How Altadena businesses are trying to recover from the Eaton fire

from Levi SumagasaiCalMatters

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A year after the Eaton fire, some small business owners in Altadena are scrambling to rebuild while, in some cases, struggling to move out of homes that burned or were severely damaged.

For others, like Steve’s Pets Store owner Carrie Myers, it’s just too much.

“People want me back,” Myers said. “But I don’t know if we can survive there. Nobody lives there… mentally I’m not there.”

Myers said she had just received a delivery before the fire last January, so about 65 animals died, including cats, rats, birds and a 40-year-old parrot. The store is now closed for good, and its website shows a message from former employee Michael Mersola, who said he would miss him because “people would just (hang out) here, I swear it was the Starbucks for animal lovers haha.”

Meanwhile, Carrie’s husband Ed is busy trying to rebuild their home that burned down. He had been dealing with a long insurance process with State Farm that, after four corrective claims, finally got better.

One regulator “was the king of no” and “existed like a big cloud in our lives for four to five months,” Ed Myers said. “Then one day, like winning the lottery, we got a new regulator.”

Other survivors of the fire, which killed 19 people, complained about insurance companies assigning them multiple adjusters, slowing things down. Now, Ed said, things look better than they did six months ago, and they’re on the road to recovery, even though they were underinsured, something many fire survivors have in common.

Small business owners and others CalMatters spoke with for this story emphasized the importance of thoughtful and timely assistance from insurance companies, community organizations and all levels of government to businesses and residents as key to the recovery of the unincorporated city of about 43,000 residents — even for the businesses that survived the fire.

“Our struggling businesses can’t afford to wait,” said Altadena City Council Chief Nick Arnzen, who called the community’s road to recovery a chicken-and-egg situation. “Without the population coming back to Altadena, they’re in a tough spot.”

Los Angeles County has received about 2,700 applications for Altadena restoration permits, according to the county’s dashboard. Of those, the county has issued about 1,200 permits and 560 homes are currently being restored.

“Heart of Altadena”

Jimmy Orlandini, owner of Altadena Hardware, estimates it could take five years to reopen his business in its original location after nearly the entire building burned down.

“Five years is an eternity to not have a working business,” he said. While others are rebuilding, they’ll need hardware, so he’s looking for a temporary place to run his business while he waits for the property owner to rebuild. It had 21 employees at the time of the fire; he believes most of them have found other jobs, while some are relying on unemployment benefits.

His family has been in the hardware business for decades and he has two other locations elsewhere. But he has deep ties to the community, having lived in Altadena for 40 years, since he was 2 years old.

“It’s really hard,” he said. “Altadena has been our best store in terms of revenue and our relationship with our customer base.” (Another business owner CalMatters spoke with, a pizza restaurant owner, called the hardware store “the heart of Altadena.”)

Orlandini and his family returned to their house in October. It didn’t burn, although “everything around us burned,” he said. But Mercury Insurance ultimately deemed it a total loss due to smoke damage and lead contamination to all of its contents.

“We don’t have a couch,” he said. “We’re sitting on camping chairs in the living room. The kids still haven’t gotten their toys back.” But he said they finally got a big payout for the contents of their house a few weeks ago, so “now we can start buying stuff.”

Uneven help

A common refrain among small business owners in Altadena: Some of the help available to homeowners isn’t available to them.

Matt Schodorf co-owns Café de Leche with his wife Anya. Their home, about 15 to 20 minutes away in Highland Park, Los Angeles, is fine except for some ash on the ceiling. He understands that Altadena homeowners whose homes have been destroyed and want to rebuild need help – these are his clients.

But their Altadena Cafe, the only building they owned out of their four locations and which he says was their busiest store, burned down. Now they are dealing with the recovery process and in some ways they feel left behind.

“FEMA in particular initially excluded us from debris removal,” Schodorff said. So Schodorff and his wife complained and were featured “all over the media,” including CNN. FEMA included Café de Leche in a federally funded debris cleanup after the media appearances, Schodorff said. He also credited Los Angeles County Supervisor Catherine Barger’s office for standing up for them.

Schodorf also said, as have others, that the Los Angeles Department of Economic Opportunity has been a huge help in providing information on grants and other support.

Still, “it feels disappointing because we feel very small potatoes, especially from a government perspective,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like it would be too much to ask: waive the permit fees, clean up your lots. Don’t make us go on the national news begging for help.”

Daniel Harlow, whose office was destroyed, agreed the business needed more help. His custom computer programming and software development business was up and running again, but it was in a separate structure in his home and was a total loss.

“A lot of homeowners insurance rules don’t apply to businesses,” he said. “Not having more help for small and medium-sized businesses is a problem.”

For example, state law that allows homeowners to get some advance payments without having to provide a full inventory of the contents of their home does not apply to the business.

Harlow is now busy with both the reconstruction of his office and the repair of his house, which suffered some damage. He lives in a rented house.

“I try to find architects and contractors while running my business,” he said. “It’s basically (another) full-time job.”

Change and more changes to come

Zak Fishman’s Prime Pizza in Altadena is the only pizzeria of the four in Altadena to survive the fire. This was a bit of good news for his family. Their house burned down and now they are rebuilding it.

Fishman, who owns several other locations in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere, said his Altadena location was closed for about a month but is doing pretty well now, given the circumstances.

“We’re really seeing a shift,” he said. “You see different types of people coming in. A lot of workers in the area didn’t have anywhere else to eat (lunch).”

Fishman opened the Altadena location in September 2023 and has seen a lot of growth, he said. He said sales at the location likely would have increased 20 percent over the previous year if the fire hadn’t happened. Now he says they are up about 8% to 10%.

“I’m definitely not complaining, it’s amazing,” he said.

With about half of Altadena’s businesses destroyed in the fire, it will be a long road back.

Judy Matthews, president of the Altadena Chamber of Commerce, said her group is working with other chambers and the county to help promote local shopping and identify more opportunities for grants and assistance for small and medium-sized businesses.

“There is more and more collaboration between local government and business,” she said. “This is critical. No one person can stand alone and say I did it.”

When more of the community is able to recover, it may look drastically different. Whether homeowners bounce back may depend on their insurance provider and whether they can fill the gap of being underinsured, some said. Whether small businesses recover may depend on the type of service or goods they offer and their location.

“Of greatest concern are retail and specialty stores and those that depend on a steady flow of customers,” Matthews said, noting that Altadena’s limited foot traffic and visibility due to its location has been and will continue to be a factor.

Arnzen, the city council president, said there is “a lot of competition for funds and help. There is the potential for people to feel left out. This is exacerbated by feelings of trauma and in some cases historical neglect, especially from marginalized communities.”

Nearly half of Altadena’s black households, or 48 percent, were destroyed or had extensive damage, according to the NAACP.

“We need to ensure a balanced recovery that supports different types of businesses,” Matthews said.

Orlandini, the owner of the hardware store, said he expects his business and customers to change.

“It’s definitely going to be a different city,” he said. “My store used to service older homes and a lot of them are gone.”

He added: “That’s the thing that worries me most about the fire – how much of history is gone and will never come back.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.