Los Angeles makes changes to aid recovery after Palisades fires, Eaton After devastating fires, Los Angeles made some of the recovery easier. There is still much to do.

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In the days following the Los Angeles fire last January, state lawmakers and civic leaders vowed to push for rebuilding of the affected areas. For California, where permitting and housing construction are notoriously slow and expensive, the scale of the destruction presented a unique challenge.

A year later, the charred houses, melted appliances and toxic ash were all but removed, the soil beneath them scraped away and then removed. Many of the residents whose homes were saved have returned. Redevelopment permits have been applied for and architects and contractors have been hired. Disputes continue with insurance companies public services and banks; Vacant lots and blackened trees abound, but if you look around, you’ll find new buildings here and there.

By this week they were issued more than 2,600 residence permits 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, it represents an excruciatingly slow return to life before the fire. But by historical standards, Los Angeles’ recovery has been pretty quick so far.

In a press release marking the first anniversary of the disaster, Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed the permit numbers as “historic.”

Last year, local governments — Los Angeles City and County, as well as Malibu and Pasadena — issued permits for single-family homes and accessory dwelling units “three times faster” than in the five years before the fire, the administration said.

Disaster recovery is almost always a slow and exhausting 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, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis since the end of last summer.

A year after large fires ravaged Maui, Paradise, Redding and the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, 2%, 3%, 15% and 30% of destroyed homes, respectively, have been cleared to rebuild, according to separate analysis by the Urban Institute.

Depending on the speed with which permits are processed, the redevelopment of Los Angeles is progressing relatively quickly. But the newly obtained permits are not completed homes.

“People can get permits, but if they haven’t calculated the costs, we’ve had people abandon their plans,” said Devang Shah of Genesis Builders, a company that sells pre-approved, fixed-price remodels in Altadena. Using permits as an indicator of progress may be premature, he added.

Some of the rapid progress Los Angeles has seen can be attributed to regulatory changes mandated by executive order after the fire. Beginning in 2025, both Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass ordered faster processing of permits for such remodels, that is, construction that meets the approximate dimensions and design specifications of the previous home. Los Angeles County has implemented a self-certification building plan approval pilot program for certain simple projects. Newsom waived building code requirements to reduce rebuilding costs.

“We got planning approval in three days, something that would normally have taken three months,” said Tim Voordtride, an architect who also lost his home in Altadena. The county has “done an outstanding job of streamlining the bureaucracy as much as possible.”

In the weeks after the fire, Voordtriede co-founded the Altadena Collective, a network of designers and architects offering discounted design services, permitting advice and contractor referrals to local survivors. He and his co-founders Chris Driscoll and Chris Corbett also created 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 were already here by this date, so we must be there.” The data set is too variable.

Colette Curtis, Director of Economic Recovery and Development, Paradise

The speed of the recovery may simply benefit from the fact that it is taking place in Los Angeles County: a giant economic center full of 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 most of the city’s homes were destroyed by fire in 2018, fewer than 1 in 5 have been rebuilt, said Colette Curtis, director of economic recovery and development for the city of Butte County.

Curtis cautioned against comparing the pace of recovery efforts among disaster-stricken communities.

“It’s impossible to say, ‘They were already here by this date, so we must be there,'” he said. “The data set is too variable.”

Paradise, an outlying, relatively low-income town, lacked the local services and philanthropic appeal of places like Lahaina and the Palisades, he said. But the drop in land values ​​and the fact that displaced owners did not have to compete with investors reserving new units for tourist rentals was a positive factor.

Another thing that may give Los Angeles an advantage is that it is a region that also has a high level of experience.

Around the same time that Vordtriede created the Altadena Collective, neighboring architectural couple Cynthia Sigler and Alex Atenson launched the Foothill Catalog, a suite of ready-to-use architectural and structural plans that had been pre-approved by Los Angeles County.

With approximately 15 projects under construction or preparing to break ground, 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 partly due to the simplification of the approval process. But also because before the fire, the custom single-family house in Altadena was a luxury product.

The local industry is “ready 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 fires, many of them on fixed incomes, represent a very different type of customer.

As builders, designers and policymakers look to rebuild in faster, cheaper and more fireproof ways, they may stumble upon a solution that could be useful long after the last Altadena home is rebuilt, he added.

“Ultimately, we’re providing a system for more efficient and affordable housing,” Attenson said. “I’m excited to try it at Altadena and see what happens beyond that.”

To date, the county has approved more than two dozen catalog plans. Attenson said they are in talks with the city of Los Angeles to implement a similar lot for the Palisades.