Can La build back better. As devastated communities struggled to kick start reconstruction, some experts say officials aren't thinking enough about the bigger picture. By Laura Bliss read aloud by Mark Ledorf. Kim and Chen Yugh's love story began with a giant Dalmatian costume. Kim was donning the head of a Sparky the fire Dog suit for a public awareness day at the Pasadena Fire Department when she spotted Chen, a former high school classmate turned fire fighter. Kim, who'd recently started a job as a hazardous materials inspector for the city, struck up a conversation, easy to do in the guise of a friendly canine. Their shared history led to a date, and within a few years they married and had two sons. In twenty eighteen, they bought a house a few doors down from one of Kim's co workers, Phyllis Lansdowne, who'd always raved about her block on Highview Avenue in nearby Altadena. I would just joke about how, oh my god, gosh, it would be so amazing to live on your block someday, Kim says, and then we found ourselves being neighbors and it was everything that she said it was and more. What the Ewes found was a mix of residents who were old and young, racially diverse, and largely middle class. It was a microcosm of Altadena at large, and a remarkably faithful reflection of how the block had been envisioned decades earlier. Gregory An, a modernist architect who'd trained in her luminaries such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, had designed the tract of twenty eight houses after World War II as affordable homes for working families, with fence free landscaping and mirror image driveways that nurtured greetings when people came and went. Seventy years later, barbecues and holiday parties still rotated through the shady backyards and open planned living rooms. Boxes of collar greens, citrus and apples would sit out on neighbours porches, homegrown harvests offered to passers by for the taking. The identical layouts of the homes put kids at ease on play dates. It was a cultural utopia for us, says Kim. Then a little after six pm on January seventh, a fire ignited in a canyon a few miles to the east. Chen needed to report for duty, so the rest of the family packed overnight bags and piled into the car, dropping him off at his station. Kim and the kids took shelter in her office four miles away at the California Institute of Technology, where she now works as a safety engineer. Having lived through fires before, they all expected to be home the next morning, but at nearly eighty miles per hour, the wind speeds were beyond anything Chen had witnessed in two decades of fighting blazes in southern California. The Santa Ana winds were crashing over the mountains like tidal waves, flinging embers far from the main fire, and igniting homes in the heart of densely built neighborhoods that, after eight months of no rain, were as dry as the mountain Chaparral. As Chen steered his fire engine up and down smoked out streets looking for people to evacuate, it was overwhelmingly clear that he and his colleagues were outmatched. Around midnight, he and a crewmate drove down Highview, where, through the hail of ash and fire, Chen glimpsed his own home, still intact, but the sight of a burning mulch pile on a nearby block felt like a terrifying omen. Every time the wind gusts would come, it would just blow a ton of embers. He says, I was just so angry at that mulch pile. By morning, along with some nine thousand other structures in Altadena, twenty one of the twenty eight homes on the U's block were in ruins, including their own. What remained were the outlines of a once intimate street, a few shared retaining walls, and all the kissing driveways. Since then, the us have been staying in a friend's guesthouse in nearby Highland Park, trying to put their lives back together as they worked through the insurance claims process and await financial relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Kim and Chen are determined to rebuild, even if they are unsure how they'll afford to. They want a new house engineered up to California's modern fire codes, with flame resistant materials and defensible landscaping. With a few of their high View neighbors, they are drafting plans to remake their block according to Ain's original vision for a colony of homes built collectively, efficiently, and most important, affordably. Part of the goal is to restore a piece of Los Angeles's architectural history, but mainly it's to get everyone home as quickly as possible. Over the past couple of months, California leaders have signaled the same desire. Even before the fires were put out, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an order waving environmental permitting requirements for resurrecting burned homes and businesses. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass suspended the city's discretionary review process for rebuilding structures as they were. LA County, the main local government for unincor corporated Altadena, has announced it will fast track permits for like for like construction, and its elected officials have asked the state to suspend a raft of housing laws. They say we'll slow the process by placing so much emphasis on recreating individual properties. However, leaders may be missing the most dramatic chance yet to examine LA's place in an ever more flammable world. The rising risk of catastrophic fire isn't a problem homeowners can solve in isolation, says Stephen Pine, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, who's written dozens of books about the history of fires around the globe. Unlike with floods, hurricanes, and other climate driven disasters, in a fire, the survival of one structure is often determined by the heartiness of its neighbor. Rebuilding the same homes in the same places could recreate the same risks that made January's fire so explosive. Pine says, the yearly blazes that sweep through southern California's iridifying landscape call for a new approach that doesn't doom residents to endless cycles of destruction. It's the same question we have about school shootings, he says, how many of these does it take? Eighty years ago, Los Angeles was drastically short on homes. The millions of workers who derived to fill defense industry jobs during World War II had already overwhelmed the residential supply, on top of a wave of dust bowl migrants in the nineteen thirties. When the war ended, the resettlement of veterans in their families prompted a true crisis, with material and labor shortages still plaguing the construction industry. Tens of thousands sheltered in tents, garages and trailers, or as borders in existing homes. Ain, who was practicing as an independent architect by the nineteen forties, believed the answer was to build collectively. Bombarded by veterans wondering what they could possibly afford, he gave them all the same answer. The New York Times wrote at the time, trying to build one small house today is next to hopeless. Small builders can't get materials. Big builders won't take small jobs. But if a group of veterans pool their plans and finances, they might interest a big builder and stand some chance of getting new homes. In nineteen forty six, two sets of aspiring homeowners heeded his advice. One a handful of veterans who bought a large plot in Silver Lake to put ten units on. The other a cast of mainly Hollywood union workers who purchased more than one hundred acres in Risida to build an entire neighborhood. Both groups hired Ain as the principal architect, as well as Garrett Ekbo, a landscape architect who was Ain's frequent collaborator. Robert Kahan, a local financier who shared Ain's Progressive Social Views also hired Ain and Ekbo to create a tract of single family homes in Altadena, which became the u's neighborhood on High View. For all these projects, Ain imagined small homes in multiples, emphasizing compact, functional, but not constrictive design. While each residence was to be private with its own yard or patio, Ecbo's landscaping also provided shared outdoor space, or at least a feeling of it. Along with two hundred and eighty homes, the project in Risita also included plans for a school, open spaces, and a shopping center. The focus on communal areas was unlike most of the hundreds of thousands of single family residences built across LA in a postwar boom that lasted through the nineteen eighties. Counter to models with larger floor plans that drove up margins for the real estate industry, Hain saw his smaller community oriented residences as a form of social art, not as profitable as other tracked homes, but more aligned with what residents needed. Not all his ideas came to fruition, the architect stuck to his principles when the Federal Housing Administration refused to provide mortgages to the receided development because it was racially integrated. The project, which was to be called Community Homes, fell apart just as the U. S. Supreme Courts struck down race restrictive covenants in nineteen forty eight. As McCarthyism dawned, Ain became a surveillance target of the FBI, which deemed him dangerously subversive. The reputational damage lost him commissions, and Ain never built another tract, but the Avenel Cooperative Housing Project, as Ain's set of ten homes in Silver Lake is known, remains coveted LA real estate generations after construction, so do an additional fifty two homes he built in mar Vista. The twenty eight in Altadena, known as the Park planned homes for their fenceless continuous landscaping, were approaching their eightieth anniversary before the fire flattened all but seven. Ain died in nineteen eighty eight, just before LA's rate of housing production fell off and never really recovered. By the early nineteen nineties, the metropolis was permitting fewer than two thousand housing units per month, down from about six thousand in the late eighties. Before the Eton and Palisades fires destroyed some sixteen thousand homes. Earlier this year, the city was in the throes of a twenty first century housing crisis, this one characterized in part by a lack of available land and decades of slow growth policies that restricted construction. The urgent need for housing has begun to loosen the grip of the single family home on LA's planning laws in favor of allowing more than one structure per lot. In that sense, Ain's approach could be a model for those trying to meet today's housing challenges, says Anthony Denzer, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Wyoming who's written extensively about Ain. That includes his pragmatism as a designer. Ain built homes with what was available, using inexpensive materials such as wood and stucco, and compromising with a workforce that wasn't always willing to follow some of his more innovative construction ideas. He wasn't trying to do something that was out of bounds. Denzer says, it was what can we do on this site with the building industry and the state that it's in. It's not the state we would wish. The Ughs hoped to remake their community in that spirit, leaning on the resources and nohow of friends and neighbors. Heading the high View rebuilding effort is Mark Lansdowne, the husband of Kim's former coworker Phyllis, who grew up in the now destroyed house she inherited from her mother. A few years ago, when the Lansdowne's daughter decided she wanted to have her wedding at the family home, the couple set about trimming hedges, dismantling bookcases, and moving family artifacts to make room for guests. The process revealed the clean lines and spaciousness of Ain's design. We realized we didn't need to put a bunch of art on the walls. Mark says the house was the art. A retired contractor and architectural project manager, Mark Lansdowne is using his professional background to rebuild the house in its former image, only with modernized fire resistant features. Working out of an office at PBWS Architects, the Pasadena firm he retired from during the pandemic, He's drawing plan that largely replicate the original footprint and dimensions of Ain's design, save a few tweaks for safety and efficiency. He's making the windows at least double pained, helping them withstand heat longer, and replacing the sloping roof with one that's made of ignition resistant metal. A few engineer friends are helping him make structural changes to bring the house up to code, and Kirsten Bono, an architect and partner at PBWS, is researching how to create more defensible landscaping around the property. In the townhouse style garage, Lansdowne wants to replace the wall that ain designed to be shared with the adjoining neighbors with a fire rated wall bolstering both his property and the one next door. Lansdowne's idea is to create four configurations of the plans he's drawing for his own home pro bono, so any of his high View neighbors can build from them for free. More than ten families have signaled they'd like to do so, he says. Kim Yu is looking for a contractor who'd be willing to build several of those homes at the same time, helping the neighborhood pool materials and lower costs. Another resident, Veretta Heidelberg, pulled in an architect friend who is now organizing the surveying for multiple high view plots at once, another potential savings. Ain would be proud. There's reason to believe home hardening updates could add meaningful protection in future fires. During the twenty eighteen campfire, which destroyed some eighteen thousand structures in the small northern California town of Paradise, the survival rate of homes built to the state's landmark two thousand and eight building code or afterward requiring fire resistant roofs, siding, and other upgrades for properties in fire prone regions was more than double that of older models. That's the standard Lansdowne is aiming for. Wildfire experts also say more compact, clustered homes could be a safer blueprint compared with single family dwellings spread far apart. Alexandra Sefard, a senior research ecologist at the Conservation Biology in Steat, has been studying the relationship between housing density and fire risk for twenty years. When she wrote her dissertation in the early two thousands, she initially thought more population growth on and near southern California's chaparral covered hillsides would only lead to more ignition and more structure laws, so she was surprised when her analysis of past fires found the relationship wasn't so linear. As the number of homes went up in a given area, the number of ignitions went up, but only to a certain point. At high enough densities, she realized there wasn't as much vegetation and access to fire suppression resources increased. Seffhard's later research showed that the arrangement of structures matters too. Generally speaking, the farther apart homes are placed, the more likely they are to burn in a wildfire. Again, the relationship isn't totally straightforward. At a certain point, when homes are too closely spaced, they become risks to one another. But Sephard has consistently found that the lowest density developed with homes spread out and wholly exposed to wild edges, presents the highest risk of lass. Structures are generally easier to defend against fire when the overall footprint of the developed area is compact and surrounded by irrigated green space. These findings should be part of the discussion in La Sefard says, because if some people rebuild and others leave, their lots vacant, remaining residents could be left more exposed than they were before, and some of those unable to afford the cost of rebuilding may look for cheaper housing farther from the city, part of a pattern that's pushed some of California's fastest population growth to the most flammable parts of the state. It seems counterintuitive to think, well, what if we put even more people in this area by building townhouses that were more affordable, but that could be safer than housing them farther away. Sefard says, if you're thinking about existing versus future housing development, how do we rebuild in a way that the existing residents are safer and that new residents might might be able to afford housing that doesn't go into new sprawling patterns. The freakish wind conditions that made the January fire so catastrophic present a crucial Caveat hurricane strength, winds flung embers far from the firefront, igniting homes in the area, many as old as are older than Ain's designs, that then became fuel for the next structure to burn. This shows that closely packed homes built with flammable materials can easily become a fire hazard. They have to be built to very stringent fire resistant building codes if we're going to space them relatively close together, because we already know that this home to home dynamic is a real problem in these high wind situations, says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist for the University of California's Cooperative Extension Program who studies the geography of fire risk. One way to address the risk of too much space, Moritz says, could be for structures to share walls, thereby eliminating whole sides of exposure. After the major urban fires of the nineteenth century, building codes were made to require any walls shared between commercial buildings and high rises to withstand fire up to a certain number of hours. That progress could offer useful lessons as far as building more hardened compact housing. One could, with the right materials and methods, come up with ways of making a really fire resistant set of homes more it, says. He adds that ains designs, if brought up to code, could serve as a starting point for communities trying to rebuild more safely. We'll be right back with can La Build Back Better? Welcome back to can La Build Back Better? The more difficult question is whether it's wise to rebuild LA's devastated neighborhoods at all. Fires are central to the natural ecology of the mountains that cradled the city, and thus they've repeatedly reduced many of its sloping communities to ash, as recently as December twenty twenty four, in the case of Malibui, whose long history of all but annual incinerations and reconstructions inspired one of the late social critic Mike Davis's most famous screeds. Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire, Davis wrote in a PostScript to The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, an essay published in nineteen ninety five, those who can afford with indirect public subsidies to rebuild, and those who can afford to live anywhere else. With a much denser population and more gridlike urban plan, Altadena has seen fewer disasters by fire than spread out Malibu, but it's no stranger to them. The nineteen ninety three Kinaloa fire, which burned in the mountains overlooking Altadena and neighboring areas, was at the time one of the worst in California history. In terms of structures lost. Yet, homeowners throughout LA have rebuilt again and again, and never have leaders tried to stop them. Despite the staggering economic and social costs of each disaster, twenty twenty five fires, in which twenty nine people died, racked up an estimated seventy five billion dollars in insured losses alone. The vast majority of what burned were single family homes, which before the fire sold for a median price of one point three million dollars in Altadena. In Pacific Palisades near Malibu, the median price was around four million dollars. About three weeks before the Palisades and Eaten fires broke out, Pine, the fire historian who lives outside Phoenix, published a prophetic essay titled Hollywood in Flames in a German publication called Bauvelt. In it, he describes LA as an unholy mingling of built and natural landscapes in which fire protection was compromised in its very constitution. Throughout the twentieth century, developers selling the California Dream made suburbs out of canyons and foothills. The park planned homes included a century of smoky bear style fire suppression turned the surrounding Mas Mountains into time bombs. But while La is an extreme example of fire prone settlement patterns, Pine says in an interview that it's no longer exceptional. Recent conflagrations in Colorado, Hawaii, Tennessee, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Greece, Portugal and beyond point to the same underlying issue. We quit doing all the stuff that we learned over a long, costly, painful period of time that prevents cities from burning. He says, it's like we forgot once upon a time. Much of humanity maintained an intimacy with fire Since ancient times, people all over the world have used fire to clear lands for hunting and agriculture. Farmers burn fallow fields to clear weeds and restore soil. These practices long kept major conflagrations to a minimum, Pine says, but as countries grew and economies urbanized, numerous wild and rural landscapes lost their human stewards. Many of Mediterranean Europe's recent major fires, as well as the twenty twenty three blaze that destroyed Lehaina, Hawaii, started in abandoned agricultural lands. So while disasters in La and Australia's Bush Country show the hazards of people moving into fire prone areas. In other cases, the problem is people moving out Pine, says, aggravated by climate changes, longer droughts, and hotter temperatures. The risk of fire is now a problem for much of the developed world. Los Angeles has made some steps toward atoning for its original land use sins. After the twenty eighteen Woolsey Fire, which tore across ninety seven thousand acres in Malibu and other nearby communities and destroyed about sixteen hundred structures, the county's planning department sought to address fire risk from a land use standpoint. Years of work led to several zoning updates, including one that bans the building of additional homes in the Altadena Foothills and other areas. The state has designated a very high Fire Hazard severity zone it passed just a month before the Eton fire, but that won't stop people from putting back homes that previously existed. I don't think that there's anything wrong with rebuilding in Altadena, says Amy Bodeck, the director of Planning for La County, noting that only twenty one percent of the homes within the Eton fire perimeter were in the state's highest risk area. In March, the state revised its maps, including more of Altadena in the most hazardous zones. While rebuilt homes in those areas will have to comply with the two thousand and eight code, the county will still allow fire victims to otherwise replace what they had. Everybody does have the right to own property, and when they do have property, they have the right to do something with it. Bodeck says, we have to respect that some communities have tried to curb rebuilding after a fire, but their examples show the limits of government intervention in the will of private property owners. After a deadly nineteen ninety one firestorm in Oakland, the local government tried to use m anda domain to widen narrow roads that had been a death trap for evacuees, but officials couldn't persuade enough homeowners to sell off strips of their property, and the routes were left unchanged. In the meantime, many residents used their insurance payouts to build much larger homes than the ones they'd had before, leaving them more exposed to future fires. In Victoria, Australia, the government offered buyouts after catastrophic bushfires in two thousand and nine, seemingly the world's first and only large scale program of its kind, but by the time it rolled out after bureaucratic delays, many homeowners had already started rebuilding, inserting a patchwork of development into a highly flammable landscape. In Paradise, the local Parks District has been buying charred properties to create a defensible buffer around the community, but the process has been slow and costly. By the end of twenty twenty five, the park's district expects to own about five hundred acres of buffer land, a tiny fraction of its target. Pine believes fire prone cities could benefit from such buffers, so long as they are maintained. He points to other models, such as a planned community in Irvine, California, that was built with large swaths of surrounding open land and avocado groves as defensible space. Meanwhile, new building codes, fire risk maps, and construction techniques are being developed and leading to more hardened homes. The problem Pine says is that most places, California being the poster child, lack the political will to advance these changes. Fast enough and on a big enough scale to keep pace with mounting risks. We need to realize we are living in a fire age, he says. Unfortunately, it looks like the country is willing to take a lot of punishment before it's going to address this in a serious way. Since January's fires, LA leaders have done little to encourage the kinds of sweeping changes Pine advocates in Pacific Palisades in Malibu. The vast majority of the almost seven thousand structures that burned in the Palisades fire were deemed to be in the very high fire hazard severity zone designated by the state's official maps. Still, Steve Soberoff, a businessman and former police commissioner tapped by Mayor Bass to lead rebuilding efforts in the Palisades, has dismissed the idea that LA should pause to consider its development patterns. This is no time for urban planning exercising, he said at a January news conference while fires raged throughout the city. You don't need to rethink Pacific Palisades. You need to rebuild Pacific Palisades. It's not just politics driving calls to put back what was lost. Addressing the desperate need for housing in Los Angeles as well as the risk of fire is a true conundrum, says Bodek, the planning director. The county has tried to strike a balance by allowing more homes near commercial corridors and farther from the ignition prone mountains, while limiting new development in the most hazardous areas. Pragmatic as that seems, this philosophy has its critics too. In late January, county supervisors stoked the ire of LA's pro density contingent when it passed a resolution asking the state to suspend, within fire affected areas, a number of laws aimed at boosting housing production. M Nolan Gray, Senior director of Legislation and Research at the advocacy group California Yimbie, argues that LA should help property owners put back more housing in these burned areas, not less, especially given the city's glacial pace of construction before the fires. Fundamentally, he believes more fire victims would have a chance at returning to their neighborhoods if even a few duplexes and town homes took the place of single family homes. When construction starts in Altadena, there's going to be a lot of new buildings there. Gray says, the question is are those going to be buildings that are affordable to the people who lived in this community before. On Highview, cost will be a major determining factor in who returns. The U. S Army Corps of Engineers is clearing ash and rubble from burned lots and has set a target completion date of January twenty twenty six, a timeline that stretches beyond what most insurers cover for temporary accommodations. No one knows what the actual construction will cost by the time Cruise can get to work. One contractor gave a high View resident an initial estimate of roughly one million dollars to rebuild her home. Another neighbor got a number closer to six hundred thousand dollars. The US were insured for a maximum of about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese and Canadian goods, including building materials, are set to push costs significantly higher. Its hard line immigration policies have already sent undocumented workers, who make up a large part of the construction workforce, into hiding State Farm, California's largest insurer is seeking an emergency twenty two percent rate increase to cover fire related claims. Home insurers have been pulling out of markets across California in recent years. That trend is expected to accelerate in the wake of these latest fires. Apart from insurance payouts in their own savings, some residents will have other resources to draw on, including GoFundMe campaigns. The Ewes were able to raise more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the platform after a local news channel featured Chen discovering his wedding ring in the ashes of their home. Others are hoping for payouts from a class action lawsuit alleging that equipment owned by Southern California Edison sparked the Eton fire. The utility has acknowledged that possibility, while arguing that the causes of catastrophic fire are widespread. A state investigation into the fire's origins is ongoing. Government loans, like from the US Small Business Administration, could bridge gaps for some, but between the staggering cost and the indefinite timeline, some residents may be forced to move on. Do I want to take out loans to pay to rebuild it. I don't know, says Jennifer Casisio, whose home on Highview was destroyed. She and her husband may take their insurance money and buy something in upstate New York, where they and their young daughter won't have to wait for their neighborhood to come back. Politicians are promising to help. Besides waiving zoning reviews for like for like home builds, both the city and county have opened one stop permitting centers for fire victims. In February, LA County Supervisor Katherine Barger announced the formation of the Altadena Recovery Commission, made up of public and private sector professionals and community members, tasked with, among other charges, developing scalable housing solutions that give all residents an option to rebuild, according to a press release. In an interview, Barger says she'd like to come up with new financing options for rebuilding, such as grants that pay for expensive fire resistant features or assistance for adding guesthouses that could later be rented out for income. In the meantime, residents are continuing to take urban planning into their own hands. The Foothill Catalog Foundation, started by a group of local architects after the fires is creating a kind of modern day Seers catalog to guide those who want to rebuild with standardized, pre approved home plans inspired by the existing architecture of Altadena. The Southern California chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects is offering technical assistance to Altadena fire victims seeking to rebuild. City Lab, an urban design think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, has launched a design competition to create affordable fire resistant home models in partnership with the city. For many High View residents, building back together might be their best shot at making it home. On a recent Tuesday night, about thirty neighbors gathered over zoom and in a conference room at PBWS Architects, where Lansdowne, wearing a T shirt emblazoned with Altadena eighteen eighty seven, shared the plans he'd create aided for his own house and potentially for others. He'd rendered a three D version of Ain's design, largely identical to the original, but with slightly wider doorways, a thicker roof, and a new side door to the garage. The hope, he said, was to find efficiencies among the rebuilders perhaps by buying expensive windows and doors in bulk, or using prefab materials that could be ordered at once. A volley of questions returned, was that beam there before? Where did the closet go? Lansdowne answered his neighbors patiently, at one point deadpanning that his house had burned down five weeks ago, so he hadn't gotten to every last detail. The room erupted in laughter. This is all very encouraging, one resident said, drawing murmurs of agreement. It's easy to get very discouraged with the whole process and the absolutely annoying, endless details. Until today, it's still early days. Lansdowne hasn't gotten his plans approved by the county yet, a process he fears will be harder than leaders have promised, given the age of the designs he's trying to revive. Both he and Kim You acknowledge there's only so much they'll be able to do to restore their neighborhood, given them many countervailing forces. But they're certain that Altadena should and can rebuild. As a member of the volunteer town council, use as high views strain of peer to peer planning could be exported to other parts of the area, any place where solidarity feels easier than going it alone. Working alongside her neighbors has been a respite from the dizzying mix of grief and uncertainty she and her family have been living in since January. Nothing is the same, she says. We just really miss our block.

Can La build back better. As devastated communities struggled to kick start reconstruction, some experts say officials aren't thinking enough about the bigger picture. By Laura Bliss read aloud by Mark Ledorf. Kim and Chen Yugh's love story began with a giant Dalmatian costume. Kim was donning the head of a Sparky the fire Dog suit for a public awareness day at the Pasadena Fire Department when she spotted Chen, a former high school classmate turned fire fighter. Kim, who'd recently started a job as a hazardous materials inspector for the city, struck up a conversation, easy to do in the guise of a friendly canine. Their shared history led to a date, and within a few years they married and had two sons. In twenty eighteen, they bought a house a few doors down from one of Kim's co workers, Phyllis Lansdowne, who'd always raved about her block on Highview Avenue in nearby Altadena. I would just joke about how, oh my god, gosh, it would be so amazing to live on your block someday, Kim says, and then we found ourselves being neighbors and it was everything that she said it was and more. What the Ewes found was a mix of residents who were old and young, racially diverse, and largely middle class. It was a microcosm of Altadena at large, and a remarkably faithful reflection of how the block had been envisioned decades earlier. Gregory An, a modernist architect who'd trained in her luminaries such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, had designed the tract of twenty eight houses after World War II as affordable homes for working families, with fence free landscaping and mirror image driveways that nurtured greetings when people came and went. Seventy years later, barbecues and holiday parties still rotated through the shady backyards and open planned living rooms. Boxes of collar greens, citrus and apples would sit out on neighbours porches, homegrown harvests offered to passers by for the taking. The identical layouts of the homes put kids at ease on play dates. It was a cultural utopia for us, says Kim. Then a little after six pm on January seventh, a fire ignited in a canyon a few miles to the east. Chen needed to report for duty, so the rest of the family packed overnight bags and piled into the car, dropping him off at his station. Kim and the kids took shelter in her office four miles away at the California Institute of Technology, where she now works as a safety engineer. Having lived through fires before, they all expected to be home the next morning, but at nearly eighty miles per hour, the wind speeds were beyond anything Chen had witnessed in two decades of fighting blazes in southern California. The Santa Ana winds were crashing over the mountains like tidal waves, flinging embers far from the main fire, and igniting homes in the heart of densely built neighborhoods that, after eight months of no rain, were as dry as the mountain Chaparral. As Chen steered his fire engine up and down smoked out streets looking for people to evacuate, it was overwhelmingly clear that he and his colleagues were outmatched. Around midnight, he and a crewmate drove down Highview, where, through the hail of ash and fire, Chen glimpsed his own home, still intact, but the sight of a burning mulch pile on a nearby block felt like a terrifying omen. Every time the wind gusts would come, it would just blow a ton of embers. He says, I was just so angry at that mulch pile. By morning, along with some nine thousand other structures in Altadena, twenty one of the twenty eight homes on the U's block were in ruins, including their own. What remained were the outlines of a once intimate street, a few shared retaining walls, and all the kissing driveways. Since then, the us have been staying in a friend's guesthouse in nearby Highland Park, trying to put their lives back together as they worked through the insurance claims process and await financial relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Kim and Chen are determined to rebuild, even if they are unsure how they'll afford to. They want a new house engineered up to California's modern fire codes, with flame resistant materials and defensible landscaping. With a few of their high View neighbors, they are drafting plans to remake their block according to Ain's original vision for a colony of homes built collectively, efficiently, and most important, affordably. Part of the goal is to restore a piece of Los Angeles's architectural history, but mainly it's to get everyone home as quickly as possible. Over the past couple of months, California leaders have signaled the same desire. Even before the fires were put out, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an order waving environmental permitting requirements for resurrecting burned homes and businesses. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass suspended the city's discretionary review process for rebuilding structures as they were. LA County, the main local government for unincor corporated Altadena, has announced it will fast track permits for like for like construction, and its elected officials have asked the state to suspend a raft of housing laws. They say we'll slow the process by placing so much emphasis on recreating individual properties. However, leaders may be missing the most dramatic chance yet to examine LA's place in an ever more flammable world. The rising risk of catastrophic fire isn't a problem homeowners can solve in isolation, says Stephen Pine, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, who's written dozens of books about the history of fires around the globe. Unlike with floods, hurricanes, and other climate driven disasters, in a fire, the survival of one structure is often determined by the heartiness of its neighbor. Rebuilding the same homes in the same places could recreate the same risks that made January's fire so explosive. Pine says, the yearly blazes that sweep through southern California's iridifying landscape call for a new approach that doesn't doom residents to endless cycles of destruction. It's the same question we have about school shootings, he says, how many of these does it take? Eighty years ago, Los Angeles was drastically short on homes. The millions of workers who derived to fill defense industry jobs during World War II had already overwhelmed the residential supply, on top of a wave of dust bowl migrants in the nineteen thirties. When the war ended, the resettlement of veterans in their families prompted a true crisis, with material and labor shortages still plaguing the construction industry. Tens of thousands sheltered in tents, garages and trailers, or as borders in existing homes. Ain, who was practicing as an independent architect by the nineteen forties, believed the answer was to build collectively. Bombarded by veterans wondering what they could possibly afford, he gave them all the same answer. The New York Times wrote at the time, trying to build one small house today is next to hopeless. Small builders can't get materials. Big builders won't take small jobs. But if a group of veterans pool their plans and finances, they might interest a big builder and stand some chance of getting new homes. In nineteen forty six, two sets of aspiring homeowners heeded his advice. One a handful of veterans who bought a large plot in Silver Lake to put ten units on. The other a cast of mainly Hollywood union workers who purchased more than one hundred acres in Risida to build an entire neighborhood. Both groups hired Ain as the principal architect, as well as Garrett Ekbo, a landscape architect who was Ain's frequent collaborator. Robert Kahan, a local financier who shared Ain's Progressive Social Views also hired Ain and Ekbo to create a tract of single family homes in Altadena, which became the u's neighborhood on High View. For all these projects, Ain imagined small homes in multiples, emphasizing compact, functional, but not constrictive design. While each residence was to be private with its own yard or patio, Ecbo's landscaping also provided shared outdoor space, or at least a feeling of it. Along with two hundred and eighty homes, the project in Risita also included plans for a school, open spaces, and a shopping center. The focus on communal areas was unlike most of the hundreds of thousands of single family residences built across LA in a postwar boom that lasted through the nineteen eighties. Counter to models with larger floor plans that drove up margins for the real estate industry, Hain saw his smaller community oriented residences as a form of social art, not as profitable as other tracked homes, but more aligned with what residents needed. Not all his ideas came to fruition, the architect stuck to his principles when the Federal Housing Administration refused to provide mortgages to the receided development because it was racially integrated. The project, which was to be called Community Homes, fell apart just as the U. S. Supreme Courts struck down race restrictive covenants in nineteen forty eight. As McCarthyism dawned, Ain became a surveillance target of the FBI, which deemed him dangerously subversive. The reputational damage lost him commissions, and Ain never built another tract, but the Avenel Cooperative Housing Project, as Ain's set of ten homes in Silver Lake is known, remains coveted LA real estate generations after construction, so do an additional fifty two homes he built in mar Vista. The twenty eight in Altadena, known as the Park planned homes for their fenceless continuous landscaping, were approaching their eightieth anniversary before the fire flattened all but seven. Ain died in nineteen eighty eight, just before LA's rate of housing production fell off and never really recovered. By the early nineteen nineties, the metropolis was permitting fewer than two thousand housing units per month, down from about six thousand in the late eighties. Before the Eton and Palisades fires destroyed some sixteen thousand homes. Earlier this year, the city was in the throes of a twenty first century housing crisis, this one characterized in part by a lack of available land and decades of slow growth policies that restricted construction. The urgent need for housing has begun to loosen the grip of the single family home on LA's planning laws in favor of allowing more than one structure per lot. In that sense, Ain's approach could be a model for those trying to meet today's housing challenges, says Anthony Denzer, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Wyoming who's written extensively about Ain. That includes his pragmatism as a designer. Ain built homes with what was available, using inexpensive materials such as wood and stucco, and compromising with a workforce that wasn't always willing to follow some of his more innovative construction ideas. He wasn't trying to do something that was out of bounds. Denzer says, it was what can we do on this site with the building industry and the state that it's in. It's not the state we would wish. The Ughs hoped to remake their community in that spirit, leaning on the resources and nohow of friends and neighbors. Heading the high View rebuilding effort is Mark Lansdowne, the husband of Kim's former coworker Phyllis, who grew up in the now destroyed house she inherited from her mother. A few years ago, when the Lansdowne's daughter decided she wanted to have her wedding at the family home, the couple set about trimming hedges, dismantling bookcases, and moving family artifacts to make room for guests. The process revealed the clean lines and spaciousness of Ain's design. We realized we didn't need to put a bunch of art on the walls. Mark says the house was the art. A retired contractor and architectural project manager, Mark Lansdowne is using his professional background to rebuild the house in its former image, only with modernized fire resistant features. Working out of an office at PBWS Architects, the Pasadena firm he retired from during the pandemic, He's drawing plan that largely replicate the original footprint and dimensions of Ain's design, save a few tweaks for safety and efficiency. He's making the windows at least double pained, helping them withstand heat longer, and replacing the sloping roof with one that's made of ignition resistant metal. A few engineer friends are helping him make structural changes to bring the house up to code, and Kirsten Bono, an architect and partner at PBWS, is researching how to create more defensible landscaping around the property. In the townhouse style garage, Lansdowne wants to replace the wall that ain designed to be shared with the adjoining neighbors with a fire rated wall bolstering both his property and the one next door. Lansdowne's idea is to create four configurations of the plans he's drawing for his own home pro bono, so any of his high View neighbors can build from them for free. More than ten families have signaled they'd like to do so, he says. Kim Yu is looking for a contractor who'd be willing to build several of those homes at the same time, helping the neighborhood pool materials and lower costs. Another resident, Veretta Heidelberg, pulled in an architect friend who is now organizing the surveying for multiple high view plots at once, another potential savings. Ain would be proud. There's reason to believe home hardening updates could add meaningful protection in future fires. During the twenty eighteen campfire, which destroyed some eighteen thousand structures in the small northern California town of Paradise, the survival rate of homes built to the state's landmark two thousand and eight building code or afterward requiring fire resistant roofs, siding, and other upgrades for properties in fire prone regions was more than double that of older models. That's the standard Lansdowne is aiming for. Wildfire experts also say more compact, clustered homes could be a safer blueprint compared with single family dwellings spread far apart. Alexandra Sefard, a senior research ecologist at the Conservation Biology in Steat, has been studying the relationship between housing density and fire risk for twenty years. When she wrote her dissertation in the early two thousands, she initially thought more population growth on and near southern California's chaparral covered hillsides would only lead to more ignition and more structure laws, so she was surprised when her analysis of past fires found the relationship wasn't so linear. As the number of homes went up in a given area, the number of ignitions went up, but only to a certain point. At high enough densities, she realized there wasn't as much vegetation and access to fire suppression resources increased. Seffhard's later research showed that the arrangement of structures matters too. Generally speaking, the farther apart homes are placed, the more likely they are to burn in a wildfire. Again, the relationship isn't totally straightforward. At a certain point, when homes are too closely spaced, they become risks to one another. But Sephard has consistently found that the lowest density developed with homes spread out and wholly exposed to wild edges, presents the highest risk of lass. Structures are generally easier to defend against fire when the overall footprint of the developed area is compact and surrounded by irrigated green space. These findings should be part of the discussion in La Sefard says, because if some people rebuild and others leave, their lots vacant, remaining residents could be left more exposed than they were before, and some of those unable to afford the cost of rebuilding may look for cheaper housing farther from the city, part of a pattern that's pushed some of California's fastest population growth to the most flammable parts of the state. It seems counterintuitive to think, well, what if we put even more people in this area by building townhouses that were more affordable, but that could be safer than housing them farther away. Sefard says, if you're thinking about existing versus future housing development, how do we rebuild in a way that the existing residents are safer and that new residents might might be able to afford housing that doesn't go into new sprawling patterns. The freakish wind conditions that made the January fire so catastrophic present a crucial Caveat hurricane strength, winds flung embers far from the firefront, igniting homes in the area, many as old as are older than Ain's designs, that then became fuel for the next structure to burn. This shows that closely packed homes built with flammable materials can easily become a fire hazard. They have to be built to very stringent fire resistant building codes if we're going to space them relatively close together, because we already know that this home to home dynamic is a real problem in these high wind situations, says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist for the University of California's Cooperative Extension Program who studies the geography of fire risk. One way to address the risk of too much space, Moritz says, could be for structures to share walls, thereby eliminating whole sides of exposure. After the major urban fires of the nineteenth century, building codes were made to require any walls shared between commercial buildings and high rises to withstand fire up to a certain number of hours. That progress could offer useful lessons as far as building more hardened compact housing. One could, with the right materials and methods, come up with ways of making a really fire resistant set of homes more it, says. He adds that ains designs, if brought up to code, could serve as a starting point for communities trying to rebuild more safely. We'll be right back with can La Build Back Better? Welcome back to can La Build Back Better? The more difficult question is whether it's wise to rebuild LA's devastated neighborhoods at all. Fires are central to the natural ecology of the mountains that cradled the city, and thus they've repeatedly reduced many of its sloping communities to ash, as recently as December twenty twenty four, in the case of Malibui, whose long history of all but annual incinerations and reconstructions inspired one of the late social critic Mike Davis's most famous screeds. Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire, Davis wrote in a PostScript to The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, an essay published in nineteen ninety five, those who can afford with indirect public subsidies to rebuild, and those who can afford to live anywhere else. With a much denser population and more gridlike urban plan, Altadena has seen fewer disasters by fire than spread out Malibu, but it's no stranger to them. The nineteen ninety three Kinaloa fire, which burned in the mountains overlooking Altadena and neighboring areas, was at the time one of the worst in California history. In terms of structures lost. Yet, homeowners throughout LA have rebuilt again and again, and never have leaders tried to stop them. Despite the staggering economic and social costs of each disaster, twenty twenty five fires, in which twenty nine people died, racked up an estimated seventy five billion dollars in insured losses alone. The vast majority of what burned were single family homes, which before the fire sold for a median price of one point three million dollars in Altadena. In Pacific Palisades near Malibu, the median price was around four million dollars. About three weeks before the Palisades and Eaten fires broke out, Pine, the fire historian who lives outside Phoenix, published a prophetic essay titled Hollywood in Flames in a German publication called Bauvelt. In it, he describes LA as an unholy mingling of built and natural landscapes in which fire protection was compromised in its very constitution. Throughout the twentieth century, developers selling the California Dream made suburbs out of canyons and foothills. The park planned homes included a century of smoky bear style fire suppression turned the surrounding Mas Mountains into time bombs. But while La is an extreme example of fire prone settlement patterns, Pine says in an interview that it's no longer exceptional. Recent conflagrations in Colorado, Hawaii, Tennessee, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Greece, Portugal and beyond point to the same underlying issue. We quit doing all the stuff that we learned over a long, costly, painful period of time that prevents cities from burning. He says, it's like we forgot once upon a time. Much of humanity maintained an intimacy with fire Since ancient times, people all over the world have used fire to clear lands for hunting and agriculture. Farmers burn fallow fields to clear weeds and restore soil. These practices long kept major conflagrations to a minimum, Pine says, but as countries grew and economies urbanized, numerous wild and rural landscapes lost their human stewards. Many of Mediterranean Europe's recent major fires, as well as the twenty twenty three blaze that destroyed Lehaina, Hawaii, started in abandoned agricultural lands. So while disasters in La and Australia's Bush Country show the hazards of people moving into fire prone areas. In other cases, the problem is people moving out Pine, says, aggravated by climate changes, longer droughts, and hotter temperatures. The risk of fire is now a problem for much of the developed world. Los Angeles has made some steps toward atoning for its original land use sins. After the twenty eighteen Woolsey Fire, which tore across ninety seven thousand acres in Malibu and other nearby communities and destroyed about sixteen hundred structures, the county's planning department sought to address fire risk from a land use standpoint. Years of work led to several zoning updates, including one that bans the building of additional homes in the Altadena Foothills and other areas. The state has designated a very high Fire Hazard severity zone it passed just a month before the Eton fire, but that won't stop people from putting back homes that previously existed. I don't think that there's anything wrong with rebuilding in Altadena, says Amy Bodeck, the director of Planning for La County, noting that only twenty one percent of the homes within the Eton fire perimeter were in the state's highest risk area. In March, the state revised its maps, including more of Altadena in the most hazardous zones. While rebuilt homes in those areas will have to comply with the two thousand and eight code, the county will still allow fire victims to otherwise replace what they had. Everybody does have the right to own property, and when they do have property, they have the right to do something with it. Bodeck says, we have to respect that some communities have tried to curb rebuilding after a fire, but their examples show the limits of government intervention in the will of private property owners. After a deadly nineteen ninety one firestorm in Oakland, the local government tried to use m anda domain to widen narrow roads that had been a death trap for evacuees, but officials couldn't persuade enough homeowners to sell off strips of their property, and the routes were left unchanged. In the meantime, many residents used their insurance payouts to build much larger homes than the ones they'd had before, leaving them more exposed to future fires. In Victoria, Australia, the government offered buyouts after catastrophic bushfires in two thousand and nine, seemingly the world's first and only large scale program of its kind, but by the time it rolled out after bureaucratic delays, many homeowners had already started rebuilding, inserting a patchwork of development into a highly flammable landscape. In Paradise, the local Parks District has been buying charred properties to create a defensible buffer around the community, but the process has been slow and costly. By the end of twenty twenty five, the park's district expects to own about five hundred acres of buffer land, a tiny fraction of its target. Pine believes fire prone cities could benefit from such buffers, so long as they are maintained. He points to other models, such as a planned community in Irvine, California, that was built with large swaths of surrounding open land and avocado groves as defensible space. Meanwhile, new building codes, fire risk maps, and construction techniques are being developed and leading to more hardened homes. The problem Pine says is that most places, California being the poster child, lack the political will to advance these changes. Fast enough and on a big enough scale to keep pace with mounting risks. We need to realize we are living in a fire age, he says. Unfortunately, it looks like the country is willing to take a lot of punishment before it's going to address this in a serious way. Since January's fires, LA leaders have done little to encourage the kinds of sweeping changes Pine advocates in Pacific Palisades in Malibu. The vast majority of the almost seven thousand structures that burned in the Palisades fire were deemed to be in the very high fire hazard severity zone designated by the state's official maps. Still, Steve Soberoff, a businessman and former police commissioner tapped by Mayor Bass to lead rebuilding efforts in the Palisades, has dismissed the idea that LA should pause to consider its development patterns. This is no time for urban planning exercising, he said at a January news conference while fires raged throughout the city. You don't need to rethink Pacific Palisades. You need to rebuild Pacific Palisades. It's not just politics driving calls to put back what was lost. Addressing the desperate need for housing in Los Angeles as well as the risk of fire is a true conundrum, says Bodek, the planning director. The county has tried to strike a balance by allowing more homes near commercial corridors and farther from the ignition prone mountains, while limiting new development in the most hazardous areas. Pragmatic as that seems, this philosophy has its critics too. In late January, county supervisors stoked the ire of LA's pro density contingent when it passed a resolution asking the state to suspend, within fire affected areas, a number of laws aimed at boosting housing production. M Nolan Gray, Senior director of Legislation and Research at the advocacy group California Yimbie, argues that LA should help property owners put back more housing in these burned areas, not less, especially given the city's glacial pace of construction before the fires. Fundamentally, he believes more fire victims would have a chance at returning to their neighborhoods if even a few duplexes and town homes took the place of single family homes. When construction starts in Altadena, there's going to be a lot of new buildings there. Gray says, the question is are those going to be buildings that are affordable to the people who lived in this community before. On Highview, cost will be a major determining factor in who returns. The U. S Army Corps of Engineers is clearing ash and rubble from burned lots and has set a target completion date of January twenty twenty six, a timeline that stretches beyond what most insurers cover for temporary accommodations. No one knows what the actual construction will cost by the time Cruise can get to work. One contractor gave a high View resident an initial estimate of roughly one million dollars to rebuild her home. Another neighbor got a number closer to six hundred thousand dollars. The US were insured for a maximum of about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese and Canadian goods, including building materials, are set to push costs significantly higher. Its hard line immigration policies have already sent undocumented workers, who make up a large part of the construction workforce, into hiding State Farm, California's largest insurer is seeking an emergency twenty two percent rate increase to cover fire related claims. Home insurers have been pulling out of markets across California in recent years. That trend is expected to accelerate in the wake of these latest fires. Apart from insurance payouts in their own savings, some residents will have other resources to draw on, including GoFundMe campaigns. The Ewes were able to raise more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the platform after a local news channel featured Chen discovering his wedding ring in the ashes of their home. Others are hoping for payouts from a class action lawsuit alleging that equipment owned by Southern California Edison sparked the Eton fire. The utility has acknowledged that possibility, while arguing that the causes of catastrophic fire are widespread. A state investigation into the fire's origins is ongoing. Government loans, like from the US Small Business Administration, could bridge gaps for some, but between the staggering cost and the indefinite timeline, some residents may be forced to move on. Do I want to take out loans to pay to rebuild it. I don't know, says Jennifer Casisio, whose home on Highview was destroyed. She and her husband may take their insurance money and buy something in upstate New York, where they and their young daughter won't have to wait for their neighborhood to come back. Politicians are promising to help. Besides waiving zoning reviews for like for like home builds, both the city and county have opened one stop permitting centers for fire victims. In February, LA County Supervisor Katherine Barger announced the formation of the Altadena Recovery Commission, made up of public and private sector professionals and community members, tasked with, among other charges, developing scalable housing solutions that give all residents an option to rebuild, according to a press release. In an interview, Barger says she'd like to come up with new financing options for rebuilding, such as grants that pay for expensive fire resistant features or assistance for adding guesthouses that could later be rented out for income. In the meantime, residents are continuing to take urban planning into their own hands. The Foothill Catalog Foundation, started by a group of local architects after the fires is creating a kind of modern day Seers catalog to guide those who want to rebuild with standardized, pre approved home plans inspired by the existing architecture of Altadena. The Southern California chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects is offering technical assistance to Altadena fire victims seeking to rebuild. City Lab, an urban design think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, has launched a design competition to create affordable fire resistant home models in partnership with the city. For many High View residents, building back together might be their best shot at making it home. On a recent Tuesday night, about thirty neighbors gathered over zoom and in a conference room at PBWS Architects, where Lansdowne, wearing a T shirt emblazoned with Altadena eighteen eighty seven, shared the plans he'd create aided for his own house and potentially for others. He'd rendered a three D version of Ain's design, largely identical to the original, but with slightly wider doorways, a thicker roof, and a new side door to the garage. The hope, he said, was to find efficiencies among the rebuilders perhaps by buying expensive windows and doors in bulk, or using prefab materials that could be ordered at once. A volley of questions returned, was that beam there before? Where did the closet go? Lansdowne answered his neighbors patiently, at one point deadpanning that his house had burned down five weeks ago, so he hadn't gotten to every last detail. The room erupted in laughter. This is all very encouraging, one resident said, drawing murmurs of agreement. It's easy to get very discouraged with the whole process and the absolutely annoying, endless details. Until today, it's still early days. Lansdowne hasn't gotten his plans approved by the county yet, a process he fears will be harder than leaders have promised, given the age of the designs he's trying to revive. Both he and Kim You acknowledge there's only so much they'll be able to do to restore their neighborhood, given them many countervailing forces. But they're certain that Altadena should and can rebuild. As a member of the volunteer town council, use as high views strain of peer to peer planning could be exported to other parts of the area, any place where solidarity feels easier than going it alone. Working alongside her neighbors has been a respite from the dizzying mix of grief and uncertainty she and her family have been living in since January. Nothing is the same, she says. We just really miss our block.