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Altadena’s Post-Fire Rebuild Proves You Can Have Woke Or Effective Leaders But Not Both

Barger speaks bluntly about the quality of the state’s insurance commissioner. ‘When you politicize an office like this,’ she says, ‘this is what you get.’

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This is why you can’t give up on politics.

Like Pacific Palisades, the unincorporated Los Angeles County community of Altadena is a hillside enclave that never quite became what the rest of metropolitan Los Angeles has been turning into. In a sprawling landscape of transplants from elsewhere, it was a place: full of families, and even full of families that have been here for decades. Whole neighborhoods were made up of remarkably pleasant older homes, in a county full of those apartment buildings that look like industrial boxes for people. When Altadena burned in January of 2025, destroying about 6,000 homes in the community and damaging many others, a lot of history was lost.

Altadena is rebuilding faster than the Palisades, and just passed the 50 percent mark for rebuilding permits, though it has the same checkerboard pattern: whole lines of houses being built in a row, interspersed with whole lines of vacant lots where nothing is happening. The rebuilding and the empty spaces blend together.

But it could be much worse, and is worse in other places. The rebuilding in Altadena is being driven forward, herded by an elected official who sees the moment as a chance for government to do better.

Her name is Kathryn Barger, and she’s a unicorn: While the 15-member Los Angeles City Council has no Republicans at all and a growing DSA presence, and the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has four performance-art leftists who don’t seem to be the sharpest little knives in the drawer, Barger is LA’s very last Republican in the county’s two biggest local governments.

Steve Lamb, who has lived in Altadena since 1957, lost his home of thirty-eight years in the fire. Watching the recovery, and struggling to build while litigation drags on and he waits for funding, he credits Barger for pushing. Altadena is rebuilding faster than........

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