“Less than a month before fires began to ravage my hometown, State Farm sent me a bill. The oracles of risk foresaw an apocalypse in Los Angeles’s future. So they raised my home insurance premium by nearly 18 percent, even though I haven’t made a single claim in the quarter century I’ve lived in my neighborhood, Mount Washington.

Last Tuesday night, the apocalypse arrived, but not on our doorstep. My son and I stood on our Northeast Los Angeles hillside at dusk, looking west through a bronze-colored haze as flames raced through Pacific Palisades, 17 miles away. After nightfall, we looked to the northeast and saw another fire burning near Pasadena and Altadena, just six miles away.

Los Angeles is suffering through what might look, from a distance, like one of those disaster flicks Hollywood is famous for, movies filled with explosions, flames and fleeing multitudes whose ranks include the wealthy and the unhoused. But there is another drama unfolding here, one with a woman tied to the train tracks as a doom driven locomotive speeds toward her. The name of this movie’s imperiled heroine is ‘The Los Angeles Middle Class.’”

Continue reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/opinion/los-angeles-fires-homes.html