Los Angeles: Hill People vs. Flat Folks

We who live in L.A.'s flatlands used to congratulate ourselves that we weren't exposed to brushfires & mudslides like the rich people on high. Then ...

Unusually, much of the destruction was not along winding mountain roads, but in fairly flat neighborhoods built on street grids.

One common suggestion right now is to ban people from living in the Southern California hills amidst sagebrush: either the population must retreat to the flatlands or the brush must be cleared out.

There are two basic types of Los Angeles residents: those who live in the hills/mountains on winding roads with sagebrush nearby, and those who live in the flatlands on conventional grid streets with the brush long ago removed.

The hills in SoCal are mostly steep enough that large parts of them are too steep for roads, lawns, tennis courts, swimming pools, baseball diamonds, and other non-flammable uses. So they are often left covered with native sagebrush. Before humans reached the Americas, sagebrush had evolved to go up in flames periodically. Burning is just part of its great circle of life, so it’s highly flammable.

In recent years, there’s been more of a push to get the sagebrush cut back from around hillside houses, but it still tends to thrive in gullies and in areas to steep for houses.

In contrast, in the flatlands, all the brush has long ago been removed for other uses.

Celebrities have typically chosen to live in the hills to discourage pestering fans and crooks from invading their privacy. That’s one reason why the Manson murders in 1969 were so shocking: Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate were following the celebrity playbook by renting a house deep in the Hollywood Hills (the red pin).

Celebrity choices have a lot of influence on real estate markets in Los Angeles. Hence, typically, living in the hills is more prestigious and expensive, while living in the flats is more mundane but convenient, although crime can be worse.

A downside of living in the hills is more natural disasters: fires and mudslides.

As a native denizen of the flats, I’ve always taken comfort in the assumption that wildfires are only a threat to those who choose to live in the hills. (After all, fire prefers to go uphill.)

Well, not completely. Back in the 1980s, I recall, an Orange Country brushfire crossed over into the suburban flats and burned down about 100 houses.

But that seemed like a fluke to me.

But then came 2025, with massive destruction not just on twisting mountain roads but also on conventional gridded streets: Here’s the map from Cal Fire of the destruction (the orange areas) in the southeast part of the Palisades fire zone, including the grid neighborhood near Santa Monica (seen in the aerial photo above):

So, on the east edge of this map are located flat, gridded, brush-free Pacific Palisades neighborhoods that are now gone.

Similarly, many of the neighborhoods in Altadena that burned in the Eaton fire are grids.

Altadena, where my dad lived in the 1930s, is built on a consistent slope rising above Pasadena to the base of the steep San Gabriel mountains. (You can see the Rose Bowl in the lower left corner of the map.) So, while the area isn’t flat, the streets aren’t winding and there isn’t all that much sagebrush intruding into residential neighborhoods, except on the steep sides of water-carved arroyos.

Hence the Wednesday evening fires in the Hollywood Hills (Sunset, which briefly threatened the big apartment buildings of Hollywood, and the bizarre Sunswept fire that started inside a hillside house above Ventura Boulevard and then briefly set off a brush fire) were alarming.

Were the hugely populated flat lands of the Los Angeles basin and the San Fernando Valley finally at risk?

Fortunately, the wind was much less on Wednesday evening than on Tuesday, so helicopters could be brought to bear, and countless firemen were deployed on the ground.

All this raises questions about rebuilding. First, people are going to continue to want to live in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. (Altadena went out of fashion during the Smog Years, but the climate is once again as superb as when my grandfather chose to retire there in 1929 to grow health food.) Those are good locations except for the burning down every so often part. Also, how do we know where the next big fires are going to be in Southern California?

It would be great to rebuild rapidly, but … do we know yet what should be done to add more decades before the next big fire burns down the replacement houses? Should, say, rebuilding be banned on the street closest to the brush and replaced with a grassy park? This could take awhile to figure out.

One problem is that steps that could be undertaken to reduce fire risks (e.g., burying power lines underground and rebuilding homes out of concrete or stone instead of wood) tend to increase the destructiveness of earthquakes. Southern California had three big urban earthquakes in my dad’s lifetime (1933, 1971, and 1994), but none since 1994, so it’s hardly unlikely that the region could get hit with an earthquake sometime in coming decades that will make people forget the 2025 fires.

I put up three paywalled posts in a row, so I won’t paywall this one so that people considering becoming paying subscribers can participate in the comments.