Expedited Rebuilding – Fact or Fiction

This was our single-story residence at 764 Radcliffe Avenue. A detached garage is at the back of the property. The remodel of this 1939 house was done by architects Marmol Radziner.

After the January 7, 8 and 9 Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in Pacific Palisades, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass issued new executive orders meant to expedite rebuilding.

Among the orders were those intended to make permitting faster and allowing qualified architects to self-certify plans that met the California Residential Code.

In April, Bass said, “With these actions we’re cutting more red tape and innovating processes within City Hall to get residents home as quickly and safely as possible. These initiatives will help reduce timelines and further streamline the rebuilding process to keep our recovery effort on track to be the fastest in modern California history.”

She issued “Implementation Guidelines for her Revised Executive Order 1.” She directed City Departments to complete permitting review in 30 days or less for rebuilding homes as they were.

Five months after the January wildfires, fewer than 300 homeowners have even applied for rebuilding permits.

According to one source, only 52 addresses have had permits approved.

Why? The rules keep changing.

Despite the Mayor issuing an executive order that rebuilds will not have to pay fees, the City Council has not approved that order. When one goes to building and safety, one has to sign a form that explains if the City doesn’t pass it, the owner will then be liable for the fees retroactively.

Here’s our journey to rebuild: Our 1939 two-bedroom home on Radcliffe had been remodeled four times before we purchased it in 1991. We hired an “up-and-coming” architect team Marmol Radziner and asked if there was a way to save the original quaint home with coffered ceilings and to make the home look complete—not one big add-on.

The answer was “yes,” and the outdoor patio, which had been enclosed with a seven-foot ceiling and wood paneling and a subsequent two-story were flattened. The story-and-a-half garage in the middle of the property was moved to the back and made a single story.

After the fire, homeowners were told that a building would be fast-tracked if it were a “like-for-like” rebuild. Our residence didn’t fit that category.

Then people were told the building would be expedited if they kept it the same size, plus 10 percent. We went to Marmol Radziner for help, and they came up with a flowing indoor-outdoor plan that utilized the same square footage, plus 10 %.

When the garage was attached to the front of the house (more of a safety issue), initially the architects were told that an attached garage now became part of the residential square footage, and the interior of the house would have to be smaller.

This editor contacted L.A. County Assessor Jeff Prang, who said it did not matter if the garage were in the front or the back of the property for tax purposes.

After that was questioned by many residents, wording was changed by the city to say a garage would not count as a “living room” if it were attached. That was important because if one had to increase the footage to account for the garage, then the project would be non-eligible and no longer fast tracked.

The non-eligible project would then also be mandated to only have electricity – no gas – according to a L.A. City Council (April 2023) ordinance that all new buildings had to be fully electric. But a lawsuit Rinnai America Corp. v. South Coast Air Quality Management District was filed in U.S. District Court in December. The case hasn’t been decided, yet, but the all-electrical requirement was waived for rebuilding by the City for non-eligible properties.  

The architects went to building and safety initially to pull the original blueprints, but found out they needed a notarized, signed document from owners, which was a new requirement.

This past week, the architects were asked to have a notarized letter to serve as agents for the property owner regarding the permitting fee affidavit. The affidavit is not available online and it was not clear to the architects that it was a requirement for submitting drawings. But they could not make a submission without this document (below).

This editor met with the architects on Friday to have the order notarized.

In a New York Post June 1 story [“LA Mayor Karen Bass used this lone house to Claim She’s Cutting Red Tape for Wildfire Victims – but Owner Says He’s Had to Fight at Every Turn”] “Walter Lopes and his wife had built their family home [on DePauw] just three years before the fire, and they wanted to keep everything just as it had been

But Lopes said his neighbors are still battling vague language and shifting rules from Los Angeles government to rebuild.

“It’s confusing,” Lopes said. “There’s a good percentage of homeowners who have not started because those rules have not been finalized. They ask, ‘Do I pull the trigger and rebuild right now? Or do I wait a month because the rules might change? Or do I wait six months because the rules might change again?’”

Today, June 2, we received the following email from the architects “We have some good news. We have officially submitted the project for building plan check as of this morning. We were informed that the applications are assigned to a plan checker every Thursday, so the review period will start then.”

CTN will keep residents posted of the progress.