There are rumors that the fires were deliberately started so planners could rebuild under the SmartLA 2028 strategy. Let’s dismiss this conspiracy theory right now. No serious person believes it. But that’s not to say that officials won’t demand that the renewal of the burned-out sections fit their definition of a “smart city,” which, we’re told, will rely on technology to come up with “solutions previously unavailable to generations before us.”
According to the city’s master plan, the goal is to “positively transform the urban environment,” and “require careful strategic planning and investment” to create “intelligent urban ecosystems designed for the humans that live there.”
Los Angeles officials have a crisis on their hands and they are ready to take advantage of it, and it will go beyond the deployment of technology. Powerful bureaucrats will be tempted to remake the city in their image. No matter what label they find most useful, they can’t erase that central planning drains the life from the urban experience.
For one, it produces dull environments. The world’s most vibrant and interesting cities and neighborhoods were not dreamed up by government planners. They evolved from the bottom-up decisions of residents, investors and entrepreneurs – not through the top-down impositions of the professionals.
Mitchell Sipus, who is an urban planner, has noted that planning “has ruined neighborhoods, devastated communities and undermined economies. … What we as urban planners believe to be true and good in ideology can just as likely wield a terribly destructive power.” Planning is inherently political, as well.
A couple of years after Los Angeles produced its SmartLA 2028 plan, the City Council unanimously decided follow the Livable Communities Initiative, which envisions “15-minute neighborhoods that can be car-light or car-free.” Should Los Angeles decide that the rebuilt neighborhoods have to satisfy the 15-minute-city rules that require cramped housing density, the fires of 2025 could repeat themselves.
“Someone can build their home to nominal fire-proof standards,” says Randal O’Toole, a longtime urban writer known as the “Antiplanner.” “But if their neighbor’s home catches fire, the radiant heat from that house will ignite the wood framing in the supposedly fire-wise house.”
To keep homes from setting each other on fire through a domino effect, they “should be built at least 40 feet and preferably up to 100 feet apart from one another,” says O’Toole. Yet “that’s simply not possible on the small lots that are located next to the Santa Monica Mountains” and other undeveloped zones in Los Angeles.
“People living on one-acre lots don’t have to worry about what their neighbor is doing because they can protect themselves by appropriately landscaping their yard and constructing their home to fire-wise standards,” adds O’Toole. “But if Los Angeles is going to keep 5,000- to 7,000-square-foot lots next to flammable wildlands, then what one neighbor does can affect the whole neighborhood.”
At the Free Cities Center, we support market approaches toward development, which means allowing high-density housing and single-family homes. We don’t think dense housing projects are inherently dangerous, but mandated density can cause unforeseen consequences in the context of wildfire protection. It’s something worth considering if the city takes this route.
A planned 15-minute development could trap residents because the escape routes would be overwhelmed. When traffic lanes are converted into sidewalks and bike paths, there’s that much less room for automobiles. Victims already had enough trouble running from the current rounds of fires. In many cases, the gridlock forced Pacific Palisades residents – more than half of whom have lost their homes – to abandon their cars and flee on foot.
If density is an existential threat in fire zones, why not build single homes on what were previously two or three lots in the neighborhoods that are now just sad fields of ash? TMZ reports that “a few who are thinking of selling are considering rolling that money into a larger lot when others in the neighborhood do sell.”
But that won’t suit the smart city/15-minute city ideologues who are likely to have enormous influence over the rebuild – if not entirely handed the levers of power. The possibility of lot consolidation was made even more remote by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who issued on January 14 an executive order “to protect firestorm victims in the Los Angeles area from predatory land speculators making aggressive and unsolicited cash offers to purchase their property.”
This not only hurts the owners who could use the cash offered by “predatory speculators,” it skews the market at a time when merging small lots into larger ones makes financial sense, and spreading out the previous densities in the burned-out areas would make them safer.
Planners can consume their hours, days, weeks and months studying texts, playing with their CAD programs and even poring over ancient scrolls, but they can never build the engaging and dynamic urban environments that thousands of private citizens acting independently and cooperatively are able to create.
Planners impose their ideas and their values on others. They believe those “others” lack their insight. Yet they tend to produce uninspiring cityscapes, transportation nightmares, unaffordable housing, and, if the Los Angeles rebuild is turned over to them, might cause more problems during any new round of fires.
Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
