While the husband and wife were inspecting Beardmore’s listing, many other, far more influential people were performing a version of the same calculation: Billionaire developers, private-equity firms on both coasts, politicians and political consultants and former residents were all trying to figure out what the fallout from the fires would be. The land probably wouldn’t burn again for at least 10 years, because the fire had consumed all the brush, grass and structures — all the available fuel. What was less certain was what the neighborhood might look like, how expensive it would be, whether to invest or walk away.
The Palisades was not the only fire in January: More structures had been destroyed and lives lost in the Eaton fire, which struck Altadena, a working- and middle-class community that also had a larger population to begin with. But Los Angeles is a city with two primary sources of power: real estate and celebrity. The Palisades, population 27,000, was in a position to harness both. And so the question of what should happen to this little slip of a neighborhood extended far beyond its borders; it reached into the highest levels of Los Angeles business and government. When the sun set over the burn zone, you could look over the lots, through the silhouettes of the chimneys, and try to make out the shape of the city’s future.
Beardmore and I were talking about all this when the buyer and his wife came back outside. They saw some water in the basement, they said, but no big deal — it seemed rain-related, not fire-related. Then they asked whether Beardmore thought the city would place the power lines underground, to help fireproof the neighborhood. Beardmore’s answer gave a taste of how complicated the rebuilding process would be: He touched on finance, construction logistics, the politics of multiple city agencies and the disparity in real estate values among the various parts of the Palisades. Then he concluded that the whole thing would involve so many interlocking forces, it was just impossible to predict.
The buyer said he’d think about it.
The Palisades was beautiful land, and in a way, that was the problem. The beauty made it easy to live in denial. On days when the wind was blowing especially hard, residents might think about the dry brush and grasses in the canyons above town. “On those days, my wife and I would look at each other and say, ‘I hope the fire doesn’t come,’” said Bill Bruns, a local historian and the former editor of The Palisadian-Post. But as soon as the wind died down, Bruns would go back to feeling safe. “If you stood in the hills and looked down at the canopy of trees that stretched for miles, and the ocean,” he said, “you’d think to yourself, Nothing’s ever going to happen to the Palisades.”
And it was true — again and again, the neighborhood got lucky. A brush fire in 1924 was swiftly contained. The Bel-Air fire of 1961, which burned almost 500 houses, was halted just above the Palisades’ northern edge. In 1978, a power line apparently sparked a fire in a nearby canyon that burned a church and several houses, but firefighters put it out. The Getty fire in 2019, which led to evacuation orders, could have easily gotten out of hand had winds been any higher. It was always a relief to residents when the Palisades avoided a megafire. But there was a flip side. Every year that the mountains didn’t burn, there was more grass and brush — more potential fuel. The danger ticked up.