Jacob Margolis
has covered the Palisades and Eaton fires since Day One.
Published January 9, 2026 5:00 AM
Nature is bouncing back
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LAist
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Topline:
Nature moves fast, especially when there are large patches of open soil, sunlight and water to feed recovery. And recovery is what we're starting to see — both in good and bad ways — a year after fires tore through the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains.
Why it matters: The destruction of last year’s January fires was devastating. Not just in how they leveled more than 16,000 structures and took at least 31 lives, but also how they stripped bare landscapes that many Southern Californians had become familiar with and had found solace visiting for decades.
What's next: Time will tell whether invasive or native plants will have the upper hand. But some early signs are encouraging.
Read on ... to see and learn about what's sprouting in Southern California's mountains.
The destruction of last year’s January fires was devastating. Not just in how they leveled more than 16,000 structures and took at least 31 lives, but also how they stripped bare landscapes that many Southern Californians had become familiar with and had found solace visiting for decades. Hillsides that we’d long seen covered in dense green chaparral and coastal sage scrub were turned to ash, with the charred carcasses of native plants left behind.
However, nature moves fast, especially when there are large patches of open soil, sunlight and water to feed recovery. And recovery is what we're starting to see — both in good and bad ways.
“Recovery begins in the first growing season,” said Jon Keeley, research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
On recent trips to the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, where the Palisades and Eaton fires burned a year ago, the signs are sprouting.
Manzanitas and oaks are regrowing from the bases of large plants that burned. Smaller, fast-growing showy pentstemon, hairy yerba santa and the pustule-causing poodle-dog bush are thriving now that competition has been removed.
But so are invasive plants like wild oats, bromes and mustard, which account for some of the green up.
What's growing?
A year after the fires, here are the plants you can see in the Eaton and Palisades burn scars.
Invasive Spanish brome growing in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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A year after the Eaton Fire, new growth is sprouting from the base of badly burned plants.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Poodle-dog bush, often found on post-fire landscapes, grows in the San Gabriel Mountains in December. Don't touch!
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Pines scorched by the Eaton Fire near the Mount Wilson radio towers in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Oak resprouts from the base of a larger plant that burned in the Eaton Fire.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Penstemon growing in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Dried out brome in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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California sagebrush sprouts in the Palisades Fire burn scar in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Invasive plants are popping up in rocky, often disturbed areas along trails burned by the Palisades Fire.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Lupine seen growing in the Santa Monica Mountains in December.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Goldenbush pops up among filaree in the Santa Monica Mountains in December 2025.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Whether invasive species or natives take root long term depends on a variety of factors, including the age of the plants when they burned and how soon the area burns again, Keeley said.
Some of the Palisades Fire area hadn’t burned in about 60 years, according to state records, which may mean healthy native-plant recovery over the long term.
Walking the area recently, I saw native California sage brush, goldenbush and long leaf bush lupine, with some invasive grasses mixed in.
The Santa Monica Mountains, photographed from Mullholland Drive, on Jan. 21, 2025, just weeks after the Palisades Fire.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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In December 2025, the Santa Monica Mountains are green again, though non-native grasses fill quite a bit of the open space.
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Jacob Margolis
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LAist
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Higher up in the San Gabriels, where the Eaton Fire burn scar has some overlap with the Bobcat (2020) and Station (2009) fires, native plants that have weathered repeated blazes may struggle to recover.
“If the fire occurs in areas that had burned within the last 15 to 25 years, then there's a good chance you're going to lose species," Keeley said. "And if you lose those species, they're replaced by non-native grasses.”
When fire occurs too frequently, native plant seedbanks can be destroyed, making recovery unlikely.
“ We've looked now at 65, 75, something like that, sites around the state over five years, and the pattern is pretty common,” Keeley said.
The nonnative grasses that replace native shrubs can often dry out and catch fire more easily than heartier natives. Shortening the interval between when wildfires can spread across a landscape, further challenging recovery. It’s a pattern that’s been documented across California — from the deserts to the mountains to the coastal hillsides.
Hope for native plants — and hard work
Even where invasive species have taken over, the hard work of conservation can help bring back natives. But fire is an ever-present threat, as Tree People learned.
For the past four years, the environmental conservation organization has been working to help reestablish native species near Castaic Lake. The work was arduous, with volunteers removing invasive plants across a 25-acre site and planting native oaks. And they were seeing good progress — until Jan. 22, 2025, when the Hughes Fire charred more than 10,000 acres, including their work area.
Oak sprouts from the base of a slim trunk in March 2025.
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Alyssa Walker
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Tree People
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A young oak puts out new growth in September 2025.
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Alyssa Walker
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Tree People
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“We brought the team out, and everyone was just kind of speechless,” said Alyssa Walker, Tree People’s associate director of conservation.
The site where they’d planted thousands of trees and worked for years was devoid of green.
But they didn’t give up. They watered seedlings they thought had the best chance of survival.
It's working.
They’re seeing the best recovery in areas where they did the most invasive plant clearance, Walker said. The baby oaks have also done remarkably well, as fire-adapted oak trees often do. And sawtooth golden bush, sunflowers, yerba santa and sugarbush, among others, are all making a comeback.
In the areas that had a lower density of invasive prior to the fire, native chamise can be seen regrowing about a year after the Hughes Fire.
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Alyssa Walker
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Tree People
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In an area dominated by invasive annual plants, invasive plants have come back.
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Alyssa Walker
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Tree People
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“We've seen things grow back, if not to their existing size, like beyond,” Walker said.
Native plants in areas that had a higher density of invasive plants before the fire are growing slower because of all of the extra competition.
What about mountain lions?
This uncollared mountain lion's habitat appears to be east of the 405 Freeway. Video captured on the morning of Sept. 7, 2019, shows it chasing P-61 in the area east of the freeway.
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National Park Service
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Recent data gathered by the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains area shows that since the Palisades Fire, at least one mountain lion, P-125, appears to be avoiding the burned area.
How other mountain lions are behaving is not yet clear, but the Woolsey Fire — which burned nearly 100,000 acres, including in the Santa Monica Mountains — offers insights into lion behavior after large fires.
After that 2018 fire, mountain lions favored areas that hadn’t burned and still had dense vegetative cover they could use to stay hidden and stalk deer, according to tracking data gathered by the Park Service over 15 months after the Woolsey Fire.
The fire squeezed the territorial cats into even smaller areas that are already fragmented by urban development.
“When you look at their post-fire behavior, because so much of the Santa Monicas were burned … they engaged in some riskier behaviors than they may have beforehand,” said Seth Riley, chief wildlife ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
That included crossing roads, one of the deadlier activities for mountain lions in Southern California. As was the case with P-61, who lived in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains.
P-61 crossed the 405 Freeway in the Sepulveda Pass, which is the first and only time that Riley and his colleagues had seen one of their collared lions cross that freeway. When the male lion reached Bel Air, he encountered another male lion, which chased him up a tree. Twenty minutes later, P-61 was killed by a car — crossing the 405 Freeway again.
Of the 11 lions that Riley and his colleagues were tracking around the Woolsey Fire, three died. P-61 was one.
P-74, they assume, got caught in the fire. Another, P-64, who lived in the Simi Hills and fled when the fire came through, was found dead two weeks later with badly burned paws. He chose to head back into the burned area instead of fleeing into neighborhoods full of people, Riley said.
When will normal return?
The Santa Monica Mountains, bisected by Mulholland Drive, about a year after the Palisades Fire. The area on the left was burned by the fire, while the area on the right, full of native vegetation, has not burned since 1944, according to Cal Fire records.
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Jacob Margolis
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I met Lawrence Szabo from Venice on a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains in mid-December. He was looking out across a canyon that had started to green up after heavy rains. We were just down the way from an oak tree that serves as a landmark for hikers and cyclists.
“ I've always viewed that oak tree as kind of my chapel,” he said. “I think that's what was the heaviest part of the fires. Not knowing whether it was still there. And then, when I turned the corner the first time and I saw it there, it pulled a tear, and I felt like we could keep going.”
Over the next 10 years, assuming invasive plants don’t take over, native plants will repopulate and spread. And in several decades our hillsides could once again be filled with the dense and beautiful chaparral and coastal sage scrub many of us grew up with.
What’s next: The temporary order expires in 14 days. The court battle will continue to play out, with further decisions by the judge expected in the coming weeks, after more arguments from both sides.
The context: In halting childcare and welfare benefits to hundreds of thousands of low-income Californians, the Trump administration wrote that “recent federal prosecutions” are driving concerns about “systemic fraud.” But an LAist review found fraud in the targeted programs appears to be a tiny fraction of the total spending. Prosecutions that have been brought around child care benefits amount to a small fraction of 1% of the federal childcare funding California has received, according to a search of all case announcements in the state. When pressed for details about what specific prosecutions justify the freeze in California, administration officials have offered few specifics.
Federal judge orders LA to pay $1.8M in settlement
Makenna Sievertson
has been covering the case and attending federal hearings in downtown L.A. since at least March 2024.
Published January 9, 2026 5:02 PM
A view of L.A. City Hall in downtown.
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Makenna Sievertson
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LAist
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Topline:
A federal judge has ordered Los Angeles to pay more than $1.8 million in attorneys’ fees and costs to the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights and other organizations that sued the city over what it deemed an inadequate response to the homelessness crisis.
The details: In addition to $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees and $5,000 in costs to L.A. Alliance, the judge awarded about $200,000 in fees and $160 in costs to the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and Los Angeles Community Action Network.
Why now: The city is appealing the decision.
Why it matters: In his order, released Tuesday, the judge compared the recent award to the millions of taxpayer dollars city officials agreed to pay an outside law firm representing L.A.in the settlement.
Read on ... for more about this week's order.
A federal judge has ordered Los Angeles to pay more than $1.8 million in attorneys’ fees and costs to the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights and other organizations that sued the city over what it deemed an inadequate response to the homelessness crisis.
The city is appealing the decision.
The details
L.A. Alliance is a group of business owners and residents who sued the city and county of Los Angeles in 2020 in an effort to push both governments to provide more shelter to unhoused people in the region.
The city of L.A. settled with the plaintiffs in 2022, and U.S. District Judge David O. Carter is overseeing the city’s progress in keeping up with the terms of that agreement. The judge found the city breached its agreement in multiple ways in a ruling last summer.
Specifically, the judge found that the city did not provide a plan for how it intends to create 12,915 shelter beds, as promised, by 2027. The court also found the city “flouted” its responsibilities by failing to provide accurate, comprehensive data when requested and did not provide evidence to support the numbers it was reporting, according to court documents.
In addition to $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees and $5,000 in costs to L.A. Alliance, Carter awarded about $200,000 in fees and $160 in costs to the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and Los Angeles Community Action Network.
The organizations are considered “intervenors” in the suit, representing people experiencing homelessness on Skid Row. Their attorneys include those from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.
Why it matters
In his order, released Tuesday, Carter compared the recent award to the millions of taxpayer dollars city officials agreed to pay an outside law firm representing L.A. in the settlement.
“It has fallen to plaintiff, intervenors, and journalists to point out the deficiencies in the city’s reporting,” Carter wrote, referring to data the city is required to report to the court as part of the settlement.
“Plaintiff and intervenors must be compensated for this,” he said.
The city’s response
Attorneys representing the city filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday.
L.A. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto’s office did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment by phone or email.
Shayla Myers, senior attorney with the Unhoused People's Justice Project at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, told LAist the intervenors participated in the case without compensation “because it's incredibly important given what is at stake in these proceedings that unhoused folks have a voice.”
Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for L.A. Alliance, told LAist he’s thrilled the court is imposing accountability on the city, including sanctions for violating the settlement agreement. But Umhofer said he’s saddened that L.A. Alliance is going to have to keep fighting to hold the city to its promises.
“The obvious city strategy here is hire a big, good law firm to fight on absolutely every front in hopes that the plaintiffs, the intervenors or the court will ultimately give up trying to hold the city accountable,” he said.
What's next
The parties are scheduled to appear in federal court in downtown L.A. on Monday, when a hearing will resume to determine whether the judge will hold the city of Los Angeles in contempt of court.
Carter has said in documents that he’s concerned “the city has demonstrated a continuous pattern of delay” in meeting its obligations with court orders under the settlement and that the “delay continues to this day.”
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Gab Chabrán
covers what's happening in food and culture for LAist.
Published January 9, 2026 3:52 PM
Asha Stark's Hot Grease specializes in Black fish fry with a side of social justice.
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Gab Chabrán
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LAist
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Topline:
Smorgasburg L.A. reopens this Sunday with 13 new food vendors joining the downtown market's annual grand reopening at the Row.
Why now: The January grand reopening with new vendors is a longstanding tradition that kicks off the year ahead. Vendors apply through Smorgasburg's website, and the team meets with every applicant to taste their food before acceptance. Competition remains fierce, with many more applicants than available spots. This year marks the market's 10th anniversary celebration in June.
Why it matters: The new vendor class demonstrates the resilience of L.A.'s independent food scene, following a challenging year for the restaurant industry, with concepts ranging from a Grammy-nominated producer's Persian-influenced pizza to Southern fried fish honoring Black migration history.
Every January, the open-air downtown food fair reopens after its winter break and announces new additions to its carefully selected group of regular vendors.
This year’s new vendor class demonstrates the resilience of L.A.'s independent food scene, ranging from a Grammy-nominated producer's Persian-influenced pizza to Southern fried fish celebrating Black American culinary traditions, to an LAist 2025 Tournament of Cheeseburger heavyweight contender.
The reopening also marks the start of Smorgasburg LA's 10th anniversary year, and will feature 41 returning vendors, who've helped build the regular event into a fun, family-friendly opportunity to try new, often cutting-edge food you may not be familiar with.
Doors open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at DTLA’s The Row, with free entry and free parking for the first two hours.
A new year
General manager Zach Brooks said this is his favorite time of year. "We add the new vendors at the beginning of the new year, everyone's excited."
Vendors apply through Smorgasburg's website, and the team meets with every applicant to taste their food before acceptance. Brooks said it's not a vetting process like "Shark Tank" but rather a matter of seeing if it's a good fit. Competition remains fierce, with many more applicants than available spots.
"I think it's just a testament to L.A. and the resilience of people who love this business and have a passion for it, and are going to continue to persevere and start their businesses and want to be out there selling food," Brooks said.
Here are a few highlights:
Viral orange chicken sandwich
Long Beach-based Terrible Burger becomes Smorgasburg's new permanent burger vendor after standout appearances at LAist's Tournament of Cheeseburgers and the market's rotating Smorgasburger Stand. The smashburger pop-up, run by husband-and-wife team Nicole and Ryan Ramirez, specializes in burgers that draw from pop culture and global influences. They've made waves with a Korean barbecue burger topped with bulgogi barbecue sauce and a viral orange chicken sandwich, previously available only at their Tuesday night residency at Long Beach's Midnight Oil, making its L.A. debut Sunday.
Terrible Burger's viral orange chicken sandwich makes its LA debut at Smorgasburg after being available only in Long Beach.
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Courtesy Terrible Burger
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"We have been big Smorgasburg fans for a really long time before we even started Terrible Burger. We would go to Smorgasburg on dates, just eat and hang out. And it was just always a little dream of, "oh, what if we ever sold food here?" Nicole Ramirez said.
Crispy fried snapper and thick-cut fries
Orange County-based Hot Grease, run by Asha Starks, is among four vendors graduating from residencies to permanent status. The Southern fried fish pop-up celebrates Black American history through food that honors Starks' family heritage.
"Folks often forget that there are Black folks in Orange County. My family came to Orange County during the second wave of the Great Migration, and they settled in Santa Ana... my food is very cultural. And the story, I feel like, is just as important to highlight," Starks said.
Hot Grease's crispy buttermilk fried snapper with thick-cut fries and "Ill Dill" tartar sauce.
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Courtesy Hot Grease
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Hot Grease serves crispy buttermilk fried snapper with thick-cut fries and small-batch sauces like "Ill Dill" tartar. Honoring the fish fry's history as a site of mutual aid, Starks directs 3% of sales to the Potlikker Line, Hot Grease's reproductive justice mutual aid fund. For January, she's added fish and grits, black-eyed peas and collard greens.
Pizza with a Persian twist
Mamani Pizza brings studio-born energy to Smorgasburg LA with pies featuring Persian-inspired creativity.
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Courtesy Mamani Pizza
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Mamani Pizza, from the Grammy-nominated producer Farsi, part of the music production team Wallis Lane, started making Neapolitan-style pizzas at his West L.A. recording studio a year ago. What began as late-night pies for friends and artists became an underground hit. Most pizzas are traditional, but Farsi adds Persian touches like The Mamani, topped with ground wagyu koobideh, roasted Anaheim chilis, Persian herbs and pomegranate molasses.
Cato Hernández
covers important issues that affect the everyday lives of Southern Californians.
Published January 9, 2026 3:48 PM
Potholes pop up after rain because water seeps into the road's crevices and weakens the foundation. Cars driving over it exacerbates the damage, leading to more cracks.
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Cato Hernández
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Topline:
All that rain didn’t just flood L.A. County streets, it chewed up our roads. You’re likely driving over more potholes than usual, so what do you do if your car gets damaged from one? You could get the government to pay for it.
How it works: You’ll want to take pictures of the pothole and your car. Then, submit a claim form. Personal property damage claims have a six-month filing period, and you’ll have to pay out-of-pocket first.
Unincorporated L.A. County: If the damage happened in an unincorporated area, you’ll have to print and mail this claim form.
Highway/freeways in L.A. or Ventura counties: For Caltrans damage claims, follow the filing directions here.
Manage your expectations: Keep in mind, this isn’t a quick way to cash. Claims can take months. You’ll also have to prove the agency was aware of the problem before your incident, such as by looking at street maintenance records for your area. Here are tips from the now-defunct site LAPotholes.com.
What’s next: Potholes continue to plague the city of L.A., and that’s probably not ending soon. In the next budget, StreetsLA (aka Bureau of Street Services) is proposing to prioritize funding for “large asphalt repair,” which means patching over sections rather than fully repaving streets, which some argue will lead to worse roads.
