Allison Holdorff Polhill pulled onto Iliff Street in Pacific Palisades and wept.
It was late October. Nine months after the Palisades fire tore through the community’s vaunted Alphabet Streets, destroying Holdorff Polhill’s home of three decades, along with those of nearly all of her neighbors.
She wasn’t crying about what had been destroyed. She was joyfully weeping at the sight of a just-erected wooden frame for a new two-story house on her lot. Throughout this decimated-but-not-dead neighborhood, she heard hammers striking, trucks rumbling, construction workers chattering.
“It’s a building zone. And I love it,” said Holdorff Polhill, a senior advisor to a Los Angeles Unified School District board member. Her family obtained their rebuilding permit in late May, started construction in early June, and expect to be in their new home by spring.
More than 1,050 homes are under construction in Pacific Palisades, where the fire destroyed more than 4,000 residences. On Holdorff Polhill’s block of Iliff Street, the rebuilding process was underway for nine out of 27 destroyed homes as of early December, according to a Times analysis of Los Angeles city building permit records.
Holdorff Polhill has become a vocal cheerleader for rebuilding, saying people often hear about all of the problems: the struggles with insurance, the permitting delays, the steep construction costs. She said it is “like nails on a chalkboard to hear people constantly referring to the Palisades as a war zone.”
She and her husband are temporarily renting in Playa del Rey, but they have decades of memories in the Alphabet Streets. It was one of the Palisades’ first subdivisions, developed in the early 1920s by Methodist ministers who named the narrow, flat roads after church leaders — Albright, Bashford, Carey, Drummond and so forth. Holdorff Polhill, the block captain for her stretch of Iliff Street, said most of her neighbors say they want to return.
“It’s devastating. Like, I don’t have my baby books — I can cry about that — but at the end of the day, this is an amazing place to live,” Holdorff Polhill said. “There’s no reason why people can’t rebuild their homes.”
True, there is desolation, with cleared lots and blackened trees nearly everywhere. But there are also yard signs declaring, “This Home Will Rise Again #palistrong,” and a sense of community endures. Lunchtime crowds and long-lingering coffee drinkers have returned to Palisades Garden Cafe. Children shriek with delight from the new playground at the Palisades Recreation Center. Hikers traverse the newly reopened trails at Will Rogers State Historic Park. And some 40% of students at the burned Marquez Charter Elementary School have returned to their campus, where they learn, for now, from temporary bungalows.
On some blocks , a sense of near-normalcy is surreal: A dad and his young son play basketball in a driveway amid a stretch of still-standing homes on Ocampo Drive during golden hour. Gardeners tend to still-green lawns along Chautauqua Boulevard. Holiday lights twinkle from still-stately homes.
Many have said recovery should be further along and have criticized the pace at which the the city of Los Angeles has issued rebuilding permits. But as Holdorff Polhill’s contractor, John Ondrejcka, walked her through the shell of her home on a warm autumn Wednesday, he said the pace of construction has sped up in recent months.
“People are complaining about permitting taking so long. I’ll say — the cities are actually turning these around pretty quickly,” said Ondrejcka, who is working on several homes in the Palisades and Altadena.
Stepping through the frame of her future front door, Holdorff Polhill instinctively wiped dirt off her shoes, forgetting — for a fleeting moment — that the house was not finished.
Holdorff Polhill, 60, and her husband moved into their five-bedroom home in 1996. At the time, they had a 2-year-old boy in tow, and Holdorff Polhill was nine months pregnant with her second of three children.
“Raising the kids here — it was like raising them in a village where they couldn’t really do anything too bad because everybody knew everybody,” she said. “They could walk to the park. It was a very safe community where people have each other’s backs.”
Holdorff Polhill said she and her husband, who works in high-risk commercial insurance, were among more than 1,600 homeowners in the Palisades whose home insurance policies were dropped by State Farm in 2024. They got on the California FAIR Plan, the state’s home insurer of last resort, which gave them “very little” for the contents of their home and for rent after it burned, she said.
After the fire, they quickly applied for an emergency loan through the U.S. Small Business Administration, available to homeowners and renters in declared disaster areas even if they don’t own a business. And since her architect — a friend who lost her home in the fire as well — had already been working on a partial remodel of Holdorff Polhill’s home, they were able to quickly draw up and submit rebuilding plans.
Carter Polhill, their youngest son, age 27, vividly recalls Jan. 7. He rode an electric bike up and down the Alphabet Streets — transformers exploding all around — and banged on doors, pleading with people to get out. He fled when the house behind his childhood home caught fire.
He is an underwater photographer who became a welder after the fire, driven by a need to learn smart, flame-resistant construction. He’s thrilled to see all the homes going up. But, nodding to the still-hanging power lines, he said he can’t help but worry, given climate change and the likelihood of ever-worsening fires.
“We need to start building stuff as quickly as possible, and we’ve got to make sure it’s all fire safe,” he said. “Because I know it’s going to happen in the future. … Our fires just keep getting worse and worse.”
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