‘My favorite hike. I will miss it.’
‘RIP’
‘Our beautiful mountain, home to many wildlife, hiking trail is gone. This is devastating. I can’t stop sobbing.’
These reviews were left on a page for the Eaton Canyon Trail just days after David Hernandez had walked his dog, Buddy, down the muddy path and across shimmering creeks to reach the waterfall at the end, a nice cap to the long winter break filled with holiday dinners and catching up with friends.
Four days later, Eaton Canyon was engulfed in fire. Not only would Hernandez’s usual trail never look the same, but the fire was encroaching upon the hardware store everyone, but especially his dad, frequented; the church by Lake Avenue where Hernandez used to sing on the choir; the house of a friend who lived nearby.
Hernandez, an architecture senior, is one of many Altadena and Pasadena community members rebuilding with the slogan, “Altadena is not for sale,” in mind. As of March, half of the 14 properties sold in Altadena after the fires were purchased by developers or investors, according to an NBC article.
However, Cal Poly has an unexpected stake in Altadena’s fight against gentrification. Hernandez, along with nine other architecture and 22 city and regional planning students, are enrolled in an interdisciplinary class where they work to recover Altadena’s homes, businesses and community centers lost to the Eaton Fire.
The unprecedented class, funded by the Wildland Urban-Interface (WUI) Fire Institute, is a combination of CRP 341 and ARCH 453, led by Beate von Bischopinck and Barry Williams, respectively, this quarter.
Because Altadena is an unincorporated community, LA County is responsible for the over 100,000 people evacuated and almost 9,500 structures affected by the Eaton Fire. With the county also overseeing recovery for the Palisades Fire and the absence of a formal planning entity dedicated to Altadena, this Cal Poly class is the city’s biggest planning resource, according to city and regional planning junior Davidson Drake.
“Everything we do in that class, everything we say, everything we discuss, everything we work on, I think, has a huge potential to make an incredible impact on people’s lives,” Drake said.
Minimizing gentrification
The main goal of the class is to minimize gentrification and retain the tight-knit community of Altadena as best as possible, according to Bischopinck.
The city is an incredibly diverse community, a result of white flight during the Civil Rights era after de facto housing discrimination and redlining practices ended for the most part during the 60s, according to an article from the LAist.
However, Black households, which make up 18% of total households in Altadena, were disproportionately impacted by Eaton due to this history of redlining. A whopping 61% of them were located within the fire perimeter, nearly half being destroyed or majorly damaged, according to a UCLA study. Only 50% of non-Black households were in the perimeter and 37% experienced destruction, the same study cited.
There is a clear connection between the history of Altadena and the way it has to rebuild, according to Ryan Miller, another lecturer teaching alongside Bischopinck and Williams. He specializes in geospatial analysis and has extra insight into natural disaster recovery, as he lived in Paradise when the Camp Fire hit.
“There’s pre-existing disparities between housing affordability and transportation access,” Miller said. “Then you layer a disaster on top of that, which destroys 5,000 or 10,000 homes – and all of those existing inequities just become exacerbated.”
There are regulations to keep the property tax of affected Altadena homes low after rebuilding, but not as affordable as homes that were passed down by four or five generations, Bischopinck explained. Quite a few of the homes with mortgages didn’t have fire insurance, meaning these homeowners were left with nothing once the fire hit, she also said.
Miller has helped Bischopinck, Williams and the students use geospatial data to their advantage: building age, demographics of certain areas and where the new building codes stop and end, for example.
Using this data, the class is researching a multitude of ways to keep housing affordable and bring back Altadena’s essential businesses and community centers: gardens, churches, libraries, parks and schools.
However, disaster recovery takes several years, and there are people who already know they don’t want to return to their properties, according to Bischopinck.
Housing cost is one factor, but Miller cited the trauma wildfires cause to a community and how some people from Paradise didn’t want to move back because of the trauma cause by living through Camp Fire.
“Some people will return because they are really rooted in that area. You can just hope and work for what they are able to find in what they have lost,” Bischopinck said. “There’s no way Altadena will not change. It will change.”
Tackling the unknown
This is the first time city and regional planning students have had a class dedicated to disaster recovery. Bischopinck has never worked on a project of this nature before, and even says that planners working in Altadena haven’t either – the Eaton and Palisades fires were some of most destructive in California history, according to an LA Times article.
Students are mainly focused on pinning down the valuable information: updated building codes, permitting processes, temporary housing options, pre-approved reconstruction plans and where and when mutual aid events are taking place.
They prepared easily digestible brochures, flyers and maps with their research for a trip to Altadena, which happened at the beginning of this month.
Brochures and flyers were distributed to community members by setting up outreach booths at a farmer’s market for displaced residents. Maps were laid out next to markers that passerbys could use to write the locations they would like to see from the rebuild.
The day before, they presented their research to the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning.
During the meeting held at their headquarters, stakeholders such as LA County Planning Deputy Director Connie Cheung supported the students’ work and provided suggestions and new tools for the Altadena rebuild. Nick Franchino, LA County Planning GIS Manager, commended students’ outreach materials for their clarity, even stating that they were better than the county’s.
The students also drove around Altadena with long-time resident and retired insurer Kevin Williams, whose family was a victim of redlining in the 30s. He gave students historical context about different areas, explained the nuances of insuring homes in Altadena and emphasized the importance of preserving its interwoven neighborhoods.
“We say, ‘Are you from ‘Dena?’ And if you’re from ‘Dena, we’re family,’” Williams said. “It’s the way the world should look and act.”
How city planning will change
Community climate resilience planning and mutual aid efforts like the ones in Altadena will be the new norm, according to Drake. He cites the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the end to their Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program (BRIC).
“We really need to step it up, because that’s the only way we can handle natural disasters in the future – we won’t have these big federal programs,” Drake said. “Our best bet is to rely on our communities and the people around us.”
Bischopinck believes that there will be more classes that follow the direction of this unique class. Sheridan Green, a city and regional planning junior in the class, is realizing that disaster recovery will be an unavoidable aspect of their careers as planners in the face of climate change.
“It will be a foundational part of the education rather than just, ‘Oh, I kind of want to be a disaster planner. I’ll go on my own and look into that,’” Green said. “In a way, almost everyone has to be kind of a disaster planner because it affects everywhere now.”
Four days after walking Buddy, two days after coming back to school, 14,000 acres of Hernandez’s childhood – gone. The heart of his community, a place he couldn’t have imagined a fire reaching just a week prior, was burnt to the ground in a matter of hours.
Altadena will inevitably change, but Hernandez’s home survived; El Patrón, a beloved Mexican restaurant of his, stands untouched; his mother’s favorite thrift shops and his old high school survived.
“The biggest death of a community is when the people aren’t there anymore,” Hernandez said.
The students created a storymap of the community events and businesses resilient against the destruction and oncoming gentrification efforts Altadena residents already face only four months post-Eaton.
Soon, they will work on building plans with Altadena business owners such as Joey Galloway, who lost half of his inherited commercial block, or Mariposa Junction, which included everyone’s favorite hardware store.
Their relationship with LA County’s planning department will continue to help provide Altadena residents solutions for affordable housing; and to help them keep the land their homes belong to.
