The Truth Behind the Mayor’s Email — And What Rebuilding Actually Requires
We received the Mayor’s email yesterday (11/21/2025) celebrating a certificate of occupancy issued for a home on Kagawa. The message framed it as the first C of O issued in the Palisades since the fire — suggesting it was a fire-related rebuild.
It wasn’t.
915 Kagawa, the white home now appearing in articles across the country, is not a fire rebuild.
It’s a Thomas James home submitted to plan check before the fire and already planned for construction well in advance.
This isn’t about catching an error. It’s about what the error reveals.
If the City can’t verify whether a single home was or wasn’t a fire rebuild — something anyone can check with one click — how can they possibly manage the complexity of rebuilding an entire coastal town?
The Mayor’s email also cites “340 active construction sites across the Palisades.” That number might be technically accurate, but the only number that truly matters is this:
How many of those sites are actually rebuilding homes lost in the fire?
That distinction is critical. It’s also exactly why we’re building our website — to bring transparency, truth, and clarity to Palisadians who deserve honest information about what progress really looks like.
We want to give people hope. We want to show signs of life, progress, and momentum.
But we also need to be truthful about where the City is still falling short — especially on the logistics needed to rebuild quickly and intelligently.
And logistics will make or break this recovery.
Rebuilding 5,500 homes in a dense coastal community — each with its own owner, architect, budget, preferences, and challenges — requires a level of coordination our City simply isn’t equipped for. We’re talking about real-time delivery management, street-by-street scheduling, coordinated hauling routes, and flexible construction workflows that change daily.
Checking the origin date of a building permit is easy.
Rebuilding a town is not.
Pali Builds has now connected with over 250 building professionals and suppliers across the region. We’re actively pursuing solutions ranging from service-zone coordination to a master dispatch system that aggregates delivery schedules from the largest local suppliers. We’ve already engaged partners like Anawalt (lumber) and FBM (drywall) to feed their dispatch data into a unified system.
Think of it like air traffic control — a single place where builders, suppliers, and homeowners can see upcoming truck schedules and avoid conflicts.
We’re not saying this to toot Pali Builds’ horn.
We’re saying it because, unfortunately, this week’s mistake reinforces why we’ve had zero confidence in the City’s ability to manage the rebuild at the scale and speed the Palisades needs.
We will continue publishing updated permit and rebuild data at the end of each month. We’re hoping for better numbers than last month — though we’re not holding our breath.
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The recent news about a single spec home being completed on the devastated and still-vacant street of Kagawa is, if anything, a milestone of failure—not a success attributable to any pro-community local or state initiative. While Mayor Karen Bass plans her next cultural event in Ghana and Governor Gavin Newsom prepares another rebuttal to Donald Trump, the urgent reality remains: the time is long overdue for meaningful intervention to rebuild the Palisades.
Many of us are still debating whether to return at all, given the persistent delays, denials, and shifting assessments from insurance companies. The permit process is slow, departments remain understaffed, and—nearly a year after the fire—it feels as if January’s disaster never happened and the political promises of support were entirely insincere. If we are losing faith in government at any level, this local situation is a clear example of incompetence and a troubling lack of motivation to serve and protect the community that elected these officials.
Great work guys. As a former Palisadian, our family is proud of the work you are doing to bring transparency to what is clearly the herculean task of rebuilding a great community. Daddy G.