Say, remember when Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass pledged to get government out of the way of rebuilding efforts after the catastrophic firestorms they both made exponentially worse? How red tape would get cut, costs slashed, and the heavens moved to see families return to the Palisades, Altadena, and other devastated areas?

That was then, of course. Now the LA Times and progressives are asking why they shouldn't remake the Palisades et al into their Utopia instead. They have taken a page out of Rahm Emanuel's playbook and now wonder whether to allow a perfectly good crisis to go to waste:

Along with the building code enhancements that are likely to emerge after these fires, change could come through land use innovations such as buying out landowners who don’t want to rebuild, putting restrictions on investors and swapping development rights.

One repeated theme is adding multifamily housing to make the communities more economically diverse and help alleviate the region’s affordable housing shortage.

In California Planning & Development Report, contributing editor Josh Stephens proposed adding two- and three-story apartments to the Palisades commercial district where side streets are “filled with shops, cafes, and small offices that, for lack of a better word, are a lot cuter than California’s typical commercial strips are.

“If European cities are any guide, it can come back even livelier and more uplifting than it once was,” Stephens wrote.

Ahem. European cities make this work by enforcing the law and prosecuting property crimes, vagrancy, and disturbances of the peace. The effectiveness of these communities in European cities comes from stable public environments where citizens and residents feel safe to walk the streets, business owners feel safe to invest in storefront operations, and where the communities themselves are socialized to respect the law and the public peace. How long has it been since Los Angeles and California have had cultures that work similarly? It's been years at least, and arguably decades for both. And that is entirely due to the progressives who have run both for many years and whose failures led directly to the scope of the catastrophe they now want to exploit. 

It takes more than architecture to build that kind of community, especially from scratch. It takes respect for private property, enforcement of the rule of law at all levels, and a government that can reliably deliver on core services to create the environment necessary for that model to succeed. A series of increasingly progressive state and local governments have failed in all of these areas, which is why thousands of homes and businesses got destroyed unnecessarily while radicals like Bass and Newsom fiddled around with virtue-signaling priorities like DEI, CRT. 

At the very least, it involves keeping your fire-fighting reservoir full when fire season comes along:

“I used to say all the time, ‘Boy, I know one thing that will never happen is our place will burn down,’” said Peggy Holter, who in 1978 purchased a townhouse in Palisades Highlands, just a stone’s throw from the reservoir. “It was the one thing I was never worried about.”

But on Jan. 7, the reservoir that had long been a lifeline was empty when Palisades residents needed it most, as a wildfire spread rapidly amid dangerously high winds.

“I think if the reservoir had been there and they were sucking out of it, I’m sure that our building would have been saved,” said Holter, who lived in a 36-unit condo complex. Holter’s townhouse and others in the complex survived the first night of the fire but later burned down after water pressure in the area diminished. “There’s nothing left.”

That the 117-million-gallon reservoir was off line for repairs sparked outrage against the DWP and its leadership, prompting at least two lawsuits and spurring Gov. Gavin Newsom to order an investigation. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has also promised a complete assessment of the city’s response to the wildfire, which has destroyed at least 6,380 structures and killed at least 11 people.

It wasn't just offline, but entirely empty. California had a significant amount of rainfall over the last couple of years, and the Palisades reservoir could have easily been filled, even if just for fire-fighting purposes. Furthermore, California voters granted the state $7 billion in 2014 to build more reservoirs to deal with fire threats and agricultural needs, the latter necessitated by the federal and state diversion of water to 'save' a baitfish in the Bay. Newsom and Jerry Brown used those funds to do ... absolutely nothing. Not a single reservoir got built over the last ten years since those funds became available. Instead, all of that potentially potable and fire-retarding water just flowed out to the Pacific.

Now the authors of this disaster want to use it to remake the community to suit their own vision without any competence or regard to the people whose property they plan to exploit. And why not? That's exactly how they've governed what should be a paradise for the last few decades, and even now these complete incompetents believe they can continue to impose their will on victims of a massive catastrophe to achieve their ambitions. 

As a native Angeleno, one who lived half of my life in the Basin, I can still recall when the Greater Los Angeles Area was a paradise. The crushing of that potential wounds me deeply, as it does fellow native Aaron Gigliotti, who still lives there. Gigliotti wrote a moving essay about what has been lost, and what can't be recovered, and not just from the firestorms:

After the fire, I slipped past the police lines. I took pictures of other homes that we admired and looked at the photographs online to remind myself what these piles of ash had once been. When I reached my favorite house, only the chimney remained. That and a small USC flag near the garden gate.

I imagine that my old neighbors in the Pacific Palisades will be making the same walks in the days to come. They’ll recall white stucco walls adorned with neon bougainvillea or ficus hedges shielding some fading star’s privacy.

But the rest of the country must understand: this world of The Beach Boys, The Parent Trap, avant-garde architects, physicists, novelists, of soft Southern California light was once here. Now it’s gone, and it will never come back. The imagination that made Old California come to life was snuffed out long ago. It won’t be remade by tech bros, influencers, or anyone else. Here, in this pretty world, Old California took its last bow.

Progressives razed Paradise, and now they want to put up parking lots over its smoking ruins. That's what they wanted all along, and will eventually achieve despite their promises to rebuild and eliminate the regulations that they have imposed for decades to prevent a healthy use of resources and property. That is their legacy of exploiting crises rather than letting them go to waste, and of creating the crises in the first place. 

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