Anderson made it through the cordon on foot. Outside his house, a single-story home with brown siding and a newly planted magnolia tree in the front yard, he marvelled that none of the charred embers that littered the lawn had set the place on fire. He went inside and emerged with a small backpack, a stuffed doll with an Afro tied to it, for his five-year-old daughter. As we made our way out of the evacuation zone, he showed me the houses of his absent neighbors and shared their professions—a midwife here, a couple who worked in television and film production there.
Back on the other side of the checkpoint, we sat at a bus stop on Lincoln Avenue, across from a McDonald’s whose sign had a giant hole in the middle. Anderson let out an exhale. “I can’t begin to talk about how thankful and blessed I feel,” he said. “I’m actually celebrating, as much as anything, my neighborhood, because this is a wonderful little neighborhood. But, I mean, we didn’t have a lock on that—yeah, we didn’t have a lock on wonderful little neighborhoods. I have a little smidge of survivor’s guilt.”
And he couldn’t help but wonder about the future. “I think about this community, and I’m so worried about how it will survive this.”
Anton Anderson and his wife, Ashaunta, at their home, which survived the Eaton Fire.
Home prices in Altadena have risen to a median of $1.3 million in recent years. Many people who long chose to live here—Jet Propulsion Lab engineers, teachers, blue-collar workers, small-business owners—have been joined by celebrities (such as Mandy Moore and John C. Reilly) and members of the creative class priced out of other Los Angeles-area neighborhoods. Lincoln Avenue, where we sat, was a corridor of particularly visible gentrification, lined with new and forthcoming outposts of hipster L.A. businesses like the Eagle Rock café Unincorporated Coffee Roasters and Los Feliz’s popular Mediterranean restaurant Kismet. Anderson mentioned Good Neighbor Bar, a cocktail bar a few blocks up the street. It was established in 2024, and it catered to some of the neighborhood’s newer residents. After it opened, Anderson had seen a post on social media noting the absence of west Altadena’s Black history on an illustrated menu, which featured pictures of the local wildlife, scenes from popular hikes, and a drawing of J.P.L. Anderson emphasized that he likes the bar and wants to support small businesses, and that Good Neighbor had been helping displaced residents find information about the state of their homes, but that the absence had been a misstep. “The artist they hired, you know, probably wasn’t from Altadena, and so probably just was, like, Well, I’m just gonna do something that’s kind of cutesy and hipstery, with the hiking and Mt. Lowe and bears,” he said. “And, yeah, and all that’s true, but, if that’s all you do, you skip over the people who’ve lived here for generations.” It was just one small example, he said.
“When you think of certain families in the city, there’s names attached to it,” Loren told me when we spoke later. “You know the Benn family, you know the Milton family, you know the Johnson family.” It was easy to imagine how such families had become embedded in the fabric of Altadena; the network of extended Benn cousins includes pharmacists, teachers in the community’s elementary and middle schools, and owners of local businesses, such as a print shop that has contracts with many of the area schools’ sports teams. Oscar and Laurie worked locally. Their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Amanda, was a home health aide. Their twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Amber, had a job in a day care that their grandchildren attended, which had been down the street from their home until it, too, was lost in the fire. Their son Julius and his girlfriend had met working at a local school. Anderson already worried that whatever iteration of Altadena came next would be affordable only to newcomers.
“When they say, Let’s rebuild Altadena, who gets to sit at the table there?” Anderson now asked. “Is it gonna be my uncle Herman, who’s probably gonna end up moving because he says he’s too old to rebuild?” (Anteres Anderson Turner, Anderson’s sister, later told me that Herman’s house, which had cost fourteen thousand dollars when he bought it in 1965, had been paid off since the seventies—“I brought my children home from the NICU to that house,” she said.) The Benns were not the only multigenerational family in Altadena. The community has been a refuge for many groups of people who were excluded by price or prejudice from housing elsewhere, including Japanese Americans who settled there after being forced into internment camps in the Second World War and Central American immigrants who put down roots in the early eighties. “That loss, it’s generational wealth, from back when you could buy a house in California for a can of soup,” Anderson said. “It isn’t gentrification if you don’t sell.”
