As local and state leaders celebrate the fastest wildfire debris removal in modern American history, the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates — a rent-controlled, 170-unit enclave off Pacific Coast Highway — remains largely untouched since it burned down in January.
Weeds grow through cracks in the broken pavement. A community pool is filled with a murky, green liquid. There’s row after row of mangled, rusting metal remains of former homes.
Yet just across a nearly 1,500-foot-long shared property line, the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park — like thousands of fire-destroyed properties cleared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the last nine months — is now a field of cleaned, empty lots.
The difference in treatment is based on standards used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which directed the corps’ cleanup efforts. FEMA, which focused on providing assistance to local residents — and not properties owned by real estate companies — argued in letters to state officials that since it could rely on the Tahitian’s owners to rebuild the heart of Pacific Palisades’ affordable housing, it would make an exception and include the property. However, it said it could not trust the owners of the Palisades Bowl to do the same.
The Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates, right, and the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, left, where fire debris has been removed.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Both mobile home parks requested federal cleanup services, records obtained from the corps show. And both Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles lobbied the agency to include the properties in its mission.
In a May letter approving the corps’ cleanup of the Tahitian, FEMA noted that the property, riddled with asbestos and perched above the busy Pacific Coast Highway, was a public health hazard and that the owners, with limited insurance money, probably would struggle to pay for the cleanup. FEMA Regional Administrator Robert Fenton also wrote to the state Office of Emergency Services, saying that he was “confident” including Tahitian “will accelerate the reopening of the park for its displaced tenants and ensure the community retains this affordable residential enclave in an otherwise affluent area.”
When it came to the Bowl, FEMA took a different tone. The agency said in a July letter to the state agency that with flatter terrain, the Bowl did not pose the same health hazard as the Tahitian Terrace did, and with $1.2 million in insurance money already disbursed to the property owners, it had “no indication the owner lacks the financial means to remove the debris independently.”
FEMA’s letter also noted that unlike with the Tahitian property, “FEMA cannot conclude that Palisades Bowl represents a preserved or guaranteed source of long-term affordable housing,” based on the owners’ track record.
The Bowl’s former residents — artists, teachers, lifeguards, boat riggers, bookstore owners and chefs — are now scattered across Southern California and the globe. Speaking to The Times, many felt helpless, frustrated and unsure whether they’ll be able to return. Many, nine months after the fire, are running out of the insurance money and government aid they’ve relied on to pay rent for temporary housing.
“We’re the great underdogs of the greatest American disaster in history, apparently. This little community,” said Rashi Kaslow, a boat rigger who lived in the Bowl for more than 17 years. “The people of the only two trailer parks — the isolated, actual affordable housing communities … you would think that we would be the No. 1 priority.”
“You would think that we would be the number one priority.”
— Rashi Kaslow, Pacific Palisades Bowl resident
The Bowl began as a Methodist camp in the 1890s, and was developed into a mobile home park in the 1950s. For decades, the Bowl and the Tahitian remained among the only places along the California coast still under rent control, preserved by the Mello Act, and consequently, some of the only affordable housing in the Palisades.
“We’re all connected through this legacy of what we had,” said Travis Hayden, who moved into the Bowl in 2018, “and I think our greatest fear is that it goes away.”
Nine months after the fire, the Palisades Bowl’s community pool is filled with a murky, green liquid.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Many longtime residents never planned to leave.
“I was going to have my bed put in the living room, with a large window wall, and lay and watch the sun set and the ocean. That was going to be the end of my life,” said Colleen Baker, an 82-year-old closet designer. “I don’t, of course, have it anymore. … It’s all gone.”
The Bowl was passed among a few families and local real estate moguls over the decades.
In 2005, Edward Biggs of Northern California bought the Bowl. When Biggs, who rarely appeared at the park, died in 2021, his real estate empire was fractured between his first wife, Charlotte, and his second wife, Loretta, further complicating the Bowl’s management.
Since the fire, residents have heard virtually nothing from ownership. Neither Colby Biggs — Charlotte and Edward Biggs’ grandson who began co-managing the park after Charlotte’s death — nor lawyers with Loretta Biggs’ real estate company, responded to a request for comment.
What Bowl residents have seen is the corps descend on other Palisades properties — clearing burned-out cars, piles of rubble and charred trees from single-family homes as well as the Tahitian — while leaving the Bowl untouched.
At the center of FEMA’s reasoning to refuse cleanup for the Bowl: “The prior actions of the owner demonstrate a lack of commitment to reopen the park for its displaced residents.”
“The prior actions of the owner demonstrate a lack of commitment to reopen the park for its displaced residents.”
— FEMA, regarding the owners of the Pacific Palisades Bowl
Over the two decades the Biggs family has owned the Bowl, residents have become painfully familiar with this “lack of commitment.”
In 2006, some residents sued Biggs and the previous owner, accusing them of failing to repair and stabilize the bluff behind the park that, the previous year, crumbled after heavy rain, leaving some units uninhabitable.
A year later, Biggs fell into a legal dispute with city of Los Angeles over a plan to split up the property that residents characterized as a move to circumvent rent control.
It prompted Biggs’ attorney to send residents a letter in 2009, stating that the inability to raise rent and the never-ending series of lawsuits made the park unprofitable and that he may file for bankruptcy. It also claimed that Biggs already had received a $40-million offer from an international hotel developer, the Palisadian-Post reported. No sale ever went through.
In 2013, Biggs decided to build an “upscale resort community” instead, by buying up resident’s homes, demolishing them, and building two-story, manufactured homes on the properties. To do so, he planned to target the homes of the residents suing him over a landslide on the property, the California 2nd District Court of Appeal found.
The residents ended up winning $8.9 million from Biggs. The case with the city eventually made it to the California Supreme Court, which sided with residents and the city.
While residents agonize over FEMA’s decision, the experiences have led many to ultimately agree with FEMA’s reasoning: They cannot trust that the owners intend to preserve their park as affordable housing.
Former Bowl residents met atop the Asilomar bluff overlooking their old community on Oct. 3 — the day after a city-imposed deadline for the owners to remove the debris — to call on local leaders to act.
Most skipped the formality of a handshake, going in for hugs. They reminisced. Many took a moment in silence to look down. Rows of empty dirt lots to the left — the Tahitian — and rows of rubble still sitting to the right — their homes.
Residents of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates meet on a hill above the park in Pacific Palisades.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Nine months after the fire, many former Bowl residents are trying to figure out what to do when their temporary housing insurance money and aid runs dry. They still have little certainty when — or whether — they’ll ever be able to return.
Baker, the closet designer, found a 388-square-foot mobile home in Santa Monica to live in.
“I’m in the very sad stage, and I’m realizing my losses,” she said. “You go to look for something and you go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s gone.’ That’s an everyday occurrence.”
Tahitian’s residents are stuck in a different limbo: With cleared lots, they wait for the property owners to decide whether to rebuild — adding back the concrete slabs for homes and building back the common spaces — or whether to sell the park to its residents, Chase Holiday, a Tahitian resident, said.
“We’re pretty much ready,” Holiday said. Indeed, Tahitian’s homeowners’ association has been in talks with the owners. Barring the complicated paperwork, “we could buy the park tomorrow.”
Although the wait is excruciating, “I feel pretty confident that either we’ll buy it or they’ll rebuild,” she said. But with little clarity over when that would happen, “the bigger question is, will I want to?”
On Wednesday, a handful of Bowl residents — including Jon Brown, a real estate agent who has become one of the Bowl’s leaders in the fight to rebuild — packed a board of Building and Safety commissioners meeting, pushing for the board to finally declare the property a public nuisance, which would allow the city to do the cleanup work and send the owners the bill.
The L.A. County Department of Public Works estimated that, at the end of September, about 20 properties in each burn area, Palisades and Eaton, had failed to clear debris.
In a letter mailed and posted at the Bowl, dated Sept. 2, the department had given the owners 30 days to complete the work or risk being declared a public nuisance.
At the Wednesday meeting, Danielle Mayer, an attorney whose law firm represents Loretta Biggs’ company, asked the commission for more time.
“This community has seen these park owners act with such a lack of integrity for years and years.”
— Jon Brown, Pacific Palisades Bowl resident
“This community has seen these park owners act with such a lack of integrity for years and years,” Brown said to the board. “They never do anything unless they are absolutely forced to.”
The board ultimately declared the Bowl a public nuisance.
It’s a small but significant step, with a long road still ahead. The Department of Building and Safety has yet to provide any details for how and when it will remove the debris. And the Tahitian’s still-empty lots serve as a reminder that debris removal isn’t the end of the battle.
Yet, Bowl residents remain optimistic that, someday, they will be able to buy the park from the owners and finally serve as the caretakers of the eccentric and beloved affordable community.
To residents, the Bowl was something special. They cared for one another. They surfed together, let each other’s cats in and celebrated holidays on the small community lawn. They raised their kids in the Bowl and sometimes bickered over politics and annoyances, as any proper family does.
“If the people were permitted to go back,” saidresident John Evans, “that would just restart — probably with a vengeance.”
Times staff writer Tony Briscoe contributed to this report.