Los Angeles is pioneering a new disaster recovery model that combines cross-sector collaboration, AI-powered coordination technology, and pre-approved wildfire-resilient home catalogs.
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The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented rebuilding efforts over the past few decades. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.
Los Angeles is pioneering a new disaster recovery model that combines cross-sector collaboration, AI-powered coordination technology, and pre-approved wildfire-resilient home catalogs.
By Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan
Pelosi is a contributing author for The Epicenter and a strategic advisor to The Resiliency Company; Former Senior Advisor for Climate at HUD. Keegan is the founder/CEO of Spring Industries, a consultancy that provides thought leadership and services to prepare communities for future challenges; Former acting Associate Administrator for Resilience at FEMA.
On paper, rebuilding the more than 12,000 structures destroyed in the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires presents a unique challenge: Buildings are scattered across multiple jurisdictions, on a fragmented landscape of irregular parcels and complex topography. Land is also expensive, totaling about $500,000 or more for just the lot, not to mention the cost to build the 1,800 square foot, single-family home on it.
Taken altogether, these caveats have traditionally driven disaster-stricken residents toward custom construction projects and complex permitting processes. Yet on the ground, we’re watching a different model emerge—one that builds on decades of recovery experience to bridge the gap between high-touch custom design and industrial efficiency.
Los Angeles is demonstrating a collaborative approach that:
This model seeks to reconcile the fiscal challenges and logistical constraints posed by the L.A. market, moving beyond static plan books toward a dynamic, digitally driven ecosystem. If this strategy can succeed in L.A.'s complex regulatory environment, it can be exported to any municipality in the country.
Historically, small-scale custom builders and NGOs led disaster recovery in L.A, creating thousands of fragmented construction sites. This meant builders competed with each other for labor and materials, driving up costs.
After the 2025 wildfires, the scale of residential destruction brought together entities that would previously have been competitors. Across the city, new organizations have reconsidered how they might leverage real estate expertise to support homeowners, always returning to a shared conclusion: Pre-approved home designs would be essential to speed recovery, reduce costs, and preserve community character.
"There is more work to be done than there is production capacity,” Bea Hsu, president and CEO of the Builders Alliance, told Pelosi and Keegan. The Builders Alliance has been central to the shift toward skill-sharing. The organization has brought together private-sector leaders—developers, consultants, and investors, including Brookfield Residential, RCLCO, and CBRE—to meet emergency demand that exceeds any single builder’s capacity. The Alliance’s goal is to drive collaboration and leverage technology to keep costs down and make homebuilding as accessible as possible.
National developers like Brookfield Residential, Richmond American Homes, and Genesis Builders are departing from their standard model of buying and developing large tracts of land to be part of the solution. Typically, national developers build 100 to 500+ homes at a time, operating on an industrial scale and optimizing every stage of the supply chain and labor schedule by building on large, contiguous tracts of land. This approach helps reduce costs and timelines through standardization and coordinated delivery. It is not an approach that works on "scattered-site" infill—disconnected individual lots with unique regulatory, architectural, and engineering requirements at each site.
This shift is possible because pre-approved home catalogs effectively transform hundreds of disconnected parcels into a "virtual tract," allowing national builders to apply their industrial-scale efficiency to individual lots. It standardizes design and engineering across a diverse geographic area, removing the unpredictable "soft-cost" hurdles—such as lengthy design reviews and unique site engineering—that have traditionally made scattered-site projects too risky for production builders. Many designs in these catalogs, including all from Brookfield Residential, are built to meet the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Plus standard. By standardizing this certification, builders are not just constructing homes; they are future-proofing their product against the national insurance crisis, helping homes remain insurable and viable for long-term ownership in high-risk zones.
The use of catalogs and the regulatory infrastructure established creates the volume and predictability needed for firms like Brookfield Residential to apply their scale and operational efficiencies in a way that supports faster, more accessible rebuilding.
Overall, “the goal is not profit or market share, but to be part of a great legacy that brings families back to the neighborhoods they called home,” says Douglas Woodward, who leads Brookfield Residential’s rebuild efforts. “These families have been through a lot,” Doug explains. “We want them to sleep better at night knowing they are safe, in a home built to the highest wildfire resilient standard, and that they are able to get insurance and insurance discounts if available.” For Doug and the Builders Alliance, the real challenge isn’t construction. “Building homes at scale is what we do,” he explains. “It is the stuff before this: How do we help the people who have lost their homes? That’s the hard part.”
Large builders are critical to the rebuilding effort: Without them, full recovery could take over 20 years. While fundamentally the work is about helping people and rebuilding communities, the arrangement still “has to work for production builders, allowing us to take advantage of our efficiencies and scale to bring down prices for those looking to rebuild the homes that they lost,” Doug shared; otherwise, “it won’t be scalable or sustainable across future recovery efforts.” Given current disaster trends, unfortunately, replicability is important, and national homebuilders are beginning to think about this as a future model.
To facilitate their participation, the Builders Alliance provides support on disaster-specific issues, such as soil toxicity testing and utility undergrounding, complications that can deter national builders from single-lot projects. The organization also serves as a professional resource to the city, county, and state, using its collective expertise to clear technical logjams and transform local government from a distant regulator into a parallel processor able to move as fast as the builders.
While the Builders Alliance provides industrial-scale capacity, organizations like the Foothill Catalog Foundation provide the architectural foundation, ensuring high-volume output doesn’t create cookie-cutter results. An architect-led initiative, the Foothill Catalog draws inspiration from the Sears Catalog, the last major example of mass-produced affordable housing; it offers about 220 different home options, designed to maintain the cultural fabric of affected communities.
Alex Athenson, who leads the Foothill Catalog, notes the goal is to provide quality design attainable for residents who “never expected to have to become a builder.” By working with local jurisdictions to obtain pre-approvals, the Foothill Catalog has reduced the standard plan-check timeline from six to twelve months to just three to four weeks. Designs are construction-agnostic: The catalog serves as a communal resource, with pre-vetted plans licensed to homeowners at a reduced fee. Homeowners can take these to any contractor, from a large firm or pre-fab manufacturer to a local non-profit builder.
Crucially for Southern California, many homes in the catalog are designed to the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home (WPH) certification and are fully electric, ensuring rebuilt homes meet the highest standard of resilience. Beyond giving homeowners long-term peace of mind, the WPH baseline also offers a competitive edge in insurability over time, helping property hold its market value even in high-risk zones.
Another piece of the puzzle that the Foothill Catalog is helping address is how to bridge the gap between traditional rebuild financing—such as insurance payouts and federal aid programs—and the cost of rebuilding to a higher safety standard. Collaborations between the Foothill Catalog and groups like PostFireLA and Resilient Los Angeles are helping reduce the cost burden on homeowners through collective purchasing and grants to support resilient rebuilding. Adding purchasing support to agnostic design creates an ecosystem that ensures pre-approved also means financially viable.
Before 2025, rebuilding after a disaster often meant wading through mountains of decentralized data—something that homeowners unfamiliar with building codes and permitting processes were ill-equipped to do. The L.A. model seeks to eliminate decision paralysis by leveraging cutting-edge technology, consolidating all the need-to-know information into dedicated databases.
Using technology like canibuild.com, the heavy lifting is handled for the homeowner. Using only an address or Assessor’s Parcel Number, the technology can provide information on where a house can be built on the lot and filter data based on topography, setbacks, floor-area ratios, and homeowner preferences for square footage, bedroom count, and resilience features.
This technology forms the backbone of the Builders Alliance. The Alliance takes this foundational information and pairs it with a catalog of pre-approved model homes, going beyond just answering "can you build?" to providing ready-to-use plans that make it easy for homeowners to decide to rebuild without starting from scratch.
Additionally, organizations like Homebound—a tech-driven builder and partner in the Builders Alliance—offer a centralized, AI-native coordination center that streamlines construction like an assembly line. The platform standardizes and automates tasks like permitting, scheduling, and material ordering through a single interface, minimizing information loss and communication breakdowns. In putting all the relevant information in one place, Homebound provides a faster, cheaper, and more predictable path back into a fire-safe home.
By integrating AI-powered tools, recovery in L.A. has moved beyond the pattern book era of the early 2000s. It has created a digital infrastructure that allows 12,000+ unique rebuilding journeys to be managed as a single, large-scale development. The city is also proving that communities can go beyond building back to what existed before and treat disaster recovery as an opportunity to construct a more predictable, equitable, and climate-adaptive future.
In part three, we will explore how home catalogs can help integrate resilience—physical, social, and economic—into homebuilding across the country outside of the disaster recovery context.
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