In this essay for TPR, urban planner and real estate developer, Jay Stark, draws from his experience as a fire-impacted resident of both Maui and Pacific Palisades to opine on the rhetoric surrounding post-fire rebuilding efforts. Here, Stark addresses what he sees is the logistical impossibility of a "streamlined" recovery given the unprecedented scale of destruction wrought by the Eaton & Palisades firestorms and the necessary, but time consuming, work of community building.
"There is no existing system that rebuilds entire communities of thousands of people in a timely manner, and certainly not due to permit reform or czars."—Jay Stark
As a 20 plus year urban planner and housing developer in Los Angeles and throughout the Western United States, I have experienced varying permitting and public policy environments related to building the urban environment. And in a fluke of personal history, I have spent most of my life sharing my time between Pacific Palisades and Maui. I have seen both fires up close and I have watched the rebuilding efforts on Maui over the last eighteen months.
I can say with some amount of certainty from my experiences and the experiences of my colleagues that permitting reform, cutting red tape and "czars" are simply a rounding error in the timeline of rebuilding a community. Unfortunately, it is more a convenient phraseology to calm the fears of traumatized voters who can't believe that this actually happened to them. No matter the location.
When you see a fifty-foot tall fire hurricane, which is burning at 2,000 degrees fahrenheit and travelling at 100 miles per hour hit a neighborhood, all you can do is get out of the way. There is nothing to do to stop it. It is hard to imagine, simply because it is unimaginable. There is no precedent for these catastrophic events. These fire hurricanes will keep going until they decide to stop and everything melts that it is in its way. In Lahaina, large fire trucks literally melted into the ground. Municipal water systems and reservoirs aren't designed to suppress these firestorms.
It will be ten years before there are new communities in Lahaina, Palisades and Altadena. The older people will leave because they don't have the time to rebuild, the young families will relocate so their children can have a future, and the folks in the middle will face impossible trade-offs.
There is no existing system that rebuilds entire communities of thousands of people in a timely manner, and certainly not due to permit reform or czars. The operational scale of labor, materials, infrastructure, education, commercial services, healthcare - all the elements of community - is enormous and these systems simply aren't designed to rebound quickly from these catastrophic events. Based on the 4.5 million tons of fire debris generated by the Palisades and Altadena fires, it would require over 500 dump trucks per day for over a year in order to remove all the debris. This is logistically impossible and no czar or permitting reform can overcome this.
My college-age children and their peers will be the future residents of New Lahaina, New Palisades, New Altadena, etc. But only after the communities have been rebuilt - two-year clean up, two years of rebuilding the infrastructure, five to seven years of residential building and then commercial services for the new residents.
All of this "czar" rhetoric and cutting of red tape is a convenient distraction from actual solutions that are at the scale required to address these unimaginable events. We need to suspend property tax collections (there are no services), allow for public purchase of strategic residential and commercial properties (this is what redevelopment used to do), waive all infrastructure and permitting costs for all businesses/residents (incentivize new investments) and pass a long-term rebuilding fee at the County and/or State level to pay for comprehensive building solutions (somehow we built a multi-billion Metro system this way). In addition, local cities and counties need to contract with third-parties for plan checking, building inspections and utility reconstruction. The continued loss of public workers at the local government level is now a real hindrance to permitting and building in a timely manner, and it is a function that can be outsourced to the private sector.
In a few months, the permitting conversation will be over, the PR czars will have moved on after being so darn frustrated by the bureaucrats, and the rebuilding will grind along. The nuanced conversations around comprehensive solutions simply won't happen - we just don't seem to be very good at it, and no one wants to engage in activities that they could actually be held accountable for - no upside for success, and all downside for failure. It turns out that actual solutions to rebuilding communities require both public and private investments, structural change in the delivery of public services, less PR and long-term financial solutions.
Jay Stark is an urban planner and real estate developer based in Los Angeles.
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