Post-fire, families weigh staying or leaving
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What was the impact of the California fires on home values?
A year after the California fires, I speak to a neighbor who had to sell and another neighbor who's partly rebuilt. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Let's start with a number from UCLA, $27 billion. That's the value of all the homes wiped out by the California wildfires a year ago. That's the typical cost of those homes before the fires, multiplied by the more than 12,000 homes gone. Now, this week here, I'm taking those big numbers and bringing them down to street level. A street in the community of Altadena, 20 minutes northwest of downtown Los Angeles. On a single block, 15 houses were total losses. Now, one of those 15 was my house, but I wanted to hear from my neighbors.
Yeah, so we were a total loss, a grounder, as they call it.
Louis lived on my side of the street, South Corner.
We had a couple of oak trees that survived in the back, but other than that, it was totally just burnt to ashes.
When the initial shock of escaping flying embers morphed into talk of what's next, Louis and his wife were all in, gung-ho.
My wife and I decided that we were committed to rebuilding, and... We went pretty full throttle and just dove into this unknown world for us, you know, architecture and design and building.
The planning department would let you go 200 square foot bigger.
We found an amazing architect who happened to be a good friend.
Three months later, a new surprise, one both delightful and daunting.
We found out that my wife was pregnant with our second child. And that was sort of the U-turn on everything.
Some neighbors asked for first names only for this so they could speak more freely with insurance and other financial matters in flux. Louie does marketing for one of the cable and streaming TV channels, a man who could see he had a plot twist on his hands.
Do we want to have a newborn, a toddler, full-time jobs, and then also a rebuild?
There's also a dog who might run outside and bring into the house soot containing who knows what. Remember, this wasn't a forest fire that consumed natural wooden brush. It was an urban fire where smoke contained, I don't know, SUVs and whatever else was piled up in people's garages and attics.
I didn't want to put the strain on the family and our careers and in what was already becoming another full-time job.
When the neighbors on my burned-out street gather occasionally in a local park for iced tea and tamales to try to hold each other in the light, we all agree that rebuilding after this fire is like being enrolled at gunpoint in a master's degree program in construction and insurance management. For Louie and his wife, a shocking year that started with an urban fire driven by hurricane force winds becomes a new year with a bigger family.
We got a boy.
The boy is great. They all live in a rental two towns over. But given all this, they've now sold their burned property at a price depressed by current conditions. Insurance money helped pay off the mortgage, but the investment in the house they purchased in 2022 is no more. The property to Louie's left has also sold, and a house mid-block that survived intact with the fire-bubbled stucco repainted sold just before Christmas for what Zillow calculates as 29 percent less than its pre-fire value. At the same time, some happy fresh plywood is visible from my burned patch, but with an address one street over.
So right now what we're in is my, I have an open concept plan. So on this side is the kitchen.
Erica is an executive producer in the television streaming world.
Over here will be the living room, great room, whatever they call it these days.
Right after the fire, she got producing with a contractor who previously built a den for her that became her favorite room in her old house. Then just after Labor Day, her crew poured the foundation. When I first visited just before Thanksgiving, her frame was up, including the subfloor and roof joists.
How did families cope with the aftermath of losing their homes?
It was to the point her neighbors threw her a party to use magic markers to write hope and love tidings onto the bare wood.
You can see there's messages like here, may God bless your home.
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