In the past year, fewer than a dozen homes in those areas have been rebuilt due to red tape.
By Catholics for Catholics
Looking to reconstruct the parts of Los Angeles ravaged by last year’s fire, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to take charge of the home rebuilding works in Los Angeles County.
The move aims to “cut through bureaucratic red tape and speed up reconstruction” more than a year after the devastating wildfires in Southern California.
On Tuesday, the White House released a fact sheet explaining that the order requires the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) to “preempt” state and local permitting requirements, according to The Daily Wire. The GOP has accused California Democrats of slowing down the rebuilding efforts by mandating people who lost their homes to accept onerous standards.
“I want to see if we can take over the city and state and just give the people their permits they want to build,” Trump told The New York Post.
The fires, called the Palisades and Eaton fires, vanquished about 13,000 homes and other residential properties in Los Angeles County. However, less than a dozen homes in those areas have been rebuilt, NBC News reported earlier this month.
Another factor are delayed insurance payouts that are breaking some rebuilding efforts, and many residents are discovering that their payouts won’t be enough to cover construction costs. California building permits and regulations only add to the high costs.
“Despite billions of dollars in Federal recovery awards and the fastest Federal debris removal in American history, only about 2,500 of the tens of thousands of homes and businesses destroyed have received permits to rebuild. Now a year after the fires, less than 10 homes have been rebuilt,” Trump’s order states. “Overly burdensome, confusing, and inconsistent permitting requirements, duplicative permitting reviews, procedural bottlenecks, and administrative delays have effectively stalled recovery efforts.”
A statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe was found intact after surviving a wildfire in a burned-down house in Altadena 🙏🏼
— Catholics for Catholics 🇺🇲 (@CforCatholics) January 10, 2025
Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, pray for California. pic.twitter.com/mecnOqUVPt
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