The Brief

When the Palisades Fire tore through coastal Los Angeles last month, it obliterated not only the sprawling mansions of celebrities, but also two seaside mobile home parks where hundreds of retirees and other long-time residents clung to a middle-class lifestyle in one of the area’s last bastions of affordability.

Now, local and state officials will reveal just how far they’ll go to ensure the recovery preserves housing for Angelenos who aren’t rich. Their response could set a precedent as California faces a likely future of more frequent and intense natural disasters on top of a statewide housing crisis. And the fate of the two parks, Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates and Tahitian Terrace, may foreshadow how climate change could affect other mobile home owners in California.

With the fire fully contained, displaced park residents say they’re no closer to answers about the future of their close-knit neighborhoods. The owners of Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates say they’re weighing their options.

Two big questions remain: Will the state or the city of Los Angeles constrain what park owners can do with their land in order to preserve affordable housing in the area? And will officials pony up any money to help them do it?

The two parks may have been more glamorous than most of California’s other nearly 6,000 mobile home parks, with their stunning views of the Pacific Ocean and a mix of two-story luxury models alongside modest trailers. But residents still face challenges that can make a mobile home owner’s path to disaster recovery more difficult than that of single-family homeowners.

For one, they’re more likely to be uninsured or underinsured, due in part to insurers’ reluctance to cover manufactured homes, said Ryan Sears, a policy advocate for Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, a nonprofit affordable housing developer that builds fire-resistant mobile homes. On top of that, the parks were located in a state-designated high-risk fire zone.

“You’re in what the state is saying is one of the worst possible areas to have a home, and me as an insurer with a bias against manufactured homes, I’m looking at that and thinking that’s just a box of matches sitting in the middle of a ring of fire,” Sears said.

Since residents owned their homes but leased the land underneath them, whether and when they’re able to rebuild will also depend on whether park owners choose to replace infrastructure damaged in the fire.

“If you’re a [single-family] homeowner elsewhere in the Palisades, as terrible as it is to have lost your home, at least you retain the right to return to the land,” said state Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat who represents Pacific Palisades. Mobile home residents, by contrast, “don’t even know what the plan is,” he said. “There’s an additional layer of uncertainty and a potential for total loss.”

An aerial view of the Palisades Fire devastation at the Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park.

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Ted Soqui

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SIPA USA via Reuters

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Residents wait for answers

While home values in the parks ballooned in recent decades, surpassing $1 million in some cases, residents who bought in years ago were paying as little as $600 per month for rent-controlled lots, not including the cost of their home. That made the area a haven for everyone from retired couples to supermarket employees, Sears said.

Nicole Miller, a retired florist, moved into the Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates in the early aughts, paying $340,000 for a small mobile home, “the kind your grandma would own,” just a crosswalk away from the beach.

“Somebody told me about this mobile home park on the Pacific Coast Highway that was a little gem and I should look into it,” said Miller, 67. She immediately fell in love with the balance of independence and community in the area, where she could tend the plants in her fenced-in yard and join her neighbors for water aerobics in the community pool. “We all respected each other’s privacy but looked out for each other,” she said.

Since the fires, Miller, who is staying with an uncle in Palm Springs, says she spends a lot of each day just staring into space. She thinks about her former neighbors, many of whom have scattered to different parts of the state.

Miller had paid off her home and owed $980 per month in rent for her space, affordable on her fixed income. Palisades Bowl management has paused collecting rent since the fire, but Miller and other residents worry that this could provide a pretext for evicting them in the future, since their leases say that a catastrophe does not provide an excuse for non-payment, Miller said. She said residents also haven’t received a promised refund of the rent they paid at the beginning of January, or heard anything from park owners about their plans.

“We aren’t any better off today than we were the day after the fire,” she said.

The right to rebuild

California law says mobile home park owners who rebuild after a natural disaster must allow tenants to return — but that they can increase rental rates to cover the cost of rebuilding.

As residents continued to sift through the rubble of Palisades Bowl last week, looking for their belongings, co-owner Colby Biggs said park owners were still assessing the damage and planned to ask the Army Corps of Engineers for help with the cleanup by early this week. That help will give the park owners a better sense of the cost to rebuild, said Biggs, who represents a family trust with a 50% stake in the property.

His grandparents bought the 150-unit mobile home park in 2005, and some of the units dated to the 1950s, he said. Mortgage insurance will cover the loss of the clubhouse and office buildings, he said, but not any of the underground infrastructure that makes the park run.

“If we have to go invest $100 million to rebuild the park and we’re not able to recoup that in some fashion, then it’s not likely we will rebuild the park,” he said. “If we can get federal or state funding, it’s a different story.”

“We’re not evicting anybody,” Biggs said. “But if the park’s not rebuilt, then obviously the residents wouldn’t have the right to reoccupy the park.”

A state law known as the Mello Act requires that any affordable housing demolished in the coastal zone be replaced by an equivalent number of affordable units. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive order in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires that exempted owners replacing housing destroyed by fire from complying with some permitting requirements under the act. But the exemption applies only to properties where there is no change in the property’s use or density. The order “establishes an accelerated process for homeowners to rebuild what they had before,” said a spokesperson for the mayor, Clara Karger.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom tour the downtown business district of Pacific Palisades after the fire.

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Eric Thayer

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Adding to the confusion is uncertainty about whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency will play its traditional role of funding and coordinating recovery from the disaster. President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk have threatened mass firings at multiple federal agencies and froze their funds, in violation of Congress’s Constitutional authority to appropriate money. “FEMA should be terminated!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday, amid media reports that administration appointees had fired the agency’s chief financial officer and defied a court order by shutting down funding for some disaster-related grants. The president has also suggested he might withhold federal aid unless California changes its voting laws.

Democratic state senators Friday proposed a state-run relief fund that would help families and individuals who were affected by the recent fires but unable to get federal aid. Allen said he and state Sens. Sasha Pérez and Aisha Wahab — Democrats representing Glendale and Fremont, respectively — plan to introduce a separate bill that would temporarily control rents on mobile homes in the fire zone and strengthen mobile home owners’ right to rebuild. The bill does not include any reconstruction funding specifically for mobile home parks.

Will government help?

Legislators could award extra funding to a state program that supports repair and replacement of mobile homes and parks, including those affected by a natural disaster. Lawmakers created the program, known as the Manufactured Housing Opportunity and Revitalization Program, to help residents, non-profit groups and owners fix safety and health problems at aging parks. It gave out $100 million over the past two years, but paused accepting applications in summer 2024. Low- and moderate-income Californians who are disaster victims can qualify for loans to replace their mobile homes through another state program, CalHome.

A coalition of housing nonprofits and community land trusts sent a letter to state lawmakers last month urging them to prioritize affordable housing as Los Angeles rebuilds.

“As we know, there is a growing threat of speculative real estate practices in the wake of climate-fueled disasters,” the letter read. It called on elected officials to use disaster relief funds to rebuild the two mobile home parks and preserve them as permanently affordable housing through a community land trust, a nonprofit that would retain ownership of the land while leasing or selling homes to residents.

While critics might question whether mobile home residents displaced by the fire should be automatically entitled to live on the coast, or whether public money would be better spent housing Californians who have even fewer resources, park residents had a simple answer: It’s our home.

“That’s what we all signed up for and put our life savings into: digs at the ocean,” said Greg Garber, a hardwood flooring contractor who said he paid $150,000 in 1999 for a home he expected to leave to his children. Losing it, he said, was “like losing a loved one.”

Nationwide, nearly 80% of manufactured homes are located in areas at high risk of a wildfire, flood or other climate hazard, a new Urban Institute report finds. More than one-third of California’s manufactured housing stock was built before 1976, the report estimates, meaning those homes are especially dilapidated and likely to be damaged in a disaster.

Some Los Angeles-area mobile home parks have converted to condominiums, said Sears, selling lots individually along with the homes atop them. It priced out those who couldn’t afford the increased cost to buy in, he said.

Palisades Bowl itself almost went that route nearly 20 years ago. Biggs said his grandparents tried to subdivide and sell off the property after a landslide made some of the units uninhabitable. But a majority of residents opposed the move, he said, and the city blocked it. In a related court case, the California Supreme Court ruled that the conversion was subject to the Mello Act, meaning developers must replace any affordable housing that was lost.

Disasters drive inequality

Other California wildfires have wiped out local mobile home parks, one of the few remaining sources of affordable homeownership in the state.

Thirty mobile home parks housed more than 1,400 people in the Sierra foothills town of Paradise before the Camp Fire ravaged it in 2018. Of those, only about five have been rebuilt, said Seana O’Shaughnessy, who co-chairs a housing committee as part of the city’s collaborative rebuilding effort.

“Every single mobile home park was grossly underinsured, so the ability for owners to build back was incredibly difficult,” she said. “There had to be some source of public funding to make it happen.”

The state’s decision not to allow mobile home parks to qualify for disaster relief grants aimed at multifamily housing made it harder for park owners, she said. Many former mobile home residents left the state, she said, and some are still searching for permanent housing years later.

The Palisades Fire devastated the Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park, where rebuilding is a complex question.

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Ted Soqui

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SIPA USA via Reuters

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In Santa Rosa, the non-profit developer Burbank Housing replaced a 162-unit mobile home park with affordable apartments after the Tubbs Fire incinerated it, displacing the mostly elderly residents. Staff for the developer met with residents after the tragedy, helping them access recovery funds and surveying them about their needs, said Burbank Housing Chief Executive Larry Florin. The 13-acre park was rezoned and divided into two parcels: one with market-rate apartments, and another with units guaranteed to be affordable for 55 years, paid for in part by federal low-income housing tax credits set aside for disaster relief. Rents are based on income and range from about $700 to $1,500 per month, slightly higher than the rates residents were paying at the park, Florin said.

Thirty-two of the park’s original residents have moved into the new apartments, among other tenants.

“When neighborhoods are destroyed, they lose the social network that’s binding them together because people spread to all ends of the earth,” Florin said. “We very deliberately have tried to rebuild not just the homes but the community.”

While disasters can occasionally lead to innovative projects like the Santa Rosa development, they often increase inequality, studies have found.

As Los Angeles begins to recover from the Palisades and Eaton fires, the city council is weighing whether to protect tenants from eviction. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed charges against real estate agents accused of violating the state’s ban on rental price gouging, and researchers are documenting the disproportionate effect of the Eaton Fire on Altadena’s Black residents.

Miller, the Palisades Bowl homeowner, hopes her neighborhood isn’t forgotten. She wants to go back, and says many of her former neighbors do too. The park was their only option to afford living in Pacific Palisades, she said.

“We’re hoping they return it to its former glory,” she said, “but better.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced several significant rule changes for the 99th Oscars, including AI protections for actors and writers as well as expanded eligibility for international films.

In a statement to NPR, the Academy on Saturday said the changes are in response to listening to the global filmmaking community and addressing barriers to entry in its eligibility process.

The Academy added that its rules and eligibility standards have always evolved alongside technologies such as sound, color, and CGI, and that AI is no different. Awards rules and guidelines are reviewed and refined each year.

A blow for Tilly Norwood 

Among the most noteworthy changes, the Academy now explicitly states that only roles, "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" are eligible for Acting awards. In other words, AI creations like the much-hyped Tilly Norwood cannot hope to win a Best Actress Oscar anytime soon.

Particle6, the production company behind Norwood, did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on Saturday about its creations' ban from consideration. In March, Norwood commented, "Can't wait to go to the Oscars!" in an Instagram post announcing its newly released music video.

The Academy also requires screenplays to be "human-authored" and said it reserved the right to investigate the use of generative AI in any submission.

Meanwhile, qualifying flesh-and-blood human actors can now be nominated for multiple performances in the same category if those performances get enough votes to land in the top five. So, someone like Anne Hathaway, who has five major movies scheduled for release in 2026, could now theoretically sweep the nominations – though that outcome seems extremely unlikely.

"If an actor has an extremely prolific year, might we even see someone swallow up three of the five nominations?," wrote Deadline's awards columnist and chief film critic Pete Hammond about the changes. "Probably won't happen, but it's now possible."

Under previous rules, an actor could only receive one nomination per category. If they had two high-ranking performances in Best Actor, for example, only the one with the most votes would move forward.

International films prioritizes filmmakers over countries

While international films can still be the official selection of their countries, now they can qualify by winning the top prize at a major international festival such as the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the Golden Lion at Venice, or the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Historically, countries "owned" the nomination, and only one film per country was allowed. The new rules allow multiple films from the same country to compete if they are critically acclaimed, and it shifts the honor from a geopolitical entity to the filmmakers themselves.

Largely positive response

The changes have prompted a largely positive reaction from the film community on social media, such as on the popular The Shade Room entertainment and celebrity-focused Instagram feed, where commenters widely praised the "human-only" move to protect creative jobs.

The Academy's Awards Committee oversees the rules in tandem with branch executive committees, the International Feature Film Executive Committee and the Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee.

The rules are scheduled to go into effect next year, covering films released in 2026.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Los Angeles changes fast, and oftentimes that means some of the architectural relics of our shared past get swept up and paved over in all the "progress." (RIP Garden of Allah.)

But there are still places where you can find ruins that tell a tale, like a long-forgotten speakeasy reputedly for old Hollywood near La Crescenta.

The ruins are still there 

On a recent afternoon, author and local historian Mike Lawler led me just beyond the boundary of Crescenta Valley Park. Joggers like me might have seen an old, towering stone arch shrouded by bushes there — and wondered what lies beyond.

Turns out there was once a place called the Verdugo Lodge back there and Lawler has spent years excavating its history.

A car speeds away from the lodge onto New York Avenue. The stone archway that still stands can be seen in the background.

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Kadletz Family Archives)

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“It was a very high-end speakeasy for a time,” Lawler, who also helps run the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, said. “An amazing thing. And all the ruins are still here, just like this arch.”

Lawler said we don’t know exactly when the lodge was built, but we do have some of the picture starting in the late 1920s. The place was set up kind of like a timeshare where people bought 10 x 10 foot ‘tent lots’ that gave them access to on-site amenities. There was a golf course, stables, trout stream, a swimming pool — and a lodge with gambling and alcohol.

“The Crescenta Valley in the teens and '20s was a hotbed of moonshine, prostitution, all that stuff," Lawler said. "It was a quiet little community. But in all these canyons up here, stuff was going on. Illegal stuff!”

We don’t have a full guest list, but Lawler said it’s likely at least a few Hollywood types had gone up to the lodge to circumvent Prohibition era laws.

In some ways, it was kind of like the original glamping. Lawler said patrons probably weren’t doing much sleeping, though.

“They might have been unconscious!” he said with a chuckle.

Lawler led me to a road that swooped around a meadow. We passed by a massive swimming pool nestled into the hillside.

Once known as the “Crystal Pool,” it’s now empty and fenced off, with pitch black locker rooms below.

The exterior of the locker rooms for the old Crystal Pool.

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Robert Garrova / LAist

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We continued our journey up the hill and eventually arrived at a cascading stone stairway.

And at the top, the big show: overgrown with orange monkey flowers and goliath agaves lies the foundation of the old Verdugo Lodge, with lofty stone fireplaces the only guardians keeping the surrounding oak trees at bay.

Lawler takes out a floorplan that one of the former owners drew up for him.

“This is what it was laid out like on the inside. So a dancehall, and band stand on that side... And then upstairs was the gambling,” Lawler said.

Lawler had in hand a copy of a Los Angeles Times article from 1933 he found. The headline reads: “Revelers Flee in Lodge Raid.”

“The police that raided it were here at 3 o'clock in the morning. And there were still 500 people here. And they said it was the classiest joint they had ever raided... Anyway, people were diving out of windows and everything,” Lawler explained.

In a ruin like this, covered with moss and overgrowth, the imagination can run wild, too.

The archway that still stands outside of what's now known as Mountain Oaks.

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Lawler pointed out a questionable door jam below the old dancefloor that’s been cemented over.

“That is a door. So what is behind there? So there’s a room in there that got walled in for some reason,” he said.

What we do know is that, sometime after the raid, the tawdry Verdugo Lodge and the surrounding land were purchased and then renamed Mountain Oaks by the Kadletzes — an entrepreneurial family who had run everything from a Turkish bath to a mini golf course. Over the next few decades, the family would rent the place out to local groups for recreational retreats.

The future of Mountain Oaks 

After they sold it in the ‘60s, Lawler said Mountain Oaks faced a “nightmare” of development threats. Over the years, some of the subdivided "tent lots" had been combined and sold off, Lawler said. A dozen private homes now stand on these pieces of land, next to the ruins of the Verdugo Lodge.

A map showing the Mountain Oaks public property acquired by The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA).

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Last year, with help from the City of Glendale, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant among other funding sources, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) put up $6.1 million to acquire 33-acres of the land — not including the private lots where the homes stand — so the public can continue to roam the meadow and ruins.

Paul Edelman, MRCA's director of natural resources and planning, said his group will continue to manage the land, doing things like brush clearance, trash pickup and sign maintenance. And he said there are no current plans to remove the ruins or make any major changes to the property.

“If somebody comes up with a grand idea where they can find some funding for us to do something to enhance it, we’re always open to it,” Edelman said.

The purchase was good news for local preservationist Joanna Linkchorst.

“I grew up directly up the hill. But I always saw the sign that said ‘private property’ and didn’t really think about it until several years ago when I finally asked Mike. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, we got a resort speakeasy down the street,’” Linkchorst said standing among the oaks and overgrowth.

Linkchorst, who founded the group Friends of Rockhaven to preserve another nearby historic site, said it’s been amazing to see all of the decaying structures that were still hiding out at Mountain Oaks.

“There’s almost like these little ghosts in your head as you imagine what it was like when there was a beautiful wood floor and there was a second floor that people came jumping out of,” Linkchorst said.

Now, let’s check in to the Overlook Hotel.

That’s the fictional place Stanley Kubrick brought to life in his 1980 film The Shining, loosely based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name.

A local architect who hails from South Pasadena meticulously crafted a 3D model of the iconic space so Shining fans everywhere never have to check out.

‘I just couldn’t stop’ 

At his day job, architect Anthony Chieh mainly works on residential and boutique commercial spaces. But over the course of five months, he spent his nights meticulously recreating a virtual replica of the Overlook Hotel from the film that first scared him when he was 12.

Of course he started with the deeply haunted Room 237. That’s where Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, has a terrifying encounter with a ghostly woman.

Chieh's 3D rendering of Room 237

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Anthony Chieh

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“But once I started, I just couldn’t stop,” Chieh told LAist.

“I ended up modeling the Colorado Lounge, and then after that I was thinking maybe I should make the lobby and then arriving to the Gold Room, and then Grady’s bathroom.”

“It’s like a rabbit hole,” he said.

Users who download Chieh’s free 3D model can fly through all of those spaces, immersed in atmospheric sounds and music from the film.

“It’s interesting to dive into these kind of fictional environments and try to make sense of it,” Chieh said. “And the hope is people will get a different perspective once they’re in there.”

Kubrick’s take on the Overlook was famously inspired by real hotels like the Timberline Lodge in Oregon and the Ahwahnee in Yosemite. But the interiors you see in the film were created on sound stages in England.

“Real architecture, physical buildings, are built for people to live. And for movies, these are more meant to express the emotional aspect of things. It’s a psychological construct,” Chieh said.

In a recently published video essay on YouTube, Chieh dives deep into those psychological constructs and how, as he puts it, “Kubrick designed the Overlook Hotel not as a backdrop, but as the film's true villain.”

How spaces scare 

Chieh said during the monthslong process he was reminded of the power of architecture and design in the real world too – whether it’s an uncomfortably repetitive carpet design or a claustrophobic hallway.

“A physical construct can affect your emotion,” Chieh said.

“You can use it in a way to make people feel comfortable and you can also use it in a way to create fear.”

Chieh's 3D rendering of the Torrance's apartment in 'The Shining'

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Anthony Chieh

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What’s next for this architect moonlighting as a 3D modeler?

Chieh says he’s thinking about giving the spaceship from “2001: A Space Odyssey" the virtual treatment next. Or maybe turning to a local non-fictional space, like the Stahl House.

That is, of course, if he can ever escape the Overlook.