Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a podcast that explores resilience & grit, generosity & kindness. We start with true stories of kindness and support during and after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Shared Ground
Episode 12: Finding Strength, Together, with Andrew King
What does it take to rebuild - not just homes, but a whole community - after disaster?
When 90-mile-per-hour winds swept through Los Angeles County this January, fires devastated neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades. In the aftermath, thousands of families faced the impossible: starting over. Among them was Andrew King, a high school principal who quickly became something more.
"Resilience is finding the inner strength to overcome, but it's also finding strength in community," Andrew tells us.
In this powerful conversation, Andrew recounts the night he tracked fire scanners from a hotel room while his children slept beside him. By morning, security alerts confirmed what he feared—his home was gone. Within 24 hours, he’d signed a new lease. Within weeks, he stepped away from his career to focus on his family and help neighbors navigate their own recovery.
Today, Andrew works with the Department of Angels, leading grassroots recovery efforts that fill the gaps left by systems not built for equity. From WhatsApp groups and block captain networks to face-to-face meetings in libraries, his work is a reminder that disasters may not discriminate, but recovery often does.
As the one-year mark approaches and temporary housing support expires, families face new decisions about whether they can afford to return—and what their communities will become.
But Andrew remains hopeful.
"When people say 'we’re not going to take it anymore,’ that gives me hope. No one’s doing this alone—people are trying to do it together."
🎧 Listen now to hear what true grassroots resilience sounds like—and what it looks like when ordinary people become leaders in extraordinary times.
📣 If this episode moved you, please:
- Share it with someone in your neighborhood, school, or city
- Comment to let us know what resonated
- Visit shared-ground.com to get involved or prepare your own community
This is how recovery begins. Together.
Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.
For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.
Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).
Thanks so much for joining us today. We have a guest we've been looking forward to talking to for a while. Andrew King is here with us. Andrew, who are you? Whom are you bringing to us this morning?
Andrew King:My name is Andrew King. Up until a couple months ago I was a high school principal and now I am a member of the Department of Angels, which is a nonprofit that is helping to coordinate fire recovery in both Palisades and Eaton. I'm also a block captain in Altadena. I am helping support with insurance advocacy work. I am a parent of two wonderful children in Altadena and I'm here just to kind of help the community recover. Thanks for being here, thank you?
Allan Marks:Yeah, wonderful. I really appreciate you taking the time. Something we've been talking to a lot of folks about on the podcast is resilience and obviously from working with students, from your own experience as a parent and now dealing with fire recovery, you're seeing different situations, both personal and kind of systemic, where resilience is important. How would you define resilience?
Andrew King:I think resilience is finding the inner strength within in order to overcome, but I think it's also being able to find the strength in community and so, regardless of whatever adversity or challenges you might face because if it's environmental, personal, from the community, resilience is about finding wherever that strength needs to come from to overcome so that you and the rest of your community and loved ones can overcome.
Allan Marks:So for community, if you think about it, sometimes it's like bottom-up communities, especially after disaster. They might just respond in a certain way and come together when they maybe were or weren't before. But you're also an educator that was running a big high school, so leadership might matter as well. How do those play off each other?
Andrew King:I think there are those leaders that may have positional power already and are just prone to step up because they are already in that seat, and I think what we've seen after the fires in both communities is you also have a lot of folks that have not seen themselves as leaders before, that have now stepped up as reluctant leaders, and so they are putting themselves in positions not necessarily of power, but positions of support, because they see that there's a need. And so, whether you are a born leader, a reluctant leader, what we have come to see is that, you know, we have people stepping up to help everyone, whether it's themselves or the community that they have around them.
Sean Knierim:If we step back to the verb you used in defining resilience finding strength in these times that doesn't necessarily mean you have the strength, but a question I'd be interested in there is it a conscious finding or is it a discovery over time that you don't go looking for? So, in the resilience that you have in mind, does one consciously go looking for that strength in order to encounter resilience, or can it happen to you? That's a great question and what I'm trying to figure out. Even now, months on after losing our home, I'm still trying to find that strength. It feels like.
Andrew King:Yeah, I think it's maybe akin to riding a bike. Okay, Right, Like you, a bunch of folks you know who may have experienced adversity over time and when it happens to them again, they are able to overcome because they've. They've had it before.
Sean Knierim:And that it is something challenging.
Andrew King:Yeah and like, and sometimes it's easy, and other times you have to find the will in order to overcome again. And sometimes you have to find the motivation or to ask yourself to find the why about why it's even worthwhile to overcome, Because it's also very easy just to say throw your hands up and be like I don't want to deal with this anymore. And so I think the why behind overcoming is also really important.
Allan Marks:You really raise a good point with this idea of throwing up your hands and saying why bother? Because there's four different people that can come from very different places and so the way you deal with it has to be different. So, for example, if I think I have no agency, whatever I do it will just won't matter, that could be a reason to do it. If I think, well, maybe what I do could matter, but I just I have no purpose, I don't have any sense of direction or meaning, or I don't have any hope, those are all different and they respond to different solutions, I think.
Andrew King:I think that's right. It depends on how much power feel like you have in any type of situation. Oftentimes, when you have students in a classroom when they feel like they have no power, those are the students that are oftentimes the most unwilling to learn, because they have no agency in that space. I think the same is true in post-fire recovery. You have folks that may have a lot more positional power, may have a lot more cultural and social capital in order to navigate their own recovery, and you have those that, for years and decades, may have felt that the system is not designed for them, and so they're just wondering to themselves is this now the time I engage and try to accrue that capital, or do I just throw my hands up because this system was not designed for me and so it really does depend on your individual circumstance.
Sean Knierim:So, andrew, as we're kicking into the conversation on this podcast, we've talked to people who have lost their homes and their experience coming through and finding. We've talked to people who have been around others that have, and increasingly we're starting to talk to people from outside communities coming in. Can you talk through your own personal journey, coming through January, of what you yourself encountered and those closest into you?
Andrew King:Yeah, for sure.
Sean Knierim:And so.
Andrew King:I lost my home in the Altadena fire in January, along with 6,000 of my neighbors, same in the Palisades. And for our story, I think, while we did lose our home, we may have been just a little bit more fortunate than others because we didn't have the fleeing by night story that unfortunately, many of our neighbors do. But for us in particular, we actually left at 10 am that morning because we got notification from Southern California Edison that they were going to shut off our power, the winds were really strong that night and they were worried about electrical fires possibly. And so, because we got notification from Southern California Edison that they were going to shut off our power, the winds were really strong that night and they were worried about electrical fires possibly. And so because we have two young kids, a six and an eight year old, we thought to ourselves well, let's go ahead and go stay at a hotel, it'll be much easier, we'll get up in the morning, go to school. That just seems like a much better solution for our children.
Andrew King:At 6.30 PM that evening, when the fire started in Eaton Canyon, I received a text message from someone saying hey, did you know a fire started Because I knew how bad the winds were going to be that night. We had actually just left dinner and we're walking back to our hotel room when I got that text message and I saw that Eaton Fire had started. I didn't tell my wife at the time, but in the back of my head I pretty much confirmed to myself we're probably going to lose our house tonight, because winds were projected 90 to 100 miles per hour. I still had hope that maybe we wouldn't, but I had resigned myself to the fact that that was very likely the case.
Sean Knierim:How long did you carry that yourself before you shared it with your wife.
Andrew King:We listened to the fire scanners all night, listening to the responders, the incident commands on the scanner radio.
Sean Knierim:Were all four of you.
Andrew King:In the same room my wife and I were, while our children slept in the kitchen area in the pull-out couch.
Andrew King:And so, while we're listening to firefighters and incident command like talking back and forth about fires erupting all across Altadena, my wife and I were just listening. I was trying to document where the fires were on a Google map that we were sharing across the neighborhood to kind of let people know what was going on. And at about 5.15 that morning I got a notification from SimpliSafe telling me that there was a front door access and then there was motion sensors in the hallway, the back hallway, the back door, and the optimist in me thought to myself oh well, maybe the firefighters are there to save our home. And then, at about 530, we stopped receiving notifications and I turned to my wife and I said I think we lost the house.
Sean Knierim:At 442. That morning I got a call from ADT, which we had lost contact with anything in the house, telling us that a window blew out. Then another window blew out that was 20 feet over the ground, but the ADT folks didn't know that the fire was happening. It was a really interesting way to find that your house likely just burned, yeah.
Andrew King:Who knew what. And for the longest time actually, I kept those notifications on my phone because I just couldn't just like clear it. And then, unfortunately, one day I was letting my kids play with my phone and they cleared it and, oh no, I lost it, but I mean kids did for you what you couldn't do for yourself.
Andrew King:Absolutely, it's actually very true I it felt like I just needed to have that, as dark as it might have been to be like, as a reminder. But I think a different story for us also that doesn't necessarily resonate with a lot of folks, is about an hour after we lost our home. I looked at my wife and I said we need to find a place to live. At 6.30 AM you were quick At 6.30 AM we called our realtor who had just had a baby and so I knew he was going to be awake. I'm going to say we need a place to live. We just lost our home and so by 4 PM that afternoon the next day we signed a two-year lease on an apartment, sight unseen, because we were first on that list and the second list we were number 13 and we knew we weren't going to get it.
Allan Marks:Wow, that kind of foresight is not luck. Now, losing your home is certainly bad luck. How much do you think resilience depends on planning, or foresight, or awareness of broader context? You said you're listening to scanners, you're looking, you know what the winds are going.
Sean Knierim:How much have you been riding that bike in the past and knew what to do? Yeah, Readiness.
Andrew King:I guess I'll call it you have to prepare for these types of things. I mean, like, if we assume that these are just ingrained things, then there's an assumption that it can't be taught. And I think this is the one thing I always impress upon educators too is, you know, there's will and there's skill, and those are really important elements. But if it's just will, then you're just born with it and I think there's a problem with that. When you start from that premise that things are just will, I think that's problematic because then there's no optimism, there's no opportunity for growth. But if it's skill which I do firmly believe a lot of this can be skill then it's about just exposure.
Andrew King:And for folks that haven't had to deal with disaster, folks haven't had to deal with any type of adversity, I do think sometimes it's hard. I mean, I was a high school principal during COVID and I had to do crisis management pretty quickly. I remember March 13th when we had to notify our community that we were closing schools and then knowing every week was something different until you had to be quick on your feet If you've ever had to be kicked out of your apartment or your home because your landlord decided to, you know, close shop on you and gave you no 10 days notice. You know what it's like to have to think quick on your feet, and so if you haven't had that experience, no, that's a muscle that you haven't exercised or ever been exposed to.
Sean Knierim:Your reflections are kind of weaving into my own reflections of thinking of what happened. So, andrew, as you came through that process and you were thinking on your feet and you were taking care of your family and you were thinking about the community that you were leading at the school, you made some decisions pretty quickly that really changed what you're doing in the world Maybe not the service you're providing to communities, but how you're providing them. What did you go through then in the coming months after you guys got into that apartment?
Andrew King:No, I didn't return to work for about three weeks after the fire, because I really took it upon myself and my family to start figuring out recovery and the school had burnt down too. No, our school did not burn down, it did not burn down. So I worked at a small downtown public charter in downtown Los Angeles Alliance Dr Algamo and High School Got it. If you guys are listening, shout out to you guys. But fortunately our school was not impacted. They were impacted by the smoke den all across Los Angeles, and so the quality of the air was just terrible and it's a school of you know, bungalows and so like the air was definitely permeating to the classrooms, but I fortunately did not have to oversee a school that burned down, which is in and of itself a terrible tragedy. I didn't go back to work initially because, one, I had to deal with my own recovery, but two, because we had worked so hard to build a competent team to lead that school that I had the fortune of being able to step back and let my school run itself, because there were such great leaders and great teachers to do the work that needed to be done. But when I did finally come back, I came back at a time that was already very tumultuous, and not to get political about this, but I serve a population of students that are under-resourced, predominantly immigrant families, and the current presidential administration really made it difficult and hard for these families to feel confident, feel safe about their place in our society. And so when I came back, I was dealing with a lot of that anxiety the families were feeling, and then I was going home and then having to deal with my own recovery and helping my neighbors navigate their own recovery and the well of energy that I had. This was draining, and I felt like every time I was going into work I was distracted and I couldn't be there 100% for them. And so I remember deciding for myself.
Andrew King:One day I was sitting in my office and then another person came in and I just knew I wasn't giving them 100% of my attention and this was the most important conversation to them at the moment, and I couldn't do that to them. I couldn't make 450 students second fiddle to my own recovery and someone needed to make them a priority, because their livelihood is just as important as my own. And so I remember sitting down at the kitchen table that evening and I looked at my wife and I said I need to know if it's okay if I step back from this job, which is a very scary premise, because I need to provide for a family. We just lost our home. We need income in order to figure out rebuilding. But my wife is a wonderful person and she looked at me and she said if that's what you really need, then okay.
Andrew King:And I'm going to tell you that lifted so much weight off my shoulders because it meant that I can focus on my family. And the one thing that we always try to impress upon people is like work is important. The work that you do is important, especially if you work is important. The work that you do is important, especially if you work in nonprofits. The people that you serve are important, but you also have to be there for your family, and so I've always tried to model that, and so the community. When I announced, they were obviously heartbroken, but they were also understanding the decision I had to make to prioritize my family first.
Sean Knierim:So what if you think back in the prior years or through your lifetime that enabled you to make this decision? And again, quite quickly, what prepared you to be able to have this ability to reflect, to make a decision, to know whom to turn to for support, but then to carry through with it? You made a bunch of decisions in times of pressure that seem to be based on really solid wisdom and support. Where's that coming from in your background, andrew?
Andrew King:Andrew- I think I have just been fortunate in my life. I feel like I had a really good education growing up. I went to a great college that really helped me feel confident choices that I made. I felt like I had the technical knowledge to kind of understand what was happening around me. But I think also like I had a strong system of supports from my family. My wife was there, my parents, my siblings are there, my friends are there. But even in this moment with this fire, I think what also helped me recover so much faster I think most others is I had my neighbors there. When you are suffering from a tragedy on your own, it's really hard to see if people understand you and are giving you empathy or just sympathy, and the sympathy can be really frustrating. The empathy because they've been through it also almost gives you strength because you don't have to re-explain. You can just say like this sucks. And they say, yeah, I know, and you believe them.
Andrew King:Yeah, because they can put themselves in your shoes, exactly Because they're literally in the same shoes, right, right?
Allan Marks:Yeah.
Andrew King:So I think that has helped me a lot. Also, and I think the other part is, you know I talk about this idea of reluctant leaders. I wasn't reluctant because I did feel like I was in a position to be able to help, but I did look around, you know, talking to my neighbors the following day and them like trying to figure out what to do next. And then you know we find out the disaster recovery center gets put up, there's all these opportunities for like money coming around, and I see people like sending text messages, like oh, there's money here and there's money here and they're giving out food here. I also knew that there were several of my neighbors that were not getting any of those text messages. They were not on social media and I had to do something. I couldn't just be that a skill that was provided to you I had to and you're saying that with conviction.
Allan Marks:I believe you that you feel like you had to when does that?
Sean Knierim:Actually, I believe you that you had to.
Allan Marks:I'll go further. I think that really is part of the wiring, Not that it's not taught. I mean empathy can absolutely be taught.
Andrew King:I'd be interested in knowing what you think. I think there's an element of like being a moralist being a humanist. I think there's an element of like being a moralist being a humanist. And if you don't do something, and you know that there are going to be consequences, if you don't and you still choose not to, then I firmly believe that you are responsible for that.
Allan Marks:It's a choice. It's a choice. Well, go further than that, though, because there are some things I suspect that you might do, regardless of knowing whether there's consequences, because it's the right thing to do yeah, I think that's a fair point.
Andrew King:Like I don't do it because I might get in trouble. I also do it because I'm a humanist and I just want to put as much good out there in the world as I can. I want to help people because people deserve to be helped. No one deserves to go through a recovery alone. No one deserves to have to deal with the mess of this and feel helpless. So if I can help because I somehow have an answer 100%, I'm going to step up.
Allan Marks:Let me ask you a question. I want to go back to Alt Because a lot of people listening to this. We have listeners from all over the world, as it turns out, which is kind of a happy discovery. Not everybody knows about Altadena or understands the distinction between Altadena and the Palisades or between either one of them and other parts of Los Angeles, which is a metropolitan area of over 15 million people. Tell us about Altadena before the fire.
Andrew King:The community that's been lost, I think, geographically first. One way to help people figure out where Altadena is is if you've ever seen the Rose Parade. That's in Pasadena and north of Pasadena is Altadena.
Andrew King:Altadena is this wonderful, eclectic, quiet but lovely community that's next to the Foothill Mountains. You have a very diverse community of folks with a historic Black community that's been strong and resilient over the last several decades. You have a lot of folks coming in that are trying to avoid the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. You know, still want to be connected as close as they can and people that just help each other. You know we have a strong buy nothing community. You have a strong community of you know, people that ride horses. There's a lady with like llamas and peacocks and you have bears that periodically enter the neighborhood and it's just fun, and so like it's, it's a lovely place, it's weird and it's just fun, and so, like it's, it's a lovely place, it's weird and it's I don't know, it's, it's fun, it's a fun place to be.
Allan Marks:Where do you see it 20 years from now? I guess either where you expect it to be and where you want it to be, if that's different.
Andrew King:Yeah, it's. It's always interesting question, right? Because there's all of these tension points about no-transcript is the case. In 20 years I hope that my children can still grow up in Altadena. I hope they all have friends there. I hope they're going to the high schools in the area. I hope that we have a rich community that can celebrate the togetherness that we've really built upon over the last several years. I think it'll continue to be a special place, but it will be different.
Allan Marks:And have the kids been able to keep in touch with the friends that they had before, or is it starting to be more scattered?
Andrew King:A couple of things. One is a lot of the kids before the school year ended opted to continue going to the school because it was too hard to both lose your house, lose your neighborhood and lose your school community, and so a lot of them have come back Now. Whether or not they're going to return after the school year or when in the fall, that remains to be seen, and I do have a lot of concerns about that In my own children. We actually pulled our kids out for a week when the schools reopened because we were really concerned about air quality, because our kids' elementary school survived, but it is immediately outside the burn scar and you have the debris trucks moving in, and so we pulled them out.
Andrew King:But then I really struggled with this idea of so they lost their house, lost their neighborhood. They're going to lose their school community too. I didn't sit right with me and so we made a choice. I have my own concerns about health long-term, but like we made a choice at that moment. But fortunately you know, like they still have a lot of friends there, the community of families are really strong because they've all made the choice to come back. And then we also have the Boys and Girls Club of Pasadena, who's been just incredible to our kids.
Sean Knierim:So let's talk about building that community you hope to see in the next decade. So you chose to move on from this role as principal and then you took a job at the Department of Angels. Can you tell us about what is the Department of Angels and what's the role you're doing for them?
Andrew King:Andrew, the Department of Angels was started in about February by the Spiegel Family Fund and California Community Foundation, and it was designed to be able to help coordinate the fire recovery and ensure that recovery was being led by the community and not having recovery done to them. A really common refrain I hear a lot is that disasters do not discriminate but recovery does, and so how do we ensure? Say that one more time.
Sean Knierim:That's pretty powerful. That's a very important point and I think this is core to how your organization was designed by trying to figure out where the gaps are and where the needs are.
Andrew King:Disasters do not discriminate, but recovery does, and I think that is important because we're talking about allocation of resources. Who does that go to In disaster? Sometimes it's who you know and that, while it is nice to have friends, that is in and of itself sometimes discriminatory because it doesn't go to the people that may need it and it's inequitable. So what the Department of Angels and us are trying to do is just ensure that we are Going to the community, finding the community-based organizations that are serving those communities and really platforming them. We're trying to determine what are the issues that these survivors are experiencing and connecting them with philanthropy, connecting them with government officials so that their voices are helping direct this recovery. Because two things one I've said it before and I'll say it again no one should be going through this recovery alone. And then, two, we should be doing this recovery together.
Allan Marks:And how do you do the outreach to those who say aren't on social media or not you know as connected?
Andrew King:no-transcript that you could create trusted folks that would be informed and help connect people that needed it to other resources. And so, in my own role, I'm a block captain for my street as part of an Altadena block captain group called Altogether, and so what I've done over the last several months is, initially, after the fire, I only had the neighbors that I knew on my WhatsApp thread, and then over the course of the next couple of months a couple of weeks really we really tried to get everyone on that street plugged into our WhatsApp. In fact, just yesterday we had another member finally join our WhatsApp group after some pushing and prodding, and so that is where I will share information about mortgage, I will share about insurance, I will share about how AI can be used to do personal property itemization, but really it's that face-to-face work. And for folks that are not on social media, then I'll do things like go meet them at the library and I was like what do you need?
Allan Marks:So libraries, by the way, have emerged as a just absolutely critical piece of this, not just for the recovery but just kind of community building and resilience in areas which have not been directly impacted by the fires across Southern California.
Andrew King:Yeah, I mean they're trusted. They're generally free to use them for community spaces. They have internet connectivity for people who would like that, and I think that I mean they're quiet spaces to talk, and so, like I've definitely and they have kind people who work and are focused on hospitality and welcoming people into the space.
Allan Marks:Yeah, and phenomenal wide range of resources.
Andrew King:It's not just books on the shelf, and they have somewhat built in childcare in that, like my kids can go read a book or color a page while I'm helping a neighbor, and so that's actually helped me a lot also.
Sean Knierim:Or so I can just stare out a window for five minutes and know the kids are over there and safe, absolutely.
Andrew King:Because it's a community right and it's a community space, and so that's definitely been helpful. And so this digital divide is real, and it's not necessarily just for elderly folks. You have a lot of people that just are not connected to the internet or not connected to social media, and they're falling through the cracks. And so when you have a strong block captain model, the idea is I can go through my list and say who have I not heard from in the last two weeks? And I'm going to call them directly and say hey, how are you doing today? Do you need anything?
Andrew King:Because we have a very strong community on WhatsApp and we have a very strong community on Discord, but it's overwhelming. It is very much information through a fire hose. And so how do you take that information and distill it for folks and at the moment at which they're ready for a specific type of information? Because there are still people today that, depending on how far they are, are just starting the recovery today, and some of us are much further along than that, but this is what they're ready for.
Sean Knierim:So I have a question on community. So block captains are working with those that own the homes or that are coming back and have a consistent connection. How are you working, either Department of Angels or as a block captain in Altadena, with the rental community, those that may or may not be coming back, that have a different connection to physically or at least an ownership to these communities, but had that same connection to the humans in the schools and the people in the markets? So what are you doing with the rental community? Some of the block captains are renters.
Andrew King:So the idea it's very geographic versus like based on home ownership status. And so you have folks that are not necessarily just talking about how do we rebuild our homes, but they're talking about how do I navigate a landlord that's not being supportive? How do I navigate smoke and ash remediation? Where do I get temporary relief? How do I navigate FEMA and the disaster recovery center? And so what you really do have is geographic communities that are helping each other. That's not. That can be just a block captain that's for an entire group of renters in one building or on one street. But I think what we've also found is that there are still, to this day, like a lot of gaps in the block captaining model that we're trying to overcome, because we are trying to make sure that we get to as close to 100% reach as possible.
Sean Knierim:I'm hearing a lot of talk about wanting to rebuild the community that was there before, and then you go through the process of figuring out what that actually means and who. But in those communities there's a good percentage of those that were part of the community in December or January 5th who might not ever move back Right. They've already had to go. Secure housing elsewhere, secure school elsewhere. The places for them to rent might not actually be constructed for years to come, so it's going to be a different crew coming through.
Allan Marks:And that's not all fire, of course, because if you think of any community Now Altadena was a relatively stable community actually, but there's a lot of communities If you waited five years or seven years, whatever the timeline might be, for example, for physical reconstruction, if you had not had a fire, and you look at any community and you look five or seven years out, there's a lot of new people that have come in and a lot of people that went away or passed away, and that's natural.
Andrew King:I think that's something you can expect anyway. But I know the signal bell that I keep kind of ringing really loudly, especially with this idea of being able to return, whether you're a tenant, whether you are a homeowner is. There's this very specific line in a lot of people's insurance policies loss of use, alternative living expenses or fair rental value, if you have California Fair Plan. What this means is, if you are displaced from your home, your insurance if you have insurance will typically pay for you to live somewhere else temporarily. Now, renter's insurance, by the way, is a little bit different.
Allan Marks:Yes, for sure, quite different.
Andrew King:Yes, unfortunately if you are a renter, you may not have temporary living expenses. Some policies may have it, but it's a rider and it's pretty expensive.
Allan Marks:And it's rare for people to actually buy it and it's time limited.
Andrew King:Yes. So for ALE or LOU or FRV, whatever you want to call it, the one thing that people have not really of mine to look into is the fact of one. There's two things it's either capped at a dollar value and or it's also capped at time. The time component is usually two years plus. You can extend it every six months and I feel pretty confident that insurance will likely continue doing that, because there's a writer in most of them that say something like if there's a disaster and you're making good faith, we'll keep on extending over six months.
Andrew King:But the one thing that really is bound is your actual coverage, and what I'm really concerned about and I've done some informal data you know, like in a surveying of my neighbors in Altadena is how much time do you have before you're going to run out of loss of use? And the biggest concern that I have is and I guess, about the anniversary of the fire. You're going to have a lot of folks that are going to run out of loss of use and now will be responsible for paying rent and their mortgage and they're going to have to make a choice about whether or not it is affordable to rebuild, and then you will have this massive influx of folks trying to find either temporary housing or just leaving both communities entirely, and that's something that I think is really far down the line until people don't see. But I'm really concerned about that.
Sean Knierim:And we're closer to that every single day. We are absolutely getting closer, andrew, as you're thinking about this opportunity right now, because one way to look at this, andrew, as you're thinking about this opportunity right now, because one way to look at this, there's an opportunity to conceive of the type of community that we want to inhabit in these two geographic spaces in the wider LA region no-transcript have a lot of community groups that have kind of reached across the county.
Andrew King:These are not twin fires, but they're sister fires and the experiences really do carry across both and so as many opportunities as we can find to advocate together whether it's for insurance, whether it's for unlocking federal dollars, whether it's for streamlining the rebuild process, collective purchasing I think those are the things that both communities will absolutely benefit from if we work together, and there's no sense of arguing about like their community versus my community. I think that we are one Los Angeles, and the more that we can do together, the more that we're all going to be able to come back home sooner.
Allan Marks:So over the time period of recovery and rebuilding we will have more fires in other areas, kind of unavoidably. I think you mentioned that collaboration between, say, altadena and Pacific Palisades across the county. Are there other things that are also possible to do to make other communities more fire resilient, more fire prepared or able to deal with the immediate crisis situation where people need to reach out for assistance or lessons learned from this last?
Andrew King:one. It's actually really interesting that you asked that, because this is also not like the first fire we've experienced and it feels like, oh my gosh, there's a fire. I'm like, well, we've had fires last year and the year before that Bullseye fire.
Allan Marks:Huge, yeah right, my family was affected.
Andrew King:Yeah, and so like it's shocking to me that it continues to feel like this is the first time for everyone. But I will say some of the lessons that you can take if you have not been impacted yet. But again, it's likely going to happen on the fire in the future. That's going to impact the community. Because number one don't wait for the fire.
Andrew King:I think there's a lot of folks that respond after day zero and then they're trying to figure out how to do the recovery. So, before day one, get to know your neighbors. You need to get on the same page, form some type of block captain group, just to get to know each other, create a WhatsApp group, get on a Discord, whatever you need to, because that communication and that trust system is going to be crucial to that recovery. I think that's going to be important. There's like monetary things that are going to require you to like fire hard in your home. But if you have the capacity to pay for upgrades to fire-harden your home, absolutely do that. There's things called Zone Zero, where you can remove combustible things around your home to prevent your home from actually burning, but that don't cost money. And then you like to exceed time too.
Allan Marks:So I remember after the Northridge earthquake there was a flurry of people that they hadn't already bolted their home, who did earthquake bolting to make sure that when the ground shifts your house doesn't fall off its foundation, because we have a lot of raised foundation construction here for single-family homes, wood frame, and we didn't see the same move to fire hardened homes in areas people think are remote.
Allan Marks:So this idea of like a wire land urban interface, the WUI right, probably a little out of date, because if you're going to get 100 mile an hour winds, the possibility of an ignition in an area adjacent to the urban center, it really is going to be an urban fire that's going to push further in. So obviously insurance companies have noticed this. You look at premiums or insurability, but I think that the idea that you need to look at your roofing material, you need to look at rain gutters, you need to look at ways where embers could get either into the attics or underneath, you know, crawl space, those are all things that I'm not seeing. The same sense of. Of course you would have to do that that we see with earthquake preparedness. I wonder why.
Andrew King:I mean, I think right now all the organizations are still trying to figure out like what the actual standards need to be. So like there are standards out there but they're not standardized for everyone. And there's questions about like. Oh well, if I am in high fire, severity zone one versus two, like my property literally is cut in half between the red zone and the orange zone, so I'm like which one do I follow? My garage is much more prone to fire than my house, I guess. Of course, if one of them catches fire, they're going to too. And so I think there's still a lack of clarity on like what.
Andrew King:Because the other part is we're already going through recovery. You don't want to impose expectations oh, here's what the recovery needs to be because you want some flexibility of what the recovery needs to be. But you also need to balance that with how do you prevent a future disaster like this again in the future? And so there are standards out there. You can look it up on your own. Ibhs has some really great recommendations for it, but again, the biggest-.
Sean Knierim:And.
Andrew King:IBHS can you break that acronym down? Oh my God, I think it's like International Building Housing Standards. I think it's IBHS say.
Allan Marks:Yeah, and the state of California has put out some statewide guidelines for building codes. That and some localities are also doing the same thing, Big cities like LA of course are thing.
Sean Knierim:Big cities like LA, of course, are looking at it. They're called, like chapter 7a, building standards or something Exactly. Can I ask? This is another definition question We've been talking about rebuilding and you also talked about recovery. How do you see those as distinct efforts? Because if I'm thinking about insurability standards for my rebuild, I'm kind of thinking rebuilding. What's the difference between recovery and rebuilding in your mind?
Andrew King:Rebuild I feel is like what are you literally going to put on your property, Like the nails and the wood and the stucco and the concrete.
Andrew King:I think that's more of a technical vision of like what is that I'm going to put on my home? The recovery to me is Is the community going to come back? Are there going to be schools? What is the infrastructure? Are there going to be businesses? Because I think rebuild is very specific to a family or a home or individual and I think recovery, in my mind at least, is more community facing who is going to be there? What is it going to look like when we're back? I think the reason why a lot of folks are still trying to decide if they want to rebuild is because they want to know what they're rebuilding back to.
Allan Marks:What is going to be there? Well, and part of that and you mentioned businesses, and I think not as much attention is paid as maybe could or should be to small business districts, especially in towns like Altadena, but not just there, where, if the merchants aren't there, if there aren't the jobs that they provide as well, that community looks very, very different.
Andrew King:The businesses are struggling now because you set up a shop, because you had 12,000 homes that would, you know, every so often come and, you know, patronize your business, and now they're gone, and so you're hoping that maybe these Army Corps folks will stop by and eat at your restaurant. But how do you do that when everyone's been displaced in this diaspora, and so I think there is absolutely a need to care for them. I think there are a lot of different solutions about helping keep them afloat over the next several years. I know I try my best, because my kids still go to school in Altadena and they go to the Boys and Girls Club up there.
Allan Marks:You know we try to stop by some businesses whenever we can, but that can only go so far. And then how do you, tied to that, how do you deal with the issues, both economic and social, around gentrification? Of course, you saw this with not just where you live, but also a lot of the student population that you're dealing with in the communities that they are coming from.
Andrew King:Yeah, I think this idea of gentrification is really interesting. Right, because gentrification is not always inherently a bad thing, in that, you know, people of color communities also want to benefit from like better schools and better infrastructure and better businesses and public safety and public safety. I think those are all good things, and so we put this called gentrification. I feel like it's a term I don't often like to use, because the idea is do we just want to make the community better? Absolutely, everyone wants to benefit from it.
Andrew King:Now, do you have folks coming in and maybe displacing? I think that's a different conversation. I think that's happening right now, with developers coming in and buying properties. But I think there's also this thing that we can't control, which is this notion right now of without there being a funding solution to help families keep their properties as long as possible. They don't have a choice but to sell, and I'm not going to fault them for it. They need to be able to recover because they don't have insurance or they're underinsured, and that is a choice every individual family needs to resolve and figure out for themselves, and I will help them as best I can. But if there is no systemic solution for it, then, yeah, we're going to continue seeing developers coming in, investors coming in buying property and displacing folks that want to live there but can't.
Sean Knierim:So, andrew, as you think about your personal experience over the last months, your community experience and then the job that you have now, looking even on the systems level, where are you finding hope? Where are the places of hope that are keeping you going?
Andrew King:I think every time I have a conversation where someone feels like they're going to get a little bit more money from insurance, or they found a new writer in their policy they did not realize before, or a document that I put out there has helped someone realize ooh, this itemization process, while terrible, is not as bad as I thought it was and therefore I can get started on it.
Andrew King:I think everyone taking one step at a time further towards recovery and rebuilding, I think gives me hope. If it just felt like everything was completely stagnant and no one was moving forward, I think that would be really difficult for me. But also when you have these community groups like Altogether, who meet and now they say, okay, we're ready to talk about rebuilding commercial properties and re-envisioning what this community could be, or you have folks banding together they say like, yeah, we're not going to take it anymore and we're going to go ahead and step up and do it together, I think that gives me hope, because then it means genuinely that no one is doing it alone, that people are trying to do it together and that really gives me the fire to keep fighting, because we helped bring these people together and we continue to bring people together so that we get back sooner.
Sean Knierim:Thank you for joining us, Andrew, thanks for the work you're doing to help bring this hope to folks like my family and others that are going through this, and thanks for being in our lives, man. I appreciate that you trusted us enough to come on today with us.
Allan Marks:Yeah, yeah, really best of luck. I'm so glad with the work you're doing. It's just critically important, so thank you. Thank you for talking about it and sharing your experience, yeah.
Sean Knierim:This has been another episode of Shared Ground. Thanks for joining us and we look forward to having more such conversations moving into the future. Thanks very much. This has been another episode of Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community.
Allan Marks:Follow us on your favorite platform or learn more at wwwshared-ground. com. That's www. shared-ground. com.