What the Fires Revealed About Los Angeles Culture

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.