Los Angeles is racing at breakneck speed to rebuild after the most destructive fire in the city's history. It's a pace so publicly linked to the 2028 Summer Olympics that Gov. Gavin Newsom referred to the global event. such as “Recovery Games”.
But in the race for gold, public safety is being pushed aside. This massive reconstruction now has more to do with damage control than prevention. The tone was set almost immediately.
Just 24 hours after the Palisades Fire started in January 2025, with homes still burning and firefighters stretched to their limits, Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass toured the burned area. The visit itself was unusual: Active fire scenes are not usually settings for political tours. Their presence underscored criticism they already faced for a bungled response, including the lack of clear public warnings ahead of historic 100 mph winds. No live news conference was held before the storm, a break from past emergencies of this scale.
Bass was actually in Africa when the fire broke out, a fact unknown to many outside his inner circle. She was unresponsive during a critical hour of the disaster while attending a reception at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Accra, Ghana, and was unable to communicate reliably during her 22-hour trip back to Los Angeles, as I report in my upcoming book, “Torched.” Newsom had been preoccupied with planning a visit by then-President Biden to appoint the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla National Monuments.
“When they first toured the damage, they talked about the Olympics and federal funding,” a city official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Losing Palisades hurt them politically. Losing the Olympics would be game over.”
Game over, unless they changed the rules.
A few days later, with flames still raging in the Palisades and Altadena, which had been affected by the Eaton Fire, the governor unveiled a state “Marshall Plan,” invoking postwar reconstruction as if nature had accepted peacetime conditions. Permitting times were reduced to less than 30 days. Environmental reviews, intended to examine where and how construction should take place on high-risk land, were suspended.
Houses were allowed to be rebuilt closer together—“taller and longer,” as Bass explained—often in the same fire corridors that had just failed.
A team of state- and city-appointed “wildfire czars” were installed to oversee the rebuilding. Long selected bass civic leader Steve Soboroffeven though he had no experience in wildfire recovery. Newsom, through his “LA Rises” Initiativenamed Lakers legend Magic Johnson, Dodgers president Mark Walter and Casey Wasserman, president of the city's Olympic organizing committee. All three were versed in sporting spectacles, not disaster mitigation.
The promise of a quick rebuild quickly became a sales pitch, most visibly in real estate listings that touted fast-track approvals and larger floor plans. “It's now easier thanks to expedited permits…this property offers a rare opportunity to create your dream home without delay,” an ad on Zillow teased. The fact that such properties were on the list hinted at something else: hundreds of survivors had already decided they would not return and had opted to sell the land beneath what were once their homes.
Investors moved quickly and approval rates were “historic,” as Newsom described it in January. About 20% of homes destroyed in Los Angeles received residential building permits in one year, according to state records, far exceeding recoveries after the 2023 fires in Lahaina, Hawaii, where only about 2% of homes had permits a year later, and in Paradise, California, where only 5% of properties had permits after the 2018 fires in Butte County. according to the Urban Institute.
Reducing bureaucracy not only accelerated the first phase of reconstruction. It triggered a speculative avalanche, optimized for quick approvals and relatively quick resale, not long-term security.
At the same time, Los Angeles has disinvested in the very system meant to defend those neighborhoods. The city has fewer fire stations today than it did in the 1960s, even as the population has nearly doubled and development has moved deeper into fire-prone terrain. Firefighters are asked to protect more homes, further away and with fewer resources.
There is a safer path.
Concrete composites, fire-resistant panels made of cement and reinforced fibers, are four times more resistant to wildfires than wood and are comparable in cost. After my recent report on these materials aired for CBS' “Sunday Morning,” my inbox was filled with messages from fire survivors, and even a local architect, asking why they had never been told such options existed.
Equally important: space. “Our urban designs are not designed to survive 70 mile per hour fires. We must increase the distance between structures,” wildfire forensic investigator Faraz Hedayati told me after examining the aftermath in the week after the Los Angeles County fires. As Hedayati explained, the dense housing associated with mid-century suburbs, development that occurred before the real threat of fire arrived, easily allowed flames to jump from structure to structure.
In a state where housing is already scarce, this is not an argument for communities to downsize. It's an argument against expanding them irresponsibly, especially when new construction does little more than meet the bare minimum of code.
Other fire-prone communities have followed the science. The Dixon Trail development in Escondido, outside San Diego, was built with increased space between houses and hardened materials that exceed code minimums. Homeowners there have been rewarded with affordable insurance premiums at a time when insurers are pulling out of much of California, including the Palisades and Altadena.
Insurance companies are not guided by feelings or politics. They follow the risk. His withdrawal is not ideological. It's financial. And it should be a warning.
In Los Angeles, where entire communities are rebuilding from the ground up, it's not too late to change course, in part because the promised speed has plateaued where it matters most. In January 2025, more than 13,000 homes were lost, but only a fraction have begun construction. Even as emergency orders dramatically reduced permitting timelines and approvals moved relatively quickly, that speed collided with a system that lacked the manpower to execute what followed. Inspectors, architects, engineers and builders have become critical points. Insurance payments keep pace with rising construction costs, leaving many homeowners unable to continue. The result is a delay, not the one leaders envisioned, but one that still offers the opportunity to rebuild smarter, not just faster.
But if we continue to rebuild for aesthetic reasons rather than resilience, we will be choosing pageantry over saving lives, racing to appear ready for the world while locking in the same failures that erased entire neighborhoods. When the next fire comes, it will be impossible to leave the legacy of that decision behind. It doesn't matter how bright the Olympic torch burns.
Jonathan Vigliotti is a national correspondent for CBS News and to Los Angeles resident.
