I remember when my mom said, “You have to be a millionaire to live middle class in Los Angeles.” We were watching the Fourth of July parade, a beloved tradition in Pacific Palisades. I knew the town was unique, and that I loved the feeling that we were all part of a community in a huge, anonymous, and very status-driven city.

At 15, I became Miss Palisades, winning a talent pageant with a children’s story I wrote about a heart cell who, not wanting to push people around for a living, escaped through the body to meet the Pupiler and learn how to let the light in. I never expected to win, but the sweetness of the story landed well in that town.

Hearing that my mother and stepfather just lost their home, people keep saying, “I had no idea you were from the Palisades.” I suspect many of my childhood friends are hearing similar incredulity, similarly reluctant to disclose that they are from a town where the median house costs $3 million. I don’t have to deal with the judgment of my privilege, saying instead that I grew up flying back and forth between LA and Anchorage, Alaska, where I was born and where my father lived — like Harvard alumni who say they went to school in Boston.

In addition to their surprise at my hometown, I’ve also had to respond to whether everyone who lost their homes was wealthy. The question, translated, is “should I care?”

Our obsession with privilege seems to mean that we cannot appreciate the suffering of those families, even the very wealthy ones, who just lost their homes. The kids I grew up with were privileged, many wealthy, but in the 1980s the homes on my street cost far less than my home in western Massachusetts. My friends’ parents had enormous wealth in those houses, but in losing all their material possessions and their community in their 70s and 80s, what do their lives look like?

These are not people who can now pay the exorbitant rents that already defined LA before the supply-demand debacle now. Will insurance companies require octogenarians to rebuild? What is the value of a plot of land in a decimated town? My childhood friends and neighbors, some of whom lost their homes and livelihoods as well, are now posting GoFundMe requests for their parents. I wonder how they are supposed to incorporate the costs — not just financial — of supporting their parents alongside child care, rents and mortgages, and all of the other expenses creating an affordability crisis for our generation.

We should care about the many, many people who rented or inherited, or whose livelihoods depended on the people and businesses in that town. And we should also care about those who worked hard to get those homes, an American Dream that is growing harder to achieve.

In high school, as I tried to make sense of the wealth in our town, I asked my stepfather what class we were in. He suggested that we were well-off but not upper class. As he put it, people in the upper class don’t work for their money.

My stepfather was born into poverty on a farm in Ohio, the only person in his town to go to college. He lived under the university stadium and, some weeks, on a loaf of bread. He thought he’d be a farmer as his parents were, but discovered he was gifted in science. He became an obstetrician and ended up in Alaska. My memories of visiting him in Alaska include a flashing beeper, back when that’s how people were contacted, and never being able to plan an activity. He was always at the hospital.

In Anchorage, he met my mother, a nurse recently separated from my father. After her divorce, my mom returned to her mother and father, a shoe salesman, in Los Angeles. Alongside her came her 4-year-old son and 2-year-old twin daughters. She wanted to be financially independent from my father, to get a Ph.D. and, hopefully, become a professor.

She planned on living in student housing at UCLA, but my stepfather was able to help with a down payment on a house (now burned) on a hill above a great elementary school (now burned) in Pacific Palisades.

My Mom wasn’t like the PTA moms in town who had time to bake cookies for student theater productions. She decided to become a child psychologist at an office (now burned) in town (now burned), and helped families all over LA get services for their autistic children. Someone once asked about my academic success and her secret. She said, “She watched me work, and she learned to work.” Incredibly, my mom hasn’t stopped working throughout this crisis, providing telehealth therapy for traumatized Angelinos despite her own losses.

After graduating as valedictorian from Palisades High School (now burned), I didn’t become a children’s author. I pursued higher education to make sense of how people rebuild after war. I was fixated on that question, hoping to prepare myself if I ever were a refugee as my grandmother and great-grandparents were.

I am not a refugee, and my mom and stepfather are going to be fine. But from my studies and travels, I know what it means to lose one’s home, not just one’s house. We all find ways to make meaning in this world, and place plays a huge part in that. Wars are fought because of the meaning we associate with land. Wealth may help those who have it find a place to live, but it does not restore what they’ve lost.

Each person in the Palisades has a story, and their suffering is not something to dismiss.

Jamie Rowen lives in Amherst and is an associate professor at UMass Amherst.