The Eaton Fire destroyed a delicate truce over Altadena’s future todayheadline

Less than a month before the Eaton Fire engulfed Altadena, longtime residents thought they’d finally resolved a bruising debate over the California suburb’s future.

For months they’d debated a Los Angeles County government plan poised to dramatically alter the character of the quiet community of just over 40,000 people, which sits at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. The plan limited construction in Altadena’s fire-prone foothills and simultaneously increased buildable density in its commercial corridors, allowing for hundreds of new housing units in the flat downtown area. It promised to both relieve the region’s critical housing shortage and also reduce wildfire risk accelerated by climate change.

In prickly public meetings and press statements, prominent residents staked out opposing positions. One side was represented by Michael Bicay, a retired NASA scientist who has for decades opposed construction in the Altadena hills on ecological grounds. When county officials arrived with their plan to add population density in Altadena, Bicay was in the middle of a campaign to stop a proposed prep school sports complex in the hills. He used the rezoning as an occasion to push for limits on future development on the community’s wildland edges.

Simultaneously, however, he recognized that Altadena had a role to play in mitigating L.A.’s sky-high housing prices — the county faces a shortage of about half a million affordable homes — which could be achieved by building more apartments along Altadena’s commercial corridors, many blocks away from the tinderbox in the hills.

On the other side of the debate was another longtime resident, Alan Zorthian, who owns a 50-acre artists’ colony in the foothills. Zorthian’s father Jirayr, a famous bohemian artist who hosted parties for luminaries like Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, built the colony into a local curiosity and tourist attraction in the decades before his death in 2004, constructing idiosyncratic homes and sheds out of colored stone and scrap metal.

Faced with the prospect of a downzoning in the hills, the younger Zorthian and other nearby landowners fought back against what they called “regulatory taking” that could devalue their property by limiting possibilities for future development. At the same time, though, the landowners argued that new apartments in the commercial areas would mar Altadena’s historic character. The community was home to Queen Anne-style mansions like the famed Andrew McNally House as well as several exemplars of mid-century modernist architecture.

After months of debate, Bicay’s side won. In December, the county voted the plan forward, signaling a retreat from Altadena’s foothills and a commitment to development in its more urban core. But the timing could not have been worse: Just a few weeks later, the Eaton Fire tore through the foothills, incinerating more than 9,000 homes and ravaging not only the town’s recognized fire zones but its commercial flatlands as well. The blaze was one of the worst urban firestorms in United States history: Together with the Palisades Fire that struck the western part of Los Angeles County simultaneously, it has caused at least $95 billion in damages. 

As Altadena begins to rebuild, residents and local officials are fearful that the once-affordable neighborhood will see rents spike and a hollowing out of its middle and working class. Real estate speculators have already descended on the area making lowball cash offers to fire victims, including Black families who lack the savings and insurance coverage to get back the homes they’ve had for generations. Some locals now worry that the county’s plan to open up Altadena for new construction, which was controversial even before the fire, could attract a rush of new development that will hasten this process of what some scholars call “climate gentrification.”

To thread this needle, local officials will have to look beyond the traditional housing debate in the United States. Most development debates in Los Angeles and other big cities pit NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) residents who oppose the disruption of new construction against YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) advocates who want to bring down housing costs by allowing the construction of as many new housing units as possible. Altadena’s divide is not so simple: Both the Bicay and Zorthian factions are simultaneously for and against new development in the town — they just have opposite views on where and how it should happen.

Sudden disasters fueled by climate change only complicate matters further. Altadena must now balance a need to shift its population away from its wildland edges, state and county policies pushing it to add housing capacity overall, and the demands of residents who want to return to their homes — homes that have burned down once and may well burn again in the future.

“We’re talking out of both sides of our mouth right now,” said Bicay. “I think it’s okay to [say] that we’re going to have a lower density in Altadena in the future. But the county, driven by the state, is allowing people to build. So there are going to be some tough decisions.”

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The county’s zoning revision in Altadena was part of a broader effort to promote new housing development and reduce hazard risk. (About 15 percent of the county’s land area is classified as vulnerable to wildfire.) Los Angeles County controls 2,600 square miles of land in the region — everything that isn’t part of an incorporated city like Pasadena, Burbank, or the city of L.A. itself. This patchwork unincorporated territory is home to around a million people and includes dense neighborhoods near the Pacific Ocean as well as huge swaths of undeveloped mountain range.

As county planners confront both a housing crisis and a climate crisis, they are facing a difficult paradox. California requires them to enable the construction of thousands of new homes under a decades-old planning law, but they can’t let people build in areas prone to fire or flooding, or in protected nature areas. The housing demand in the region is so great, and the risk of disaster so widespread, that the county has no choice but to loosen zoning rules in safe areas in order to comply with the law — a move that in the United States nearly always triggers protests and pushback from residents opposed to growth in their own neighborhoods.

In the summer of 2023, county officials announced that they would rework Altadena’s decades-old zoning restrictions, which only allowed for single-family homes and a handful of multi-story buildings, to further this housing mandate. After a series of meetings and hearings, none of which drew much attention, planners unveiled a two-pronged proposal. First, the plan would upzone to allow new housing in Altadena’s commercial corridors like Lincoln Avenue, a semi-blighted west end corridor home to little more than a few churches and Mexican restaurants. Second, the proposal would limit development in the fire-prone foothills, where subdivisions have crept up steep slopes alongside forest preserves and hiking trails.

The plan also included a light-touch version of what climate experts often call “managed retreat,” or the government-sponsored relocation away from areas vulnerable to disaster. Most places pursue managed retreat only once it’s too late, for example by buying out homes that flood repeatedly, but the county was hoping to reduce risk over the long run by nudging investment away from the hills and preserving undeveloped space.

At first, the community was warm to the idea of new housing on Altadena’s main streets, according to Amy Bodek, the planning director for Los Angeles County.

“Altadena is very accepting of density in appropriate locations, and is very accepting of new residential units,” she said, describing the community as more amenable to growth than other parts of Los Angeles where the county has worked. “That was a really big benefit to working with that community.”

But that may have only been true of the small subset of engaged residents who bothered to chime in on the zoning plan. A typical Altadena town council election draws a few hundred voters at most — hardly surprising in an unincorporated area that most people see as just another part of sprawling Los Angeles — and just a couple dozen people showed up to the county’s “visioning workshops” about rezoning in the summer of 2023. Bicay pushed other local preservation organizations to support the plan, and that was enough to get it to the final stages.

Only in the last months of 2024 did a few outspoken residents start to gin up opposition to the plan, saying the county was devaluing their property by depriving them of the right to build on it. Zorthian joined together with a few other large landowners who had contemplated new construction and a few business owners on commercial corridors who opposed new affordable housing, fearing it might worsen traffic and bring in low-income residents.

“We found out what the plan was doing to the handful of us left who still have larger property, and we don’t want people telling us what to do,” said Zorthian. 

The Eaton Fire changed everything. Tearing west through the San Gabriel Mountains toward Altadena, it burned almost the entirety of the Zorthian ranch, including several homes in the artists’ colony and much of Jirayr Zorthian’s remaining artworks. Embers from the fire then spiraled down into the denser flatlands and burned thousands of homes, including all but a few on Bicay’s cul-de-sac block, which sits right at the base of the hills. (The zoning on his own block has not changed, but the surrounding areas have been downzoned.) The blaze then continued west and destroyed a patchwork of homes and businesses along Lincoln Avenue, turning the northern stretches of the corridor into a moonscape.

The question now, in light of the fire, is whether the county’s pre-existing plan to bring fire-conscious growth to Altadena is the right path out of this devastation, or whether a surge of new development will hasten gentrification and displacement. The county plan proposed to build new apartments on commercial corridors and direct investment toward the city’s west side, but planners had assumed that these changes would happen over years or even decades. Now, as burned-out residents tangle with real estate speculators in every corner of the town, there’s a chance that this shift could happen in a matter of a year or two. Developers could take advantage of the new zoning to buy up fire victims’ damaged homes and develop large apartment complexes allowed under the new paradigm.

Some locals who supported the plan are now wary of the upzoning effort. The longtime manager of Mota’s Mexican Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue, Lupe, said she worried that a big developer could buy up multiple lots and build expensive new housing that the former residents of those lots couldn’t afford. (In an interview with Grist, Lupe only provided her first name.) Her own house suffered smoke damage in the fire, and she has been living there while waiting on a contractor to fix it.

“[The county plan] is a good idea, but only if they do it the right way,” she said. “But if people don’t have insurance, and they come and want to take your property to do whatever they want to do, I don’t like that way.” 

“Gentrification had already started, and I would think fire would speed it up,” said Veronica Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society and former president of the Altadena town council who represents a census tract on the more disinvested west side of the town, home to many. She pointed to the fact that wine bars and yoga studios had opened in recent years, a change that residents referred to as the “Pasadena-fication” of Altadena.

“I think it’s a good idea to put more housing, but now it’s going to have to be rethought,” she added.

Bodek, the county planner, said she understood the fear of gentrification and vowed that the county will work to prevent developers from snapping up victims’ homes or buying out longtime businesses. 

But there’s also the matter of fire risk. The Altadena plan discouraged development in the foothills because the state of California classifies them as extremely vulnerable to wildfire, but the Eaton Fire burned almost the entirety of the town, reaching almost two miles south of the fire zone and destroying homes that had never been seen as risky.

That means it’s possible the county’s original plan didn’t go far enough. Bicay, who was a lead advocate for the plan, now says it might be necessary to reduce the density of Altadena’s flatlands by between 5 and 10 percent, which would require leaving many burned-out lots empty without rebuilding them. Nic Arnzen, another member of the town council, says the town might consider leaving vacant some lots that residents don’t want to rebuild, carving out a larger zone of open space near the hills. An analysis from the climate risks firm First Street Foundation, which home listers like Zillow use to inform prospective buyers of property hazards, shows a much broader area of fire danger than that shown on maps from CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency.

Zorthian, who opposed the plan, acknowledges that the fire risk in the hills was greater than he had assumed. But he now sees the county plan as hypocritical: If almost the whole town burned down, why should he and a few other large landowners be the only ones with new limits on what they can build?

“It’s going to change the character of Altadena,” he said. “You’re going to have behemoth apartments like you have all over Los Angeles.” For his part, he’s trying not to let the new plan affect him. Once he’s finished cleaning up the scarred ranch, he plans to forge ahead with his vision to erect a museum in honor of his father, and he’s hoping to reacquire some of his father’s works to replace the ones lost in the fire.

Except for supporters like Bicay and opponents like Zorthian, not many Altadena residents engaged in the debate around the county’s original plan. Now, though, a larger agglomeration of residents and community groups have emerged to help steer the town’s rebuild. There are nonprofit associations like Altadena Strong and Rebuild Altadena, existing preservation groups like Altadena Heritage, plus a new foundation run by real estate magnate Rick Caruso and an informal recovery council that Bicay serves on. The county will also convene its own commission.

Other fire-struck areas in the Golden State have dealt with similar questions in recent years, with mixed results. The northern California mountain town of Paradise, for instance, saw a furious debate over where and how to rebuild after the deadly 2018 Camp Fire. It ended up imposing a strict barrier of undeveloped land that now functions as a firebreak. In Santa Rosa, meanwhile, the neighborhood of Coffey Park built back on its original footprint after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, with almost all residents returning to single-family homes that are still vulnerable to wildfire.

Nicole Lambrou, an Altadena resident as well as an architect and urban planner at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said that local governments vary in their commitment to changing the built environment when they rebuild after a fire. 

In many cases, she said, governments bow to political pressure from fire victims, scrap planned reforms and try to get everyone back in their homes as soon as possible. But such a rushed recovery is often bad for the long-term resilience of a community in the wildland-urban interface. Residents end up rebuilding the same flammable homes in the same vulnerable areas, ensuring future losses and more displacement.

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“A lot of times the measure of success is, ‘is it a one-to-one rebuild?’ That emphasis on building back what was there as soon as possible makes bypassing existing plans much easier,” she said. On the other hand, she added, the scale of loss in a place like Altadena might force the community and its elected officials to reconsider the assumptions behind their previous commitment to more density — after all, the effort to build more homes is premised on the belief that Altadena is a safe place to live.

“The plan was put in place with a certain baseline of a built environment that is no longer there,” she said.

Bodek, the county planner, says she thinks that building more density in Altadena’s downtown core is still the right move. As she sees it, to declare Altadena too risky would be to write off huge sections of California’s exurban sprawl, much of which sits well within range of flying embers from mountain fires.

“I’m looking at this as a once in a lifetime, catastrophic event,” she said. “If this is going to be the new norm, then everyone, not just Altadena, but everyone in the entire state, is going to have to reassess their land use policies. That could mean the demise of, you know, 200 years of the way of life in California. And I’m not going to go there.”