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There’s No Easy Story To Tell About Wildfire Recovery In Karen Bass-Era Los Angeles

‘People are suffering. This is a disaster of such proportions. I can’t say that things are going well.’

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A much-told story in the news media over the last year and a half is that the rebuilding of Pacific Palisades after a disastrous fire has been slowed by the incompetence of a city government led by Mayor Karen Bass. “For L.A.’s mayor, a Palisades recovery marked by missteps, reversals and delays,” a headline in the Los Angeles Times said near the end of 2025. That’s true, and Bass is presiding over the decline of the entire city, but that’s nowhere near the whole truth. Much of the story now has moved outside of the clearly political, providing a reminder about the limits of government.

Pacific Palisades is the most pleasant neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, and one of the best city neighborhoods in the country. It backs up to the hills and fronts on the ocean, and it’s an urban enclave: just off Pacific Coast Highway, but far from major freeways like the 10 and the 405. For decades in a dirty and decaying Los Angeles, the Methodist-founded Palisades persisted as what was effectively a small town within a giant city, safe and peaceful, in an island of natural beauty.

Then it burned, in a shocking piece of government failure that’s gradually being exposed by time and litigation. Six thousand homes were destroyed here, with more homes being lost outside the boundaries of the Palisades and about a thousand nonresidential properties destroyed. As a sign of how burned-out residents view the whole thing, a neighborhood coalition that formed around fire recovery topics calls its website They Let Us Burn.

Today, not quite 20 months after the fire, the Malibu Village mobile home park — which, despite the name, isn’t in Malibu — looks like this:

If you look closely, you’ll see the top of a lifeguard stand on the beach, sticking up behind the ruins across Pacific Coast Highway. That’s a pretty good hint about the old quality of life in Pacific Palisades.

Up the hill from that still-ruined community, along Sunset Boulevard, weeds grow in the foundations of apartment buildings that aren’t being rebuilt, and concrete stairs climb to nothing. You can see the outline of what was here in the ruins that have replaced it.

Burned-out lots stand behind fences, with piles of uncleared fire debris. Blackened trees crack and collapse, still unmanaged.

In the hills you can find a somewhat cleaner version of more of the same, bare foundations where people used to live.

But you can also see this, and you can see it everywhere:

At the cultural center of Pacific Palisades, in the “alphabet streets” named for Methodist ministers (Albright, Bashford, Carey, Drummond …), construction is well underway, and whole blocks have active construction on nearly every lot. From several intersections, you can look........

© The Federalist