Climate Change Is Killing the Myth of Los Angeles
I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect. We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work. L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews pulled a pregnant, unhoused woman from a storm drain above a raging river. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena further exposed the gap between the city we imagine and the one we actually live in. What happens when a city built on the mythology of sublime weather has to finally face how to live with a climate that refuses to stay in line?The Los Angeles myth goes back more than a century: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce mailed millions of pamphlets eastward, selling Midwestern families on a kingdom of eternal spring. Sunkist built a national brand on winter oranges ripening while Chicago froze. Railroads sponsored booster fiction and postcards promising a life where weather was not an obstacle but an asset. In the dead of winter, “[you could] have a small, five-acre citrus farm and do really well and then hop on the streetcar and go to the beach for the day,” said professor Char Miller, a historian and environmental analysis scholar at Pomona College.Miller has spent decades tracing how this mythology ossified. While the pitch obscured who paid the price—Indigenous communities pushed off their land, Chinese and Japanese residents marginalized or excluded—the promise endured in part because the landscape helped carry it. But for all the valleys, deserts, and coastlines, there were also floods, fires, earthquakes, and landslides: hazards only mentioned in the fine print. There’s an old line Miller heard during his early days on the West Coast in the 1970s: “California is 90 percent paradise, 10 percent apocalypse.” It was something people once said with a kind of wry affection, the same sensibility baked into disaster films that love to see Los Angeles perpetually destroyed. It was the myth of a place that could always be rebuilt, where catastrophe was fleeting and bounty would always return. But that ratio, Miller says, is shifting, leaning more toward calamity. It was nearly midnight in New York when my phone lit up. A friend in Los Angeles was calling to ask if I wanted him to move anything out of my apartment, which had just fallen under an evacuation order while I was back East. Earlier that afternoon, on January 8, West Hollywood had been in the mid-70s—bone-dry, humidity in the 20s. The kind of day that feels ominous if you’ve lived here long enough to know what those numbers mean. By nightfall, another fire was creeping toward Runyon Canyon, the hiking trail so quintessentially L.A. it sometimes has a valet. In the weeks that followed the January fires, the political blame game was relentless. Some went after Mayor Bass, others after Governor Newsom. But the fury felt like a way to avoid the harder truth of a city playing dumb about its own new climate reality.Even while the January fires were still burning, city and state leaders promised to rebuild immediately, suspending regulations that might have slowed development in the very zones that were incinerated. “What that did was to take off the table any kind of transformation that might have slowed down the very things that that fire consumed, which is rapid growth up into fire zones,” Miller said. A recent CalMatters analysis found that nearly four million people in Southern California are living in such hazardous zones.Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that despite all the finger-pointing after the January fires, the forecast wasn’t the problem. Meteorologists had issued “crystal clear warnings” days ahead of time. The real issue, he suggested, is that Los Angeles still treats climate disasters as if they can be willed away, as if better heroics in the moment could out-muscle physics. “We can’t expect to have a firefighting force that can magically overcome hurricane-force winds amid record dry conditions producing a blizzard of embers in the suburbs,” Swain said. “You just can’t fight that in the moment.”The deeper problem is structural. Southern California is one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the country, and millions now live in or immediately downwind of terrain primed to burn. Many neighborhoods haven’t seen major fire in decades, which feeds the illusion of safety. But growth has pushed suburbs further into the wildland-urban interface just as warming has lengthened fire season, increasing the chances that a Santa Ana wind event arrives when vegetation is crisp and unrecoverably dry. Most years won’t align as catastrophically as January did, Swain noted, but when they do the math is unforgiving.Work has to happen long before the flames arrive. Swain pointed to neighborhoods where community groups had already tackled vegetation management, replaced vulnerable vents, or cleared brush from wooden fences. Those blocks didn’t just fare slightly better, but some avoided becoming ignition points entirely. Fire resilience, he emphasized, is cumulative; every house that doesn’t burn is one less launching pad for embers to race downwind.The fixes aren’t always grand or expensive. Sometimes it’s a few hundred dollars for finer mesh vents that stop embers from blowing into attics. Sometimes it’s ripping out head-high brush along a property line. Sometimes it’s insisting that new construction in fire zones meet tougher standards or retrofitting homes that were built for a climate that no longer exists.Swain sees the January fires as a preview of what strong Santa Ana events will look like going forward. Historically, many of the strongest Santa Ana events came after at least some winter rain. Now that rain is arriving later, meaning more wind events strike when the hills are still crisped from autumn, as was the case in January. But the problem in Los Angeles isn’t just meteorological: It is political, infrastructural, and deeply cultural. Miller likes to point to other parts of the country that faced similar crossroads and chose differently. After catastrophic floods in 1998, San Antonio bought out homeowners in riparian zones rather than sending them back into danger. Houston did something similar after Hurricane Harvey. These weren’t mass seizures or punitive acts; they were buyouts at market rate, voluntary and forward-looking. “What if,” Miller wondered, “you went to people who were burned out in Altadena and the Palisades and said, ‘We’re going to pay you not to rebuild’?” It’s a planner’s maxim—build up, not out—but in Southern California, the political will rarely matches the topographic reality.And yet, amid the devastation, there were signs of another kind of civic instinct. In Altadena, neighbors organized mutual aid networks at local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf and Bike Oven, and community leaders helped residents navigate insurance, microloans, and temporary housing. New nonprofits sprang up to support people psychologically and financially. Miller is skeptical of rebuilding policy, but he’s quick to note the human creativity that emerged in the fire’s wake—a kind of grassroots adaptation that government hasn’t yet matched.In May, Miller remembers stepping off a plane at LAX behind someone wearing a leather jacket with two mottos curved across the back: “Never forget” on top, “Rebuild Altadena” on the bottom. “I think the bottom circle erases the top,” Miller said. “If you rebuild, you have already forgotten because you are not paying attention to what happened and why it happened.”
I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect. We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work. L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews pulled a pregnant, unhoused woman from a storm drain above a raging river. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena further exposed the gap between the city we imagine and the one we actually live in. What happens when a city built on the mythology of sublime weather has to finally face how to live with a climate that refuses to stay in line?The Los Angeles myth goes back more than a century: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce mailed millions of pamphlets eastward, selling Midwestern families on a kingdom of eternal spring. Sunkist built a national brand on winter oranges ripening while Chicago froze. Railroads sponsored booster fiction and postcards promising a life where weather was not an obstacle but an asset. In the dead of winter, “[you could] have a small, five-acre citrus farm and do really well and then hop on the streetcar and go to the beach for the day,” said professor Char Miller, a historian and environmental analysis scholar at Pomona College.Miller has spent decades tracing how this mythology ossified. While the pitch obscured who paid the price—Indigenous communities pushed off their land, Chinese and Japanese residents marginalized or excluded—the promise endured in part because the landscape helped carry it. But for all the valleys, deserts, and coastlines, there were also floods, fires, earthquakes, and landslides: hazards only mentioned in the fine print. There’s an old line Miller heard during his early days on the West Coast in the 1970s: “California is 90 percent paradise, 10 percent apocalypse.” It was something people once said with a kind of wry affection, the same sensibility baked into disaster films that love to see Los Angeles perpetually destroyed. It was the myth of a place that could always be rebuilt, where catastrophe was fleeting and bounty would always return. But that ratio, Miller says, is shifting, leaning more toward calamity. It was nearly midnight in New York when my phone lit up. A friend in Los Angeles was calling to ask if I wanted him to move anything out of my apartment, which had just fallen under an evacuation order while I was back East. Earlier that afternoon, on January 8, West Hollywood had been in the mid-70s—bone-dry, humidity in the 20s. The kind of day that feels ominous if you’ve lived here long enough to know what those numbers mean. By nightfall, another fire was creeping toward Runyon Canyon, the hiking trail so quintessentially L.A. it sometimes has a valet. In the weeks that followed the January fires, the political blame game was relentless. Some went after Mayor Bass, others after Governor Newsom. But the fury felt like a way to avoid the harder truth of a city playing dumb about its own new climate reality.Even while the January fires were still burning, city and state leaders promised to rebuild immediately, suspending regulations that might have slowed development in the very zones that were incinerated. “What that did was to take off the table any kind of transformation that might have slowed down the very things that that fire consumed, which is rapid growth up into fire zones,” Miller said. A recent CalMatters analysis found that nearly four million people in Southern California are living in such hazardous zones.Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that despite all the finger-pointing after the January fires, the forecast wasn’t the problem. Meteorologists had issued “crystal clear warnings” days ahead of time. The real issue, he suggested, is that Los Angeles still treats climate disasters as if they can be willed away, as if better heroics in the moment could out-muscle physics. “We can’t expect to have a firefighting force that can magically overcome hurricane-force winds amid record dry conditions producing a blizzard of embers in the suburbs,” Swain said. “You just can’t fight that in the moment.”The deeper problem is structural. Southern California is one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the country, and millions now live in or immediately downwind of terrain primed to burn. Many neighborhoods haven’t seen major fire in decades, which feeds the illusion of safety. But growth has pushed suburbs further into the wildland-urban interface just as warming has lengthened fire season, increasing the chances that a Santa Ana wind event arrives when vegetation is crisp and unrecoverably dry. Most years won’t align as catastrophically as January did, Swain noted, but when they do the math is unforgiving.Work has to happen long before the flames arrive. Swain pointed to neighborhoods where community groups had already tackled vegetation management, replaced vulnerable vents, or cleared brush from wooden fences. Those blocks didn’t just fare slightly better, but some avoided becoming ignition points entirely. Fire resilience, he emphasized, is cumulative; every house that doesn’t burn is one less launching pad for embers to race downwind.The fixes aren’t always grand or expensive. Sometimes it’s a few hundred dollars for finer mesh vents that stop embers from blowing into attics. Sometimes it’s ripping out head-high brush along a property line. Sometimes it’s insisting that new construction in fire zones meet tougher standards or retrofitting homes that were built for a climate that no longer exists.Swain sees the January fires as a preview of what strong Santa Ana events will look like going forward. Historically, many of the strongest Santa Ana events came after at least some winter rain. Now that rain is arriving later, meaning more wind events strike when the hills are still crisped from autumn, as was the case in January. But the problem in Los Angeles isn’t just meteorological: It is political, infrastructural, and deeply cultural. Miller likes to point to other parts of the country that faced similar crossroads and chose differently. After catastrophic floods in 1998, San Antonio bought out homeowners in riparian zones rather than sending them back into danger. Houston did something similar after Hurricane Harvey. These weren’t mass seizures or punitive acts; they were buyouts at market rate, voluntary and forward-looking. “What if,” Miller wondered, “you went to people who were burned out in Altadena and the Palisades and said, ‘We’re going to pay you not to rebuild’?” It’s a planner’s maxim—build up, not out—but in Southern California, the political will rarely matches the topographic reality.And yet, amid the devastation, there were signs of another kind of civic instinct. In Altadena, neighbors organized mutual aid networks at local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf and Bike Oven, and community leaders helped residents navigate insurance, microloans, and temporary housing. New nonprofits sprang up to support people psychologically and financially. Miller is skeptical of rebuilding policy, but he’s quick to note the human creativity that emerged in the fire’s wake—a kind of grassroots adaptation that government hasn’t yet matched.In May, Miller remembers stepping off a plane at LAX behind someone wearing a leather jacket with two mottos curved across the back: “Never forget” on top, “Rebuild Altadena” on the bottom. “I think the bottom circle erases the top,” Miller said. “If you rebuild, you have already forgotten because you are not paying attention to what happened and why it happened.”
