As the fires expanded across the hillsides in Los Angeles toward its center, an anonymous quote was spreading across social media: Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until youre the one filming it. Climate change has arrived in our living rooms, imploring us to take to the streets to repair our neighborhoods, keep a watchful eye over those who stand to profit from it, and stand better prepared for whatever happens next.My partner and I live in a 10-unit apartment building at the base of the Hollywood Hills, roughly equidistant between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire. By the early morning of Wednesday, January 8, the Santa Ana winds had increased their rate of destruction with unpredictable speed and intensity. Yet even as late as the afternoon, we were firmly planted at home without an evacuation plan. As the winds howled down our narrow street, we were scrolling to learn as much as we could about the ongoing devastation across the city on a variety of media channels, including the loss of many historic structures in the Pacific Palisades that had once felt so permanent.A house burns in Altadena (Tag Christof)On the other side of the county, the community where the Eaton Fire raged received less immediate media attention. Altadena was home to 42,000 people who lived at the base of the Angeles National Forest. We lived there from 2020 to 2024, originally drawn to the neighborhoods Christmas Tree Lane, a towering row of deodar cedar trees planted in 1883 along Santa Rosa Avenue that have been illuminated with Christmas lights since 1920. Having largely withstood the worst of the Eaton Fire, these historic trees stand tall in visible contrast with the devastation of more than 5,000 structures surrounding them.To the RooftopThere are serious historic losses throughout the area. The Andrew McNally House, built in 1887 for the cofounder of the Rand McNally publishing company at the top of Santa Rosa, was engulfed in flames and is now far beyond repair. So is the nearby Bunny Museum, an exhibited collection of rabbit-themed gifts between married couple Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski that first opened in 1998. And so is our go-to pizza place, Side Pie, along with Altadena Hardware, Rancho Bar, Public Displays of Altadena, the Zorthian Ranch, and many other community spaces that helped make Altadena feel a thousand miles away from the pace of urban life just down the hill. And this says nothing about the losses of homes and personal belongings of its creative residents, including musicians and architecture scholars.Altadena, a historic, diverse neighborhood with many artists, was one of the Los Angeles communities hit worst. (Tag Christof)As an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, Altadena did not receive the immediate nor the reliable attention it deserves. Our former duplex apartment is gone, along with thousands of other working-class residences. Community members noted the absence of fire trucks on their streets for several hours at a time as they filled trash cans with water and made way for wildlife galloping down the slope.By early Wednesday evening, our Hollywood hillside retreat was just outside the mandatory evacuation zone of the Sunset Fire, a fast-moving fire originating in Runyon Canyon. The zone included some of the most recognizable icons of Hollywood itself, including Graumans Chinese Theatre, the Magic Castle, and the Hollywood Bowl. The eastern edge of the boundary was marked by the 101 freeway, just 1,500 feet west of us. (Though freeways are environmental hazards in themselves, they are apparently decent fire barriers.)We packed the car with little forethought while monitoring the situation on Watch Duty, a real-time map of wildfire and firefighting information. Still in need of visual proof before abandoning our home, however, we took to the rooftop with our neighbors, exchanging names in between intimate exchanges of hopes and fears. Finally, on the other side of a hill in the near distance, we saw the flames stretching out and upward with our own eyes, unmediated by any news program or phone app. We drank wine straight from the bottle.Altadena residents inspecting the neighborhood (Tag Christof)A fleet of tandem-rotor helicopters flew overhead, close enough to rattle our apartment building from the 1970s. We watched them scoop up water from the nearby Hollywood Reservoir and then expel it over Runyon Canyon with incredible precision and consistency. The fire was contained by the time we attempted to sleep at two in the morning. We unpacked the car the following morning while leaving our most prized possessions near the front door.The Eternal Infernal SeasonThe infernal season used to more predictably fall between late August and early October. Or at least it did in 1998, when Mike Davis published The Case for Letting Malibu Burn in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. The essay is a treatment of the political history of fire in Los Angeles as a faithful reflection of larger class struggles comparing coastal and tenement fires. Critical of the developmental practices of Malibu, where homes are built higher and higher in the mountain chamise with scant regard for the inevitable fiery consequence, Davis settled on letting the nouveaux riches fend for themselves in the aftermath. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, he wrote, governmental policies established the precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.8 a.m. on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California (Tag Christof)Carnage in Altadena (Tag Christof)Thirty years later, however, there is no longer an infernal season to reliably speak of, nor are the affected areas as clearly demarcated. Climate change has affected the character of urban-scale fires, which can now happen virtually year-round, with unknowable ferocity, in areas long thought to be out of harms way. The threat is no longer in some far-away Malibu: It is here, and it affects everyone, even if they arent directly in harms way. The smoke tanked the air quality in the region, and ash, along with other wind-borne debris, settled like a light snow across the metropolis.In times like these, its easy to paint a bleak picture of the budgetary priorities of public and private powers in a city whose landscape and ecology have historically been the playthings of financial speculation. According to CBS, more than 1,600 home insurance policies in Pacific Palisades were dropped by State Farm in July (along with several more in other fire-prone areas of the region), while some of the wealthiest property owners of the area, such as billionaire developer Rick Caruso, hired private firefighters to protect their own businesses.(Tag Christof)The City of Los Angeles, meanwhile, dispatched nearly 800 incarcerated firefighters (about 30 percent of the total on-the-ground workforce) for as little as $5.80 a dayunsurprising statistics, considering the long-term budget cuts to the fire department that have increasingly hampered its ability to handle wildfires. Many rental listings have increased dramatically in a cruel response to the sudden housing shortage, and the valuation of real estate across the city may predictably follow suit.(Tag Christof)But this sense of administrative collapse only paints half the picture. As the manifestations of climate change reach closer and closer, the larger Los Angeles community has responded with a generosity that defies stereotypes of our great city. While local activists call on city leaders for an eviction moratorium and a rent freeze, Mutual Aid LA is maintaining an extensive list of resources available to those affected by the fires, for instance, while LA Fire Mutual Aid Resources is mapping the donation and volunteer service centers rapidly assembled, many of which are small local businesses. A spreadsheet is circulating for AEC folks to aid in rebuilding.This form of solidarity, which was the subject of Rebecca Solnits book Hope in the Dark 20 years ago, has spread across screens with as much intensity as disaster images. At the time of this writing, the fires have collectively burned more than 40,000 acres, more than twice the size of Manhattan. Twenty-five residents are confirmed dead, and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed.Shane Reiner-Roth is a writer and lecturer on architecture and urbanism.