Will L.A.’s Fires Permanently Disperse the Black Families of Altadena?

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I met the Benns through their cousin, Anton Anderson, a fifty-seven-year-old technology consultant and podcaster who, with the exception of going to college at Dartmouth, has lived in Altadena his whole life. It was a Friday afternoon, three days after the Eaton Fire began, and Anderson and I were standing on Lincoln Avenue near a National Guard checkpoint that was limiting access to the northern reaches of Altadena, where the fire had hit hardest. He wore a Dartmouth T-shirt and a Patagonia fleece vest, and at his feet were two gallons of water. As we started chatting, he told me that he had brought them for an elderly widow and her son, neighbors who he believed had not evacuated. Anderson and his neighbors had experienced relatively good fortune. Almost all of the houses in their cul-de-sac, in west Altadena had survived. His elderly mother, Evelyn, one of the original sixteen Benn siblings, had not lost her house, in the Meadows, either, and Anderson had managed to rescue a few of his late father’s paintings from the smoke. (“They’re not going in the Louvre,” he told me, “but they have sentimental value.”) Still, it would likely be a long time before he, his wife, and their two children could return home. Their house had been damaged by the smoke, and much of the neighborhood to the east had been destroyed. For the time being, they were staying with his sister in Covina, about a forty-minute drive away.

In the immediate aftermath of the Eaton Fire, public access to the most damaged areas had still been possible, and residents had driven around downed power lines, past blocks of smoking ruins, to report back to neighbors on the state of their homes. By Friday, following the deployment of the National Guard, officials had begun clearing hazards and conducting a grim assessment of the damage, including a search for human remains. Residents were not being allowed back in, even as people’s desperation to lay eyes on their homes was mounting. Anderson tried his neighbor, the widow, by phone. She picked up. She had left, she told him, but her son was still at home watching the news. “The electricity is back on?” Anderson said, incredulous. After she hung up, he checked on his Ring camera. “My kids’ messy room is online starting at 2:17 P.M.,” he verified.

Anderson made it through the cordon on foot. Outside his house, a single-story home with brown siding and a newly planted magnolia tree in the front yard, he marvelled that none of the charred embers that littered the lawn had set the place on fire. He went inside and emerged with a small backpack, a stuffed doll with an Afro tied to it, for his five-year-old daughter. As we made our way out of the evacuation zone, he showed me the houses of his absent neighbors and shared their professions—a midwife here, a couple who worked in television and film production there.

Back on the other side of the checkpoint, we sat at a bus stop on Lincoln Avenue, across from a McDonald’s whose sign had a giant hole in the middle. Anderson let out an exhale. “I can’t begin to talk about how thankful and blessed I feel,” he said. “I’m actually celebrating, as much as anything, my neighborhood, because this is a wonderful little neighborhood. But, I mean, we didn’t have a lock on that—yeah, we didn’t have a lock on wonderful little neighborhoods. I have a little smidge of survivor’s guilt.”

And he couldn’t help but wonder about the future. “I think about this community, and I’m so worried about how it will survive this.”

Anton Anderson and his wife, Ashaunta, outside their home, which survived the Eaton Fire.

Home prices in Altadena have risen to a median of $1.3 million in recent years. Many people who long chose to live here—Jet Propulsion Lab engineers, teachers, blue-collar workers, small-business owners—have been joined by celebrities (such as Mandy Moore and John C. Reilly) and members of the creative class priced out of other Los Angeles-area neighborhoods. Lincoln Avenue, where we sat, was a corridor of particularly visible gentrification, lined with new and forthcoming outposts of hipster L.A. businesses like the Eagle Rock café Unincorporated Coffee Roasters and Los Feliz’s popular Mediterranean restaurant Kismet. Anderson mentioned Good Neighbor Bar, a cocktail bar a few blocks up the street. It was established in 2024, and it catered to some of the neighborhood’s newer residents. After it opened, Anderson had seen a post on social media noting the absence of west Altadena’s Black history on an illustrated menu, which featured pictures of the local wildlife, scenes from popular hikes, and a drawing of J.P.L. Anderson emphasized that he likes the bar and wants to support small businesses, and that Good Neighbor had been helping displaced residents find information about the state of their homes, but that the absence had been a misstep. “The artist they hired, you know, probably wasn’t from Altadena, and so probably just was, like, Well, I’m just gonna do something that’s kind of cutesy and hipstery, with the hiking and Mt. Lowe and bears,” he said. “And, yeah, and all that’s true, but, if that’s all you do, you skip over the people who’ve lived here for generations.” It was just one small example, he said.

“When you think of certain families in the city, there’s names attached to it,” Loren told me when we spoke later. “You know the Benn family, you know the Milton family, you know the Johnson family.” It was easy to imagine how such families had become embedded in the fabric of Altadena; the network of extended Benn cousins includes pharmacists, teachers in the community’s elementary and middle schools, and owners of local businesses, such as a print shop that has contracts with many of the area schools’ sports teams. Oscar and Laurie worked locally. Their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Amanda, was a home health aide. Their twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Amber, had a job in a day care that their grandchildren attended, which had been down the street from their home until it, too, was lost in the fire. Their son Julius and his girlfriend had met working at a local school. Anderson already worried that whatever iteration of Altadena came next would be affordable only to newcomers.

“When they say, Let’s rebuild Altadena, who gets to sit at the table there?” Anderson now asked. “Is it gonna be my uncle Herman, who’s probably gonna end up moving because he says he’s too old to rebuild?” (Anteres Anderson Turner, Anderson’s sister, later told me that Herman’s house, which had cost fourteen thousand dollars when he bought it in 1965, had been paid off since the seventies—“I brought my children home from the NICU to that house,” she said.) The Benns were not the only multigenerational family in Altadena. The community has been a refuge for many groups of people who were excluded by price or prejudice from housing elsewhere, including Japanese Americans who settled there after being forced into internment camps in the Second World War and Central American immigrants who put down roots in the early eighties. “That loss, it’s generational wealth, from back when you could buy a house in California for a can of soup,” Anderson said. “It isn’t gentrification if you don’t sell.”

The smoke had very literally not yet cleared, but the vultures were already swooping. Anderson told me that one of his neighbors had received a query from a developer asking if he was planning to sell. Within a few days, Anderson and his sister, Anteres, had received calls, too. (On January 14th, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that “unsolicited, undervalued offers” to purchase property would be outlawed in the fire zones of Los Angeles County for the next three months.) Compared to Black Americans as a whole, Altadena’s Black residents have nearly twice the rate of homeownership. In the case of the Benn family, the younger the person was, the less likely they were to own their home and the more likely they were to have to leave. Anderson was able to buy a home in 2010, shortly before he met his wife, who is a physician, but Anteres rents in Covina, because Altadena was financially out of reach. None of Oscar and Laurie’s children, who range in age from their mid-twenties to their early thirties, own their own homes.

A family photo.

Laurie and Oscar Benn, center, with their family outside an Airbnb in Monterey Park.

Oscar and Laurie and their seven children are something like the von Trapps of Altadena, and for years they have played as a band at weddings, funerals, conventions, banquets, and birthday parties. Oscar, Sr., had been a preacher, and Oscar, Jr., taught himself how to play piano and sing at church with his siblings; Laurie grew up singing in Chicago. They fell in love over their shared passion for music, and their daughters inherited the interest.

“They all came together and started working on harmony,” Oscar recalled, of his girls as children. “They would be in their room just practicing and practicing, listening to Mariah Carey, listening to Anita Baker, because those are the songs we were singing at weddings. . . . They’re singing together and, like, wow, now they’re singing. And people want to hear those Benn girls.” Loren is now a professional vocalist and an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. And it wasn’t only the girls. Oscar and Laurie’s youngest son, Linden, plays the drums, and Julius is an actor and a singer.

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