JohnDe
La dolce vita
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How will calamity change Los Angeles?
Short-sighted policies amplified the destruction. Will LA–and California–learn from their mistakes?
“MY HUSBAND saw a glow on the hill,” explains Laurie Bilotta. She’s standing in her backyard in Pasadena pointing at Eaton Canyon, a popular hiking spot. Her eyes are trained on the spot where the Eaton Fire broke out on January 7th. In the few seconds it took for Bob, her husband, to yell “fire!”, the flames had grown to her height. Then “the whole mountain just exploded. There were just flames everywhere.” The couple grabbed their two Siamese cats and drove south towards safety. By some miracle their house survived.
Chart: The Economist
The Eaton Fire is one of several that have swept across Los Angeles County. At least 24 people have died and more than 12,000 buildings have been destroyed. Parts of Altadena, a mixed-income neighbourhood set ablaze by windblown embers, look as though a bomb went off. Only small remnants—a toy truck, a swing set, one very resilient lemon tree—are left amid the ashes.
With high winds and no rain in sight, the fires are far from contained. Already, experts are predicting that they will prove the costliest in America’s history: not because of their size, but because of where they broke out. With nearly 10m residents, LA County is more populous than 40 of America’s 50 states. Many Angelenos live in picturesque neighbourhoods, set against the mountains, that are extremely vulnerable to wildfires. A typical home in Pacific Palisades, a ritzy area razed by the flames, cost more than $3m before the fire.
Even as firefighters battle against the flames, locals are asking two questions. How could Los Angeles have prepared better for this calamity? And how will it change America’s second city?
Fires are common around Los Angeles because of its terrain and dryness, but several factors have added to their destructive power. Climate change has increased the risk of conflagration. California is seeing more weather “whiplash”, where fires follow heavy rainfall. Los Angeles was bombarded with atmospheric rivers during the past two years, delivering heavier rain than usual. LA’s vegetation flourished. But a lack of rain since May dried out those same plants, and primed them to burn.
It doesn’t help that non-native species have proliferated in the mountains around LA. Invasive grasses have replaced fire-resistant chaparral on the foothills. Research from Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute suggests that clearing flammable vegetation around Los Angeles could reduce fire intensity in 2050 by roughly 15% relative to today. But federal and state laws often require onerous environmental reviews that can delay prescribed burns for years.
The city’s building code is fairly strict, requiring new homes to be reasonably fire-resistant. But NIMBYism makes it hard to build new homes at all, so much of the existing stock pre-dates the beefing up of the building code. Old neighbourhoods, full of homes with flammable wooden parts, stretch into the foothills. Narrow, winding roads ramble through the canyons, leaving little room for firetrucks or mass evacuations. In the unincorporated parts of LA County, such as Altadena, nearly 90% of homes were built before 1990. In fact, the largest share of houses was constructed in the 1950s during LA’s postwar building boom.
Photograph: AP
Californian politics has also hampered LA’s response to the fires. Not because water was diverted from cities to save “an essentially worthless fish called a smelt”, as Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. But the state’s penchant for policymaking by ballot measure (ie, referendum) has made it harder to fund public services, such as firefighting, and distorted California’s home-insurance market. In 1978 Californians voted to cut the property-tax rate and limit future increases. Local tax revenues plummeted. To make up for the fiscal shortfall, cities slapped fees on development projects, which raised the cost of new construction.
In 1988 another ballot initiative, Proposition 103, limited how much insurers can raise their rates. So premiums do not reflect the true (and rising) risk of owning inadequately fireproofed homes in the most fire-prone areas. Several insurance firms, unable to afford the cost of reinsurance, have left the state. California’s insurance commissioner last week banned insurers from cancelling the policies of clients living in areas affected by the fires for one year, thus making the state even less attractive to insurers.
When the smoke clears, the fires could change Los Angeles in several ways. There will be political repercussions, for a start. Karen Bass, the city’s mayor, travelled to Ghana despite fire-weather warnings. It is not odd for mayors to make foreign trips, and Ms Bass only presides over part of the county—how prepared Altadena or Pasadena is for wildfire is not up to her. But her absence while the city burned may not play well with voters, and Ms Bass faces re-election next year. Her response to the fires will feature prominently in that campaign.
Some residents may leave. Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a think-tank, suggests that a quarter of Angelenos have considered moving to avoid the effects of climate change. Yet Americans more broadly are moving into risky areas, not away from them. A bigger threat to LA’s population growth is that housing costs may rise as Angelenos displaced by the fires search for somewhere to live. Some 47% of Los Angeles residents surveyed by PPIC in 2023 said they had thought about quitting because of housing costs.
Another big question is whether Los Angeles will rebuild better. Playing host to some World Cup games in 2026, the Super Bowl in 2027 and the Olympics in 2028 will focus minds. Officials will want to show the world that LA has recovered. Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, says he is organising a “Marshall Plan” for the city, a reference to the aid America sent Europe to rebuild after the second world war. “We already have a team looking at reimagining LA 2.0,” he says. To this end he issued an executive order streamlining the rebuilding of homes in burned areas.
New homes will be subject to modern fire codes, which will help. Stephanie Pincetl, who runs the California Centre for Sustainable Communities at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks the city should seize this opportunity to ease its housing shortage by building denser, mixed-use neighbourhoods. You can have palatial apartments, she offers, “but then you have places where the cleaning lady can actually live and not have to take a bus for an hour and a half across town.” Looking across a charred Eaton Canyon, Mr Bilotta points out a few mansions on the hilltop across the way. After a big fire wiped them out in 1993, bigger ones were built in their place. He thinks the same thing will happen this time around. “There will be more larger homes over there,” he says. “That’s just a guess.” ■