Donald Trump will be inaugurated today. Los Angeles is thirteen days into reeling from an ecological disaster that will define the city for the rest of its existence. Tens of thousands of people have had the course of their lives altered forever, and the chance of getting the full federal recovery funds necessary to make people whole is slim to none for a city that Trump and his cohort openly despise. In the midst of this disaster, we have seen our mayor take time to thank millionaires and corporations and not the thousands of everyday Angelenos who have moved heaven and earth to care for people who have lost everything. She also has already named former LAPD Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff to lead the city’s rebuilding efforts, a very grim sign considering Soboroff’s ties to corporate real estate. Scientists are already warning that the fires have created massive superfund sites, the ash from the buildings that have burned down will be toxic for years, and as the city insists on rapidly rebuilding, millions of Angelenos will be exposed to harmful pollutants. Meanwhile, we have my city councilmember, Traci Park, going on the radio insisting that the highly wasteful and harmful 2028 Olympics are “more important than ever.”
Everything I care about regarding municipal politics in LA is under heightened threat due to these fires. In a county with roughly 70,000 homeless people, threats to the immediate health and well-being of people living outside have never been higher. The truth is this city was already in a humanitarian disaster before January 7th. Unhoused people are subjected to such extreme abuses by our city government that Human Rights Watch had to do a detailed report on how deadly and ineffective our criminalization of unhoused people is. Jaw-dropping levels of price gouging by landlords across the city seem to be teeing us up for another round of vicious rent increases across a city where half of all renters are rent-burdened. Consensus already seems to be forming among LA’s political elite to rebuild the Pacific Palisades as quickly as possible, despite the fact that it is almost certainly going to burn more and more frequently as climate change increases the conditions for extreme fires like the one we’re living under. Los Angeles has done shockingly little to get off fossil fuels and close oil drilling plants in our city; we’re currently considering upgrading a SoCal Gas facility which would lock us into burning methane for decades.
The thing about LA that I think tends to baffle and frighten people when they first come here is that the city has a remarkable ability to absorb people’s private suffering and keep it from affecting others. Because the city is so vast and built on a complex legacy of segregation, because so much of the population moves through the city in cars on freeways, it is exceptionally easy to tune out the suffering of your neighbors who might be living less than a mile away from you in fairly dire conditions. The most surreal part of living through this is how many pockets of the city just kept on churning; our Ralphs never closed or even really ran out of stock and my wife and I went to the movies twice this weekend. I went to work this week and while it was draining to have to get on calls and listen to people’s updates on the fires, in many ways it felt like any other week at work. The thing I worry about is people attempting to revert back to normalcy as quickly as possible, but I also have to admit that I viscerally understand the desire for routine after living through one of the most stressful weeks of my life.
In a perverse sense, the beauty of the last thirteen days has been watching Angelenos collectively remember how interconnected we are. The rupture this has created has reminded us not only of how deep our love for each other extends, but also how deep our capacity runs to take care of each other. Podcaster extraordinaire Jamie Loftus did a great episode of her show Sixteenth Minute of Fame where she highlighted all the extraordinary ways Angelenos have been meeting this moment with compassion, as well as the people who are quickly being forgotten in this crisis. Chelsea Kirk, a tenant organizer, has helped spearhead a remarkable effort to shame and report landlords for price gouging during the fires, and they may already be seeing tangible results. (If you are good with managing spreadsheets, I really recommend helping these folks out.) The Sidewalk Project in Skid Row has heroically been getting high quality survival gear to unhoused people and directing the tsunami of donations that have flooded the area. There’s more I could list, but suffice to say that the mutual aid and nonprofit infrastructure that has churned away in the background since 2020 came roaring back to life in the last few days in a way that can only be described as miraculous. I truly have never been prouder to call myself an Angeleno.
The past week has really demonstrated that people do fundamentally want to live in a society determined by communal care and reciprocity. It is always tragic when so much is destroyed at this scale, but the process of rebuilding presents a chance to make different, better choices about how this city is built. You may instinctually be feeling that now is not the time for politics, that the need to heal and recover quickly is more important than scoring political points. But tragedies of this scale are always political, and if we defer to the established powers that be, they are going to make the same short-sighted, selfish choices that they make every day which leave vulnerable Angelenos to suffer. Naomi Klein’s remarkable book The Shock Doctrine demonstrates how every crisis and disaster can be exploited by capitalists and their allies in government if they are not effectively resisted. The group NOlympics has been warning since 2017 that the 2028 Olympics would be just such a shock to Los Angeles, and that was before these fires leveled huge parts of the city, leaving fertile soil to be gobbled up by the rapacious elite for private gain.
What I personally have been focused on over the last few days has been organizing some paths to begin thinking about the long-term needs LA is going to have as the fire recovery continues. I’m helping to put together a mass call for people on the Westside to get informed about where they can direct their advocacy to try to force the government to care about the most vulnerable and impacted people. We have a panel of speakers lined up to speak about tenants rights, the needs of the unhoused, and low-wage workers who are suddenly out of jobs, and we’ll hear from my friend Chad who lost his home in the Palisades fires. If you live on the Westside I highly encourage you to RSVP! I’m also getting ready to canvass my neighborhood and attempt to get people to fill out this survey to be able to better understand what people are going to need as the recovery continues.
I bring these projects up just to try to give you a medium-term set of goals you can start thinking about as we start this recovery process. Eventually all the clothing donations will be sorted and most of the fire evacuees will move out of the evacuation centers into a more permanent living situation. But we will need to stay engaged in order to prevent places like the historically Black community of Altadena from being totally consumed by the greed of developers. We’ll need to make sure that Los Angeles takes this as the dire warning that it is and finally transitions off of fossil fuels. There has to be some sort of plan to absorb the workers who lost their livelihoods into some other part of the LA economy. The work ahead is daunting and it’ll take all hands on deck. I would encourage everyone to think creatively about what skills they have. If you’re great with spreadsheets, great at fundraising or researching, or just gifted at talking to people, there are people who are really going to need your help for the long haul.
If getting your hands dirty doesn’t feel like something you have capacity for at the moment, please consider donating to this GoFundMe for outdoor workers impacted by the fires, this GoFundMe for other essential workers, and check out this list of families who’ve lost their homes and are low on their fundraising goals. If you feel overwhelmed by the scale of the climate crisis and feel powerless, you really can start to make a difference by changing your consumption habits. Driving and flying less, eating less meat, and buying less clothing all do make a difference. Pulling your money out of banks that overly invest in fossil fuels can be effective too, particularly Citibank, which was targeted by protests for weeks last summer for their complicity in the crisis.
I’ll close with this, a quote from David Lynch who died this week, most likely due to the smoke from the fires exacerbating his already very poor health. He was a beautiful soul and someone who understood the darkness of this city and still loved it anyway. I pray we can all do the same.
“I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of the jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about the light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available.”