California moves to quickly rebuild homes destroyed in the L.A. wildfires. Should it?

In response to what could turn out to be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, California’s political leaders have taken swift action to try to help residents rebuild thousands of homes and businesses destroyed in a spate of deadly wildfires.

“When the fires are extinguished, victims who have lost their homes and businesses must be able to rebuild quickly and without roadblocks. The executive order I signed today will help cut permitting delays, an important first step in allowing our communities to recover faster and stronger,” Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday in a statement.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued her own executive order on Monday.

“This order is the first step in clearing away red tape and bureaucracy to organize around urgency, common sense and compassion,” Bass wrote. “We will do everything we can to get Angelenos back home.”

But not everyone thinks that the impulse to rebuild fire-prone areas makes long-term sense, especially since climate change continues to elevate wildfire risks.

“There have been utterly understandable, natural reactions. You’re seeing it in the elected leaders saying that they are going to rebuild again,” Alice Hill, a fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Los Angeles judge, told Yahoo News. “The challenge is the nature of the land underneath our feet is changing. The nature of extreme weather events is changing and those alterations make some areas far less safe than they have been historically.”

Lessons learned?

Some climate scientists who have long warned about the consequences posed by rising global temperatures are also questioning the wisdom of simply replacing the destroyed homes as they were before the latest round of wildfires ravaged Southern California.

“In Pacific Palisades and in the Eaton Fire, once the fire got into the urban area, it wasn’t really a vegetation or a forest problem,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrologist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute. “It was structures burning one after another and setting fire to their neighbors. So that raises a whole question about what kind of urban development we should have. What kind of building materials should we allow?”

A growing body of scientific research has shown that, thanks to climate change, the conditions that made these wildfires so potent will get only worse as long as mankind continues to burn fossil fuels.

“Moving forward, the future will hold more of these wet-to-dry whiplash events in California,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said, noting that climate change simply adds another layer of risk to an area where a naturally arid climate and Santa Ana wind events already made it susceptible to wildfires.

Hard choices

Just as with residents who have lost homes in coastal states like Florida due to hurricanes made stronger by climate change, the decision to rebuild in California involves much more than a simple risk calculation.

“We’re already past thinking about next steps; we moved pretty quickly into action,” Dustin Bramell, whose family of four lost their home in the Palisades Fire, told the Washington Post. “The only thing we have now are our friends, family and community.”

For many people like Bramell, who believe climate change is increasing the risks of living in Los Angeles, the question shifts from whether to rebuild to how to do so more safely. For years, California homebuilder Mike Roddy has been critical of “the use of lumber framing” for houses. “Embers, high winds, can easily ignite wood,” he said in an email. His company, Butte Build Better, has constructed more than 600 homes and apartment units with steel frames.

“We are facing enormous problems if we continue to burn fossil fuels and chop down native forests,” he said in a 2022 interview, adding, “Substitutes are available.”

But Hill questions whether it will be feasible to stay ahead of climate change in places prone to disasters.

“You can either build a structure that is just going to survive. That might look like a concrete dome, not very aesthetically pleasing, but it might survive the kinds of intense wildfires that we have, or you don’t build there again,” she added. “The insurance industry is sending us a signal that the way we have been building in these areas is just not safe.”

'Money will talk'

Another expert on the ongoing insurance crisis, former Obama administration science adviser Susan Crawford, agrees that while “this is a situation full of anguish and despair,” it is also “distressing that we’re incapable of taking a longer view.”

“Building back in exactly the way that you were before the disaster seems shortsighted in light of what we know about accelerating, ferocious impacts of climate change, but I understand the human impulse to drive everything back to the status quo as quickly as possible,” she said. “But insurance companies increasingly will require that a house be built — and that a community be structured — in such a way that fire risk is minimal. In this situation, money will talk.”

In part, the push by Newsom and Bass to ease building regulations is a response to the at-times byzantine restrictions that can result in long delays in rebuilding from wildfires.

Consider the speed of the rebuilding effort following 2018’s Woolsey Fire. That blaze destroyed 1,643 structures in Malibu and left three people dead. Since then, the city of Malibu says it has issued 296 permits to rebuild homes and that just 363 applications to rebuild have been approved by the planning commission.

Crawford, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, empathizes both with those traumatized by the loss of their homes as well as with local governments that will soon face a property tax revenue shortfall. But she has also studied the domino effect that climate disasters pose for the larger U.S. economy.

“Los Angeles County is made up of 88 separate municipalities, separate local governments. To some extent, individual cities will fare differently from one another,” she said. “But the larger picture is that the entire region will be a place of softening property values and lost revenue and that will have a great effect on the ability to fund services and public infrastructure.”

'The American West is in big trouble'

For California residents who decide that living in the state isn’t worth the risks posed by fire, the question becomes “where to move?”

“It is apparent that the American West is in big trouble. We’ve seen extreme heat, extreme drought and now wildfire conditions which are pointing toward needing to incentivize development in slightly safer areas, or at least to think about withdrawing federal support for infrastructure in areas that become uninsurable,” Crawford said.

But both Crawford and Hill stress that there are ways to make the situation better in Southern California.

“It will take courage, but we’ve seen communities do that post-disaster. After the great fire in London in 1666, they banned all wooden buildings. I’m sure that wasn’t popular,” Hill, who penned a recent article on how to rebuild Los Angeles. “Nero, when Rome burned, said we’re going to have wider alleys, it’s too dangerous to have these narrow streets. After the Great Fire of Chicago, similar restrictions were issued on building materials. This is the chance to really move big ideas.”