THE LOST CITY

Their homes were destroyed. Their communities are gone. How can the people of Los Angeles rebuild?

- ABE STREEP

The heat from the fires in Altadena was high enough to melt a basketball backboard.

West Mariposa Street. It was Tuesday morning, January 7, and the Santa Ana winds had picked up. A 69-year-old woman named Jerri Flowers was outside her house on a corner lot in Altadena. She had bought it for $100,000 decades earlier, but it was now worth ten times that, with a roof topped with solar panels and an unruly Chinese elm tree in the yard.

Flowers is one of the many residents of Los Angeles I spoke to over the past few weeks, people with markedly different lives in a sprawling city. But in the days following the fires that started on January 7, they shared an understanding of what it was to fear losing everything. Flowers and the others walked me through what they had lost—and what they hoped to rebuild.

For Flowers, her home was where she raised her family. She worked for the county health-services department and was one of many Black Angelenos who had found an affordable place to live in West Altadena. The decades had taken from her—she had buried one son and then her husband. But she had maintained the place, and the house’s increasing value allowed her to take out loans for payments on her car. One son still lived with her, while a daughter had moved to Kansas City. In a room she called “the library,” she kept bookshelves full of Bibles.

As Flowers retrieved the trash cans, she saw a neighbor doing the same thing. The woman walked into the street, extended her arms, and exclaimed, “Remember when you were a little girl, the wind was blowing, and you would act like you were flying?”