post-fire los angeles
the crisis is far from over, but the contours of the recovery are becoming clear
Six years ago, I stood on Sunset facing west. The light was off, too dim for that time of day—greyed out by particulate matter from the Woolsey Fire—muffling the long, sharp shadows that usually come in late afternoon in Los Angeles. The images from Malibu were worse. Horses milled around lifeguard stations, fleeing the quaint farms and ranches at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. A plume of smoke formed a second crest high above the Santa Monica Mountains. On the east side, only the sun glowed neon red. Further west, everything was crimson.
To the north, another fire—given the improbably twee name “Camp Fire”—burned in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. It would wipe the small town of Paradise, California, off the map. Its plume stretched two hundred miles, obscuring distant San Francisco with particulate matter reminiscent of industrial London’s fog, soot cast in white, gray, pink, yellow, orange, or red, depending on the time of day. The air quality cratered, and authorities advised everyone to stay indoors without proper protection—the same N95 masks that would be used when the coronavirus arrived a year later.
Watching this year’s fires from New York, my memories jumble with new photos and videos from Los Angeles: burnt remains of friends’ and colleagues’ homes shared on Instagram, a faint smell of barbecue in the air, running my finger through a fine dusting of ash on a white tabletop, a party in the shadow of a ruined Malibu mansion, its iron beams on a hillside looming over the still-standing poolhouse, fundraisers for the victims, strangers, friends, horses, tweets in Hindi, Arabic, Korean from around the world—often with AI visuals attached—exaggerating the already apocalyptic scenes coming out of Southern California. Hollywood, the cinematic city, has always struggled to portray itself plainly, without a sprinkling of movie magic.
People always say, “This time is different.” But in this instance, I believe that’s true. The scale and severity of the fires will transform the city in their wake.
Catastrophes have a way of knocking cities onto entirely new trend lines. After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco would never again place among America’s top ten cities, ending its tenure as the capital of the West Coast. Hurricane Katrina was decisive in Houston’s victory over New Orleans as the center of the Gulf Coast’s oil and gas industry. COVID-19 pushed New York’s population growth back into the red, after four decades of recovery from the disastrous nineteen-seventies.
But the best historical precedent for what is to come is post-9/11 New York.
Comparing September 11th to the Los Angeles wildfires is tricky. Every tragedy is singular, even if the structural features of the aftermath are, in many ways, similar. Casualties from the fires have been lower than those from the terrorist attacks—though that’s no consolation to those who lost loved ones—while the damage is spatially much more extensive. The Palisades Fire alone has consumed more square footage than the entire island of Manhattan.
After the attacks, New York was so spiritually distinct from its successor, pop culture could not bear to admit anything had changed. The disaster was hinted at via subtle allusions, like Carrie Bradshaw declaring shopping a patriot duty, parroting President Bush’s infamous call to action. What can you do? Stimulate the economy. Similarly, after the embers are snuffed, Los Angeles will appeal to her industries and her citizens to stay, to invest, to shop, to party, to spend.
Crass as it may sound, the approach isn’t wrong. An economic gut punch and some population decline are inevitable. If film production flees and the middle class decamps for Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Colorado—wherever—consumption will slump and the economy will crater, stymieing any rebuilding efforts.
Like Los Angeles, on the eve of September 11th, New York’s economy was already dented by the declining fortunes of the tech industry. The dot-com bubble had popped, and the stock market had crashed only a year earlier. Tech layoffs, compounded by Hollywood’s post-pandemic struggles, thinned out the region’s upper-middle class. The state’s jobless rate has been among the highest in the nation for the past four years.
Will the fires be a death blow to the studios? Anxieties are overblown. The fires will harm the entertainment industry—especially film and TV—that’s inevitable. Some amount of production may move elsewhere in the near term. But as we saw with the premature declarations of Silicon Valley’s demise post-COVID or London’s collapse post-Brexit, entrenched networks of talent are very hard to move. Austin, Miami, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam remain also-rans despite their best efforts to poach tech and finance. And New York’s position in the global financial system never wavered, despite the looming ruins just blocks away.
The apocryphal, if morbid, quote attributed to Lord Rothschild—“Buy when there’s blood in the streets”—reflects the inevitable outcome of chaos: the powerful will find investment opportunities in other people’s tragedies. Catastrophes reorder urban space. After 9/11, gentrification in New York pushed east toward Brooklyn rather than south toward Chinatown. The fires will push the wealthy away from Malibu and south toward Manhattan Beach.
But fears about a surge in rental prices may be misplaced. Again, look to post-9/11 New York for clues: it took Manhattan three years for residential rents to surpass their pre-attack baseline. In the near term, the rental market has already seen endemic price gouging, but whether or not rents reach record highs will depend on how bad the economic fallout is—and how many people leave as a result. It’s unpopular to say, but rising rents are a signal of a strong economy—unless the decline is a result of new capacity coming online (see: Austin).
The “it’s-time-to-build” sentiment, currently popular in venture capital, will be put to the test. Governor Newsom has promised that reconstruction efforts won’t be hampered by California’s famously complex and time-consuming regulations. My guess is that concerted pressure from activists will be needed to hold him to his word. California has been “building” a high-speed rail connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco since 2008. A bond initiative to expand the state’s water infrastructure—essential to fire mitigation—was passed in 2014. Even with the $7.5 billion provided by Proposition 1, no new reservoirs have been completed.
Despite promises to the contrary, we should expect the recovery to be slow.
Ground Zero remained a scar on Lower Manhattan for thirteen years—One World Trade Center wasn’t completed until 2014. When I moved to New York in 2010, I remember watching the excavation of an 18th-century shipwreck from the forty-fourth floor of the former U.S. Steel Building. In a patriotic twist, this Hudson River sloop was built from the same timber used to construct Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. But for all the antiquarian interest, the pit remained a mass grave, open to the air a decade after the fact.
A great absence loomed over downtown, made all the more uncanny by the twin beams of the annual Tribute in Light—taller than any building in the world—dissipating somewhere above in the humid summer night. Anniversary after anniversary, “stakeholders” argued over the shape of the recovery. The families of victims, the property owners, the city government, the state government, the federal government, the Port Authority, and the local business community—which in this instance was America’s most powerful, Wall Street—all had opinions on what the new New York should look like. And all those opinions had to be reconciled.
There will be blame and animosity in the aftermath, if only to satiate our innate desire to know why something like this came to be. There will be villains, scapegoats, and grand historical narratives. The San Francisco quake had Mayor Eugene Schmitz and inadequate building standards. Hurricane Katrina had George W. Bush and the levees. 9/11 had Osama bin Laden and American foreign policy. COVID will likely have Anthony Fauci—if Peter Thiel’s truth and reconciliation commission is pursued.
We already see the culprits emerging for these fires: climate change and California’s dysfunctional Democratic machine, at whose feet the state’s inadequate fire mitigation practices will be placed. And just as after 9/11, entire communities will be viewed with suspicion. President-Elect Trump blamed California’s sanctuary policies for the blaze on Truth Social, after a migrant with a blowtorch was detained by a neighborhood watch, arrested, then released by the authorities.
Friends have forwarded Instagram stories of people angrily confronting homeless encampments over open camp fires—which, under the circumstances, seems entirely reasonable.
That desire to assign blame will fuel conspiracy theories. Was 9/11 an inside job meant to provide a rationale for unending imperial wars in the Middle East? Were the levees blown up to concentrate damage on poorer, blacker neighborhoods in New Orleans and spare wealthier, whiter areas? There are already accusations that these fires were started to clear a path for a “smart city” transformation—benign-sounding until you learn that in this instance, “smart city” implies internal passport controls linked to social credit scores, facial ID, and pre-crime algorithms.
These fears aren’t entirely misplaced.
I don’t know if “fifteen-minute cities” corralling us into a one-mile radius will ever come to pass, but September 11th was a pretext for undermining civil liberties. I worked as a page at my local public library in high school. It’s hard to reconcile how upset we were then about warrantless searches of our library records and how blasé we are now about the vast surveillance apparatus we live under.
After September 11th, the labor market in New York was a disaster—soon to be compounded by a financial crisis and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. According to the BLS, the national unemployment rate for my cohort—men with a bachelor’s degree who graduated in 2009—was over 25% from October 2007 through October 2011.
There is a silver lining, though: while the economy may be dour in the wake of a disaster, it is often accompanied by newfound creativity. When discussing the post-internet movement with a client (which, to be clear, began at the very end of post-9/11 New York), I pointed out there was an upside to mass unemployment—though we didn’t see it at the time: people did far more interesting things than simply get jobs. You can’t be lured away from your creative aspirations by gainful employment if there’s no gainful employment to be had.
There was a dark glamour and cultural dynamism in post-9/11 New York.
It was the era of the Beatrice Inn, electroclash, Misshapes, the garage rock revival, the Strokes, Young Hollywood, Heath Ledger, the Olson twins at NYU, Gawker Stalker, peak glossy magazine, the expansion of Condé Nast, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, the New Museum on the Bowery, MoMA PS1, Bedford Avenue and Williamsburg, Dash Snow, the last enfant terrible artists, Proenza Schouler, Alexander Wang, Opening Ceremony, The Standard, High Line, Freemans, hipsters, Momofuku Noodle Bar, Per Se—I could go on.
Like New York, the unique strengths of Los Angeles will shine as it rebuilds. The city is where tech, entertainment, and culture converge. That won’t change.
This is where the similarities hopefully diverge.
The post-9/11 era came to a close on May 1, 2011 when President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. There was celebration in New York. People ran through the streets with flags cheering, whooping with glee. Thousands gathered at Ground Zero. For the first time in a long time, to celebrate—drunk with righteousness and champagne.
Less than a week after the attacks’ tenth anniversary, a new era in New York had begun. By September 17th, Occupy Wall Street protesters had gathered in Zuccotti Park. It was the first of many memetic political movements that would shape New York’s culture in the decade to come.
Post-9/11 New York was an era of political disillusionment. The anti-war movement had failed; the military-industrial complex was in control. Activists murmured that September 11th was an inside job meant to derail an incipient anti-globalization movement with the new task of stopping the invasion of Iraq. It would take the collapse of the economy to shake people out of their apathy.
I expect the fires in Los Angeles will have the opposite effect.
This is a turning point for California and the way it is governed. People are angry: there were devastating fires just six years prior, and now a second devastating fire in Malibu in less than a decade. Seemingly, nothing was learned.
Twenty-first-century California was not only blessed with natural beauty and arguably the best weather on Earth—it was also home to the infinite money spigot known as the tech industry. But despite profligate spending in the first decades of the new millennium, the standard of living declined, the cost of living rose, school quality languished, and luxury beliefs like “harm reduction” and “defunding the police” took hold.
For the wealthiest Angelenos, the good times were very good—so good, in fact, that it became easy to ignore the facts on the ground. But when a fire is raging in your neighborhood, and the hydrants run dry, it becomes clear something has gone dangerously wrong. The fact that the Palisades Fire destroyed one of the state’s wealthiest and most connected neighborhoods makes dire political consequences for the fires all the more likely.
As I write this, firefighters soldier on. The embers are far from contained. We wait and we pray. New winds are predicted. Will new fires spark? We can only speculate. The situation may deteriorate, it may resolve. But either way, it’s important to remember, the fires will be extinguished.
Los Angeles will remain.
This was an interesting read and thought experiment for the most part, I always appreciate historical parallels and the exploration of history to prepare us for the future .
I challenge you to look beyond a Twitter video when presenting information on topics like the 15 Minute City to a broad audience who may be hearing about it for the first time. Here’s a link to the original research by Professor Moreno. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-6511/4/1/6. I encourage all to read it for themselves and see the overwhelming lack of evidence to support the claims that this concept is trying to instigate an Orwellian social concept of limited mobility and shepherding of humans.
Although you present it in a shrewd way, you leave air for the fear mongering associated with this topic to live on, and you do not make any attempt to address it. For Los Angeles natives who haven’t walked to a basic service their whole lives, maybe the very thought of a walkable area is their 9/11 (tongue in cheek).
Beyond that I think this parallel on government overreach, surveillance, privacy impacts due to the fires vs. 9/11 seems superficial in its analysis. What national security threat would the government have to justify and implement a parallel Patriot Act? A fire is not an amorphous group of paramilitary actors on the other side of the world. A fire is random (to some extent), it physically impacts many but on a national scale few. The psychological impact can’t be negated but it pales in comparison to the fear and nationalism created when the war hawks circled and the drum of patriotism rang out for vengeance post 9/11.
Read twice, then blew my nose a lot more than anticipated ✊️