My Childhood Home Is on Fire

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Firefighters stand below as brush and trees burn during the Sunset Fire near Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California, on January 8, 2025. | Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images Multiple major wildfires, fanned by unusually strong seasonal winds, are currently burning through the Los Angeles area, leaving devastation in their wake. Thus far, those fires have led to at least five fatalities, massive evacuations, and significant damage to more than 2,000 buildings.  Though destructive fire seasons have become increasingly common in California, it’s still relatively rare to see a major urban area facing fires in the way Los Angeles now is. But as populations have grown in communities that are close to vegetation and open space, experts told Vox, the risks of wildfires moving into denser, urban areas has increased. That dynamic is compounded by climate change, which has fueled extreme heat and parched the landscape in regions like Southern California that are already susceptible to wildfires.  Collectively, these factors mean that wildfires may become more frequent in urban areas — and while cities do have some safeguards in place against these natural disasters, there are dangerous sources of fuel in them, too.  “[Urban fires] have become more common and severe,” says fire historian and Arizona State professor emeritus Steve Pyne. “A problem that we thought we had fixed has returned.”  What are the risks of wildfires moving into urban areas? For places that are located near vegetation, as many parts of Los Angeles are, the fire risk can be high.  “In the southern California urban areas … we see a highly dense, large urban area butting right up to highly flammable shrub ecosystems,” says Mark Schwartz, a University of California Davis conservation scientist.  These cities have sections that exist in what researchers call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where human development meets “undeveloped wildland” and vegetation. That means these populated areas are close to or intersect with natural ones like forests and grasslands. Such adjacency to vegetation — especially in regions like the arid Western US, which is prone to fires — directly increases a city’s risk because blazes that typically begin in brush and shrubbery can move quickly through abundant fuel sources.  That danger is especially acute for Los Angeles right now, as Santa Ana wind gusts hit nearly 100 miles per hour — potentially carrying flames rapidly from where they begin. In general, more people have also been moving into wildland-urban interface spaces, increasing the population and activity in these areas, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. That means more risk to humans living there, and also more potential for fires to start. While lightning strikes can and often do spark wildfires, most blazes are caused by people; past conflagrations have started because of campfires, an irresponsibly discarded cigarette, or downed power lines.   “Where there are humans, there’s plentiful sources of ignition, and where those sources of ignition are near vegetation that can burn, that elevates the risk,” Diffenbaugh said.  Climate change only amplifies such hazards: The clearest signal that climate change is influencing the severity of fires is the rising temperatures, which lead to more fuels, such as dry vegetation, that are primed to burn. Cities that are more “hardscaped” (comprised of materials like concrete and metal) and farther from sources of vegetation have lower fire risk. Those that have greenery can also make themselves more fire resistant with mitigation practices like prescribed burns (controlled fires meant to simultaneously reduce fire risk and promote healthy vegetation growth), more native plants, and less vegetation near structures.  What fuel sources exist in cities that could keep major fires churning? Homes, as well as vegetation, can serve as fuel for fires. Other structures like natural gas tanks and fuel depots can exacerbate blazes if they catch on fire, says Stephanie Pincetl, a University of California Los Angeles professor of environment and sustainability.  According to Schwartz, “Once a fire moves into an urban area, house to house ignitions becomes the biggest concern.” Homes built of wood can be flammable, and embers can also be blown into structures via vents and windows, so a house can catch fire and burn from the inside, even if the exterior is fire-proof. Free-standing single-family homes — compared to row homes, which often share walls with neighboring buildings — can be especially vulnerable to fires because of how many exterior-facing walls they have and the number of different points where a fire can catch, Pincetl notes.  In cities like Los Angeles, drier vegetation like palm trees can also provide fuel for wildfires.  What’s the worst damage we’ve seen wildfires do to cities in recent memory? The Camp Fire, which took place in northern central California in 2018, is the deadliest in state history. It caused 85 fatalities, destroyed more than 18,000 structures — including burning almost completely through the town of Paradise, California — and burned over 153,000 acres.  It was so destructive due to similar conditions we’re witnessing in Los Angeles County this week: “High winds piled on top of dry fuels,” Schwartz said, emphasizing that the wind played a particularly significant role in spreading the flames. As Wired’s Matt Simon explained, the wind during the Camp Fire helped carry “billions” of embers, which started a number of small fires farther from the front lines of the main blaze. Those embers ignited homes and other structures across Paradise — making the fire tougher to contain.  Many homes within Paradise were also more vulnerable to fire. Almost all the homes in town had been built prior to 2008, when California imposed a new fire-safe building code that requires the use of certain materials for building exteriors and roofs, the Los Angeles Times reported.  The leveling of Paradise was devastating: Before the fire, around 27,000 people lived in the community. As of 2023, its population was fewer than 10,000 (though it has continued to rebound since the fire). The fires burning in Los Angeles County threaten a far denser urban area: Today, almost 10 million people live in Los Angeles County. Both wind and ample dry vegetation have also contributed to the growth of the recent Los Angeles fires, which have spread as the area has experienced both moderate drought conditions and a massive windstorm. Experts say it’s “unlikely” that the current wildfires could damage all of Los Angeles due to both the diversity of landscapes in the city and the precautions that it — and other cities — have taken to strengthen firefighting forces and use more fire-resistant building materials such as plaster and concrete. “Cities used to be very, very flammable,” Pincetl said. “Over the decades, we have learned to build cities that are far less vulnerable to catching on fire.” “It used to be back in the late 1800s, for example, that entire cities would be lost because everything was made out of the same wood material,” Tim Brown, a researcher at the Desert Research Institute, told Vox. “In today’s built environment, there are varying building materials, especially in urban and commercial centers, that would allow for much easier fire control.”

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In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election. These are not merely matters that might be disputed, or on which reasonable people can disagree, or of which citizens in the public square can claim ignorance. They are lies, big, consequential lies that strike at the heart of the American system of government, that deny the history through which we have all lived, that reject the unambiguous facts that are in front of our noses. They are lies that require exceptional brazenness, or exceptional cowardice, or a break with reality to assert.Lying itself is a common thing. There are the routine social lies that all of us experience and tell: “Your talents are terrific, just not the right fit for the organization,” or “I have always admired your accomplishments,” or for that matter, “What an adorable baby.” There are the comforting lies: “It was a really close call,” or “Your son did not suffer.” There are the lies of loyal aides: “The president’s abilities are unimpaired by advancing age.”Politicians lie differently, some of them often and freely. They promise things they know they cannot deliver, they deny cheating on their spouses, and they claim ignorance about realities on which they were briefed. Even so, the lies required to get into the Trump administration are qualitatively different.[Read: What I didn’t understand about political lying]They are different in part because they are not simply spewed by politicians who once knew better and said otherwise in public. Rather, they have to be affirmed by the talented and not-so-talented men and women who are being named to important positions in government—the secretaries, undersecretaries, directors, and senior advisers who make the government work. They are different, too, because this is a prerequisite for senior government service. In the first Trump term, Jim Mattis and John Kelly and John Bolton did not have to lie in this way to get their jobs. Very few of them would have willingly done so. And they most certainly did not have to lie so egregiously and so blatantly.What difference it will make is an interesting question. In other parts of their lives, many of these people are supportive friends and spouses, generous donors to good causes, and talented administrators. Their sense of reality will not necessarily be impaired by having had to deny this particular historical truth, or at least not immediately. They may very well do good, making government more efficient or helping tame the aggressive coalition of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that poses an increasing threat to world peace. They may dismantle unnecessary regulations, or pernicious speech codes that in their own way suppress the truth.But still, at the beginning, when the seed of their government service has been planted in the soil of a new administration, it will be found to have a rotten kernel.[Read: Lies about immigration help no one]I learned as an assistant dean, many years ago, that student malefactors often found it impossible to admit to having done something wrong. That unambiguous case of plagiarism “wasn’t me,” I heard more than once—not a denial of having stolen another’s words and claimed credit for them, but a strange psychological trick of convincing themselves that it had been some other self, an aberrant doppelgänger, who had done the dirty deed. The disciplinary process in which I took part had as its objective bringing the student to realize that no, that really was you who did it, and the question is how you are going to deal with that fact.Twenty-year-olds found that process wrenching enough. Fifty-year-olds would, I think, find the tension between their self-conception and their behavior unbearable, short of a major breakdown or a conversionary religious experience. So they will look to two other defenses.The first, the resort of particularly shallow people, will be simply not to care. Given the character of some of the Trump appointees—serial infidelities, dubious business practices, careers of evasions and deceptions—this may feel like just one more. They will shrug it off.The more likely response will be a variety of self-defenses to keep intact their self-image as honorable public servants. Some will offer the defense of the Vichy bureaucrats, who insisted that as distasteful as the regime was, better that they should execute its policies than someone else. More likely will be their conviction that a great opportunity exists to do good in their chosen sphere of action, and this is just the price they have to pay for it. History having faded as an essential and respected discipline for policy makers and statesmen, they may think that most history is a pack of half-truths or falsehoods anyway, and not particularly relevant to the needs of the moment. That is a surprisingly common view among successful executives: Of one I heard it said, “For him the past simply does not exist; today, to some extent; but the future is what he really thinks about.” The individual concerned would probably not have disputed or even have been disturbed by that characterization.[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]Whatever the defenses they come up with, however, the senior appointees of the Trump administration will have to enter public service having affirmed an ugly lie, or several. No matter what other qualities they have to their credit, that will remain with them. That, in turns, means that we can never really trust them: We must always suppose that, having told an egregious lie to get their positions, they will be willing to tell others to hold on to them. They can have no presumption of truthfulness in their government service.That in turn will change them fundamentally. In Robert Bolt’s marvelous A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains to his daughter why he cannot yield to Henry VIII’s demand that he declare the king’s first marriage invalid, allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, and hopefully get the male heir the kingdom desperately needs. More knows that that declaration is in the public interest. He also knows that his refusal will sooner or later lead him to the execution block.When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.To land a top job with Donald Trump, you have to open your fingers. It is, as Solzhenitsyn suggested, the end of your integrity.Not a huge or even a noticeable price for many of these people, although perhaps one that most of them have not thought much about. It is equally pointless to condemn or pity them for becoming what they have chosen to be. But we should also recognize that, for the next four years at least, and despite whatever protestations of higher belief some of them may make, we need to be wary, because henceforth we will have a government of damaged souls.

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14. After looking into how that could be, she learned that her parents had added her as an “authorized user” on their credit card. That made their spending and payment habits a part of her credit history too—and likely gave Case a starting credit score that was, as she recalls it, already “fairly high.”Credit scores are meant to be neutral measures of someone’s financial reliability, but in practice, they’re an easy way for some better-off families to give their children an early financial advantage. A range of services promise to help parents ensure that their kids enter adulthood armed with good scores. On TikTok, “generational wealth” influencers tout the benefits of authorized usership. Fintech start-ups, such as Greenlight and GoHenry, advise parents on establishing a credit history for their children. And financial institutions such as Austin Capital Bank promise to improve children’s future credit scores with programs that allow parents to authorize the bank to take out and automatically repay loans in their child’s name.[Read: Can the flaws in credit scoring be fixed?]Many parents are taking advantage of these tools. In a 2019 poll commissioned by the consumer-financial-advice website CreditCards.com, 8 percent of the roughly 1,500 American parents surveyed said that at least one of their minor children had a credit card—presumably through authorized usership, because kids under 18 can’t get their own credit card. And data from TransUnion last year showed that nearly 700,000 22-to-24-year-olds had authorized-user accounts. Trying to build credit for kids who haven’t graduated from high school isn’t necessarily new. But as wages stagnate and homeownership slips out of reach, “financial well-being has become more complicated and more precarious for young adults,” Ashley LeBaron-Black, a family-life professor at Brigham Young University, told me. “Parents recognize that, and are trying to prepare their kids.”These days, your score doesn’t just determine your access to a credit card or a loan. It is your passkey to successful participation in society at large, influencing what job or apartment you can get and how much you might pay for car insurance or a security deposit. But not everyone is set up to receive a good score. Research on the topic is scant, but the scholars I spoke with told me that credit scores are closely tied to race and intergenerational wealth—specifically, who has a legacy of wealth in their family and who does not—and that the gap between who gets a good score and who doesn't can start forming when people are still young. Eighteen- to 20-year-olds from white-majority communities start out with credit scores 24 points higher than those from Black-majority communities, a report from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found. (The paper didn’t mention the affluence of those communities, but on average, white households are wealthier than Black ones.)This disparity deepens as people get older. In 2021, Black Americans had a median credit score of 639, compared with 730 for white Americans and 752 for Asian Americans. (The maximum score is 850.) And another paper found that people in the lowest income bracket had an average credit score more than 150 points below that of their highest-earning peers. Credit scores are another way for “a lot of economic inequality, disparity, generational-wealth gaps to just be further encoded and passed on,” Yeshimabeit Milner, the founder of the advocacy group Data for Black Lives, told me.Calculating credit scores is complicated. Algorithms draw on a report that includes information about all of your financial accounts and loans, as well as any bankruptcies. Some factors, such as a long record of repaying debts on time, are associated with higher scores. Others, including a failure to meet payment deadlines or a short credit history, can nudge it down. For young people, this can mean that a good score might seem far-off. Most people in their early 20s will inherently have a short history; you can’t even get a score until you’re 18. But authorized usership lets you begin building your report early.[Read: An overlooked path to a financial fresh start]The mechanism, which the Federal Reserve Board introduced in 1975, was originally intended not for children, but for married women, who until the previous year hadn’t been able to get their own credit cards. In an effort to ensure that these women’s long spending and payment histories wouldn’t be invisible, the Federal Reserve ruled that they could retroactively assume part of their husband’s credit history. Inadvertently, this ruling also opened the door for some kids. Now two of the major credit bureaus, Experian and Equifax, recommend authorized usership as a way to improve your report, and FICO, the data-analytics company that produces the country’s most popular credit-scoring algorithm, confirmed to me that being an authorized user “can help those who are new to credit start establishing a credit history.” The company didn’t specify how much of a difference it makes, but one study found that people across the age spectrum with short credit histories saw their score increase by 22.4 points after they were added as an authorized user.Of course, authorized usership, like many of the most effective ways to build credit young, works only if one’s parents have a high score; inheriting someone else’s unpaid debts will hurt your report. Similarly, using a co-signer to get a good credit card, as 3.7 percent of young Americans do, is another option—but it’s available only to those whose parents have strong credit histories. Case, the former Federal Reserve researcher, found that 18-to-20-year-olds with co-signed cards had scores nearly 50 points higher than those who opened accounts by themselves (though that may be in part because the co-signees also tended to come from wealthier census tracts). On their own, once kids turn 18, they can get what is known as a “secured” credit card by making an upfront cash deposit. But that does little to build their report compared with what “being an authorized user on an American Express gold card could ever do,” Milner said.Even though young adults’ credit scores often dovetail closely with their parents’ scores, many institutions treat credit scores as personal measures of financial savvy and character. “There’s this idea out there that somehow your credit score is a marker of how responsible and moral of a person you are,” Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told me. Hiring managers study credit reports to evaluate an applicant’s ethics, and some short-lived dating apps even pledged to accept only users with high scores. In reality, however, your score does not reflect your virtuousness. It’s easier for those with an economic cushion to meet payments, and harder for those without that wiggle room—especially if they have a lower credit score and are charged more for things such as car loans and home mortgages. “It’s just a vicious cycle,” Wu told me.Many people probably don’t think about all of this when they clear their credit-card balances each month. But Case’s research background has prompted her to be more attentive to the ways in which credit scores shape who has access to the American economy and how much interest they must pay for the privilege. It’s hard to trace the logic behind her credit experience (or anyone else’s), because the whole system is opaque, she told me. She can’t know how much of a boost being an authorized user gave her. What she does know is that she didn’t have a problem getting her first credit card or passing her first landlord’s credit check—hurdles that often hold back people with low or nonexistent credit scores. She may have just been starting out, but fair or not, she was already a step ahead.

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