Sometimes it seems like homo sapiens are hardwired to disregard impending doom.
Even having bought a home we only semi-jokingly call Glugglug House because it is on the River Thames—and even though we know there is a flooding risk—my partner and I have spent enormous amounts over the past two years making it our forever home.
Yet, I was shocked to hear that not one but two climate scientists are known to have lost their own homes in the Los Angeles fires. “Why on earth were they living there?” I wondered, without realizing how very ironic my reaction was.
The L.A. fires, which have been replaced following rain by mudslides, scorched and flattened a populated area more than 12 times the size of that destroyed by the Hiroshima atom bomb in 1945. For context, the area devastated is now roughly the size of Paris or Washington, D.C.
Surprisingly, forest fires are not even the deadliest real and present danger in southern California. Earthquakes and tsunamis are constant threats. And, though it’s less of an imminent danger, there’s the Yellowstone caldera to consider, an underground supervolcano spanning Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana that could take out most of California—in fact, the resulting volcanic winter could take out much of life on earth.
So, all things considered, looking at a 50- or 100-year time horizon, is L.A. even viable as a human habitation? I think the city and its intelligent and creative people will have the foresight to build back better—its largely wooden-built houses are barely more robust than film sets. But one has to wonder if that mainspring of capitalism, the boring-but-important home insurance industry, will eventually render Los Angeles the world’s first ghost megapolis.
Across large parts of the fire-ravaged city’s west side, residents are already paying as much for insurance as they do for a hefty percentage of their mortgage—a $40-50,000 annual premium is not unusual. And that was before January’s fires. It is possible that in the future, insurance companies won’t cover L.A., or large swaths of it, at all.
It’s presumed that people displaced by the fires will move to safer parts of the city, so those areas may boom initially. But the loss of many of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods could start a longer process of overall decline.
One has to wonder if that mainspring of capitalism, the boring-but-important home insurance industry, will eventually render Los Angeles the world’s first ghost megapolis.
Then there’s the question of infrastructure. There are parts of L.A. where even a modest, boho house looks like a dream home—but it has nevertheless struck me that the ubiquitous overhead power lines appear a bit … well, primitive. Can that be safe? It turns out not. That lashed-up look may have been responsible for many of the fires starting. L.A. needs to bury its power lines, but that alone is a massively expensive undertaking.
As fewer people can afford to live in L.A.—or are unwilling to buy there because they can’t get home insurance—there are also important questions to ask about what effect a gradual hollowing out, and even abandonment, of Los Angeles could have on the American economy.
California’s economy currently accounts for 15% of the United States’s entire GDP. If the state’s homeowners and businesses lost trillions in equity, the ripple effects—from property values to consumer spending to logistics to stock prices—could drag the rest of the country down. And as we know from the Great Depression of 1929 and the 2008 financial crisis, when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
Could Los Angeles even become the Pompeii of the future, a vast metropolis destroyed by a combination of nature and humanity’s odd safety-averse nature? Now that the U.S. is ruled by a latter-day Emperor Nero, who loathes California’s progressive culture and climate friendly policies, is that even more likely?
A New Pompeii?
The Pompeii comparison is not one that naturally occurs to the people of Los Angeles, even though 50 years ago, in the heart of the Pacific Palisades fire zone, the billionaire oil man J. Paul Getty built The Getty Villa, a reproduction Roman villa modeled on one buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
Now one of the campuses of L.A.’s J. Paul Getty Museum, the Villa has survived this year’s Palisades fire. (The larger campus, the Getty Center, is one of few structures in L.A. that’s designed to be fire-safe.) Curiously, though, in 2013, when the Villa hosted an exhibition called The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection, not one review suggested any parallels between L.A. and Pompeii.
The Pompeii comparison is one that was first posed a full six years ago, when the French thinker and futurologist Jacques Attali posed the question: “Is California a new Pompeii?”
Attali, who served as a special adviser to French president Francois Mitterrand for 10 years, argued that California was on course to become so unbearable that technology and media businesses, together with some of the world’s most prestigious universities, would have to move upstate or even out of the state entirely.
“It will lead to immense and lasting chaos, which will contribute to the decline of the American superpower,” wrote Attali. “[This] is eerily similar to what happened 20 centuries ago in Pompeii: in 62 C.E., the warning signs of the impending disaster appeared in the form of earthquakes; from 70 onwards, the rich left the city, which declined before being destroyed in 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It was never rebuilt. One of the first signs of the slow decline of the Roman empire.”
In the context of the latest fires, I wondered what Attali thinks today. Having just published a book in France on the history and future of cities, Attali speaks to me from his loft home in Paris.
“Although Pompeii was of course smaller, and was more a resort for Romans than a major city, it’s exactly the same in the sense of being a place where people have the best of culture, of architecture; of quality of life, food, academic life and also sexual life, and eroticism and sensuality. And Pompeii could be seen as a metaphor for a potential failure of a very large empire,” he says.
“Rome didn’t realize its fragility. The U.S. is very strong, particularly with its new president, but it’s also very fragile, ecologically and politically. So it’s a very interesting comparison, even though, as we say in French, comparison is not reason.”
Los Angeles, Attali believes, is now at the beginning of a very large crisis, because people cannot live there any more. “So either they move elsewhere because they are forced to, or they rebuild on the spot without insurance,” he says. “In the meantime, rent is skyrocketing. The rich will survive and be richer than ever; the super rich will be super-richer. And of course, the poor will lose.”
But why do so many choose to ignore the danger, which now seems so clear?
On that point, I turned next to the Canadian writer John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (2023), who lives in Vancouver, BC but was staying south of Los Angeles looking after his elderly father when the fires broke out.
His book, an account of the 2016 inferno that engulfed the oil town of Fort McMurray in sub-Arctic northern Alberta, recounts how the fire was so hot that it even burned concrete. He works through the psychology we deploy when it comes to where we live.
“All of us are living in a certain amount of fantasy, and despite the fact that California is a famously flammable state, the residents of Los Angeles County, who live on steep, flammable hillsides, imagined that they might somehow magically be impervious to this,” he says.
“The water system and the hydrant system are excellent, but when you’re driving that much water uphill with pumps, that’s when you start to lose pressure. This happened in Fort McMurray, too—another wealthy city with good infrastructure.”
Vaillant believes that the insurance issue, alongside the infrastructure question, could be one of the greatest obstacles to the resurgence of LA.
“The withdrawal 18 months ago of coverage from swathes of California by State Farm, a major, august insurance company, was really sobering news,” he says.
“California has the eighth-biggest economy in the world, and this insurer is saying we can’t invest in it. This is a withdrawal, a retreat, and the effects will be felt throughout the entire country because real estate is such a pillar of the economy … we’re entering a new state of precariousness that is financial, physical, biological and botanical.”
But even for those who had insurance, Vaillant points out a quirk in U.S. home coverage that could stymie progress. Most policies, he explains, require claimants to rebuild in the same way and on the same spot—exactly what would make the area unviable.
With vast swathes of the county now lying in ruins—some 75% of properties in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Malibu have been destroyed—the land itself will retain immense real-estate value. If the ultra-rich do start building sumptuous and fire-resistant homes, protecting them with private fire brigades, we may see these areas become even more exclusive than they were before.
“California has the eighth-biggest economy in the world, and this insurer is saying we can’t invest in it. This is a withdrawal, a retreat, and the effects will be felt throughout the entire country.”
This process, known as climate gentrification, is already being discussed by sustainability experts. It’s happened in Flagstaff, Arizona, 7,000 feet above the heat of the lower-lying parts of the state, where housing and rental prices have risen to the point where there is no affordable housing at all. The same effect can be seen on the repeatedly hurricane-threatened east coast of Florida, which has seen an exodus of its wealthiest residents. They have begun to retreat inland and to towns on the gentler west coast—where there’s now a property boom.
Juliette Hohnen is British-born and a very successful real estate agent and broker, dealing with multimillion-dollar homes for celebrities and other mostly wealthy clients. She lives with her actor husband just outside the fire zone in Bel Air, but when we first spoke they were already driving south with their most precious possessions as the fire threatened to reach their area.
A few days later, when the couple returned home, she was back at work and facing the fact that out of $125 million worth of properties she had been dealing with a few weeks previously, $40 million worth had either already burnt down or were at risk.
Among the professional classes, real estate agents are not the most likely, perhaps, to find themselves acting as first responders in a crisis. But Hohnen is proud of having banded together with her rivals in the business to help rehouse what are possibly the wealthiest refugees since Vesuvius erupted 2,000 years ago. “I’m a public servant at this point,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last week. “I have to help whoever I can.”
Speaking to me afterwards, Hohnen is anxious to point out, first, that not everyone in the affected areas is wealthy. “Some of these people in the Palisades have been living there for 70 years, and I don’t think they will be rebuilding,” she says. If you can’t afford to rebuild, she explains, the land values are expected to go down. But owners of “burnouts” will still have land worth one or two million dollars.
“So the people who are going to be buying properties are mostly going to be investors, or developers, who don’t mind waiting however long it’s going to take to rebuild. They’re also the people with cash, so they will be low-balling, although the governor has made it illegal to submit a lowball unsolicited offer, which is good.”
Among the myriad problems facing L.A. is Trump’s plan to expel many of the Mexican construction workers who would be able to help rebuild. Research shows that 40% of construction workers in California are immigrants, but in residential homebuilding, that proportion is much higher. In south California, almost 30% of these migrants are illegal and thereby vulnerable to Trump’s mass deportation policy.
“I’m not being political here,” Hohnen says, “but I think if he deports the workforce, there’ll be a major uproar.”
She continues: “You know, the reality is, we know California and Hollywood is a false paradise. We know that it’s a desert. We’ve had to bring water into it, but the original native people of this country were able to live here because they did control burns, and then we built up in all of those areas.
“But what you have to understand about Americans—and Californians, in particular—[is that] the people are mostly immigrants. We’re here to make our mark. We work hard, we make money. Our own house’s value has doubled in 20 years, now it’s gone down to half of what it was. We’re life gamblers. I came here with nothing. Now I have stuff, and it’s not that I want to lose it, but if I did, I’d still be fine.”
It’s true that while the sprawl and the freeways are not things of beauty, the city is still a paradise found. It has overcome environmental problems in the past. In the 60s and 70s, it was synonymous with killer smog. The air still isn’t great everywhere, but the smog has reduced drastically.
Will the fires prove to be a more gradual but nonetheless Pompeii-like blow—and will this extraordinary conurbation start to deflate, as climate refugees, rich and poor, trek east in a sort of reverse Grapes of Wrath, to higher and safer places?
Or will it be a disaster movie in reverse, where the talent, resourcefulness and financial strength of a beleaguered population does recovery its own way and rises again?
It may be a story for our time.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology