What Is The First House Rebuilt After The Wildfires In Los Angeles? It’s Complicated.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced “a major milestone” in the recovery from January’s wildfires that razed 13,000 homes across the region: A four-bedroom house in Pacific Palisades had received its final approval from the city, making it the first house to be rebuilt after the fires.

“The Palisades community has been through an unimaginable year, and my heart breaks for every family that won’t be able to be home this holiday season,” Bass said in a statement. “But today is an important moment of hope.”

But Bass didn’t mention the family that would be moving back into the finished property.

That’s because there isn’t one.

A homebuilding company, Thomas James Homes, owns the parcel. Before the fire, it sought permits to bulldoze the vacant home on the site and build a new one. The fire took care of the demolition. The new house isn’t planned as a place to live, but rather will serve as a model property for what the company could build for Palisades residents who’d lost their homes.

Reaction to Bass’ celebration was swift. Wildfire survivors called the mayor’s announcement tone deaf and claimed the project shouldn’t count as a wildfire rebuild. By the next morning, Bass had deleted her social media posts touting the development.

The furor over the house at 915 North Kagawa Street put a spotlight on the still raw emotions felt by Palisades residents as they approach a year after being uprooted from their community. And it highlighted the symbolic power a “first home” holds for fire victims as a concrete sign that individuals and, therefore, entire neighborhoods are rebounding from loss, said Rebecca Ewert, a sociologist at Northwestern University who has studied the aftermath of wildfires.

“The recovery process is overwhelmingly measured by rebuilding, by regular people and by officials,” Ewert said. “It’s a visible symbol of things returning to normal.”

By celebrating a homebuilder rather than a homeowner, Ewert said, the city scrambled the traditional meanings of resilience, tenacity and commitment often attributed to residents who return as quickly as possible.

“Developer rebuilds don’t shore up that community fabric,” she said. “People want to see the community knitting back together.”

Five days before 915 North Kagawa Street received a certificate of occupancy, the city’s final sign-off that allows people to inhabit a dwelling, a project 35 miles away in Altadena presented its own definitional quandary.

The Rodriguez home survived the Eaton fire that leveled much of the foothill community, but their garage did not. The owners, Jose and Sandra Rodriguez, told LAist they decided to replace the garage with a two-bedroom accessory dwelling unit so their adult son, David, who lived in a small unit attached to the garage before the fire, would have a new place. Jose, a retired construction worker, hired a crew and they built the 630-square-foot ADU themselves, completing it on Nov. 17.

But unlike Bass’ announcement of the Kagawa project, the county did not publicize the Rodriguez’ certificate of occupancy. After POLITICO identified the project as the first one completed on Los Angeles County’s rebuilding dashboard and asked for comment, Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents the area, called the development “another tangible reminder that Altadena’s recovery is moving forward.”

While very different scenarios, the ADU and model house rebuilds do not fit traditional narratives around disaster recovery that prioritize returning homeowners, not renters or family members in backyard units, Ewert said.

Sometimes, she said, when elected officials, media and others tout the grit of those who return earliest to a community, they overlook the structural factors, such as robust insurance coverage, that research shows play larger roles in determining who can come back fast, if at all.

“This symbolic link between who rebuilds first and who is seen as the most responsible and worthy obscures the deep inequalities that lead to uneven rebuilding in the first place,” Ewert said.

Officials with Thomas James Homes trumpeted the Kagawa project in Bass’ press release, praising the city for accelerating permit processes and contending their development points a way forward.

Founded in Los Angeles, the company had built more than 60 homes in the neighborhood before the blaze, said its CEO Jamie Mead in an interview Friday. Mass homebuilders, who often can offer lower prices and more precise timelines than fully custom options, were seen as instrumental in Santa Rosa’s fast rebuild after the Tubbs fire eight years ago.

The company is working with 30 Palisades residents on rebuilds and hopes that the Kagawa model will demonstrate to other survivors that they can return quickly, Mead said.

“What we’re showing with this development is we can bring the community back,” Mead said.

Thomas James Homes bought the property in November 2024 and applied to redevelop it the same month. The city signed off on a demolition permit for the 1,600-square-foot house on Jan. 7, the same day the fire destroyed it, city records show.

On April 1, the city approved a building permit for the new, 4,000-square-foot home. The certificate of occupancy came 7.5 months later.

Beyond the frustration that Palisades residents felt about celebrating the completion of a builder’s home, some argued the mayor shouldn’t have held it up as an example of the city’s efforts to speed up permitting.

Because the Kagawa project began before the fires, it already completed some of the initial pre-development processes and wasn’t a fair comparison to rebuilds that started from scratch, said Frank Renfro, a Palisades resident who is tracking permitting.

“It’s overlooking that chunk of time and the real-world challenges that people have to overcome,” Renfro said in an interview.

Mayoral spokesperson Paige Sterling said in a statement to POLITICO last Monday that Bass’ social media posts about the Kagawa project “were temporarily removed because of some confusion that we wanted to clarify and to confirm information."

The next day, Bass posted a thread on X that included a detailed permitting timeline. She lamented false claims circulating online that the house hadn't burned in the fire.

"The original information we shared was accurate, but our priority is to make sure information about this milestone is clear and accessible," Bass said.

About 1,100 home rebuilding permits have been approved between the city and county of Los Angeles, the two largest jurisdictions affected by the fires, with hundreds of projects under construction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. By the middle of last week, additional houses were finished in the burn zones and the first homeowners moved in.

Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom have called recovery efforts in Los Angeles the fastest in California history, citing the rapid pace of debris clearance six months after the blazes.

But homes were finished more quickly in other recent major fires in the state. The first homes were rebuilt between seven to nine months after 2017’s Tubbs fire and 2018’s Carr, Camp and Woolsey fires, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation.

The Altadena ADU and the Palisades model were completed in 10.5 months.