicians with the most power over how these questions get answered – County Supervisor Kathryn Barger – has made it clear where she stands. In an op-ed, she made “a commitment to ensure that everyone who calls Altadena home can remain a part of its future.” She continued:

Powerful stuff! But Supervisor Barger’s track record on housing is mixed at best – last year, she blocked affordable housing due to NIMBY opposition – and it’s hard to trust that she’ll do the right thing for Altadena. As we’ll see, her instinct to block housing was activated again by the Eaton fire.

In late January, tucked in a wide-ranging motion covering countywide wildfire recovery efforts from debris removal to inspection of farm crops exposed to smoke, Barger laid out how she plans to save Altadena’s Black community: build back just the way it was. She explained that her motion would “help rebuild Altadena in the image of what it was before this deadly fire.” The part of the “image” that Barger can try to control is the buildings. She’s betting that if we rebuild the same buildings, the same people will come back. But what if rebuilding the buildings means the people leave?

I’m interested in how this motion would affect Altadena’s people, not its buildings. Let’s look at how this motion would affect three groups – homeowners, small businesses, and renters.

Homeowners

Altadena was a community of middle-class homeowners – 74% of Black residents owned their homes. They understandably have plenty of anxiety about whether they can afford to rebuild. Most of them are seniors on a fixed income, and many of those had paid off their mortgages and dropped their homeowners insurance. Those that do have insurance may not get a big enough payout to rebuild. Fire hazard maps may be redrawn, requiring newly built homes to include costly fire-hardening measures that cash-poor homeowners can’t afford. Speculators are already calling with exploitative offers to buy folks out. If you know anything about this country’s history of real estate (or emergency alerts, or Covid, or maternal health, or…), you know that Black folks have very little reason to trust that people will be looking out for them in this process.

What does Barger’s motion do to help cash-poor Black homeowners rebuild? Not much. It prioritizes building back what was there before. Homeowners who apply to build the same size house as before get to cut to the front of the line in the approvals process. “Like-for-like” rebuilds even get their own special permit review team. While this sounds sensible, it ignores the many homeowners who can’t afford to build like-for-like. Aid efforts are being put in place to help cash-poor homeowners, but they aren’t likely to be enough – the collective homeowner shortfall could run to the hundreds of millions. Instead, if Barger were serious about helping Black homeowners rebuild, there are several policies she could leverage:

• SB 9, the duplex law, provides homeowners with several ways to unlock the wealth tied up in their land. They can split their lot and sell half of it, or build a duplex and sell half of it, or even split the lot and build two duplexes.

• A new state law allows several townhouses or condos to be built on any vacant lot. Homeowners could sell to a developer on the condition that they get one of the new homes for free.

• Another new state law allows homeowners to sell an ADU built on their property – but their city has to pass an implementation law first. The County could work on legalizing the sale of ADU’s. Instead, Barger’s motion asks the state to let them take longer to approve them. Bodek also said she wants ADU’s banned in fire zones countywide, which would make them illegal in Altadena if fire maps are redrawn to include it.

For Black homeowners who lost their homes, their wealth is literally in the ground – they still own their land. Until recently, the only way for folks to access that wealth was to sell their property and be displaced from the neighborhood – which is a big reason why the Black share of Altadena’s population fell from 43% in 1980 to only 18% today. Now homeowners have tools to unlock the wealth in their land and stay. But instead of prioritizing these tools, the County is sending homeowners who use them to the back of the line while their wealthier neighbors sail through the approval process. Given that the County will potentially have to process permits for more than 6,000 houses, that could mean years of delay for folks using creative ways to stay in their community.

Why make it hard for homeowners to leverage their land wealth? Because what all these tools have in common is that they add density, and they require homeowners to partner with developers. This scenario triggers the County’s worst NIMBY instincts. At the hearing to consider Barger’s motion, Planning Director Amy Bodek used some impressively fuzzy math to tell us what she thinks will happen to all those households if they partner with developers:

If you only think developers = unscrupulous = displacement, you can’t imagine developers = partners = remaining in the community.

The result of this blindness to the usefulness of developers will likely be that many Black homeowners will be forced to sell and move away. This displacement will happen because of not building. Barger talks a good game about preventing displacement, but that’s exactly what she is encouraging.

At the hearing, Barger said, “Altadena’s future must be shaped by those who call it home.” But she’s not letting them shape it. Instead, Altadena’s future is being shaped by Kathryn Barger.

Small Businesses

This is where things get weird, with a twist at the end. Barger’s motion proposes that the Board of Supervisors ask Governor Newsom to suspend for five years a bunch of state laws that make it easier to build apartment buildings. The list includes just about every major housing law passed in the last few years to address California’s housing shortage – SB 330, SB 35, SB 6, AB 2011, AB 2097, Density Bonus Law, and more. To rebuild Altadena, Kathryn Barger wants to make it harder to build.

Why suspend all these laws that make it easier to build apartment buildings? Here’s Amy Bodek:

Translation: To bring back the 800 businesses that burned down, we want to force the property owners on Altadena’s main streets to rebuild the same one-story commercial strips instead of selling to a developer who might build an apartment building. If we make it impossible to build apartment buildings, the property owners will have no choice but to rebuild.

That’s unlikely to happen. Let’s say you’re the owner of the cute brick building in Mariposa Junction (pictured above) where Altadena Hardware and a few small businesses were located. You like the idea of rebuilding, but who’s to say your tenants will come back? How long will it take until enough people live in Altadena to support the kinds of small businesses – a hat store, a bike shop – that paid rent so you could pay your mortgage? (Six years after Paradise burned in the Camp fire, with an intense rebuilding effort, the population is one-third its pre-fire size.) You might conclude it’s too risky to build another small commercial strip. Or maybe your insurance payout just isn’t enough to cover rebuilding. Maybe you’ll just wait out the five-year pause and then sell to a developer who can build an apartment building. That is, if you can afford to pay your mortgage in the meantime – if not, you’ll lose your property to the bank, which can afford to sit on it until the building pause is lifted.

Businesses can’t survive in a city without people. Until Altadena’s population rebounds, few property owners are going to take the risk of rebuilding what was there before. This motion isn’t a recipe for building back Altadena’s commercial corridors the way they were. It’s a recipe for vacant lots.

There is another way. If the County can’t convince the Governor to suspend all those state laws, apartment buildings could be built on Altadena’s main streets, bringing more people to live in the community. Enough people to support the small businesses Kathryn Barger says she wants to save. Instead of suspending laws that enable apartment buildings to be built, why not improve them – for example, require developers to build ground floor commercial spaces and give displaced businesses the first right of return at their old rent?

Now here’s the twist: just one month before the fire, the County legalized the very apartment buildings they are trying to ban on Altadena’s main streets! Bodek:

Wait a minute. Before the fire, they believed upzoning created the potential for massive displacement of small businesses, which they say is terrible, but they went ahead with it anyway? And now that 800 businesses have actually been displaced by fire, they want backsies? Something is broken here. Zoning should reflect a holistic, long-term vision for a community. Did this vision include the displacement of Altadena’s treasured small businesses? Or is something else going on?

I don’t think they believe this talk about displacing businesses. They didn’t when they upzoned, and they don’t now. They don’t believe small businesses are actually going to sit tight for several years while their old building is rebuilt and then move back in.

So what’s Barger up to with suspending all these laws? I think she wants a do-over on the upzoning. Here’s what she said in December when she reluctantly voted to approve it:

Barger likes to assert control over housing. As I mentioned, she blocked a senior affordable housing project in San Dimas after community pressure. In Altadena, she demanded the developer of a another senior housing project make the building shorter (thankfully, that project got built and survived the fire). For Barger, legalizing apartments in Altadena in response to state mandates seems to have represented an intolerable loss of control. Perhaps the fire presented her with an opportunity to take it back.

Renters

One group that has gotten overlooked in this conversation is Altadena’s renters. The fire burned 122 apartment buildings in Altadena, most of them smaller and older. These naturally affordable homes keep affluent neighborhoods from becoming only playgrounds for the rich. In a town where the median house is worth $1.1 million, renters could afford to live in Altadena’s older apartment buildings and keep the neighborhood at least somewhat economically diverse. Amy Bodek:

But they’re not. The thing about affordable housing is that it’s almost impossible to build naturally without the government chipping in to subsidize it. One place that has made it work is the City of LA, whose ED 1 program has been a smashing success, with developers submitting plans for tens of thousands of affordable homes with no government funding. But ED 1 works because developers can take advantage of state laws that lower developers’ costs by letting them build bigger, denser buildings with no parking and enabling them to charge low rents. Guess which state laws Barger wants suspended?

Another way to get affordable housing is to give developers incentive to set aside a few apartments for low income tenants when they build a new apartment building. If the developer sets aside the units, they get to build bigger or faster. This is the basis of the state density bonus law, which Barger wants to suspend. If she gets her way, developers of new apartment buildings will have no incentive to include affordable units. When the owner of an old, naturally affordable four-unit building has no choice but to rebuild like-for-like, “in the image of what it was before”, the rents in the rebuilt apartments will be much higher than they were in the ones that burned down. Same building, different people. What does this mean for renters? Unless Altadena gets a massive influx of government funding to build affordable housing (unlikely!), new apartments built in Altadena will be market-rate, and the old renters won’t come back. Again, displacement in the name of preserving the community.

Bottom line

Barger’s motion is a disaster for Altadena’s Black community. Here’s the nightmare scenario: only wealthy homeowners will be able to rebuild, lower-income renters will be displaced, and the smaller population that remains won’t be able to sustain the businesses that want to reopen. Altadena will become a whiter, wealthier bedroom community.

Many of the buildings will come back. But the community will be gone.

And to be clear, massive displacement of Black folks from Altadena had already been happening for decades before the fire due to the housing crisis. Listen to the people who live there, like Akeem Mair, who lives with his 94-year-old grandmother:

None of this is inevitable. It is driven by policy, and policy can be improved. Here are just a few ideas for helping Altadena’s Black community – its people – survive this tragedy:

1. Give cash-poor homeowners options. Expedite duplexes, lot splits, and small lot developments for homeowners who commit to moving back in to one of the new homes.

2. Create a clearinghouse of pre-approved designs for ADUs. Legalize selling ADUs.

3. Require ground-floor commercial in new apartment buildings. Require developers to offer them to displaced businesses at their old rent.

4. Let developers use independent reviewers to approve their plans if the County can’t do it within a reasonable timeframe.

What makes a community? Our cultural obsession with “neighborhood character” means the focus for decades has been on how the community looks – mostly its buildings. This is the approach Kathryn Barger is taking. But if we focus on rebuilding the buildings, we’ll get the Disney version of Altadena. It will look the same, but the people – homeowners and small business owners – won’t live there anymore. A neighborhood needs its characters. Put the people before the buildings, and Altadena’s Black community will get a fighting chance.