< The Latest 2025-01-22T15:00:29+0000
The Pasadena Star-News | Wed 01/22 07:00am PST | Larry Wilson
If Altadena was like a secret to those of us who have lived and thrived there — The New York Times stole that line from an earlier column of mine in a story of theirs last week, and they are welcome to it — it is a secret no more.
From Albania to Zimbabwe, Altadena is now a dateline, plus a real place, everyone around the world recognizes, for the tragedy that is the Eaton fire that mostly burned down the town, and for the resilience of the townspeople.
And part of that resilience is the new organization Altadena Not For Sale. I am just loving how quickly the group sprang up to counter real-estate vultures in the fire’s aftermath. Our correspondent Jarret Liota went to the group’s demo Saturday at Woodbury Road and Lake Avenue — the Altadena border, where unincorporated town meets the Pasadena city border — and reported: “With her Pasadena home shown on the news the night of the fires, Emily Zeug was taken aback to receive a call from a real estate developer the very next morning asking if she wanted to sell her property.’We thought it was scummy,’ she said, disgusted that parasitic developers are already trying to exploit the tragedy of the fires by getting bargains.”
I’m disgusted, too, but such is the world that we live in, and it was always thus. Parasites will swarm in where people have been hurt and will try to take advantage. The good news: Those people and their allies will rise up to warn the vulnerable and, it is to be hoped, stop them in their tracks.
At least 17 people are dead from the fire. Thousands of homes and businesses are entirely gone. About 9,000 acres of neighborhoods where people lived — more in the San Gabriel Mountains — have been scorched down to the earth by the firestorm.
And, yes, some people who owned property in Altadena and northeast Pasadena will choose not to rebuild here. They will sell and move somewhere where they feel safer, and where the memories of what was are not around as a constant reminder. But now is not the time to sell to some rando caller. Wait for the insurance, for the market to shake out, for cooler heads. Altadena land is still Southern California real estate, one of the most valuable things a person could ever invest in. Don’t sell short.
So much is still to be sorted out by our community. There has been so much death, destruction, so many tears. There are friends who lost everything I’ve reached out to, and others who I’ve been too selfish and without words to do so. I hope to be forgiven for that.
But I have been talking to a lot of people. There are too many takeaways to get them all in. But a few things of note:
This week I was talking with community activist Porfirio Frausto, long a leader — and trail boss — at Outward Bound Adventures. He was driving by John Muir High School on Lincoln Avenue the other day, our mutual alma mater, just below the Altadena border, and saw dozens of cleanup workers picking up debris and dealing with smoke damage and other issues at the school, which was not burned in the fire. Since Fio knows, like, everyone, he was surprised that he didn’t know any of the young workers at the site.
Concerned as he always is about local employment, he inquired if the workers, who he found out were making $60 an hour, were from the Altadena and Pasadena area. They were not. Most were from the Inland Empire. But there is an explanation: The Pasadena Unified School District’s insurance company was organizing the hiring, not the district itself.
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My take: In the short run, this is an emergency, and the insurance company is in charge. But let’s make sure that in the medium and very long run, which is what it’s going to take to rebuild, that most of the workers come from Altadena and Pasadena.
And then there’s this wild notion being floated about now being the time to revisit the topic of Pasadena annexing Altadena during the recovery to bring more efficient relief than the county can. That’s nuts. Altadena has time after time over the last century rejected either being annexed by Pasadena or incorporating itself. And now, with no tax base, and with Pasadena having issues of its own, is particularly the wrong time for annexation. The county, if distant, has deep pockets. But this notion of the many tiny water companies that serve Altadena folding and the town being served by Pasadena Water & Power? That’s worth looking into.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com