malibu via AP

Letter From Malibu: Do We Stay or Do We Go?

Beyond the devastation of the thousands of homes in the singular coastal city of Malibu is the palpable fear among residents that the Palisades Fire has also laid waste to the community’s genii locorum, or “local genius”—its evanescent quality of soul. Disdaining the cliché of being a Beverly-Hills-by-the sea hideaway for celebrities and the one-percenters, local denizens and neighbors had in the past contended pridefully, if not vainly, that Malibu was a distinctive livable community of “real” people with everyday concerns.

To be sure, there is also a special concern for Malibu’s fragile land and marine environment of “unaltered natural resources and rural characteristics,” a description from the preface of the city’s Municipal Code, which calls upon its citizens to protect and preserve these features. 

To longstanding residents such as myself, Malibu was considered an environmentally conscious small town—for many, much like the towns of the Midwest and New England, where their parents and grandparents might have lived before migrating to a benign and balmy southern California. 

Many houses were passed from generation to generation, allowing families of limited means to remain and lending its neighborhoods a rare (for California) economic diversity and local workforce.

 

And once people settled—especially if buying a house when they were still bargains—Malibu, with its inviting beaches and exurban congeniality, was a community few left. Many houses were passed from generation to generation, allowing families of limited means to remain and lending its neighborhoods a rare (for California) economic diversity and local workforce.

The harsh reality now is that the still smoldering Palisades Fire and the comparably disastrous Woolsey Fire of a few years ago have compromised that conceit—that the city has in fact been hollowed out and appears destined to become a tourist town of trophy McMansions, weekend houses, scorned AirBnBs, and scattered luxury boutique hotels. 

Burned-out residents trading candor for anonymity did not want to be identified as considering moving, less it compromise anticipated FEMA and insurance funding or rebuild permit waivers, and at their request they are not identified in this essay. But most who were interviewed sadly admitted that they probably, and very reluctantly, will sell their valued and beloved piece of Malibu, faced as they are with the daunting prospects of plan approval and protracted construction in a redevelopment maelstrom where, they add, there are still pending rebuilds from the Woolsey Fire of six years ago. “Whatever crocodile tears they may shed for us ‘victims,’” said one resident, “if the past is any prelude to the future, this calamity is going to be a honey pot for the building trades and a bloated bureaucracy. Construction prices are going to be crazy.” 

The fires and the loss of permanent population can be expected to accelerate the already continued departure of resident-serving, locally owned small stores and down-home eateries. This was pronounced during the pandemic and will now surely increase as the smoke from the Paradise Fire dissipates, to be replaced by top-of-line chain stores and obscenely priced restaurants already cluttering the city’s fractured “downtown,” their traffic crowding the local roads.

However financially viable, there seems to be a commercial imperative among market chains for the debatable prestige of a Malibu address and playing to the pretensions of the tourist trade. Locals long ago shied away from the area to shop elsewhere inland.

Paramount to these changes have been the ravaging of the fires in the more modest, crowded, and fire-prone Malibu neighborhoods, with their larger households; the sort of residents that sent their children to public schools, coached Little League, hosted Halloween hauntings, were community volunteers, and shopped locally out of loyalty to familiar merchants.

Also affected and diminished were venerable, longtime residents, many of whom had lobbied valiantly in Malibu’s protracted struggle to become a city, which it did in 1991. 

The Woolsey Fire of 2018 destroyed 1,600 structures and damaged 400 more in and adjoining Malibu, reducing the city’s population from 13,000 to an estimated 9,000. Though still not contained, the Paradise Fire figures for Malibu, separate from the other affected communities, are expected to be similar, if not higher, reducing the number of residents to a projected 6,000, less than half the size of just a few years ago. 

If the aftermath of the Woolsey Fire is any indication, it is these households that, sadly, will not have the deep pockets, the patience, or the professional support to contend with the miserly insurance companies, City Hall apparatchiks, and covetous consultants.

The universal declarations of concern and caring for the fire victims echoing at the press notwithstanding, long-term residents (including me) who have witnessed these events over time have to be leery of the special interests that feed off the fallout of the natural disasters that periodically wrack Malibu. Notably, these are the rapacious real estate and development consortiums, but in a continuing national housing crisis no longer limited to locals as in the past, they’re now pervasive, regionally and beyond. 

The devastation in Malibu as a fraction of the incendiary wildfires elsewhere in Southern California no doubt will test local governments, considered by some the soft underbelly of democracy, lacking the needed funds and personnel to pursue a rebuild. 

Sitting as I do in a fire zone, in a wind-damaged and ash-coated home once again spared by fickle winds off the ocean that turned the flaming embers elsewhere, I worry about the future fires that will surely come to a sure-to-be changed Malibu. 

Featured image via AP.

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