Hector Tobar
Less than a month before fires began to ravage my hometown, State Farm sent me a bill. The oracles of risk foresaw an apocalypse in Los Angeles’s future. So they raised my home insurance premium by nearly 18 percent, even though I haven’t made a single claim in the quarter century I’ve lived in my neighborhood, Mount Washington.
Last Tuesday night, the apocalypse arrived, but not on our doorstep. My son and I stood on our Northeast Los Angeles hillside at dusk, looking west through a bronze-colored haze as flames raced through Pacific Palisades, 17 miles away. After nightfall, we looked to the northeast and saw another fire burning near Pasadena and Altadena, just six miles away.
Los Angeles is suffering through what might look, from a distance, like one of those disaster flicks Hollywood is famous for, movies filled with explosions, flames and fleeing multitudes whose ranks include the wealthy and the unhoused. But there is another drama unfolding here, one with a woman tied to the train tracks as a doom driven locomotive speeds toward her. The name of this movie’s imperiled heroine is “The Los Angeles Middle Class.”
This winter’s conflagration will accelerate Los Angeles’s long-running crisis of unaffordability. There is a shortage of homes in the metro area. The impact of so many displaced renters and owners seeking shelter — not to mention the time it will take to rebuild — will strain the already-tight rental market.
According to an analysis of census data by the Latino Data Hub, “half of all individuals in Los Angeles County lived in a rented home,” and more than half of renters in the county pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income for rent and utilities. As The New York Times reported on Friday, certain unscrupulous landlords started raising rents by as much as 20 percent even as the fires continued to spread, despite laws banning price gouging during a declared emergency.
Read the rest of this story, which has a stunning ending, at The New York Times. Hector Tobar is a native of Los Angeles and a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book is Our Migrant Souls, winner of the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.