The City of Los Angeles repeatedly ignored state wildfire safety regulations as it permitted new development in areas with severe fire hazards, a lawsuit filed Dec. 23 in the L.A. County Superior Court alleges.
The lawsuit, brought by the State Alliance for Firesafe Road Regulations and the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, provided 75 examples of building permits and other plans approved by the city that the lawsuit alleges violate requirements known as the state’s “minimum firesafe regulations.”
The regulations require wide, flat roads with only short dead-end offshoots to ensure easy evacuation for residents and easy access for fire crews in fire-prone areas. They also require strategic fuel breaks to slow the progression of flames, standardized fire hydrants and water sources to aid the firefight, and when practical, at least 30 feet between buildings and the property lines to limit the spread of fire between homes.
In 2021 the legislature expanded the areas where these rules apply to include not only the wildlands where the state’s firefighters respond to fires, but also “very high” fire hazard areas within cities like Los Angeles. Yet fire safety watchdogs say the regulations are inconsistently enforced.
“It’s so tragic that good legislation supported by clear direction from the state attorney general goes woefully ignored because oversight and enforcement are lacking,” said Marylee Guinon, president of the State Alliance for Firesafe Road Regulations, a nonprofit founded in 2021 to protect the minimum firesafe regulations. “Existing communities and future communities are at risk.”
The lawsuit is the latest instance of fire safety watchdogs teaming up with local residential groups to stop unrestrained development in hazardous areas as the state pushes to address its housing crisis.
After the January fires, investigations by The Times found that while L.A. and state officials have taken steps to adopt stricter fire-safety standards in recent decades, they did little to slow increasing development in the city’s wildlands and struggled to adopt and enforce regulations designed to protect vulnerable communities. When The Times inquired whether the city had analyzed its evacuation routes as mandated by a 2019 law, for example, city and state officials all either failed to point to an analysis in line with the state’s guidelines or claimed the responsibility lay with a different agency.
Following the 1980 Panorama fire in San Bernardino County that killed four, the State Legislature has required the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to research and then label areas across the state with “moderate,” “high” and “very high” levels of fire hazard. These maps are meant to determine where the state should enforce stricter fire safety standards.
Over the years Cal Fire has expanded these hazard zones, while the Legislature has continued adding safety requirements for areas within them, based on lessons learned from past wildfires.
Today the hazard zones are referenced in more than 50 sections of the California Codes. Los Angeles, the largest city in the state, has more acres in very high fire hazard zones than any of its other cities.
Before filing the lawsuit, the Hillside Federation, a nonprofit representing roughly four dozen homeowner and resident associations in the Santa Monica Mountains, challenged the city on one permit approval it found particularly egregious.
In April the city’s Department of Building and Safety issued permits for the construction of a new single-family home on a vacant lot nestled between Bel Air and Beverly Crest. Weeks later the Hillside Federation appealed the department’s decision, arguing the project was too far down a dead-end road that is too steep and narrow for fire trucks.
In September the Board of Building and Safety Commissioners denied the appeal.
“What we allege, and I believe to be true, is that the city was systematically ignoring the regulations and allowing developments to proceed in these very high fire hazard severity zones,” said Jamie Hall, an attorney with the Channel Law Group who is representing the plaintiffs.
The Department of Building and Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment; the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office said it does not comment on pending litigation.
Wildfire risk has complicated the state’s fraught housing debate, often shaped by pro-development “yes in my backyard” advocates and local “not in my backyard” groups that don’t want to see their own neighborhoods radically transformed.
Local resident groups and fire safety organizations have made natural allies, fighting any attempts by the state to waive existing development regulations in fire-prone areas and forcing local governments to follow the regulations that are on the books.
That coalition has become especially vocal in the Palisades.
One law already on the books would have allowed homeowners in the Palisades to rebuild single-family homes as duplexes — until backlash led Gov. Gavin Newsom to create an exception for fire-prone areas. A bill to create a local authority that could complete rebuilds on behalf of homeowners was doomed by misinformation claiming it would instead create an explosion of dense, low-income housing. And residents still are worried officials will find a way to apply a new law aimed at increasing density near transit stops to the Palisades, even though the enclave does not have any stops that would qualify.
Residents, with January’s terrifyingly slow evacuation still fresh in their minds, fear added density would only make evacuations worse. And as they mourn the loss of their neighborhoods, regulations that could further quash the possibility of ever regaining that sense of community have only added insult to injury.
The lawsuit does not take issue with any Palisades rebuilding permits but does point to the destruction and evacuation challenges during the fire as a warning: Further development in dangerous areas with little consideration for safety can only worsen the next disaster.
“Why did it have to come to this? Why couldn’t the city, in light of this horrific, tragic incident … just do what was required?” Hall said. “Why do they constantly have to be sued in order to just do the right thing?”
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