Last month, much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles was declared a federal disaster area, opening up eligibility for dearly needed assistance after what may have been the most catastrophic fires in the city’s history. But one could practically hear the late Mike Davis, California’s doom prophet laureate, letting out an unearthly sigh of frustration from beyond the grave. The complications of rebuilding amid Southern California’s cascading crises of climate change, housing scarcity, and homelessness are now growing clearer by the day: Unless something big changes, “recovery” from these fires will further entrench one of the city’s most privileged enclaves—and make our city on the whole less livable.
As Davis pointed out in his notorious 1995 essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” environmental catastrophe feeds housing scarcity, which in turn feeds inequality. This perverse feedback loop dates back to 1956, when much of Malibu, which abuts the Palisades, caught fire. It was a headline-grabbing national tragedy set amid the widespread fear of nuclear annihilation. The federal government looked at Malibu in flames and saw a preview of America under nuclear assault, so it rushed to subsidize the recovery and remove red tape as a demonstration of American resilience. This move, Davis wrote, “established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.” Under this regime, “regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed.” The resulting construction effort always, he explained, favors bigger, fancier homes for an ever richer and smaller slice of the Los Angeles population.
We’re almost certainly about to watch this regressive sort of rebuilding play out in the Palisades. “There’s nothing that’s going to prevent them from doing this,” Stephanie Pincetl, founding director and professor at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, told me. “We are going to get fewer housing units up there, unless there’s a kind of dramatic intervention. There’s no way we can rebuild what was there before.”
Pacific Palisades is less wooded and slightly more urban than its next-door neighbor, the City of Malibu, and while not as spectacularly opulent, it still boasts A-list celebrity residents—along with captains of industry—and a median home sale price of $4.2 million, according to Realtor.com. Even higher home prices appear to be the primary goal for this recovery. According to The New York Times, Seamless co-founder Jason Finger, a Pacific Palisades resident, posted a rant to his neighborhood WhatsApp group, saying that calls for affordable housing were unacceptable and that exclusivity should be increased. Real estate billionaire Rick Caruso recently told Joe Rogan he wants to see the recovery happen as quickly as possible. “If somebody thinks it’s going to take five years, let’s go figure out how we get it done in two years,” he said, but added that compulsory affordable housing shouldn’t be imposed “off the backs of people who have lost everything.”
Rogan concurred, describing life in the area as a sort of prize for life’s winners. “The whole idea is that you make enough money where you could live in a place that’s very difficult to live in, but it’s beautiful and it’s really safe.”
Other factors will increase this inequality. The skyrocketing cost of insuring homes in the Palisades “is going to make it really, really expensive for anybody to rebuild those houses,” Pincetl pointed out, to say nothing of “the trade wars that are looming,” which spell higher costs for materials hit by new tariffs like steel and aluminum. In other words, only a concerted effort by policymakers would result in Pacific Palisades becoming anything other than more outrageously posh.
Few people believe there’s an easy fix for Los Angeles’s housing crisis. Somewhat convincing research exists, for example, to support the idea that affordable housing mandates decrease overall housing supply, even as they lower housing costs in the short term. But even if this is the basis of your housing politics, the creation of bigger mansions is still a step in the wrong direction. The Los Angeles region is short 500,000 units, according to the county Homeless Initiative. We simply need more homes, not fewer. The almost 7,000 structures that burned in the Palisades fire are, in a real sense, crucial infrastructure in this failed market, even if many of them are mansions.
There are ways of integrating affordable housing. And they would not, to be clear, have to be some perfunctory nod to social justice. “Couldn’t we imagine something like more dense, more urban pockets of redevelopment?” Pincetl mused. She envisions “a kind of perimeter of defensible space, which would be re-vegetated with more fire resistant plantings. The construction itself would be hardened to fire,” and there would be space both for the service workers the wealthy rely on, as well as “pockets of really fancy houses or apartment buildings.” But this smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism has no real chance of being built, she said: “The city council in December reaffirmed the exclusivity of the single family zone.”
In the name of short-term safety, there’s at least one valid reason to tolerate some degree of increased land scarcity. “Spatial buffers. Buffer zones. There’s no substitute for it,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate-adaptation scholar at Tulane University and a former member of the Obama administration’s climate resilience team. These small areas of unused space keep wildfires from spreading as rapidly.
The buffers Keenan envisions would have to cut large swaths through the Palisades, though. In the recent fires, embers blew up to three miles, according to preliminary reports. So rebuilding with better buffers wouldn’t look like a dollop of defensible space on everyone’s property, creating the familiar gap between trees and houses in dry wooded areas. “It would involve a combination of buyouts and eminent domain,” Keenan said, “to take the property and to place it into a state of management so that it would function as a type of buffer.”
Such an effort would be expensive and politically fraught, Keenan said. In addition, “obviously it leads to a kind of land scarcity problem, which undermines housing affordability, but there’s really no alternative at this point.”
L.A.’s problems are all intertwined, and the way we rebuild Pacific Palisades will have ripple effects across the city, just like the fires themselves did. It remains deeply irksome as an Angeleno to watch NASA satellite imagery of the toxic aerosols and particles from the Palisades fire—not just smoke but carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur dioxide, and various volatile organic compounds: the products of burning appliances, furniture, synthetic fabric, and building materials—drift over the city where our children breathe, or at least try to. True, a great deal of the really nasty stuff from the Palisades fire appears to have drifted out to sea rather than into neighbors’ lungs, but that’s cold comfort.
It’s also disheartening to contemplate the cost in both resources and human suffering when Palisades homes—many of them beautiful structures that the rich live in as their reward for being rich—burn down. The January fires, including the Eaton fire, wiped out $350 million in public infrastructure alone. Long-term ill health effects in firefighters after the Palisades fire are an area of concern, and at least one volunteer fire captain, Greg Baker, traveled hundreds of miles from his home in Northern California, only to suffer a broken back while protecting Pacific Palisades. (Some Palisades residents, including Rick Caruso, paid for their own private firefighters.)
Davis saw this system for what it was decades ago—long before climate change had amplified the impacts of L.A.’s already predictable disasters. As a city, we treat every crisis like a one-off. We have a housing crisis, and no plausible solutions on the horizon. Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future, we know more L.A. homes will burn down.
“I think what California needs is a kind of strategic vision, because this is going to come up over and over again,” Keenan said. Smart people need to sit down together, he said, and take a realistic look at what he called the “menu of options that we have both at the state and at a local level” with an eye to “what they cost us, and what we get for them.” Unfortunately, he added, “I don’t know if people have appetites for that kind of stuff anymore.”
The post The L.A. Fires Were the First Tragedy. The Second Is Just Beginning. appeared first on New Republic.
