Photos by Grace Mahoney
This story was published in partnership with High Country News.
Altadena used to disappear under the trees.
Adonis Jones’ neighborhood was once defined by thick oaks and pines, their canopy guarding winding trails where Black cowboys rode, shaping his childhood memories. Now, standing on the bare site of his future master bedroom, he can see straight down to downtown Los Angeles. The view is spectacular, yet it feels like a violation.
“You can look down on the city now because there ain’t no trees,” he said a few days before he celebrated his first New Year’s with his wife, Denise, away from Altadena.
Before the Eaton fire, Altadena had the fifth-highest tree canopy coverage of LA County’s 584 ZIP codes. Since the fire, the city has lost at least half of its trees, and local arborists fear the destruction is not over.
Black families who migrated to LA from the Jim Crow South were drawn to Altadena because of its leafy, almost-country feel. It felt closer to the rural South, separate from the smog-ridden, concrete nature of LA. Through the wooded streets, people from across the valley wandered and became neighbors. Shade made it possible to hike or sit outside on summer evenings and chat with whoever passed by — about the news or a neighbor’s dog.
With the trees gone, so is the informal infrastructure that protected the community and bound it together, Jones said. With this loss, the question is no longer just about what will grow back, but who will be allowed to return.
A year after the Eaton Fire, the recovery maps a familiar inequity. Research from UCLA shows Black homeowners were not just the most likely to lose their homes, but are the least likely to have moved toward rebuilding them. They hold the lowest number of approved permits and the highest share of empty, barren lots.
For Jones, who is 67, a walk through his neighborhood today brings a pang of envy alongside the joy.
A home is rebuilt and reframed along a street in Altadena, California, as many Black homeowners face longer delays in recovery after the wildfire.
Up the street, a neighbor’s roof is already being framed. Across the way, a foundation is poured. But at Jones’s property, which he had lived in for 55 years, there is only a chain-link fence and dirt, unchanged since the debris was cleared.
“It is like I’m stuck in a forever Christmas Eve,” he said. Every morning he wakes hoping for a text: His permits have been approved. “You go to sleep, and then hopefully Santa got what you put on the list.”
But the gift never comes.
After weeks of waiting, the Jones family learned why those early messages never appeared — the applications hadn’t even reached the right department. So more than half a year after their lot was cleared, the process started again.
“This mix of hope and hurdles shows recovery is still fragile,” said Gabriella Carmona, one of the UCLA researchers.
Historical redlining practices led to the concentration of Black families into the areas of Altadena most affected by the fire, and a series of failures during the fire led to the area being the last to receive evacuation orders. Black and Latino households were also more than twice as likely as white households to lack insurance. That’s why “targeted support is needed to help families return home,” Carmona added.
Denise and Adonis Jones sit together in their rental home in Monrovia, holding on to each other as they wait for permits to rebuild the Altadena house they lost in the Eaton Fire.
The fragility she describes is written across Altadena’s landscape.
The modest, single-story homes that held generations of Black history are being replaced by two-story modern structures that loom over the sterile landscape.
On permit applications, residents are required to plant new trees on their lot. Still, most people, including the Jones family, are planning to plant saplings, thin baby trees that will take a generation to reach the height and shade of the oaks and pines that burned. Jones joked that he was “not about to spend money on fully grown trees,” then wondered aloud whether he or his neighbors would even be alive to sit beneath the branches they are now required to plant.
Black homeowners in Altadena skew older, making them especially vulnerable to underinsurance, predatory buyers, and the sheer time it takes to navigate multiyear rebuilds. Investors already make up most of the buyers of fire-damaged properties.
“I don’t know if I’ll be living when that tree happens to grow at full strength,” Jones said.
The loss for the family is not only visible in scorched ridges; it has settled inside them as a new way of seeing the world. The fire has upended the assumption that a lifetime in one place guarantees stability or control. Every act of rebuilding is shadowed by the question: What if another disaster comes, and everything resets to zero again?
Jones spent 42 years coaching football in the community, and he still runs into former players and neighbors at the grocery store and gas station. Now, when they stop to ask how he’s doing, the conversation almost always bends back to the fire and his empty lot.
After the fire mangled Denise’s diamond ring, she had it refurbished, but a small, permanent hole is left in the band. It is a flaw she decided to keep, and a constant reminder, much like in the familiar faces that Jones sees, that they must learn to live with what the fire took and did not give back.
So, they keep showing up. For lunch with Jones’ daughter, Rochele. To learn the best way to grow plants in their rental home. To hit golf balls on the fairway with friends.
For thousands of Black Altadena residents, the rural charm of their community has shielded them from the hustle and bustle of America’s largest county and offered them a rare, generational connection to the land.
Watching how this fire has landed unevenly, they have come to a simple decision, distilled from a year of standing watch over a dirt lot and a lifetime of watching others face their own disasters: “Don’t take life for granted.”
The trees will take their time. So will the family. They are OK with the hope that some future family will sit under their shade and talk about the news, a dog, or a bad day, the way people once did when Altadena disappeared beneath the trees.