Eureka: how the private sector is helping rebuild LA after the January 2025 wildfires 

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Wildfires devastated parts of Los Angeles in January, delivering a shattering blow to local communities. As well as the human cost, estimates suggest economic damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars, potentially the most costly natural disaster in US history. That high price tag is driven in large part by the swathes of valuable real estate that bore the brunt of the blaze. Clearing debris and rebuilding homes is a major undertaking, much of it requiring private enterprise.

0:56But offering your services in the wake of such a crisis can be a sensitive matter for entrepreneurs, a fine line that property firm Crest Real Estate is navigating with great care. Monocle's Gregory Scruggs took a tour of the burn zone and filed this report.

1:16Brothers Stephen and Jason Summers run a permit expediting business called Crest Real Estate. They help clients navigate the LA region's thicket of bureaucracy to get construction jobs done. It's a skill set that makes these third-generation Angelenos convinced they are uniquely positioned to help rebuild their hometown while also drawing on the city's architectural legacy. Specifically, the Case Study Houses, a project that recruited the top modern architects of the 1940s and 50s to design prototype homes for the baby boom era. While those designs are admired by fans of mid-century modern architecture, only 25 were built, mostly in Southern California.

2:02The Summers brothers think they can do much better. And they'll have to, if they want to make a dent in the recovery effort, considering that 7 ,000 buildings burned in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood alone. Crest's quest begins in a West Los Angeles office building, with a large format map spread out across a conference table, where Stephen Summers gives me a lay of the land. We are looking at an aerial map of the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood that unfortunately was changed forever on January 7th when the fires began and ran through the community in an entirely unprecedented manner, a way that frankly no one in the Los Angeles area could have anticipated.

2:53We are now all collectively as the real estate industry and other impacted parties in Los Angeles working together to try to come up with ways to successfully rebuild what was lost. You're not operating in a business as usual environment. There's an urgent need to rebuild a humanitarian need in the wake of this natural disaster. At the same time, you are a private sector enterprise. eyes. What is the business opportunity that you see in helping Angelenos rebuild from the fires? Look, Jason and I have always felt that doing the right thing will be good for business. And so immediately after the fires, we got together with each other and with a number of other leaders in the industry.

3:37And we were just thinking about how can we actually help bring our skill sets and our companies to bear on this problem. And what we realize is, you know, Crest is really a hub at the center of so many different professionals within the real estate industry in Los Angeles, because we handle the permitting and entitlements on thousands of projects every year throughout Los Angeles. Through that, we've been able to use those connections to bring architectural firms and other suppliers, manufacturers, builders together to create the Case Study 2.0 initiative. The Case Study 2.0 initiative is bringing together world-renowned architectural talents to prepare standard plan designs that can be acquired for far less than what a custom one-off plan would cost an individual homeowner.

4:38So these designs are intended to be replicable on multiple parcels throughout these communities so that they can be built efficiently and at less cost, but still maintaining the highest possible integrity of aesthetics. And that's really what people in these communities are concerned about. They're concerned that as a result of this rebuild, the character, the soul of these communities is going to be lost because it's almost necessary to some extent to have replicated housing to rebuild thousands of units. And so because we have these connections to the top architects in the world, we've been able to get all of them together to agree to contribute designs that truly they are breathtakingly beautiful and also tremendously varied and provide those to the community for, you know, as a new option for rebuilding.

5:36This is going to save costs for people in a number of ways. We've had each architect select a contractor that will be the preferred builder of their plan so that you can have one contractor building the same plan five times, 10 times, or even 20 times. And in doing so, they're going to achieve an economy of scale and in some ways almost an assembly line approach that isn't typically available to one-off custom home building. What makes one-off custom home building so expensive is that every single design detail is custom because that design is individual. That design is a complete one-off for that client on that lot.

6:20And we don't want to lose the feeling that these homes are custom. But at the same time, to build thousands, we need a little bit of replicability. And the reality is, is if you look throughout these neighborhoods before the fires, there were homes that were repeated. But as long as they're spread out enough, you don't feel that. And what you will feel when this program is completed and these homes are built is that they've been designed with attention to detail, with the best materials, but also built quickly. To better understand the scale of the challenge, we hop into Jason's electric range rover and head into the LA traffic en route to the Palisades.

7:05When we arrive, Jason describes the scene. Police activity, the National Guard with machine guns guarding the entry, debris trucks coming in empty, leaving full, and just thinking of how much more there is. And now we start to see the burnout areas, the charred trees, the empty lots. But this is just the outskirts of where the real damage occurred. Evidence of the fire's impact is everywhere. Along block after block, masonry chimneys are the only structures left standing, on lots strewn with twisted metal and debris piles. The clatter of heavy machinery is omnipresent as workers race to remove the rubble.

7:54The air quality monitor in Jason's vehicle spikes and registers unhealthy levels of fine particulate matter.

8:04We pull up to 870 Kagawa Street, where longtime Palisadian Doug Halford is standing on the site of the 1941 bungalow where he raised his family. It burned to the ground, and only the garage remains. But he's committed to rebuilding and eagerly talks over potential designs with Stephen and Jason. An a la carte menu like Case Study 2.0, he tells me, is exactly what he was looking for in order to save both time and money without compromising on the quality of his rebuilt home. But why, I ask him, stay rooted in the Palisades given its current state? Virtually no crime in this area. And, for example, when my kids are 8 and 10 years old, they'd go, oh, we want to go to the grocery store.

8:51Okay, you know, it's nine o 'clock at night, go to the grocery store. You could just walk up the street, they were nice and safe, and your neighbors sort of watched out for everybody. So I think the whole community became one because it was in a very compact area. And on top of that, you know, then you have all these community involvement things. For example, up at the recreation center, I coached every sport, you know. I'll be at the grocery store and a 35-year-old man will come up to me and go, Coach Doug! In a city not known for free-range parenting and a village-like atmosphere, it's easy to see why residents are so emotionally invested in the Palisades and why Crest Real Estate is so invested in helping them rebuild.

9:38As we stand in the wreckage, Stephen forecasts the recovery. Construction's already beginning on new houses, And really over the next 6 to 12 months, that's going to pick up at a rapid pace. In about three years, I'm anticipating that a large number of homes will be built back, but not a majority. People will be living here. Still, you'll be able to clearly tell that the fire came through. I think in five years, it will start to feel normal in this community. And in a decade, the Palisades is going to be the most desirable place to live in all of Los Angeles. For Monocle in Los Angeles, I'm Gregory Scruggs.

10:30Thanks to Gregory Scruggs for that report. And you can learn more about all the work the team is doing by heading to CrestRealEstate.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.