Altadena Landlords, Businesses Push Ahead Despite Missing Customer Base After Fires

Altadena’s main commercial nodes used to bustle as people dined at restaurants and shopped at local businesses. Now, five months after historic fires swept the area, those streets are instead dominated daily by trucks and their crews hauling burned debris out of residential lots. 

The change in traffic illustrates a stark reality for businesses that are still standing after the fires. These business owners, and their landlords, were spared the worst of the flames but are now trying to hang on in areas that have lost large chunks of their residents.

“Sales are down massively, but of course they are — there’s no way that a place can have 8,000 homes disappear and everything would be the same,” said Randy Clement, the owner of Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine + Spirits on Lincoln Avenue. 

Clement owns the building at 2311 Lincoln Ave. where his business is located after purchasing it in 2023. It was not physically damaged by the fire and is still open for business, but customers have largely dried up. A small surge of business hit in April as insurance adjusters descended on the area, but the uptick waned as cleanup was completed and insurance claims got underway.

Now, former patrons live elsewhere as they wait for repairs or rebuilding on their homes, leaving a deep dent in foot traffic for local businesses.

“Without a customer base that’s present in a continuous way, it makes business operations and life inherently unpredictable,” Clement said. 

Clement has had a little help from the county on the business front. In April, the County Board of Supervisors approved a motion that allowed small businesses to turn underutilized spaces into pop-up spaces for events. 

Clement is taking advantage by turning the wine shop’s parking lot into an outdoor space where he plans to host food trucks, live music, holiday parties and other events that the building couldn’t previously accommodate. The ability to use his parking lot in this way is a lifeline for his business, Clement said. 

“You figure out how to make it work,” Clement said. 

Still, it’s not the same as a steady stream of customers, and the dropoff in revenue for local businesses means a possible crunch when rent is due.

Business and property owner William J. Galloway Jr. owns three buildings near Mariposa and Lake avenues. Two were badly burned, but one will be salvageable, Galloway said.

Of the seven tenants that once resided in his buildings, Galloway said he knows of just one that has found a new location. That tenant is a State Farm agent who’s working out of another agent’s Pasadena office.

Galloway’s insurance provides for lost rents in this case, but he is already seeing costs add up for rebuilding. Galloway knows he was underinsured for one of his buildings and will have to go out of pocket to rebuild it.  

The biggest source of frustration, he said, is the lack of forward movement on commercial property rebuilding. While it’s important for people to be able to rebuild their homes, he worries that the lead time that residential rebuilding has over commercial means the neighborhood infrastructure to support those homes won’t be there when people return.   

In May, a mobile home park in the Palisades fire area was approved for cleanup, something that some officials saw as a positive indicator that other commercial properties might get similarly lucky. But while this one commercial property was accepted, the vast majority are still waiting to learn their fate. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency told Bisnow in April that commercial properties need to meet certain criteria to be considered, including that their debris was found to pose an immediate threat to public health and safety. 

The county submitted requests for debris removal for every business that opted in by submitting a right of entry form. In total, that included 68 requests across both burn areas and all affected cities except Pasadena, which filed its own requests, a representative for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works told Bisnow in an email. 

The uncertainty around removal has kept many property owners in limbo as they wait for the information they need in order to move on to whatever the next step is.  

Galloway opted into debris removal, a move that many officials recommended even though commercial properties don’t usually qualify for the service. That was two months ago. He’s still waiting to find out whether it’s been approved.  

Meanwhile, he is also waiting to hear from his insurer. He hired his own adjuster to interface with the adjuster from the insurance company, and he’s grateful that he doesn’t have to personally handle the back-and-forth with his insurer in addition to his regular day-to-day workload.  

But the lack of forward progress on both fronts — debris removal and insurance — is adding up.

Giving people something to come back to is also on Clement’s mind and is a motivator for him to keep his doors open. He said the more Altadena looks like it did before the fire, the more likely people will want to return. 

“We wanted people to see that they are not alone, that there are prefire things that still exist, and we want to be a beacon of hope for this community,” he said.