Middle-Class Dreams Lie in Ruins in Palisades Mobile Home Park

The Los Angeles wildfires destroyed mobile homes, leaving people who saved to build a middle-class life digging through rubble for anything that remained.


The remnants of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, a mobile home community destroyed by fire. Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

By Jacob Bernstein
Reporting from Los Angeles
Published Jan. 11, 2025
Updated Jan. 12, 2025, 7:02 a.m. ET

Up on Amalfi Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, luxury homes owned by celebrities are still standing. But down at the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, a mobile home community on Pacific Coast Highway just across from the beach, all of the nearly 200 homes are destroyed.

“Nothing but ruins,” said Maria Nol, who lived in a mobile home there with her daughter, her son-in-law and her three grandchildren. … Ms. Nol was one of many people who worked and struggled their way to a middle-class life but has now been digging through rubble for anything that remained.

“The media is advertising and publicizing all the celebrities that lost their homes, but the people who live here inherited homes from their parents who bought in the ’70s,” Ms. Nol’s daughter, Lynda Park, 43, said on Friday. … Ms. Park had worked at the Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church. That also burned to the ground this week. So did the home of the family her mother worked for as a cleaner.

Ms. Nol owned the house in the 16000 block of Pacific Coast Highway but did not have an insurance policy on it. Getting one had become too expensive, she said, given the high probability

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Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section. More about Jacob Bernstein