Column: Recovery will be tempered by hard decisions and, if we aren’t careful, inequality
- In the wake of the fires’ devastation, what comes next is not easy, and worse, often not fair.
- Gardeners, cleaning ladies, cooks, even nannies are now without work, but still have rent due. How do we include them in recovery?
As firefighters slowly start to control the flames that have decimated too many of the hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, talk of recovery is already underway.
For those whose beloved homes are now reduced to slanting chimneys and ash, it may provide comfort to hear these pledges from our president, governor, mayor and other powers-that-be to support and streamline help for survivors of this heartbreaking tragedy. And certainly, there should be no message more important than one of hope and solidarity.
But as a journalist who has wandered the aftermath of more than one fire, I feel compelled to offer a caution: What comes next is not easy, and worse, often not fair.
It’s a caution meant not to pour salt on wounds, but because having seen it too often, my hope for L.A. is that we can do better. But that better has to start with a hard truth that many don’t want to accept: Fire will again hit these same places, maybe in our lifetime.
That means we can’t just build back what was lost, or else we are setting the stage to repeat tragedy.
“Anyone who thinks that this isn’t going to happen again is fooling themselves,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch told me. He’s the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School. Like virtually all of the climate scientists I spoke with, he’s not trying to be a downer.
But the facts are the facts — the Palisades, and to a lesser extent Altadena and the other areas experiencing fire, are all in high-risk fire zones. Even though there’s not much left to burn now, the landscape will most likely return to being hazardous within a matter of years. That would be true with or without climate change.
But the heating of the planet is causing weather whiplash, as my colleague Ian James wrote about, making winds mightier, turning fires into fire-nados and morphing rain into atmospheric rivers that bombard us into thinking there cannot possibly be a drought, though we are living through one of the driest periods in California history.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who helped California create one of its first climate risk assessments more than 20 years ago, said that means the frequency and intensity of disasters will also increase, a situation she likens to a baseball player on steroids — bigger, meaner and good at what they do.
“We have to prepare for what’s coming in the future,” she told me, which sounds obvious. But also, how?
California needs a plan for how and where we will live in the future.
What does it mean when it comes to rebuilding responsibly — both for people and the future — in places that back up to the ongoing dangers of the wildland-urban interface, as scientists like to call those coveted neighborhoods where hiking trails are just a few hundred yards from front doors?
Most unfortunately, it means that survivors will be asked to sacrifice more: More money to build fire-resistant homes; more time to rebuild as those hurdles are navigated; more stress as they figure out what is possible and what is not.
Government, of course, has a lot of responsibility to ease those burdens, and to set rules that are both responsible and reasonable, if politically unpopular. Which they always are.
But the reality is that with more than 10,000 structures gone, replacing even a fraction of them will tax our government’s ability to keep up, never mind do better. People are going to be angry at FEMA and zoning and new building codes and permit waits — sometimes rightfully, sometimes furious at change that has to happen if we are serious about preventing future catastrophes.
Still, there are real systemic questions that need examination — and government accountability — before we start putting houses back up in dangerous places.
For example, the small lots and narrow streets of the Palisades — which make it hard for people to get out and firefighters to get in — were never designed for the mini-mansions that filled them, said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University.
He points out that the Palisades “was laid out in a way that was intended to maximize the value of the lots because of their beautiful views,” but that unintentionally created “a huge fire risk.”
Many of those streets, he said, align perfectly with the Santa Ana winds, meaning embers funnel down them during a fire and “you get this falling dominoes effect” of homes.
All of those are factors that would be hard to change. But they are risks that need to be made clear or mitigated before allowing people to move back into harm’s way — because many living in the Palisades did not understand that they were living in a place that had seen fire in the past and will almost certainly see it again.
But those examinations take time, and more than that, they take a desire by the owners of all that property to subject themselves to new restrictions, and accept that even with them, some peril remains.
So maybe the bougainvillea can’t climb up the side wall anymore. Maybe the wood fence isn’t a great idea. Maybe the charm of an Arts and Crafts bungalow needs to go without flammable cedar shingles. Those are the kind of nitty-gritty things we should talk about up front, because they do make a difference.
“You can maintain neighborhoods so that they resist that kind of a fire but it takes will, and more than will it takes political consensus that it is the right thing to do,” Wara said.
Here’s where we get to the part about inequality. Because the right thing to do collectively may not be feasible individually.
The Palisades, clearly, is wealthy. But even within its wealth, there are degrees. There are plenty of folks in the area who don’t have to worry about rebuilding costs, or even losing another home to fire in the future. They can afford it.
There were also many families living in those glamorous streets who had been in the neighborhood for decades or even generations. Their homes may have been paid off or close to it, their life savings sunk into that plot of ground. And there are many living in Altadena and other affected areas who are just working Angelenos, paying off a mortgage — this was a neighborhood that drew Black and Latino families for its affordability.
I won’t delve into insurance, but even with it, it is unlikely to cover everything for these regular people — especially with the brutal competition for resources such as contractors and architects that is about to begin, driving costs even higher. Let’s not even get started on the tariffs and deportations our incoming president has promised, both of which would further complicate rebuilding.
There have been at least 16 deaths and more than 10,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. Firefighters made more progress on containing the Eaton and Palisades fires overnight, but the Palisades fire grew by about 1,000 acres and strong winds are expected overnight.
And though the insurance commissioner placed a moratorium on cancellations of home insurance in these areas for now, when that lifts, premiums will go up — maybe a lot.
At what point can an average person, even the above-average-but-not-filthy-rich person, simply not afford the rebuild or the risk?
It’s a question that has plagued much of California for years, but has now stormed into Los Angeles with a ruthless force, and with a twist: Does the Palisades become even richer, a place where only those who can afford to see it all burn down can build?
Across fires, not just here, it is “nearly impossible to rebuild a place in a way that is inclusive of all existing residents and sustainable in the face of future climate change,” Karen Chapple told me. She’s a professor emerita of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, and she studies the aftermath of fires.
Schlegelmilch, the Columbia professor, has seen it too. He said recoveries too often become “uneven” and the people who need help the most have the hardest time getting it.
“You’ll have very wealthy people who are going to have access to resources … and who are going to have accountants and lawyers who are going to help them,” he said. “And then you have those who are barely scraping by and don’t get paid if they don’t get to work … trying to manage 15 different things.”
There’s also a trickle-down economic effect, even for those who weren’t displaced. Gone also are thousands of yards that had gardeners. Cleaning ladies, cooks, even nannies are now without work, but still have rent due. How do we include them in recovery?
And there’s only so long survivors can camp out in hotels and on couches. The housing crunch that is surely coming holds the risk of pushing everyone down a notch, as the most desirable housing is taken up by those with the independent wealth or insurance checks to cover it.
This might be the most crucial part of our recovery, figuring out how to make it more fair. Figuring out all the different people who need to recover in one way or another, and figuring out how to live in a place that burns with the least amount of risk for the most vulnerable.
It’s easy to see how all this becomes a crucible; a crushing personal weight and tinder for political unrest and infighting as we strive to stabilize and move forward.
But we have to recover in a way that allows us to live with fire, and each other. So the hardest part of recovery will be having the clarity and will to do it right.
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