As Los Angeles recovers from its devastating wildfires, environmental engineers, urban planners and natural disaster experts are casting forward with visions of what could come next for neighborhoods that have been reduced to ash and rubble.
Apartment buildings could spring up where strip malls and parking lots once stood, with locals walking to ground-floor shops, offices and cafes, European-style.
The city could “infill” vertically to add affordable housing in safer downtown areas, rather than outwards with more single-family homes on fire-prone hills.
Some blocks could be turned into buffer zones, where no building was allowed. And the city’s trademark palm trees, which burn like Roman candles, could be replaced with fire-resistant native trees.
These are some of the bold ideas academics have for Los Angeles as it recovers from the Eaton and Palisades fires, which killed 28 people and damaged or destroyed nearly 16,000 structures. Together, the blazes charred 152 square kilometers — an area larger than Paris.
The city is far from rebuilding, with many people only now being allowed back to their burned neighborhoods. When construction does begin, few of the dozen experts Reuters spoke to expected their dream plans to be adopted, citing factors ranging from lack of future insurance coverage to political pressure to rebuild as before.
Nonetheless, experts in urban development, climate change and housing said Los Angeles has a chance to think outside the box. Many also said there should be no rush to rebuild. Instead, residents of Pacific Palisades and Altadena should be afforded time to decide what their future communities should look like and dream big.
“The biggest thing is how do we promote infill development in safer areas,” said Emily Schlickman, assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California, Davis, who suggests retreating from fire-prone peripheries.
Model cities
Los Angeles could learn from cities like Kobe, Japan, decimated by a 1995 earthquake, where officials imposed a two-month building moratorium, said Columbia University’s Jeffrey Schlegelmilch.
“One of the most important things is to give yourself time to come up with a robust solution,” said Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the university’s climate school.
Then there are Houston’s Harris County and the city of San Antonio, Texas, which bought up homes and properties to reduce future flood risk. In the case of Harris County, authorities offered willing sellers pre-flood market values for homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 then demolished them.
Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College in Claremont, California, is among those who point to Texas’ experience. While buying up properties in Pacific Palisades and Altadena would be costly, Miller said, it would be possible with the financial support of the city, county, state and possibly insurers.
Burned-out lots could be turned into what he envisions as fire buffer zones. While disruptive to residents, Miller believes many would be willing to use the money to relocate.
“People go, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be in danger, and you’re buying me out. Yeah, thank you,'” said Miller.
He despairs at city and state efforts to fast-track redevelopment in areas that burned at a similar housing density.
“They just pulled the plug on the moonshot,” Miller said.
Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, wants to see more green spaces like playing fields and bike paths between fire-risk areas and homes.
“It simply is unsafe to rebuild communities where they were, and retreating may be the wisest approach,” Hill wrote in a Jan. 14 essay.
A little more panache
Other experts advocate rebuilding the communities but in a way that will resist fire.
“The only way to do this impactfully is to do it communitywide so if the fire gets in, it has a hard time moving on,” said Michael Gollner, a professor of mechanical engineering at University of California, Berkeley.
Gollner tests prototype houses to see how they handle flames. Homes can be made more fire-resistant by moving a wooden fence back five feet (1.5 meters), surrounding a house with gravel and putting mesh over attic vents to stop embers, he said.
Then there is landscaping, a contentious subject for some homeowners.
“Who wants to cut down their juniper? But come a wildfire, your juniper is a torch,” said Gollner.
Ecologists suggest Los Angelenos replace palms, junipers and eucalyptus with trees that evolved to survive fire, such as California oaks. The species has thick bark that resists flames and leathery leaves that burn slowly.
“There are lots of people who are working to plant oaks, and I think there’s some effort in giving them more panache,” said Alexandra Syphard, a San Diego-based wildfire ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute.
For Hussam Mahmoud, a professor in civil and environmental engineering at Colorado State University, the key is predicting the path of future fires.
He has developed a model that calculates which buildings will burn, allowing a community to fire-harden “super spreader” structures, rather than fully adapt every house to resist wildfires.
Hardening a home begins with using metal or concrete for a roof and fire-retardant materials on the sides. Multipane windows are less likely to break from the heat and cause a home to burn from within.
“When the fires hit L.A., it’s clear that nobody knew what was going to happen, which buildings were more likely to burn,” said Mahmoud.
