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Heather Vandenberghe is among the Mipeninsula’s newest residents, having just moved into an Eichler rental home in Menlo Park earlier this year.
Vandenberghe was working with local Realtor Lori Buecheler of Compass real estate and also using home-searching web sites on her own when she found the short-term rental property only three days after beginning her search.
Though not remarkable in and of itself, it represents a very unexpected turn of events for the advisor for fashion and wellness companies and her youngest daughter, a high school student.
Their move has its origins in the catastrophic wildfires in her native Los Angeles on Jan. 7.
While it’s been nearly three months since she fled her Southern California home and relocated to the Midpeninsula, Vandenberghe is still getting settled into her new neighborhood nearly 400 miles away from the place she once called home. She recently sat down with us to share her story about the events that brought her to Menlo Park.
A narrow escape
Jan. 7 was an extraordinarily windy day that began with Vandenberghe cutting up her Christmas tree for disposal out in front of her hillside home overlooking the ocean in Pacific Palisades. Not more than two hours later, she and her daughter were hastily loading several days worth of clothing, medications and important documents into her car, as they narrowly escaped encroaching flames spread by the ferocious hurricane-force Santa Ana winds topping out at 114 miles per hour.
“I was on a call when I got an alert on my phone about a fire in the area,” Vandenberghe said. “But, the alert gave no indication how serious it was. And we didn’t get an evacuation order.”
It wasn’t until she walked out in front of her house — where she saw the approaching flames and several neighbors preparing to evacuate — that the emergency became apparent.
According to multiple media reports, the fire was reported at around 10:30 that morning, and the first broad evacuation order wasn’t issued until about noon, after many residents had already started to flee the area.
“We got out of the neighborhood just in time,” said Vandenberghe, who headed toward her father’s home on the southern edge of the Palisades. “We were able to get onto PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) just before it was closed.”
That allowed them to narrowly avoid the nightmarish scene on nearby gridlocked Sunset Boulevard, where people were ordered by the fire department to abandon their cars and literally run for their lives from the flames.
For a while, Vandenberghe watched the destruction unfold from her father’s deck. But, just an hour later, she, her daughter, and now her father, had to flee again as the fire engulfed more of the picturesque community. They found a hotel room in nearby Santa Monica to spend the night, awaking the next day to choking, smoke-filled skies.
“Our home and our neighborhood was completely gone,” she said.
That life-altering fact was confirmed as she and her daughter drove north to the Bay Area on Jan. 8 to stay with a close friend who’s a professor at Stanford University, and where her eldest daughter is a student and Vandenberghe herself earned a graduate degree years ago. Being among the first Palisades fire victims to file a claim with her insurance company, State Farm, her house was declared a total loss.
“Rebuilding is going to take many years,” she said.
A 364-mile journey north to find refuge
Deciding to instead relocate to the Midpeninsula for the long-term, Vandenberghe — who works from home — is among a small number of the estimated 200,000 people displaced by the fires who headed north to the Bay Area. The January conflagrations, which remained active for 25 days, killed 29 people and destroyed 18,000 homes and businesses – primarily in the upscale coastal enclave of the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, and the San Gabriel Valley community of Altadena, 35 miles to the east.
Property damage estimates from the wildfires range from $95 billion to $164 billion, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
The California Legislature voted to provide $2.5 billion in aid to fire victims, while Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested an additional $39.7 billion in assistance from Congress.
The massively damaging fires are sure to push already skyrocketing home insurance rates even higher statewide. An emergency request by State Farm Insurance to increase its rates by 22% was rejected in February by Ricardo Lara, the state insurance commissioner. A month later, he provisionally approved the rate hike after the company reported experiencing financial struggles due to the Los Angeles wildfires.
Though initially thrilled to return to her childhood home of Pacific Palisades nine years ago to raise her own daughters after spending 15 years in New York City, Vandenberghe is now enthusiastic about her new home.
“There is such a strong sense of community here,” she said of the Midpeninsula. “Everyone has been so friendly, helpful and welcoming.”
Vandenberghe will be in the local housing market again when her short-term lease expires, but, she plans to make the Midpeninsula her new home.
Disaster ‘hits home’ on the Midpeninsula
Realtor Lori Buecheler was touched by the Palisades fire through another client, as well. She represented a client, a long-time local resident, in the sale of his Palo Alto home last fall before he moved to Malibu. However, his new home there was destroyed in the Palisades fire, which leveled hundreds of homes in the coastal community to the west of Pacific Palisades.
“I have many friends who live in that part of Los Angeles and in Santa Monica,” Buecheler said. “It is a very similar housing market price wise and in building costs to the Midpeninsula.”
Rebuilding individual homes in the Palisades will likely cost “well north of $1,000 per square foot,” she said..
There’s always the possibility a housing developer may enter the picture to rebuild housing on a large scale, Buecheler added.
The Palisades fire hit close to home for another local Realtor, Susan Sims of The Agency Los Altos. Her husband’s parents lost their home of 52 years in the January disaster.
Sims and her husband provided refuge for her in-laws — her husband’s 87-year-old mother and 90-year-old father — before searching the Midpeninsula for housing options.
“Just imagine losing not only your home of 52 years, but your entire community, as well,” Sims said. “In all those years, they had only evacuated once before for a fire, back in 1978. And they were able to return home two hours later.”
No such good fortune in 2025. Not that it dimmed the irrepressible optimism of her mother-in-law.
“She has maintained her positive outlook, despite all that has happened,” Sims said. “My mother-in-law is a pretty amazing person.”
Sims was able to find housing in Palo Alto for her father-in-law at a facility known for its memory care program and at a multi-generational housing development that includes a retirement community for her mother-in-law.
“Timing is everything,” Sims said of the housing search. “We were very fortunate.”
A long, hard road to recovery
Since the Los Angeles wildfires, 475 state and federal crews have been working around the clock to clean up ash, soot and damaged buildings. As of March 21, 1,300 parcels have been cleared of debris, according to the Governor’s office.
The need for assistance by fire survivors remains overwhelming. A $1 million grant program offered by the California Association of Realtors had to be closed after a single week when it was inundated with more than 1,300 applications.
Donations to fire victims can still be made through such organizations as the American Red Cross, United Way of Greater Los Angeles, California Fire Foundation, California Community Foundation and GoFundMe.
