1 week ago
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I love my landlord. I don’t mean that I find him charming, though I do. I mean I moved on to a swath of dirt in Los Angeles county with three ancient cabins on it, and over the course of six years, went from pleasantries in the driveway to saying: “Love you Jeri, bye!” on the phone.
When I moved into one of the rickety structures on his unlandscaped property in Topanga Canyon, one of the last hippie enclaves just north of the Pacific Palisades, I was the latest in a very long line of tenants. It was a bucolic slice of land and it had to be, because without the scenery, you would notice the three cabins were one good gust away from falling down the cliff.
Jeri had purchased the property for $57,000 in 1977 – and 1977 is where it stayed. There were no keys to any of the houses, and you shared each equally with the coyotes that burrowed beneath them, the raccoons that lived on them, and the rats that lived in them. Everything was held together by an equal number of nails to staples. There was a single piece of loose plywood preventing you from falling into the septic tank. It was wonderful.
A jazz musician by trade, Jeri has never worked an office job in his life. He buys salmon exclusively from the sale bin at Ralph’s, uses the same “Happy Birthday!” banner for every celebration (Christmas and weddings included), and sleeps on a confoundingly high pile of old blankets so his bed is tall enough for his 6ft 5in frame. He once took us out to dinner and paid for it with $2 bills. “Who doesn’t love a $2 bill!” he exclaimed, flapping them in the air while wearing a ladybug antennae headband. It was the week of Halloween, and he didn’t want people to think he was “some kind of curmudgeon”.
And he wasn’t. Jeri’s landline was always ringing with some faraway friend wanting to catch up, but when he needed someone to pick up medication from the pharmacy or help repair something on the property, he asked us.
Jeri is a man with history, panache and character. He is not, I’m sure you guessed, a man with social media.
I moved to Colorado four years ago. It pained me to leave Jeri, but I was his final tenant, and he was preparing to move on. Three months ago, he finally sold his property. His heart ached to leave Topanga, but his heart also ached without medication. He needed to be closer to medical care, so he sold his personal paradise and moved into a trailer home on the Pacific Coast Highway.
He moved all the photos of him playing drums with the greats, photos of him with Aretha Franklin and James Brown. He moved all the paintings his daughter had done as a child. He moved the collection of well-worn T-shirts from the concerts of long dead musicians.
He moved all of it into a trailer home, and then on Wednesday 8 January, that trailer burned to the ground.
I was taking January off Instagram, but the reports of the Palisades fire pulled me back in. I wanted to see the updates coming from my friends in Santa Monica, Altadena and Topanga.
As the smoke clears, all I see on Instagram now are links to GoFundMe. I know five people so far whose homes have burned to the ground. Their internet donation funds are being shared by everyone I know because not only are these people loved, they’re loved on Instagram – a near prerequisite of a GoFundMe getting funded.
GoFundMe is now the backbone of American comeback stories. Help me raise $10,000 to buy my dad a new wheelchair. Our insurance won’t cover our $60,000 NICU costs. We need $3,000 for our dog’s heart surgery. We have become accustomed to bailing each other out when the system won’t. Hell, we even launch the GoFundMe campaign before we finish filing the paperwork.
That’s the American way – because we’ve found it’s the only way that works. But not everyone is equal in the face of generosity, or at least not in the face of the algorithm. There is no safety net beyond the one you’ve built around yourself: a good picture, a good story and a good platform to post it on. Please share.
For Jeri to have a GoFundMe, he would need someone like me to run it, someone who can craft his story and get it shared. Jeri’s friends, for the most part, are not millennials with decades of internet connections under their belts. His friends are, like him, offline.
Every GoFundMe campaign relies on luck: how many times it gets shared and who does the sharing play a pivotal role in the goal being met. If your sister-in-law shares it to her 300 Instagram followers, you might raise $1,000. But if your sister-in-law is Mandy Moore, and she shares it to her Instagram followers, it will get funded. And in fact, after she did share her brother- and sister-in-law’s campaign: it raised more than $200,000 of the $175,000 goal.
I can help fill this role for Jeri, but Jeri doesn’t want help. He’s old-school in his charity: if someone else has less, they need it more.
That’s how charity is generally thought of: those with more helping those with less. What happens when that system gets turned on its head? What happens when the system is those with more followers get more help? The economic disparity in the US is so extreme that helping a person with any means can feel confusing and unfair.
According to GoFundMe’s annual report, the number of campaigns launched to cover essential expenses like rent and food quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. After the destruction of the multiple fires in LA, many people find themselves with children and pets and no family for hundreds of miles. Many people who put everything into businesses run out of their homes will find their income stolen. Many house cleaners, gardeners and caretakers will find their jobs have gone up in smoke. Many people who lived quiet, private lives will now be wondering how to be loud enough to be heard.
But how do you build a story for someone whose entire story is in the past? What if their story is private? What about someone who’s still working on their own redemption arc? How, in America, do you get someone to buy in when you have nothing to sell?
Is it fair to share one GoFundMe out of hundreds experiencing the same loss when you have fans? Fans who almost certainly have less money than you but now have a tangible way to express their support? The community is rallying around the inevitable inequity that is bound to occur in a city with great economic disparity. There are now Google Sheets compiling GoFundMe campaigns, sorted by those that still need support. But the story is always the same: the people with better connections get lifted first.
I don’t think that all help should be relegated to local communities, or that people with large Instagram followings shouldn’t get any help. For what it’s worth, I do think GoFundMe is good – but its goodness is derived entirely from the system being bad.
There is an often quoted, now deleted post from the X user @PerthshireMags regarding our ongoing climate disaster: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
My landlord and I could have had a very transactional relationship – but when you’re in fire country, you learn to check on each other. It’s just that it’s all fire country now.
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Kelton Wright writes ShangriLogs, a diary from another fire country in Colorado
