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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Getty Images

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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.”

In just four days, the Los Angeles Official Martin Luther King Day Parade will take over South L.A.

The LA Local recently spoke with Sabra Wady, the parade’s lead organizer, who said this year’s parade will look much the same as recent years.

So, whether you’re attending the parade or watching it on TV, here’s everything you need to know about Monday’s parade:

The procession will begin at 10 a.m., with ABC7 set to begin a broadcast at 11 a.m.

What time does the parade start? How can I watch? Is anything happening after?

Wady said the best place to catch the parade in person is the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. King Boulevard, or “camera corner,” where the parade will culminate and organizers are planning a live preshow. Bleacher seats, though, will be limited.

The Metro K Line runs directly to the intersection, dropping people off at the Martin Luther King Jr. Metro station.

Onlookers can also post up along the parade route with folding chairs and other self-arranged seating, Wady said.

The parade broadcast will run until 1 p.m., but Wady said the procession is expected to keep going until mid-afternoon.

“After the cameras stop rolling, it’s the people’s parade,” Wady said.

LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Councilmembers Curren Price and Heather Hutt – who represent council districts 8, 9 and 10, respectively — will organize the annual MLK Freedom Festival in the Leimert Park Plaza from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

What route will the parade take?

The route will remain the same, running down King Boulevard from Western Avenue to Crenshaw Boulevard before turning south down Crenshaw and heading to Leimert Park. Much of the route will be closed to traffic overnight before the parade.

More than 150 groups, including bands, floats, horseback riders and marchers, will trek down the boulevard. Wady said organizers cut off new sign-ups weeks ago in order to keep the parade manageable.

What will road closures look like?

Colin Sweeney, a spokesperson for the LA Department of Transportation, said in an email that the department will close off traffic down the main parade route overnight.

Here are the roads that will be closed to all vehicles for the duration of the parade and festival.

• King Boulevard from Vermont Avenue to Crenshaw Boulevard 
• Crenshaw Boulevard from King Boulevard to 48th Street
• Leimert Boulevard from 8th Avenue to Leimert Park 
• Degnan Avenue between 43rd Street and Leimert Park

Sweeney said only residents will be allowed to drive into the band of neighborhoods directly along the length of the parade route. That includes the blocks from 39th Street to 42nd Street along King Boulevard and the blocks between McClung Drive and Victoria Avenue along the Crenshaw closure.

The transportation department will allow traffic to cross the parade route at major intersections — including Western Avenue, Arlington Avenue and Stocker Street — but those crossings will be shut down at 10 a.m. All closed roads will stay blocked off until the parade and festival wrap up and transportation officials determine crowds have sufficiently dispersed, Sweeney said.

Wady said the parade is expected to peter out around mid-afternoon. The festival at Leimert Park Plaza is scheduled to end at 5 p.m.

Vehicles parked in the parade assembly area, parade route and disbanding area will be subject to impound or tickets, Sweeney wrote.

Topline:

By the numbers: Film and television shoot days totaled 4,625 in the final three months of 2025, up 5.1% in that timeframe. But overall last year, there were 19,694 shoot days, which is down 16.1% from 2024's total of 23.480.

Why it matters: Production in Los Angeles has been slow to rebound since the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hollywood writers and actors strikes in 2023. There is also increased competition from other states that offer appealing film tax credits and other incentives for productions that decide to take their shoot outside of California. This summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded California's Film and TV Tax Credit Program in an effort to lure productions back to the Golden State.

What's next: Film L.A.'s Phil Sokoloski says that many of the productions approved under the expanded tax credit program are just now getting underway, and he hopes the industry will start to see the effects of not only the tax incentive expansion in 2026, but also L.A. Mayor Karen Bass' directives to streamline the permitting and shooting process in the city.

In L.A., there is no shortage of events to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

Since 1986, the federal holiday is observed on the third Monday of January to honor the life and legacy of the Civil Rights leader.

California African American Museum

The California African American Museum is hosting a King Day scavenger hunt on Sunday from 2 to 3 p.m. On Monday, it is hosting an all-day event honoring King that will culminate with a performance by the Inner City Youth Orchestra of L.A., which is billed as the largest majority Black youth orchestra in the country.

Orchestra at Skirball

The orchestra will also perform at the Skirball Cultural Center on Saturday evening. The free event is already at capacity, but you can try your luck by signing up for the waitlist here. Earlier Saturday, the orchestra will join the Santa Monica Symphony for its annual MLK concert.

Parades and celebrations

Cedric the Entertainer will be the grand marshal of this year’s official L.A. MLK Day Parade on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard between Western and Crenshaw avenues on Monday. If you’re looking for a parade earlier in the weekend, you can head to Long Beach’s MLK Day parade on Saturday. Also on Saturday is a celebration of King’s legacy at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Culver City.

Volunteer opportunities

In 1994, President Bill Clinton officially decreed MLK Day as a day of service. If you’re looking for opportunities to volunteer, grab free tickets to Monday’s MLK Day Volunteer Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

Free access to state parks

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that more than 200 California state parks will be free to enter on Monday. The move comes after the Trump administration eliminated MLK Day and Juneteenth from the list of days when it’s free to access national parks. There are 12 free state parks on the list in L.A. County, including Los Angeles and Will Rogers State Historic Parks, as well as Topanga and Malibu Creek State Parks. See the full list here.

A 2017 Los Angeles Times article tells the tragic story of Lai Hang, a terminally ill woman who killed her 18-year-old son George, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

It’s a carefully reported story by journalist Frank Shyong about a family, about the shame and stigma that can surround mental illness in Asian American communities, and how media portrayals of people with mental disorders can perpetuate harmful misconceptions.

So when Shyong was first approached about the idea of adapting the story he wrote into a narrative film, he had some “very intense” concerns about whether a film would get the story right.

But after conversations with the filmmakers, and thinking through the potential value of telling fictionalized stories based on real-life events, Shyong says, “ I think I realized that my story was in a lot of ways incomplete.”

Nine years later, the film, titled Rosemead, is finished. Directed by Eric Lin and written by Marilyn Fu, the film stars Lucy Liu as Irene, a character based on Hang, and Lawrence Shou as Joe, who’s based on George.

And Shyong, who is credited as an executive producer and served as a consultant on the film, says “it’s sort of completing the circle a little bit” — fleshing out Hang and George as “full 360 degree human beings” and giving glimpses of how their story might have ended differently.

Reporting on trauma in Asian American communities

Back in 2015, when the events depicted in Rosemead happened, the breaking news coverage revealed the basics of what was known at the time — that a woman had fatally shot her son in a Rosemead motel and turned herself in.

“ I think a lot of people probably realized there was more story there,” Shyong says. But the only person who knew the details, Hang’s longtime friend Ping Chong, had declined to talk to the media.

Still, Shyong kept following up because the court records hinted at a story that he thought should be told.

The court records revealed that Hang had been dying of cancer, and that Chong continued to visit her after she turned herself in, performing Buddhist rituals for her.

“Just knowing those two facts,” Shyong says, “and knowing Asian American families, and how complete and terrifying the sense of responsibility that a parent can feel toward a child, I just thought there's gotta be something there.”

He would visit Chong’s shop, a traditional Chinese pharmacy, leaving notes for her and talking to her about why he wanted to know more. And he gained her trust.

 ”You just have to say, ‘This is [the] story I think is here. And do you think that story is true? And if so, can you help me tell it?’ And that's all I did,” Shyong says. “I think that's all any journalist ever does.”

It’s a story that Shyong says he would come to learn is more common than many may expect.   “When you are a caregiver in these communities,” Shyong says, “you can find and name a tragic story like this in probably every zip code.”

How filmmaking and journalism can complement each other

Shyong’s article ends with this poignant quote from Chong, about her friend: “People will only know her as the mother who killed her son [...] But she was more.”

The piece itself goes a long way toward dispelling Chong’s concern, including details about Hang’s life — that she was a talented graphic designer, that she was “beautiful, smart and ambitious,” that she’d lost her husband to cancer, and that she deeply cared about her son.

But “in this case fiction,” Shyong says, “could give closure to characters in a way that I couldn't in reality. It could tell the fullness of this family story.”

The film shows Liu’s character Irene having fun with her son at the beach, and joining his therapy sessions at the urging of a psychiatrist, despite being visibly uncomfortable doing so.

It shows George (Joe in the film) with his friends, who come to visit him after he has an intense schizophrenic episode at school.

The sound design gives a sense of what it’s like to experience schizophrenia, and a part of the film where Joe runs away shows how quickly a boy with a mother and friends who care about him can become an unhoused person who someone might fear on the street.

Ultimately, the film ends on a note of hope, which grew out of something that Shyong learned from Chong after the article was published. In a way that he couldn’t do in print, “It added parts to the story that I wanted to see depicted.”