L.A.’s fires will make the city’s housing crisis even worse

L.A. was already struggling to build housing. Now it needs more.

There’s a perception that the houses that burned in L.A.’s fires were mansions. But in the city of Altadena, where the Eaton Fire devastated neighborhoods, many of the people who lost homes weren’t rich. On one block that burned down, several of the small 1930s houses were rentals. Other homes that were destroyed had been in the same families for decades—purchased when a house might have cost $50,000 rather than the million-plus it’s worth today.