Esther Kim

Founder, Altadena Village Partners

Esther Kim is Co-Founder of Altadena Village Partners, a community-led advocacy of design and planning professionals who support commercial property owners in rebuilding Altadena's neighborhoods as walkable, resilient, vibrant centers rooted in community and local ownership.

Through a survivor-focused, neighborhood collective of blocks, Altadena Village has been able to reach over 80 commercial property owners, and create a program for case management and recovery in an area devastated by the January 2025 Eaton Fire. These village-scaled areas provide social resilience and are coherent planning units across which infrastructure, mobility, place-making, environmental remediation, housing and economic development and investment may be assessed and implemented. The group is coordinating a mixed-use retail popup as a bridge to long term recovery.

Altadena Village has explored ways in which neighborhood blocks can function as decarbonization zones powered by geothermal energy and joint utilities--creating opportunities for infrastructure financing that fold into the larger EIFD to help fund the recovery. In collaboration with the adjacent Altagether residential block network, and community partners, Altadena Village creates a process for holistic recovery that is owner-led, culturally relevant, and retains stakeholder agency toward a strong, sustainable future.

Throughout her career, Esther Kim has engaged in projects that bring strategic clarity to complex, real-time spatial and social mappings. She is published in the New York Times and in global publications for her visual journalism on the conflicts in Libya and Syria, and was an early participant in the Covid Tracking Project. Prior to the Los Angeles wildfires, Esther Kim practiced architecture through her own firm and is a small scale real estate developer. She is a former Campus Planner at ArtCenter College of Design. Esther has a Master of Architecture from Columbia and a Bachelor in History from Brown.