We are advising our clients who lost homes in the Palisades Fire to start the permitting process as quickly as they can to get ahead of what will be a rush of applications. While there are uncertainties ahead of us, being first in line, will have it’s advantages. Our clients for The Galloway project were loving being in their freshly completed home in late 2024. There project had replaced an existing home they tore down and they painstakingly worked over a multi-year construction to build the home of their dreams in it’s place. Tailored specifically for their professional and personal needs, the home represented a vision for how they would live their lives.
When the wildfires burned thousands of acres in Southern California in January of 2025, their home like so many was not spared. The question they faced was would we rebuild in the Palisades or move? They knew the process for building a new home in Los Angeles could be at best cumbersome. What regulatory hurdles would be in place after the fires for rebuilding? Did they have it in them to start the process all over again? Perhaps an advantage to having recently completed their home was that they knew the design meet the current building codes and requirements. They also knew they loved the design and even in the short period they were able to live in it, they were establishing roots that ran deep. They wanted to rebuild.
Our clients decided that they would submit the plans exactly as they had been built with no changes. They loved the design, and also hoped this would expedite the process. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times covering the approval of the first rebuilding permits, our clients were one of the three that were approved–one of the only two permits approved for complete rebuilds after the fires devastation. While starting over again seems daunting, you have to approach it withe some humor as our clients shared in the article.
“To wrap my head around building this house again after we just did it, is not something I want to do,” Lionelli said. “The first time I was very hands on. This time it’s going to be, ‘Wake me up when it’s over.’ ”
Our team and our clients are happy to have the momentum behind us, and are looking next at the debris removal process. All debris is slated to be removed per the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Everything must be cleared before the rebuilding can start.
