Mobile homes by the beach: In Pacific Palisades, a middle-class dream is destroyed

From Pacific Coast Highway, the mobile home park was mostly hidden by a steep, terraced hillside. Residents — many in their 80s and 90s — felt as if they were in on some great secret of wealthy Pacific Palisades, with their little houses on little rented lots with grand ocean views.

They lived on palm-lined cul-de-sacs with names such as Aloha Drive, Kiki Place and Bali Lane. Their mobile home park, just across from Will Rogers State Beach, was called Tahitian Terrace.

It’s gone now.

When it destroyed all but one of the 158 mobile and prefabricated homes in Tahitian Terrace on Jan. 7, the Palisades fire wiped out something rare in affluent, celebrity-studded Pacific Palisades: an affordable beachfront neighborhood.

Now that Tahitian Terrace is gone — along with the roughly 170 homes in the adjacent Palisades Bowl mobile home park — residents fear they will be priced out of Pacific Palisades, where the average home price was more than $3.4 million before the fire.

In Tahitian Terrace, people owned their homes but rented their plots, which are rent-controlled.

When the flames came, Tahitian Terrace was home to an eclectic mix. There was wealth, yes — among the homeowners was “Shark Tank” star and investor Barbara Corcoran. But there also were seniors on fixed incomes who had paid off their homes decades ago and a smattering of young, middle-class families.

There were retirees such as John “J.B.” Borris, an ex-Air Force colonel, and his wife, Dorothy, who had lived there since the mid-1990s.

Newer families including Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Aleksander Edwards, his wife, Becky, and their 4-year-old daughter, Sierra.

And Brandon Zamel, who — along with his wife, Swea, and their sons, Ben, 10, and Max, 6 — lived on the lot where he grew up.

“It was like everyone knew it was the best-kept secret to live there,” said Zamel, 40. “You had a better view there than any of the multimillion-dollar houses over the hill. Where we lived, it’s the closest you could get to any kind of middle-class intro to the Palisades.”

This is what remains of that best-kept secret.

On Jan. 24, Tahitian Terrace was still under an evacuation order — one of the last to be lifted.

The Zamels showed their IDs at a National Guard checkpoint on the edge of the Palisades and, to their surprise, were allowed to drive in. They weaved through neighborhood streets to the hilltop Asilomar View Park.

Straight ahead, the Pacific sparkled on the sunny, blue-sky Friday. Down below, Tahitian Terrace lay in ruins.

It was Swea’s first time back. She was desperate to see the house before the rains made everything soggy.

They climbed down the steep, denuded hillside and into the park. When they reached their lot, Brandon wrapped his arms around Swea’s neck and held her close.

Wearing N-95 masks and gloves, they picked first through the remains of Ben’s room, where Zamel found his older son’s coin collection. He found Pokémon cards still in their tins, but they turned to dust when he touched them.

Swea shouted from what once was the dining room.

“My All-Clad ladle!”

Then: “Brandon, our wedding silverware! You can’t use it. But it’s there!”

She found a tiny horse figurine. Her sons’ baby spoon and fork. The broken handle of a ceramic spoon rest, the painted German words still visible: “Guten appetite.”

The blackened washing machine that Zamel had spent so much time repairing. The charred husk of their Toyota Prius.

Zamel, who is reflective by nature, paused, shovel in hand, watching his wife pick through the ash.

“You look for things that — it doesn’t even matter what it is, but because it was yours, if it has any life to it, it’s like you want to just preserve it, you know?”

Tahitian Terrace — carved into a hillside adjacent Temescal Canyon Road — had its grand opening in 1962.

It was the golden age for mobile home parks, which popped up across the country after World War II. In his 1962 book “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” author John Steinbeck marveled at the houses, “these new things under the sun, of their great numbers,” and “the parks where they sit down in uneasy permanence.”

By 1979, Tahitian Terrace residents were paying between $200 and $400 a month for their ocean-view pads, The Times reported at the time. It was a steal, even then.

“Most of the residents are enrolled in bridge classes, art lessons or the once-a-month brunch at their shake-roof clubhouse,” The Times reported, noting that new residents “are getting younger all the time … presumably because of the comparatively low prices.”

In 1983, Brandon Zamel’s dad — then a bachelor in his early 30s — moved onto Copra Lane. He got married. And after the birth of Zamel and his sister, the family lived in a bigger house in the Palisades while renting out the Tahitian Terrace unit.

Zamel’s parents divorced when he was about 8, and his dad moved back to his little house. By that time, Tahitian Terrace had been converted to a retirement park for residents 55 and older.

Since his father already owned the house, he was allowed back in — and Zamel and his sister were virtually the only kids in the park.

“The neighbors hated us,” Zamel said, laughing.

The squabbling, elementary school-aged siblings were loud. One neighbor kept trying to get them kicked out, claiming they were throwing rocks at cars.

“It was like a mini-Florida,” Zamel said. “They didn’t want to be around children.”

In 1992, John “J.B.” Borris and his wife, Dorothy Baumann, then in their 30s, moved to Tahitian Terrace, snapping up a 1960s double-wide trailer on Vista Terrace.

They bought from a friend who had an age exemption to live in the park, which, per federal law, allowed up to 20% of the units to be occupied entirely by people younger than 55.

“Immediately, I sensed this was a neighborhood like I’d never lived in before,” said Borris, 67. “There’s a simple word for it that’s hard to define because it means so many different things: bohemian. Ever since the ‘90s, I’d say, ‘I live in that bohemian community down by the ocean in the Palisades.”

A group of older women would lounge in the pool by 2 p.m. every day, gossiping over bottles of cheap Cold Duck sparkling wine. They “looked like raisins, because they were so dark from sitting in the sun,” Borris said.

Some days, they were serenaded by a neighbor who played a portable organ.

Eventually, Borris and Baumann moved to a pad on Aloha Drive, near the clubhouse. Ten years ago, they brought in a new Silvercrest modular home: 1,600 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths.

Just before the fire, they paid $1,400 a month in rent for their lot; the house itself had been paid off years before.

“Think about it: I have an ocean view, and I’m paying $1,400 a month,” Borris said. “People in the middle of Santa Monica in apartments are paying $4,000 a month. You don’t really see much turnover in our park.”

In 2012, Zamel, who produces immersive and virtual reality art, married Swea, a horse trainer.

They moved the next year into the unit on his dad’s old Copra Lane pad, trading their Sherman Oaks apartment for a 1,100-square-foot manufactured home with four small bedrooms.

By then, Zamel’s father and stepmother lived on another lot one street down the hill. For a time, his sister lived a few doors away.

Tahitian Terrace had just been converted back to an all-ages park. When the Zamels’ first son, Ben, was born in 2014, he was the only baby in the neighborhood — two decades after Zamel and his sister had been the only kids there.

But Ben and his little brother were doted upon by all their adopted grannies and grandpas.

Max, who watched gardening videos with his dad on YouTube, had a garden in front of their house. He watered, fertilized and harvested his own tomatoes and set up a vegetable stand, where he showed off his horticultural expertise to neighbors.

“People would come by and say, ‘I love your cherry tomatoes,’” Zamel said. “He’d be like, ‘They’re Super Sweet 100s,’” naming the exact type.

Not long before the fire, Max realized he could set out a bowl of tomatoes and basil and leave out a cup for money. The kindergartner, who had just learned how to write, put up a handwritten sign that read: “We Will Beack [sic] Leave the Money in the cup.”

He hauled in about $60 a week.

After everything burned, Zamel said: “One of the dark realizations in all of this is — it was December, January, and the tomato plants were still producing because we’d had no rain. These plants were growing like crazy.”

On Jan. 7, Swea Zamel knew the winds were coming. She has, many times before, hauled trailers into fire zones to evacuate horses and keeps a close eye on fire alerts year-round.

That morning, she got up early, sprayed down the plants and left out four fire extinguishers before starting her 45-mile commute to Thousand Oaks, where she works at a ranch.

Brandon dropped Ben and Max off at Marquez Charter Elementary School. Just after 10:30 a.m., Swea called. The PulsePoint app had dinged, saying a fire had started in the Palisades.

Go get the boys, she said.

At 10:55 a.m., as he hurried their sons to his car outside the school, Zamel pointed his cellphone video camera at the hills north of campus. He saw flames.

Zamel said he realized, with a pit in his stomach, that he was one of the first parents to come get their kids. No evacuation orders had been issued.

“I think everyone underestimated this,” Swea said.

The couple phoned Ingrid, a 90-year-old widow who lived on the same street as Brandon’s father. Like Swea, she was an immigrant from Kiel, Germany. Pack your stuff, they told her.

At home, Zamel made the boys hot dogs and let them play on an iPad while he quickly packed their pale blue 2008 Toyota Highlander, keeping an eye on the smoke in the north. When he saw fresh smoke and ash in Temescal Canyon, to the east, he knew it was time to go.

At 3:42 p.m., he pulled away from Ingrid’s house. She sat in the front seat. The boys were in the back. The fire was straight ahead, in the hills. He started recording.

“Are those flames?!” Ingrid asked, startled.

“That’s the flames,” he responded.

“What! Oh my God, guys!” she said.

There was only one road into and out of the park: Tahiti Avenue, which leads to Pacific Coast Highway. It was gridlocked.

At 3:45 p.m., Aleksander Edwards, a 41-year-old fire captain, recorded his own video of the flames in the hills north of Tahitian Terrace — the mobile home park where he and his wife, Becky, bought their first home as a married couple in 2018.

Their place on Kontiki Way was a two-bedroom 1960s trailer house with tires and taillights on the back. The pipes were old. The heater rattled. Edwards’ head nearly touched the low ceilings. But they felt as if they had hit the jackpot.

When Sierra was born in 2020 during the isolating early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, all the older “aunties and uncles” living around them made the young family feel less alone.

“Being a firefighter, I’d be out at work three or four days at a time,” Edwards said. “I knew that if the water heater busted or my wife’s car needed a jump, if I wasn’t there I knew there were people looking out for them.”

He was off duty on Jan. 7 and stayed behind after Becky and Sierra headed to safety. By 4:07 p.m., flames were right above the park.

Edwards, wearing sweatpants and Vans, grabbed his wildland coat and a heavy-duty fire hose from his Prius.

“In my head, I was like, ‘We’re gonna save this street. We’re gonna save this park,’” said Edwards, who had fought the destructive 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu.

In Tahitian Terrace, the on-site park managers stayed a long time. The two groundskeepers stuck around, watering hillsides. A friend of one of Edwards’ neighbors, also a firefighter, grabbed the gear in his car.

Borris stayed, too, wielding a garden hose.

Flames entered the top of the park about 4:30.

“It was like being in a hurricane but just dry, hot wind,” Edwards said. “The palm trees were bending over like Miami in a hurricane.”

A Cal Fire engine and a Los Angeles city firetruck rolled in, he said, but the crews were outmatched.

Before 6 p.m., Edwards heard the smoke alarm going off inside his house. It was ablaze.

His Prius was parked next to his neighbor’s house, which was fully engulfed. If the car burned, he would likely be trapped. He waved goodbye to his home and drove away.

“It sucked. It was really hard. I was in shock,” Edwards said, his voice cracking. “It’s this helpless feeling, watching my neighborhood burn down and not being able to do anything about it.”

By the time Borris left, he didn’t see anyone else.

“I turned down my street, Aloha — I didn’t see any flashing lights on the firetrucks that were there for an hour with us,” he said. “I go, ‘There’s nobody here except me.’”

He walked down Tahiti Avenue, flying embers singeing his skin, to Temescal Canyon Road, where he had parked his car.

“I was scared,” he said. “My life and military training — I had to be careful. If I run and fall, I’m going to be dead.”

One of his neighbors on Aloha Drive was among the dozen confirmed to have been killed by the Palisades fire. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner lists the person online as Unidentified Doe #63.

Many questions remain about how, and whether, Tahitian Terrace, which is owned by Azul Pacifico Inc., will be rebuilt or if the land use for the coveted coastal property will be changed.

Clint Lau, a manager for the site, told The Times that rent is halted on the burned plots. The owners, he said, are in close talks with city officials about how to move forward.

Michelle Bolotin, a real estate agent, said that when she first started selling in Tahitian Terrace about two decades ago, homes went for as low as $200,000.

“I had just moved into the Palisades myself, and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this is just so wild that this is here,’” she said. “It’s a prime real estate location in a very expensive neighborhood, and it’s affordable.”

In recent years, she said, there was a big cost range. She recently sold a unit for $1.9 million. She sold another for $535,000. Its new owner closed escrow on Jan. 6 — the day before the fire.

Bolotin said she hopes city officials push to preserve the park, noting that the Mello Act, a state law, requires affordable housing to be preserved in the coastal zone.

“They need to know that this is already deemed to be affordable housing,” Bolotin said. “A lot of people are worried they are going to lose their stake there.”

During a recent public meeting, Los Angeles City Coucilwoman Traci Park called Tahitian Terrace and the adjacent Palisades Bowl “incredibly special, wonderful communities.”

“From my perspective,” she said, “we absolutely want those to continue as they were before.”

Borris has vowed to return to Tahitian Terrace, where he hung a spray-painted banner from the frame of his charred carport that read: “WE WILL RISE FROM THE ASHES.”

Edwards, who scored an open apartment in Santa Monica near his parents, said he would like to return to Tahitian Terrace, too. Eventually.

Zamel said it’s difficult to think beyond his family’s immediate and immense needs. His father’s house in Tahitian Terrace burned, too. So did his sister’s, elsewhere in the Palisades.

The Zamels are staying, for now, in a guest house on the ranch where Swea works.

There are moments, Zamel said, where “you think you’re good and you think everything is normal.” And then there are little moments, every day, that are gutting. Like when he pulled his house keys out of his pocket. And when he went to cancel his Spectrum internet account and had to provide the address of a place that no longer exists.

Ben’s and Max’s elementary school burned down. Their classes now meet in a temporary location at another school off Sawtelle Boulevard. The Zamels wake before dawn for the two-hour schlep to the Westside to keep them in school with their friends.

Ben told his parents it’s hard to be happy. Max cries when his dad leaves his side.

Zamel’s 40th birthday was Jan. 19. Max and Ben gave him a Hello Kitty coffee mug they had grabbed at a donation center.

“It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten,” he said.

A few days after the fire, a neighbor told Zamel she had finally checked the bag she used to carry while walking her dog through Tahitian Terrace.

Inside were a few tomatoes she had bought from Max. They were squishy but still intact.

Zamel wept.

His family will replant the seeds.