Five Lessons From the L.A. Wildfires

It's been a year since the Palisades and Altadena were largely destroyed by wildfire. They're still early in the rebuilding process. What has this tragedy taught us about building better places?

Altadena after the wildfire.

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It’s been exactly a year since the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles virtually destroyed the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena (two communities, by the way, that aren’t close to each other). There’s been a lot of hand-wringing since then about both how to build back these communities and how to reduce the risk of wildfire damage in the future, especially since severe wildfires have become much more common in California in recent years.

Given the timing, thought it would be a good time to reflect on what we’ve learned over the past year. So here are five lessons that I think we’ve learned since the L.A. wildfires a year ago:

1. The Prevailing Impulse Is To Build Back Exactly The Same As Before

There’s a pretty typical pattern that occurs after almost every wildfire in California. Immediately after the wildfire, public sentiment lies with the idea of not building back – or , at least, building back differently. Because, how could we possibly put people back in that dangerous situation?

But then after about a week of watching videos on television and social media – watching people who have lost their homes lament the loss of the life they knew – public sentiment changes to, We must allow people to build back exactly as before. And preferably as fast as possible.

The Palisades Village shopping center survived the fire due to private firefighting by the owner, billionaire Rick Caruso.

This is an understandable emotional reaction, because people don’t like change. In a weird way, it’s a similar impulse to NIMBYism: Nothing in our community should ever change, unless we all agree that it’s something we want. But this sentiment obscures the underlying reality that often it is the way the community was built before that increased the risk. Houses up against the wildland-urban interface. Narrow, curvy streets in hillside areas. Flammable construction materials.

So building back exactly the same won’t bring back the community as it was before because …

2. No Matter What, The Community Will Never Be The Same

When we in urban planning talk about “community character,” we are often referring to the built character of a community – the buildings, the public infrastructure, the urban vegetation. That’s often what people don’t want changed. But the truth of the matter is – and this is a pretty good YIMBY argument – that the more the built character stays the same, the more the demographic character changes. A nice community has a finite number of nice housing units, so over time more affluent people will move in.

This process is both disrupted and accelerated by a natural disaster such as a wildfire. Some people, traumatized, will simply choose to leave and never return. Others, under-insured, will not be able to afford to rebuild what they had before, so they will likely sell out and leave as well. So who comes in?

Rebuild houses in Paradise are bigger and more expansive than the old ones.

Weirdly, when the community is in flux, it’s folks who are more affluent. That’s because it’s the longtime residents who are often traumatized and underinsured – and because they moved in when the community was probably much cheaper, they’re the ones most financially at risk. Meanwhile, affluent folks looking for a bargain move in to take their place.

Early last year I had a conversation with the mayor of Paradise, California, near Chico, which was completely destroyed by wildfire in 2018. As an inland community 75 miles north of Sacramento and almost 200 miles away from San Francisco, Paradise was a modest community before the wildfire, with a median household income of around $65,000. That meant a lot of people couldn’t afford to come back and COVID meant that a lot of equity-rich Bay Area folks started looking at what a good deal Paradise seemed to them.

Home prices have doubled since the fire. That is, the homes that exist, because …

3. Rebuilding Takes A Long Time

In addition to wanting to build back exactly the way things were before, people also want things built back fast. But usually that doesn’t happen. Seven years after the devastating fire, for example, only a third of Paradise has been rebuild.

We tend to blame government red tape as time goes on, especially permitting processes for rebuilding homes and other buildings. But that’s not the only factor. It takes a long time for insurance companies to assess the damage, process the claims, and pay out funds to those displaced.

Then, rebuilding requires a whole ecosystem of skilled people – architects, engineers, contractors, construction workers – and in a community where thousands of buildings burned to the ground there simply aren’t going to be enough of these folks to bring the community back quickly no matter what. You put on top of that the factors described above – especially those who aren’t coming back, who must sell their land to new folks or investors who then have to navigate the system – and that adds more time.

4. You Have To Do Both Mitigation And Avoidance

There’s often a debate in the wake of natural disasters, especially wildfires, about whether the emphasis should be on mitigation or avoidance – that is, should we simply not put structures in hazardous locations or should we do the best we can to mitigate the risk for those that are already there.

As a land use planner, I’m a fan of avoidance. I think it’s always better to keep people out of harm’s way than try to create the armature to deal with harm when it comes. And I think that’s an approach the state should be more aggressive about, especially in the so-called wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where unfortunately more and more California homes are being built.

But I have to admit that in California today, an avoidance-only approach is unrealistic, for two reasons. First,