Friday, January 24

California leaders promise a quick rebuild, but that may put homes at risk of fire again

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.

Both Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom have pledged to rebuild the thousands of houses that have been damaged as wildfires continue to burn 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. According to experts, it’s critical to limit construction in high-risk regions, establish buffer zones between residences and wildland, and position homes farther apart in order to make communities more robust to wildfires, particularly as they grow more frequent and intense owing to climate change.

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. Pacific Palisades doesn’t require a reconsideration. 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.)

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Urban planners doubt that the necessary improvements to make new homes safe will be implemented in light of such rhetoric and evidence from previous fires.

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.”

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