Is the Palisades being rebuilt to burn down again?

The Pacific Palisades is rising from the ashes of the costliest wildfire in U.S.history — but some building experts fear Los Angeles is rebuilding the wealthy enclave only to watch it burn again.Nearly 1,000 homes are under construction after the devastating January 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures.But most new homes are still going up with traditional wood framing, even as noncombustible steel- and concrete-based alternatives become increasingly available, and are now roughly on par in cost. Wildfire experts stress that wood-framed homes can still be made fire-resilient with the right protections.Some architects and builders argue the Palisades has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to go further — and question why homes rebuilt from the ground up should rely on combustible framing at all.Architect and USC Professor Geoffrey Von Oeyen said losing houses he built in past fires dramatically changed how he views wood-framed homes.“When I drive through the Palisades and I look at these wood houses, I see them differently,” he said.

“I no longer see them as just a structure for a house, but I see them as fuel for fire.”Von Oeyen compared the rebuilding effort to reconstructing a city with the same vulnerable materials after an earthquake exposed their dangers.“It would be like if our city had had a terrible earthquake,” he said.“And imagine the city is only built out of unreinforced masonry, just bricks, and it all collapsed.

And then we just rebuild again in unreinforced masonry and go even bigger and even taller in the same thing, and we don’t learn our lesson.”Entrepreneur Dustin Bramell, who lost his own home in the Palisades Fire, shares the concern.“I think that if you look at a lot of the rhetoric around the rebuild, it’s been about the speed of the rebuild,” Bramell said.“But I think that we have to balance that with the long-term view to ask, are we doing enough to make sure that this doesn’t happen again...