Los Angeles is racing at breakneck pace to rebuild after essentially the most harmful fireplace within the metropolis’s historical past. It’s a tempo so publicly tethered to the 2028 Summer season Olympics that Gov. Gavin Newsom referred to the worldwide occasion as the “Recovery Games.”
However within the dash for gold, public security is being sidelined. This large rebuild is now about harm management greater than it’s prevention. The tone was set nearly instantly.
Simply 24 hours after the Palisades fireplace ignited in January 2025, whereas properties have been nonetheless burning and firefighters have been stretched skinny, Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass toured the burn zone. The go to itself was uncommon: Energetic fireplace scenes are usually not usually levels for political walk-throughs. Their presence underscored the criticism they have been already dealing with over a failed response, together with the absence of clear public warnings forward of historic 100-mph winds. No stay information convention was held earlier than the storm, a break from previous emergencies of this scale.
Bass was really in Africa when the fireplace erupted, a truth unknown to many outdoors her interior circle. She was unresponsive throughout a important hour of the catastrophe whereas attending a reception on the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Accra, Ghana, and she or he couldn’t talk reliably throughout her 22-hour journey again to Los Angeles, as I report in my forthcoming book, “Torched.” Newsom had been preoccupied with planning a go to by then-President Biden to designate the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments.
“The primary time they toured the harm, they mentioned the Olympics and federal funding,” one metropolis official informed me, talking on situation of anonymity. “Dropping the Palisades damage them politically. Dropping the Olympics can be sport over.”
Sport over, except they modified the principles.
Inside days, as flames nonetheless tore via the Palisades and Altadena, which had been hit by the Eaton fireplace, the governor unveiled a state “Marshall Plan,” invoking postwar reconstruction as if nature had agreed to peacetime situations. Allowing timelines have been slashed to below 30 days. Environmental opinions, meant to scrutinize the place and the way constructing ought to happen in high-risk terrain, have been suspended.
Properties have been allowed to rebuild nearer collectively — “taller and longer,” as Bass defined — typically in the identical fireplace corridors that had simply failed.
A staff of state and metropolis appointed “wildfire czars” was put in to supervise the rebuild. Bass chosen longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, despite the fact that he had no expertise in wildfire restoration. Newsom, via his “L.A. Rises” initiative, named Lakers legend Magic Johnson, Dodgers Chairman Mark Walter and Casey Wasserman, president of the town’s Olympic organizing committee. All three have been versed in sports activities spectacle, not catastrophe mitigation.
The promise of a speedy rebuild rapidly turned a promoting level, most visibly in actual property listings that touted fast-track approvals and bigger flooring plans. “Now made simpler with expedited allowing… this property provides a uncommon probability to create your dream dwelling at once,” one itemizing teased on Zillow. That such properties have been being listed in any respect hinted at one thing else: A whole lot of survivors had already determined they’d not return, selecting to promote the land beneath what had as soon as been their properties.
Buyers moved rapidly and the approval charges have been “historic” as Newsom described it in January. Roughly 20% of destroyed homes in L.A. obtained residential constructing permits inside a yr, in keeping with state data, far outpacing recoveries following the 2023 fires in Lahaina, Hawaii, the place solely about 2% of properties have been permitted one yr on, and in Paradise, Calif., the place simply 5% of properties had permits following the 2018 fires in Butte County, according to the Urban Institute.
Chopping pink tape didn’t simply speed up the primary section of the rebuild. It triggered a speculative rush, optimized for speedy approvals and comparatively fast resale, not long-term security.
On the similar time, Los Angeles has disinvested within the very system meant to defend these neighborhoods. The town has fewer fireplace stations right this moment than it did within the Nineteen Sixties, even because the inhabitants has practically doubled and improvement has pushed deeper into fire-prone terrain. Firefighters are being requested to guard extra properties, unfold farther aside, with fewer sources.
There’s a safer path.
Concrete composite supplies, fire-resistant panels comprised of cement and bolstered fibers, are 4 occasions extra immune to wildfire than wooden, and comparable in value. After my current report on these supplies for CBS’ “Sunday Morning” aired, my inbox crammed with messages from fireplace survivors, and even an area architect, asking why that they had by no means been informed such choices existed.
Equally vital: area. “Our city layouts are usually not designed to outlive 70-mile-an-hour fires. We should improve the space between buildings,” forensic wildfire investigator Faraz Hedayati informed me after surveying the aftermath within the week following the L.A. County fires. As Hedayati defined, dense housing related to mid-century suburbs, improvement that occurred earlier than the true risk of fireside arrived, simply allowed flames to leap from construction to construction.
In a state the place housing is already scarce, this isn’t an argument for shrinking communities. It’s an argument in opposition to increasing them irresponsibly, particularly when new development does little greater than meet the naked minimal of the code.
Different fire-prone communities have adopted the science. The Dixon Path improvement in Escondido, simply outdoors San Diego, was constructed with better spacing between properties and hardened supplies that exceed minimal code. Owners there have been rewarded with inexpensive insurance coverage premiums at a time when insurers are retreating from a lot of California, together with the Palisades and Altadena.
Insurance coverage firms are usually not guided by sentiment or politics. They observe danger. Their retreat will not be ideological. It’s monetary. And it must be a warning.
In Los Angeles, the place whole communities are rebuilding from scratch, it isn’t too late to vary course, partially as a result of the promised pace has stalled the place it issues most. Greater than 13,000 properties have been misplaced in January 2025, but solely a fraction have damaged floor. At the same time as emergency orders slashed allowing timelines and approvals moved comparatively quick, that pace collided with a system missing the manpower to execute what adopted. Inspectors, architects, engineers and builders have grow to be choke factors. Insurance coverage payouts lag rising development prices, leaving many householders unable to proceed. The result’s a delay, not the one leaders envisioned, however one that also provides an opportunity to rebuild smarter, not simply quicker.
But when we proceed to rebuild for optics reasonably than for resilience, we’re selecting pageantry over saving lives, racing to look prepared for the world whereas locking in the identical failures that erased whole neighborhoods. When the subsequent fireplace comes, the legacy of that call will likely be unattainable to outrun. Irrespective of how vibrant the Olympic torch burns.
Jonathan Vigliotti is a nationwide correspondent for CBS Information and a Los Angeles resident. His new book “Torched” is due out in Could.
