From unhoused folks to beachfront Malibu homeowners, wildfires hit all of LA society
On Malibu’s storied Pacific Coast Highway, Kenya Johnson walked barefoot towards the red orb of a setting sun that glowed behind ochre clouds of smoke above the dazzle of the ocean. She carried her worldly possessions: A Bible. One dress. A jacket for the cold night to come. A sleeping bag.
Like tens of thousands of her fellow Angelenos, Johnson had evacuated her home Jan. 7. Smoke from raging wildfires choked the beach where she had set up her tent. The 38-year-old, originally from San Francisco, knew it was time to move on, so she packed up what she had, slung it on her back, and walked away toward Los Angeles. Two days later, she was on her way back.
Barely a mile up the coastal freeway, TV producer and showrunner Peter Lenkov sifted through the ash of the oceanfront Malibu getaway he used as an “escape” from a home barely 40 minutes away in greater Los Angeles. So far, he had found two pairs of vintage sunglasses, melted in their cases beyond all recognition. He was still looking for a watch his wife gifted him, hoping it might somehow be recognizable enough to keep as a paperweight.
Southeast from Malibu, across acres of charred, still-smoking wasteland, the Nguyen family looked on with horror at the remains of the house they had called home for 19 years in Pacific Palisades. Twenty-year-old Sean Nguyen, collected spoons and other cutlery from the fine gray dust of their memories. A lifetime of saving and hard work had been consumed in a few hours by the voracious Palisades Fire, leaving almost nothing in its wake but a few barely identifiable lumps of blackened metal.
Los Angeles has long been a city of contrasts. Here, the mega-rich live cheek-by-jowl with houseless people who survive by foraging in the trash cans of the wealthy. Sandwiched in between are generations of working people and middle-class families, some of whom were lucky, or smart, enough to have invested decades ago in a few thousand square feet of some of the most sought-after real estate on the planet.
This sprawling city is home to 212,100 millionaires and 43 billionaires, according to a 2024 Henley and Partners report. It also has one of the nation’s largest populations of homeless people, numbering about 75,000 last year.
But wildfires don’t care how much money you have.
Fanned by strong winds that whipped them into infernos, the past week’s fires have been the most destructive in the city’s history. By Saturday, crews battled six fires across the area. More than 300,000 residents remained under evacuation warnings or orders. The flames had already destroyed thousands of structures and homes, with tens of thousands more at risk, officials said.
Accumulated wealth can insulate one from some of the hardships that rise from the ashes of tragedy. Solid insurance policies can assure the possibility of rebuilding or resettling. A fireproof safe can protect valuables, heirlooms and memorabilia. But tens of thousands of Angelinos from all walks of life who lost their homes in this week’s wildfires are also coming to terms with another stark reality: The more you have, the more you have to lose.
“No matter what you have, no matter how much it cost, a trauma like this is a trauma,” said Lenkov, the TV producer. “When you suffer, you suffer. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in your pocket.”
Camps engulfed by flames
Chris Edwards was guarding a friend’s camp while he went to the store when he realized the fires were coming.
The 42-year-old, originally from New Mexico, who has called Los Angeles’ streets, canyons and beaches his home for nine years now, ran back to the shack he had cobbled together from plywood and plastic. As the Palisades Fire tore down the canyon towards him on Jan. 7, he grabbed what he could and he and his girlfriend ran west towards the beach.
Interviewed two days later at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, Edwards still bore the marks of the struggle. Smudges of soot on his face. Hands blackened from picking through the rubble of what was left of his home camp.
“I have a solar panel left, that’s it,” he said.
Barefoot, red-eyed and dirty, Edwards reflected on the wildfire that tore through his community. His thoughts weren’t for his own losses, or where he might sleep that night, or get his next meal, or fill his empty backpack. He was thinking about the people who lost their multimillion dollar homes.
Edwards remembered seeing the terror and anguish on his neighbors’ faces as they watched the fires approach. Most of those people lost everything, just like him, he said. And their loss, their emptiness, is no less poignant than his.
“They’re humans, just like me,” he said. “Their loss is comparable, or even more, than mine.”
But like him, Edwards said, every resident in the city affected by the wildfires is also learning a valuable lesson about the transience of possessions. Things burn. Stuff comes and goes. But life carries on.
“Life’s not about stuff, it’s just about the experience,” he said.
Johnson, another unhoused resident who has called Malibu home for the past few months, had a similar attitude. She said she has chosen to live her life free of the shackles and temptations of property and possessions. Even before the fires came, she said, she had sold the few things she owned, keeping only her well-thumbed Bible, a few essentials, and her faith in a higher power.
“I don’t cling to worldly possession any more,” Johnson said. “I need nothing. I don’t need anything but God, and he provides everything.”
Wildfires create a new financial reality
One of the worst-hit neighborhoods of Los Angeles was the prestigious Pacific Palisades.
The once-leafy thoroughfares known as the Alphabet Streets now look like a nuclear bomb detonated at the Chase bank in the nearby shopping village. Water runs endlessly down the streets from hundreds of destroyed faucets, sinks, baths and showers. Smoke smolders from the ruins everywhere you look. Orange flames rise from broken gas pipes.
Surveying the wreckage of the home where his children grew up, Jack Nguyen acknowledged that in the grief and chaos of his emotions, he was also doing some math.
“You say to yourself, I’m a lot less wealthy than I was before,” he said. “But then, you’ve got to put it in perspective and think that there are other people who are far, far worse off. It’s that balance of trying to deal with the reality that your financial plan in life has now been uprooted, versus you’re still much better off than most people.”
Homes on Nguyen’s street typically sell for north of $3 million. But back in the early 2000s, when Nguyen and many of his neighbors first moved in, prices were far more attainable for middle- and upper-middle-class families looking to settle in a safe location with decent schools.
Since then, wealth has moved into Pacific Palisades, driving home prices up. That’s nice on paper, Nguyen said, but when your house is in ruins and you’re faced with rebuilding your life in the only place your children have ever called home, the financial and emotional reality is as stark as it is daunting.
“We’re going to have to rebuild, which is going to take a minimum of three years, then try to sell, and the real estate market is probably going to nosedive,” Nguyen said. “Our financial plan has been thrown for a complete loop.”
‘We have very good insurance’
By the time Jan Scruton evacuated her Pacific Palisades home, there was no time to pack. She rushed her two dogs to a car outside, where the sky in one direction was blue. In the other, it was all smoke and fire, “a nightmare racing toward us.”
Time was running out to navigate traffic-jammed roads to safety. She and her husband Jeff, who works in the film and entertainment industry, each got into one of the family cars. They’d been evacuated for fires before.
But this time Scruton, 71, turned around to look back at a home that was central to her life. It was where she’d raised children and made lifelong friends in a community with a small-town feel. As winds buffeted her, she snapped a picture with her phone.
It would be the last shot of her home before it burned to the ground.
Scruton lived in the house for more than four decades. In the early 1980s, then a new mother, she found a home she and her husband could afford in the peaceful enclave situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica mountains.
Over the years, as the area drew more celebrities, home values shot up. Today, the area’s average home values are $4.5 million. Some families who moved in decades ago passed homes down to their children.
Scruton and her husband expanded their home as they raised three children who attended school there. Jan Scruton got a real estate license and made art. Her home became the family’s center for holidays. Grandchildren swam in their backyard pool. Neighbors became close friends.
The fire wiped that all away. The holiday ornaments. Jeff’s first car, a 1966 MGB, that he’d babied all these years and left in the garage.
They were just things. But they were also totems of a life built and lived here.
“When you lose absolutely everything, every touchstone in your life, you’re numb,” she said, breaking into tears.
Like elsewhere, many are wondering whether insurance will cover costs. Scruton said she believes the insurance she carries will allow her to rebuild.
“We have very good insurance. So it's just a matter of going through the process of finding a place to live for the next two or three or four years while they clean up,” she said. “We’re fortunate that we have those resources.”
But that didn’t negate the pain of losing her home and community.
“This was a very tight, close-knit community where everybody knew each other, knew each other's children, knew each other's grandchildren,” she said. “I already miss my neighbors. I miss my pharmacist. I miss the people at the market. I miss the people that were part of the fabric of my life.”
Oceanfront Malibu ‘dream home’ destroyed
Lenkov, who helped produce the reboots of Hawaii Five-O, MacGyver and Magnum, P.I. initially had trouble recognizing where his home once stood. It was only when he identified his next-door-neighbor’s pool that he realized he was looking at the charred remains of his dream escape pad on Malibu’s venerated waterfront.
Picking through the dusty remains of the property, Lenkov pointed out where his treasures once stood: A redwood surfboard from the 1800s that graced one wall. No sign remained of Lenkov’s prized 1952 Vincent Black Shadow motorbike. The vintage sunglasses were melted into their cases. The watch his wife gave him still lies unfound among the ashes.
Lenkov, whose primary residence is a few miles inland, acknowledged that his Malibu beach house was an extravagance. It was, realistically, “unnecessary,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, it was a dream realized.
“This was the idea of living in Southern California, to get a place on the beach,” he said.
Lenkov and his neighbors may be financially well-off, he said, but they have still lost cherished memories and the physical manifestations of those memories: Video tapes, photographs, CDs, books, keepsakes, hard drives, memorabilia. All consumed by flames and lost forever.
As crews across the region struggled to stamp out the remaining fires, Angelinos from all over – no matter the ZIP code or value of the home they lost – looked with anxiety and uncertainty to potential struggles ahead: battling for a place to rent in a tight housing market; gearing up for possible fights with insurance carriers; and wondering how or whether they could protect themselves and the city they love from the next conflagration.
Standing in the ruins of his multimillion-dollar property, Lenkov considered the fate of his other neighbors: People like Edwards and Johnson who may well have slept on the sand not far from where his vintage motorbike looked over the sparkling Pacific Ocean.
“I told my kids yesterday, I came to Los Angeles with nothing,” he said. “If I leave with the clothes on my back, I still won. I still got something out of my experience here.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: LA wildfires hit everyone: homeless to luxury beachfront homeowners