Despite the stress of the fires, most L.A. County residents don’t plan to leave, poll finds

Despite widespread stress, smoke inhalation and other disruptions caused by the January wildfires, a majority of Los Angeles County residents are happy with their lives here and don’t plan to leave.

Fewer than 1 in 4 L.A. County residents are considering moving out of the area because of the fires, and fewer than 1 in 10 residents are seriously weighing that decision, according to a new poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies co-sponsored by The Times.

The poll found that 57% of residents are satisfied with the region’s quality of life, while more than 7 in 10 people are happy with their own neighborhood.

“This huge tragedy affected a lot of people in the county, and yet, the overall measures on the quality of life in Los Angeles are positive,” said Mark DiCamillo, the director of Berkeley IGS poll. “It’s the California lifestyle. A lot of people like it.”

The fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades destroyed more than 13,000 homes and businesses and, in combination with smaller blazes in Hollywood, Studio City and Sylmar, forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people.

The poll found that the fires had a wide-reaching effect on the physical and mental health of county residents, including those who lived far from the disaster zones.

Nearly 4 in 10 L.A. County residents said their health, or the health of a family member, had been harmed by wildfire smoke. About 6% said they or a family member had been treated by a doctor for an illness or injury resulting from the fires.

The mental toll was higher still, with 3 in 10 residents saying they’d experienced high levels of additional stress.

Anxiety was more pronounced among women than men: About 37% of women said they experienced high stress during the fires, compared with 22% of men. Men were also more likely to say the fires hadn’t stressed them much at all, with 4 in 10 saying they had low anxiety, compared with 22% of women.

“Women are often the caregivers in the household, either for older folks or for their kids,” DiCamillo said. “The burden is greater for them.”

Parents in Los Angeles County reported feeling more unease than people without children, the findings showed. Parents also were more likely to say they are seriously considering leaving the county in the aftermath of the fires.

After seeing news coverage from the Palisades on Jan. 7, Ana Herrera, 37, packed suitcases for her and her two young daughters, just in case. Then the Hurst fire erupted in Sylmar, just a few miles north of their home in Pacoima.

Fretting that the fire would move south into their neighborhood, Herrera put her daughters in their car seats and drove to a family member’s house in South Los Angeles for the night. It felt like a surprise sleepover for her kids, she said, as she wondered whether they would be able to go home again.

On top of the normal worries when raising a family, she said, it was a lot to handle.

“Just the waiting, and the winds,” she said. “It was so stressful.”

The level of confidence that residents have in the region’s recovery had a strong correlation with whether they are thinking about moving, the poll found.

Among residents who reported having a little confidence or not much confidence in L.A.’s recovery, 44% said they were considering a move, compared with 9% of residents who said they had a great deal of confidence in L.A.’s ability to bounce back.

Political ideology is another significant factor in whether people like Los Angeles County and plan to stay after the fires, DiCamillo said.

Residents who describe themselves as very conservative or are registered Republicans reported far lower levels of satisfaction with the county’s quality of life compared with their more liberal neighbors.

When asked whether they were satisfied with the county’s quality of life, 36% of strongly conservative respondents said yes, compared with 3 in 4 strongly liberal respondents. When asked about their own neighborhoods, 60% of strongly conservative residents said they were satisfied, compared with 84% of their strongly liberal neighbors.

“It’s an interesting dichotomy,” DiCamillo said. “What you’re seeing is a lot of Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters who say, I kind of like where I live, but I don’t like the county.”

The poll found that several sectors of the workforce have a higher-than-average number of people considering a move out of L.A. County because the fires, including the transportation sector (41%), the arts and entertainment industry (36%) and the trades (32%). The sectors with the lowest shares were office work (17%), social services (18%) and warehouses (18%).

Arts and entertainment workers also reported higher-than-average rates of high stress from the fires: 38% of workers said they experienced a high level of additional anxiety. Other industries that saw a similar reported rate of high stress included workers who were directly affected by the fires, such as domestic work (38%), social services (37%) and healthcare (36%).

The Berkeley IGS poll was conducted online in English and Spanish on Feb. 17 to 26.

It surveyed 5,184 registered voters in Los Angeles County. The margin of error may be imprecise; however, the survey’s estimated margin of error for Los Angeles County voters is 2 percentage points, and higher for subgroups.