A 550-pound black bear tagged "Yellow 2120" has resumed his career as Altadena's most conspicuous uninvited tenant. On Monday, the bear was found in the crawlspace of a home on Minoru Drive — his third known occupation of a residential crawlspace — after ripping out ductwork to access the space. The homeowner's family tried loud music and a leaf blower. The bear was unimpressed. He left on his own terms. Yellow 2120 first made headlines in November 2025 when he moved in under Ken Johnson's Altadena home and stayed for two months. California's Department of Fish and Wildlife tried sweet-scented lures and ammonia-doused towels. Nothing worked. It took the Bear League, a volunteer organization, armed with paintball guns to finally evict him in January. Johnson's description — "He's a nuisance and he's living under my house rent-free" — captures the surreal domesticity of the situation. The bear's serial residency is not an isolated quirk. It sits inside a steep trend line. Los Angeles County logged 28 bear sightings in 2017. By 2023, that number was 455 — a 16-fold increase in six years. Alex Heeran, a research scientist at California's Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Guardian that 2025 is on track to be record-setting for reported bear encounters, with interactions peaking in late summer and early fall during pre-hibernation feeding. The Eaton wildfire, which tore through the Angeles National Forest and scorched parts of Altadena in January 2025, intensified the overlap. At least two 500-plus-pound black bears sought refuge in homes evacuated during the fire. Whether Yellow 2120 was among them is unclear, but the pattern is unmistakable: wildfire destroys habitat, bears move downhill into neighborhoods, and the encounters become structural rather than anecdotal. California's black bear population — the only bear species in the state — is estimated at 49,000 to 71,000, with 50% in the north coast and Cascade regions and 40% in the Sierra Nevada. They are overwhelmingly non-confrontational, having killed only one person in the state in recorded history. The problem is not danger. The problem is infrastructure: crawlspaces, unsecured food sources, and residential construction that was never designed for cohabitation with large omnivores. The current response toolkit — ammonia, leaf blowers, paintball guns, sealing crawlspaces after the fact — is reactive and household-by-household. There is no systematic adaptation strategy for a metropolitan area that is functionally merging with bear habitat. The Bear League operates as volunteers. Fish and Wildlife monitors and tags. Homeowners improvise. The bear does what bears do. Yellow 2120 is a symptom, not an anomaly. Urban expansion into wildland-urban interface zones, combined with wildfire-driven habitat destruction, is producing a permanent overlap between human and bear territory in Southern California. The question is not whether this continues but whether governance catches up to a cohabitation pattern that is already well underway.
