The L.A.-to-NYC Migration Has Begun

Ilian Rebei, who moved his art gallery Nagas from Paris to Los Angeles, had been thinking about relocating to New York, where most of clients are based, but hadn’t set anything in motion. “I had this idea in mind, but nothing concrete, no plan,” says Rebei. And then the wildfires hit. “I heard that in the Pacific Palisades it moved from ten acres to 200 acres very quickly,” he said. “And with artwork, when it’s gone, it’s gone.” Shortly after the fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills, he started calling freight companies to see if anyone could move the art from his Hollywood gallery — about 35 paintings and 15 drawings — to New York. “I had to call, like, 20 or 30 places,” he says. Once he locked one down, he set about finding a new home for himself, contacting Nancy Elton, a real-estate agent at Bond New York, about a rental listing she had for a studio apartment on the Upper East Side. “There was a real sense of urgency,” says Elton. “We saw the apartment at 2:45 p.m. Thursday, had him approved by 8 p.m., and he signed the lease at 8:20.” On Saturday, he moved in. “From where I was living in Santa Monica, I could see the fire with my own eyes,” Rebei said. “Of course, I could have moved later, could have taken the risk. But at one point, you have to decide, and I decided that the moment was now.”

While many Angelenos are staying in, or at least close to, the city right now, some have taken the massive destruction as a sign that it’s time to move on — a reversal of the longstanding New Yorker dream of moving west. With tens of thousands of Californians still under evacuation orders, some ten thousand of structures destroyed (along with a lot of the infrastructure needed to supply them with basic utilities), and experts saying that, optimistically, rebuilding will take two to three years, it’s clear that thousands of people will need to find semipermanent housing in the immediate future. And that’s likely to prove difficult in L.A., where the sudden housing crunch has resulted in price gouging which, despite being illegal, is widespread.

Ryan Serhant recently told Fox Business that he’s been inundated with calls from L.A. brokers who have clients looking for rental housing on the East Coast. And those clients are increasingly interested in buying instead of renting, as the scope of the destruction becomes clearer: “People have said this is the final straw for the state.” But other New York brokers say that most of the conversations they’ve had with people from Los Angeles are of the “Yeah, we might be looking to move back” variety. Still, they expect that there will be something of an exodus in the coming months. “I texted a client who moved to L.A. to see if everything was okay,” says Enrica Petrongari, a real-estate agent at Keller Williams NYC. “He said, ‘Everything is burned out. Luckily, we have insurance. But I don’t think it’s worth having a house in California anymore.’”

For some homeowners who are already bicoastal, New York is the obvious place to live during the yearslong process of rebuilding their L.A. homes. “People need stability. They’re not going to check into a hotel for six months,” says Yan Gladkov, an agent at Keller Williams NYC. Gladkov’s clients include a couple whose home has burned down in the Hollywood Hills. They have a pied-à-terre on Billionaire’s Row to retreat to but are now considering buying something larger in New York, or possibly the Hamptons, that they can use as a primary residence while they rebuild in L.A.

For Alex O’Keefe, a TV writer who worked on The Bear and rents in a South L.A. neighborhood not touched by the fires, last week’s destruction was only the latest sign that Hollywood, at least as he knows it, is over. The end of the streaming boom, the writer’s strike, and subsequent changes to streamers’ models have all translated to less work, making it hard for him to carve out a living in the industry. And now, he says, the fires are going to have “domino effects. A big Hollywood star or producer who lost their home in the Palisades? They are probably not going to want to make their next thing here,” he said. “I also think insurance on production will be sky high and it will be harder to finance the governor’s plan to raise tax credits for L.A. production.” And then, of course, there are the wildfires themselves, and fire season in L.A. seems to expand every year. That’s why he’s decided to permanently relocate to New York. “Certainly it’s not any better rent-wise,” he says, “but my fiancée’s family lives in New York, and we can stay in their spare room.”

The offer of free housing on the North Fork garnered a lot of reactions but limited interest from those displaced by the wildfires.
Photo: Office of Tangible Space

Still, the majority of Angelenos who are looking are most likely still in an exploratory phase. Michael Yarinsky, a partner at the design studio Office of Tangible Space, recently offered up the studio’s North Fork home for free on Instagram as temporary housing for a displaced family. “It was available for the next month or so, and the vibe there is very similar to Altadena, very creative, a lot of working artists,” says Yarinsky. He says he’s currently in conversation with a couple of people who are interested, but it seems to him that people who’ve lost a lot are not looking to get out: “They want to stay local, monitor the situation — some of them haven’t even gotten access to their home’s site. I think it will probably happen that some of them end up moving to the East Coast, but a lot of people are just trying to get a sense of where the ground is right now.”