In September, I drove up Lake Avenue to meet Shawna Dawson Beer, one of the most outspoken locals spearheading recovery ideas. At first, the storefronts conveyed a staid sense of normality, not too different from what I remember growing up. But as I kept driving, the view quickly transformed into a tattered landscape of cleared lots and lingering debris. The homes on Dawson Beer’s block just west of Lake were all gone, though on the corner, two women carried on a normal conversation, as if they had just bumped into each other on a neighborhood stroll. On Dawson Beer’s lot, the first inklings of apple trees were sprouting up from the cleared dirt.
Dawson Beer, who runs a private Facebook group for Altadena residents that counts more than 10,000 members, has an extensive list of fixes that she thinks will help the area regain its footing—from soil testing to ensure the land isn’t laced with toxic contaminants to new financing structures to help people afford to rebuild. But perhaps her most important idea is a call for Altadena to become an independent city, a tall order at any time but especially in the midst of fire recovery. To effectively build back, she says, Altadena must break free from the existing power structure. “We need to steer our own ship,” she tells me.
