Community Rebuilding After the Palisades Fire

“I started the night of the event,” architect and designer May Sung says of her community rebuilding efforts needed as a result of the Palisades fire. “I was getting texts from all my clients, neighbors and friends.” Would my home survive? (Comparatively few did.) Do I have time to get out? (Barely.) There was confusion in the evacuation process, resulting in people abandoning their cars on Sunset Boulevard, hopelessly trapped in traffic gridlock, and running for their lives.

Sung, who lost two homes in the fire and will rebuild, is a neighborhood block captain for Team Palisades, a neighbor-led support network modeled after the Block Captain framework of After the Fire USA, formed after the devastating 2017 fires in California’s North Bay. Her neighbors, Allison Holdorff Polhill and Sue Kohl, also lost their homes and are in the process of rebuilding. The Team Palisades mission is direct and simple: “We mobilize to share trusted resources, challenge broken systems and ensure that every resident—renters, seniors, families—has a fair path home.”

“Even though everyone wants to build back quickly, we need to be cautious to build back correctly, making sure we’re becoming more fire safe and fire wise,” says Sung.

To that end, Sung, Polhill and Kohl are implementing fire-hardening measures in their rebuilds. For her personal home, Sung is incorporating as much of the Insurance Institute for Building & Home Safety (IBHS) standards as possible. (See BuildingGreen’s story on post L.A.–fires insurance navigation in our current issue.) These include a standing-seam metal roof, steel dual- tempered glass doors and windows, two-hour-rated walls, no eaves, and five feet of defensible space around her home. The style, she says, “will be transitional, to blend both my husband’s traditional sensibility with my modern preference.”

Kohl’s new home is well along in the rebuilding process, which is an encouraging sight in the neighborhood. Her new implementations include metal gates, Hardy board siding, no open eaves, double-pane metal windows, interior sprinklers, a fire resistant–rated roof, five feet defensible space (aka Zone 0). And, like May, as much IBHS compliance as possible. “I got started early because I had a builder/client who offered early on to build me a house,” Kohl says. “I did not meet with an architect or spend a lot of time in detailed planning. Honestly, I just didn’t, and still don’t have the time for that. So I trusted my builder to build a nice house and only modified a couple of very small things on the floorplan.”

The quick turnaround for Kohl is good news, to be sure, but it comes with the sad realities plaguing the Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods of L.A. “I’m not sure I'll be ready to move right away,” she says. “I don’t want to be living all alone in a dark neighborhood without any neighbors. I will take it one day at a time.”

Polhill had recently remodeled her kitchen and a couple of bathrooms downstairs with the help of her friend and architect Eva Sobesky. “After the fire, Eva’s house was leveled too,” Polhill says. Together they agreed to submit a full plan to rebuild as soon as possible, with the same basic footprint and square footage. Dropped by State Farm in May 2024, Polhill had California Fair Plan. “It does not pay much for rent, so we are fiscally motivated to return AND we love our community and want to get back ASAP,” she says. “Additionally, I am involved in the public school rebuild (Senior Advisor to Nick Melvoin LAUSD) and we have acted with great speed to get our students back on their campuses.”

BuildingGreen will sponsor a discussion moderated by Polhill—with Sung and Kohl along with Reza Akef of Polaris Homes, Ron Marome of Fleetwood Windows and Doors, Rob Jernigan of Clayco, and Matt Talley of AECOM—on the Team Palisades community support and rebuilding efforts this Saturday, November 22, at 3 pm on the main stage at the WestEdge design fair. Register to attend here.