My City in Ashes
A personal reckoning with the fires and failures of Los Angeles
To hear Michelle read her essay, listen below:
Los Angeles is burning. Again. The charred landscape smokes, memories evaporating into the hazy magenta horizon. On Wednesday, January 8, I drove to work at dawn. The Santa Ana winds ripped through the city, carrying the scent of destruction, while darkened clouds swirled above like thieves bulging with stolen fragments of our lives. It felt like the apocalypse had arrived—fast, furious, and all too familiar.
That evening, my partner and I had planned to host a dinner for friends, but the fires became our uninvited guests. Mindi and Nina, former Angelenos who fled to Mexico in fear of Trump’s presidency, were staying in a rental near Sunset Boulevard—dangerously close to the spreading flames. We told them to pack their bags and stay with us. Another friend, newly evacuated, joined too. Together, we huddled around the TV, watching firefighters battle the inferno while city leaders, including Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom, provided updates. The news was grim: fires multiplying across the city like unchecked weeds. By nightfall, the flames felt omnipresent, but none of us were truly shocked. In LA, fire is both a literal and metaphorical inevitability—a manifestation of neglect, mismanagement, and misguided priorities.
Los Angeles has a history of devastating fires: the Woolsey Fire of 2018 claimed lives, homes, and over 96,000 acres. Yet, despite the precedents, little has been done to mitigate the risk. In 2023 alone, there were nearly 14,000 fires linked to homeless encampments—a grim testament to the city’s growing crises. Power lines are tapped, streetlamps gutted for electricity, and dry vegetation turns any spark into a catastrophe. The ashes of these policies now blanket our city and invade our bodies.
Upon arriving in Los Angeles in the winter of 2012, it was everything I had imagined. The snow-capped mountains painted a stunning profile in the distant east, the glistening ocean stretched to the west, and the air fragrant with orange blossoms. Everything fell into place quickly: I met my life partner, produced a feature film, and secured a full-time job as an entertainment reporter. In 2017, we bought a house in Mid-City, and our block became a close-knit community. We formed friendships with several neighbors, looking out for one another, inviting each other to holiday parties, and keeping an eye on each other’s homes during vacations. However, when COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests swept through the city, everything changed.
The protests impacted our neighborhood and nearby businesses severely. Many storefronts boarded up their windows, most with spray-painted signs declaring “Black-owned business,” which could have been accurate or not, as many of our neighbors were Mexican or Asian. Gradually, those neighbors began to move away, replaced by newcomers who often didn’t occupy the homes. Over the past few years, I've witnessed a tripling of homelessness on our streets. Now, when I walk my dog, I navigate around bodies sleeping on the sidewalk. They seem to appear overnight, linger for weeks, and then disappear, leaving behind clothes, blankets, dishes, and sometimes furniture and scraps of food that are never cleaned up. RVs from the 1980s and '90s have parked on every corner of our five-block radius, surrounding us like ghosts. Some have dogs leashed to the exterior, barking incessantly at the sounds of traffic. A few RVs even tap into electrical poles for power. This summer, I noticed not one but two extension cords stretching across Orange Avenue at Venice Boulevard, haphazardly connected to a street lamp, with its panel lying next to exposed wires.
The fires are a symptom of a larger decay. LA’s progressive policies, while well-intentioned, have often failed in execution. Sanctuary city status, defunded police departments, and relaxed enforcement on property crimes have contributed to a sense of lawlessness. Felonies downgraded to misdemeanors mean crimes like catalytic converter theft go largely unpunished. I am grateful that our new District Attorney Nathan Hochman lifted a ban on prosecutors filing charges for low-level misdemeanors.
Meanwhile, residents like me wake up to find discarded belongings, syringes, or worse on our sidewalks. One day while walking my dog my neighbor screamed at me from across the street, “Go home right now! There’s a homeless man with a machete running through the streets!” I picked up Dax and ran back home, telling another neighbor I passed the same news. I called the city’s emergency help number, but no one came. They rarely do at these events, which seem to happen with increasing frequency.
Leadership is failing us. In November 2022, Karen Bass was elected as our mayor. I did not vote for her, despite my friends urging me to support a black woman. To me, Rick Caruso, a builder and developer who promised to tackle homelessness directly, was the right choice. In fact, Bass hardly spoke about homelessness during the early part of her campaign; it wasn’t until Caruso gained significant traction that she pivoted in the last couple of weeks. After her victory, she made addressing homelessness her top priority. Bass was conspicuously absent during the first critical hours of this firestorm—returning only after attending an inauguration in Ghana. When pressed by a reporter upon her arrival, she refused to answer questions. Her silence spoke volumes.
The mayor of the second largest city in our country refused to answer questions from a reporter, following what would be among the most destructive fires in the city’s history. Heading into the 4th week of the fires, the Palisades Fire has reached 75% containment, and it has burned more than 23,400 acres, and there is now the Hughes fire, which has burned more than 10,000 acres.. Almost 5,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. The Eaton Fire has burned over 14,000 acres and is 95% contained. It has also devastated over 7,000 structures, with 28 reported deaths overall. The dry Santa Ana winds have dissipated, and the weather forecast calls for rain which bodes well for our firefighters, but so many questions about how our leaders could’ve mitigated and lessened this catastrophic event remain.
From 2020 to 2024, the gradual pace of these policy ideas continued to grow, and I could feel it seeping into my very being, threatening to erode my humanity. Every day on my drive to work, I noticed an increase in the number of tents beneath the freeways. One week, the city would come to clear them away, only for the tents to reappear days later. Soon, they were everywhere—behind fences along the freeway and tucked into the dried bougainvillea bushes at the ends of freeway ramps. Last month, while driving home along Pico Avenue and approaching La Brea Avenue, I spotted a half-naked white woman, perhaps in her mid-60s or 70s, with a nest of grey hair cascading over her head and shoulders. Grime smothered her back, ravaged from street life. I felt a pang of shame watching her, yet I couldn’t look away. Part of the issue is that everyone is pretending this isn’t happening. Then, she stopped, dropped her pants, and defecated on the sidewalk—that’s when I finally turned away.
Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, if you didn’t already know, is the first woman and lesbian fire chief in the fire department's history. Her sex and sexuality are prominent in the first paragraph of her bio on the department’s home page. In the second paragraph in the first sentence, we learn that she leads a diverse department of over 3,000 firefighters. It isn’t until the third paragraph that we start to read about her skills and time as a firefighter. In a now viral video, LAFD Deputy Chief Kristine Larson—who heads the Equity and Human Resources Bureau—responded to concerns that she couldn’t carry a woman’s husband out of a fire by saying, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” Larson also said, “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency that looks like you.” Shouldn’t the priority be competence, not color? Somewhere along the way, DEI hiring practices have subsumed actual job duties and kneecapped our empathy for those who don’t share our skin color or sex—swallowed it up like a fire consuming all life in its path.
The city’s focus is misaligned. DEI initiatives dominate headlines and official biographies, while practical needs—like ensuring adequate fire safety and caring for our neighbors—take a back seat. These policies and practices come at the expense of competence and basic public safety.
I refuse to sacrifice my humanity on the altar of disastrous DEI practices. Despite the destruction, perhaps we can all learn from this. We now have an opportunity to reject identity politics outright—to stop making judgments and decisions based on skin color and embrace our common sense. Our common humanity.
Last week, I rescued a scared and lost silky terrier darting through the streets. Her owner, Chanel, was frantic when we finally reunited them. Tears streamed down her face as she clutched her dog, Dior, refusing to let go. At no point did Chanel ask for a black person to give her baby back. She didn’t care what color I was. She wanted her dog to make it home safely.
But such moments are not enough to save Los Angeles. We need leadership with vision and courage—leaders who prioritize infrastructure, safety, and the basic dignity of their constituents over political grandstanding. We need policies rooted in pragmatism, not performative gestures. We need public servants who serve the public—regardless of race, sexuality, or sex.
As I refill the birdbaths in my backyard, I see the ash settle like snow on our deck. It is more than the residue of fires; it is the residue of failed policies and a city teetering on the edge. Los Angeles can rise from the ashes, but only if we confront the flames consuming us—both literal and figurative—with honesty and resolve.
 | A guest post by
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On NPR yesterday, they were talking about Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs and how this would mean a return to colorblind, merit-based hiring, which would only lead to “diversity” if the most qualified candidates happened to tick those diversity boxes. And they made it sound like this was a bad thing. I wanted to yell at the radio, a la JD Vance, “are you even listening to yourselves?” If I’m stuck in a burning building, I want my rescuer to look more like The Rock or like Michael Jordan than like me.
The meeting in the fire station with the president last night struck me as nothing less than an intervention. Here is the ultimate Democrat party run state, and one of its historically most leftist policy inebriated major cities, lying face down in the vomited results of its orgiastic 60 year weekend bender. After decades of emphasis on racial and sexual identity at the expense of merit…after decades of self flagellating virtue signaling about ‘the environment’ that has resulted in enacting overreaching policies that elevate the habitats of field mice and small fish over the habitats of humans….after decades of accumulated demoralization resulting in de facto endorsements of rampant drug use,( connected quite directly to homelessness)….and after decades of taking for granted basic infrastructure and thereby neglecting the maintenance of it, just what were we to expect?