In the era, when American cities regularly lit up, the widespread destruction was sown by what looks in retrospect, as an opportunity.
After a large fire of 1871, Chicago accelerated his growth as a dominant metropolis. In Boston, who burned down in 1872, the cost of land, recently crowned with the best buildings. After a fire in 1889, Seattle built a higher city center in brick and stone, with wider prospectuses and modern infrastructure. San Francisco, after an earthquake and a fire of 1906, built a denser housing that could better hold all migrants to the West, seeking to move there.
These cities have changed in ways and with a speed that would not be possible without fires. The lessons of this story are relevant in Los -Angels today, where elected officials promised to speed up the path to restoration from destructive forest fires – but only if residents restore exactly what was there before. This means that, according to the order of opinion, to clear the path for new buildings of the same size, in the same place intended for the same use, without adding some kind of housing units.
What other cities did more than a century ago does not mean that Los Angeles should replace at home with one family with high buildings on the slopes of the Pacific Palisads, or that residential Altaden should build a commercial center of the city. The fact that these past fires presented was a rare chance to answer in new ways to pressure related to cities – from population growth or growing rents, or developing requirements of the new century. Cities adapt slowly and often badly to this pressure. But sometimes throughout history, a destructive tragedy can make this easier.
For many years, in Los -Andheles, it tenses under the crisis of housing, which will deteriorate forest firesThe field facing thousands of destroyed houses and again homeless residents, Governor Gavin News And Mayor of Los -angles Karen BassHe admitted that burdensome obstacles in the construction region would prevent restoration from the disaster. Offering the measure of both confidence and compassion, they promised to abandon environmental rules in order to speed up permission, to create a “universal store” for a home building bureaucracy.
This is a wide act of resolution, which builders and defenders of housing for years have sought to combat a lack of a lack of affordable housing.
“Now we suddenly get it – but only for this,” said Paavo Montconen, professor of urban planning and state policy at the University of California at Los -Ageles
Chicago:
According to M -on -Monkonen, Los -angles will not be able to extract the beautiful new architecture of the city center.
Imagine that the city and state have now been made as easily in the construction of more dense and affordable housing in least Places prone to fire. Or, if the burned residents could quickly build something that reflects today's needs, and not what was built in the area of a decade ago. In accordance with the order of the city, there is no relief from regulation if residents want to replace the house with one family with duplex of the same size, or if they want to add Little grandmother in the backyardField
“Let's not allow this crisis to be wasted,” said Martin Muoto, General Director Sola impactwhich develops projects of affordable housing in South Los -Angeles. He lost his palisades home in fires. He welcomed what he called a comprehensive and dramatic set of changes in the construction rules. But as a developer who lives the former homeless residents, he wants the city now he offers him as a homeowner – “so that we can build faster, cheaper and better.”
The disasters can afford a change by cleansing, it would seem, insoluble forces that limit how the cities grow. As a rule, new buildings replace obsolete only soda (and landlords, who are still beneficial from real estate in the inaccurate conditions, may have few incentives for their updating). Large public works, such as wider streets and new parks, are difficult to insert into the surroundings, which are already full of hundreds of buildings and owners of buildings.
“The Americans are not thinking about together very well, especially when it is connected with property,” said Karl Smith, a historian who is wrote about the great Chicago fireField
No one wants the disasters to occur. But when they do this, he said, they can create the opportunity to rethink things, especially on a wide scale. (For their part, the Chicagoers in a young and rapidly developing city in 1871 were not particularly attached to the fact that they had already built, he added.)
Boston:
When the majority of the city center Boston burned down a year after Chicago, real estate owners were updated to a kind of virtuous cycle, erecting an echole and higher buildings and stimulating their neighbors to do the same. Economists Richard Hornbek and Daniel Keniston found that The cost of land increased significantly as a result in the fire area and next to it.
If there were no fire, Mr. Hornbek said: “More than the buildings, it seems to be gradually replaced and improved, but you do not get a surge of growth.”
A Fire of 1889, which destroyed more than 25 square blocks of the Sith Center Helped the city to develop In the real metropolitan center, said Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, professor at the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington.
The city replaced its wooden sidewalks and small wooden frame buildings, having built commercial buildings several floors above bricks and stone, some of which remain attractions. The city also adopted a more stringent construction code and professional fire department. He raised the level of the street around Peeionerskaya Square to help drainage and wastewater.
“The city was modernized,” said Mr. Ochsner.
Seattle:
In the dignity of Francisco, the blocks that burned after the 1906 earthquake were restored with a denser case than similar blocks, not far from the boundary of the fire. This inequality remained even a century after According to James SyodlaProfessor of the economy in Kolbi -College. These rebuilt blocks are also dedicated less land with housingEquipping a place for growing commercial and production needs of the city.
The era of destructive city fires ended largely for 1920 years, since construction standards, state law enforcement, modern firefighters and electric lights forced fires to spread less often, especially in the city of the city of cities. Other types of disasters have since repeated some of the same lessons: in some parts of London, Blitz, City, bombed a large extent during the Second World War of Germany. Restored above than before; In Nizhny Manhattan, after September 11, among the new construction, the city restored the old streets and Raised the surroundings It is less determined by office work.
Suddenly deleting many restrictions on the change, these past disasters have a way to reveal how difficult changes are in normal time.
“The cities are changing very, very slowly,” said Mr. Syodla. “It is very, very difficult to change.”
This was even more believable in Los -Andheles before fires this month than in the San Francisco to the 1906 earthquake. The earthquake was before the emergence of zoning rules. It was before California Act of Environmental Quality Slow building in the state. This was before the growth of local activity against the new development.
San Francisco:
Fires in Los -Angeles clearly make it clear to all these obstacles that underlie the housing crisis.
“We used crisis rhetoric for a decade in which there was nothing to show,” said Nolan Gray, senior director for legislation and research in the California Equisition Group Yimbi. “Palisades, as it were, call it bluff.”
Restoring plans there show that you will have to make a city and staff to build housing with urgency everywhere.
