‘We’re all freaking out.’ For mobile home residents, few answers after Palisades fire
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There has been a sobering awareness in the WhatsApp group chat where Clove Galilee has kept up with her neighbors since the Palisades fire destroyed their homes.
It’s the realization that, one month after the crisis, “life has gone on for most people,” said Galilee, who lived with her wife in the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park in Pacific Palisades. But not for them.
“It’s like a death in a family,” Galilee said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, can I help you?’ for the first month. And then? Time goes on. And all of these people are still going to be struggling.”
For people who lived in Tahitian Terrace and the adjacent Palisades Bowl mobile home park, the struggle to figure out their lives after the fire has been compounded by a deep uncertainty about whether the parks — which contained some of the most affordable housing in affluent Pacific Palisades — will be rebuilt.
More than 300 mobile and prefabricated houses in the parks were incinerated in the Jan. 7 fire.
Residents like Galilee owned their houses but leased the small plots of land on which they sat. So, even if they want to rebuild, the decision is out of their control.
The ocean-view parks on a terraced hillside just across Pacific Coast Highway from Will Rogers State Beach are prime Westside real estate. The individual mobile home pads have been rent-controlled for decades — despite objections from park owners over the years who argued that they should have been able to charge more to keep up with California’s soaring property values.
Although state laws require cities to preserve and increase affordable housing, the mobile home residents fear they will be priced out of Pacific Palisades if the park owners decide not to rebuild.
The Palisades fire wiped out something rare in affluent, celebrity-studded Pacific Palisades: an affordable beachfront neighborhood.
“This is, for many people, the one place that they can still live on the Westside. That’s our plea, to protect that and allow us to come back,” said Galilee, who works in the Office of Sustainability and the Environment for the city of Santa Monica.
Before the fire, the average home price in Pacific Palisades was more than $3.4 million. A typical lot in the mobile home parks rented for around $1,300 a month. Many residents had paid off their mobile homes decades ago.
The owners of Tahitian Terrace and the Palisades Bowl could not be reached by The Times for comment.
In an email to The Times on Monday, Olga Samson, regional manager for Martinez & Associates, which manages the Palisades Bowl, said that “it is far too early to have any discussions about the future of this property.”
Martinez & Associates wrote in a Jan. 10 message to tenants that the property owners “are just beginning to sort out the potential environmental, legal and financial consequences of these sudden and disastrous events” and that the “process is complicated and will take considerable time and involve coordination between many private and public stakeholders.”
Residents in both parks have said that communication from ownership has been sparse and that government officials — even if they are sympathetic — have been able to provide few answers about the tenants’ rights.
“It’s a complex situation,” said Pete Brown, a spokesman for Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades.
City planners, Brown said, have met with residents and the property owners and are “trying to create a path forward.” But, he said, “it’s going to take some time” — probably a year or more.
Steve Soboroff, the chief recovery officer for the city of Los Angeles, said the mobile home parks “served a great need” for affordable housing in Pacific Palisades. Any attempt to rezone the land for one or a few wealthy buyers wanting big lots “would be a long and arduous process,” he said.
“To have them changed to be one lot for a mega-billionaire is not what Palisades needs,” Soboroff said.
He added that “there’s this knee-jerk implicit bias against affordable housing” in the Palisades because people confuse the term with housing for the homeless.
A request by L.A. County to temporarily waive state housing laws drew the ire from advocates who accused the county of skirting efforts aimed at boosting affordable housing.
James Frantz, an attorney who specializes in wildfire litigation, said he is representing more than 40 mobile home owners who lived in Palisades Bowl and Tahitian Terrace and who fear the parks will not be rebuilt.
He said that, while he has not yet spoken directly with the park owners, he believes that “if they are folks of great integrity and honor, my thought is they will allow the mobile home owners to come back and rebuild the property and have brand new mobile homes ... which should increase the value of the neighborhood.”
Lisa Atkinson, a 59-year-old painter who has lived in the Palisades Bowl for four years, said that ownership is “not talking to us” and that “we’re all freaking out.”
“It’s so painful because we don’t know if we’re going to be able to go back to where we live,” she said. “If you have a house, you’re able to go back and rebuild. Not only do we have to buy a new home but also we might not have a space to put it on.”
Atkinson said she and other Palisades Bowl residents were outraged and insulted last month when they were blocked from viewing their burned homes unless they signed an agreement to “forever waive” the ability to sue the park’s owners and managers.
She refused to sign. And residents eventually were allowed in.
Atkinson lived in an 850-square-foot, two-bedroom mobile home that she bought for $401,000 and paid off. The monthly rent and utilities were about $1,300 a month.
Atkinson said that Foremost Insurance recently canceled her home insurance policy, saying the hill behind her home would be indefensible in a fire. She said that the house was “a total loss” and that the only financial assistance she will receive will be from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In neighboring Tahitian Terrace, the fire destroyed all but one of the 158 mobile and prefabricated homes. One park resident, 79-year-old Elizabeth Morgan, died at her home on Aloha Drive, according to the L.A. County medical examiner.
Galilee, 55, and her wife, Jenny Rogers, the director of recreation and arts for the city of Santa Monica, said they were surrounded in the park by teachers, firefighters and municipal employees. Many neighbors were retirees: For more than two decades, Tahitian Terrace was a retirement park for residents 55 and older.
There were a lot of creative people — artists and actors and writers who were still struggling to find work after the recent Hollywood labor strikes.
The couple said that finding the mobile home in 2010 was a stroke of serendipity. They lived in foggy San Francisco at the time and had come to Southern California for Rogers’ 39th birthday. Rogers was born in early March and raised in rural Nebraska, where winters are cold. She wanted to see the sun on her birthday, for once.
A parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach will be used as a staging area for potentially hazardous household waste removed from the Palisades fire zone, officials announced.
They stayed at a hotel in Marina del Rey and were disappointed to have rain and fog all weekend. A man at the front desk told them to drive 15 minutes north on Pacific Coast Highway to find clearer skies.
They took his advice and stumbled upon Tahitian Terrace. A young, newlywed couple was taking a tour with a real estate agent, and they joined.
Galilee and Rogers were stunned when they walked up Samoa Way, with its epic ocean view. Because of the way the hillside is carved, they could not see or hear six lanes of traffic on Pacific Coast Highway — but they could hear waves and children laughing on the beach.
After viewing a 1969 double-wide trailer, they told the young couple: You should buy it. It’s a great investment.
“They were just like, ‘OK, thank you, crazy lesbian ladies.’ They wanted no part of it,” said Rogers, laughing.
“They were like, ‘No, why would we buy a mobile home?’ We just kind of looked at each other, and by the time we got back in the car, we turned to each other and were like, ‘We’re going to buy this.’”
Rogers, now 53, had long felt deep down that they would some day live by the beach. For a year, she had been having furniture, vases, lamps and oil paintings of the ocean delivered to the couple’s San Francisco loft, where they had little room for them.
“Things would be delivered to the house, and Clove would be like, ‘What is this?’” Rogers said. “And I said, ‘It’s for the beach house.’ She was like, ‘Excuse me? You understand, we don’t have a beach house.’”
Rogers would say: Not yet. But we will.
“A sign arrived that said, ‘Welcome to the Beach House,’” she added. “I think Clove thought I was having a psychotic break.”
They paid $275,000 for their mobile home with the million-dollar ocean view. The final payment is due in October.
When the flames came, Galilee went inside and lay on the floor.
“I said, ‘Please, please don’t take our house,’ just asking the universe for grace,” she said. “That’s the last thing I did in the house.”
They loaded her Subaru with the photographs, letters and scripts of Galilee’s mother, the renowned theater actor and director Ruth Maleczech. And they saved the clothes from their 2008 San Francisco wedding — Galilee’s pale pink dress and Rogers’ pinstriped tuxedo.
For the last month, they have lived in the same Marina del Rey hotel they visited in 2010. And they have spoken often of their return — to Tahitian Terrace, to the same plot on Samoa Way, to the neighbors they loved.
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