L.A. issues first rebuilding permits as fire recovery accelerates
The initial round of federal cleanup finished in record time, and experts say the permitting process appears to be outpacing other blazes as well.
PACIFIC PALISADES, California — Ben and Ellie Perlman were standing on the roof of their two-story house, watching the blaze barrel toward their neighborhood, when they made the decision.No matter what happens, they promised each other, we’re going to rebuild.Subscribe for unlimited access to The PostYou can cancel anytime.SubscribeIt was an abstract commitment. Flames had not yet swallowed the new house they had moved into just nine months earlier. They hadn’t seen their Pacific Palisades block entirely leveled. And they hadn’t fully reckoned with what it would mean to start over.But 2½ months after the Los Angeles firestorms, the Perlmans are following through on their rooftop resolution. They are poised to be among the first group of families to receive rebuilding permits and break ground, a milestone moment in the timeline of disaster recovery.“Now that the house burned down, it hasn’t changed our resolve,” Ben Perlman said. “This is our community, this is our home and we’re committed to it.”The first batch of permits comes as officials here have prioritized speed in response to the unprecedented disaster, which spawned fires that destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County in January. The initial round of federal cleanup finished in record time, and experts say the permitting process appears to be outpacing other incidents as well.Follow Climate & environmentThe city so far has green-lit the rebuilding of four properties in the Palisades, an affluent neighborhood near the Pacific Ocean, and has more — including the Perlmans’ — in the pipeline, days away from final approval. Lawmakers in Los Angeles County, which issues permits for parcels outside city limits, including the heavily affected community of Altadena, say they expect their first applications to be granted soon.The progress signals the beginning of a new, important phase.“The first permit is a sign of the road back,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and chief executive of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities navigate rebuilding. “Now, instead of being in response mode, you’re starting toward a new tide coming in — one of hope and recovery that gains momentum. You can’t have momentum without a first.”‘Follow me’After moving from the East Coast and bouncing around a few neighborhoods in the area, the Perlmans finally settled in the Alphabet Streets district of the Palisades. They walked their Yorkie to the coffee shop most mornings and enrolled their 2-year-old daughter in a local temple’s early-childhood program.“We felt safe, we felt respected,” said Ben Perlman, who runs corporate strategy for his family’s retail business. “It’s hard to put a pin in it and explain exactly what that feeling is, but it felt good. It felt like home.”Within days of finding out their house burned, they had contacted their contractor to discuss rebuilding plans.“I don’t think they hesitated for a minute,” said Oran Belillti, owner of Ortam Construction, which built the five-bedroom, 4,100-square-foot modern home that the Perlmans moved into last year.Because they had recently built their home and opted to reuse the already approved plans, the Perlmans’ postfire application was fast-tracked under emergency state and city orders.They began submitting their paperwork in mid-February and less than a month later received word that their permit was in the final stage of the process — a progression that was roughly four times faster than when they first built the house. They’re now awaiting a final inspection of their cleared-off lot and hope to begin construction soon.What comes next is far less certain.Unsettled debates about the future of infrastructure in the area — whether the local utility will move power lines underground, for example — could eventually delay rebuilding work. And even once the house is finished, there’s still the matter of moving back: Will the surrounding area still be littered with toxic fire remains? Will the rest of the neighborhood transform into an active construction zone?“There are many more questions than answers right now,” Perlman said. “But I feel it’s important for somebody to step out into that void and say, ‘I’m going to figure it out. We are building, follow me.’”Perlman helped launch 1Pali, a grassroots group focused on facilitating in-person gatherings for the fire-scattered community. He wants to lead by example. If others see his family rebuilding, he hopes, maybe they’ll follow suit.“There are a lot of people who are still on the fence,” said Belillti, the builder. “If they see that, wow, there’s already a house going up in the Alphabet Streets, I think they’re going to say, ‘Well, if that guy can do it, we can start to do it, too.’”Across the street from the Perlmans, Jeff Scruton is also moving forward. The 44-year resident of the Palisades decided to choose from a list of preapproved architectural plans rather than rebuild his home as it was — another option for residents whose homes were not built recently but who are still hoping to expedite the process. His builder expects to begin work in October and finish a year later. Scruton was heartened to hear of the Perlmans’ progress.“The more people who are doing that,” he said, “the better.”‘A wicked problem’In Paradise, a northern California town almost completely destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, staff in the Building Resiliency Center still ring a bell and cheer for every new permit issued.In the local vernacular, residents celebrate whenever they see the frame of a house “go vertical,” rising from the foundation and beginning to take shape. Nearly 19,000 structures burned, most of them homes.“I will see a home go vertical and it changes what my street looks like,” said Jen Goodlin, the executive director of Rebuild Paradise, a nonprofit that supports the town’s recovery. “It takes away from the devastated look. That burned-out empty-looking space now has something in it.”For Los Angeles, places like Paradise contain messages from the future. On the surface, the two couldn’t be more different — an international metropolis in one of the country’s most populous regions and a remote town in the mountain foothills — but residents of both now know what it’s like to see their community burn. And more than six years into recovery, those in Paradise know what it takes to move back.“Someone has to be willing to take the step,” Goodlin said. “Not only does it give hope, it creates camaraderie. It doesn’t matter who your neighbors are, if they choose to come back to an area that’s disaster-impacted, you have this common ground. It breaks down all these barriers between humans.”Los Angeles issued its first rebuilding permit on March 5, just 57 days after fires broke out in the Palisades and Altadena.Elected leaders in California and Los Angeles have been under intense local and federal pressure to oversee a rapid rebuild, and they have faced criticism from some who say their approach has been scattered and disjointed.Traci Park, a Los Angeles city council member, said at a recent meeting that the number of permits issued so far “doesn’t seem like very many” and that the city risks “losing our audience if we make this any harder for people.”It’s difficult to compare disasters, since each one occurs in a specific local context, but Los Angeles’s early pace is, despite the scrutiny, significantly faster than four recent major fires analyzed by the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.Paradise issued its first permit 78 days after the fire, though progress plateaued in subsequent months. In Shasta County, California, it took 91 days following the Carr Fire. In suburban Denver, 95 days elapsed after the Marshall Fire. And on Maui, it took 267 days for officials to approve the first permit after fires razed much of Lahaina in 2023. After one year, the study shows, none of the jurisdictions had approved permits for more than a third of affected houses.Officials in L.A. seem to have “responded well to lessons learned in other places,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of the fire rebuilding analysis. Policies mandating expedited permitting and lifting certain environmental regulations signal a focus on moving quickly, Rumbach said.The key, he added, will be balancing speed with deliberation, so that the process is equitable for all impacted Angelenos and minimizes displacement.Thompson, of After the Fire, said every community must define its own measurements of a successful rebuild. If Los Angeles carries on at its current pace, 80 percent of residents could return in about five years, she estimated. She has visited both fire zones three times and said the region could be the model of recovery.“It’s the land of doers, of producers, of organizers,” Thompson said.In the Palisades, Perlman visits his block at least once a week. The last of his lot’s debris was removed Friday. It is now blank slate. He’s done an informal survey of his neighbors and found that nearly everyone is committed to rebuilding.His family feels fortunate to have the means to return, and Perlman said the community must support residents who are underinsured, who might struggle to come back. Some of those displaced include retirees without the assets to cover the gap between insurance and reality; others had no insurance and could be forced to sell.Rebuilding is “a wicked problem,” he said — full of complexity and challenges. But in conversations with others, he’s trying to keep focused on the big picture: “We want to rebuild, we want to get back into our houses as soon as possible,” he said. “We can’t lose sight of that.”At the family’s rental home in Brentwood, the Perlmans’ 2-year-old talks about everything she misses: her toys, her bed, “the burned house.”“We miss the burned house, too,” Perlman tells her. “We’re going to build another one.”
