After the January wildfires in Los Angeles, conversation around rebuilding took off, with city and state officials crafting plans for the future of fire-devastated communities.
The Los Angeles branch of the Urban Land Institute also has a plan.
ULI partnered with the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and USC Lusk Center for Real Estate to draft a roadmap to support post-wildfire rebuilding in the Los Angeles area, calling in more than 100 experts in land use, urban planning and economic development to provide both technical analysis and actionable recommendations for the city, county and state to accelerate recovery.
Lew Horne, incoming chair of ULI Los Angeles, said he organized the group within days. The experts come from real estate, architecture, construction, law, insurance and other private practices around the city. Each expert was sorted into a focused group to tackle different topics, and ULI fronted $150,000 to create a staff to document the work streams, Horne said.
Six weeks later, the 175-page Project Recovery report had come together.
“We did not want this to be an academic exercise,” Horne told L.A. Business First. “It was designed and customized to create a data source for our elected officials who are going to make key decisions. Nobody has been trained to handle the biggest disaster that our country's ever seen in these fires.”
Priorities behind streamlined rebuilding policies
Horne, who also serves as president of CBRE in Greater Los Angeles, said it has been estimated rebuilding after the fires will take three to five years. Debris removal on its own has been estimated will take nine to 12 months, but Horne said ULI believes the infrastructure can be designed and installed during debris removal in the Palisades and Altadena.
The report’s cross-sector deep dive identifies major roadblocks to recovery and proposes strategic solutions. Some recommendations are standard and already in the works by the city and county: Debris removal protocols should be standardized; rebuilding efforts should be fast-tracked with enhanced government capacity to manage the permitting and inspection process; and labor and supply-chain issues affecting construction logistics and timelines should be addressed.
Other priorities — such as stabilizing California’s property insurance market to ensure continued coverage and offering mortgage forbearance to help fire victims who need it return to their communities — are on a larger scale. The report also proposes a group of Community Rebuilding Authorities to coordinate recovery efforts across impacted areas through inclusive community engagement, and incorporating wildfire-resilient vegetation and land-use management practices to prevent future environmental devastation at the same scale.
In addition to the assembled experts, the report draws on ULI’s experience advising disaster-affected communities, including the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado and Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, and builds on more than a decade of work by ULI’s Urban Resilience program.
“One of the most crucial aspects of this work is its intended ongoing relevance to the way we build durable communities,” said Stuart Gabriel, director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and a leader of the project's Advisory Committee, in a statement. “This is not the first and certainly will not be the last time climate-related disasters impact our communities. With this framework, Los Angeles can set a new standard for how cities can respond to these events in the future.”
Maintaining affordability in the rebuilding process
The fires affected more than 20,000 parcels in Los Angeles County, with the Palisades and Eaton fires accounting for the vast majority of the damage. Residential structures amounted to more than 70% of those damaged.
Horne said cities should factor in equity and affordability in the rebuilding process by providing options that lower per-square-foot costs. To facilitate more affordable rebuilding, one of the team’s ideas is to create a builders’ alliance through which big-track builders could use their purchasing power to reduce supply costs on building, and permit a swath of homes to accelerate the building process.
Instead of individual property owners delivering homes, the builders’ alliance could deliver homes at price points closer to $500 per square foot, rather than the $1,200 per square foot it would cost if an individual went about the process, Horne said.
“The thought of having 5,000 or 6,000 individuals building individual lots with individual architects and individual engineers and individual construction — just the pure logistics of getting that many people in there at any given time would be problematic,” he said. “The key component is also to provide optionality with insurance, because you can't get a loan without insurance and you can't build a building without a construction loan and construction insurance.”
In the current “market of uncertainty,” Horne noted that many insurance companies are deciding whether to leave California. The report’s insurance piece was left partially incomplete, Horne said, as ULI remains concerned about what needs to come next, whether that be more regulation or attracting insurers back to the communities with less regulation.
“The issue that we're dealing with is that most everybody is underinsured, and if they had a loan, chances are that loan is probably at a 3% rate, and now that's going to double,” Horne said. “We felt that if we could bring down the cost of the house and then deliver that, it might help residents on the finance piece.”
Partnership with Los Angeles and affected communities
ULI presented its report to the city and county of Los Angeles, and is now waiting on specific feedback about the policy suggestions. Meetings are scheduled between the organization and the city to expound on certain areas.
While the city and county have their own guidelines and plans for rebuilding, Horne said the report has been positively received. Rebuilding will be an ongoing process for years, and Horne admitted that this version of the report will likely be considered “Project Recovery 1.0” and will be revised after input from officials.
As Clare De Briere, a member of the ULI Global Board of Directors and founding partner of Catalyst Property Co., said in a statement that the report is a “service from the real estate community to Los Angeles and provides a blueprint for managing these types of crises around the globe.”
In the bigger picture, Horne said rebuilding centers the community coming together.
“There really is a spirit of, let's all figure out how to play a role and make a difference here,” he said. “There's a deep empathy in the private sector, which is very interested in playing a role, and I think the city and the county are very open to that.”