ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: Pressure is mounting on Los Angeles leaders to speed post-wildfire rebuilding, but they’re not exactly getting the heartwarming narratives they could use to tout their efforts. Mayor Karen Bass recently got into hot water for publicizing a model home in the Pacific Palisades as the first house to be rebuilt in the city after the fire that largely destroyed the neighborhood. An Altadena accessory dwelling unit built to replace a burnt-down garage was the first finished project on Los Angeles County’s rebuilding dashboard, but it drew little fanfare from local officials. Our new housing reporter, Liam Dillon, has reported extensively on the challenges wildfire survivors face as they figure out how to replace their lost homes. We chatted with him about where things stand more than 10 months after the destructive blazes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It seems like leaders aren’t getting the tidy scenes they’d like of survivors returning to their neighborhoods. Can you explain what they’re dealing with? There's a tremendous pull for people — fire survivors and also elected officials — to have this first house be this symbol of recovery. And recovery to happen fast, and recovery to validate, on the survivors’ side, all the time and energy and trauma they’ve had to overcome to show that, yes, this community can come back together. And then for elected officials, there's a lot of interest in showing that all the things that they've promised — faster permitting, streamlining, all this sort of stuff — are coming to fruition. And so you want a lot of emphasis and effort on getting this first house done, as you said, in this sort of tidy narrative about a returning homeowner. But what has happened, and the reality is, you have more complicated answers to this question about what the first house actually is. The first was a garage burned down, although the main house survived in Altadena, and that was rebuilt as an accessory dwelling unit — sort of a second house, or back house, where the homeowner lives on the property, but his son is the one who's going to be moving into the house. And that is a first house, but there was not the sort of celebratory elements around this that you would expect with the traditional narrative of a returning homeowner. Can you explain why Mayor Bass got into some trouble for framing this model home as the first one rebuilt in the city? There were a few reasons. I think there was no clear implication in the initial press release she put out that there was not a family that was going to move in there. And in fact, that's what I had thought. When I was doing initial interviews that afternoon about this, I was asking the developer, “OK, tell me about the family that's going to move in.” And the home builder told me, “Oh, well, we're going to use it as a showcase or as a model home.” It just became more complicated as this idea of the first house. I think people were upset that there was a celebratory element of what is essentially an advertisement for this developer being touted as the first property, No. 1. Two, the mayor was talking about how the city had streamlined permitting, and we're getting things out faster. And there was some pushback about the fact that because this project was in the works prior to the fire, it had a lot of things, boxes checked, before the fire. Therefore, it was already moving through the process. And so the idea that this started from the same footing as fire survivors was not correct. What has the rebuilding experience been like for people who aren’t developers with projects already far down the road? What I'm hearing is that, generally speaking, people believe that other issues are holding them up from rebuilding more than permitting. I'm hearing the big holdup is more so about insurance and whether people have the means to rebuild. I think we're going to need to see, as time goes on and more projects hit this pipeline, whether that will still hold true. My last project at the LA Times was to look at prior fires in the state. And we found that four of them — the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the 2018 Camp Fire, Woolsey Fire and Carr Fire — they had first homes completed between seven and nine months. And here we are now, 10 1/2 months later, after the Palisades and Eaton fires, and that's when the first home is being done. And so for all the touting, not just by Mayor Bass, but by the governor, about this being the fastest recovery to date … this is a sign, that it took 10 1/2months to finish a house, that we're no longer ahead of the game. Why is there so much pressure to rebuild so quickly? Both for symbolic and for practical reasons. For symbolic reasons, everyone talks about having their community being the same as it was, to recover, to rebuild, to do all those sorts of things, and to bring back what was lost. Practically, there is a rush to rebuild because people are going to run out of insurance coverage. And you have to be pretty far along, or all of a sudden, you're going to be in a situation where you have to pay a mortgage payment, you have to pay the rent on your temporary property and then you have to pay for any gap in rebuilding costs between what your insurance coverage allows and what the ultimate cost is. And those three sets of bills become overwhelming for people to the point that they just can't do it. As long as people have that temporary living expenses that the insurance provides, they can kind of handle things. But once that coverage goes away — typically 18 months, two years, three years after the fire — then you're in a situation where people just simply cannot afford to come back. IT’S TUESDAY AFTERNOON. This is California Playbook PM, a POLITICO newsletter that serves as an afternoon temperature check on California politics and a look at what our policy reporters are watching. Got tips or suggestions? Shoot an email to lholden@politico.com. | 
Comments
Post a Comment