The women on stage line up and bow to applause, celebrating a moment of triumph. These dancers from Westside School of Ballet have completed their summer showcase, eight months after dozens of families at the school lost their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires.
Connie Bell glides out to center stage with the rest of her cohort, beaming with joy and relief. She stands with perfect posture, her hair pulled into a neat bun, wearing a forest green leotard and matching mesh skirt that floats when she moves.
Ms. Bell has been dancing her way through heartache. In December, her husband died after a long illness. A month later, the Palisades fire incinerated their Malibu home. She and Ed had been together for 45 years and raised a family in that little house at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Why We Wrote This
The LA wildfires forced thousands into sometimes overwhelming decisions on how to rebuild their lives. For 10 months, Connie Bell has shared her journey with us. Widowed a month before fire destroyed her home, she is embracing possibilities both exhilarating and daunting.
Now, as she puts it, she is back where she was as a young adult. That was the last time she was on her own, with no place she called home, no family or career to drive her decisions, with limited resources and unlimited choices.
The stakes are high, financially and emotionally. The loss of the house comes with deep sadness; rebuilding may be out of reach.
Thousands of people, like Ms. Bell, have been confronting the same decisions: sell or build; forge a new life or try to reclaim the old. The Pasadena and Altadena wildfires caused unprecedented loss in the Los Angeles area: more than 16,000 structures destroyed, three-fourths of which were homes.
Recovery is slowly getting underway across the county. Of about 4,500 applications, fewer than 1,500 building permits for fire-gutted sites have been issued by LA County and cities impacted by the fires: Los Angeles, Malibu, and Pasadena.
The labyrinth of housing, permits, government benefits, and insurance payouts is daunting. But for some, the destruction has also created a clearing – an opportunity to reevaluate and reset. Ms. Bell is taking it.
She has discovered that heartbreak and joy can coexist. Even when a person is grieving, she says, “there also are times to laugh and be alive and have joy. Those things don’t go away.”
Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor
January: “Just Connie”
On January 7, with hurricane-force winds driving fire toward the coast and smoke blacking out the sky, Ms. Bell grabbed just a few things: Sirus the family parrot, enough clothing for an overnight stay, and her ballet slippers.
She had lived most of her life in the small oceanside city, where wildfires and evacuations come with the landscape. “I didn’t really feel like I was in any danger, but I just felt like staying wasn’t the right thing for me to do,” she says.
Nearly 250,000 people were under evacuation orders that night, including Ms. Bell, who took refuge with her daughter and son-in-law in LA. By morning, everything was gone: clothes, furniture, photos, mementos – all the evidence of her family's life together perched on the edge of the sea.
With everything upended, she found structure and purpose in the ballet studio. Two days into the fires, Ms. Bell was back in class.
Ballet, she says, “sort of saved me.”
Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor
She has been dancing since childhood, through college, then professionally and as a ballet teacher. Today, she takes adult classes at Westside, in Santa Monica.
“In that room, she is just Connie,” says Charlie Hodges, her instructor. Being happy and complete in the studio, he adds, showed her that she could be those things elsewhere.
February: Home for now
A few weeks after the fires were contained, Ms. Bell has moved into a condominium that her daughter owns in Santa Monica. She is staying there with Sirus and a bulldog named Otis who made his way into Ms. Bell’s care after his owner died unexpectedly. She and the dog relate to each other, she says.
What she lacks in stability, she makes up for with resolve. Ms. Bell is ready to embrace a new chapter and sell her property. She is not alone. In the first six months after the fires, a surge of lots hit the market: more than 170 were sold in Altadena, compared with six in the first half of 2024. In the Palisades, it was 94; one the year before.
Ms. Bell’s reasons for selling are mostly financial. In this part of California, where property values and cost of living are among the highest in the country, she could make enough from the empty lot to retire in modest comfort.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
And the thought of rebuilding without Ed feels like too much. Of the house, she says, “I just don’t have any more room for that.”
The days are stacked with checklists, phone calls, and paperwork. Her lot needs to be cleared of debris, and there are codes and filing deadlines to piece together. The trust for her estate burned, so she needs to track that down.
Amid those tasks, there is also delight: Allegra, her daughter, is having a child soon – Ms. Bell’s first grandchild.
She is creating her plan by focusing on what she loves. “I’m refreshing myself,” she says, “and I hope that I can be happy. I want to be happy.”
March: Sunshine and rainbows and realism
In late March, Ms. Bell is still waiting for a sofa to be delivered – the missing piece in a living area that’s starting to feel like home with a fluffy white rug, round metal coffee table, and Otis sprawled on the floor. Sirus squawks from his large cage.
She is balancing familiar habits – like ballet – with the newness of recovery. Her resources are limited, but not her persistence.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“There’s confidence that whatever she gets hit with, she’s gonna have the strength and the intelligence, the creativity to prevail,” says Beth Friedman, a longtime friend.
Built in 1946 on an iconic stretch of California waterfront, the house she shared with her husband was a far cry from the celebrity mansions that Malibu is known for today. The income she made as an Airbnb superhost helped pay the costs that come with waking up to ocean waves and dolphins.
Ed and Connie bought the house in 2002, when their two children were not yet teenagers. For a time, the four of them shared its one bedroom, their beds lined up side-by-side like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, says son Colborn.
The close quarters inside were offset by an expanse of sun and ocean outside. The house hovered over sand on support beams lapped by the ocean tide. It was, Colborn says, “a perfect place.”
Protecting it was a priority. Ms. Bell is properly insured, unlike thousands of homeowners who have been caught in the state’s insurance crisis. Between 40% and 80% of homes lost in the wildfires are underinsured, according to a state agency. The largest insurers have been pulling out of California for the last few years due to increasing environmental risks and the rising costs of rebuilding. Many homeowners have been forced onto the state’s FAIR plan, a syndicate of companies required to offer fire policies to homeowners left behind by the traditional marketplace. Those policies are more expensive and offer limited coverage.
Ms. Bell’s insurance covers three years’ worth of living expenses, plus a payout for the 800-square-foot house. Selling the lot comes with security and retirement. Rebuilding – which could net her more if she sold later – would take everything she has plus some. It would also take years of managing building codes and construction details.
Yet selling comes with unknowns. What will the glut of lots do to the value of her land? The longer it sits, the more her imagination fills in the property, edging out the financial realities of rebuilding.
Before the ruins are cleared, she returns to the place that framed her life and loves for 23 years.
Ms. Bell finds poetry in the wreckage, pointing out the warped roofing panels that look like handkerchiefs and the mangled antique iron bed frame draped like a piece of lace.
Tragedy has not corrupted her view – a mix of New York realism learned from her parents, says her son, and the 1960s California hippie culture she grew up in.
“Things go on and things must continue,” says Colborn. But also, for her, “everything is kind of sunshine and rainbows. She has a multiplicity to her that is in contrast, but at the same time I think is useful.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
April and May: A new vision
By mid-May, her cream-colored couch is finally in place, along with end tables and a lamp. A TV hangs on the wall. Ms. Bell, Otis, and Sirus are starting to have a routine.
When grief creeps in, she focuses on what was not lost: “My husband feels like love now,” she says. “And my family and my community. Those things no one will ever take from you.”
Spring has brought some setbacks: Her neighbors’ properties have been cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers. She hired a private contractor, but the person disappeared. Worse than the $1,000 she lost is the hit to her confidence. She appealed to the county but missed the deadline to sign back up for the Corps. She didn’t know who to trust, she says, and she didn’t trust herself.
Despite that, she doesn’t languish in distress. “It’s not like I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just been a little bit harder getting there than it should have been,” she says.
That churning fuels more what-ifs: Late-night musings are giving shape to a new vision.
In place of an empty lot, Ms. Bell imagines building a jewel box on the water’s edge. She is in touch with an architect who specializes in buildings made of glass. The lot is too small for a family home, she says, so she’ll make it a work of art – maybe to sell, maybe not.
Her children do not agree about her change of heart. Allegra thinks she should “sell the lot as soon as possible, invest the money, and live my life,” says Ms. Bell.
Colborn, on the other hand, has pushed for a rebuild. Not only would the house create a legacy for their family, he says, but he believes the project would help his mom “realize a new lease on life.”
It already has. Ms. Bell is exploring plans and permits, which she believes will add to the property’s value. It is a business decision as well as a creative one, she says, even if she is not quite sure how she’ll pay for it. Art, in step with logic.
August and everything after: Joy in the art of it
In early August, Ms. Bell sits quietly in the garden at a Santa Monica bakery.
She and her fellow dancers wrapped their ballet showcase two days earlier. The weeks of practice deepened their camaraderie, she says, just as she had hoped. Now, she feels “wonderfully and creatively liberated.”
Her teacher, Mr. Hodges, sees someone recovering with grace and grit. “She’s not trying to recreate the life she had, but she’s trying to respond to that and build a life that’s next.”
What’s next, now, is rebuilding. Geologists and structural engineers will help Ms. Bell and some neighbors build foundations on the beach. Architects will deliver plans for her new home.
There is joy in the art of it, and an expectation that whatever she chooses will be right for her and for the property, “and so that’s all a beautiful thing.”
“I feel like there’s so many wonderful things to live and be and do,” she says.
