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The numbers. The Palisades and Eaton fires in LA destroyed more than 16,000 structures combined. Roughly 6,800 in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Roughly 9,400 in Altadena and the surrounding Eaton burn area. ³ A year later, by early January 2026, just 10 homes had been rebuilt across both burn zones. By March, that number had crept up to 13. One in Pacific Palisades. Twelve in Altadena. None in Malibu. ⁴ The city of Los Angeles had received more than 3,000 permit applications, and issued about 1,400 of them. LA County received another 2,900 applications, with 1,153 issued. Not bad overall.⁵ So the AI did its job. The permits moved. The houses didn't. The gap we are not comfortable talking about. Here's where it gets interesting. Rebuild costs in Palisades are running $800 to $1,000 per square foot. Insurance payouts are calibrated to older estimates closer to $400 per square foot. ⁵ That difference is brutal. On average, Palisades homeowners are getting $1.5 million less from their insurance than they need to rebuild. In the worst documented case, the gap is $3.4 million. ⁶ These are wealthy neighborhoods. Median home values north of $3.5 million pre-fire. Homeowners with brand-name policies, dwelling limits, and the FAIR Plan as backstop. And still, most of them can't close the gap between what their insurer pays and what it actually costs to rebuild their home. Then layer on the wildfire-urban-interface construction code premiums. Soil testing on bluff lots. A contractor market where labor is overbooked and prices have spiked. Insurers refusing to write new policies in the burn scar. Homeowners unable to get financing without one. Even when the bureaucracy gets out of your way, the math still has to work.And if rebuilding is this hard for the wealthy, think about what it looks like for everyone else. We haven't even started talking about low-income families.
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