Architect and coalition leader Charles Bryant stands near the remains of his home, which burned down in the Eaton Fire. (Photo by William Jenkins / AfroLA)
This story was co-published with AfroLA, nonprofit solutions journalism for Los Angeles told through the lens of the Black community. To republish this article, please contact AfroLA. Subscribe to AfroLA’s newsletter.
Carla Flagg remembers the joy of growing up in west Altadena.
“We had these great pool parties where all the cousins and everybody would come to the Fair Oaks house,” she says, smiling, as tears welled up in her eyes. Her parents owned the house and passed it down to her sister and her sister’s kids. “ We had that home for 50-some odd years, and there are still people who know the original phone number.”
Flagg’s family home was one of some 9,400 structures that were destroyed in the Eaton Fire in January. It was also one of many homes passed down within the Black community by family members. Discriminatory redlining of the 1960s steered her parents away from Pasadena, and realtors encouraged them to purchase on the west side of Altadena.
“It is something that we as a family wanted to keep as part of our generational wealth and our legacy,” Flagg says.
Flagg, an architect and volunteer with the Altadena Rebuild Coalition, recently shared these memories on video. She’s been helping facilitate storytelling among Eaton Fire survivors as part of the coalition’s mission to preserve the cultural significance of Altadena’s Black community. She felt it was time to share her own connection, too.
“Altadena is life for me,” she says. “I can’t wait for it to come back.”
In the wake of what is likely the costliest wildfire disaster in U.S. history, she and a group of Black architects, engineers, contractors and other building professionals joined forces. They hope to rebuild Altadena with the same cultural fabric that made it into an epicenter of Black homeownership, economic vitality and culture
The coalition was launched by members of the National Organization of Minority Architects’s Southern California chapter, who snapped into action after the fires. Without targeted assistance, many Black families might be forced to leave the area. The destruction is personal; at least eight members lost their homes entirely, others were displaced due to smoke and ash damage, and everyone knows someone impacted.
The coalition is focused on three central goals: cultural preservation and historical significance, community engagement and rebuilding support. That includes pairing architects with residents to help them start thinking through what it will take to rebuild. The fire disproportionately impacted Black neighborhoods, according to a UCLA study that found nearly half of Black homes were destroyed or sustained major damage, compared to 37% of all other racial/ethnic groups’ homes.
But to create the kind of change they’re envisioning, they have to start by building trust, says coalition co-founder Eletrice Harris, a program director at SoCal NOMA.
“Between the County information [about debris cleanup] and all these people sneaking up trying to buy their property or get them to sign on to either a lawsuit or so many things going on, their [heads are] spinning,” she says. “So we’re setting ourselves up to be a trusted partner in the community that they can come to with these issues and we can help steer them in the right direction.”
Help for the community from the community
Three months after the fires, Steve Lewis hasn’t been able to move back into his 1929 Spanish mission-style home. While it didn’t burn down, it sustained smoke damage. He and his wife have been living between a friend’s Airbnb in Glendale and Detroit, where he also works and their daughter lives.
Lewis has been an architect and Altadenean since the early ’80s, when the Black population peaked at 43%. As costs rose and original Black residents were priced out, the Black population dropped to 18%. But Lewis says it never felt that way.
Read the full story, and hear an interview with Carla Flagg, at AfroLA.