I really, really, need every think piece that talks about 'rebuilding LA' to look at an actual map of what was damaged by the fire before I hear their views on urbanism and what Los Angeles needs.
Yes, 23k acres burned in the Palisades fire, and 15k in the Eaton fire. Yes that's a lot of area compared to SF, Manhattan, etc. Most of that area is mountainside! There's not suddenly 50 square miles of open space in LA to remake in the image of some ideal.
Of the portion of heavily burned land that was developed, quite a bit was also mountainside, or at least foothill. There's ~25 regular-ish blocks of the villages (backed up against foothill) that were destroyed, and some flat-ish area on Sunset Mesa, and the west side of Temescal Canyon, and a bit on Castellammare (but thankfully that wasn't as heavily impacted). But as the names implies, these are all mesa/ridge tops, bracketed by cliffs & canyons. The impacted parts of Altadena are a bit more regular, but very much sloping foothill backed up against their own mountainside. Moreover, both areas are somewhat peripheral, even for the city-without-a-center.
The point being that these are not places one can casually lay out some expansive transit-oriented scheme that's going to solve housing problems for the city. They're topographically and geographically constrained, and need to be rebuilt in a way that's compatible with their constraints. To say nothing of the fact that these were people's homes, and are people's property, and they might have a say on how they would like to rebuild.
There are some real challenges facing LA w.r.t. family-size rental/affordable housing stock, insurance in fire-prone areas, insurance generally depending on state policy, etc. I hope the civic and political energy leveled against barriers to rebuilding in Altadena and the Palisades can later be focused on ongoing transit expansion and associated higher-density development, infill, etc, in the parts of the city where those make sense. But to pretend that these fires present some great opportunity to 'remake' Los Angeles as a whole is a misunderstanding at best, reductive and insulting at worst.
Thinking only flat areas are ripe for high-density urbanism is still a NIMBY mentality. Where I'm from there were much worse constraints yet the rate of growth by which cities are developed vastly outclasses the YIMBYest cities in the US let alone California.
There should be respect to the families that lost their property. But it's not insulting to suggest that NIMBY development exarcebates disasters like this. Heck if land use was as productive as it should in America most of those families wouldn't have a good chunk of their wealth evaporates as a result of a natural disaster, and rebuilding would've been hella more faster and cheaper.
It seems to me that right solution is to upzone Altadena. Small apartment buildings work fine in dense suburbs.
The other part is that if can’t upzone Palisades to upzone other areas instead. It makes sense to build denser close to transit than force it on rich areas in the hills.
Yes. This is what we're already doing around the transit we already have. I hope the camaraderie and community drives us to build more, faster.
> upzone Altadena
> upzone Palisades
Why? Why is it imperative that we take this disaster as an opportunity to advance policy change in the affected areas specifically? Why should we build denser housing in areas that are clearly at risk for fire?
I was going to include a bit about that, but my comment was already kinda long. All the other reasons besides, the events of the last week should be an indication to the would-be urban planners that the __burn scar__ is perhaps not the best place to locate new high-density density development.
That said I hope policy and prudence drive homeowners that rebuild SFH to include more fire-safety and fire-resistant features. Closed eaves, pool-fed sprinklers, automated shutters, (pains me to say) landscaping setbacks, ...
"You can't build dense buildings on a mountain side"
What are you talking about?!? Downtown San Francisco has easily 4x the density of the area and it's built on mountains. Italy has dense villages on the sides of mountains all over the place. The idea that nobody can build density in 2025 because of some type of geological feature is just ridiculous, self-serving, nothing should change ever talk.
None of SF's dense apartment buildings are on hills, there is a good reason for that. You could terrace them like they do in Chongqing, but even in HK they tend to build in valleys between mountains except for luxury condo housing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Levels). Italy follows the same pattern as SF.
The point was that the headline numbers don't really represent the amount of existing development that was destroyed. There's been lots of comparisons of the area to e.g. Manhattan which I think drives some of these think-pieces that act like there's a city-sized blank-canvas area to rebuild.
Could we have built on more of the burned-over mountainside? Maybe? I'm not sure SF is the right comparison though. Just the developed portion affected by the Palisades fire ranges from sea level to 450m elevation (over ~2.5mi straight-line distance); Temescal Peak is 650m. Most of developed peninsular SF is below 100m elevation. Its more like trying to densifiy Berkely or Pacifica or Carmel by building apartment buildings up their hills.
Doable? Probably. But why go to the trouble? Why take the fire and seismic risk of building dense housing on a mountainside when LA is spoiled for space in the basin and valley?
A lot of single-family housing burned in the fires. For the sake of density, we need to put in more apartments, and ones that don't cost $3-4K/mo for a 1-2 bed. Metro is expanding ahead of the Olympics, and Waymo services a decent chunk of the city (not the burned areas though); you could go with less parking to save costs, but a lot of folks have roommates, so you end up needing double the parking, and that clogs up the streets... there are no easy answers to this situation, unfortunately.
LA is one of the most car-centric cities I've ever seen. "we can have less parking" would require a fundamental shift in culture.
Doing it right after a major fire where people are alive precisely because they were able to put themselves and a few belongings into their personal vehicle and go where they could shelter with friends or family is bordering on an impossible ask.
Malibu and the Palisades were exclusive neighborhoods where celebrities and other well-off industry personnel lived. They're not adding low income apartments or execute any urbanist pipe-dream for the same reason they're not bulldozing Pac Heights to install homeless shelters. Not going to happen. Ever.
It's a bit paradoxical that people on HN believe anything is possible in technology - we're going to live on Mars! - but advocate hopelessness in other matters.
It's just like technology: If you make it happen, it will happen. If you don't, it won't. Some people are working hard, developing the technology, while many sit around saying it's impossible, etc.
Opportunity knocks, right now. There's no guarantee of success. Let's go!
McMansion is a Texan thing. New homes in LA are a fairly boxy west coast style. Box housing maximizes square footage use and takes advantage of the fact that it doesn't really snow in LA so no very sloping roof is needed.
Density is an imperative for Los Angeles, and big sprawl-y cities generally. And we're building density! DTLA is getting more residential, train stops are getting surrounded by everything from 5+1s to superblocks, Santa Monica is getting taller, ...
That global imperative does not translate into a local demand that every SFH (and in particular, these SFHs) be replaced with denser housing. As you realize in your comment, the damaged areas aren't exactly well-positioned to support substantially denser housing.
These are the palisades though so very hilly with lots of great views. I can't really imagine building apartments up there, and they are really not very centrally located anyways, not like lower Brentwood or most of Santa Monica.
Even Hong Kong builds mostly between its hills and only on them when really rich people are involved (e.g. Victoria Peak).
Everyone wants to rebuild in accordance with their favorite urban planning theory.
Very few want to give developers the profits they need to match the profits they get rebuilding in accordance with maximizing the return on their investments.
People asking for cheap apartments are just not being realistic. Why rent that square footage at less than luxury prices when the market will readily eat up the square footage at prices far exceeding the national luxury median?
And that’s before we even get to the people who want condos or luxury homes.
You would basically need to make a law that caps how much an owner can make on his land for some of these ideas to work.
It's amazing how many are in denial about this. If it were so self evident that cheaper apartments were worthwhile to developers in LA, then we'd be seeing more new ones being built as opposed to the luxury megacomplexes that have been popping up everywhere.
After the Santa Rosa fires in 2017, that city’s leaders ignored local worker pressure to increase density in favor of leaving zoning unchanged and letting family people rebuild single-family sprawl. Rents never dropped from their 25%+ increase that year and the region’s economy has been depressed since due to workers having less pay and landlords who spend their rents in other counties. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in cities like LA after they predictably burn each year, now that the “zone it for density or we invalidate your zoning” laws are in place. Forest mismanagement fires are making up for weak-willed politicians unwilling to use eminent domain for anything but highways and that is a force of change that some city will eventually take advantage of. I hope, anyways.
Just don't make houses out of flammable materials. Easy. Exterior walls must be cinder block filled with concrete and rebar or poured concrete with lots of rebar and perhaps fiber reinforcement. Roofs must be metal or ceramic or stone.
Most rural houses in Australia are built this way. They still burn down.
I don't think anyone really understands how intense wildfires can get when fanned by wind. It will destroy almost anything.
See: Black Saturday bushfires, Australia.
> "it really made no difference whether the houses were brick or timber. In fact, with the speed of the fire front some timber houses fared better than brick as it moved too fast for the houses to catch, but the bricks exploded from the sudden change in temperature."
> "When you have a fire front coming through at 800C it'll melt your window seals and aluminum window frames. The glass will fall out then everything is on fire.
In the LA fire most home fires were ignited by the trillions of red hot embers driven by the wind. If these embers can ignite a home then the house is lost. So the key is to make the house from materials that resist ignition from wind driven embers.
A useful alternative would be the Longreads article from 2018, discussing the history of the region that burned and how it was known to be a fire danger from the beginning (and has burned every so often as predicted):
> The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames
> Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded
> He also provided a classic account of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning its way to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 blaze.
And identifies that the policy of colonizing wildfire-prone zones with single family homes was set in the late 50s:
> By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.
Fires continued, of course, like clockwork:
> The next firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire weather (drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity, and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind) with a bumper crop of combustible wood-frame houses. According to firefighters, the popular cedar shake roofs “popped like popcorn” as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridgeline of the Santa Monicas toward the sea
And so on. So I wouldn’t say it’s “too early” for political takes on reconstruction; this debate — Oh No Fires! What Next For Zoning? — has been going on for almost one hundred years, even if it’s news to the current decade that this was ever a risk.
The government officials argue that there is no money, but in reality, almost every department is seeing budget increases other than the fire department. The city administrators are getting 3x the money than last budget. California leaders are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
The government officials argue that there hasn't been any budget cut or mismanagement, they made an entire website about it: www.californiafirefacts.com
Though, charitably, I suppose the city-level mismanagement that you're talking about do not directly contradict gavin's claims about state/federal level cuts. Maybe.
It’s the same story in every place where elections are won through political machines that mobilize voters along ethnic lines (e.g. Chicago, New York City, etc.) Whoever controls the political machine will win the elections, regardless of competency. And to be clear this isn’t a red versus blue thing—even within the parties, specific factions control the machines.
When you keep rewarding bad decisions by voting for the same people such that they have a monopoly on elected offices, there really isn't a duty or motivation to perform well at their job. This isn't unique to California but it's one of the worst examples.
I still don't see how building more homes would fix the housing crisis. Aren't there like millions of uninhabited homes? Isn't the problem that landlords are free to extract as much money as they want to provide a necessity without adding any value to it? Wouldn't any solution necessarily involve a massive direct or indirect devaluation of properties?
You think that building housing for more people won’t help the people who are looking for housing.
The vacant homes count any vacancy even if they are for sale or between tenants. It is impossible to use those for housing. And putting people in them means that normal buyer and tenants couldn’t live there.
Rent is a market and landlords can only charge what people can pay. More cheaper housing will drive down rents, or more likely slow down rent growth since prices are sticky.
Building more homes would make existing home less valuable but would make the land under the homes more valuable cause could be used for more valuable housing. I also think that remaining houses will be more valuable for people who want house over apartment.
> Aren't there like millions of uninhabited homes?
No. Certainly not in places where people want to live.
Why would you think there are? Why would someone deliberately let their property deprecate while not earning an income, (setting aside the unearned speculation caused by land values increasing)
LA has about 2-3% empty homes. Higher than some global cities, but still a very small number.
Readit News
Yes, 23k acres burned in the Palisades fire, and 15k in the Eaton fire. Yes that's a lot of area compared to SF, Manhattan, etc. Most of that area is mountainside! There's not suddenly 50 square miles of open space in LA to remake in the image of some ideal.
Of the portion of heavily burned land that was developed, quite a bit was also mountainside, or at least foothill. There's ~25 regular-ish blocks of the villages (backed up against foothill) that were destroyed, and some flat-ish area on Sunset Mesa, and the west side of Temescal Canyon, and a bit on Castellammare (but thankfully that wasn't as heavily impacted). But as the names implies, these are all mesa/ridge tops, bracketed by cliffs & canyons. The impacted parts of Altadena are a bit more regular, but very much sloping foothill backed up against their own mountainside. Moreover, both areas are somewhat peripheral, even for the city-without-a-center.
The point being that these are not places one can casually lay out some expansive transit-oriented scheme that's going to solve housing problems for the city. They're topographically and geographically constrained, and need to be rebuilt in a way that's compatible with their constraints. To say nothing of the fact that these were people's homes, and are people's property, and they might have a say on how they would like to rebuild.
There are some real challenges facing LA w.r.t. family-size rental/affordable housing stock, insurance in fire-prone areas, insurance generally depending on state policy, etc. I hope the civic and political energy leveled against barriers to rebuilding in Altadena and the Palisades can later be focused on ongoing transit expansion and associated higher-density development, infill, etc, in the parts of the city where those make sense. But to pretend that these fires present some great opportunity to 'remake' Los Angeles as a whole is a misunderstanding at best, reductive and insulting at worst.
</rant>
There should be respect to the families that lost their property. But it's not insulting to suggest that NIMBY development exarcebates disasters like this. Heck if land use was as productive as it should in America most of those families wouldn't have a good chunk of their wealth evaporates as a result of a natural disaster, and rebuilding would've been hella more faster and cheaper.
The other part is that if can’t upzone Palisades to upzone other areas instead. It makes sense to build denser close to transit than force it on rich areas in the hills.
Yes. This is what we're already doing around the transit we already have. I hope the camaraderie and community drives us to build more, faster.
> upzone Altadena > upzone Palisades
Why? Why is it imperative that we take this disaster as an opportunity to advance policy change in the affected areas specifically? Why should we build denser housing in areas that are clearly at risk for fire?
That said I hope policy and prudence drive homeowners that rebuild SFH to include more fire-safety and fire-resistant features. Closed eaves, pool-fed sprinklers, automated shutters, (pains me to say) landscaping setbacks, ...
What are you talking about?!? Downtown San Francisco has easily 4x the density of the area and it's built on mountains. Italy has dense villages on the sides of mountains all over the place. The idea that nobody can build density in 2025 because of some type of geological feature is just ridiculous, self-serving, nothing should change ever talk.
Could we have built on more of the burned-over mountainside? Maybe? I'm not sure SF is the right comparison though. Just the developed portion affected by the Palisades fire ranges from sea level to 450m elevation (over ~2.5mi straight-line distance); Temescal Peak is 650m. Most of developed peninsular SF is below 100m elevation. Its more like trying to densifiy Berkely or Pacifica or Carmel by building apartment buildings up their hills.
Doable? Probably. But why go to the trouble? Why take the fire and seismic risk of building dense housing on a mountainside when LA is spoiled for space in the basin and valley?
Doing it right after a major fire where people are alive precisely because they were able to put themselves and a few belongings into their personal vehicle and go where they could shelter with friends or family is bordering on an impossible ask.
It's just like technology: If you make it happen, it will happen. If you don't, it won't. Some people are working hard, developing the technology, while many sit around saying it's impossible, etc.
Opportunity knocks, right now. There's no guarantee of success. Let's go!
The city could issue no permits to rebuild SFH on that land and then buy it for 15-minute walkable development.
That global imperative does not translate into a local demand that every SFH (and in particular, these SFHs) be replaced with denser housing. As you realize in your comment, the damaged areas aren't exactly well-positioned to support substantially denser housing.
Even Hong Kong builds mostly between its hills and only on them when really rich people are involved (e.g. Victoria Peak).
Very few want to give developers the profits they need to match the profits they get rebuilding in accordance with maximizing the return on their investments.
People asking for cheap apartments are just not being realistic. Why rent that square footage at less than luxury prices when the market will readily eat up the square footage at prices far exceeding the national luxury median?
And that’s before we even get to the people who want condos or luxury homes.
You would basically need to make a law that caps how much an owner can make on his land for some of these ideas to work.
Deleted Comment
I don't think anyone really understands how intense wildfires can get when fanned by wind. It will destroy almost anything.
See: Black Saturday bushfires, Australia.
> "it really made no difference whether the houses were brick or timber. In fact, with the speed of the fire front some timber houses fared better than brick as it moved too fast for the houses to catch, but the bricks exploded from the sudden change in temperature."
> "When you have a fire front coming through at 800C it'll melt your window seals and aluminum window frames. The glass will fall out then everything is on fire.
https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu...
> The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames
> Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded
> He also provided a classic account of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning its way to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 blaze.
And identifies that the policy of colonizing wildfire-prone zones with single family homes was set in the late 50s:
> By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.
Fires continued, of course, like clockwork:
> The next firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire weather (drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity, and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind) with a bumper crop of combustible wood-frame houses. According to firefighters, the popular cedar shake roofs “popped like popcorn” as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridgeline of the Santa Monicas toward the sea
And so on. So I wouldn’t say it’s “too early” for political takes on reconstruction; this debate — Oh No Fires! What Next For Zoning? — has been going on for almost one hundred years, even if it’s news to the current decade that this was ever a risk.
Deleted Comment
https://www.kqed.org/news/12021505/a-tragedy-waiting-to-happ...
In fact the station that responded first to the fires of last October was the one cut.
https://oaklandside.org/2024/10/22/oakland-budget-cuts-firef...
The government officials argue that there is no money, but in reality, almost every department is seeing budget increases other than the fire department. The city administrators are getting 3x the money than last budget. California leaders are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Edit: this just from yesterday https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/response-time-for-oaklan...
Though, charitably, I suppose the city-level mismanagement that you're talking about do not directly contradict gavin's claims about state/federal level cuts. Maybe.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
The vacant homes count any vacancy even if they are for sale or between tenants. It is impossible to use those for housing. And putting people in them means that normal buyer and tenants couldn’t live there.
Rent is a market and landlords can only charge what people can pay. More cheaper housing will drive down rents, or more likely slow down rent growth since prices are sticky.
Building more homes would make existing home less valuable but would make the land under the homes more valuable cause could be used for more valuable housing. I also think that remaining houses will be more valuable for people who want house over apartment.
I've never seen rent go down or slow down as a result of market forces, it must be forced by the local government.
Why would building more homes drive price down? Why wouldn't the builders just sell it at market price?
No. Certainly not in places where people want to live.
Why would you think there are? Why would someone deliberately let their property deprecate while not earning an income, (setting aside the unearned speculation caused by land values increasing)
LA has about 2-3% empty homes. Higher than some global cities, but still a very small number.