She found that older homeowners were more likely to relocate than rebuild, and that moving quickly came at the expense of rebuilding in a way that could mitigate the risk of future wildfires.
“Santa Rosa is a really important lesson,” she said. “People went back and rebuilt right in place, and it’s exactly what you don’t want to do. What they should have done well before the disaster happened is have a plan for rebuilding that said when your house burns down, we’re not going to support you rebuilding it the same way.”
While a methodical plan to incorporate policy recommendations, rezoning priorities and mandates for resilient building materials has obvious benefits, there are tradeoffs.
A longer rebuilding period comes at the expense of getting local economies moving again, as previous fires have shown. Municipalities need to act quickly to maintain tax revenues so critical services don’t have to be cut. And let’s not forget the obvious — people need long-term shelter so they’re not paying expenses related to the rebuild at the same time they’re shelling out for rent on temporary housing.
Changes to housing and zoning face some of the same headwinds after a fire that they do in. normal civic life — namely local politics.
“Disaster recovery is political, not technical,” said Andrew Rumbach, a researcher at Urban Institute. “We try to make good decisions with the information we have, but we give a ton of power to local elected officials, and they listen to voters. It’s very politically unpopular to tell people that they can’t rebuild.”
Each of the previous California fires had different dynamics, though.
Santa Rosa is in the wine country north of San Francisco, and it provides a loose analogue to Altadena. Ventura, a coastal town just north of Oxnar, has a larger population of high-income residents along with more expensive homes, which makes it similar to Pacific Palisades.
In the aftermath of the Thomas Fire, displaced residents with the means to do so flocked to Ventura’s dense downtown. The area just happened to have a large influx of new multifamily housing, providing shelter for those deciding whether to rebuild.
In the end, many chose not to. Of the 530 homes that burned, about 300 used their insurance money and the proceeds from selling their land to move elsewhere. These were mostly older people who passed on the long hassle of rebuilding.
This could be predictive of Pacific Palisades. Homeowners there whose homes burned — including celebrities Mel Gibson, Billy Crystal, Paris Hilton, Anthony Hopkins, Melissa Rivers and Miles Teller — can afford high-end temporary housing, and the long-tenured older ones may not want to wait it out.
The rush to expensive rental housing is already playing out in LA. An agent in the area told the New York Times that she has a rental listing that got 1,000 applications in the days following the destruction in Pacific Palisades.
In the two years after the Tubbs Fire — which at the time was the most destructive in California history — 28% of households whose homes were damaged moved to another census tract. Those who left were also skewed older, and fewer people chose to rebuild in Santa Rosa.
Older people were more likely to leave, but that was also driven by the fact that many of them planned to leave anyway. The fires simply sped up their timelines to move.
It’s a similar dynamic to the population outflow from Manhattan in the months following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Residents who planned to leave in the next year or two left ahead of time, giving the false impression that there was a permanent population decline.
Ventura and Santa Rosa took different approaches to rebuilding. Ventura adopted a longer recovery process, while Santa Rosa streamlined permit processing and applications to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The Ventura method might better prepare for a future fire, but it would no doubt face opposition in Pacific Palisades from homeowners. It’s not hard to imagine Mel Gibson ranting on Joe Rogan’s podcast about new restrictions, even if it was as trivial as moving bushes that were next to his house to a spot few feet away from it.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have already indicated they prefer to rebuild quickly, with both setting the goal of having building permits approved within 30 days.
Bass signed an executive order that creates a task force entity to fast track approvals, and the group will have representation from all relevant city, state and federal agencies. Newsom’s order calls for waiving building requirements related to environmental and preservation laws.
There’s also a requirement that eligible rebuilds cannot exceed 110% of the destroyed home’s previous size, which means they won’t impose mandates for defensible spaces around homes that tend to shrink them.
Paradise, California, is a rural community with an older population, which makes the specifics of it less applicable to the urban environment of Los Angeles. However, it serves as a warning for what can happen if communities and homeowners aren’t prepared for the worst.
Prior to the Camp Fire in 2018, the city’s 27,000 residents had considerably less wealth, with a median home value of $218,400. About 17% of the housing stock was mobile homes.
The Camp Fire forced about 13,000 households to leave, most of them going to nearby Chico. Almost 41% of those displaced were low income and 34% were renters. Those who didn’t move suffered major income loss, and the fire decimated the city’s infrastructure.
The year after the fire, the city’s population sat at just over 4,000, and it’s currently about 9,000. Those who stayed did so because they couldn’t leave.
“You’ll see that pattern for sure among the working class Altadena folks,” Chapple said. “People are going to stay in that area to the extent possible, but some are just not going to be able to afford to leave.”
FInd more of our wildfire coverage here.
