What Kind of Los Angeles Will Rise From the Fires?

Will a different city emerge from the Los Angeles fires?

Time and again fires have fast-tracked urban change. London after the Great Fire of 1666 rewrote its safety laws, widened streets and erected new public buildings, like the domed St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, which decimated downtown, invented the modern American metropolis with newfangled steel-frame skyscrapers.

The fires in Los Angeles, aside from tightening already elaborate building codes, probably won’t result in anything as dramatic. For starters, it is a very different kind of city, one that isn’t concentrated around a center. The fires ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena, primarily residential neighborhoods in the hills, amid the combustible chaparral. More than how those neighborhoods were built, the problem was where.

But, outside of climate and urbanist circles, discussions about moving people out of harm’s way are not front of mind at the moment, for understandable and very human reasons. The focus is on returning displaced residents to their communities. Not everyone who lost a home may elect, or be able, to return, but over the course of conversations on the streets in Altadena, in living rooms in Malibu, and elsewhere all across the city, I have yet to meet a displaced Angeleno who doesn’t wish to go back. Replacing those homes will be a struggle and costly.

Rebuilding communities will be harder still.

Risk has of course been baked into life in Los Angeles for as long as people have lived in the region. The city’s rich, storied history includes a steady drumbeat of fires, mudslides, floods, droughts and earthquakes. What seemed different about these latest fires, Angelenos told me, is how the unusually fierce Santa Ana winds, combined with a drought that turned dozens of square miles into tinder, threatened to blow embers from the hills and canyons into urban flatlands not usually considered vulnerable to wildfires.

“Over the years I have designed three buildings on Hollywood Boulevard,” John Kaliski, a veteran Los Angeles architect, told me, “and never once was the risk of wildfires raised as an issue.”

“We live two miles south of Sunset Boulevard,” he added, “and for the first time it dawned on us that embers could reach our neighborhood. This was new.”

I asked Kaliski if he would now consider moving. He paused. Maybe, he said.

To Altadena.

Because “it’s a wonderful place,” he said.

And that’s the reality of Los Angeles. Altadena is a wonderful neighborhood. Outsiders continue to misrepresent Los Angeles as a sprawl of suburbs in search of a center. In fact it is one of the densest cities in the country, a collection of distinct, far-flung and complex neighborhoods. Many of those neighborhoods in the hills date back generations, long before the automobile arrived.

“The historic pact of L.A. has always been that you can have this urban life, with big-city amenities, but live in wild nature,” as William Deverell, a leading California historian and dean at the University of Southern California, put it to me. “The fires just revealed more explicitly than ever the cost of that pact.”

That pact was what the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sold to frigid East Coast residents and Midwesterners suffering a tuberculosis pandemic during the 1870s, when the transcontinental railroad first linked the wider nation to what was still a scruffy, little-known settlement on a fugitive river in Southern California. Mountain air was the cure to tuberculosis, and orange trees could even grow outside your kitchen window, boosters promised.

The pitch worked. An aqueduct, one of the signal feats of early-20th-century American engineering, was soon constructed to sluice water from hundreds of miles north and quench a rapidly expanding population settling in the San Fernando Valley and up into the mountains. The world’s most extensive streetcar network was created to transport all these people across the ballooning metropolis.

Boosters also promoted what has become the sclerotic insanity of governance structure in Los Angeles. Today, the City of Los Angeles is just one of 88 cities in the County of Los Angeles, which is itself among several counties comprising the larger region of Los Angeles. At the turn of the last century, newcomers seeking to build single-family homes in the hills were promised the freedom to establish their own townships.

Altadena remains an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, serviced until the 1940s by streetcars. It is home to a mix of wealthy, working- and middle-class residents — artists, musicians, back-to-nature types, academics from nearby Caltech, and a historic Black community. Much of the social as well as physical fabric of the neighborhood is now in shambles. I ventured past the National Guard troops one day to survey the damage and, even after seeing the images in the news, was startled by the seemingly unending destruction — street after street of charred chimneys, melted steel and piles of toxic ash.

Afterward I bumped into Kameelah Reese and her two young sons, Kobi and James, at Octavia’s Bookshelf, a few blocks away in Pasadena. Pasadena’s abrupt normalcy seemed almost surreal. The bookstore had become a temporary relief center, one of countless businesses in the region that offered to help displaced residents. The outpouring of support across the region reminded me of New York after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Reese told me her family has lived for generations in Altadena. “There is no question in my mind,” she said. She wants to go back. So I asked her if the extreme winds and fires had made her think twice about whether the neighborhood was still safe.

“No,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “The fires showed that no place is safe.”

It was a response I heard from other displaced Angelenos. If extreme weather now means no place is safe, then home remains the safest alternative. Altadena is Reese’s home. It’s where she knows everyone. “It’s my community,” she said.

And that’s the challenge moving forward, as Alejandra Guerrero, a Los Angeles architect at a nonprofit firm, pointed out. “The focus is on houses, but rebuilding community is something else.”

When you listen to people talk about what they lost, Guerrero’s co-executive director at the firm, Elizabeth Timme, added, “they remember going to the corner store or meeting with their child’s principal at the school that burned down.”

Restoring a community like Altadena “isn’t going to be quick or easy,” agreed Michael Maltzan, the architect of Los Angeles’s Sixth Street Bridge, among other recent projects. His family had to evacuate when the Eaton fire threatened to overrun a canyon near their house. Rebuilding will take years and potentially involve additional building codes that may raise construction costs, and entail new forms of development that could improve but also alter the neighborhood. “The question is whether displaced residents regard the community that emerges as a net positive or negative,” he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed two bills providing $2.5 billion in state money, and he also issued an executive order suspending some permitting and review requirements, to help resurrect ravaged houses and businesses. The suspensions imply that these permits and reviews were never especially necessary in the first place — or else that speed has suddenly become more critical than safety — but either way, the steps are intended to hasten recovery.

Authorities are nonetheless estimating that cleanup will take months before any construction can begin. Meanwhile, the long, tortuous process of recouping losses will frustrate more than a few displaced residents. Insurance may evaporate after the state moratorium on cancellations for displaced homeowners runs out, complicating loans.

And private equity firms are already in the wings. If swaths of a neighborhood like Altadena are bought up by equity investors looking to make money, the neighborhood will become not just different but even less affordable. State and local officials insist they will prevent these firms from doing that.

We’ll see.

Chicago took decades to emerge from its Great Fire. New York is still rebuilding a park on the Lower East Side that flooded during Hurricane Sandy, 13 years ago. Cities “evolve in hundred-year increments” is how Kaliski, the architect, puts it, pointing out that in Los Angeles the neighborhood of Crenshaw has been a focus of various renewal efforts since the 1940s; Bunker Hill, since the 1920s.

There’s lots of discussion percolating in the Los Angeles design community now about prospective moonshots for new building materials and new forms of housing. California and the city had both been trying to construct more housing to address a shortage before the fires. In recent years the state has issued tens of thousands of permits, the largest number of them in Los Angeles, to homeowners contemplating what planners call accessory dwelling units, but most of us know as granny flats, an ordeal that can still entail years of bureaucratic hell.

There’s certainly plenty of room in the flatlands to accommodate more housing that wouldn’t Manhattanize neighborhoods. A century ago, Los Angeles pioneered one of the great architectural typologies of low-rise, high-density, multifamily living, around shared courtyards that allowed residents access to the outdoors — a big reason many of them moved to Southern California in the first place. Los Angeles could go back to the future.

But will the fires have any direct impact on the housing shortage? Misperceptions about the water supply are already skewing recovery conversations. Los Angeles is hosting the World Cup next year and the Summer Olympics in 2028. Public attention will inexorably turn. Amnesia will set in.

Who today remembers the Bel Air Fire in 1961? It destroyed hundreds of homes, including those of many celebrities. Like the Palisades and Eaton blazes, the Bel Air Fire was driven by Santa Ana gales, and it led to new laws, including one prohibiting wood shingle roofs for new construction and another requiring brush to be cleared from around houses. There were questions raised about the livability of the foothills. But people moved back to Bel Air. The disaster slipped down the memory chute.

The Woolsey Fire was just six and a half years ago. It burned nearly 97,000 acres, more than twice the territory destroyed by the Palisades and Eaton wildfires, erasing more than 1,600 structures and causing the evacuation of 295,000 people. I visited a house in Malibu, designed by the architect Geoffrey von Oeyen, that survived the recent fires, which replaced one leveled in the Woolsey Fire. The Palisades fire didn’t reach the new house because a few weeks ago yet another fire cleared a stretch of underbrush that prevented the latest blaze from spanning a canyon.

The house’s owner, the architect’s brother, said his insurance company had already discontinued his insurance a few months before the recent fire and he was stressed and fearful. But he wasn’t moving. He and his brother had grown up just up the hill, in a house their father had designed.

This is home, he said.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.