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Three decades ago, Nancy Wallace narrowly escaped death in what was then California's most destructive wildfire. Since then, the problem of wildfires has gotten much worse, so bad in fact that the state now faces a crisis in its market for home insurance. Solving the insurance crisis is something that's very much in Wallace's wheelhouse, and she's been developing some important ideas and tools to try to fix it.

Wallace is a professor of finance and real estate at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and she's a former adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. She specializes in identifying and mitigating financial risks in housing markets, and she's conducted some eye-opening studies on the rising risk of wildfires. She's working with climate scientists to create forecast models that can help rescue failing insurance markets. And she's advocating for new insurance schemes and financial products that would help California homeowners retrofit their homes and lower the danger that they're destroyed by future fires.

But Wallace's expertise in this area is more than just academic. It's informed by her horrifying experience.

A story that begins with fire

On Oct. 20, 1991, Wallace smelled smoke wafting in the air outside of her home, high in the hills above Oakland, Calif. The day before, a fire had broken out down her street. Firefighters had put it out, but she was now on high alert. The air felt dry. The wind was picking up. And the smell of smoke scared her.

Wallace grew up in Michigan, never experiencing the danger of wildfires. She and her husband had moved to Oakland a few years earlier when she got a job at nearby UC Berkeley. They scraped together every penny they could and bought a fixer-upper in the Oakland Hills, near the ridgeline of the mountains above the city, surrounded by Monterey pine and eucalyptus trees. They had finished remodeling their home just one month before this fateful day.

After smelling smoke, Wallace and her husband grabbed family heirlooms and antiques, important documents, some paintings and clothes, and their cat. They jumped in their car. And that's when they saw a hurricane of fire engulfing the neighborhood below them.

The Oakland Hills fire burned thousands of homes and created a dust cloud that could be seen for miles. Picture taken on Oct. 20, 1991.<br>

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<a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/search/photographer?photographer=San%20Francisco%20Chronicle%2FHearst%20Newspapers" class="Link" target="_blank" >San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers</a>

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They turned frantic. When they hit a fork in the road, they hesitated whether to turn right or left. Both directions were being enveloped by flames. Wallace insisted they go right.

" Seconds after going right, a car came out of the flames," Wallace says. "And they said, 'If you go up this road, you will die.'"

They said that power lines had fallen on a truck. A firefighter (who turned out to be Oakland Fire Battalion Chief James M. Riley Jr.) and a passenger he was trying to rescue were both dead, and the truck and power lines were blocking the road. Wallace and her husband were forced to turn around.

"At that point our cat shed her fur — literally shed her fur," Wallace says. "Because the fire was just beating on our car. I thought for sure the car would burst into flames."

They drove the other direction, down a winding, one-lane road through the heart of the inferno. Embers were flying everywhere. Houses and trees were bursting into flames. They saw a motorcyclist on fire. They saw frantic drivers crashing into trees. They saw a heroic policeman — officer John William Grubensky, who would soon die attempting to rescue a family from a burning home — on a loudspeaker, trying to keep people calm and get them out safely.

Wallace and her husband got lucky. Their 6-year-old son was miles away, safe and sound during the whole ordeal. He had spent the night at a friend's house. They were also lucky, of course, to escape with their lives. On the very same narrow street they had escaped on, vehicles after them got stuck behind a car that crashed, blocking their exit route. "Just on that one street, I think there were five people who died, along with Officer Grubensky," Wallace says.

The Claremont Hotel in October 1991

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About two weeks later, Nancy and her family returned to see what happened to their home. It had turned to ash. "In the middle of this ash was a porcelain bowl," Nancy says. Porcelain apparently doesn't burn. "It was just sitting on top of the ash by itself. It was surreal. Everything else was gone."

The Oakland Hills fire in 1991 ended up killing 25 people, injuring 150 others, and destroying around 3,000 homes. For a long time, it was the most destructive fire in California history. That is, until the last decade, when California has seen a mind-boggling uptick in even more destructive fires, including two in L.A. in recent weeks.

Why California properties got more valuable after fires

Around five years ago, Wallace recounted her incredible story in the Oakland Hills fire to her former Ph.D. student Carles Vergara-Alert, who was back in Berkeley on a sabbatical as a visiting professor, and two other Berkeley economists, Richard Stanton and Paulo Issler. And it inspired them to study how the rising risk of wildfires was affecting housing markets.

A pretty weird thing seemed to be happening to properties destroyed by fires. Nancy noticed it in her own community. After the fire, people got insurance money and rebuilt their homes. Their homes seemed to get bigger and nicer. And, like elsewhere in the Bay Area, their home values went on a rocket ship to the moon in the decades after the fire. It was like everyone had forgotten that it was still a risky area.

Of course, this was just a casual observation about one place. Wallace, Vergara-Alert, Issler and Stanton decided they wanted to build a comprehensive dataset to see what happened, more systematically, to California housing markets after they were scorched by wildfires.

The dataset they assembled is pretty amazing. After each fire in California, the state's fire agency, Cal Fire, sends a team of technicians to investigate. They create detailed maps of the burn areas and document, house by house, damages. The economists used this rich data on burn areas between 2001 and 2015, focusing on the houses that burned and the nearby houses that did not. They combined this data with their own comprehensive data on virtually every home in California.

You might think that property prices of the houses that burned would plummet. I mean, the house is destroyed, nearby parks, trees, hiking trails, and everything else is scorched, and the home's views become burn zones, at least in the near-to-medium term, before nature and man-made structures come back. Even more, you might think that the risks of living in the area would be top of mind for years to come, suppressing demand to live there. But no. Houses continue to be valuable investments in these fire-prone communities. Not only that. The economists found that, between 2001 and 2015, the properties that burned down and got rebuilt were actually significantly more valuable within five years of the catastrophe. Fire actually boosted their property values!

One sort of obvious reason for this is these rebuilt houses were newer. And they were built to follow a more modern, state-mandated building code, making them more resistant to fire and earthquakes and generally safer. And, just as Wallace had observed in her own neighborhood, these rebuilt houses tended to be bigger.

And, in big wildfires, the houses in whole neighborhoods got built back bigger and better. Because the value of your house is influenced by the value of houses in your neighborhood, that was another boost to property values. Meanwhile, nature recovers — and, Wallace says, it recovers rather quickly in areas with Mediterranean climates — and the amazing beauty of these Californian communities returns.

Now, fires are obviously devastating in terms of lives lost, people hurt, disruptions to business and so on. And for people who don't have insurance, they cause huge financial losses. But — at least in the period the economists studied, when, for the most part, there were functioning private insurance markets that offered full coverage and generous payouts — it seems like fires were actually a financial win for the average insured homeowner who lost their home. They were also a win for developers and construction companies, which rebuilt the homes. And they were at least partially a win for municipalities because rebuilt, more valuable homes meant higher property taxes, offsetting the tremendous taxpayer costs of fighting the fire and cleaning up afterwards.

Of course, there was at least one huge financial loser in all of this: insurance companies. They had to foot the massive bill for home reconstructions.

In normal insurance markets, that's fine. People pay premiums, and those premiums are estimated based on the probability of losses. When those losses materialize, the insurance company pays. It's the whole game.

But, Wallace says, something funky began happening in California's insurance markets, and the state's insurance system ended up breaking down.

How California's insurance market failed

First, the state has had restrictive regulations on what insurance companies can charge. Wallace says that a big force behind that was Proposition 103, which was championed by Ralph Nader. In the 1980s, Nader and other consumer activists argued that insurance companies should be strictly regulated when setting their premium rates. This ballot initiative, which was narrowly approved by California voters in 1988, required insurance companies to get rate hikes approved by the California Department of Insurance, and it introduced a bunch of measures that made rate hikes much harder to impose.

In this post-Prop. 103 regulatory scheme, for example, the state prevented insurance companies from using forward-looking estimates of risk — so-called "catastrophe models" — when setting their rates. Consumer advocates saw these kinds of models, which use computers to forecast an uncertain future, as a Trojan horse for price-gouging. The state forced insurers to only use backward-looking estimates of risk. They figured it was more transparent and fair to use hard, verifiable data from the past. The state required insurers to base their premium rates on a 20-year average of historical losses. It also prevented insurers from pricing into their premiums the cost of "reinsurance," or insurance for insurers — something that insurers sometimes need after extreme weather events require massive payouts.

With these and other measures, the California Department of Insurance effectively kept home insurance premiums artificially low. And, Nancy says, that had some big side effects, like incentivizing more people to live in fire-prone areas.

"Prices are important, especially for things like where people locate, where houses are built," Wallace says. Artificially low insurance prices, for example, may have encouraged cities and developers to build neighborhoods closer to the flammable wilderness. In fact, in recent decades, fire-prone areas have seen some of the fastest population growth rates in the state.

And greater density in fire country may have contributed, Wallace says, to problems like narrow roads prone to traffic jams, making escapes from wildfires — like the one she personally made — much harder. And this increased number of people living in fire-prone areas meant that taxpayers had to invest much more in firefighting and other public services to keep people safe.

For a time, California's insurance system was maybe workable. Big, destructive fires used to be rarer, so the insurance system didn't experience as much stress. But, Wallace says, around a decade ago, there was a tipping point where big wildfires started becoming more frequent and more destructive. California has seen hotter temperatures. Droughts have increased. Wind speeds have picked up. And big, destructive fires have become more commonplace.

With climate change, it has started to become clear that the future will not look like the past, and California's regulations requiring insurers to make pricing decisions based on backward-looking models of risk have started to look pretty dumb.

In a free market for insurance, a higher risk for catastrophe would result in higher insurance premiums. But since California regulations prevented that, insurance premiums stayed artificially low. As big fires began demanding big payouts and the specter of more mass destruction loomed larger, insurance companies struggled to make the math work. And so they began fleeing the state.

"The California Department of Insurance is seriously at fault," Wallace says. "They destroyed the markets."

With no ability to get standard private insurance, many Californians, especially in high-risk areas, were forced onto the state-created insurance plan of last resort, the California FAIR Plan (which is funded by private insurance companies and their policyholders in exchange for these insurers being able to sell property insurance in the state). This plan was not meant to be a permanent solution. It's a high-risk pool. It's expensive and it caps insurance payouts, so people with valuable properties, for example, can't get the full value of their homes insured. (For more on the Fair Plan, listen to The Indicator's recent podcast episode, "Who's on the hook for California's uninsurable homes?")

Last year, seeing insurers fleeing their state — and perhaps seeing the studies by Wallace and others — California regulators came to the conclusion that the state's insurance regulations were unworkable. California's insurance commissioner, supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom, ended the ban on using forward-looking catastrophe models for setting premiums, giving the green light to the insurance industry to start actually trying to price in the rising risk and cost of wildfires. As part of this deal, insurers have agreed to underwrite more policies in fire-prone areas. Those changes took effect mere weeks ago, just before the outbreak of fires around Los Angeles.

Newsom recently touted the fact that, after these changes took effect, a private insurer agreed to insure homes in the town of Paradise, which notoriously burned entirely to the ground in 2018 (listen to this 2021 Planet Money episode about efforts to rebuild the town).

" I thought that was an absolutely crucial step," Wallace says of California's recent reforms to how it regulates insurance markets. "Now we have to get to work and figure out what the true pricing should be."

What is the right price for living in fire country?

Finding the right price for insurance premiums entails building and refining statistical models that can nail down the risks of wildfires for houses and businesses around the state. The current models, Wallace says, are not good enough. Insurance companies and the government, she says, "literally do not know" what the real risks are. There is quite a bit of uncertainty about, for example, how far fires can spread, which exact homes are the most at risk, and whether big fires in certain places are like 50- or 20- or 10-year events. Inaccurate estimates of fire risks, Wallace says, could result in premiums that are too low, as has been the case for a while in much of California, but also too high in some cases.

And that's why she and her colleagues at UC Berkeley, and, more specifically, Wallace's lab at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, have been building bridges across disciplines, marshaling the data and intellect of climate scientists, computer scientists, engineers, economists and more to create high-tech models that can better estimate the risk of wildfires.

And that's important. As we've seen, the costs of fire destruction are enormous. And someone has to pay for it. If homeowners want to continue living in fire-prone areas, Wallace says, they need to bear more of the risk and, in effect, pay higher insurance premiums.

"This risk cannot be borne exclusively by insurance companies," Wallace says. "It's also got to be borne by homeowners." Bearing more of that risk would, she says, incentivize homeowners to take more actions to protect their properties (and fight what economists call "moral hazard," or people's tendency to not take steps to mitigate risk when they're insured).

Beyond just accurately pricing wildfire risks, Wallace says, the government and insurance companies should work to incentivize and help homeowners to retrofit older, more flammable homes. Wallace points to a study by economists Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower. The economists find that California houses built after the mid-1990s — and, even more, those built after 2008 — are far more likely to survive wildfires. That's because the state strengthened its building codes during those years, requiring that homes be built with, for example, more fire-retardant siding and roofs.

" In Paradise, in Sonoma, in Napa, the Woolsey Fire, the houses that survive are those with the post-2008 building code requirements," Wallace says. "The major problem in California is that our [older] housing stock is not built to withstand the embers and the radiant heat of fires."

But updating California's older housing stock is expensive. Which is why Wallace wants policymakers and businesspeople to create new home loan programs, which would make it feasible for California homeowners to invest in making their homes more resistant to fire. She believes this could even be a money-making product for financial firms. " If you're a bank, wouldn't you like to invest in home loans that make the mortgages that you're also planning to make safer?"

Wallace also hopes that, going forward, insurers could offer discounts on home insurance for taking anti-fire measures that lower risks, further incentivizing homeowners to protect their homes and reduce costs. This could be facilitated by technological innovations. For example, Wallace points to a former grad student of hers who created an app, Firebreak, which helps homeowners identify fire risks around their properties.

What happens after the L.A. fires?

As Wallace and her colleagues found in their study, for a long time, California homes that were destroyed by fires ended up getting bigger, better and more valuable. Will the same thing happen again in Los Angeles hillsides after the latest shocking fires?

Wallace suggests that it's possible this time is different. For one, "We don't have that insurance market anymore," Wallace says. "It's been broken  by not allowing firms to price the risk."

Many homes in the L.A. hills were forced off of private insurance policies that gave them full coverage, and they had to turn to the California FAIR Plan, which caps residential coverage at $3 million. There are a significant number of destroyed homes that were worth more than that. Wallace also points to less affluent neighborhoods, like Altadena, where many homeowners did not have insurance (only people with mortgages are required to have fire casualty insurance). Absent some sort of government help, many fire victims will likely be unable to afford reconstruction. In the wake of natural disasters, construction costs tend to surge because tons of people need to build all at once and there are shortages of everything.

Another big cost will be building back better. If the city and state are being sensible, Wallace says, they will make investments in better infrastructure, like a less fire-prone electricity grid and better water systems to fight fires, making it less likely for future fires to break out and spread. Even more, she says, the state should continue mandating that builders of new houses follow the building code that has proved to be more resilient to fires. " It's absolutely nonsensical to build back in the same risky way," Wallace says. (Newsom recently issued a vague executive order on this issue, directing state agencies to waive building regulations to speed up construction, but only those regulations "that can safely be suspended.")

Because of high costs and more limited insurance coverage and other factors, Wallace says, there may be fewer homes built in the L.A. neighborhoods devastated by fires. And, with higher insurance premiums reflecting the risk for buildings there, these neighborhoods will likely become even more exclusive dens for the rich.

Despite the current tragic circumstances, however, these burned-down neighborhoods still have a lot going for them. Their views of the ocean and the city are often incredible. Their charred parks and hiking trails will recover. And they're still close to a legendary metropolis, with a vibrant culture, an incredible economy and a housing shortage. Land in L.A. is still very valuable.

"L.A. is a major, metropolitan, gateway city of the world," Wallace says. "And it is not going away."

And whether it's floods or tornadoes or earthquakes or wildfires, human beings have a remarkable knack for comfortably living in areas with lots of risk.

Wallace expects that, if the state pursues the right path to make these neighborhoods more resilient to future fires and follows through with fixing the state's broken insurance system, destroyed properties in L.A. will be rebuilt, insurable in the private market and they'll eventually "return to trajectory," increasing in value like they were in the years preceding the devastation.

As for the victims who lost everything in the fires, Wallace, reflecting on her own experience losing her home, advises people to begin creating inventories of the things they lost and working with builders to get real estimates of the costs to rebuild, keeping in mind that construction costs will likely climb as everyone else seeks to rebuild. Such information can be crucial for getting adequate payouts. Insurers may provide a vital service, she suggests, but they're not really your friends.

Our most recent Planet Money episode has more on the fires in California. Hosts Sarah Gonzalez and Nick Fountain report on conditions inside the Altadena burn zone, and how one father and son are approaching the difficult choice of how, or whether, to rebuild.

The Los Angeles City Council is asking the private nonprofit organizing the 2028 Olympics to provide more information on the role the federal government will play in policing the Games.

The council unanimously passed a motion Tuesday requesting that LA28 produce a detailed report on the federal Olympics task force on security that President Donald Trump announced last year.

"We all have increasing concerns about their involvement and their influence around what policing will look like," Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said of the federal government, citing the ICE agents that have descended on the streets of Los Angeles and other U.S. cities since summer.

The federal government is overseeing security planning for the Olympic Games. The agency leading that effort is the Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. That set-up is not atypical, but it has sparked criticism from immigrants rights advocates and community members concerned that the Games may bring more federal agents to the streets of L.A.

LA28 also caught flak when it quietly added a number of Trump allies to its board of directors last year. The new additions mean Trump allies have nearly the same representation on the board as the city's six appointees.

The motion passed Tuesday asks LA28 to report to the council how the federal security task force will affect the city's planning for the Olympics. It also directs LA28 to "include guidance on what guardrails the City can enact to ensure that the City's most vulnerable communities are protected."

LA28 did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the city council's action, which did not include a deadline.

It appears that the City Council can do little to enforce its motion.

The city's contract with the Olympics organizers requires LA28 to update the city on engagement with federal authorities that "relates materially to the City," and to periodically update the city on the event's national security designation. But the council's request for more information on the federal task force doesn't fit neatly into any category spelled out in that agreement.

Gabriel Avalos, a spokesperson for Rodriguez, acknowledged via text that the City Council could not compel the private Olympics organizers to respond to the motion, and that the council's request was just that: a request.

"Now the ball is simply in their court," Avalos added.

Most L.A. residents agree that their neighborhoods could use more parks, but the lack of green spaces in Los Angeles is nowhere more glaring than in Koreatown.

Parks appear like postage stamps on neighborhood maps, surrounded by apartment towers and busy corridors. When parents want to take their kids to play outside, they often have to leave their immediate neighborhood. The city has even put a number to it: About 18,000 residents in Koreatown live further than half a mile from a park, according to a recent report on park needs, which also notes that access to green space is key to mental and physical health.

“One of the things that makes this neighborhood amazing is the fact that it’s so active and vibrant,” said Adriane Hoff, parks advocate and a longtime Koreatown resident. “But then there’s also the flip side of it, that we don’t have that place where we can sit back and recharge.”

And yet, officials have done little to address the problem over the decades. So, The LA Local is digging into why it’s been so difficult to develop green spaces in Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake — some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in LA and made up predominantly of renters.

It has been about a decade since the city announced and approved the Pío Pico Library Pocket Park, Koreatown’s first new park since the 1920s. The 0.6-acre space would transform a parking lot into a park on top of an underground structure. It is expected to open in early 2027 with a budget of $26 million.

An aerial view of Liberty Park in Koreatown.

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Right around the corner is Liberty Park, a privately owned green space that has only escaped development into a 36-story tower because residents rallied for it to be designated a historic-cultural monument in 2018. The simple lawn, without any of the amenities you might expect to see in a park, has hosted street fairs and World Cup viewing parties, as well as being a mecca for dog walkers and yoga classes.

“As the community has become much more dense, much more residential in nature, this park has taken on even more importance,” Adrian Fine, president and CEO of the LA Conservancy, said about Liberty Park.

Overall, Los Angeles has not prioritized its investment in park spaces, according to the Park Needs Assessment report from the Department of Recreation and Parks.

L.A.’s per-capita investment is dramatically lower than other cities of similar size, population and density. The city invests $92 per capita, versus the average of $283 in other cities.

And it’s the city’s poorest residents who feel that the most. Many residents who live in areas identified as needing parks the most earn less than 80% of what the median household earns in the state, according to the latest available data from the city.

Delfino Chocoj plays soccer at Seoul International Park in Koreatown.

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There are bright spots in Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake. Efforts are underway to renovate or expand existing park spaces, updating outdated facilities or expanding the footprint of the green space, like at Seoul International Park.

Then there’s the question of MacArthur Park.

The 30 acres in Westlake, replete with lake, soccer field and playground, has been described as an open-air drug market with a growing unhoused population. City officials want to install a fence to address “safety concerns” — a move at odds with proposals to instead open up the park to more people by making Wilshire Boulevard a car-free zone.

Harm reduction outreach workers have in particular raised concerns about the impact of a fence. They say if the park is closed off, then many of the unhoused people who need services will be forced out of the area and likely will not receive the services they need.

On one recent morning, people dozed off on the grass, ducks argued on the lake and a pickup soccer game played out in a nearby field. A police cruiser drove onto the park grounds and a pair of officers spoke to a group of people.

“To me, it feels like the city tries to make it better and then doesn’t go far enough,” said Lidia Reyes, who took a 5-minute bus ride to the park with her daughters.

“It’s nice in the day,” said Reyes as her daughters played nearby. “And not so nice at night.”

If you feel a lift after exercise, you're in good company. Movement can boost mood, and according to the results of a new study, it can also help relieve symptoms of depression.

As part of a review of evidence by the Cochrane collaboration — an independent network of researchers — scientists evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials that included about 5,000 people with depression, many of whom also tried antidepressant medication.

"We found that exercise was as effective as pharmacological treatments or psychological therapies as well," says Andrew Clegg, a professor at the University of Lancashire in the U.K.

The findings are not a surprise to psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. "This new Cochrane review reinforces the evidence that exercise is one of the most evidence-based tools for improving mood," says Mateka.

He explains how it mirrors some of the effects of medication. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins. So there is certainly overlap between exercise and how antidepressants offer relief," Mateka says.

In other words, exercise helps release chemicals in the body that are known to boost mood.

And there's another powerful effect too. Exercise can trigger the release of brain growth factors, explains Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa. He says depression can decrease neuroplasticity, making it harder for the brain to adapt and change.

"The brain in depression is thought to be less plastic. So there's less what we call neurotrophic factors, or BDNF," Fabiano explains. He calls it the Miracle-Gro for the brain. "And we know that exercise can also boost it. So I think exercise is a fundamental pillar we really need to counsel patients on," he says.

And while medications and therapy are important tools, Fabiano says exercise is recognized as a preferred treatment for depression.

"Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in guidelines for depression globally with good acceptability and safety," he writes. Yet he says it remains underappreciated and underutilized.

"It's much easier for a primary care physician to prescribe medication to a patient. You just write it on a pad," Fabiano says. It's harder to prescribe exercise, which takes time and effort and can be difficult to start for people who are depressed.

Fabiano says exercise can work best as part of a combination of treatments. "We can start someone on an antidepressant — maybe that improves their mood, and they're able to engage in therapy. And from there, maybe now they're more interested in starting some of these lifestyle habits like exercise," Fabiano says.

How much exercise is enough?

The evidence shows light to moderate exercise — where you get your heart rate up enough to feel slightly winded — can be as beneficial as vigorous or intense exercise, at least early on. And Fabiano says it's OK to start with a "low dose."

"Ultimately you want to work your way up. But going from completely sedentary to even just going for a walk every day, that's where you start seeing those exponential gains," he says, stressing the importance of getting started with modest amounts.

The study found that a combination of aerobic exercise and resistance training appears to be more effective than aerobic alone. The meta-analysis found between 13 and 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms, though long-term follow-up was rare. Researchers say there's more to learn about how regular exercise may help stave off depression.

Mateka says there are lots of options. "When it comes to exercise, it's about just finding the exercise that works for you, such as something like yoga or tai chi versus something like walking and jogging," he says. For some, group activity can add to the psychosocial benefits.

At the end of the day, it's best to pick something you enjoy or go back to an activity or sport you liked as a child.

"Exercise is something that is extremely low cost. It's very accessible. It has very minimal side effects. And it has the opportunity to impact you positively, mentally, emotionally, socially and physically," Mateka says.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Time to ditch your winter jackets. Southern California is in for a potentially record-breaking heat wave — in January.

Temperatures will peak Wednesday, hitting the mid-80s in some areas, especially in the valleys, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Lewis. Downtown Los Angeles will see a high of about 82 degrees, and Pasadena could be closer to 85 — record numbers for this time of the year.

“We’ll see a little bit of a cooling trend toward the end of the week, but it’ll be quite gradual, so we’ll still stay relatively warm into the weekend,” Lewis said.

Going into the weekend, temperatures will be in the upper 70s to low 80s.

“It’ll be pretty nice weather and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any real significant issues in terms of rip currents or high surf,” he said. “It should be a pretty nice day for the beach here in mid-January.”

What’s causing the high temperatures

“The Santa Ana winds are certainly the driving force,” Lewis said.

Even if you don’t feel the winds, it’s bringing warmer temperatures — and they’re higher than average by about 10 to 15 degrees.

And while Santa Ana winds typically fuel fire conditions, the risk is lower for this heat wave, Lewis said.

“The fire risk is absolutely mitigated by all the rain we got, so it’s really not much of a concern, even though we have these hot, dry and windy conditions,” he said.