The Summary
- California leaders have promised that the post-fire rebuilding process will be speedy.
- But experts say reconstructing damaged neighborhoods in their former image would put the residents at risk of another devastating fire.
- Instead, they recommend changes like spacing homes farther apart and using more fire-safe building materials.
Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have pledged to rebuild the thousands of houses that have been destroyed as quickly as possible, despite the fact that wildfires are still burning in Southern California.
Now is not the time to practice urban planning. That will cause a fifteen-year delay. At a news conference on Friday, Steve Soboroff, a businessman and former police commissioner who is in charge of managing the city’s reconstruction efforts, stated that we need people back in their homes.
Urban planners, engineers, and disaster management specialists warn that restoring the Pacific Palisades and other fire-ravaged areas to their pre-fire state could leave inhabitants vulnerable to future fires. To make communities resilient to wildfires especially as they become more frequent and intense due to climate change the experts said it s essential to restrict development in high-risk areas, create buffer zones between properties and wildland, and space homes farther apart.
Don’t let a disaster go to waste is one of the topics that people discuss. Stephen Miller, a professor of law at Northern Illinois University with expertise in sustainable development and land use, stated that now is the moment for change.
That contradicts Soboroff’s focus on quickness.
The Palisades’ layout is exquisite. That community operates in a lovely way. You don t need to rethink Pacific Palisades. He stated on Friday that the Pacific Palisades must be rebuilt. A request for response from Soboroff was not answered. (NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff is his son.)
Given such rhetoric, as well as examples from past fires, urban planners are skeptical that the changes needed to make new homes safe will come to fruition.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior scholar at the Urban Institute, a think tank focused on social and economic issues, “it’s like they’ve got the pedal all the way down to the floor on the speed side and not necessarily the deliberation side right now.”