Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
from Ben ChristopherCalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
In the days immediately following the Los Angeles firestorm in January, state lawmakers and civic leaders pledged to step up recovery efforts. For California, where permitting and home construction is infamously slow and expensive, the scale of the destruction was extremely challenging.
A year later, the charred homes, melted appliances and toxic ash were all but removed, the dirt underneath scraped off and then hauled away. Many of the residents whose houses were spared have returned. Permits have been filed for reconstruction, architects and contractors have been hired. Battles with insurance companiesutilities and banks still exist, vacant lots and blackened trees abound, but look around and — here and there — you’ll find new construction.
From this week more than 2,600 residence permits were issued between the Palisades and Altadena — roughly one in five of the nearly 13,000 homes lost. Another 3,340 are under review.
For many displaced and traumatized homeowners, this represents an excruciatingly slow return to the way things were. But by historical standards, Los Angeles’ recovery has been swift so far.
In a press release marking the first anniversary of the disaster, Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the permit numbers as “historic.”
Last year, local governments — the city and county of Los Angeles, as well as Malibu and Pasadena — issued permits for single-family homes and accessory dwelling units “three times faster” than in the five years leading up to the fire, the administration noted.
Disaster recovery is almost always an exhausting and slow process. Of the more than 22,500 homes destroyed in five of California’s most destructive wildfires between 2017 and 2020, fewer than four in ten had been rebuilt by 2025. Los Angeles Times analysis since the end of last summer found.
A year after the major wildfires that swept through Maui, Paradise, Redding and the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, 2%, 3%, 15% and 30% of destroyed homes, respectively, have received permits to rebuild, according to a separate Urban Institute analysis.
Based on the speed at which permits are issued, Los Angeles’ redevelopment is proceeding relatively quickly. But the permits just pulled are not completed homes.
“People can pull permits, but you know if they haven’t settled their costs — we’ve had people abandon their plans,” said Devang Shah of Genesis Builders, which sells pre-approved, fixed-price remodels in Altadena. Using permits as an indicator of progress may be premature, he said.
Part of the rapid progress seen in Los Angeles can be attributed to regulatory changes imposed by fiat after the fire. Beginning in 2025, both Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass authorized faster permitting for like-for-like remodels — construction that adhered to the rough dimensions and design specification of the home that was there before. Los Angeles County has implemented a pilot program for building self-certification plan approval for certain simple projects. Newsom waived building code requirements designed to ease reconstruction costs.
“We’ve got planning approvals in three days that would normally take three months,” said Tim Voordtride, an architect who also lost his home in Altadena. The county “has done a remarkable job of making things as efficient and streamlined as a bureaucratic entity can.”
In the weeks after the fire, Voordtriede co-founded the Altadena Collective, a network of designers and architects that provides discounted design services, allowing advice and referrals for contractors to local survivors. He and his co-founders Chris Driscoll and Chris Corbett also started a nonprofit called Collective OR, which aims to represent inexperienced and anxious homeowners in negotiations with builders and architects.
“It is impossible to say ‘they have been here by this date, so we must be there too.’ The data set is too variable.”
Colette Curtis, Director of Recovery and Economic Development, Paradise
The pace of reconstruction may simply benefit from the fact that it is taking place in Los Angeles County: a huge economic center filled with financial resources and political connections.
“We have access to a really good supply chain, there’s a lot of capital, there’s a lot of infrastructure,” said Ben Stapleton, director of the US Green Building Council California.
This is in contrast to a city like Paradise.
Because the majority of homes were destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, less than one in five have been rebuilt, said Colette Curtis, director of recovery and economic development for the city of Butte County.
She cautioned against comparing the pace of recovery efforts in disaster-stricken communities.
“It’s impossible to say ‘they’ve been here by this date, so we must be there too,'” she said. “The data set is too variable.”
Paradise, an outlying, relatively low-income town, lacks the local services and charitable appeal of places like Lahaina and the Palisades, she said. But lower land values and the fact that displaced homeowners didn’t have to compete with investors setting aside new rental units for tourists were a net positive.
Another thing that might give Los Angeles an edge: it’s a region that’s also very expert.
Around the same time that Vordtriede created the Altadena Collective, the close-knit pair of architects Cynthia Sigler and Alex Atenson released the Foothill Catalog, a package of ready-made architectural and structural plans that had been pre-approved by Los Angeles County.
With approximately 15 projects under construction or under development, Attenson said the pre-approval process can reduce the overall cost of developing an individual single-family home by at least 10 percent.
This is in part by shortening the approval process. But it’s also because before the fire, the “custom single-family home” in ALtadena was a luxury product.
The local industry is “geared to serve that customer who is building their dream home from scratch, with a very large, if not unlimited, budget,” Attenson said. Longtime homeowners displaced by fire, many of them on fixed incomes, represent a very different type of buyer.
As builders, designers and policymakers scramble to rebuild faster, cheaper and more fire-resistant ways, they may stumble upon a solution that could be useful long after the last home has been rebuilt in Altadena, he added.
“Ultimately, we’re providing a system for more efficient, affordable housing,” Attenson said. “I’m excited to prove it at Altadena and then see where it goes beyond that.”
So far, the county has approved more than two dozen of the catalog’s plans. Attenson said they are now discussing a similar lot for the Palisades with the city of Los Angeles.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.