In the era when American cities regularly caught fire, the widespread destruction seeded what looks, in retrospect, like possibility.
Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 accelerated its rise as a dominant metropolis. In Boston, which burned in 1872, the value of land newly topped with better buildings surged. After its 1889 fire, Seattle built a taller downtown in brick and stone, with wider avenues and modern infrastructure. San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire built denser housing that could better hold all the westward migrants eager to move there.
These cities changed in ways and at a speed that wouldn’t have been possible without fires. The lessons of that history are relevant in Los Angeles today, where elected officials have promised to speed the path to rebuilding from devastating wildfires — but only if residents rebuild exactly what was there before. That means, according to a mayoral order, clearing the way for new buildings of the same size, in the same location, intended for the same use, without adding any housing units.
What other cities did more than a century ago doesn’t mean that Los Angeles should replace single-family homes with high-rises on the slopes of the Pacific Palisades, or that residential Altadena should erect a commercial downtown. What these past fires presented was a rare chance to respond in new ways to the pressures bearing down on the cities — from population growth, or rising rents, or the evolving demands of a new century. Cities adapt slowly and often poorly to such pressures. But occasionally across history, a destructive tragedy can make doing so easier.
For years now, Los Angeles has been straining under a housing crisis, one that will be worsened by the wildfires. Facing thousands of destroyed homes and newly homeless residents, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, acknowledged that the region’s onerous obstacles to construction would impede recovery from disaster. Offering a measure of both certainty and compassion, they promised to waive environmental regulations, to speed up permitting, to create a “one-stop shop” for the bureaucracy of home building.
It’s a sweeping act of permission that builders and advocates for housing have sought for years to address the region’s shortage of affordable housing.
“Now suddenly we’re going to get it — but just for this,” said Paavo Monkkonen, a professor of urban planning and public policy at U.C.L.A.
Chicago:
Los Angeles won’t garner beautiful new downtown architecture out of this moment, Mr. Monkkonen said, but lasting impacts could lie in changing the region’s regulations and institutions — what would be an equally monumental legacy.
Picture if the city and state now made it just as easy to build denser and affordable housing in the least fire-prone places. Or if burned-out residents could choose to swiftly build back something that reflects today’s needs rather than what was built in the area decades ago. Under the city’s order, there’s no relief from regulation if residents want to replace a single-family home with a duplex of the same size, or if they want to add a little backyard granny flat.
“Let’s not let this crisis go to waste,” said Martin Muoto, the C.E.O. of SoLa Impact, which develops affordable housing projects in South Los Angeles. He lost his Palisades home in the fires. He applauded what he called a comprehensive and dramatic set of changes to building rules. But as a developer who houses formerly homeless residents, he wants what the city is now offering him as a homeowner — “to allow us to build faster, cheaper and better.”
Disasters can enable change by clearing away seemingly intractable forces that constrain how cities grow. Normally, new buildings replace outdated ones only haltingly (and landlords who still profit off properties in disrepair may have little incentive to upgrade them). Large public works like wider streets and new parks are hard to insert into neighborhoods that are already full of hundreds of buildings and building owners.
“Americans are not real good at thinking together collectively, particularly when it has to do with property,” said Carl Smith, a historian who has written about the Great Chicago Fire.
No one wishes for disasters to happen. But when they do, he said, they can create an opportunity to rethink things, especially at a broad scale. (For their part, Chicagoans in the young and rapidly evolving city in 1871 were not particularly wedded to what they had already built, he added.)
Boston:
When much of downtown Boston burned a year after Chicago, property owners upgraded in a kind of virtuous cycle, erecting sounder and taller buildings and incentivizing their neighbors to do the same. The economists Richard Hornbeck and Daniel Keniston have found that land values increased substantially as a result in and near the fire zone.
Had there not been a fire, Mr. Hornbeck said, “things limp along more, buildings kind of gradually get replaced and improved, but you don’t get the spurt of growth.”
The 1889 fire that destroyed more than 25 square blocks of downtown Seattle helped the city evolve into a true metropolitan center, said Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, a professor in the department of architecture at the University of Washington.
The city replaced its wood sidewalks and small wood-frame buildings, constructing commercial buildings several stories taller in brick and stone, some of which remain landmarks today. The city adopted a more stringent building code, too, and a professional fire department. It raised the street level around Pioneer Square to aid drainage and sewage.
“The city modernized,” Mr. Ochsner said.
Seattle:
In San Francisco, blocks that burned after the 1906 earthquake were rebuilt with denser housing than similar blocks just outside the fire boundary. That disparity remained even a century later, according to research by James Siodla, a professor of economics at Colby College. Those rebuilt blocks also devoted less land to housing, making space for the city’s growing commercial and manufacturing needs.
The era of devastating urban fires largely ended by the 1920s, as building codes, government enforcement, modern fire departments and electric lighting made fires less likely to spread, especially in the downtown heart of cities. Other kinds of disasters since have echoed some of the same lessons: In parts of London heavily bombed during the World War II German blitz, the city rebuilt taller than before; in Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, amid the new construction, the city reconnected old streets and nurtured a neighborhood less defined by office work.
By suddenly removing many of the constraints to change, these past disasters have a way of revealing how hard change is in normal times.
“Cities change very, very slowly,” Mr. Siodla said. “It’s very, very difficult to change.”
That was even truer in Los Angeles before the fires this month than it was in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. The earthquake was before the advent of zoning regulations. It was before the California Environmental Quality Act slowed building in the state. It was before the rise of local activism against new development.
San Francisco:
The Los Angeles fires make clear all those obstacles underlying the housing crisis.
“We’ve been using crisis rhetoric for a decade with nothing to show for it,” said Nolan Gray, the senior director of legislation and research with the advocacy group California YIMBY. “The Palisades sort of calls that bluff.”
The plans to rebuild there reveal what the city and state would have to do to construct housing with urgency everywhere.
