The Brief

New data is out that suggests the January fires in the L.A. region affected the local economy on a wider scale than just the burn zones.

The findings come from the  L.A. County Department of Economic Opportunity and the  L.A. County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), a nonprofit organization that measures growth in the region.

Research initially focused on the loss of housing and jobs in the burn zones of the Palisades and Eaton fires. It’s now been expanded to include “secondary areas” — the periphery sections that were under mandatory evacuation but didn’t burn.

What happened to the local economy next to the burn zones?

While businesses in the burn zones were damaged or completely destroyed, those in the nearby areas were still significantly affected, said Dan Wei, an economist at LAEDC.

“ Even they did not experience any property damages, many of those businesses face cleanup, safety checks and challenges, such as staffing shortages and slower return of customer demand,” she said.

To see the financial effects, researchers modeled two scenarios for the evacuation zones where business was completely disrupted for two lengths of time. The first scenario was a shorter one where business was disrupted for about 20 days, while the second was a longer one that ended at around 45 days. Here’s what they found:

• Loss of sales for all goods and services: $625 million to $1.2 billion
• Employment losses: 3,250 to 6,140 job-years (this measures jobs for one calendar year)
• Labor income losses: $250 million to $473 million
• Loss of federal, state and local taxes: $119 million to $234 million

Factoring in the burn and evacuation zones, between $5 billion and $10 billion may have been lost in total economic output, and up to $1.6 billion in taxes.

The county has launched a campaign called "Shop Local. Dine Local. Recover Local." to help small businesses get back on their feet. Residents have also started restaurant crawls and dining clubs.

How was housing affected?

The flames destroyed or affected more than 18,000 structures, according to  CalFire damage inspection data, which doesn’t count smoke and ash damage.

“ While Eaton’s losses were concentrated in larger single family development, the Palisades experienced more diverse impacts across housing types, schools and community structures,” said Matthew Skyberg, a  senior GIS research analyst with LAEDC.

Single-family homes took the hardest hit between both fires, making up 68% of all destroyed structures.  

Rent and home sales

Fears of rent gouging were commonplace just after the fires. But when rental prices from last year were compared to current data from ZORI, Zillow’s rent index, the data only showed a slight short-term increase in the median rent for L.A. County after the fires started.

“ However, by six months from the end of the wildfire in June, the middle rent in the county had cooled below’s 2024 trend,” LAEDC’s Max Chomas said.

The increase was more pronounced in ZIP codes closer to the fires, but prices also dropped six months out.

The surge decreases the farther you get away from the fires.

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Courtesy LAEDC Institute for Applied Economics

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The median amount doesn’t include high and low  rents. As LAist has reported, some rents did spike above California’s 10% limit on price gouging after disasters.

Comparing the fires’ effects

The two fires had different effects on Altadena and Pacific Palisades communities.

In the burn zones, nearly 1,900 businesses and 10,000 workers were affected. Most of those were concentrated in the Palisades Fire.

For evacuation areas, that jumps to about 5,000 businesses and nearly 37,500 employees. The Eaton Fire takes the lion's share there.

Justin Adams, a senior economist with LAEDC, said  this is consistent with their overall findings.

“This suggests that while the Palisades experienced more concentrated direct damage, the Eaton fire potentially created wider reaching business disruptions,” he said.

“ While these businesses may recover more quickly, their temporary closure during the crisis did contribute significantly to economic losses and supply chains disruptions throughout the region,” Adams added.

Recovery metrics

Chomas said  there doesn’t appear to be evidence of a long-term flight of residents from the area. According to the data, house listings and sales in the burn areas have aligned with historical trends so far.

But there’s still much to be done to keep people in their communities. As of Sept. 9, officials have approved 798 permits, which represents 3% of destroyed residential buildings. Compared to other recent fires,  L.A. County is in the middle here on recovery.

Some rebuild permits for the L.A. fires have taken longer than expected to issue.

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Courtesy LAEDC Institute for Applied Economics

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“However, every wildfire seems to have its own recovery path,” Chomas said.

As of May 2025, 94% of filed insurance claims have been paid, which are mostly for residential properties. Nearly two thirds of those claims are for lots in the Palisades Fire.

Debris has also been cleared for nearly all parcels that signed up for federal removal.

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for recent television advertisements that promoted his political message while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda and accuses Trump of personally directing them. It asks the court to declare the ads illegal and stop the use of federal funds to pay for them.

Trump has faced bipartisan backlash for the ads, which glorify him and echo his campaign pitch as voters cast early ballots with the midterm elections less than a month away.

The spots, which began airing in September, already have cost more than $12 million to run, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, and a total of $20 million in Homeland Security Department funding has been tapped to pay for them.

Responding Monday to the criticism, Trump defended the ads as “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said he’d pay for them using his MAGA Inc. super PAC going forward.

But on Tuesday, the fifth ad in the campaign began airing with the notice “paid for by the U.S. Government,” promoting Trump’s military actions in Venezuela earlier this year. The same day, Trump made it clear he hasn’t committed to reimbursing any money that has already been spent, telling reporters “we’ll decide.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement that Trump is misusing taxpayer dollars in “a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he added.

Legal experts have suggested the ads run afoul of a federal statute against congressionally appropriated money being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and potentially other federal laws. The Homeland Security money tapped for the ads comes from a $175 million package Congress gave to the department as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have done to promote various policies. Legal experts have said the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

The defendants in the lawsuit — Trump, the White House, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Fall has only just begun, but it's already time to start thinking about the quintessential winter bug: the flu.

The annual flu season usually starts in October or November. But this year, it looks like the flu started to pick up in early September.

"There are enough signs pointing in the same direction to make me think, 'OK, yes. This is the start of flu season,'" says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The percentage of people testing positive for the flu in the West has been rising steadily since around the beginning of September, she says. And the number of people showing up in emergency departments because of the flu has also been rising for weeks, she adds.

"It's very uncommon to see flu activity rising this early. It's activity that we might normally see more like November or December," she says.

The timing of the flu season isn't the only thing that's odd. It's also unusual that flu activity seems to have started in Western states, such as California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

"It typically starts in the South and then expands from there," Rivers says. "So two uncommon developments there."

Rivers stresses that the amount of flu activity is still very low in most parts of the country. But that's starting to change as the flu picks up nationwide.

It's unclear why flu activity would have started so early, and in such an unusual part of the country. But one clue might be a new variant that evolved a mutation, which appears to make it better at evading existing immunity, especially among teenagers.

"That's our best argument for what's going on right now in terms of this early flu season," says Dr. Alex Greninger, a virologist who heads infectious disease diagnostics at the University of Washington. Doctors there are seeing as much flu right now as they usually would around Christmas, and the mutated variant appears to be common, he says.

So Greninger, Rivers and others are urging people to think about getting their flu shot earlier than usual.

"It's crucial that people get an influenza vaccine," says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this might be a year that people might want to get a vaccine early."

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't been promoting flu shots as it usually does. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, is a long-time vaccine skeptic.

"It is disappointing that CDC is quiet given that flu kills of hundreds of kids a year and can result in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last year as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protest what he called political interference at the agency.

The CDC declined to make an official available to NPR for this story. In a statement, a CDC spokesperson said, "CDC is developing a communications strategy to provide clear, accessible information about influenza vaccination and other critical steps people can take to protect themselves during respiratory virus season. This includes information about the benefits and risks of vaccination to support informed decision-making."
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