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California leaders promise a quick rebuild, but that may put homes at risk of fire again

Reconstructing fire-ravaged neighborhoods in their former image could make residents sitting ducks for future blazes, experts say.
Burned homes seen from above.
Burned homes near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Jan. 9. Josh Edelson / AFP - Getty Images
By Aria Bendix and Denise Chow

The Summary

  • California leaders have promised that the post-fire rebuilding process will be speedy.
  • But experts say reconstructing damaged neighborhoods in their former image would put the residents at risk of another devastating fire.
  • Instead, they recommend changes like spacing homes farther apart and using more fire-safe building materials.

As wildfires continue to smolder in Southern California, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are both promising a speedy rebuilding of the thousands of destroyed homes.

“This is no time for urban planning exercising. That’ll delay it by 15 years. We need people back in their houses,” Steve Soboroff, a businessman and former police commissioner tasked with overseeing the city’s rebuilding efforts, said at a news conference on Friday.

But reconstructing Pacific Palisades and other fire-ravaged neighborhoods in their former image could make residents sitting ducks for future blazes, according to urban planners, engineers and disaster management experts. To make communities resilient to wildfires — especially as they become more frequent and intense due to climate change — the experts said it’s essential to restrict development in high-risk areas, create buffer zones between properties and wildland, and space homes farther apart.

“One of the things that people talk about is, don’t let a disaster go to waste. This is the time to change,” said Stephen Miller, a law professor at Northern Illinois University who specializes in land use and sustainable development.

That’s at odds with Soboroff’s emphasis on speed.

“The planning of the Palisades is beautiful. The way that community works is beautiful. You don’t need to rethink Pacific Palisades. You need to rebuild Pacific Palisades,” he said on Friday. Soboroff did not respond to a request for comment. (He is the father of NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff.)

Given such rhetoric, as well as examples from past fires, urban planners are skeptical that the changes needed to make new homes safe will come to fruition.

“Right now, it’s like they’ve got the pedal all the way down to the floor on the speed side and not necessarily the deliberation side,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a social and economic policy think tank.

An aerial image shows utility crews working behind homes destroyed by the Palisades Fire.
Homes destroyed by the Palisades Fire along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif., on Jan. 15.Patrick T. Fallon / AFP - Getty Images

When asked about that concern by NBC News, Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, pointed to the mayor’s statements last week.

“We have to build in a way that we can pardon the area for fires and make sure that we are a resilient community,” Bass said at the time. “Obviously, we need to look at building codes, we need to look at what was done in the past, and we need to come back stronger and build in a better way.”

How to rebuild better

In an ideal world, Miller said, developers would reconfigure the Palisades to minimize development in areas at high risk of burning, such as along hillsides with lots of brush. San Diego, for instance, restricts homes from being built on steep hillsides, since wildfires travel faster uphill. 

Spacing homes farther apart than the minimum of a few feet required by the Los Angeles fire code can lower the odds that embers travel from one house to another. Miller also recommended a buffer zone between homes and wildland areas, which would be kept clear and contain nonflammable vegetation. 

Planting more native species like succulents or sage on public land near residential communities can also reduce the risk that fires will spread — as opposed to the palm trees that ignited like candles in the Palisades. The city of Malibu banned the planting of new palm trees in 2020 for this reason — one of the lessons learned from the Woolsey Fire in 2018. 

When it comes to landscaping for individual yards, it helps to space shrubs and plants at least 15 feet apart and to use gravel, concrete or paved walkways instead of mulch, experts said. For construction, materials like brick, stone or concrete reduce the risk of burning relative to wood. Designers also suggest avoiding wood siding or fences and installing dual-pane windows and sprinkler systems inside the home. 

Some of these strategies are already mandated by California’s fire code, which went into effect in 2008, and by Los Angeles-specific amendments to that code. For the most part, burned homes will likely be constructed to the newer codes, which require structures in at-risk zones to be built with fire-resistant materials, such as retardant-treated wood and tempered glass. The California code also includes rules for vegetation management and landscaping to reduce combustible matter on a property.

“The codes are much, much better today than they were when these neighborhoods were built originally. If they rebuild to the new codes, that will be a significant step towards being more resilient,” Rumbach said. 

He added that homeowners could also choose to go beyond those requirements — for instance, by using more metal in construction or adding a concrete perimeter wall to make a property more fire-resistant. Lawmakers could even offer incentives for such efforts, Rumbach said. 

However, if the Palisades were rebuilt for maximum resiliency, some residents would have to relocate. That can be done via programs that allow homeowners in high-risk areas to transfer their development rights to lower-risk areas. However, experts said the strategy is idealistic and the city is unlikely to implement such a program.

An entire area ravaged by the Palisades Fire.
An area ravaged by the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles on Jan. 15.Etienne Laurent / AFP - Getty Images

None of these efforts are necessarily speedy.

“It is unrealistic to ask communities that have been built over decades and decades and then destroyed in a few days to rebuild with just completely different construction immediately,” said Erica Fischer, an assistant professor of structural engineering at Oregon State University. 

Still, Rumbach noted that Los Angeles has more resources than many communities devastated by past wildfires. Newsom has already proposed $2.5 billion in funding for recovery efforts. 

“It’s in a big metro area. Everything you need to recover is there,” Rumbach said. “But still, even in the best case scenario, it’s a multiyear process.”

Other experts questioned whether homes should be rebuilt in Pacific Palisades at all.

“We should think very carefully and very thoroughly about whether or not this is a place to rebuild in,” said Jonah Susskind, a senior research associate at the design firm SWA, adding: “We have to acknowledge that this community, this infrastructure, these homes, will almost certainly burn again at some point in the future.” 

Repeating past mistakes

In Los Angeles, Bass has authorized several actions that will allow residents to rebuild homes in the same style and size. Those include waiving a requirement for new buildings to use electricity rather than gas for heating and appliances, directing city departments to review reconstruction projects within 30 days and waiving hearings that evaluate whether a development complies with zoning regulations.

Newsom, meanwhile, has suspended environmental permitting requirements that can delay or block construction (but which experts say also mitigate wildfire risk). A spokesperson for Newsom said current building codes largely remain in effect for homes that will be rebuilt, though the governor has tasked several agencies with assessing whether to suspend certain rules to facilitate rapid construction.

Urban planning experts said the scrutiny that both Newsom and Bass have faced over the fires has likely added pressure on them to speed up development. President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have said Newsom should have done more to pre-empt the blazes.

Bass, meanwhile, has been lambasted by celebrities and politicians accusing her of mismanaging city resources, and for being out of the country when the fires broke out. Seidl said Bass is “leading our city through one of the worst crises in our history,” and that “misinformation surrounding this crisis has been staggering.”

On top of that, Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, which may serve as a looming — albeit impractical — deadline for recovery.

Newsom and Bass aren’t alone in pushing to rebuild devastated communities in their old image. After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, for example, city officials exempted people who had lost homes from local green building codes.

“There was huge public pressure to roll back some of the energy codes and some of the resiliency measures that were being proposed, because they said, ‘Don’t do this on the backs of people who just suffered a disaster,’” Rumbach said.

Now, he said, the area’s homes are “being rebuilt largely as suburban tract housing that could burn down again if there were a wildfire that blew through.”

Firefighters inspect a burned house in the middle of debris.
Firefighters inspect a burned house from the Palisades Fire on Jan. 15.Apu Gomes / Getty Images

Long term, designing homes and neighborhoods to be more fire-resistant will also require more research into which mitigation efforts are most effective.

Whereas rigorous lab testing has measured how materials and structural systems hold up against shaking in simulated earthquakes and strong winds for hurricanes, the same can’t yet be said for wildfires, according to Fischer.

“I can assess the construction of a house for earthquake demands, I can suggest a laundry list of mitigation measures for hurricanes, but unfortunately we don’t have the science to back that kind of thing up for wildfires,” she said.

Part of the challenge is that wildfires spread because of a complex combination of factors, including weather, climate, topography, vegetation and local construction techniques, making it hard to apply lessons from one fire to the next. 

Still, Fischer said strides are being made, as civil engineers work with wildfire experts and forest ecologists to study the impacts of fires on structures.

“We have roadmaps for other hazards. It can be done,” she said. “It’s going to take time to work through the research to put wildfires into a similar framework, but it’s not all doom and gloom.”

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Aria Bendix

Aria Bendix is the breaking health reporter for NBC News Digital.

Denise Chow

Denise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.