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Alot of the owners of the million dollar homes have spent a lifetime getting to that point. However they were graced by God to have that kind of wealth, they still earned it.
I don't know where you live, but a million dollar home in some areas of So Cal today is not so strange, and the average price of a home in the Bay Area is way up there, also.

In some areas of SoCal, yes, a million dollar home is not unusual. However, the vast majority of SoCal is still not million dollar homes - even in the burn areas.

I live in SoCal. I know the area in San Bernardino that burned. I also know some of the areas in San Diego that burned. I know the areas of Claremont and Rancho Cucamonga very well, as I live near them. I know some of the mountain communities. I know Hemet, I know Simi Valley...

And I know that if ten percent of the homes in San Bernardino city that burned were million-dollar homes, it'd be an extremely high estimate. The ones in Claremont were 500k-700k homes, usually due to the size of the property that they were on rather than the actual value of the house itself. Many of the homes in Rancho that burned were new duplexes, and averaged somewhere around 250-300k... one block of the Rancho homes that burned were higher, though (I believe somewhere around 550k). Hemet is a horribly cheap area to live in as far as home buying goes, although I don't have averages on their housing prices right now (I'm just trying to get ahold of a friend there to make sure she and her family are alright)...

So yes, a million dollar home in some areas of SoCal is not strange. However, the vast majority of the burn areas right now are not million-dollar homes.

As to whether they were graced by God to have those homes, keep in mind that many of the homes that /were/ in the high-end range that were destroyed were the homes of actors/actresses, TV personalities, ex-politicians, and people who had "family money". The areas that did burn that were million-dollar homes were considered "exclusive" communities.

As a working class person, I have very little sympathy for someone who gets paid $250k per year (that's a minimum; some of the TV news anchors get paid far more) to spend two hours a day, five days a week, smiling at a camera and reading off of a teleprompter. Equally, I have virtually no sympathy for people whose predecessors made the money for them, and who are merely living off of the proceeds.

I feel for all of the victims... but I feel for the ones who spent the time working their posteriors off to build up a good home and life for their kids the most, who have just lost it all. Those are the people who will be most affected by this fire. Their lives will never be the same again.

Regardless of who and what and where and why, the fact of the matter still remains that the damage occurred, and whether or not the people earned what they had, many people still have lost it. And other people are still in danger of losing their homes as the firestorms continue. That's what we should be focusing on, not on whether the homes were richy-rich or not. My initial comment on the subject pointed that out, and I shall continue to point that out.

My dad bought a little acre property with a cottage on it at the end of the freeway, with cows around and orange groves, in 1960. He had just started his first practice. The house was a little "expensive" at $14,000.

Today he is retired, and his house in the country is smack in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley. It's worth more than a million today.