With the flames still burning, the urge to quickly restore the two devastated communities to their former selves became a political imperative.
First Governor Gavin Newsom and then Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued orders aimed at removing bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles and expediting the rebuilding of damaged or destroyed homes.
As urgent as this declaration of resolve feels to many, some architects, urban planners, and academics believe that public officials should slow down and make communities more resilient to future fires. Some critics say they want to think carefully about how to make it more resilient and better serve local communities. Affordable housing needs.
“Just going back to the way things were is definitely a missed opportunity,” said Liz Falletta, an architect and professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. “It was a missed opportunity to think about these things differently.”
More bluntly, Mark Rybeck, a former Los Angeles City Council legislative analyst and now a staunch critic of City Hall, has called for a complete halt to rebuilding at the Palisades, but says, “What’s going on there?” What has not been done is to first investigate what happened and apply the lessons learned to reforms such as building codes and building codes that would significantly increase the capacity of local fire water systems. ”
The order “will allow property owners to begin rebuilding more quickly with the same building materials and fire protection requirements that have failed to protect more than 10,000 homes,” he said in his opinion. As mentioned in the article.
Unlike many past disasters that randomly destroyed communities, burning down one home and leaving the next door unharmed, the Palisades and Eaton fires burned entire neighborhoods and completely rebuilt them. It created a blank slate on which to design.
Tucked away in a semi-rural area away from urban centres, both communities, despite dramatic demographic differences, share a strong identity but also an insularity that makes them vulnerable.
In addition to fire-resistance considerations, ideas being floated to reshape the two communities include creating more common spaces and increasing distance between homes, improving street patterns; This includes replacing popular but fire-hazardous vegetation.
For example, studies have shown that California oak has a better ability to absorb embers without igniting than primary materials such as eucalyptus and palm, said Alexandra Shipherd, principal investigator at Oregon State’s Conservation Biology Institute. He said it was shown.
In addition to the tightening of building codes that will become apparent after these fires, change could come through land-use innovations such as buying out landowners who do not want to rebuild, restricting investors, and exchanging development rights. be.
One recurring theme is adding multifamily housing to increase the economic diversity of the community and alleviate the region’s affordable housing shortage.
In the California Planning and Development Report, contributing editor Josh Stevens proposed adding two- and three-story apartment buildings to the Palisades commercial district. In the Palisades commercial district, the side streets are filled with, for lack of a better word, shops, cafes, and small offices, and are much cuter than California’s typical commercial strips.
“If European cities are any guide, they could return even more vibrant and exhilarating than before,” Stevens wrote.
Dowell Myers, an expert on urban growth and social change at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, isn’t advocating a delay.
“The housing situation is so desperate that people don’t want to live a boring life,” Myers said.
But he advocates increasing density.
“We really need more multifamily,” he says. “LA is a dense suburban area built toward the ocean. That doesn’t make sense as a 21st century metropolis.”
Myers, who lives near the Altadena fire zone, said the community would be welcoming, especially if it was designed for seniors and young families who can’t afford it.
“That would be a socially desirable and attractive trade-off,” he says.
“We don’t want to jeopardize the heart of the neighborhood, but certainly in a commercial district why not build apartment complexes?”
However, there was a common pessimism among these critics about the chances of their ideas coming to fruition.
“The forces that made it difficult to do new and different things in the past are still with us, including insurance and mortgage underwriting standards, planning and zoning, risk-averse developers, and NIMBYism. “There are,” Falletta said.
“The hard part is getting everyone financially and mentally healthy,” said former Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton. He is currently a practicing professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego.
Fulton compared the situation to the aftermath of the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, which destroyed nearly 3,000 single-family homes. Immediate calls to ban rebuilding on the same site were thwarted by intensive television coverage of those who had lost everything.
There are probably property owners in both Pacific Palisades and Altadena who, if they had insurance, would take the insurance money and decide to move elsewhere. (A 2018 state law prohibits the insurance industry’s previous practice of requiring policyholders to rebuild on the same property.)
Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute for Environmental Sustainability, is using Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), a process in which property owners sell the right to rebuild to residential properties, to transform their properties into communities. I think there is a possibility that it can be used as a lever. Developers allowed to build above allowable density elsewhere, such as in the Palisades commercial district.
“It’s not in the public interest to rebuild in the same place and in the same way,” Pinsettle said.
Something similar to development rights transfers is a key element in the recovery of Paradise, California, a foothills town that was almost completely destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire.
Paradise commissioned a study and determined that the new community would include an external buffer of non-combustible vegetation, selective rebuilding in areas with the lowest fire risk, and compliance with each home’s planned wildfire program. It was found that one layer of protection could reduce the risk of fire by 75%. Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.
The city is seeking state and federal grants to buy the vacant land and is receiving donations from owners who have decided not to return.
“We want everyone to know that there are other jurisdictions that have gone through something like this and you are not alone,” Paradise Irrigation District Manager Kevin Phillips said.
Fulton said he was skeptical that the TDR process would work in Los Angeles because new city and state laws already give density bonuses to encourage development.
“Theoretically, you could buy people who want to sell and build taller buildings,” Fulton said. “You’ll have to have the money.”
Ryabek suggests the city come up with the money to acquire land for mini-firebreaks, more fire stations and a reservoir.
How these ideas are received in the community varies.
Westside Neighborhood Association Land Use Committee Chair Barbara Bloyd despised density advocates who were “trying to eliminate single-family housing and zoning for the area. That agenda is just beneath the surface of many of these conversations. It still exists.”
“This is not the time to let ideologues prevail,” said Martin Muoto, founder and chief executive of Solar Impact, an affordable housing developer whose Palisades home burned down.
Muoto said he could imagine new apartments in the Palisades commercial district providing affordable housing for some of the domestic staff employed there.
“For example, the Gerson House could be rebuilt as a ground floor grocery store and three or four stories of affordable housing,” he said.
But he sees any lot-swapping plans as a threat. Palisades’ wealthy and resourceful residents are important to the city’s tax base and cultural life, but they have options, he said. If they abandon the city en masse, LA will become even poorer.
“I personally know about half a dozen people who are considering moving to a vacation home in Utah or a vacation home in Colorado,” he said. “We don’t want them to run away. We don’t want them to go to Florida.
“My position is that it is critical to provide certainty, clarity and speed to families whose lives have been shattered by tragedy,” Muoto said.
Altadena City Council President Victoria Knapp also worries that longtime residents will abandon the community, something she fears low-income Black and Latino families will have a hard time turning down. It is aimed at speculators with low-budget proposals.
“We have families that own land together for generations,” Knapp said. “If I sell everything, I can go somewhere else and start over.”
Knapp said the community would welcome more apartment buildings if they were built in the right locations, especially in small business districts scattered throughout the community.
“It’s possible,” she said. “But we have to plan for it. It’s too early to tell what Altadena 2.0 will be, but it’s too early to prevent it from becoming something we don’t want.” I don’t know.”
Seiferd, of the Institute for Biological Conservation, said the rebuilding goals of protecting against future fires and serving broader public interests are being treated as irrelevant or contradictory.
“California has a housing crisis,” Seiferd said. “When it comes to fire-rated housing, people talk about it in two different conversations. We need to start bringing them into the same conversation.”
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