California's future depends on how leaders rebuild after the Los Angeles fires
94 comments
·January 16, 2025kristjansson
ianburrell
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.
unquietwiki
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.
calciphus
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.
whimsicalism
in 10 years time self-driving will be all over LA, we should build with foresight
grajaganDev
I think this is optimistic.
fragmede
No need to wait 10 years, Waymo currently operates in LA.
thrance
I don't see what that's got to do with city planning and increasing density.
kristjansson
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.
ravenstine
The reason modern apartments in LA cost an arm and a leg is the same one for why new houses are no longer starter homes but McMansions.
rayiner
We shouldn’t rebuild at all in many of these places.
grajaganDev
We should build glass and steel high density apartment buildings with no parking.
bilbo0s
Those apartments would all cost more than 3k a month. Putting up high rises in LA is expensive. (Earthquakes, fires, etc). So there is zero motivation for developers to not get the maximum amount of rent possible for a given square footage.
No one has explained why a given developer should rent for less than 3K when they could easily rent the same space fo 4K? Is the government providing an incentive covering the shortfall?
likeabatterycar
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.
mmooss
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!
laweijfmvo
This. It's not like all of downtown LA was leveled and we get to re-imagine it through rose-colored glasses.
whimsicalism
the electorate controls the people with guns, so we can kinda make whatever we want happen if we vote for it
Ancapistani
It may be California, but it's still the US. The electorate are the people with guns.
caseysoftware
> the electorate controls the people with guns, so we can kinda make whatever we want happen if we vote for it
"Do it the way we want or die" is a pretty bold take.
Are you going to enforce this or demand to have law enforcement or even military units do it?
piva00
Altadena isn't one of those exclusive neighbourhoods though.
likeabatterycar
Middle class and minorities in Altadena don't want to raise their families in Soviet-style apartments because some hipster urbanist thinks its best. They want SFH, that's why they live there.
grajaganDev
But those celebrities and other well-off industry personnel are now burned out.
The city could issue no permits to rebuild SFH on that land and then buy it for 15-minute walkable development.
ceejayoz
If they want to be in litigation with angry deep pocketed people for a few decades, sure.
umanwizard
You are living in a fantasy.
bilbo0s
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.
ravenstine
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.
ProfessorLayton
It's literally illegal to build anything other than a SFH in most of LA. It's no wonder why cheap apartments aren't being built.
whimsicalism
building up gets you more square feet and is almost certainly going to be the profit maximizing approach delta regulation in an environment like this
bilbo0s
Sure.
And that’s where luxury condos and apartments come in.
There is no scenario where building for less than luxury returns makes sense in these areas. Renting a set square footage for 1500 makes no sense when I can rent the same square footage for 3200.
And that’s at the bottom end.
bryanlarsen
Multiple apartments should be more profitable than a single family luxury home.
orionsbelt
Not in some of these areas. This was some of the best real estate in the country. $80M homes burned down.
bilbo0s
Multiple luxury condos? Definitely.
Multiple luxury apartments? Maybe? Depending on amenities and view.
But multiple non luxury apartments for the hoi polloi? Not a chance. I challenge even the politicians championing non luxury apartments to run the numbers and make them work. They just don’t.
People are out here advocating that we make multiple apartments available all under 3K. That’s insanity. The same space can easily be rented for much more than 3K. If I’m a developer, what’s my motivation to forgo that ludicrously high return? Being a good guy? I’ll take the return and make a donation to the boys and girls club instead thank you very much.
altairprime
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.
palmfacehn
Not surprised to read political takes on reconstruction from Vox. It may be a little bit early for this.
altairprime
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):
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.
zeroonetwothree
California leaders haven't made good decisions since the 70s. So basically we're doomed.
darth_avocado
Oakland just shut down 2 Fire Stations in the hills where the risk of fires is the highest, with up to 7 more on the horizon due to budget cuts.
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...
tredre3
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.
spiralpolitik
Prop 13 is the third rail of California politics that is choking the state.
Until someone is willing to grab the nettle and fix the property tax situation to be fair and equitable to everyone then California cities are eventually going to run out of money to maintain infrastructure.
darth_avocado
Can’t really speak about the entire state but in Oakland’s case, it is absolutely budget cuts. And closing 2 fire stations in the most fire prone area, where a recent major fire took place, can safely be called mismanagement.
palmfacehn
Hypothetically speaking, if the event could be attributed to incompetence, mismanagement or malfeasance - Which incentives would drive elected officials or bureaucrats to take responsibility?
sieabahlpark
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rayiner
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.
rs999gti
Democratic state majority since Reagan and California still can't get anything done.
likeabatterycar
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.
rayiner
California is like Iraq. Many people will always vote their ethnic/sectarian affiliation (not only between the parties, but within them) regardless of governance outcomes: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/03/iraq-20-years-insider-r... (“One of the main characteristics of virtually any ethno-sectarian system is that, almost by design, it inhibits good governance. Any accountability would reduce the scope of ethno-sectarian groups to exercise authority. Thus, the system actively discourages evidence-based policy debates that might serve to improve it. Instead, formal political discourse focuses on stoking fear, and on blaming other communities for failures. Fearmongering is the rule at all times.”)
spiralpolitik
It's a fair take. California is now unaffordable for most families and it's going to get worse.
Example: New construction in Santa Clarita (north Los Angeles county) $800k 3 bedroom town house. Even with ~50% down you are still looking around $4k+ per month in payments, with 25% of that amount being property tax.
You'll also likely be paying more due to Mello-Roos and with HOA and home insurance on top of that. Plus it's unlikely at this point you'll be able to get fire insurance.
Good luck trying to make the numbers work on the country medium income of ~$100k.
(And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home).
yostrovs
"And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home)."
I believe there are a lot of families that pass down wealth, most of it being used to buy houses.
readthenotes1
Would LA be bright enough to hire a Christopher Wren even if they knew him?
thrance
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?
ianburrell
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.
ta1243
> 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.
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jas39
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dang
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
grajaganDev
This is an incredibly simplistic take.
rs999gti
If California does not do controlled burns to the underbrush like what nature or the American Indians were doing when the Conquistador arrived, then there will be more and more wildfires. This is regardless of climate change or what politicians are in power.
grajaganDev
What you are missing is that the homes themselves provided the fuel. It had nothing to do with underbrush or forest management.
spiralpolitik
Good luck doing a controlled burn where the smoke is going to blow into a rich neighborhood like the Palisades.
You'll be buried under so many environmental impact lawsuits that any burn will take years (if ever) to happen.
hyperliner
[dead]
lysace
.
iamtheworstdev
Honestly, that's not wild at all to me. They invented AI with other people's money. But they have to use their own money to fight fire.
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.
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