By None of these efforts are necessarily speedy.
“It is unrealistic to ask communities that have been built over decades and decades and then destroyed in a few days to rebuild with just completely different construction immediately,” said Erica Fischer, an assistant professor of structural engineering at Oregon State University.
Still, Rumbach noted that Los Angeles has more resources than many communities devastated by past wildfires. Newsom has already proposed $2.5 billion in funding for recovery efforts.
“It’s in a big metro area. Everything you need to recover is there,” Rumbach said. “But still, even in the best case scenario, it’s a multiyear process.”
Other experts questioned whether homes should be rebuilt in Pacific Palisades at all.
“We should think very carefully and very thoroughly about whether or not this is a place to rebuild in,” said Jonah Susskind, a senior research associate at the design firm SWA, adding: “We have to acknowledge that this community, this infrastructure, these homes, will almost certainly burn again at some point in the future.”
Repeating past mistakes
In Los Angeles, Bass has authorized several actions that will allow residents to rebuild homes in the same style and size. Those include waiving a requirement for new buildings to use electricity rather than gas for heating and appliances, directing city departments to review reconstruction projects within 30 days and waiving hearings that evaluate whether a development complies with zoning regulations.
Newsom, meanwhile, has suspended environmental permitting requirements that can delay or block construction (but which experts say also mitigate wildfire risk).
Urban planning experts said the scrutiny that both Newsom and Bass have faced over the fires has likely added pressure on them to speed up development. President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have said Newsom should have done more to pre-empt the blazes. Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Bass, meanwhile, has been lambasted by celebrities and politicians accusing her of mismanaging city resources, and for being out of the country when the fires broke out. Seidl said Bass is “leading our city through one of the worst crises in our history,” and that “misinformation surrounding this crisis has been staggering.”
On top of that, Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, which may serve as a looming — albeit impractical — deadline for recovery.
Newsom and Bass aren’t alone in pushing to rebuild devastated communities in their old image. After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, for example, city officials exempted people who had lost homes from local green building codes.
“There was huge public pressure to roll back some of the energy codes and some of the resiliency measures that were being proposed, because they said, ‘Don’t do this on the backs of people who just suffered a disaster,’” Rumbach said.
Now, he said, the area’s homes are “being rebuilt largely as suburban tract housing that could burn down again if there were a wildfire that blew through.”
Long term, designing homes and neighborhoods to be more fire-resistant will also require more research into which mitigation efforts are most effective.
Whereas rigorous lab testing has measured how materials and structural systems hold up against shaking in simulated earthquakes and strong winds for hurricanes, the same can’t yet be said for wildfires, according to Fischer.
“I can assess the construction of a house for earthquake demands, I can suggest a laundry list of mitigation measures for hurricanes, but unfortunately we don’t have the science to back that kind of thing up for wildfires,” she said.
Part of the challenge is that wildfires spread because of a complex combination of factors, including weather, climate, topography, vegetation and local construction techniques, making it hard to apply lessons from one fire to the next.
Still, Fischer said strides are being made, as civil engineers work with wildfire experts and forest ecologists to study the impacts of fires on structures.
“We have roadmaps for other hazards. It can be done,” she said. “It’s going to take time to work through the research to put wildfires into a similar framework, but it’s not all doom and gloom.”
