By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2026-08-20 19:49:12 | Updated at 2026-08-20 20:12:52
34 minutes ago
The Pacific Palisades is rising from the ashes of the costliest wildfire in U.S. history — but some building experts fear Los Angeles is rebuilding the wealthy enclave only to watch it burn again.
Nearly 1,000 homes are under construction after the devastating January 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures.
But most new homes are still going up with traditional wood framing, even as noncombustible steel- and concrete-based alternatives become increasingly available, and are now roughly on par in cost.
Wildfire experts stress that wood-framed homes can still be made fire-resilient with the right protections.
Some architects and builders argue the Palisades has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to go further — and question why homes rebuilt from the ground up should rely on combustible framing at all.
Architect and USC Professor Geoffrey Von Oeyen said losing houses he built in past fires dramatically changed how he views wood-framed homes.
“When I drive through the Palisades and I look at these wood houses, I see them differently,” he said. “I no longer see them as just a structure for a house, but I see them as fuel for fire.”
Von Oeyen compared the rebuilding effort to reconstructing a city with the same vulnerable materials after an earthquake exposed their dangers.
“It would be like if our city had had a terrible earthquake,” he said. “And imagine the city is only built out of unreinforced masonry, just bricks, and it all collapsed. And then we just rebuild again in unreinforced masonry and go even bigger and even taller in the same thing, and we don’t learn our lesson.”
Entrepreneur Dustin Bramell, who lost his own home in the Palisades Fire, shares the concern.
“I think that if you look at a lot of the rhetoric around the rebuild, it’s been about the speed of the rebuild,” Bramell said. “But I think that we have to balance that with the long-term view to ask, are we doing enough to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?”
Bramell’s wood-framed home was among those destroyed.
It took him an entire year and one day to receive his insurance payout for the structure, he said.
“’It made me very uneasy sleeping at night to know that I was reliant on this third party to tell me whether or not I was going to be able to rebuild my house,” he said.
Von Oeyen had already experienced a similar loss years earlier.
One of his prized projects, a Malibu home he spent years remodeling, was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey Fire shortly after the work was completed.
“I know how badly I felt and how devastating it was,” he said.
Those experiences galvanized both men to search for ways homeowners could reduce their own wildfire risk rather than relying solely on government, insurers and firefighters to protect them.
Bramell co-founded Case-Study: Adapt, bringing together 10 leading Los Angeles architecture firms to design disaster-resistant homes for 16 families whose properties were destroyed in the Palisades and Altadena.
Von Oeyen is designing two of those homes, one of which just won an international architecture award.
Rather than wood framing, their projects use steel and concrete panels manufactured by building technology company RSG3-D.
It’s the same building system being used to rebuild Zooey Deschanel’s childhood home, which the Palisades Fire destroyed.
“I think as we move into this kind of new world where there’s less reliance on large institutions for our own protection,” Bramell said. “I’m not only building my house above code, but I’m also building it with a material that I know won’t burn. And that’s just the thing that seems to make sense to do, especially if the cost to do so is basically exactly the same.”
RSG3-D builds walls with a foam and steel core, sandwiched between concrete panels.
“So when a wildfire shows up, it presents no combustible material,” CEO Ken Calligar said. “So we’ve had success in wildfires where the fires have just gone around the building because there was nothing to combust.”
Calligar is scathing about America’s reliance on wood: “Wood is probably the worst technology decision ever in the history of man.”
Von Oeyen believes the RSG3-D homes he is designing would have survived the January 2025 blaze.
“Not to say there won’t be a lot of smoke and a lot of mess afterward, but yeah, they would have survived that,” he said.
Wood-frame homes can still survive a wildfire as well, if builders take extensive precautions against the three primary ways homes ignite: wind-blown embers, radiant heat and direct flame contact. Embers are considered the biggest threat.
“People can still build with wood framing, but they have to do everything right with that house otherwise,” Brad Sawyer, a risk advisory leader at Marsh McLennan, said.
To protect against embers, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a nonprofit research organization funded by the insurance industry, recommends measures including a Class A fire-rated roof, flame and ember-resistant vents, noncombustible gutters and downspouts and a five-foot noncombustible zone around the home.
Additional protections against radiant heat and direct flames include dual-pane tempered-glass windows, enclosed eaves, noncombustible decks and fire-resistant doors.
Many such features are already required under California building codes for homes in high fire-hazard severity zones.
“Our standard is the minimum level that will resist embers, flames, and radiant heat,” IBHS senior wildfire fellow Laura Blahl said. “People come up with really creative designs that can further protect their home, and those are good ideas.”
But in tightly packed neighborhoods such as the Palisades, fire resilience isn’t just about how a homeowner builds their own property.
A vulnerable house can ignite and become fuel for neighboring homes, meaning the decisions made on one property can increase the risk across an entire block.
Sawyer said that makes wildfire protection a “team sport” when homes are built close together.
Von Oeyen said today’s fire-resilience standards are designed to be accessible for most homeowners in the U.S., where houses are overwhelmingly built with wood.
“So I think IBHS is looking for what is a reasonable standard of safety that is accessible to average Americans,” Von Oeyen said. “’Because the idea is if it’s not accessible to average Americans, people can’t adopt these policies and they can’t be part of it.”
In 2023, 93% of newly completed single-family homes in the U.S. were wood-framed, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of Census Bureau data.
Another 7% were concrete-framed, while fewer than half a percent were steel-framed.
Wood has historically been cheap, plentiful, lightweight and familiar to architects, engineers, contractors and construction workers in the U.S.
But Bramell argues that rebuilding from scratch presents an opportunity to move beyond the construction methods Americans have traditionally relied upon.
“If you asked somebody in 1910 what they wanted, they would have told you a faster horse,” Bramell said. “But the reality wasn’t that people wanted faster horses, they wanted a faster way to get around. And so the answer actually was a car.
“And I think we’re in that very same moment in time right now where people are looking for ways to take what was done before and transform it to bring it up to the standards needed for the 21st century.”
Bramell accused the city of failing before the fire to sufficiently encourage homeowners to harden their properties.
“They didn’t come to me and say, hey, change your vents to ember-resistant vents because that’s going to protect you in the event of a wildfire,” he said.
Bramell says one way the city could incentivize homeowners to retrofit an existing home or build a new one more fire-resiliently is by providing more certainty around insurability.
Right now, he and many other homeowners are rebuilding without clarity about the quality or cost of the insurance they could receive.
“I haven’t seen a conversation which is, hey, we brought all the insurance companies here… and we sketched out a plan that said, ‘if you build it this way, we will insure you,’” he said.
And the challenge stretches far beyond the thousands of structures destroyed in the Palisades Fire.
Many more homes remain standing in wildfire-prone communities across Southern California, raising the much larger question of how governments persuade existing homeowners to retrofit properties before the next disaster.
“And that’s probably a much bigger topic of conversation than talking about the Palisades and how we rebuild, because that’s 6,500 homes, right?” Bramell said. “And we know that we have a lot more than 6,500 homes that sit in the same type of risk that the Palisades sits in today.”
For Bramell, repeatedly rebuilding vulnerable communities is ultimately not just a fire-safety problem but an economic one: “And so it’s an ultimate destruction of wealth in the state of California if we continue down this path of having to rebuild community after community.”
He hopes the destruction of the Palisades can instead become an opportunity for Los Angeles to demonstrate a different approach.
“But I think that that’s our opportunity in LA,” Bramell said. “Is to kind of lead the way and show people what is possible in the world of housing.”
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