Robert Bullock first realized something might be wrong around 2 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 8. He was riding his bike near Robinson Park in Pasadena, California, when the wind started blowing hard from the north, carrying debris and downing trees. Bullock pedaled a few more blocks east and spotted the flames of the Eaton Fire. He immediately turned south toward his sister’s house, located just outside of the large swath of Pasadena that was eventually placed under evacuation orders and warnings.
Bullock, 70, has lived in Pasadena and the nearby town of Altadena for his entire life. For the past 20 years, though, he has been homeless. The two foothill communities are closely linked, nestled below the San Gabriel Mountains about a dozen or so miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Bullock knows at least two dozen people who lost their homes in the fire, among them relatives with whom he sometimes stayed.
“I thank God that I’m here,” said Bullock, standing just outside of Robinson Park on Wednesday, Jan. 15. He was referring to the fire’s rising death toll; by Jan. 21, at least 27 people had died in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
The Eaton Fire is just one of several blazes to hit the Los Angeles region this month. It and the Palisades Fire, which started in the coastal region west of Santa Monica, are the two largest ones, and together they have destroyed over 12,000 structures, displacing tens of thousands of people. As of Tuesday, Jan. 21, the Eaton Fire is at 14,021 acres and 89% containment; the Palisades Fire is at 23,713 acres and 63% containment.
Across Los Angeles County, people experiencing homelessness grappled with the fires’ immediate and cascading impacts. In addition to being forced to flee dangerous areas, people who live outdoors endure higher levels of smoke and toxic air than people with houses who can shelter inside. Since many lack working cellphones, they can easily miss emergency alerts and evacuation notices. Kristen Aster, director of public policy and advocacy at The People Concern, a nonprofit that conducts outreach to unhoused people in the Los Angeles area, said that her organization found it hard to keep in contact with some of the people they served in the two weeks since the fires started.
More than 75,000 people are unhoused in Los Angeles County, and over 52,000 of them are completely unsheltered, according to the 2024 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. This year’s count was initially scheduled for the week of Jan. 21; one of the last posts before the fire on the Altadena Town Council’s website was a call for volunteers to fan out into the community and tally the number of unhoused people.
In the wake of the fires and amid the chaos of the recovery, Los Angeles County cannot accurately count the number of unhoused people in the region. The federal point-in-time count, required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has never been considered a perfect measurement tool.
“People go around and count with their eyes, ‘Hey, that’s a tent. Hey, that’s a car. It looks like someone’s living in that car. Hey, that’s an RV. It looks like someone’s living in that RV.’ So, it’s not 100% accurate,” said Aster.
Despite this, the survey results matter, since they indicate which areas receive services and funding and can provide insight into whether efforts to address homelessness in a particular area are helping, or whether the situation is getting worse. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority announced last week that this year’s count will be postponed until February due to the mass displacement of both housed and unhoused residents across the region
City officials and volunteers now face the challenging task of discerning who might be temporarily displaced and awaiting fire assistance, and who might be experiencing ongoing homelessness. It’s a line that can be blurry, since natural disasters often force new people onto the streets. This makes a difference, because people displaced by fires are generally eligible for support from FEMA and other disaster relief efforts, while different funding streams provide aid for people experiencing ongoing homelessness.
Los Angeles County isn’t the first one in the state to postpone the count following a major wildfire; Ventura County and Sonoma County both postponed their 2018 counts following devastating regional wildfires, and both eventual counts included people who had become newly unhoused due to the fires.
This underscores the difficulty of accurately measuring and addressing homelessness as climate change brings increasingly extreme weather. These disasters not only scatter unhoused people, forcing them to flee for safety outside of their normal locations; they also push anyone who has lost a home into an even more precarious situation.
“I don’t know how to explain it. I have no emotions right now. I don’t know how to feel.”
“It hasn’t really dawned on me yet; I’m just trying to figure out what to do, which way to go,” said Antonio Miller, 48, sitting at a picnic table at Pasadena’s Central Park. The one-bedroom Altadena apartment he was renting for $1,600 a month burned in the Eaton Fire.
Miller has struggled with housing in the past; before he moved into that apartment, he experienced a period of unsheltered homelessness. After evacuating from the fire last week, he returned to sleeping and spending time in parks, trains and building stairwells in the Pasadena area. Miller said that his mental health issues, including anxiety, make it hard for him to be around the large number of people at the evacuation shelters. He lost his job a few months before the fire and has no idea what he’ll do next.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I have no emotions right now. I don’t know how to feel.”
Even before the recent fires, the Los Angeles area was mired in a housing and homelessness crisis. Experts have long advocated for more affordable and permanent housing. Now, thousands of people will need new housing, increasing the demand on an already tight housing market and piling yet more pressure on overstretched social service providers.
“In our region, tens of thousands of folks have been displaced,” Aster said. “And so in general, both now and in the future, we’re going to continue to see increased pressures on our existing strained housing system, right? Increased competition with limited supply of housing, and now we have even less supply, given all the losses.”
That possibility worries Darren Myles. Myles has lived in his car for the last few years, parking it at night wherever he can in the Pasadena and Altadena area, hoping to avoid being ticketed. For the past week, he’s slept in an N-95 mask, waking up to a car coated with ash and dust.
Myles said that he has spent years trying to navigate Section 8 waitlists and affordable housing options. Now he’s wondering how much the fires might set back his ability to find housing, even as he grieves the many losses in his community.
“Everything’s a waiting process, now it’s going to be even more of a waiting process,” said Myles. “They gotta tend to everybody, the people who lost their homes up here first.”
Until then, the 61-year-old plans on staying in his neighborhood of over 40 years.
“This is just home, it’s always been home. … This is where my roots are,” said Myles. “I’ll hang out here and see if I can get my life back, keep my life going here.”
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