Margaret Larkin holds a piece of her Christmas decor outside of what remains of her home. Larkin lived on her block in Altadena, Calif. for 36 years.
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Two weeks after the Eaton Fire, hundreds were gathered at Robinson Park Recreation Center for Dena Love Day. There were food trucks giving away food, and a live DJ played as people danced and grieved. It was a bittersweet celebration for a community reeling in the wake of devastating wildfires.
They were marking a milestone: Pasadena had gone a year without a single gang-related death, according to the Pasadena Police Department.
“I never lost hope of my community. But today was just a new spark for me that God was just there,” LaToya Carr said. “I feel like I’m on a team and I won a championship.”
Carr, 49, is a community outreach coordinator with Pasadena’s Gang Outreach Violence and Interruption Services, established last year. The city’s northwest neighborhood was once a hotspot for gun violence and racial profiling.
Latoya Carr, right, hands out awards to Cedrick Jolley, left, and Andre Brown at Robinson Park Recreation Center at Dena Love Day on Jan. 19, 2025. Jolley and Brown were volunteers helping victims of the Eaton Fire.
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In the wake of the deadly fire, Carr witnessed her community rallying together after Black Altadenans were hit hard by the flames.
“I’ve seen you guys last week,” Carr said as she handed out trophies to people who volunteered at mutual aid sites passing out water and clothes to fire victims who lost their homes. “ Y’all was loving on each other, working together to make things happen for other people. And that’s a big deal.”
Dena Love Day brought together resources for residents: hairdressers offered braiding services next to FEMA employees helping people apply for disaster relief. It was a moment to breathe and reflect in a neighborhood that had faced so much adversity.
A history of redlining and discrimination
For years, redlining drove inequities in Altadena and Pasadena. Lake Avenue, which bifurcates the two into east and west, had historically been a de facto segregation line preventing families of color from purchasing properties east of Lake Avenue.
“ Steering was something that real estate agents did,” said Barbara Richardson King, 77, who earned her real estate license in 1985 when there were few other women of color in the profession.
Redlining had been outlawed for two decades, but home sellers still found creative excuses to redirect her interest. “ I’ve been kind of blocked out of showing property for one reason or another. ‘Oh the seller’s out of town and he doesn’t want any showings for the next week,’ ” said the third-generation Pasadenan.
Barbara Richardson King stands in her realtor’s office. She’s sold homes for three decades in Pasadena and Altadena.
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Still, Black Angelenos found a rare kind of prosperity in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley as Altadena became one of California’s first integrated middle-class neighborhoods. King’s uncle, M. Earl Grant, founded Family Savings & Loan in 1949, one of the first Black-owned financial institutions west of the Mississippi that offered mortgage loans to families of color, King said. There was a doctor’s row, a block of Black medical professionals, and lawyers and school principals. Jackie Robinson’s mother, Sidney Pointier and Octavia Butler all called Altadena home.
The Black population in Altadena was more than 40% in the 1980s, according to the Altadena Historical Society, but today it’s fallen to 18% as the neighborhood has become increasingly expensive. The average home is valued at more than $1 million.
About 75% of Black Altadena residents own their homes, higher than the national average of 44%. Residents had accumulated generational wealth through their homes, but thousands of those homes have turned to rubble. According to a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles, almost half of Black-owned homes were destroyed or heavily damaged in the Eaton Fire, the deadliest and most destructive of the Los Angeles wildfires.
How the fires exacerbated inequities
Several families on the west side of Altadena reported receiving delayed evacuation alerts, hours after their neighbors to the east. The west side is where all 17 deaths occurred in the Eaton Fire. Local and federal officials are investigating potential flaws in Los Angeles County’s emergency alert system.
Margaret Larkin, 66, had seen her fair share of fires and heavy Santa Ana winds in her decades of renting her cul-de-sac home on the west side of Altadena. That night on Jan. 7, she could see the fiery glow of Eaton Canyon in the distance.
“ I kept saying, ‘The fire will never come down. It has to hit so many houses first before it gets to us,’” Larkin said. But the winds were picking up and throwing flaming embers at speeds up to 100 miles per hour.
“ My phone didn’t have service. We didn’t have electricity,” said Larkin, who said she didn’t receive an evacuation notice to leave. When she and her daughter finally left at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, it was chaos.
“ Every street you turn on, there was fire or there was a tree fell over. It was pitch dark,” Larkin said. She said there was so much smoke, their car headlights did little to illuminate the road ahead and all she could hear was the sound of the wind like a train horn and the cracking of falling debris as her entire block was burning.
They escaped unscathed, but when she returned to inspect the damage two weeks later with her family, there was nothing left where the flames had leveled her home.
Veronica Jones, the first Black president of the Altadena Historical Society, said these issues are symptomatic of the underinvestment west of Lake Avenue.
“ You just wonder why there aren’t a lot of trees on the west side,” Jones said. The 71-year-old is a former member of the Altadena Town Council who has pushed to increase funding for their local parks and libraries.
Veronica Jones, the Altadena Historical Society’s first Black president, stands in front of a lot full of burned cars on Jan. 21, 2025. The Eaton Fire came just a block away from her home in west Altadena.
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Throughout her daily three-mile strolls of west Altadena, the prevalence of liquor stores has been a continual eyesore for her.
The daunting prospect of rebuilding
A big question looming on the minds of Black residents is whether they have a future in Altadena.
“We didn’t just lose our house, we lost our community,” said Aldra Allison, a housing specialist who works with the City of Pasadena. Allison, 68, and her husband Herman had rushed so fast out of the house they hadn’t been able to rescue their children’s photos from the mantle of their fireplace. “I’ve cried so much that I can’t cry anymore … that chapter in my life was gone.”
Allison, an affordable housing specialist with the City of Pasadena, taught genealogy classes on Black families at the Alkebu-lan Cultural Center, helping compile a book about Black pioneers in Pasadena. Allison worries about the future of Black homeownership. More than half of Black homeowners in Altadena are over the age of 65. She expects many might face challenges to rebuilding.
Aldra Allison holds letters that her children wrote to her, some of the only keepsakes she was able to salvage in the Eaton Fire that ravaged her Altadena home. The Eaton Fire was the deadliest and most destructive of the Los Angeles wildfires. She and her husband are staying in an apartment in Monrovia, Calif.
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Many of the seniors in Allison’s caseload were on fixed incomes and being pushed out of Pasadena because of the skyrocketing rents. The Eaton Fire displaced thousands of families, making affordable housing even more scarce in the area.
“There are so many developers out there sending letters, misinformation to people saying ‘You can’t go back,’ or ‘You can’t afford to go back.’ [Residents don’t] realize that it’s really early in the game,” Allison said. Even if people’s homes burned down, they are still responsible for the mortgages. People need to not panic.”
Allison said she would hate to see older residents losing their generational wealth by selling to developers circling the carnage of the fires.
“You just have to be patient and seek help, because there’s help out there. There’s no doubt that I will one day rebuild my house,” Allison said.
L.A. County Board Supervisor Kathryn Barger has vowed to protect the mom-and-pop charm of this unincorporated town where people of color make up a majority of the population.
“Altadena is not for sale,” Barger said in a recent county board meeting. She also commended Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to lift permitting requirements to fast-track rebuilding in the wake of the L.A. fires.
“ I am convinced that if we can move the red tape, get rid of it, and allow people to return and begin the rebuilding effort … that is going to bring the community back,” Barger said.
This week she launched the Altadena Recovery Commission, a group that includes community members to aid and shape rebuilding efforts.
“The cost of housing is so expensive that it is pricing many young African American families out of the market, and they’re having to move away,” Barger said. She said she doesn’t want the Eaton fire to be the last chapter of Altadena’s historic Black community. “I want to make sure we don’t let that history go away and that we provide the opportunity to the next generation.”
A legacy of resilience and hope
This isn’t the first time Dena’s Black community has had to rebuild. In the 1950s and 60s, the expansion of the 210 and 710 freeways upended the lives of thousands of Black residents in Pasadena.
“This hurts because this was truly an act of nature,” said 73-year-old Marcus Williams, a recently ordained elder at Friendship Baptist Church in Pasadena. The church, with its Spanish-style white stucco steeple, stands at the heart of Old Town Pasadena — once a thriving Black commercial district that has since been supplanted by an upscale shopping district with stores like Apple and Anthropologie.
“ I am saddened. I’m frustrated. There’s no one to blame, no finger to point. This is a natural disaster. The freeway was not,” Williams said.
At Friendship Baptist Church, the congregation celebrated four elders who were ordained during a Sunday service on Feb. 2, 2025. The church was once a center of Black life in Old Town Pasadena. Church elders are hopeful the wave of displaced residents will be able to return.
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But many of those displaced persisted, becoming part of the wave of Black families who moved to the west side of Altadena in the 70s and 80s, shaping the town into a legacy for Black wealth.
“ We have suffered innumerous, immeasurable things that would have crushed a lesser people. But still, we are here and we are surviving. And we will come back,” promised Williams.
Local bookseller Nikki High, 50, has been drawing inspiration from the prescient work of Octavia Butler.
“ [Octavia Butler] had been studying global warming as early as the 80s,” High said, who opened Octavia’s Bookshelf two years ago in honor of the Afrofuturist writer. In Parable of the Sower published in 1993, Butler depicted an apocalyptic future through the perspective of a preacher’s daughter, Lauren Olamina. Olamina’s journal entry for Feb. 1, 2025 begins with, “We had a fire today.”
Nikki High transformed her bookstore, Octavia’s Bookshelf, into a mutual aid hub for Altadena residents affected by the Eaton Fire. High, on Jan. 21, 2025, poses in front of a Scrabble board with a message for developers.
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“It’s jarring to see how accurate, within weeks, she was of [predicting] these events,” High said. But she doesn’t see Butler as a prophet of doom. Parable of the Sower is a blueprint of hope. Lauren Olamina is rebuilding and she’s basing [her new] community [on] feeding each other and being accountable for one another.”
High’s home was narrowly spared by the flames that engulfed her entire block in Altadena. She focused on her community, transforming her bookstore into a mutual aid hub where people could pick up masks, burritos, toiletries and other basic necessities. On the ground, dozens of similar mutual aid sites popped up at stoplights, empty parking lots, and gas stations.
“Nobody’s coming to save us,” High said. “We have to embrace each other.”
Producer Janet Woojeong Lee contributed reporting.
