After the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires, officials are pushing for rapid rebuilding. However, architects, urban planners, and academics urge a more deliberate approach, proposing fire-resistant construction, multifamily housing, and land use innovations to address future risks and the region's affordable housing shortage.
Even as the flames still raged, the impulse to quickly restore two devastated communities to what they once were became a political imperative. First Gov. Gavin Newsom, then Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, issued orders designed to speed the rebuilding of damaged and destroyed homes by stripping away bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles.
As urgent as that show of determination felt to many, it has critics among architects, urban planners and academics who would rather see public officials slow down and think deliberately about how to make the communities more resistant to future fires — and contribute more to the region's affordable housing needs. 'If we just build back the way it was, it's definitely a missed opportunity,' said Liz Falletta, an architect and professor in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. 'It's a missed opportunity to think differently about these things.' More bluntly, Mark Ryavec, a former L.A. City Council legislative analyst and now acerbic critic of City Hall, is calling for a dead stop on rebuilding in Palisades 'without first examining what happened there and applying lessons that may be learned to reform building codes and significantly increase the capacity of the local firefighting water system.' The orders 'will allow property owners to more quickly start rebuilding — with the same building materials and fire safety requirements that failed to protect over 10,000 homes,' he said in an opinion piece. Unlike so many past disasters that ripped through communities randomly, taking out one home and leaving the one next door intact, the Palisades and Eaton fires — in wiping out whole neighborhoods — created blank slates that could be redesigned from the ground up. Tucked away in semirural settings away from the urban core, both communities, despite their dramatic demographic differences, share an insularity that engendered strong identities and also made them vulnerable. Besides attention to fire-resistant construction, ideas being floated to reshape the two communities include creating more common space and greater distance between houses, improving street patterns and swapping out popular but fire-prone vegetation. Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon, said studies have shown, for instance, that California oaks are more capable of absorbing embers without igniting than staples such as eucalyptus and palm. Along with the building code enhancements that are likely to emerge after these fires, change could come through land use innovations such as buying out landowners who don't want to rebuild, putting restrictions on investors and swapping development rights. One repeated theme is adding multifamily housing to make the communities more economically diverse and help alleviate the region's affordable housing shortage. In California Planning & Development Report, contributing editor Josh Stephens proposed adding two- and three-story apartments to the Palisades commercial district where side streets are 'filled with shops, cafes, and small offices that, for lack of a better word, are a lot cuter than California's typical commercial strips are. 'If European cities are any guide, it can come back even livelier and more uplifting than it once was,' Stephens wrote. Dowell Myers, a specialist in urban growth and societal change at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, isn't advocating delay. 'The housing situation is so desperate we don't want any dilly-dallying,' Myers said. But he does advocate for more density. 'You really need to have more multifamily,' he said. 'L.A. is suburban density built out to the sea. It isn't viable for a 21st century metropolis.' Myers, who lives close to the Altadena fire zone, said he thinks his community would welcome it, especially if it was designed for seniors and young families that can't afford to buy. 'That would be a socially desirable and appealing trade-off,' he said. 'I don't think you want to threaten the heart of their neighborhood, but certainly on the commercial corridors, why not put multifamily there.' Among these commentators, however, there was a common pessimism about the likelihood that their ideas can be realized. 'The forces that made it hard to do things new and different in the past are still with us — insurance and mortgage underwriting standards, planning and zoning, risk-averse developers, NIMBYism,' Falletta said. 'The difficult part is making everybody whole, both financially and emotionally,' said former Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton, now a professor of practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Design Lab at UC San Diego. Fulton compares the situation to the aftermath of the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm that destroyed nearly 3,000 single-family homes. An immediate call to prohibit rebuilding in the same location faltered under a barrage of TV coverage of people who had lost everything
California Fires Rebuilding Urban Planning Affordable Housing Fire Resistance Land Use
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