For more than a decade, his job was to help homeless people find housing.
Last week, social worker Anthony Ruffin lost his home.
On Monday morning, five days after the Eaton Fire destroyed much of Altadena, Ruffin, 56, wiped his eyes over a cup of coffee at a Glendale diner, recalling the history he has spent much of his life with. He talked about a black neighborhood.
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Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and was a Pulitzer finalist four times.
“I would walk around, knock on doors, say ‘hello’ to people’s moms…I’d go to people’s houses and get sandwiches from their moms,” Ruffin recalled. “‘Mr. Lee, how are you doing?’ Miss Phillips, would you mind making me a 7-up cake like you used to do when I was a kid? Hello, Mr. King.” Robert across the street. , I sat there for hours talking to him. ”
Ruffin grew up in a two-bed, one-bath house on West Palm Street, just above West Altadena Street between Lincoln Avenue and Fair Oaks Avenue, which he later purchased from his parents. Ruffin, who faces a lot of suffering every day as part of her job, has established a morning routine of waking up early and sitting in her garden, looking out at the San Gabriel Mountains and listening to the birds. During that time, he was surrounded by plants he named after homeless clients to whom he was particularly attached.
“It was my safe place,” he said.
From left to right, Anthony Ruffin, Sieglinde von Deffner and Janet Lowe speak as people arrive at Leimert Park Plaza to receive the coronavirus vaccine.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
Early on the morning of Jan. 8, Ruffin and his wife, Joni Miller, a longtime social worker serving the homeless community, had to evacuate without time to gather valuables.
A handwritten letter left behind was written by Miller’s grandmother on the day he was born.
The same goes for the disabled cellphones, seven of which contained photos, contact information and notes from Ruffin of hundreds of customers thanking them for their help.
Hours later, they learned that their house and everything inside had been incinerated, along with most of their block and neighborhood.
“It’s terrible,” Ruffin told me through tears as she tried to collect herself near the hotel where she and Miller were staying.
Ruffin and I met more than a dozen years ago when he worked for a nonprofit organization called Housing Works Hollywood. He served as a case manager for my friend Nathaniel Ayers. Nathaniel Ayers was a Juilliard-trained musician who became known as “The Soloist” while homeless on Skid Row.
Those of us who know Mr. Ayers have secured some of his possessions, including various musical instruments. Ruffin told me he’s been holding Ayers’ drumsticks for years.
Last week they were lost in a fire.
Ruffin’s mentor at Housing Works was Molly Lowery, a legendary social worker who also assisted Ayers, whose motto in assisting clients was one Ruffin adopted. “Whatever you need, for as long as you need it.”
In 2017, Times photographer Francine Orr and I profiled Ruffin and his work with the Hollywood 14, a group of homeless and severely disabled people with severe physical and mental illnesses. His regulars included amputees, diabetics, and drug addicts. “Some are partially paralyzed,” I wrote. “Many are ghosts, their original forms almost invisible in the shadow of constant mental illness.”
The setting sun illuminates the charred remains of the Altadena Community Church on January 11, 2025.
(Allen J. Scherben/Los Angeles Times)
Ruffin was, and still is, regularly out on weekends and in the middle of the night to check on customers. He knelt on the sidewalk and looked them in the eyes, took them to appointments, visited them in the hospital, and worked tirelessly to gain their trust and house them.
Ruffin said his desire to become a social worker had a lot to do with his biological father’s struggles and homelessness. Ruffin said she wasn’t close to her father until later in life, when he worked as a legal briefs deliveryman in downtown Los Angeles. Eventually, the two developed a belated but “beautiful relationship,” Ruffin said, adding that her father carried a briefcase containing a copy of my story about his son, a social worker.
In 1976, Ruffin and his mother, Myrtle Williams, moved into a home in Altadena that had been purchased in 1972 by his stepfather, Carl Williams, a truck driver from Texas. Angeles was off-limits to blacks, and the west side of Altadena was a safe haven.
“We played soccer on the street, we played baseball on the street, we went to school on the street,” Ruffin said of his childhood.
The house was often full, he continued, with various relatives who needed a place to stay for a short time or longer.
“It was a happy time because there was so much love in that house and people were just sleeping where they slept,” Ruffin said. “If you fell asleep on the couch in the living room, on the floor, on your bunk, that’s where you slept. There was a space under the bunk, so someone was sleeping there.”
Ruffin said it’s not uncommon for black men in her neighborhood to come to the end of their lives and insist on dying at home. Ruffin said they are aware of racism and housing discrimination, struggle to find jobs that pay enough to buy property and support their families, and say they “have no choice but to live in the homes they built.” “I thought I wanted to die.”
The Eaton Fire destroyed this school bus, which was parked outside Aveson Charter School in Altadena, on January 11, 2025.
(Allen J. Scherben/Los Angeles Times)
Upon Carl Williams’ retirement, his mother and stepfather decided to move to Hesperia in his place. Still, they wanted to keep the house in the family. So Mr. Ruffin bought this house from them 20 years ago, and in honor of all the sweat and love his parents put into this house, he decided to preserve it without changing the floor plan or remodeling it. With this in mind, we began the renovation.
“I worked two jobs to protect that property because I knew how much it meant to my family,” Ruffin said Monday, pausing to wipe away tears. “We really fixed up the house and it looks really nice.”
Ruffin said her mother and stepfather, now 76 and 83, are “devastated” by the destruction. The same goes for all the neighbors who are devastated by the disappearance of the foothills.
“I talked to all of them,” Ruffin said. “I talked to Miss Lee. I talked to Dr. Douglas, and I couldn’t stop crying.”
Ruffin and Miller also lost two cats and one of their two chickens. When they fled, they managed to pick up a one-eyed cat, Maple, who was once homeless in South LA, and a rescue dog, Nan, who was a stray on Skid Row.
On Jan. 13, with their lives forever changed and their immediate future uncertain, Miller, who like her husband works on Skid Row for the county health department, returned to work. Ruffin was on vacation like any other holiday.
“Today we have to meet a homeless person and help them get into housing,” Ruffin said of his Skid Row clients. “I did it on Friday as well. Every day I have to help someone…I’ve had my own problems, but I’m lucky. A lot of people on Skid Row are addicted and homeless.” They’re struggling and they don’t have some of the resources that I have. I mean, I got a motel room now, and they don’t have it.”
Like many others who lost their homes in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, Ruffin was busy sorting out insurance issues and temporary housing options. Since he has no idea what insurance will cover him or how much it will cost to start over, he said he plans to start a gofundme page and share the proceeds with his neighbors.
But he knows exactly what the long-term plan is. He wants to rebuild in the same place and in the same dimensions.
“There’s so much history there,” he said. “I want exactly the same thing. Nothing more. Nothing more.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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