Scale the business— and there is no bigger business than home ownership. That is not true of course but there is a kernel of reality attached to the single best way for an ordinary homeowner to build wealth.
Obstacles in the way include rising insurance premiums, higher mortgage rates, shortage of properties which feeds into higher prices, and this climate changing world where natural disasters strike with increasing frequency and ferocity.
The home buyer stretching their wherewithal to get into the game has been bumping up against rising prices and too many our finding that they are being shut out of the market.
Many trying to form households for the first time remain locked out. It is crazy frustrating. While potential buyers are being slapped around by the rental market the existing homeowners are building equity, enjoying a two year rise in stock market indexes. The result is we have this bifurcated tale of two fates in the economy.
We are beginning, and only at the the very tip of the spear of the climate emergency. Powerful climate fueled weather events are striking across the world. In California it has been wildfire, torrential rains, and elevated wind events while on the East Coast Florida is getting walloped by more frequent and more powerful hurricanes.
Layered into the contradictory forces is the emotional health of our people. Personal wealth does not give you a get out of the climate emergency crisis. You buy a home you own it and the fateful forces in your neighborhood, the uncertainty is weighing on people. What I mean by weight is stress. Stress is a nasty force, damaging both our mental and physical well being.
Out there are prices, rates, and responsibilities while in here are sleepless nights, worries, appetite loss, and increased alcohol use. All this stress is driving us collectively to the wall of worry where we find ourselves struggling to cope.
Here in LA we don’t need to have personally lost our home, seeing nearby neighborhoods disappeared by fire, hearing from people that have been hit by the wildfires, seeing the smoke, having our phones go off with alerts from CalFire, fielding calls, texts and emails from far off friends checking to make sure you are still safe, all these factors add to our foreboding, the sense the world we are folded into is spinning out of control. It is human to worry for our safety, for our future, for a sense that there is a plan in place to extract ourselves from such a fiasco rather than plunged inescapably into events from which there is no exit.
Layered atop this mountain of stress is a belligerent Republican leadership that has lost its soul. Instead of help, they send denigration, instead of compassion they threaten to withhold emergency aid. It is vulgar, it is unseemly, and it is a breach in the duty of the people’s government that we all pay our taxes to.
None of what the Republicans are speaking to is remotely sensible. In a time of crisis, we pull together, we help our neighbors, we have a duty to stop fires, to clothe, feed and house the victims of this horrific natural disaster. Thank you Taylor and Travis, they get it.
Ten days from now the new administration takes the wheel of power and most in California can only imagine what madness lies ahead. Personal stress levels are only going to grow worse. Governing in a crisis requires the display of empathy, to have compassion for the suffering of others, to set aside partisan inclinations and lend a helping hand to any and all Americans.
It has been especially heartening to see Mexico and Canada sending help to Los Angeles. It has been uplifting to see footage of the Governor on the job, out on the frontlines assessing the situation, gathering information, and directing aid in this very chaotic event.
Because of the size of the event an ordinary citizen is hard pressed to put in place a mental model of the physical scale of the disaster. Even though we see a single burned to the ground home and then find there are another 1000 more exactly like it, we do not have any real power of the imagination to hold such a complex event in some coherent understandable graspable way. At some point our inner circuit breakers pop, we throw up our hands, and we spiral into a sense of futility, there is this sense that we might as well just give up. That is not a good place for anyone to get stuck in.
I have spent the last 72 hours with a couple that own a home in a zone that has been evacuated. In the first two days they thought they would be fine, the electric power to their neighborhood restored, the order to evacuate would end, and they could return home. Waking up checking wind directions and worrying about the fire turning and coming toward their community took its toll, eventually it was simply more than they could bare, they were no longer feeling like this would all blow over and they could return and carry on with life business as usual.
La Canada is the next town to the west of Altadena. One of their lifelong Altadena friends with a home there they learned by text message had lost everything, a beautiful home and all his many exotic cars he had collected. And that begins to fester in a mind, their friend’s loss is horrific, where will he go, what will he do turns into a question of what would happen if the same fate befell their life.
The Los Angeles Fires of 2025 has yet to put into a context how we are ever going to put into context the scale of the destruction we are going through. Is this the costliest natural disaster in US history? How many cars and homes lost? How many people injured or killed?
What it will be like to live near an entire a community burned to the ground is a question without an answer, a firsthand experience none of us wishes on another. Where will all our wildfire refugees go, when will the rebuilding begin, how long will this all take, will life ever return to some semblance of normal?
More common are the smaller losses, an accident totals your car, a child breaks their arm falling from a tree, your boyfriend dumps you for someone else. We do not wake up to find ourselves in an entire region under threat of wildfire, we do not wake up wondering where we will go, what will we do, when will this all be over.
Our placeholder is compassion, our best we can do for the moment is empathy, donate time, send money to the World Kitchen, Red Cross, or Food Banks. Taking action helps. The gorilla in the room is the worsening effects of climate change and the race against time to reverse it. Knowing that there is no way any individual can do anything, that the solution is our acting collectively, then the inability of any of the great human forces to prevail— economic, political, religious, and social forces are all frustrated and derailed by our inability to form a consensus to respond.
When our troubles rise to this level we cannot help but wonder if this is the inevitable slow but fateful decline of the entire enterprise, whether humans are worthy of what we have been born into, whether we will persist in our thinking we are separate not fully folded into the fabric of this earthly existence.
My glass is half full. I see us halting this human caused disaster. It will not be easy. We have much to do, many to persuade— we need the time we need the money and courage to do this important work. I happen to believe in those close to my life, the good friends, colleagues and family members. I believe in all of you. Let’s prepare to do this necessary work.
