President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass rarely are unanimous on anything, but all three have taken steps toward letting victims of Los Angeles County’s January firestorms rebuild their communities essentially as they were before.
In both places, this would mean large quantities of single-family housing and few multifamily apartment and condominium buildings. However, the seemingly innocuous aims announced by these leading politicians may soon run afoul of housing density factors playing no role in rebuilding that’s followed other major California blazes.
Some of these were the 2018 Camp fire that leveled Paradise, the Tubbs fire covering parts of Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties in 2017 and the 2018 Woolsey fire that destroyed a large swath of Malibu. The factors include recent state and local laws demanding vastly increased density in new housing and lots of low- and middle-income units.
In the modern era, no other event has created nearly as much newly buildable land as the January infernos, which turned more than 16,000 structures to ashes. A clear majority of former residents in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles want to rebuild their communities much as they were before the fires.
Laws adopted since the previous huge burns demand density and economic diversity, though. Newsom could suspend some of those laws if he chooses, just as he exempted properties leveled by the Palisades fire, which also decimated many extremely pricey Malibu homes, from normal coastal zone regulations. He has not done that.
Here’s one basic reality the recent laws don’t recognize: If density increases in burn footprints, the number of prospective victims in the inevitable future fires there will also increase. Some planners are already saying there should be less development, not more, in these areas because of their histories of repeated fires. The recent laws don’t figure this in.
For example, two 2021 California laws known SB 9 and SB 10 let developers erect three-story buildings along all major thoroughfares, regardless of locale. Permits for such construction are nearly automatic under the rules. They can sometimes rise as high as eight floors.
However, the most important street in Pacific Palisades, the storied Sunset Boulevard, previously had nearly no buildings of more than two floors. Higher-rise structures may enable more economic diversity but would also put many more residents at risk, yet little or nothing about risk was involved in the one-size-fits-all laws that sped to passage.
Meanwhile, city ordinances in Los Angeles and other places contend with density differently, focusing on economics. One local law dictates that all units in buildings put up before 1978 would need to be replaced with units that are “affordable” to low-income renters even if previous tenants had high incomes.
Another law, governing post-1978 structures, would require that landlords prove all tenants before the fires were high-income. If they can’t, new units could only be built if they’re affordable for extremely-low-income, very-low-income or low-income households in direct proportion to city-wide percentages in those economic categories.
This may let some household cleaners and gardeners live much closer to work than before but would also put many more people at risk in a place of frequent fires. The new residents would fall into economic classes below nearby neighbors planning to rebuild in single-family zones.
That is, unless developers buy up significant numbers of suddenly vacant lots and build up to six units on each, where there was previously just one home. That’s also permitted almost automatically by recent state laws.
On the other hand, few previously-burned communities have had as many residents with access to political, financial and cultural power as Pacific Palisades and Altadena, power that may be used to resist the new laws. All of this means rebuilding these two communities may prove far more financially and morally complex than after previous fires, where recent laws did not apply.
Legislators and local officials could change some of this and let the stricken communities try to recapture their former character. How likely is that, though, when many lawmakers were elected on platforms demanding ever more housing density and diversity?
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.