Progress on Rebuilding in the Palisades? No, Not Really.

The LA Times published a story yesterday headlined “The first home has been rebuilt in the wake of the Palisades Fire.” Here’s how the story opens:

Less than a year after 6,822 structures burned in the Palisades Fire, the first rebuilding project has reached the finish line in Pacific Palisades: a two-story showcase home located at 915 Kagawa St.

In a press release, Mayor Karen Bass announced that the home received a certificate of occupancy from the L.A. Department of Building and Safety on Friday, meaning it passed inspection and is safe to inhabit.

“Today is an important moment of hope,” Bass said in a statement. “With more and more projects nearing completion across Pacific Palisades, the City of Los Angeles remains committed to expediting every aspect of the rebuild process until every family is back home.”

Having read that, you’re probably thinking that this is one of the homes that burned down during the fire and has just been completed and certified for occupancy. As Bass said, it’s “an important moment of hope.”

Except that’s not really what happened here. If you keep reading the story sort of admits this situation is a bit different from most homes in the Palisades:

Real estate records show Thomas James Homes bought the property before it was destroyed. It sold for $3.4 million last November.

The house was built as a showcase home — an advertisement of sorts for other residents looking to rebuild.

What the Times doesn’t tell you is that the plan of the developer was always to tear the site down and rebuild it, Thomas James Homes had already submitted plans to the city for rebuilding months before the fire swept through the area in January. Spencer Pratt, who has been advocating for homeowners in the area, pointed this out in response to Mayor Bass posting a tweet about this home as a “moment of hope.”

Plans were submitted on Nov 8 2024.
Not a fire rebuild, just a developer spec from 2024. The only “MOMENT OF HOPE” is you not being Mayor a year from now.
That is how we will move forward! https://t.co/Kz9esazkzW

— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) November 22, 2025

As you can see, Mayor Bass deleted her tweet. At least she’s capable of some level of embarrassment. 

This house had plans submitted for a rebuild two months before the fire. It was going to be (mostly or completely) torn down anyway. There was probably no one living there when the fire swept through. That makes this completely different from the families who lost their homes and most of what they owned overnight back in January. Those families aren’t construction companies and didn’t have a plan for a rebuild already in the city pipeline when disaster struck. They were starting from nothing with nothing, tying to find some hotel or rental to live in while they await a check from their insurance company.

So it’s a little irritating to see Mayor Bass act like this is a great moment of hope and that it shows the city is really zooming along on construction when in fact we’re 10 months out and not a single home (that wasn’t already scheduled to be torn down) has been rebuilt.

This is on top of the fact that we’ve recently learned (and here the LA Times deserves credit) that firefighters on the scene of the Lachman fire knew it wasn’t out when they were ordered to leave. And that state park service people were on scene that night and the next day, contradicting Gov. Newsom’s claim the state had no responsibility for the fire or the site. 

Officials also appear to be lying about the type of fire involved. This was not a “holdover fire” which would have been undetectable from the surface. On the contrary, neighbors could see (and even filmed) smoke rising from the ground after the fire department left the area. Today the Times has a follow up on that story which suggests the official story coming from the LAFD is a lie.

In the weeks since federal investigators announced that the devastating Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of a smaller blaze, top Los Angeles Fire Department officials have insisted that they did everything they could to put out the earlier fire…

In an interview last month, then-Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva said that firefighters returned to the burn area on Jan. 3 — due to a report of smoke — and “cold-trailed” an additional time, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dug out hot spots.

“We went back over there again. We dug it all out again. We put ladders on it. We did everything that we could do — cold-trail again,” Villanueva told The Times on Oct. 8. “We did all of that.”…

A dispatch log obtained by The Times, however, shows that firefighters arrived at the scene that day and quickly reported seeing no smoke. They then canceled the dispatch for another engine that was on the way, clearing the call within 34 minutes. The log does not mention cold trailing. It’s unclear if crews took any other actions during the call, because the LAFD has not answered questions about it.

The city’s official position on this looks very much like a cover up. There was an after-action report generated after the Palisades fire, but that report doesn’t say much of anything about the earlier Lachman fire which reignited days later. When the LA Times pushed to know why the Board of Fire Commissioners told them to get stuffed:

“The after-action review that was presented to the commission is exactly what we asked for,” Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said at the board’s meeting on Tuesday. She said the review was only supposed to cover the first 72 hours after the Palisades fire erupted.

We’re the experts here and we don’t need to know about the previous fire and the failure to put it out. But people whose jobs aren’t on the line at the moment don’t see it that way.

Two former LAFD chief officers said the report also should have provided an examination of what might have gone wrong in the mop-up of the Lachman blaze, which investigators believe was deliberately set, as part of its “lessons learned” section.

“A good after-action report documents what happened before the incident,” said former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now emergency and crisis management coordinator for the U.S. Capitol. “The after-action report should have gone back all the way to Dec. 31.”

No s**t, Sherlock. This is clearly an attempt to downplay and ignore the actual failures which allowed this historic disaster to happen. Gavin Newsom is doing his best not to let reality interfere with his plans to run for president.

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