Architectural historian lost his Altadena home. How will he rebuild?

Written by Amy Ta, produced by Nihar Patel

Aerial view of homes destroyed by wildfire in the Parker Canyon area of the Pacific Palisades, CA, Jan. 27, 2025. Photo by Ted Soqui/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect.

People of different income brackets and races have had their lives upended in the past three weeks due to the recent LA wildfires. That includes people whose jobs grapple with construction and natural disasters. Architectural historian Erik Ghenoiu and his architect wife Scarlett Esion made their home more fire-resistant, and they were active in fire mitigation efforts in Altadena. Still, their house didn’t survive the Eaton Fire. 

Ghenoiu teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and heads a faculty initiative on why certain buildings burned and others didn’t.

He tells KCRW that before this month’s fires, he replaced his yard’s vegetation with gravel and hardscape; cut trees so they wouldn’t be close to the house; and removed outdoor wooden furniture. Plus, the neighborhood as a whole tried making their wildlife-urban interface “more defensible,” and the county cleaned the debris basin where “extra fuel” was growing. 

“We can now see that this piecemeal and personally proactive strategy isn't enough to protect everybody together. … Flying embers is something that we all knew existed, but no one had really come up against flying embers under 100 mile an hour winds.”

Ghenoiu says many people who lost their homes are trying to analyze what they could have done differently to protect their properties. Others are wondering how their units survived. Now at SCI-Arc, his research team is trying to get answers. 

He says he now wants to make a new and safer version of their neighborhood, and preserve the sense of community. 

“I've been advocating to everyone: Don't think about selling quickly for a low cost. … I think most of us feel like we were underinsured, but some people maybe had inherited houses and didn't need to have insurance. But I think the mechanisms that are going to make it possible to rebuild, they're not all in place yet. And so we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that we have to leave these places that we love to live in. And so I think that rebuilding makes a lot of sense financially, as well as for the heart.”

Given the way insurance and property values work, and the fact that he still must pay his mortgage, Ghenoiu says it’s a financially better decision to rebuild. 

“We're in a city where the value of an empty lot versus the value of a lot with a house on it is dramatically different. And it seems … your best interest is going to be served by rebuilding on that site. Of course, as a scholar, I want to make sure that we find ways to help people, and to advocate for policies that will make it so that those rebuilt houses are as ignition-resistant and fire-hardened as they can be.”

When it comes to the expenses of rebuilding, Ghenoiu advises people to keep in mind that the county is already in a housing and affordability crisis. 

“One neighborhood completely rebuilt brand new could just become a very expensive neighborhood, and a lot of the people who used to live there might have to move somewhere else. And I don't think anyone in the neighborhood wants that, and it would be easy to expend our way towards safety privately. But I think that's a question that might better be served on a public level.”

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