When dreamy, beach-adjacent Pacific Palisades became a moonscape after the conflagration that started on Jan. 7, 2025, homes worth billions of dollars, lifetime bodies of work by musicians and artists, and prized real estate in one of the best areas of L.A. became dust. Many fire victims want to rebuild and reclaim their old community. However, it didn’t take long before the state and local leaders who had promised to move mountains to streamline the rebuilding process began to have other ideas. Instead of receiving help from Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom, they and state Democrats dragged out the permitting. And now it appears we know why.
The Palisades and Altadena fires left 15,000 structures in cinders and thousands of people without homes.
Now, using lack of housing in the state as an excuse, Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA planners are considering instituting planning changes that would play the Palisades like a game of Tetris, placing hundreds of units of low-income housing in areas where previously there had been two.
This is how Newsom put it:
Thousands of families – from Pacific Palisades to Altadena to Malibu – are still displaced, and we owe it to them to help. The funding we’re announcing today will accelerate the development of affordable multifamily rental housing so that those rebuilding their lives after this tragedy have access to a safe, affordable place to come home to.
Senate Bill 549, which is moving through the California legislature, in addition to the county’s new ideas, would put in place so-called “Resilient Rebuilding Authorities” that give these bureaucrats new taxing authority, using such things as higher property taxes, tax-increment financing, and grants to buy up burned-out land and put in low-income housing. That’s right: They’d raise the prices of the property taxes on the very people they were supposed to be helping by increasing taxes and gobbling up the Palisades and other fire-ravaged areas, and forever changing the community by infilling it with low-income apartment buildings.
Related: At This Blistering Pace, Burned Down Parts of L.A. Should Be Rebuilt in…Decades and Decades
As one fire victim, former MTV “The Hills“ star Spencer Pratt, noted, the proposed changes would reward with more responsibility the very people who botched fire preparation and the response in the first place.
“We want control over how we rebuild,“ he pleaded in a video posted to social media. “Stop attempting to land-bank our properties,“ he continued. “What we need are real solutions that allow us to maintain our dignity and ownership, not political appointees using our neighborhood as a pilot program,“ he put it.
Furthermore, he said in a video near the site of his burned-down home, the plan sounds like something developed in the faculty lounge using the Palisades as its private planning sandbox.
Respect our voice. Support our ability to rebuild—locally, and on our terms –
The Palisades pic.twitter.com/RdpXoPGwDe— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) July 16, 2025
Despite promises to the contrary, Los Angeles has approved only 25% of the permit requests made. According to the city, instead of days to get different permits, it’s actually a 55-day turnaround on some of them.
Spectrum News reported:
According to the City of Los Angeles, “more than 650 plan check applications for 440 plus unique address have been submitted.”
The city approved 220 of those applications and issued 165 permits.
But some, including property developer and former Mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, have been critical of the pace of permitting.
In a video posted to social media, Caruso said, “the permitting process is a mess people have submitted plans and are waiting months for them to be approved. The Mayor’s office says the permitting process is going twice as fast as permitting after the Camp and Woolsey Fires.”
Caruso, a Democrat who helped plan part of the Palisades as a developer, is appalled at the rate at which the permits are eeking through the City of Los Angeles planning Department.
We deserve better!
Mayor Bass has repeatedly emphasized the “rapid pace of rebuilding, including issuing permits.”
Thousands of homes were destroyed, and yet fewer than 100 building permits have been issued after six months. Does anyone believe this is rapid rebuilding?
While… pic.twitter.com/9fuUAhf8To
— Rick J. Caruso (@RickCarusoLA) July 7, 2025
There are some skeptics out there — count me as one of them — who can’t help but wonder about the timing here. The permit process has been slow enough to allow legislative Democrats and LA social engineers time to develop this plan to take over some of the nicest real estate around to run DEI housing projects. This is tantamount to running multiple urban renewal zones — take-overs of land and taxing authority — that don’t need government to take them over. Why not let people rebuild their own homes and let them move back instead of building apartment buildings?
Related: Now Karen Bass’s Pants Are on Fire, Too
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” former Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once counseled. California Democrats took the lesson to heart. Just as many cynics had feared.
Fox News personality Raymond Arroyo visited the Palisades to talk with some homeowners fighting to get permits to rebuild. One woman said they can’t heal from losing their home because every step is a fight with everyone. A man told Arroyo that he got some permits for a foundation, but one of the permits took six weeks to get after the city told him he could have it. Rinse, repeat.
And on it goes.
My @IngrahamAngle report on the fate of the Palisades after the fires. Resident Hillary Cannon: “We’ve been let down a lot by the government and the decisions they have made…”. Permits are being held up and citizens remain in limbo. @FoxNews Watch this: pic.twitter.com/MQ0JVCnkg9
— Raymond Arroyo (@RaymondArroyo) July 17, 2025
Before the fires, the Palisades had two specified low-income properties. The area also had two trailer parks and another 700 rent-controlled apartments. Under the Resilient Rebuilding Authority zones, everything now would be solely low-income. And it’s low-income based on the averages from the entire county, not the formerly luxurious Palisades.
No water in the hydrants, little prepping for fires, no mayor on duty, dragging out the permit process to get landowners to give up and sell, and now the county and state are changing the rules on the fire victims.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
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