Helen Liddell is angry. There are strangers on her property.

The 69-year-old slows her white Toyota sedan down just enough to turn into the curved driveway of the vacant lot. She hits the brakes, rolls down her window, and hurls a question to the three women standing there.

“Why are you taking pictures of my property?”

Typically, Liddell is upbeat and welcoming. Today, her tone is pointed and accusatory.

Her mood only shifts when she understands that the picture-taking strangers are there because they want to know her story.

That story changed seven months ago. Before that, Liddell’s home was a lively space beneath the San Gabriel mountains in Altadena. A Black woman who moved to the city decades ago, Liddell maintained a backyard that was luscious and green. It was alive with herbs and vegetables that she used to make elaborate Southern meals for visitors.

Art that her sister brought back from trips to Africa lined the walls of Liddell’s house. Anyone who needed a place to stay, from friends in town for a weekend to incarcerated individuals getting back on their feet, knew they could stay in her extra bedrooms.

Today, all that’s left of the home where Liddell and her grandson lived is a driveway. Her once lush backyard has a single survivor, a plant that she brought with her from Mississippi, where she grew up. Her rotating cast of houseguests has been replaced with signs that read “KEEP OUT."

Liddell’s story is not unique. In fact, she’s one of 6,116. On January 7, wildfires began to burn through vast swaths of Los Angeles from the affluent Pacific Palisades to the famous Hollywood Hills to Altadena, an unincorporated city known for its historic Black community.

For 24 days, flames ripped through homes, businesses and countryside, destroying more than 15,000 structures. The west side of Altadena, where most of the Black population lived, including Liddell, bore the brunt. With the scorched homes and business, decades of history went up in flames.

Six months after the fires, Altadenans are in the midst of an achingly slow fight to rebuild. The community is grappling with financial hardship, stalled rebuilding efforts and predatory developers hoping to snap up land on the cheap.

For a city with so much history, the path from recovery is windy—and nowhere near complete.

ALTADENA IS NOT FOR SALE

As Liddell drives around Altadena, she passes by a series of signs. They are taped to business windows, planted on vacant lots, strung up on houses, the same phrases everywhere: “ALTADENA STRONG,” MAKE ALTADENA GREAT AGAIN” and “ALTADENA IS NOT FOR SALE.”

For every such sign, there are contradicting ones nearby.

Real estate agents like Robert Farrell with Coldwell Banker Realty have marked their territory on vacant lots across the city. On Zillow, hundreds of properties are up for sale in Altadena.

In June, the LA Times reported that approximately 250 lots have been sold in Altadena. Developers like Black Lion Properties and Ocean Development are responsible for nearly half of these sales. The rate of property sales in Altadena is outpacing the Palisades, where, at the time of the LA Times report, only 60 lots have been sold.

With numbers like these, there’s plenty of evidence Altadena is for sale after all.

Local residents and groups fight that perception. Since the fires first ravaged the town, non-profit organizations new and old came together to help the community. The Greenline Housing Foundation is one such organization.

Founded by Black Pasadena resident Jasmin Shupper in 2020, Greenline Housing supports people of color facing systemic barriers in the real estate market. The foundation has focused on connecting Altadena homeowners with affordable housing around LA. That is crucial work as predatory landlords and sellers hiked up prices after the disaster.

Click to read an Altadena mom’s fight for history

Shupper says it’s been important to support Altadena’s Black population, and to focus on “the impact that we have the potential to make for a demographic that is so often disproportionately impacted by natural disasters, but also left out of recovery efforts.”

Other groups have tried to make rebuilding easier. Architects Alex Athenson and Cynthia Sigler founded the Foothill Catalog Foundation to help streamline the process. With The Foothill Catalog, homeowners can choose a building design that is pre-approved by the county with design costs fully covered by the foundation.

“[We knew] that there were going to be so many roadblocks and hurdles for so many people,” Sigler says. “Especially the Black community in Altadena that has really just has this wonderful legacy that's built up over time and multi-generational homeowners.”

A House Filled With Smoke

Liddell is one of those multi-generational homeowners. She was born and raised in Jim Crow-era rural Mississippi before moving to Altadena in 1973.

Like many other Black Southerners who left the region during The Great Migration, Liddell headed west in search of a better life. Relatives had already found solace in Altadena. They shared stories about the area’s rich Black community and beautiful scenery.

When Liddell followed, she was happy to see that her family was telling the truth.

“When I first came here, Altadena was a predominantly minority area, lots of Blacks. And it's at the top of a hill and it's very quiet,” Liddell says.

She bought her house in 1990 and lived there until the fires hit. For 34 years, she curated her home, built a family and found community with her neighbors.

She planned to pass the house down to her grandson someday.

When the fire reached her neighborhood, Liddell was asleep. She was aware a wildfire was burning on the edge of town, but this was a regular occurrence in LA and she assumed that the fire department would take care of it.

Around 3 a.m., Liddell’s neighbor and a deputy sheriff pounded on her door, waking her and her grandson.

“I can hear a lot of commotion going on. And when I woke up, the house was black, dark, and filled with smoke,” Liddell says. “And I can hear my neighbors saying, ‘They're in there. They're in there.’ And he was telling the deputy sheriff that he wasn't leaving until we got out.”

With no time to prepare and no evacuation order, Liddell and her grandson fled their home. They had the clothes on their back and the car they drove off in.

Even with guidance from the sheriff, the path out of town was harrowing.

“Everybody started going up west and turning on Lincoln. We only had one direction going up, and we just just followed the street,” Liddell says. “And you had fires burning on both sides. Oh, God. Charcoal briquettes flying at you. It's amazing that the car didn’t blow up and we didn't get burned, with the briquettes.”

Liddell could not return to Altadena for a week. The only evidence she had of what became of her home came from photos neighbors sent her. Other than the metal patio furniture, a cement rabbit from the backyard, and the plant from Mississippi, the fire spared nothing.

Today, Liddell stays in an unfamiliar Pasadena apartment. She wears unfamiliar clothes donated by strangers, and lives among unfamiliar people who do not resemble the community she was forced to leave behind.

She drives around Altadena daily to check on her property. She loops around up to four times a day. Sometimes, she uses her voice to scare off insurance fraudsters, greedy real estate agents, and other bad actors. She sees it as a better use of her time than hanging around in Pasadena.

In her new surroundings, she says, she is reminded of the racism she fled in Mississippi.

She’s not alone in feeling displaced. Altadena native William Syms also lost his multi-generational home in the fire. He was born in Altadena and planned to pass his house down to his children. Syms relocated his family to Glendale.

“I plan on building”

When Liddell returns to her property after a drive around Altadena, Sebastian Marroquin is there waiting for her. The two share introductions then begin talking numbers.

“Are you gonna stay like-for-like exactly, with the same square footage? Or are you gonna add?” Marroquin asks.

“To start, [we require] usually as a deposit by law, we do a thousand dollars.”

“And then you do about five to 10% for the beginning stage.”

Marroquin is a Pasadena-based real estate agent and construction advisor familiar with Altadena. Since the fires, he has been working with homeowners around the city on rebuilding, connecting them with designers, builders, and city inspectors. In his off-time, he hosts free workshops on the rebuilding process, teaching the community about designing, permitting, and budgeting.

“I'm grateful that I'm in this position where I can bring a little bit of my knowledge to people so that they can start their process and start a new life,” Marroquin says.

As Marroquin and Liddell wrap up their conversation, shake hands, and go their separate ways, there are still questions in the air. Liddell still isn’t sure exactly how she’s going to afford rebuilding, what the timeline looks like, or who to hire.

One thing Liddell does know is that she isn’t going anywhere. Her piece of Altadena is not for sale.

“I plan on [doing] whatever is easiest to rebuild,” Liddell says. “I plan on building the house the same.”