A Rare Middle-Class Paradise in L.A. Was Swept Away by Flames [View all]
LOS ANGELES—It was a sliver of paradise that people could actually afford, hidden along a coveted stretch of Southern California coastline.
Set across the highway from a sandy state beach and steps down a bluff from ultraluxury celebrity mansions, the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, a community of about 170 manufactured and mobile homes, was home to a middle-class jumble of longtime residents, young families with children and newer transplants living their beachfront retirement dreams. The homes, some of which offered vistas of the Pacific Ocean, were far more affordable than most of the larger houses on the hillside above. But the fire that roared through the moneyed neighborhood above it Tuesday afternoon also destroyed the Bowl, as its denizens affectionately call the park.
Owners of lower-cost homes are vulnerable to becoming permanently displaced following natural disasters. The fires that have swept through Los Angeles this week, devastating neighborhoods, represent one of the biggest disasters in state history. Mobile-home park residents are less likely than other homeowners to have insurance, said Andrew Rumbach, senior fellow at the Urban Institute. If park owners choose to rebuild, the high cost of construction and the need to bring decades-old parks up to current building codes usually means the parks become more expensive, he said.
Bowl residents don’t know if they will ever be able to build back their unique and beloved community, which they say dates to the 1950s. Residents owned their houses, but not the land beneath them, and they don’t know what the park’s ownership will decide about its future.
Before the fire, the Bowl was a place where people would congregate on their terraces for happy hours and cinematic sunsets, leave bowls of soup on the doorsteps of ailing neighbors and band together to search for lost pets. Voice-over actors. Teachers. Bookkeepers. Surfers. Interior designers. Young children. The whoosh of the Pacific each night was a reminder of how good they had it in a place that had priced out so many others.
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