Rebuild Progress: Fire Survivors and Community Partners Join IBHS Leadership
Last Friday, we spent the day alongside IBHS CEO Roy Wright and a group of community partners, including Greenline Housing Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, the Foothill Catalog Foundation, Altadena Collective, Team Palisades, Palisades Recovery Coalition, and fire survivors in various stages of rebuilding with resilience.
Caption: Community partners visit in-progress homes in Altadena with IBHS leadership
The day gave IBHS leadership a firsthand look at the work happening on the ground:
Gap funding that is helping families achieve code compliance before the Resilient LA Delta Fund fully launches
Fire-safe zones taking shape around structures
The realities of lot size constraints across LA
Perhaps most striking was how much survivors care not just about their own homes, but about ensuring their neighbors and communities rebuild to a higher standard. One Altadena family captured the spirit of the day well, describing the “peace of mind” that comes from knowing they’re building back stronger and recognizing how many others are “stepping out in faith” as well.
The day closed with IBHS’s annual recognition at Climate Resolve’s Coolest in LA awards, where Roy was named an honoree. In his remarks, he reflected on what the tour reinforced: that this rebuild isn’t about any single home. It’s about neighbors looking out for neighbors.
Thank you to the homeowners who opened their doors, the partners who gave their time, and to IBHS for their continued commitment to this work.
Caption: with the IBHS team at Climate Resolve's Coolest in LA Awards honoring Roy Wright
Updates from Resilient Los Angeles
Rebuilding after a wildfire is complicated enough, but rebuilding safer requires better coordination and a clearer roadmap. Research from other disasters demonstrates that, in the aftermath of an event, homeowners don’t often adopt higher resilience standards voluntarily, which is understandable given how overwhelming the recovery experience is. But access to grants specifically targeted towards resilience upgrades can get homeowners to think and choose differently, providing guidance during difficult times.
The guidebook is written primarily for funders, nonprofits, community development finance institutions, and public agencies interested in administering Resilience Delta grants, which help homeowners cover the extra cost of rebuilding to the highest wildfire resistance standard. It walks the reader through best practices in program design: who qualifies, how to structure awards on a sliding scale, how to administer applications and verification, and how to connect the effort to the broader ecosystem of post-fire recovery.
A few key takeaways:
Building to a resilient standard during new construction typically costs between $10,000 and $30,000 above standard construction—far less than rebuilding to code and retrofitting.
Evidence from other states shows that grant programs like this go beyond helping individual households; they create demand that encourages contractors to get trained in new methods, and they shift community norms toward resilience.
Hardening whole neighborhoods matters more than hardening one home at a time. Targeting high-risk, high-need areas and incentivizing homeowners to upgrade together provides a bridge to resilient recovery.
If you're working on wildfire recovery funding in Los Angeles or thinking about what a replicable model could look like, download the guidebook here.
HomeownerResources
We’ve started publishing articles on our website addressing the most common and important questions we hear about building safer, more insurable homes in LA. You can review all past articles here.
Below are two we’ve published in the last month, written with homeowners, builders, and insurers in mind:
From the Front Lines of Resilience in the Last 30 Days
Pacific Palisades residents are exploring the creation of a “resilience district” that would allow homeowners to pool funding for neighborhood-wide safety upgrades as they rebuild. The idea would finance shared infrastructure, such as buried power lines, expanded evacuation routes, and other fire-hardening measures that individual homeowners could not easily implement on their own.
Another model emerging in California: fire prevention via homeowners association. Neighborhoods are experimenting with HOA agreements that require residents to follow rules about defensible space, fire-resistant landscaping, and ongoing maintenance, shifting responsibility for fire mitigation from individual homeowners to neighborhood-wide governance.
A new study finds that climate change is shifting wildfire seasons across North America, but not in the same way everywhere. While fires in the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada are starting earlier due to earlier snowmelt, California and the drought-prone western U.S. are seeing fire season stretch further into late fall and winter.
After fire destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena, disproportionately impacting the town’s historic Black neighborhoods, a Pasadena radio host and journalist launched a weekly call-in show to document residents’ experiences during recovery. The project captures stories of loss, mutual aid, determination to rebuild, and the resilience of a California community working to preserve its identity.
Partner Spotlight
The Foothill Catalog Foundation offers a collection of ignition-resistant, pre-approved home designs for displaced residents in LA to rebuild quickly and affordably. The Foundation’s goal is to create a more streamlined path for LA residents to rebuild with resilience: pre-designed, pre-approved homes can speed construction and maximize affordability.
Created with community input, the catalog is designed to help neighborhoods rebuild for safety without losing their community identity and architectural character.
The PILLAR platform is designed to be a clear and easy-to-navigate path to an insurable home. It walks homeowners through their building choices, calculates how much a resilient rebuild would cost, and then connects them with grantmakers and lenders—all directly within the platform.
Sign up today to get notified as soon as funding becomes available.
