We’re already seeing a battle over what gets built to replace what was destroyed. In his February article for the Free Cities Center, PRI fellow Kerry Jackson fears that Los Angeles officials will be tempted to rebuild the burned-out mostly single-family neighborhoods along the lines of the city’s master plan. That means design standards that “positively transform the urban environment,” and “require careful strategic planning and investment” to create “intelligent urban ecosystems designed for the humans that live there.” In English, it means higher densities.

So far, the approach taken by the city and county seems focused on rebuilding along the “fire-wise” principles that incorporate best practices in wildfire resilience. I braced for the worst when I saw an article in the environmentalist planning publication, Planetizen, which reported on rebuilding resources from the county’s Chief Sustainability Office and its climate resilience officer. But, per the article, the office is mainly concerned about implementing “practices like building hardening and defensible space not only help individual properties but significantly improve neighborhood-scale resilience.”

An article in the left-wing Nation magazine focused on devastation in Altadena in the San Gabriel Valley, a city settled by African Americans who fled the discrimination of the Jim Crow South. To its credit, the publication’s concern—a legitimate one, in my view—was assuring that residents there had the resources and help necessary to rebuild their community in ways that reflected the history of the city. For instance, architects are “compiling a set of plans for the types of houses typically found in Altadena—ranches, Mission style, Craftsman bungalows—and working with other architects (and, ideally, builders) to streamline the design and construction process so that displaced residents can rebuild as quickly and easily as possible.”

That’s great. But there are plenty of reasons to share Jackson’s concern. As Reuters reported in late January, “As Los Angeles recovers from its devastating wildfires, environmental engineers, urban planners and natural disaster experts are casting forward with visions of what could come next for neighborhoods that have been reduced to ash and rubble. Apartment buildings could spring up where strip malls and parking lots once stood, with locals walking to ground-floor shops, offices and cafes, European-style.” The headline calls it a “moonshot moment”—but Los Angeles needs fewer moonshots and more policies that uphold property owners’ rights to rebuild their homes as they please.

So far, most of the re-envisioning talk is just that, talk. Beyond the state exemptions from CEQA and the Coastal Act, the city of Los Angeles has waived a controversial rule that required new construction to be electric-only—overturning a ban on natural-gas appliances. Furthermore, the city is taking a lenient approach toward “non-conforming” structures, thus allowing them to be rebuilt as before as long as they don’t exceed 110% of the pre-existing size. The myriad exemptions give wide latitude for affected homeowners to rebuild, which reduces concerns that planning agencies might use the destruction as an opportunity to force a change local land-use patterns. But we’ll watch and see, especially in light of legislation that would create an agency with the authority to spend state dollars on “affordable housing” projects in fire-damaged areas.

If California is ever going to address its housing shortages, it needs to take lessons from the wildfires and get serious about reforming CEQA. The wildfires reinforced that these regulations are impediments to construction. Four months after the devastation, we’re still not seeing calls for overturning or revising the 1970 law, but lawmakers are going further than before. And Newsom even held up the budget to secure far-reaching CEQA reforms. That’s perhaps one of the few silver linings from the wildfires.