At first, Sylvie Andrews thought her home had survived the fire.
Like many of their neighbors in Altadena, California, she and her partner evacuated in the early hours of Jan. 8, as 60 mph winds propelled flames west from Eaton Canyon through the unincorporated foothill community just outside Los Angeles. By late the next morning, many of the homes in their neighborhood had burned to the ground — but a neighbor called to say their house was still standing.
Andrews and her partner raced back home, turning the corner to see the building still miraculously intact among the smoldering wreckage of their block. Then, just as they pulled up, something on the roof caught fire. They hooked up hoses and trained them on the house, but no water came out. “We managed to save a couple of things out of the house before it went down,” Andrews said.
Seven months later, she understands the feeling behind all the “For Sale” signs going up on burned-out lots around Altadena. The Eaton Fire destroyed 6,000 homes and killed at least 19 people. The prospect of returning is daunting: For her and many other residents, insurance won’t cover the cost of rebuilding, and the work itself would take years.
But for Andrews, who has lived in Altadena nearly all her life, the signs also indicate an ominous trend: Her community is being bought up by developers. Nearly 150 damaged lots had been sold by early June — at least half of them to corporate buyers. Even Altadenans who are committed to rebuilding are being inundated with unsolicited offers that are hard to turn down. The first lot sold after the fire went for $100,000 over the asking price, paid in cash.
As more properties enter the speculative market, Andrews worries that Altadena will lose more than its homes — that the fire will take her community, too. If locals are priced out, this will cease to be the multigenerational, multicultural haven she grew up in — a patchwork of bungalows and cottages with a Black homeownership rate double the national average, a place where a middle-class family like hers could still afford to buy a home.
Now, Andrews and a group of other displaced Altadenans and LA housing activists are working on a way to protect that legacy. Like fire survivors in Hawai’i and Washington, they’re starting a community land trust to keep the land in local hands.
A COMMUNITY LAND TRUST STARTS OUT a lot like a trust made for wildlife conservation: A nonprofit buys land to permanently remove it from the housing market. But rather than sealing it off from humans, the trust then leases the lots to community members who buy the houses on top of the land for affordable prices. The homeowners agree to sell those homes for similarly reasonable rates if they ever relocate, and the trust holds on to the land forever.
The model emerged in the early 1970s, created by an interracial group of civil rights activists in rural Georgia who wanted to keep Black farmers from being forced off their land. It’s skyrocketed in popularity over the last two decades as both rural and urban communities reckon with the growing housing affordability crisis. According to the International Center for Community Land Trusts, there are more than 300 trusts around the country, from Anchorage to Aspen. But in recent years, they’ve started cropping up in a new context: communities recovering from fires and floods.
“What if we were to use the shock of something big for positive change?”
That’s exciting to Kelly Pohl, who researches climate resilience, housing and land use at Headwaters Economics. In high-demand places like mountain towns and coastal areas, she said, disasters tend to accelerate gentrification. Low-income housing is more likely to be damaged and less likely to be rebuilt, a pattern that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities. Meanwhile, corporate buyers see investment opportunities in devastated properties they can buy up cheaply and develop.
“Institutional investors across the U.S. now own a huge share of single-family homes, and that’s driving up prices and rents across the country,” Pohl said. “That trend is just accelerated after a disaster.”
This kind of disaster profiteering is a particular threat in the West, where many communities that already face steep housing prices are also seeing an increased risk of wildfires and flooding. But housing experts say it’s not inevitable: While disasters fundamentally alter places and communities, the way we respond to them is up to us, said Simon Windell, with the Northwest Community Land Trust Coalition. “What if we were to use the shock of something big for positive change?” he said. For recovering communities, land trusts offer a way to combat displacement — and build climate resilience at the same time.
WHILE ANDREWS AND HER NEIGHBORS PONDER what a community land trust could do for Altadena, they’ve been looking to Lahaina, a town of 12,000 on the island of Maui. The historic capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom is no stranger to gentrification: Native Hawaiians have battled displacement there for more than a century, watching their homeland converted first to sugar plantations and then to vacation homes and high-priced resorts.
In the wake of the wildfires that killed more than a hundred people and destroyed thousands of homes on Maui in August 2023, Lahaina residents who’d managed to hang on were bombarded with calls from potential buyers. Local housing activist Autumn Ness saw two possible options: They could relinquish their homes to investors. Or, as Ness put it, “We can lock arms and draw a line and be like, ‘Beat it. You guys are not welcome here. We are organizing to buy our own town back.’”
Working quickly, Ness and Carolyn Auweloa, a Native Hawaiian conservationist, brought together a team of residents to form the Lahaina Community Land Trust. In two years, the nonprofit has been able to acquire 13 properties, with space for 34 housing units. Though its team cannot always match corporate offers, they’ve found that their vision resonates with homeowners looking to sell. In Lahaina, where private land ownership did not exist before the mid-1800s, many see the value in returning control of the land to a collective guided by Native Hawaiians.
One big challenge for post-disaster community land trusts is raising enough money to acquire land before developers swoop in. Thanks to the Lahaina group’s experience in local housing politics, it has been able to secure $21 million in funding from Maui County. But public funding isn’t the only route to success. In Washington’s rural Methow Valley, the Methow Housing Trust is funded entirely by philanthropy. Donations range from $5 a month given by supportive locals to $1 million contributed by a sympathetic second-home owner. A decade after the Carlton and Okanogan Complex Fires destroyed crucial housing for local workers, the trust has managed to sell 50 homes to full-time valley residents, with enough land and capital to double that by 2030.
In Hawai’i, the houses built by the Lahaina Community Land Trust will eventually go to families affected by wildfire, and others with deep roots in Lahaina — including Hawaiians who’d been displaced before 2023. In the meantime, the trust is working to help survivors avoid having to give up their homes in the first place. It has created a program to help homeowners cover the difference between their insurance payout and the cost of rebuilding in exchange for the right of first refusal should they ever decide to sell. So far, 10 families have signed up.
“Every time we help a family stay home, we’re actually putting one more piece of land into the forever-protected housing inventory,” Ness said. “They can pass that house on to their kids. They can sell it if they want to. But it’s only ever going to be lived in by a Lahaina resident, and it’s always going to be affordable.”
AS CLIMATE CHANGE ACCELERATES the number and severity of wildfires and floods, a community that’s been through one disaster is increasingly likely to experience another. Community land trusts created to assist with recovery serve another purpose, too: helping people prepare for an unpredictable future.
In Washington, the Methow Housing Trust builds houses with fire-resistant materials and works with residents to help them limit the fire risk around their homes. In the Florida Keys, where Hurricane Irma destroyed a quarter of the homes in 2017, a community land trust is building cottages on 12-foot podiums designed to withstand 200 mph winds.
“The resiliency of a place comes from relationships, history, familiarity, being able to know how to live wisely in a place.”
But community land trusts also contribute to disaster preparedness in a subtler way. “The resiliency of a place comes from relationships, history, familiarity, being able to know how to live wisely in a place,” Auweloa said. Preventing displacement can ensure that those relationships endure — that the people who know and care about a place will be the ones who steward it.
And, Auweloa said, a community land trust helps people consider their own responsibility to the land itself. “It’s not just something you can sit on, like shares in a stock or blocks of gold,” she said. “It’s a living thing, and it’s going to respond to the environment.”
THE ALTADENA COMMUNITY LAND TRUST working group started meeting in early spring, just a few months after the fire. Still in early planning stages, its members are looking at partnerships with other nonprofits focused on recovery — and pushing state legislators to create a $200 million acquisition fund to help them compete with developers.
In June, the group opened its meetings to the public. On one of the first Zoom calls, some 25 people showed up: Altadena residents who’d lost their homes in the fire, along with others who’d already been priced out, local housing activists and curious Angelenos. Matthew Vu, who works with the Los Angeles Community Land Trust Coalition, prompted participants to share the values they were thinking about. “What are we trying to build together?” he asked.
The answers appeared in a word cloud as people submitted them: Affordability. Transparency. Equity. Culture, diversity, dignity. As the meeting progressed, attendees formulated goals: making space for multigenerational living, maintaining homes for Black families, rebuilding a shared garden.
“At the end of the day, a community land trust is not a very radical type of vehicle,
Vu said. “It’s basically a real estate holding entity.” What makes the mechanism powerful, he said, is the commitment it represents. “We are committing ourselves to one another — to be non-exploitative, and to have this intergenerational, sustainable model that will hold all of us for generations to come.”
Just recently, the group settled on a name: Altadena Earthseed Community Land Trust, a reference to Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic book series. A pioneering Black sci-fi writer, Butler grew up in Pasadena, and her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower opens in an LA suburb that looks a lot like Altadena, ravaged by fire, racism, and economic inequality in the year 2025. Andrews said the trust sees another parallel in the book’s characters, a diverse group of people who escape the destruction and work together to establish a new community.
Butler’s books are about “supporting each other through a calamity,” Andrews said, “but also shaping a worldview that allows you to live through climate change and massive upheavals in society.” In Altadena, she and other survivors are trying to do something similar: figure out “how to ride out these changes in a way that actually benefits the people in the community and helps us survive.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
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