Nic Arnzen can spot people who, like him, have lost their homes to the LA wildfires. “We have the same look in our eyes, the same zombie-like walk,” he said.
Arzen’s home in Altadena, a diverse community nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, was consumed by the Eaton fire. He estimates tens of thousands of people have been displaced here and “half of them won’t have a home to come back to.” It’s overwhelming, said Arzen, who serves on the Altadena Town Council, “the impact is unimaginable.”
The wildfires that have incinerated whole neighborhoods across Los Angeles are among the most destructive and costliest in California’s history, destroying more than 60 square miles and killing at least 27 people.
Those displaced like Arnzen face a pressing question: What do we do now? Stay and rebuild homes and lives, hoping disaster won’t strike again, even as wildfire risk grows, or leave for somewhere perceived as safer?
The decisions people make about where they live are “extremely complex” and based on a slew of factors, said Jesse Keenan, associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University.
But as extreme weather supercharged by climate change fractures American lives, those in high-risk areas are being pushed to confront the reality that it’s getting harder and harder to insulate themselves from disaster.
Incinerated communities
California is America’s wildfire ground zero. “Fire is a part of living here,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at Climate Central, a non-profit research group. “It was here long before we were.”
People have learned to live with the risks, she told CNN, but the problem is fire behavior is changing, amplified by the climate crisis, which is driving hotter, drier conditions.
LA’s fires exploded as extraordinarily powerful Santa Ana winds swept across a landscape parched by extraordinary drought. They burned hotter and spread faster due to the sheer amount of vegetation after an uncommonly wet winter last year. The region’s extreme swing from wet to dry conditions is part of a phenomenon called “weather whiplash,” becoming more common as the world warms.
These ingredients — in addition to the city’s sprawl, which pushes outskirt neighborhoods into fire-prone wildlands — set the stage for immense destruction.
In just days, the flames incinerated not only homes but schools, daycares, grocery stores, cafes and workplaces. People have been cut off from their communities, Keenan said.
In the immediate aftermath of a disaster like this, many of those displaced stay with family and friends and tend to remain local, Keenan told CNN.
What happens longer-term will depend on a number of factors.
Past evidence suggests most of those displaced will eventually return to their communities, bound by strong ties to family, friends and jobs. “Climate refugees from LA are likely to look for housing in the same region,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at the non-profit First Street Foundation.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to go back to exactly where they were living.
For renters that will be “a near impossibility,” Keenan said, California’s housing market was already red hot, and the fires will add “extreme demands,” exacerbating an affordable housing crisis.
For homeowners it’s also fraught. Those with insurance likely have a long wait for claims to be processed and payouts could well fall short given the costs of rebuilding. “We simply do not have enough people and workers … to rebuild housing at the scale of these devastations,” Keenan said.
And that’s if rebuilding happens at all. In some areas, the state may step in to create buffer zones to act as fire breaks.
Then there are the costs of cleaning up toxic contamination from the cocktail of chemicals released as flames ate through electronics, metals, plastics and paints. It adds up to a lingering pollution, to which children are particularly vulnerable, Keenan said.
The fires will add a new dimension to the state’s already perilous insurance crisis. Insurers had been refusing to renew policies in high wildfire risk areas before this disaster. “We will (now) see huge increases in the cost of home insurance,” said Porter. Many homeowners “will no longer be able to make the economics of home ownership work,” he told CNN.
At the same time, as with every disaster, there will be “predatory property buyers coming in,” Keenan said. The new houses will likely be far more expensive than those they replace. It’s a well-trodden cycle: middle class housing “begins to evaporate” and “these areas actually become wealthier,” he said.
The disaster may even fuel “climate gentrification” where people move into lower income communities at less risk of fire and flood and displace those already there. There’s “this slow crowding out that happens when people can bid up on rent,” Keenan said.
No safe havens
While some of those displaced in LA may find their housing situation changed by forces beyond their control, others may choose to leave.
Even before the devastating fires, climate concerns were pushing some out. Peter Kalmus left Altadena in 2022, after living there for 14 years. “It felt like heat waves were getting more intense, drought was getting worse, fire was getting worse,” the climate scientist told CNN, and “it would only get hotter, drier and more fiery.”
There may be a small minority of people after LA’s fires who also take this route, those “shocked or traumatized enough” that they decide to move further afield, to somewhere they deem safer, said Alex de Sherbinin, a geographer at Columbia Climate School.
People often consider places like Buffalo, New York, Detroit and much of Ohio to be lower risk, said Kelsea Best, assistant professor at Ohio State University, who researches how people adapt to climate change.
These areas have ample water resources and are less prone to fires, hurricanes and extreme heat. But, she added, “there is no place in the US that has zero climate risk.”
This was starkly revealed last September when Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, in western North Carolina, a city previously billed as a “climate haven.”
Kalmus, who moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, knows “nowhere is safe” from global warming, especially after Helene, but his current home “feels less risky” than Southern California.
So far, there is relatively little evidence of large-scale climate migration from high risk states like California, said de Sherbinin. People’s resilience tends to be high, and memories short.
The question is, what happens when a previously unimaginable disaster like the LA fires strikes again, and again. The impacts can mount up, said de Sherbinin, affecting infrastructure, the local tax base, money available for services and climate adaptations. Communities become “a lot less viable,” he said.
In Altadena, Arnzen had always known the fire risk was there, but had tried to persuade himself it wouldn’t reach him. That sense of security is now gone. “This was traumatic. This is something we’re going to never recover from,” he said, and he faults no one who might seek safety elsewhere.
But he has no intention of leaving. He wants to be part of rebuilding Altadena to be more resilient to the fires he knows are likely to come again. “I have lost so much that all I can do is focus on and be determined to gain more than I’ve lost.”
