Pacific Palisades, Twenty Months Later by Chris Bray

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Article originally published: “Tell Me How This Ends” by Chris Bray on substack

If you missed this, Spencer Pratt just wrote that the rebuilding of Pacific Palisades is failing, and the community is dying. I have warm memories of the neighborhood, as an old visitor with friends there, and I’ve been avoiding it. I live near Altadena, and have friends there too, and watching its destruction has been sickening. I didn’t want to go double that. But Pratt’s essay forced me to go back. My best guess, after a bunch of walking and talking, is that there are two stories sitting side-by-side, a bunch of success and a bunch of failure. I don’t think Spencer Pratt is wrong, and I don’t think he’s quite right.

There’s a bunch of rebuilding. In the “alphabet streets” around Palisades Village (Pratt’s “Potemkin Village”), whole blocks are mostly being rebuilt. (See this X post for the view of a Palisades resident who thinks the rebuilding in this one spot gives a false impression.) I drove in an hour after I read Pratt’s essay, and I was immediately a bit confused by the difference between what he wrote and the amount of construction I could see.

However.

There are places where nothing has happened. It’s like the fire was a month ago. That’s a pile of fire debris that was taller than me, in front of an incredible burned-out single-home lot just off Sunset Boulevard, with pieces of someone’s partially burned white picket fence mixed into it. I saw a lot of that. If you live in Los Angeles, you can go see this for yourself. Start here and wander toward the ocean.

After a fire that happened in January of 2025 — you can do the math! — absurdly pleasant oceanview properties and gorgeous lots in the hills with views to forever are dead. The weeds have taken over.

In Los Angeles, oceanfront properties that have been effectively abandoned can produce just one result, and yes.

If you want to fall asleep to the sound of waves breaking on the beach near your bed, homelessness in Los Angeles beckons. If you want walls, that…may be harder. I took this picture on Monday:

That burned in January, 2025.

All over Pacific Palisades, there are stairs that lead to nothing.

And doors and gates that open onto nothing.

Still like that. Remarkable.

I don’t want to minimize the amount of rebuilding that’s underway, which is very real and a sign of hope. But we’re headed to the two-year mark, and there’s quite a bit of ruin that’s beginning to stick.

More to come, and watch The Federalist for a long story tomorrow morning with local interviews. There’s a very deep well of stories here for someone who wants to dig persistently into a single event. Six thousand homes burned in this one very beautiful place. No one is going to manage to tell every story.