
Marketplace’s David Brancaccio on community, loss and rebuilding in Altadena
Marketplace’s David Brancaccio on community, loss and rebuilding in Altadena

Until that moment, we’d only seen photos.
“Oh, it’s hard to look at,” said my wife, Mary. “The post box? Oh, the mail inside it burned up. It’s all just ashes. Who knows what it was?”
The footprint of what was a 1,100-square-foot, two-bedroom cottage in Altadena, California, is now mainly a 34-by-34-foot sandbox of ash and cracked stucco after being ravaged by the Eaton fire. We live in New Jersey but had intended to move to the cottage to be closer to our grandkids.
We owned our home just two months and one day before it was gone.
Now, we get that others have it worse. We have some insurance, and our kids are all self-sufficient adults living elsewhere. Since we only moved in before Thanksgiving, many irreplaceable things were being boxed for transit and not here yet.
Among the things that were here, though, was a copper flask of water that I got from the mouth of the sacred Ganges River years ago while reporting from the Himalayas. We had placed it on the mantel over the fireplace. The chimney is still standing; any mantel piece is unrecognizable.


If we can get the money together to rebuild, among the many questions keeping me awake is, where are we going to find a builder? Sixteen thousand places burned in and around Altadena this month, and replacing all of them would create enormous new demand up against a limited supply of contractors.
Then, I learned some of the realities of that business.
“Most people are remodelers,” explained Waleed Delawari, a contractor and developer who knows how to build from the ground up. “Surprisingly, most contractors don’t know the new-construction side of it or the understanding of how to build with scale.”
Scale, meaning someone with the skills to spin the plates on several builds at the same time. Because, rest assured, any contractor interested in my modest job will be multitasking.
“If they’re helping one or two or three people in your neighborhood, make sure that they have the know-how to build that large of a property with that many people,” Delawari said.
Delawari had to flee his Altadena home with his wife and kids when he saw the hillside go red. He will rebuild, but even a person of his skills — mortgage broker turned contractor and developer — can’t predict what it will cost.
“I just found out my slab is broken, so I have to pull that out,” he said. “That price per square footage is going to easily change.”
To get a long view from a wildfire survivor, I turned to Jeff Chemnick, who runs a nursery and private garden in Santa Barbara, playfully named Aloes in Wonderland. His house was one of 220 lost in a fire 16 years ago, and he built a more fire-hardy home in what’s seen as record time: “Two years almost to the day,” he said.
That stopped me in my tracks — two years is fast? Chemnick is a botanist who’d been a contractor, which helped him network to find a builder. Again, the goal is to get a good contractor.
“Sadly, several of our friends sort of fell for the smoke and mirrors of contractors from out of town that promised new building techniques, cheaper prices. And price is certainly a consideration, but it should not be your primary driver,” he noted.
I asked Chemnick: Did those friends end up with a house in the end? A deficient house? Or did they really get scammed and didn’t end up with a house?
“Well, one of them, the contractor that he engaged is in prison,” Chemnick responded.

Back near our home, I chatted with Sandra, who lives just across the street. Her place is also a total loss.
“We added on to the house. I mean, if I hadn’t added on to the house, it would have been paid for, but I still have a mortgage,” Sandra said. “I hate that the vultures are coming around,” she added.
The vultures, as she sees them, are already waving low-ball offers to people in distress to buy their property at fire sale prices. A piece of advice from a fellow fire survivor: If you can wait, do not sell now. The Environmental Protection Agency and the county will clean up the toxic materials and debris in the coming months, and just that will increase the value of your property.
Now, people will do what they have to do, but it’s clear that the firestorm is already causing an exodus. My new community here is — against our will — in flux.
Since we can’t get mail at our burnt-out address, the post office in nearby Pasadena has set up a system to help. You get in line, show your ID and the postal crew checks whether anything has been forwarded. The vibe is nurturing.
Apparent strangers check in on those they pass: Did you get any sleep last night? A woman shakes her head. All walks of life, doesn’t matter who you are. You want your mail? It’s in this parking lot.
There’s something leveling here, equals in trauma. But for how long?

“Without forethought and without coordination, we’re going to risk a rebuild that amplifies the region’s inequality and also puts people in Altadena at more risk from the changing environmental landscape,” said political scientist Megan Mullin, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.
Mullin understands people need shelter and need it now. But she argues that rebuilding homes is only part of what’s needed if we want to end up with a vibrant community versus a collection of new houses.
“Early rebuilding can even serve as a barrier to implementing community priorities that might emerge through a longer, more engaged process,” she said — an engaged process, meaning that the people who live here set priorities. “We don’t want decision-making in the next six months that preempts the kind of longevity that makes a place so special.”
David Chávez teaches the history of Southern California at Compton Community College. He and his family are back at their place just over the line in North Pasadena, after the evacuation order was lifted. The house survived, but he’s wondering about the nature of this place.
“It’s a matter of building the political pressure to move policy to reflect the needs of the community,” he said.
Chávez and his partner set up on their driveway to get N95 masks and other donations to neighbors in need. You can see other people-powered mutual aid stations that have popped up in parking lots nearby.
“I just saw a flyer for a gathering of protest with the title of ‘Altadena is not for sale,'” he said.

“What we know doesn’t work in these situations is when communities simply told what’s happening and they’re not at the center of the decision-making — when everyone’s kind of racing toward getting back to some past state without thinking about some of the consequences of the future,” said Sam Carter, who works on urban transformation as founding principle of Resilient Cities Catalyst.
Taking the time to build resilience, he said, can yield returns that include cold, hard cash. Regarding something I very much worry about when planning my own rebuild: Will we ever be able to get insurance again?
“What sort of those community-scale actions that could actually shift the risk profile and could actually change the way insurers look at these communities,” he asked, “and might actually shift risk to an extent that insurance could actually go down in some of these communities?”
Meanwhile, back at my property, we need power in so many ways — a feeling shared by many Altadena residences.
“I look around, and now all I see is all the hard work it’s going to take to bring it back,” said my wife, Mary. “And I’m wondering if I still have it in me to do it, if I’m still young enough to do it.”
Who do you blame? The infernal wind? Climate change? Some neighbors are suing the electric company that kept its transmission lines energized near the apparent origin of the fire.
Oh, and that copper vessel with the sacred water to bless the house at Thanksgiving? I spot it. Like so much of my community and my new home, it is ash-covered — yet recognizable and imbued with so much meaning among the charred debris.

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