Gavin Newsom signed a $2.5bn wildfire relief package this week, with the goal of helping Los Angeles “rebuild faster”. Both the California governor and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, pledged to suspend environmental and other regulations to make rebuilding homes and businesses easier. Donald Trump has reportedly said he wants the city to recover quickly so that the 2028 Olympics, which Los Angeles is hosting, can be “the greatest Games”.
But many environmental and urban planning experts say that Los Angeles should actually be pausing, and taking a moment to consider how and where to safely rebuild communities located in high-risk wildfire zones.
“Why are we building to burn?” asked Char Miller, an environmental historian at Pomona College, and author of Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs the California Dream. While it makes sense that politicians would embrace the optics of getting Angelenos back into their homes as soon as possible, he said, reconstructing without any other major changes means that, once again, “You’re going to build and you’re going to burn.”
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“There are lots of reasons to consider whether or not the public – the state taxpayers, the federal taxpayers – should be spending billions of dollars to fight these fires and rebuild in places that we know are highly flammable,” echoed Stephanie Pincetl, the director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California Los Angeles. “Unfortunately, we’re having a very hard time contemplating a different kind of building in a different kind of place.”
The Guardian spoke with three experts about why Los Angeles might want to “take a pause” on rebuilding plans, and what alternatives to simply rebuilding in the same way might look like.
Char Miller, environmental historian at Pomona College and the author of Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning, and Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs the California Dream.
Both the governor and the mayor have promised to diminish environmental regulations and any other red tape that slows rebuilding down. They’re sending a signal that people should get back into their homes. I totally get that, and I expect I’d be right there with them if my home had burned.
But it’s not a strategy that any government should embark on without thinking about it, without taking a pause. There are arguments floating around, which I find really interesting, thinking back to the big fire in London, the Chicago fire and the fire that destroyed San Francisco. These were all cities built out of wood. Afterwards, they redesigned and reorganized those cities. We can’t redesign Altadena and Pasadena and the Palisades in the same way – we’re not going to bulldoze those mountains. The contexts are fundamentally different. But they hired Christopher Wren to produce the new London. Today, we’re not hiring people to say, “Hold on a minute, maybe we should rethink what we’re doing.” Those other cities took a pause, and we hit fast forward.
Many of us who are convinced we shouldn’t blindly rebuild think we should build up, not out. Build density, not low-density sprawl. We also think we should build buffers that we don’t have currently. I made an argument after the Thomas fire in 2017: what if we, through the city and the state, would go to people whose homes were burned and whose lands were burned, and said, ‘We are happy to buy your house, or what’s left of it, and turn that into recreational space.’
I lived in San Antonio for many years – a flood-prone city. After a massive flood in 1998, the county and city had enough. They said, we’ve had more than a century of big floods, let’s do something different. So they put lines in their budget to offer people an escape. They’d buy them out of the flood plain so they can be safe. And shockingly, people took them up on the offer. After Hurricane Harvey, Houston adopted the same strategy. Their real estate markets are nothing like Los Angeles’. It would be infinitely more expensive here. But the logic still holds.
Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California, Los Angeles.
We need to build inward, not outward. We’re not Manhattan, we’re never going to be Manhattan, but couldn’t we be more like parts of Brooklyn, or parts of Boston?
How about allowing those large houses that exist through Los Angeles to turn into duplexes and triplexes? They could turn into three apartments, still with plenty of open space: they have a yard, they have lots of street parking.
It would mark a change for the building trades in the region, which have become so accustomed to building suburbs. But it could actually lead to more jobs, and more interesting jobs, if we were not building outwards, and we were instead thinking about how we retrofill neighborhoods – how we build really well-built buildings in more central areas.
Some of the promises of the LA mayor are concerning. For example, Bass has stated that the electrification requirement will be suspended for new buildings. There’s no reason to do that. Electrification is not more expensive [than gas power]. In the longer term, because we will be weaning ourselves off fossil gas, this is extraordinarily shortsighted. There’s an opportunity to start from scratch, and have a fully electric home, and she is not enforcing that. We’re not thinking about how to rebuild in a more resilient, climate appropriate, locally appropriate manner.
Miriam Greenberg, sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. She is currently leading a research project called Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Research for Resilience: Addressing California’s Climate, Conservation and Housing Crises.
What we often see in the aftermath of the disaster is uneven redevelopment. There’s major differences for those who are documented and undocumented, who have different access to aid, as well as for homeowners vs renters, and those with often vastly different levels of insurance. Often, in order to rebuild, people have to bring things up to code, to new environmental sustainability standards, which are great. But that can be expensive. [Federal Emergency Management Agency] funding can get people a certain way along, but then there’s all these costs they did not anticipate, because of the regulations. The result in our area [almost five years after the CZU fire] is that there’s a lot of half-built homes in these areas that people can’t afford to finish.
There’s a perception, backed up by a number of famous articles, like The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, that people living in these high-risk areas are rich people. Yes, some of the most expensive real estate in the world is in these areas. At the same time, [the California WUI] is a very diverse area, and where some of the most affordable housing in the state is also found – from older rural housing to exurban sprawl to mobile home parks. As living in dense urban areas – that are safer in relation to fire and many other climate hazards – has become out of reach for many people, we have seen lower-income people also moving to these WUI areas in large part because they’re places they can afford.
So from an equity perspective, I understand the need to loosen regulation, as Newsom and Bass are doing, and to enable people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the costs of these things to be able to stay in these areas, not just the rich people who can afford to put solar panels on their new house.
But why are we enabling people to rebuild unsafely in areas that we know are going to burn again?
It’s important to remember that, in the places where there is this inequality, we are also going to see inequality in terms of whose houses burn. Yes, multimillion-dollar houses are burned. But Alexandra Syphard, a research ecologist who studies wildfires, has found evidence to show that the cost and condition of housing is correlated with structure loss, and people who are lower-income, and living in poorer quality construction, or older houses, or who have not been able to afford the cost of mitigations, are more likely the ones whose houses are burning.
If we’re going to encourage people to rebuild by any means necessary, we are going to be repeating these dynamics. We know it’s going to happen again.
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