But planners and residents working to rebuild Los Angeles won’t be starting with a immaculate slate. Existing roads, infrastructure and plots will influence how the city will be rebuilt. Some residents may want immediate reconstruction on the same plot of land, while others may want to sell their land to create a buffer zone.
On January 13, Mayor Bass issued an executive order making this possible permission to accelerate for “like for like” reconstruction and exempts them from inspections that would snail-paced down the reconstruction process. Governor Newsom also relaxed permitting rules under the California Environmental Quality Act to speed recovery.
How Los Angeles chooses to rebuild next is “a question of social values,” Moritz says. “It’s not a scientific question anymore. Shouldn’t we as a society have a say in where and how people build or rebuild to make it safer and less impactful from a public funding perspective in the future? Because many of these events will happen again.
In recent years, wildfires in California have become larger and more destructive. Between 2009 and 2018, approximately 7.08 million acres were burned in California – more than twice the amount burned area in the years 1979–1988. The number of fires entering urban areas has also increased. In the 10 years between 1979 and 1988, about 22,000 acres of burned land were located at the so-called wildland-urban interface – areas where development is close to fire-prone nature. Between 2009 and 2018, this area increased to 32,000 acres.
One result of all this is that California authorities have good maps of high-risk areas. Many of the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires have been classified as: zones with a very high fire riskmeaning that for new developments in these areas, steps should be taken to minimize the risk of fires spreading from wild vegetation to homes, including planting fire-resistant vegetation and trimming any other trees and shrubs away from homes.
But demand for housing in cities like Los Angeles is so high that developers often build in very high fire risk zones anyway. After a fire, developers usually slow construction in high-risk areas for a while, but after a few years they return to their previous pace of development, says Nicholas Irwin, who studies real estate economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Cities and local authorities need to consider how to discourage development in high-risk areas, says Irwin. One way would be to raise development taxes in wildfire-prone areas, but another would be to encourage developers to infill – build more homes and apartments in underused urban areas.
“We need denser development, especially in places like Los Angeles. The real estate market is out of control and it will get even worse, he says. “We need to think about ways to rebuild that allow for more units to be built to improve affordability, but also ways that are more resilient to future wildfire risks.”
Burying power lines can also significantly aid protect homes from the risk of wildfires. The fire that destroyed Paradise has been created due to a power line failure, as did at least seven other of California’s most destructive wildfires. Burying power lines is not inexpensive, and these costs are passed on to utility customers, many of whom do not live in wildfire-prone areas.
“It’s the little things that make the difference in the long run,” Irwin says. Burying power lines, encouraging denser development and building more defensible communities. But these long-term investments require changing the way people think about living in wildfire zones and accepting that more resilient communities come at a cost. “I just don’t know if we’ll learn anything,” Irwin says.