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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]These homes start at $2.5M and go up rapidly from there. I bet most of these folks were self-insured.

This represents a huge, extremely wealthy chunk of the Los Angeles county tax base. Lots of families with young kids. It's as if a wild fire completely destroyed CCMD and adjacent neighborhoods in upper NW DC.

This disaster will upend Los Angeles's budget - lots of costs to clean up but also lots of these people will move away. It will only be partially rebuilt, likely with multi-family housing. The entire area will be rebuilt much differently.[/quote]

Californian here. I think it’s entirely possible that the state turns deep red politically. There is already a lot of anger at the left simmering under the surface. [/quote]
Indeed, the waste of resources is jaw dropping.[/quote]

With the budget surplus they could have been burying power lines, but I guess there were more important priorities to squander the money.[/quote]

The cost and time required to bury overhead lines in settled areas would far exceed any budget surplus, plus it isn’t going to come from state funds.

I live in a different western state where some neighborhoods have buried lines and most do not. Our city utility provider began burying lines in the early 2000s and abandoned the effort in our specific neighborhood after completing just two streets due to the infrastructure challenges they encountered.  In other neighborhoods it is moving along but definitely not quickly- it’s literally a decades-long, patchwork effort. It would probably take a century to bury the lines just in Pacific Palisades. [/quote]

With the sheer devastation in the area, Pacific Palisades will be rebuilt with buried lines. I expect the area to look a lot different after this. The city has the opportunity to remake an entire urban area near the beach. It's not going to be a low-density sprawling bedroom community again. [/quote]

I’m the Pp you’re replying to and I agree, lines will be buried where areas have been leveled- that’s the easy part. My point was that the PPs saying that lines should have been buried in existing neighborhoods are naive about how challenging and expensive it is.[/quote]

How expensive will be rebuilding entire towns and neighborhoods? It should have been a priority and it wasn't. There's no excuse for misplaced priorities anymore and the residents should be fed up. I used to live in LA County and got the hell out because I couldn't take it anymore.[/quote]

So expensive that it was not done.

Think about it like sewage and water: they are arguable far more necessary than electricity yet municipalities typically only can update them when acute situations in the form of sewage overflow and water main breaks demand it. Even when there are funds to divert, it’s very difficult to convince people they should vote in favor of things like infrastructure. It’s the same reason most people are willing to go buy furniture or remodel a bathroom. when they buy a new house even though they really need a new roof or siding. That’s why federal pandemic spending was so impactful, because it took all of the local bickering off the table and put money into bridges and roads and equally dull but vital things.

And in CA it’s even more complicated because of how property taxes and legislation work. Maybe you can get in a time machine and change all that and fast forward to now, but otherwise the effort to unwind decades of legislation, tax policies, uncoordinated planning and infrastructure decisions is too great to make a significant change in the future.[/quote]

The writing was on the wall. Plus no inertia to do any of the right things. We pulled the plug and left. I feel bad for all our friends left behind, some who have lost homes, but this was all a disaster waiting to happen.[/quote]

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