The Pacific Palisades is being rebuilt after the devastating January 2025 Palisades Fire, the costliest wildfire in U.S. history, but some building experts are raising concerns that the wealthy enclave is being reconstructed with materials that could lead to future destruction. Nearly 1,000 homes are currently under construction following the blaze that destroyed close to 7,000 structures.
Despite the increasing availability and comparable cost of noncombustible alternatives like steel and concrete, most new homes in the Palisades are still being built with traditional wood framing. Wildfire experts emphasize that while wood-framed homes can be made fire-resilient with protective measures, architects and builders question why homes rebuilt from the ground up are not opting for less combustible materials.
Geoffrey Von Oeyen, an architect and USC professor who lost homes he built in previous fires, now views wood-framed houses as potential fuel. He compares the rebuilding effort to constructing a city with vulnerable materials after an earthquake revealed their dangers. "It would be like if our city had had a terrible earthquake," Von Oeyen said. "And imagine the city is only built out of unreinforced masonry, just bricks, and it all collapsed. And then we just rebuild again in unreinforced masonry and go even bigger and even taller in the same thing, and we don’t learn our lesson."
Entrepreneur Dustin Bramell, who lost his wood-framed home in the Palisades Fire, echoed these concerns. "I think that if you look at a lot of the rhetoric around the rebuild, it’s been about the speed of the rebuild," Bramell stated. "But I think that we have to balance that with the long-term view to ask, are we doing enough to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?"
Bramell experienced a lengthy insurance payout process, taking over a year to receive compensation for his home's structure, which left him feeling uneasy about his reliance on third parties for rebuilding. Von Oeyen also experienced a similar loss years prior when a Malibu home he remodeled was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey Fire.
These experiences motivated Bramell to co-found Case-Study: Adapt, an initiative that brings together Los Angeles architecture firms to design disaster-resistant homes for families displaced by wildfires. Von Oeyen is designing two of these homes, one of which has received an international architecture award. These projects utilize steel and concrete panels manufactured by RSG3-D, a building technology company, instead of wood framing.
"I think as we move into this kind of new world where there’s less reliance on large institutions for our own protection," Bramell said, "I’m not only building my house above code, but I’m also building it with a material that I know won’t burn. And that’s just the thing that seems to make sense to do, especially if the cost to do so is basically exactly the same."
The RSG3-D building system creates walls with a foam and steel core sandwiched between concrete panels. Ken Calligar, CEO of RSG3-D, stated, "So when a wildfire shows up, it presents no combustible material. So we’ve had success in wildfires where the fires have just gone around the building because there was nothing to combust." Calligar was critical of the widespread use of wood, calling it "probably the worst technology decision ever in the history of man."
Von Oeyen believes homes built with the RSG3-D system would have withstood the January 2025 blaze. "Not to say there won’t be a lot of smoke and a lot of mess afterward, but yeah, they would have survived that," he said.
Making Wood-Frame Homes More Resilient
Wood-frame homes can still survive wildfires if builders implement extensive protective measures against embers, radiant heat, and direct flame contact, with embers posing the greatest threat. "People can still build with wood framing, but they have to do everything right with that house otherwise," said Brad Sawyer, a risk advisory leader at Marsh McLennan.
The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety recommends measures such as Class A fire-rated roofs, flame and ember-resistant vents, noncombustible gutters and downspouts, and a five-foot noncombustible zone around the home to protect against embers. Additional protections include dual-pane tempered-glass windows, enclosed eaves, noncombustible decks, and fire-resistant doors. Many of these features are already mandated by California building codes for homes in high fire-hazard severity zones.
Laura Blahl, a senior wildfire fellow at IBHS, noted that current standards aim to resist embers, flames, and radiant heat, while acknowledging that creative designs can offer further protection. However, in densely populated areas like the Palisades, fire resilience extends beyond individual properties. A vulnerable home can ignite and spread fire to neighboring structures, making decisions on one property impactful for an entire block.
Sawyer described wildfire protection in close-knit neighborhoods as a "team sport." Von Oeyen pointed out that current fire-resilience standards are designed to be accessible to most U.S. homeowners, where wood framing is dominant. In 2023, 93% of newly completed single-family homes in the U.S. were wood-framed, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Historically, wood has been favored for its affordability, abundance, light weight, and familiarity among construction professionals. Bramell argues that rebuilding presents a unique opportunity to move beyond these traditional construction methods. He used the analogy of people in 1910 wanting faster horses, when in reality they desired a faster mode of transportation, which the automobile provided. "And I think we’re in that very same moment in time right now where people are looking for ways to take what was done before and transform it to bring it up to the standards needed for the 21st century."
Bramell also criticized the city for not adequately encouraging homeowners to harden their properties before the fire. He suggested that the city could incentivize retrofitting and new construction with greater fire resilience by providing more certainty regarding insurability. Currently, many homeowners are rebuilding without clear information on the quality or cost of future insurance policies.
"I haven’t seen a conversation which is, hey, we brought all the insurance companies here… and we sketched out a plan that said, ‘if you build it this way, we will insure you,’" Bramell said. The challenge of persuading existing homeowners to retrofit properties before the next disaster extends far beyond the thousands of structures destroyed in the Palisades Fire, impacting numerous wildfire-prone communities across Southern California.
Bramell views the ongoing cycle of rebuilding vulnerable communities as an economic issue, stating, "And so it’s an ultimate destruction of wealth in the state of California if we continue down this path of having to rebuild community after community." He expressed hope that the Palisades Fire could serve as an opportunity for Los Angeles to pioneer a different approach to rebuilding, demonstrating "what is possible in the world of housing."