14 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
L.A.POSTCARD
AWARD-WORTHY
W
ildfires, drought, the prospect of
Caitlyn Jenner as governor: noth-
ing can stop people from moving to
California. “There were definitely some
who left,” Kurt Rappaport, the C.E.O.
of Westside Estate Agency, said the
other day, referring to the pandemic ex-
odus. He wore a black blazer and stood
at the bar at Soho House, the site of the
first-ever Power Broker Awards, an Os-
cars for the unsung heroes of Los An-
geles real estate.
“But moving to Texas or Florida to
save on taxes?” he went on. “Do you want
to live in Florida? Miami is cheesy. It’s
fun for Art Basel, but have you been to
Miami in the summer? Not pretty.”
The awards were hosted by the Holly
wood Reporter, which publishes an an-
nual list of the area’s top thirty real-
estate agents. Degen Pener, the deputy
editor, explained, “We look at sales,
social-media followings.”
Pener said that the evening was mod-
elled on an event that the Reporter does
for top stylists. “They would say, ‘We see
one another at fittings and running out
of Gucci and Prada, but we never get to
sit down and chat,’” he said. “I’m sure
these agents see one another going in
and out of listings, on the other side of
contracts.” He added, “They’re very com-
petitive. Hopefully we sat everyone right.”
There were twenty-eight agents
in attendance, and all were, in theory,
nominees. “I’ve already asked,” Fredrik
Eklund, a Douglas Elliman agent and
a star on Bravo’s “Million Dollar List-
ing,” who wore a flowered blazer, said.
“I’m not getting an award.”
“I don’t look at myself as, like, the
star,” Carl Gambino, an agent with
Compass, said. “All I like to do is buy
and sell real estate.”
“So many of our clients are stars,”
Matthew Altman, of Elliman, said. “I
was a talent agent before, at C.A.A.”
Real estate, he added, is more lucra-
tive. “Unless you own C.A.A. But it’s
the same fucking clients. Same fuck-
ing people.” He reached across the bar
to stroke Rappaport’s hand. “I just
want to touch a legend,” he said. “He’s
a big deal.” Among Rappaport’s re-
cent sales: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s house
(a hundred and twenty-five million
dollars), and Ellen DeGeneres’s (forty-
seven million). Altman looked up atRappaport and asked, “Do you know
anyone who wants a fuck-you com-
pound for thirty million?”
The agents talked about how the
pandemic had changed their business.
“It’s harder,” Rochelle Atlas Maize, of
Nourmand & Associates, said. “I spe-
cialize in Beverly Hills, and there’s no
inventory. No one wants to sell.” She
went on, “The biggest change is peo-
ple wanting more land and not build-
ing these mega-mansions. It’s O.K. to
have the land, or to turn it into a sports
court. Pickleball has gotten huge.” The
same went for in-home medical facili-
ties, she said. “So you can have proce-
dures without leaving the house.”
The brokers sat for dinner (greens, lean
proteins, the rare plate of pasta). “Con-
gratulations on all the hard work you’ve
done, persevering through this past year
and a half,” Pener said to the group.
Gambino appreciated the friendly
vibe. “In other places, it can be animal-
istic,” he said. “Like Florida.”
A glass was tapped. “If you want
a drink, get it before you go into the
awards,” Alexander Ali, the C.E.O. of
the P.R. firm the Society Group, which
helped put on the event, said. The crowd
filed into a theatre, and Pener explained
the criteria used by the judges, all em-
ployees of the Reporter: “Over-all salesbe especially problematic for communi-
ties with high rates of prior infection and
low levels of current vaccination. A re-
cent C.D.C. study in Kentucky found
that people who had previously been
infected but never got vaccinated were
more than twice as likely to be reinfected
as those who got immunized after con-
tracting the virus were. Among vacci-
nated people, breakthrough infections,
while unnerving, remain uncommon and
generally mild, even with the Delta vari-
ant, but the chance that a breakthrough
will develop into a serious illness seems
to increase with time, as immunity ebbs,
especially for older people. Our collec-
tive immunity will rise and fall, through
some combination of booster shots, re-
peat infections, and time. “It’s like paint-
ing the Golden Gate Bridge,” Robert
Wachter, the chair of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco,
said. “The minute you’re done, you have
to get started all over again.” Compli-
cating all this is the possibility that a new
coronavirus variant could unsettle what-
ever equilibrium we reach.
Only two per cent of people in low-
income countries have received even a
single dose of a COVID vaccine. This is
both a moral and a public-health failure:
each week, thousands of people around
the world die a vaccine-preventable
death, and, as the virus continues to cir-
culate unchecked, the probability of ever
more dangerous variants rises. In June,
the daily coronavirus case counts in the
U.S. were a tenth of what they are today,
and lower than at any point since the
start of the pandemic. Then came Delta,
and nearly a hundred thousand Amer-
ican COVID deaths. “What happens next
depends a lot on whether this virus
evolves into an even worse strain,” Eric
Topol, the director of the Scripps Re-
search Translational Institute, said. “We
don’t have this thing contained globally.
Heck, we don’t have it contained here.So far, the U.S. hasn’t been home base
for a major new variant. Alpha, Beta,
Gamma, Delta—they all came from
other parts of the world. But we are such
an epicenter that, in the future, we could
be the Greek-letter originator.”
There’s only so much that individu-
als can control about the viral threat
they’ll face this winter. But whether our
immune systems are prepared will be
determined by the choices we make today.
Gaps in vaccination rates of a few per-
centage points can be hugely consequen-
tial, especially when the lower rates are
concentrated in certain communities and
high-risk groups. Perhaps the safest pre-
diction is that reopening, variants, and
immunity will combine in disparate ways
for people, depending on their age, health,
and risk tolerance, as well as their neigh-
bors’ decisions. We all walked into this
pandemic together. But we’ll leave it at
different speeds, and at different times.
—Dhruv Khullar