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The scenes of destruction in Los Angeles have brought a sense of déjà vu for Steve Crowder. Six years ago, similar images of fires ravaging his community of Paradise, California, were plastered across televisions and social media.
“It is Paradise revisited,” said Crowder, the mayor of Paradise. “Sitting here watching the news, these fires in L.A. have hit me the hardest.”
Now, his town could give an indication of what the road to recovery may look like for those in the Los Angeles area joining the growing list of towns and cities devastated by wildfires. For those communities, recovery has been measured in years, not months. It has required billions of dollars in federal assistance, though federal money doesn’t address every need after a disaster. And putting that money to use comes with unexpected challenges that have gone far deeper than the surface-level destruction.
“My message to any of these towns is, don’t let anybody tell you you can’t come back, because we are proof you can come back. There is light at the end of the tunnel,” Crowder said. “The first time you walk through your town you’re going to think, ‘Oh, there’s no way we can come back from this.’ Well, there is, even though it looks like you’re walking through where a nuclear bomb went off.”
For those in Los Angeles, where the wildfires have killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 12,300 structures, officials are beginning to discuss what may come next. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is already starting to “reimagine L.A. 2.0,” with a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort that could cost tens of billions of dollars.
But much of that recovery will depend on federal resources, which could get entangled in wider political fights in Washington. Republicans in Washington have suggested putting conditions on aid to California or linking it to other policy priorities.
President Joe Biden has made federal funding available for the next six months to cover temporary housing, emergency assistance to individuals and costs related to immediate public safety threats, like debris cleanup and hazardous materials. But longer-term funding to rebuild public infrastructure, like water systems, roads and schools, will be up to the incoming administration and Congress.
Meanwhile, coarsened political rhetoric and public blame-seeking on the part of Trump and others have added to an already uncertain situation for the fire survivors — and could be fueling politicization of the disaster, said Jennifer Gray Thompson, whose organization After the Fire has worked since 2017 with communities affected by wildfires.
“One of the things I love about working in disasters is it’s nonpartisan, everyone gathers together as Americans and they support each other. But now I’m getting messages every day telling me, ‘You deserve it, we’re so glad this happened to you,’” Thompson said. “There have been parts of America that have always been unkind, but I’ve never known us to have this level of cruelty.”
Even without the current level of political infighting, the rebuilding process for communities affected by past wildfires has been yearslong and could indicate a long road ahead for those in Los Angeles.
It can take weeks before residents are even able to check on their properties and more than a year before all the debris and hazardous materials are removed so homeowners can start rebuilding. It could be several more years before critical infrastructure, like water systems, power lines, roads and schools, is fully rebuilt, with funding fights in Washington potentially delaying that progress further.
“I hate to say it, but if you lost your house, and even if you have the means to rebuild, you better buckle up, because it’s going be a ride that you’re not going to like,” said Pete Gaynor, who served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Trump administration. “I’m sorry to say it that way. It’s just the way it is.”
For those who lost their homes, FEMA provides temporary shelter, typically in hotels. But setting up longer-term temporary housing, like mobile home communities, can take more than a year, in order to find the land for those structures and to build out the road, water and electric infrastructure, Gaynor said.
In Paradise, 90% of the town, including 18,000 structures, was destroyed and 85 people were killed. The population went from around 26,000 people, many of them retirees, to as few as 2,000 overnight. Along with losing their homes and businesses, residents lost their jobs, children lost their schools and the city lost nearly all of its tax revenue.
Six years later, rebuilding is now well underway. The city is constructing around 500 homes a year and has rebuilt a third of its homes with its population up to 11,000, according to Crowder. Last year, Paradise was the fastest-growing city in California, attracting a mix of returning residents and newcomers, many of whom are families drawn to the town because of its schools and relative affordability, Crowder said.
Nearly all of the city’s infrastructure was damaged in the fire, including water systems, cell towers, power lines, roads and schools. Officials are still in the process of installing underground power lines and repaving roads. One silver lining of the process has been the ability for the city to rebuild with more modern infrastructure and buildings that will be more resilient to future fires.
FEMA has helped fund much of that rebuilding, but the federal process has felt belabored and full of red tape, at times, Crowder said.
“They operate like a typical big government machine. Although the help was appreciated, it is a little slow sometimes,” Crowder said. “It’s all good intentions, but some of the assistance that is offered is almost impossible to get. It sounds good on paper, but we are still seeing some of that with the housing situation where people are applying for programs but they are so stringent that no one could qualify.”
Crowder, who was a city council member as the city started to rebuild, has been on the phone with local officials in Los Angeles County, helping guide them through the early stages of their recovery.
The most recent California fires have also affected him personally: His daughter lost her home in Altadena last week to the Eaton Fire, which has killed at least 11 residents and destroyed more than 1,900 structures.
Crowder lost his home and business in the 2018 fire, and it took him 18 months to be able to rebuild at a cost that far exceeded what his insurance company paid him for his loss. While most fire victims in Paradise had some form of insurance, many didn’t receive enough to cover the full cost of rebuilding, because costs skyrocketed following the surge in demand for labor and materials after the disaster.
“The majority of people that had insurance in Paradise were underinsured and didn’t realize it,” Crowder said. “If one or two houses had burned, we probably wouldn’t have been underinsured, because before the fire you could build a house for $150 a square foot. That went overnight to $350 a square foot, and the insurance didn’t go that far.”
The town also had to contend with alleged fraud by contractors, who fire victims said took millions of dollars in insurance payments from them without providing the promised work, Crowder said.
For those who have been able to rebuild, finding and affording homeowners insurance has become another struggle. Crowder said the typical policy has gone from around $1,500 a year to $5,000 through the state-backed insurer of last resort. It’s an issue that will likely only get worse for Californians following the Los Angeles fires.
In Maui, Hawaii, more than 2,000 structures were destroyed in the community of Lahaina and around 12,000 were displaced in a fire that killed at least 100 people in August 2023.
FEMA and other federal agencies have provided about $3 billion toward Maui’s wildfire recovery, with more than $1.3 billion going to direct rebuilding efforts, like removing debris, providing temporary housing, rebuilding a local school and repairing public infrastructure.
Much of the first year of the recovery in Maui was spent clearing debris and hazardous material before property owners could begin rebuilding. It also took around a year for the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the process of testing, inspecting and clearing damaged water and sewer infrastructure so local officials could begin repairing and rebuilding those systems.
In addition to debris removal, the properties also had to pass soil inspections, since fires can cause toxic materials to leak into the ground, and have erosion control measures put in place following the loss of the vegetation that typically holds the soil in place.
Housing has been an especially difficult challenge in Lahaina, where there was already an affordable housing shortage — something Los Angeles was struggling with as well before the fires. Many residents were forced to move to other parts of the island or leave altogether, and housing has been a particular challenge for renters, said Jason Economou, president of the Maui United Way.
Nearly 15 months after the fire, families began moving into a temporary FEMA housing complex that consists of 169 modular homes. FEMA is also providing mobile homes that people can place on their private properties while they wait to rebuild.
But not all residents displaced from their homes were eligible for FEMA housing assistance. That includes people whose homes were badly damaged but didn’t burn, as well as undocumented immigrants, said Kimo Carvalho, executive director for HomeAid Hawaii, a nonprofit affordable housing developer.
His organization is in the process of moving residents into a state-funded development for those ineligible for FEMA assistance. It received more than 900 applications for 450 manufactured housing units where residents can live for up to five years. The first residents started moving in a year after the fire and the development is expected to be fully occupied by April.
“Their lives have been on pause for a year. Most have been in three to four different living arrangements, a lot of them weren’t able to maintain their full-time jobs, so they’ve been trying to figure out how to make money,” Carvalho said. “It wasn’t until I started seeing everyone move in that they started stabilizing. Then it’s almost like all the things that they were dealing with pre-fire are finally starting to come out.”
Beyond the price and logistics of rebuilding, there has also been the emotional cost.
Families have had to frequently move between temporary housing arrangements across the island, and a once tight-knit community has unraveled. That’s left residents feeling isolated and without a support network, compounding the struggles they face with rebuilding their lives after the fire, Economou said.
“The community is never going to be quite the same,” Economou said. “When people are forced to move as economic refugees, the makeup of the community changes, the size and the amount of housing that’s available changes. It’s not just that the old stuff is gone, so we’re just going to rebuild and pick up where we left off. That’s impossible. The community will never be the same after an event like this.”
Shannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News.
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