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Image: CAL FIRE_Official/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
[As] the former head of the federal emergency management agency, Craig Fugate, has said: “A house that gets destroyed is not an affordable home.” It’s not a sustainable one either. The city needs greater urban density, not more firebelt bungalows. Ironically, it might be the inability of the insurance industry to pay up that finally forces LA to change.
— The Guardian
Oliver Wainwright takes the adage “Build up, not out” as his clarion call for rebuilding Los Angeles County in the wake of the (still ongoing) urban wildfires that have also sidelined many other critics of its present urban stasis, which was not addressed at all in the directive Mayor Karen Bass proffered yesterday only a week after the crisis began.
The recent “exclusionary” decision to restrict most new developments to already high-density zoned neighborhoods, which account for just 28% of the city, hangs in the background here.