‘Criminally reckless’: why LA’s urban sprawl made wildfires inevitable – and how it should rebuild

 

‘Criminally reckless’: why LA’s urban sprawl made wildfires inevitable – and how it should rebuild

 

A century of foolhardy development, including public subsidies for rebuilding in the firebelt, hugely contributed to this tragedy, writes our architecture critic. LA must rethink – and build upwards not outwards

 

Oliver Wainwright

Wed 15 Jan 2025 16.49 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/15/criminally-reckless-la-wildfires-urban-sprawl

 

‘Crime don’t climb” is one of the glib mottoes long used by Los Angeles real estate agents to help sell the multimillion dollar homes in the hills that surround the sprawling metropolis. Residents of the lush ridges and winding canyons can rest assured, in their elevated green perches – safely removed from the smog-laden, supposedly crime-ridden flatlands beneath. What the realtors neglect to mention, however, is that, while crime rarely ascends the hills, flames certainly do. And that the very things that make this sun-soaked city’s dream homes so attractive – lush landscaping, quaint timber construction, raised terrain and narrow, twisting lanes – are the very things that make them burn so well. They create blazing infernos that, as we have seen over the past week, are tragically difficult to extinguish.

 

LA’s ferocious wildfires have seen an area about three times the size of Manhattan incinerated. At least 12,000 homes have burned to the ground and 150,000 people have been evacuated, as entire neighbourhoods become smouldering ruins. Twenty-five people have died, 24 more are missing. Estimates suggest the cost of damage and economic losses could reach $250bn, making it the costliest wildfire in US history – mainly due to the flames torching some of the highest-value real estate in the country. And it’s not over yet. The city is bracing for further destruction, as weather forecasts suggest winds might pick up again.

 

With winds of 10mph, I'm a firefighter. When they're at 30mph, I'm an observer

 

Media coverage has had the air of a Hollywood disaster movie, as helicopters swoop through dark red skies while the list of charred celebrity homes grows, and the palm fronds are left blackened. Mel Gibson lost his $14.5m Malibu mansion while recording a Joe Rogan podcast. Anthony Hopkins’s colonial pile in Pacific Palisades was reduced to a scorched brick chimney. Bella Hadid posted about the loss of her 11-bathroom childhood home, in the inauspiciously named Carbon Canyon. There were Ballardian scenes of bulldozers sweeping abandoned Porsches off the streets, while imprisoned firefighters – temporarily released from jail to battle the blazes for around $10 a day – risked their lives to prevent the inferno from consuming further luxury properties.

 

Celebrity mansions have made most of the headlines, but fire doesn’t discriminate. Most of the 200 mobile homes of the Palisades Bowl trailer park went up in flames too. Across town, the Eaton fire ripped through the mixed-income community of Altadena, ravaging more than 14,000 acres of homes, schools, churches and businesses. It has been a shocking, saddening spectacle – but also one that was entirely predictable. Blame has been variously hurled at water mismanagement and fire department budget cuts, but little could have been done to stop these blazes. After a century of misguided urban development and flagrant disregard for climate change, it was only a question of when they would ignite.

 

This disaster has been on the cards for decades. In his 1995 essay, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, the late activist and urban theorist Mike Davis charted how generations of unbridled residential construction in the fire-prone hills had created the perfect conditions for a firestorm. He railed against the “rampant uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs” which saw timber-framed homes “scattered like so much kindling across isolated hilltops and ridges”. The forests of southern California are supposed to burn as part of their natural cycle, he argued, and it was criminally reckless of the authorities not only to allow but actively incentivise development in such fire-prone areas.

 

The region’s extraordinary fire hazard, he pointed out, is shaped by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the Santa Ana winds, the strong, dry gusts that blow in towards the coast from the north-east. The valleys and gorges around LA act as giant bellows, accelerating the fire winds as they are funnelled through the landscape, made hotter and drier by the climate crisis. Over the last week, these winds have reached more than 80mph, blowing embers from ridge to ridge and street to street, making the fires virtually impossible to contain. As one emergency responder put it: “At 10 miles per hour, I’m a firefighter. At 30 miles per hour, I’m an observer.” Any higher, another added, you’re just a wind sock.

 

But there’s no fire without fuel and ignition, and the relentless march of homes and cars into the tinder-dry hills has provided both. The foundations were laid over a century ago, as LA’s population boomed 13-fold, from 170,000 in 1900 to 2.2m by 1930. People were drawn west by the promise of owning their own wooden bungalow in a garden of earthly delights, a land of warm winters and citrus trees in every back yard.

 

The city sprawled outwards and upwards, as new arrivals sought their own piece of Eden, searching for “thickets of privacy”, as the late architecture critic Reyner Banham put it, away from dense urban life. Where people went, fires followed. And every time, the official response only exacerbated the situation. “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale,” Davis writes, “as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire victims.”

 

Warnings were ignored. In 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, designer of the California state park system, suggested that 10,000 acres of Malibu mountains and beaches be preserved as a public park. Instead, the land was flogged to “wealthy pyrophiles” as theorist Davis calls them, to build their fire-prone retreats. Many have burned and been rebuilt several times since.

 

“The Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidisation of firebelt suburbs,” Davis adds, describing how the aftermath of one 1950s blaze saw Malibu declared a federal disaster area, and affected homeowners offered tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, which simply fuelled the danger. After another 1970s fire, he notes, many rebuilding homeowners were exempted from the new standards governing water pressure and width of access roads – factors that have made blazes even harder to contain.

 

Could this moment finally be a watershed, forcing LA to retreat from its firebelt, rather than continually build into it? The policy of fire suppression has led to enormous buildups of flammable vegetation, or fuel, much exacerbated by the proliferation of invasive species. The area’s native chaparral (scrubland coverage of shrubs, bushes, and small trees) has always burned as part of the ecological cycle, rejuvenating itself and the soil in the process – a natural phenomenon that was carefully managed by Indigenous groups for centuries.

 

And nature, it seems, can cope with fire. Lodgepole pines, which grow in the mountains around LA, have cones that open in response to fire, releasing their well-protected seeds. The seeds of manzanita shrubs only start to grow when the ground above them burns, pushing new shoots up through the ashy soil. Fauna benefit too. Rodents take advantage of the open ground to forage for seeds; rabbits munch on green shoots; birds of prey hunt across the now open ground, looking for lizards, snakes and rodents; deer populations tend to grow at the edges of burned land, where they use surviving chaparral for cover from predators, while eating the fresh new vegetation.

 

Suppressing this cycle has not only harmed the local ecology, but allowed vast amounts of fuel to accumulate, massively increasing the severity of fires when they finally ignite. Half-century-old chaparral, full of dead mass, burns with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old vegetation. The extreme fires that follow change the nature of the soil, making flooding, erosion and landslides much more likely when the rains return.

 

Rather than simply rebuild, as these fire-ravaged areas have done time and again, the cataclysmic events of recent days should trigger a rethink as to how the city could grow back. The insurance industry is already reticent to underwrite homes in fire zones, and there are questions over whether they will foot the multibillion dollar reconstruction process. Building codes are also likely to change, making construction in these areas even more expensive.

 

Rather than simply look to technological fixes, introduce bigger fire breaks around residential areas, and conduct more controlled burns, this could be an opportunity to fundamentally shift the suburban mindset of LA. The city’s pyrophilic urban form has been enshrined in zoning codes for decades: almost 80% of its area is exclusively zoned for single-family homes, pushing new development ever further out into the firebelt.

 

There have been paltry attempts to increase density, such as allowing the back yard development of accessory dwelling units, essentially little sheds, but they are a drop in the ocean – and are often just used as guest rooms or Airbnbs. As Char Miller, author of Burn Scars, a history of wildfire suppression in the US, puts it, the adage should be: “Build up, not out” – building in higher density, away from fire zones rather than sprawling into them. He cites the example of flood-prone San Antonio, where the city brought homeowners out of the floodplains, “ratcheting up safety as the top priority rather than growth”.

 

In LA, there is already pressure to rebuild as quickly as possible, with mayor Karen Bass issuing an executive order this week to “clear away red tape”. But, as the former head of the federal emergency management agency, Craig Fugate, has said: “A house that gets destroyed is not an affordable home.” It’s not a sustainable one either. The city needs greater urban density, not more firebelt bungalows. Ironically, it might be the inability of the insurance industry to pay up that finally forces LA to change.