LA Asks: Was Mike Davis Right?

One of the last times I spoke to the great Los Angeles writer Mike Davis was during the Woolsey fire, in 2018. Before this past week, Woolsey was the last megafire to blast Los Angeles. It burned nearly a hundred thousand acres around Malibu, destroyed more than 1,500 structures. I asked Davis back then what he expected to see once the flames died down. “Bigger mansions,” he said. “What tends to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have adequate insurance.”

“The fires are like gun violence,” he added. “You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”

To live in LA, even if you never leave your neighborhood, is to live in Greater Los Angeles, to know you reside in one of the world’s largest megacities, a mountainous, immense plaited landscape—Los Angeles County alone constitutes 88 separate cities, from Beverly Hills to Azusa—that unfurls in all directions. And one that also burns recurrently. Since the last time I checked the news, 16 people were dead. Tens of thousands of acres torched. More than 12,000 structures destroyed, with several of my friends and relatives burned out of their homes, and a bunch of my favorite restaurants reduced to ash. What’s different this time, compared to Woolsey, is the fires’ bandwidth. We have the Palisades and Kenneth fires to the west. Eaton and Creek in the east. The Hurst and Lidia fires up north. All we need now is Disneyland to go up in flames (we do not need this) and we’ll be surrounded.

The first night of the fires, I spent two hours helping friends and acquaintances sign up for emergency alerts, encouraging them to download the Watch Duty app, which tracks burns. But the person I wanted to speak to most was Davis.

Davis died in 2022, at 76, from complications linked to esophageal cancer. In person, he was a sweetheart—a cheerful man with a buzzcut and an oddly high-pitched voice. As a thinker and writer, though, he was strident, both intellectual and street-smart—Davis was a truck driver and Marxist activist way before he was awarded the so-called MacArthur “genius” grant. Of course, Los Angeles has plenty of other great chroniclers—Carey McWilliams, Lynell George, Octavia Butler through her fiction—but it’s Davis I turn to when I’m confused, especially when things are aflame.

The book he’s best known for is City of Quartz, a dense, controversial opus from 1990. In it Davis showed LA to be both utopian and dystopic, a sunshine-soaked fortress of capitalism-sodden concrete, from vile prisons to the private, gated real estate that fuels so many Netflix shows. Quartz is both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable, which is why I sooner recommend his follow-up, 1998’s Ecology of Fear, which is easier to dip into. That doesn’t mean it’s any less provocative, though, especially the chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

Davis’s argument in “The Case” is forcible, and kinda obvious: It chronicles the region’s fire history to show Southern California as a place that ignites regularly. Making the point that to live here, alongside the Santa Monica Mountains, in the flightpath of Santa Ana winds, is either to accept fire as part of the ecology, as natural as the Pacific’s waves, or to live in denial. Because the fires don’t care, but that doesn’t seem to stop celebrities from building mansions in fire-prone zones, or the city, county and state to continue blowing taxpayer money to protect and rebuild them. As a result of the cyclical, ever-expanding builds and rebuilds, Davis wrote, “our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.”

On a personal level, it’s an extremely tough argument for me to endorse, especially this week. My mother’s cousin, my first cousin once removed, just lost her adorable, petite hillside home, where she raised her children and survived multiple fires. I enjoyed many beautiful Easter and Thanksgiving meals on her deck while Malibu’s storied sunsets turned everything to rose. Last I heard, she’s staying with friends, she’s okay, but what is okay in this scenario? No one is sleeping well. Everyone is extremely stressed. Last week’s incessant faulty evacuation notices didn’t help. One day I spent the morning volunteering at a food bank, the afternoon clearing brush from a friend’s hillside, knowing the work is only just beginning—because with battleships of smoke on all horizons, it’s hard to guess when this will end. I cry daily for people I know and people I’ve never met; my Instagram stories are one Gofundme after another. So when I indulge my rage toward politicians controlled by lobbyists, toward climate crisis deniers, toward real estate developers who build unaffordable housing in unwise spots, I think Davis was broadly right in his polemic—as Angelenos, we live in Mike Davis’s world—even if he was slightly trolling. “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” he once told me. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”

I bet his opinion would be as firm as ever.

There’s a lot of Luigi Mangione in the air right now, and I didn’t sense that during Woolsey. We’re feeling the magnitude of shared suffering—you can live in Hollywood or Pasadena and still experience the destruction of the Palisades like a bat to the gut—but that doesn’t mean we’re blind to the starkly unjust dynamics inside the emergency. Los Angeles is charred, hurting, and angry. Altadena, one of my favorite towns, full of middle class homes that rarely experienced fire, is in ruins. Still, there is a compassionate underbelly to be found in all the mutual aid compensating for our government’s gaps and failures—people shuttling supplies, sorting donations, helping the least protected; I spoke to a bartender Saturday night who makes ends meet cleaning houses, and she’s taking on additional jobs just to give away the extra cash. Yasi Salek, host of the great podcast Bandsplain, lost her Altadena house, with all the material things that make up a life—T-shirts, ticket stubs, books she loved. “I felt so protected and cocooned by these things, grounded in my own history. It’s all gone now and that’s okay,” she wrote on Instagram.

Again, what does it mean to be okay, today and tomorrow, knowing fires are still burning and will return again soon? That the climate crisis will continue to make them worse? In my ideal scenario, each round will make more folks open up to and care more for their neighbors. Because what I value most about Los Angeles is its people—all these open-hearted, striving, oddball, courageous people. I remember Davis saying something similar on the phone one time, and I wrote it down: “Whenever you bring large numbers of people from diverse cultures and they have to live with each other, you can’t have a better incubator or crucible for creating new culture. It’s really in my mind the glory of LA.”