Developer Rick Caruso warned Wednesday that Los Angeles is at the “tipping point” of failure in the effort to recover from the Palisades Fire, adding that the private sector should be given a greater role in the recovery.
Caruso, who ran against Mayor Karen Bass in 2022, published an 0p-ed at the website of his new non-profit foundation, Steadfast LA, which has worked to provide solutions to challenges in the rebuilding process.
In his essay, published on the four-month anniversary of the fire, Caruso warned that the city had adopted a self-congratulatory posture while ignoring the major challenges still facing displaced residents, and that it was failing to help those trying to rebuild their homes.
He noted that only 31 rebuilding permits had been approved by the city, and that residents feel that much of what the city is doing is being a “veil of secrecy.”
Caruso added:
The city’s chosen language – calling this disaster recovery the “fastest in modern California history” – assumes it’s more prudent to measure the response against past disasters, rather than conducting what is really needed: a clear-eyed assessment of where the mistakes were, where management failed, and how a better process can be created so hard lessons can be learned. Their rearview mirror approach is like comparing apples to monkey wrenches because the scale and devastation of what happened in January is unprecedented, and the nature of the communities impacted are markedly different than any past examples. On numbers alone, the estimated cost of the Palisades and Eaton fires may be 15 times more than the Camp Fire, and these most recent fires destroyed 15,000 more structures than the Woolsey Fire. Rebuilding is still ongoing in Paradise and Ventura County after those fires over six years ago, which can’t be our barometer for success.
We’re at a tipping point. Instead of equating this to previous disasters, we need be forward-looking and reimagine the city’s response in a way that disaster recovery has never been done before with a focus on creativity, innovation, transparency, and accountability.
In LA, we have the best and brightest companies, executives, and workers of anywhere in the world and they’re all eager to contribute. But, instead of embracing this invaluable resource as the X-factor that can make our recovery both different and better, the city has shunned it. They don’t return calls, there hasn’t been an effort to proactively engage, and there are no signs that the city wants to leverage this wealth of knowledge and ideas to drive the response, even though it’s impossible to execute a rebuild of this size without the private sector taking a significant portion off the government’s plate.
Read Caruso’s full op-ed here.
The idea of a “tipping point” will strike a chord with many residents, who are facing the reality that their insurance coverage — if they have any — will likely fall far short of the construction costs necessary to rebuild.
Many residents are wondering whether to try to rebuild — or to sell their lots into a market that is slowing down and seeing prices fall, with speculators waiting on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, as elected officials claim credit for progress, those residents who have returned to their homes are being faced with new challenges, such as major congestion involving construction vehicles, and aggressive enforcement of traffic violations.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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