The Pacific Palisades — the Los Angeles community where more than 6,800 structures were destroyed and nearly 1,000 were damaged in the California wildfires — is among the wealthiest enclaves in the United States.
The average household income is $375,000, three times the city average, and the typical home is worth $3.7 million. The community is home to Hollywood royalty, chief executives, political donors and hedge fund managers.
Its deep-pocketed, well-connected residents have access to power that few have: They can pick up the phone and call Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass or Steven Soboroff, whom the mayor appointed as the rebuilding czar. The sheer concentration of affluence — coupled with the frustration that the government’s response to one of the biggest American catastrophes in recent history has been inadequate — could greatly shape the future of the Palisades.
Past disasters have shown that in the aftermath, wealthier communities fare better than their poorer counterparts, and in its resurrection, the Palisades will be more expensive and more exclusive than it was before the fire tore through it last month, according to Max Besbris, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies how climate change impacts real estate values, residential decision-making and inequality.
“I suspect that because these are pretty wealthy households with a lot of economic and also political power, they’re going to be able to dictate the terms of their own recovery,” Dr. Besbris said.
In Altadena, where 9,400 structures were destroyed and 1,000 damaged, the median household income is $130,000 a year. While Altadena’s rebuilding might be uneven, Dr. Besbris said, “recovery in the Palisades is going to be this really fast, big buildup back toward really valuable, very expensive properties.”
Some of the residents whose homes burned are calling for the neighborhood to incorporate as a separate city, similar to Beverly Hills, which has been an independent city within the county for a century and has its own mayor, City Council, fire department, police department and school district.
On Monday, the billionaire developer and onetime mayoral candidate, Rick Caruso, 66, announced a nonprofit to help expedite the rebuilding of the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena. And Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times has created a leadership council of executives and lawyers to influence the cleanup effort.
“It’s about the Rolodex — who can I call in?” Dr. Soon-Shiong, 72, who was evacuated from his Brentwood home and is concerned about toxins in the debris, said in a telephone interview.
William Wyatt, 41, the founder of the Donerail Group, a merchant bank, joined Dr. Soon-Shiong’s council, upset about the destruction to the community and of his house in the Huntington neighborhood. Before the fires, he paid $1,000 for private security that patrolled his neighborhood because he felt that the police response was inadequate. To him, the fires revealed far deeper shortcomings.
“Our community deserves better,” Mr. Wyatt said. “As we build back, we must build back with a simple underlying refrain: what has been has not been good enough.”
According to estimates, the insured losses in the Palisades could range from $23 billion to $29 billion. As the community burned, fortunes often fell along property value lines, with some of the most coveted swaths, like the Riviera, with some homes valued at well over $30 million, largely spared, while the Alphabet streets, with smaller homes on postage stamp lots, were decimated. (Private firefighters have been credited, at least in part, with saving the most expensive properties.)
Mr. Caruso’s Palisades Village shopping center did not burn because he hired a private fire fighting company to defend the property.
In Mr. Caruso’s vision for the Palisades, the power lines will be buried, the water system and fire hydrants upgraded, and affordable housing will be limited. “Let’s not have social policies slowing down or impacting the ability for people to bring back the community that they’ve lost,” he said of the prospect of adding additional affordable housing, although state laws mandate that cities increase it.
Last week, grieving that his Pacific Palisades home had burned, Jason Finger, 52, a founder of the delivery app Seamless, fired off a message to one of the neighborhood WhatsApp groups. He wrote that low-income housing mandates would destroy property values and described a future where every car entering or exiting the Palisades would be tracked and unfamiliar ones followed by a drone — ones flagged as stolen would trigger an immediate call to the police; all new homes would be built to fire-resistant…
Read More: L.A. Faces Pressure From Wealthy Residents as the Pacific Palisades Rebuilds