A Chinatown fire leaves 50 homeless. The cause outrages residents

A man on his phone watches a fire at a construction site on New Depot Street.

Sept. 28, 2024 Updated 6:24 AM PT

When Andy Liang stepped outside his apartment building to investigate the fumes he smelled in the early morning of Sept. 13, he saw there was a small fire at the abandoned construction site next door on Bunker Hill Avenue.

Liang turned around and walked back into the second-floor apartment that he shared with his parents. Their apartment faced the construction site, but this wasn’t the first fire that had broken out next door.

“I thought it was nothing serious until it started spreading,” Liang said.

The fire jumped to a neighboring three-story apartment building, injuring six people and displacing 50 individual tenants and families. Liang, who called 911 after the blaze started growing, roused his parents and evacuated when the flames threatened his unit.

Residents stand outside their fire-damaged apartment in Chinatown.

The construction site has been an ongoing issue for the neighborhood, attracting squatters and forcing first responders to put out a number of small fires there after it was abandoned at the end of 2022.

Wilson, who declined to give his last name because of privacy concerns, said he moved into a unit on New Depot Street with a friend and her three children about three months ago. Right away, he said, he noticed squatters living nearby in the construction site. Every night when he was trying to sleep, he’d hear people moving around or making noise.

“I had the feeling that it wasn’t safe,” said the 60-year-old. An immigrant from China, he has lived in Los Angeles for 40 years.

The rear of a vehicle in a fire's aftermath at a construction site on New Depot Street on Sept. 13.

Wilson said the owner of his building called the police several times about the squatters, but nothing ever happened. About a month ago, Wilson said, he saw the fire department at the construction site battling a small blaze and chatted with one of the firefighters. They told him that they had been there “many times.”

Neighbors on Bunker Hill Avenue and New Depot Street told The Times they had previously voiced their concerns about the construction site to Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez’s office, the city’s Building and Safety Department and the Los Angeles Police Department.

The tenants said officials told them that the city couldn’t act on their complaints about the campers because the tenants didn’t own the construction site, so they didn’t have a say over who could or could not be on the property.

On the morning of the fire, Wilson said, his roommate thought she heard rain. But when she looked outside, she saw there were flames everywhere.

After running out to safety together with his friend and her children, Wilson said, he remembers thinking that the blaze wouldn’t reach his building. But then he saw the flames get blown over by the wind.

The view through broken windows after a fire at a construction site on New Depot Street.

Around 8 a.m. Daisy Ma and other staff members of the Chinatown Service Center arrived to find the 50 tenants, a majority of whom were seniors, standing or sitting across the street from the burned buildings in shock and some in tears.

Recognizing that many of the individuals and families whose homes were engulfed in flames were clients of their health center, staffers there stepped in to interpret for their clients and other tenants whose first language is Cantonese, said Ma, chief government and community relations officer for the nonprofit. That enabled the residents to interact with the Red Cross, city officials and others who stepped in to help the victims obtain food, clothing, medicine and a place to sleep.

Many of the units were red-tagged and couldn’t be reentered by the tenants, Ma said, so the nonprofit worked with firefighters to recover the residents’ medications, canes and walkers, as well as state and federal representatives to obtain new copies of their Social Security numbers and naturalization certificates.

Many of the displaced residents spent the night after the fire at the Alpine Recreational Center, which the Red Cross and the city’s Emergency Management Department jointly opened. After that the group was split, with some staying temporarily at the Best Western Plus Dragon Gate Inn or the Royal Pagoda Motel.

Three displaced tenants who needed specific medical care — for example, routine catheter cleaning — were temporarily placed in a rehabilitation center where they could receive 24-hour medical attention.

Ma said it’s been difficult for the fire victims to be separated from one another and away from their community. The feelings were compounded by the arrival of the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar.

A man and woman stand across the street from their fire-damaged apartment.

The festival is a time to gather with family, share a meal and wish for luck or prosperity. This year, the festival was observed four days after the fire; the Chinatown Service Center and the Red Cross coordinated with Best Western to use the hotel’s meeting space to host a dinner that day for the whole group of fire victims.

Liang said his parents are staying at the Best Western and will be moved to the Royal Pagoda Motel at the end of the month.

They’re “holding on,” he said, especially his dad, who was recovering from colon-cancer surgery he underwent two days before the fire.

A week after the fire, Liang returned to UC Santa Barbara for his sophomore year with some financial assistance provided by the First Chinese Baptist Church and the computer he recovered from his burned unit.

He calls his parents daily to check in on their situation.

Wilson has been living at his friend’s house in Temple City. His Chevrolet coupe, which he bought a year ago, burned up in the flames. His insurance company is willing to cover a portion of the car’s cost, but Wilson still has to pay the remaining $10,000 on his car loan.

His passport, along with the tools he uses for his job as a handyman, were inside the car and were also destroyed.