Jacob Soboroff

Simling's story is one of them, and I'm just watching it play out up close.

Affordability is a primary reason why I think many people are not going to show up back in the Palisades to rebuild their lives or in Altadena to rebuild their lives.

The cost of living in all of these places is high enough already where with an insurance market that makes it extraordinarily difficult, particularly for people whose homes survived the fires—

is leading to, I think, prohibitive hurdles for so many people to coming back.

And I mean, I can just tell you, they don't know the answers to these questions.

I'm telling you about from the resident's perspective, they don't know what to do or where to go, and they feel like it's a long way off.

What do you do when an entire community is wiped off the map?

I don't think that there are easy answers and I don't think people are finding them from their politicians, state, local or federal.

I think that there is a profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on.

And like when someone dies, and obviously 31 people did in this case, and none of us will ever experience the grief that those families are feeling, what was lost is incalculable.

You know, two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone now.

And so everybody has to make individual decisions for themselves.

Those same text threads that I detail in the book in real time as the fire unfolded are now lighting up with

Hey, did you see that the house down the block is for sale?

We're trying to figure out if we can rebuild or if we're going to go live with our family members in another city, if we're going to leave the state entirely.

Those are the conversations that are happening today.

And I don't think that the ramifications of what has happened and sort of literally the population shifts that are happening are going to be understood, if not now, you know, even for years to come.

Yeah.

One of the lenses through which I looked at this is how the federal government's response has affected or will affect the recovery.

And one of the things I did in the aftermath of the fires was embed with NASA and their scientists from Jet Propulsion Laboratory.