One Year After the Palisades Fire
One year ago, leaders stood in front of cameras and promised that the Palisades would be rebuilt quickly, safely, and stronger than before. They promised urgency. They promised support. But one year later, we have to ask: did they deliver on these promises? Where are the people who lost their homes today? And should we feel sure that this won’t happen again?
January 7th marked the one-year anniversary of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires that ripped through Log Angeles County, destroying over 16,000 structures and taking 31 lives.[1] It was horrible to watch, especially if you were a resident of southern California, as so many people lost their homes. Palisades specifically burned for 31 days before it was fully extinguished, causing billions of dollars in damage. In the immediate aftermath, officials declared a state of emergency, promised swift action, and assured residents that rebuilding would not become another bureaucratic nightmare. But here we are one year later, and unfortunately none of those things seem to be the case.
Let’s look at the promises that were made and how delivering on those promises has been going so far.
Promise 1: “We will cut red tape and fast-track rebuilding.”
At the time of the Palisades fire, leaders promised to cut down on bureaucracy and make the process easy for fire victims to get back into their homes.
Now, it’s true that Governor Newsom signed executive orders to suspend certain regulations like CEQA and the Coastal Act.[2] But the executive orders didn’t, and legally couldn’t, fix the core bottlenecks in the process created by all of California’s compounded regulatory burden. The executive orders signaled urgency, but they didn’t fundamentally change how rebuilding actually works on the ground. Rebuilding and prevention require permanent statutory reform. For example, executive orders can direct state agencies to prioritize work, but they cannot rewrite local zoning laws, override city and county permitting authority, force agencies to approve permits faster, or add staff, capacity, or funding automatically. This means that just saying the words “streamlining,” or declaring it in an executive order, only applies to a narrow portion of cases, but no single authority owns the full process or can simply approve thousands of permits. So, while leaders talked about fast-tracking, homeowners were still stuck navigating the same fragmented system.
Where is progress on this promise today? As of this January, less than a dozen homes have been rebuilt, and only 900 homes are currently under construction.[3] That roughly just 17 percent of the total 16,000 structures destroyed by the fires. The City of Los Angeles has received more than 3,000 applications for permits to rebuild, but under half of them have actually been issued.[4] Clearly, the issue is not a lack of interest in rebuilding, as thousands of homeowners have applied to do just that, but the process hasn’t changed substantially to fast-track homeowners’ ability to recover. So, when leaders point to executive orders or emergency actions as proof that they acted decisively, the numbers tell a different story. If cutting red tape was the goal, the tape is still very much intact – and for thousands of families, it’s still standing between them and home.
Promise 2: “Residents will be supported and not left on their own.”
Alongside promises to cut red tape, leaders also promised something more personal: that residents who lost their homes would be supported, that they wouldn’t be left to navigate this disaster alone. They were told that there would be clear guidance, coordinated help across agencies, support with insurance and rebuilding, and help with temporary housing. But one year later, many residents say support was inconsistent, fragmented, and often conditional on how well they could manage the process themselves.
Take the story of Miriam Engel, whose home in Palisades was rendered uninhabitable after the fire. She said bluntly, “We were failed at every level — local, state and federal.”[5] She’s still paying mortgages on a burned lot and taxes on property she can’t live in, and she says that herself and other fire victims just cannot catch a break in the entire recovery process. Can you imagine watching your house be destroyed, or uninhabitable, and still being expected to pay property taxes?
A key frustration stemmed from that fact that instead of a single point of contact, homeowners were often expected to act as their own case managers – coordinating between city departments, state agencies, utilities, insurers, contractors, and lenders. The number one complaint of fire victims has been about their battle with insurance companies to receive financial relief from their claims.
But let’s be clear, this wasn’t just an insurance company problem, it was a policy problem. I talked about this last year at the time of the wildfires, so if you want the details on our state’s insurance crisis, you should go check that article out, but in short: California’s regulatory framework has made it difficult for insurers to price wildfire risk accurately or adjust rates quickly, pushing many carriers to reduce coverage or exit high-risk areas altogether. That left fewer options, slower payouts, and more reliance on last resort plans that weren’t designed to handle disasters at this scale.
As private insurers pulled back from wildfire-prone areas, state leaders repeatedly pointed homeowners to California’s FAIR Plan as proof that no one would be left without coverage. The California FAIR Plan is the state’s insurer of last resort – which means it exists to provide basic fire insurance to homeowners who can’t get coverage from the private market. It is state mandated, but funded by private insurers, and it’s supposed to be a unique option in instances when private insurers refuse to insure your home or cancel your policy because of wildfire risk.[6]
But the FAIR Plan is not comprehensive insurance. It offers limited coverage, higher premiums, and high deductibles – which makes sense, because you should be getting insurance coverage from a private insurer first. After the fires, many FAIR Plan policyholders reported slow claims processing, disputes over coverage limits, and low payouts.[7] That’s because the FAIR Plan was never designed to carry this much risk. But as California’s regulatory environment made it harder for private insurers to stay in the market, more and more homeowners were pushed into the FAIR Plan, concentrating risk into one plan, and thus leaving homeowners stranded after such a large disaster. So, what we’re seeing is that the FAIR Plan was meant to be a safety net, but California turned it into a substitute for a functioning insurance market – and that is a result of bad policy.
Promise 3: “We will rebuild stronger and safer.”
The last promise was a forward-looking one that said this tragedy would be a turning point. Our leaders promised that the failures which led to so much destruction would be fixed, and that communities like this wouldn’t be left vulnerable again. Specifically, this referred better wildfire prevention, stronger vegetation management, hardened infrastructure, and faster, more coordinated emergency response. But one year later, it’s fair to ask whether anything has fundamentally changed.
California continues to struggle with basic wildfire prevention measures. Vegetation management and fuel reduction remain slow, fragmented, and bogged down in permitting and environmental review. In 2025, California Republicans put forward the majority of wildfire prevention proposals, focusing on cutting CEQA requirements to speed up vegetation management.[8] But environmentalists were hesitant to cut CEQA regulations, leaving us in the same position that we were in last January.
At the same time, critical infrastructure vulnerabilities remain. Think of what a mess our power grids are! Aging power lines, limited grid hardening in high-risk zones, and inconsistent enforcement of defensible space rules continue to leave communities exposed. This poses a huge fire risk, as 10% of wildfires between 2016 and 2020 were caused by electrical power. In 2022, extreme heat caused power lines to sag and spark fire.[9] We need a fundamental overhaul of our grid to lower this risk, but what happens more often is power companies just shut off power in the hottest days of summer – which is a band-aid, not a real fix.
What’s most troubling about all of this is that the same conditions that made the Palisades fire so destructive still exist today. Dry brush remains unmanaged. Insurance markets are weaker, not stronger. Insurance companies are moving out of California entirely. And rebuilding is happening without a serious, transparent reassessment of whether communities are actually safer than they were before.
This Matters in an Election Year
There are two fundamental reasons why we need to assess these promises. The first is that this has a real human impact. One year later, most families who were affected by the fires are still not home. Some are renting far from their communities, some have drained savings just waiting for approvals, and others have given up entirely, selling their lots rather than waiting years to rebuild.[10] Bad policies have negative impacts on real people, and if we care about the people around us, our fellow Californians, then we should not be content to let our state leaders make promises to vulnerable people and then fail to deliver on them. These fires exploded the way they did because of policy failures of our government – which I covered last year and you should go back and reread if you missed it – and they are now failing to correct the damage they caused. That is unacceptable.
Which leads us to the second reason this matters, and that is because this year is an election year. This year, voters will once again be asked to trust the same leaders, the same agencies, and the same system that is failing these families with bigger budgets, more authority, and fewer questions. But this trust must be earned, and it’s clear from the lack of progress on fulfilling these promises that our leaders have NOT earned our trust! Voters shouldn’t be focused on whether leaders meant well, but on whether they delivered on their promises. This is the same thing I said last week about judging policy not by its intention but by its outcome. If leaders can’t follow through after a disaster this visible, this devastating, and this personal, there’s no reason to believe the same approach will suddenly work in the future. The intention has not been enough to actually make change, and so perhaps it is time to vote differently, as accountability is long overdue.
Anniversaries aren’t just about remembering what happened, they’re about measuring whether our leaders kept their word. And one year later, Palisades doesn’t look like a success story. It looks like another broken promise Californians were told to trust. As we head into another election year, we as voters must ask ourselves: if this is how promised recovery looks after disaster, why should we believe what these same politicians are promising next?
References:
[1] Associated Press. “These Numbers Tell the Story of the Los Angeles Wildfires, One Year Later.” TODAY.com, January 7, 2026. https://www.today.com/news/los-angeles-wildfires-one-year-later-rcna252861.
[2] Governor of California. “Governor Newsom Signs Executive Order to Help Los Angeles Rebuild Faster and Stronger | Governor of California,” November 26, 2025. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/01/12/governor-newsom-signs-executive-order-to-help-los-angeles-rebuild-faster-and-stronger/.
[3] Irfan, Umair. “Why Almost None of the Homes Burned in LA Have Been Rebuilt Since Last Year’s Fires.” Vox, January 9, 2026. https://www.vox.com/climate/474478/la-fires-los-angeles-eaton-palisades-rebuild-anniversary.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Wesler, Ariel. “Survivors Seek to Rebuild 1 Year After Eaton and Palisades Fires.” Spectrum News, January 7, 2026. https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/southern-california/wildfires/2026/01/07/california-eaton-palisades-fire-anniversary.
[6] Newman, Lisa. “California FAIR Plan Insurance Explained: Coverage, Eligibility & How It Works.” Inszone Insurance, November 3, 2025. https://inszoneinsurance.com/blog/understanding-the-california-fair-plan#:~:text=The%20California%20FAIR%20Plan%20is%20the%20state's,for%20detached%20structures%20like%20sheds%20or%20garages.
[7] Veiga, Alex, and Gabriela Aoun Angueira. “Most People Remain Displaced One Year After LA-area Wildfires | AP News.” AP News, January 7, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-la-altadena-rebuild-home-construction-c7bc38063fd8db94dc96522d9e60a836.
[8] Kamal, Sameea. “Why Bills to Help Prevent California Fires Fail.” CalMatters, February 27, 2025. https://calmatters.org/digital-democracy/2025/02/california-wildfire-prevention/.
[9] Federation of American Scientists. “When Fire, Extreme Heat, and an Aging Electrical Grid Intersect,” August 18, 2025. https://fas.org/publication/when-fire-extreme-heat-and-an-aging-electrical-grid-intersect/.
[10] Irfan, “Why Almost None of the Homes Burned in LA Have Been Rebuilt Since Last Year’s Fires.”
