Real estate vultures eye middle-class enclave of ravaged LA

Danielle Neal is a fourth-generation resident of Altadena who saw the house she grew up in and the home she rented burn down in the wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County.

Neal, 30, said her aunt and uncle, who lived in the family home, have already been deluged by parties looking to purchase the still smoldering ruins at a steep discount.

“There’s not a lot of compassion,” Neal said of the speculators. “It feels like a version of looting.”

Real estate vultures are circling the middle-class community of Altadena and other burned out parts of Los Angeles, hungry to turn a profit from fire victims still struggling with where they’ll live and how they’ll rebuild their homes and lives. Investors are reaching out to people like Neal’s family, as well as to local real estate agents who’ve fielded inquiries from across the country.

Neal’s fear, and that of many in her community, is that the wildfires will change the character of a neighborhood that had long been home to middle-class residents, many of them Black. Nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles proper, Altadena featured streets lined with Craftsman-style bungalows that were home to working-class families and artists for generations.

Los Angeles has already gone through multiple waves of gentrification. A January study from the University of Southern California found that the region’s housing problems were decades in the making, tied to tightened loan standards and limited construction. The fires could push residents grappling with an existing affordability crisis to the brink, making the Los Angeles area accessible only to the rich.

On Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning unsolicited, low-ball property offers in fire-affected areas for three months. The fires, which have raged for more than a week, have killed at least 24 people and destroyed over 10,000 structures, mostly homes.

“We were starting to see the shift before the fire,” said Mike Rothschild, 46, a writer who lost his Altadena home in the blaze. “Younger families moving in, Black families moving out.”

Protecting the community will be hard because it’s an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, without a local mayor or city council to oversee development. “It’s a little bit like the Wild West in some ways and can leave the town a little rudderless because there isn’t a lot of leadership,” Rothschild said.

Teresa Fuller, an Altadena resident of more than two decades who leads a 20-agent team at residential brokerage Compass, said she’s heard from investors interested in buying damaged properties, calling from as far away as Connecticut and Florida. She’s also been approached by a local resident who offered to pay cash for homes to “keep out someone who doesn’t have an Altadena vibe.”

“Some people who are massively underinsured are going to need” to sell, she said. “If my job is to help someone out of a bad spot, I’m going to help them out of a bad spot.”

Fuller has been hosting Zoom sessions for homeowners to hear from lawyers and insurance adjusters about the claims process. She’s reminding people to take their time when making decisions about their homes. “You don’t have to sign anything right now,” she’s told them.

Like many others, Fuller is concerned her hometown won’t be able to recover its old character as it rebuilds, but said that isn’t a reason why all developers and investors should be kept away. “We all need to be open to every possibility and not assume someone is bad because they’re an investor,” she said.

Not all Altadena residents agree. Gary Moody, 73, is a retired consultant and former head of the NAACP Pasadena chapter who has lived in the neighborhood for over 20 years. He spent Monday at the NAACP office, fielding calls and helping neighbors get their lives back on track. Moody lost two friends to the Eaton Fire, including one who died with a water hose in his hand, he said.

Moody’s advice to survivors is to “not jump the gun” on accepting offers and to be patient. He reminds them that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has only just arrived and is accepting applications for assistance from both the insured and uninsured.

“The fire is still burning,” he said. “The people first on the scene are usually trying to get the most for the least amount of money.”

Tim Gordon, owner of real estate business Gordon Buys Homes in Oceanside, California, said he hasn’t approached anyone in Los Angeles because he feels to do so right now would be “predatory.”

His company posted an ad online last week that read, “Companies like Gordon Buys Homes buy fire-damaged properties in Los Angeles, so those who can’t or won’t rebuild after such a big loss have an option.” In an interview, Gordon said the ad was an automated marketing mistake and “a little too soon” for his taste.

Beyond real estate investors, Altadena residents are also being hounded by lawyers. Local attorney Michelle Iarusso, who works on insurance and civil rights matters, was on a Zoom call on Jan. 12 with 150 out-of-town lawyers looking to sue anyone who might be found responsible for a fire, like a utility or government. She urges residents to seek representation from trusted sources and use community connections.

It’s hard not to draw parallels between Altadena and Hawaii’s Lahaina, both tight-knit communities of mostly middle-class people situated in an idyllic landscape devastated by wildfire. One analysis showed that Maui’s population was reduced by at least 1,000 residents as a result of the island’s 2023 fires. Altadena locals are concerned that their patch of paradise will go in a similar direction.

More than six years after a fire destroyed Paradise, California, the town’s population is less than half of the 26,500 residents it had before. Some members of the community, which had a large retiree population pre-fire, “didn’t want to spend their remaining years rebuilding,” according to Colette Curtis, Paradise’s recovery and economic development director.

“Every ethnic and racial group has a community in the U.S., and Black people, we have so few left – they’re all gentrified and gone,” said Scott Alan Rivers, an architect who has worked to rebuild wildfire-ravaged homes in the Los Angeles area.

Members of the Southern California chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects are meeting later this week to coordinate their response and other groups are forming to help Black homeowners navigate the process of rebuilding. Moody and others in the community are building a coalition of Black fire survivors, sending texts and reaching out to people they know to prevent them from falling for scams, he said.

Altadena had been a refuge for Black and Latino residents seeking affordable housing in the Los Angeles area for decades. In 1960, 95% of the community’s residents were White, according to Altadena Heritage, a nonprofit focused on preserving its history. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement — including rare opportunities for credit for Black families that wanted to buy homes — the minority population spiked. Before the fires, roughly 60% of residents were from an underrepresented group, according to Los Angeles county data.

Locals, like Danielle Neal, who kept properties in their families, allowed Black homeownership rates to stay much higher than elsewhere in the country. Neal family lore involves a relative who took a train west from Georgia and wrote back to the clan: “The weather is great, and there is work for us here.”

Her family is focused on rebuilding and keeping “Altadena Altadena,” she said. Many in the community are angry at the speculators and “very committed to saying no,” she said.