Rebuilding After Fire

Paradise, Lahaina, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena have all suffered devastating fires in recent years. However, these types of urban fires are nothing new, although not nearly as common as they once were. The Wikipedia List of Town and City Fires has 322 urban fires identified as “major conflagrations” going back to antiquity. With climate change, we should expect more fires like these recent ones, driven by extreme winds, fueled by alternating periods of excessive rain and drought. How we rebuild will determine how bad the next fires will be and how we thrive coming out of the fire.

Emily Badger had a great piece for The New York Times Upshot about what Los Angeles could learn from the great fires of the past. She looked at how Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco rebuilt after their great fires. We can take lessons not just from these fires in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but looking further back to cities like Lübeck in the 1200s, London in 1666, and Tokyo in the first half of the 20th Century.

Lübeck – 1276

Lübeck is a port city in modern day Germany along the Baltic Sea. The city was founded originally in the 800s and then re-founded in 1143 after being razed in 1128. After its re-founding, Lübeck became wealthy and prosperous through Europe’s northern trade routes, where the city was a major port. However, the importance and wealth of the city waned as European trade shifted westward across the Atlantic after Columbus’ voyage to the Americas.

At the height of its power and wealth, Lübeck burned twice in a 25 year period, first in 1251 and then again in 1276. These fires lead to significant changes to the city’s built environment as city officials sought to prevent future fires and landowners used it as an opportunity to rebuild with their current needs in mind.

Before the fires, most buildings in Lübeck were made of wood, with framed construction not unlike what we build today. Generally, structures were two to three stories with a subterranean basement used for goods storage. Buildings were mixed-use, as were most buildings before the imposition of Euclidian Zoning, with merchants working out of their homes. Lots were relatively large with structures only partially covering the lot.

After the fire of 1251, landowners who could afford to rebuilt in stone, while other continued to build in traditional wood framing. However, after the 1276 fire, city officials in Lübeck required all buildings to be built from stone and brick, and to have fire-proof roofing materials. This prevented another major fire in Lübeck until the Allied bombings in WWII.

One other change that happened in Lübeck as the result of the fires is that many lots were subdivided. This subdivision made room for many new merchants and residents, and allowed the city to continue growing over the coming centuries.

In addition, the size of buildings on the lots grew. Due to the changing nature of trade in Europe through the 1200s, merchants in Lübeck needed more storage space for their goods.

These changes as a result of the fires in Lübeck in 1251 and 1276 set the stage for the city to become of the wealthiest in Europe in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Without the fires, Lübeck would have still been an important trading port, but likely would have not risen to the heights of power and wealth that it did.

London – 1666

London, and its Great Fire, are obviously better known than Lübeck. The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed about 80% of the building in The City of London (the original medieval part of London within the original Roman city walls.)

London had originally been built as a Roman town on the banks of the River Thames in 47AD. (There is evidence of settlement in the area going back as far as 4800BCE, but modern-day London was founded in 47AD by the Romans.) As the city grew, the original narrow alleyways and cart paths continued to be used, with buildings butting up against the public rights of way.

As the city grew more prosperous and crowded, landowners needed to maximize their building sizes to make room for the added people and commerce. They started building beyond their property lines on the upper stories, expanding their square footage into the unused air rights above the alleyways and roads. As buildings got taller and built further out over the alleyways, buildings on opposite sides of the street got closer to one another, almost touching in some places.

Prior to the fire of 1666, buildings were made to wood with thatch roofs. This made the buildings like tinderboxes, and fires were quite common.

Because fire was so common, there was a well organized volunteer fire fighting force in every London neighborhood at the time of the Great Fire. The primary technique for fighting fires at the time was to create fire breaks by tearing down entire rows of buildings to prevent the spread of fires. This is not significantly different from modern wildland firefighting techniques of digging dozer lines to create a fire break. However, in the case of the Great Fire of 1666, indecisiveness on behalf of the city’s mayor to order the creation of fire breaks delayed their creation too late, after the fire was truly out of control.

With about 80% of The City destroyed, including about 13,500 homes, a massive rebuilding effort was needed. A number of people put forth plans to entirely replot the city in an orderly manor not unlike Haussmann’s renovation of Paris two hundred years later. However, these grand plans did not come to fruition because they were too labor intensive and time consuming with the majority of workers in London having been displaced by the fire.

However, just four months after the fire, the Rebuilding of London Act was passed to speed the rebuilding and help ensure future fires would not spread throughout the city. The Rebuilding Acts (a second one was passed in 1670) made some significant changes to the city’s built environment and the commerce of rebuilding. Like in Lübeck, the first change the Rebuilding Acts instituted was to require the exterior of buildings to be made from brick and stone, instead of wood and thatch. The Rebuilding Acts also limited the height of buildings based on the occupancy and proximity to different sized roads. Buildings rebuilt sine the fire that did not meet these standards were ordered to be torn down.

The Rebuilding Acts also widened some roads throughout the city. One of the biggest problems during the fire was that fire fighters could not get through all of the people trying to flee. This is not unlike firefighters at the Palisades Fire needing to use bulldozers to clear abandoned cars from Sunset Blvd so the fire trucks could get through.

The final main change the Rebuilding Acts instituted was to set prices for goods and labor for rebuilding in order to prevent price gouging. If workers didn’t abide by the set labor rates, they could be imprisoned for a month. However, no such protections were granted to renters and tenants who were displaced or upon their return to their former homes.

These changes to the built environment have endured to this day, with many of the buildings rebuilt after the 1666 fire still standing, even surviving the Blitz. This is in part what makes The City one of the wealthiest and most desirable parts of London today.

Tokyo – 1945

Tokyo, like Lübeck, suffered two great fires within about 25 years of each other. First, in 1923 the Great Kantō Earthquake triggered a fire that led to the destruction of a third of the buildings in Tokyo at the time. Then, in 1945, the city was destroyed again, more thoroughly this time, by the Allied fire bombings towards the end of WWII.

Tokyo, along with many Japanese cities, had a long history of fires. Traditional Japanese construction consists of wood framing, paper walls, and tile roofs. These buildings were very susceptible to fire and burned on a regular basis. There is a line in the Shogun television show about it that says, “There are also tsunami that come from the sea and fire that break out in the villages and cities. It is why our housing are built to go up as quickly as they come down.”

In the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake and resulting fire, proposals were put forth to modernize the urban planning of Tokyo, much like the plans put forth for London after the 1666 fire. However, these plans didn’t come to fruition at the time due to the time and expense it would take. Existing landowners wanted to rebuild quickly to get back to a sense of normality.

As a result, much of Tokyo was rebuilt as it was, using traditional Japanese building techniques once again. However, some changes to the city were made, with up to 10% of each private parcel being made available for “Land Readjustments” to allow for wider roads, added fire breaks, and to build parks. This process of Land Readjustments and the idea of creating amore modern planned city would become increasingly important after WWII.

In the post-war period, the Allied powers running Japan and their Japanese partners focused on rebuilding the country’s industrial sector, while leaving the rebuilding of homes up to the property owners. This lead largely to an eclectic collection of buildings throughout Tokyo as people built whatever they could afford on their old pieces of land.

Through this rebuilding process, city officials continued to use the Land Readjustment process to expand roads and build more parkland, but for the most part there was not a master planned rebuilding of the city.

In many ways it is this lack of planning that provides Tokyo its unique feel, quite different than most other large cities around the world. Tokyo continues to be a city made up of unique neighborhoods, largely ordered around neighborhoods that date back to the Edo period.

Of these cities, Tokyo is the one that changed the least due to its repeated destruction, largely because of the long history of natural disasters and rebuilding in Japanese cities.

Los Angeles – 2025

At the end of the first week of 2025, Los Angeles was hit with the two most destructive urban fires in the region’s history. The Palisades Fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades along the cost. It destroyed 6,837 buildings and damaged another 1,017, whiling killing 12 people. The Eaton Fire in Altadena was even more destructive, destroying 9,418 structures and damaging an additional 1,073, while killing 17 people. These damage assessments will only grow as the full extent of the destruction is determined.

While these fires are still burning, the efforts to rebuild are already underway. However, unlike cities in the past, the efforts thus far have been aimed at rebuilding these communities exactly as they were, not allowing them to change to meet current needs or help prevent future fires.

At the state level, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order just five days after the start of the fires that suspended the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Coastal Act to speed up rebuilding efforts. However, these suspended requirements only apply to new buildings that are no more than 110% of the footprint and height of the buildings destroyed by fire. That means that new buildings will not be able to substantially change to meet modern demands, in communities that were largely built out more than a half century ago.

At the region level, things are even worse. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has requested that the State suspend many of the recent housing laws passed to address California’s ongoing housing crisis. Namely, the Board of Supervisors wants to: suspend the State’s Density Bonus Law, which would allow more affordable homes to be built in the fire damaged areas; curtail the ability for homeowners to split their lots to build two homes instead of one, as happened throughout Lübeck after the 1276 fire; and to no longer permit Accessory Dwelling Units for homes in the fire affected areas. In addition, the Board of Supervisors wants to enforce current parking standards on rebuilt properties, even if those properties do not substantially change uses from what destroyed in the fires. In other words, the Board of Supervisors seeks to make no changes to these communities to address either the risk of future fire or the ongoing needs of the community, unless it’s to build more parking and further entrench the car dependence of the region.

Currently, little is being done to address the immediate housing needs of the tens of thousands of residents displaced from their homes by the fires, or to make the region more resilient to future fires. Communities throughout the LA region should be building homes as quickly as possible to house the displaced and ensure there is sufficient housing capacity to accommodate the next wave of fire-displaced residents, because this will happen again.

Governor Newsom has already shown he knows what it takes to rebuild quickly, suspend onerous regulations that slow construction. If CEQA and the Coastal Act can be suspended for a fire emergency, they should be suspended for the ongoing housing crisis as well.

To date, no one has suggested changing the way we build in high fire hazard areas. Homes built to the Passive House standard survived the Palisades Fire, while all of the traditional stick-framed buildings around them burned. Most importantly for these buildings is the airtightness standard, which ensures that burning embers cannot be blown into the interior of the walls or roof areas. Similarly, nobody has suggested the use of non-combustible materials for the exterior of buildings in these areas.

As I’ve talked about recently, it is difficult to incrementally grow a neighborhood that has high home values. However, when homes are destroyed by fire, the economics of building back greater completely change. Splitting a lot, or building two or three homes in place of one becomes relatively easy, if it’s allowed. While these fires are a terrible tragedy for a great many people, they are also an opportunity for the region to grow and address some of the ongoing problems plaguing the State. If only it was allowed and encouraged.