To Rebuild Post-Fire, Los Angeles Should Look to Singapore
Months after the fires, Los Angeles is beginning to rebuild, but current proposals don’t address the city’s long-standing housing issues. LA should emulate Singapore, which took a devastating fire as a cue to revolutionize its housing market.
Excavators demolish fire-damaged homes in the Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, on Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
After Los Angeles suffered some of the most devastating wildfires in the city’s fire-prone history earlier this year, there has been a flurry of activity aimed at a rapid recovery.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass declared that LA would “aggressively” rebuild, and signed city ordinances to stop landlords from price-gouging displaced renters and ban evictions of survivors for a year. Through his nonprofit Steadfast LA, failed billionaire mayoral candidate Rick Caruso offered prefab homes to survivors who can’t afford to rebuild. Building permits are also being speedily approved. After Governor Gavin Newsom nearly immediately slashed environmental regulations, some reconstruction has already begun without testing the soil for toxic substances.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, in tandem with UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, recently released a 175-page recovery plan that touches on everything from clearing debris to rebuilding infrastructure in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods, where an estimated 12,500 housing units were burned down.
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