For the past 70 years, Fox’s Restaurant served pancakes, pork loin and catfish to the people of Altadena in Los Angeles County. That was until last week’s devastating wildfire reduced it to a charred wreck, sparing only the diner’s roadside sign.
Paul Rosenbluh, Fox’s owner, now wonders whether there’s any point in staying around to rebuild. “You can only live in a disaster zone for so long,” he says. “At one point you say, ‘I just don’t want to deal with this shit any more.’”
Tens of thousands of others across Los Angeles are facing the same dilemma — whether to stick it out in areas reduced to smouldering heaps by one of the costliest natural catastrophes in US history, or to move somewhere less vulnerable to climate change-related disasters.
The wildfires, fanned by the powerful seasonal winds known as the Santa Anas, began in the wealthy coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood on the morning of January 7. Other fires soon broke out across the city and its suburbs, leaving at least 27 people dead, destroying more than 12,000 structures and forcing roughly 180,000 people to evacuate their homes.
The potential economic loss has been estimated at between $135bn and $150bn, far higher than the $16.5bn record set by the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, which was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history.
The two worst fires, Palisades and the Eaton Fire in Altadena, continue to burn as of Friday. But Karen Bass, LA’s mayor, and California’s governor Gavin Newsom have already issued urgent executive orders this week to jump-start the rebuilding process. They are pledging to cut through red tape to speed things up, including by streamlining planning reviews and waiving environmental requirements.
“People lost their homes, but they’re also ready to get back up and running,” Bass, who has faced tough criticism of her handling of the crisis, said this week. “If your property burnt down and you want to build it back exactly as it was before, you shouldn’t have to go through an elaborate, time-consuming permitting process.”
Yet looming behind the push to rebuild are some difficult questions: can the city afford the cost of rebuilding areas that are becoming uninsurable? Are the worst-hit areas even safe for human habitation? And does Los Angeles as it is configured today, with houses positioned dramatically on hillsides and abutting forests, still make sense in a warming world?
The fires have raised “significant questions about the long-term sustainability of a city that is fundamentally based on sprawl and single-family development”, says Michael Maltzan, the LA-based architect who designed the Sixth Street Viaduct bridge downtown and is a proponent of sustainable, high-density housing in the city.
“Is this a moment where we should, in a radical way, rethink the way we live in the city?” he says. “Fires happen every couple of years at different scales. As much as we’d wish this is a one-time anomaly, it’s not — this is part of a regular cycle of life in southern California.”
The beautiful natural setting of Altadena, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, was what drew people to want to live there. The town became a haven for middle-class Black families pushed out of white-dominated neighbourhoods elsewhere.
But the terrain is dry, with little rainfall, and so a perfect environment for wildfires. Conditions become perilous with the Santa Anas, the so-called “devil winds”, which blow out of the desert and dry out vegetation.
Shawna Dawson Beer, a marketing consultant whose Altadena cottage burnt down in the Eaton fire, has become convinced that the danger of living in Southern California is rising. “The fires have underscored the fact that none of these communities are safe any more,” she says. “The high-risk area has tripled in size.”
California has attempted to “fire proof” such neighbourhoods with an exemplary building code that stipulates the rules for building homes in areas prone to fires. Residents must create a 100-foot defensible space around their homes and clear flammable materials to provide a safe perimeter for firefighters.
But that did not help much in the latest conflagrations. “The winds were so strong there was nothing the firefighters could do,” says Moira Conlon, founder of PR firm Financial Profiles, who lost her home in Pacific Palisades, an upscale neighbourhood that is home to many Hollywood stars and studio executives.
Conlon is unsure about rebuilding. “The place is a toxic waste zone with no infrastructure,” she says.
The costs of reconstruction at a time when thousands of others are also rebuilding could end up being prohibitive, she adds. “Can you imagine the shortage of material and labour we’re going to see? Do I want to spend the next five years of my life fighting for builders?”
And then there is the threat of more wildfires. These are no longer merely a seasonal hazard but an ever-present risk at a time when a changing climate fuels searing temperatures and long droughts. “It’s terrifying and God knows it could happen again,” Conlon says.
The threat of natural disasters has always been seen as a fair price to pay for the privilege of living in LA, with its dramatic coastline and Mediterranean climate.
There were floods in 1938 that killed 115 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake wrecked buildings and inflicted up to $40bn in damage. Wildfires have always been a worry, particularly in the parched period between August and October.
In his book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, the LA writer Mike Davis charted the history of fires in the coastal paradise of Malibu, which he declared was “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world”. He questioned the cycle of rebuilding after each fire, which he said was for decades enabled by cheap fire insurance. The result was ever-larger “firebelt suburbs”.
That cycle may now be broken. Many of the homes destroyed in the fires this month are uninsured. Companies like Allstate and State Farm recently stopped selling new home insurance policies in California, blaming regulatory caps on price rises that made it increasingly challenging to cover losses.
State Farm also announced last year it would not renew policies for 72,000 homes and apartments in California, including 69 per cent of insurance plans in Pacific Palisades — though it partially reversed the move after this month’s fires. Many homeowners dropped by State Farm had turned instead to California’s state-backed Fair Plan, which provides coverage of up to $3mn a residential property — not much considering the value of real estate in these parts.
The patchy insurance picture may mean that, whatever the political rhetoric, it will be difficult to build back better. “Many individuals will have no insurance, and many more will be underinsured, which means that people will be under pressure to cut as many corners as possible in rebuilding,” says Maltzan. “That means houses will be built less well than they originally were.”
Dawson Beer’s house was insured, but she fears her policy will not stretch to the enormous costs of rebuilding a new home in Altadena. “Costs are going to go up significantly, just based on supply and demand,” she says. “I’ve heard it’s going to cost $700-900 per square foot to rebuild, and no insurance company will cover that.”
Then, after houses are rebuilt, new insurance premiums might end up being too high for most homeowners, as more companies change policies to reflect the elevated risk of fires. “When we get back in and rebuild, isn’t there a risk that our community is uninsurable?” she says.
The devastation comes with California already in the grip of a cost of living crisis. The sudden appearance of thousands of homeless residents all looking for a roof over their heads will only exacerbate the city’s chronic housing shortage. The median price of a home in Los Angeles is already over $1mn, after rising by 30 per cent between 2018 and 2023.
“The big question is the affordability of housing,” says Manfred Keil, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, a non-profit development organisation. “Housing costs will go up after the [fires], people won’t be able to afford it and that’s when they’ll start to leave.”
There is a precedent for this: six years after the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, the town’s population stands at around 9,300, compared with 26,500 before the blaze.
Despite the pledges by Bass and Newsom, red tape will also slow down the reconstruction process, says Edward Ring of the California Policy Center, an education foundation. “If you look at how long it takes to get a building permit in California, you can only expect to start construction in three years,” he says “You’ll spend $100,000 on permits and fees. Imagine what that means when you’re trying to rebuild.”
Meanwhile it is unclear who will actually pay the bill for reconstruction not just of homes but also of infrastructure destroyed in the fires.
“We want to rebuild but how long will it take [authorities] to return the utilities? How do you plug in a saw?” says Rosenbluh, the restaurateur. “Fatigue and the length of time will take its toll. People might just take the insurance payment and move to Virginia.”
All of this adds to the already substantial problems for Los Angeles, where Hollywood is struggling and there remains a stubborn homelessness crisis. City leaders will have to oversee the recovery from the fires while also preparing to host eight Fifa World Cup matches next year and the Olympics in 2028.
But the city has weathered “very traumatic periods”, notes Ian Campbell, a longtime businessman in LA who served a key role at California’s Department of Commerce and later was vice-chair of PR company Abernathy MacGregor. Besides the flood, earthquakes and fires, LA also survived the shrinking of the aerospace industry — a major employer — after the end of the cold war, he notes.
“LA has a long history of these startling moments, partly because we live on such tenuous topography,” he says. “This could be another time of reckoning for Los Angeles. Is the city going to continue to allow people to live in areas that are risky, and should all of society subsidise that? These are things that are going to have to be confronted.”
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