A year after the Palisades fires in California, homeowners face the challenge of rebuilding
Palisades fire victim Janna Kohl and Douglas Elliman agent Cory Weiss talk to Fox News Digital about recovery efforts and the aftermath of the Los Angeles area fires exactly one year later.
Janna Kohl and her husband, longtime residents of Pacific Palisades, consider themselves lucky.
“What really breaks my heart are people like our next door neighbor. They were in their 70s and 80s. They had lived in their house for 60 years. It was their original home and they were pillars of the community. And people like that are not coming back,” Kohl told Fox News Digital.
January 7 marks the one-year anniversary of the start of the deadly Los Angeles wildfires – the Palisades and Eaton fires. Although the fires were brought under control by the end of the month, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation reports that they alone caused up to $53.8 billion in property damage.
The department’s research also found extraordinarily high destruction rates, with the Palisades Fire destroying 56.3 percent of all assessed structures and 55.8 percent of single-family homes. The Eaton Fire destroyed approximately 50% of all structures and single-family homes.
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But the fires didn’t just destroy homes: they forced families to make year-long decisions, conditioned by insurance, infrastructure and time.
An aerial view shows empty lots and new homes under construction in Pacific Palisades, California on January 5, 2026. (Getty Images)
“All of a sudden I had a numbing feeling that I was never going to go back to that house. But you can’t really dwell on that because at that point you had to step up,” Kohl said. “Everyone was grabbing every rental they could. There weren’t even any hotel rooms. The rest of the city was still burning. And you just had to think, oh my God, where are we going to go and how is this going to get fixed?”
“I think when these fires happened, like I said, I’ve been in the business for over 25 years, I would say it was the most emotionally trying year as a broker that I’ve had and as a broker. [has] my team,” Cory Weiss of Douglas Elliman – and Kohl’s real estate agent – also told Fox Digital.
“People came to you in shock. And I think once you saw the shock wear off, there was anger, and then they were really trying to figure out where their lives were going.”
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According to Kohl and Weiss, about 25 to 30 percent of residents will rebuild, while most will leave; and the deciding factor is often not desire, but rather calculations regarding insurance conflicts, labor shortages, permitting delays and rebuilding costs.
“I don’t think anyone knows what their insurance will cost. I think everyone’s like, ‘I have to figure this out, I just have to build my house, and I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,'” Kohl said. “As much as I want to go back, it won’t be what it was for another seven to ten years, in my opinion.”
“Every case is different. Not everyone had the same insurance policy,” said Weiss, who helped 30 families displaced by the fires relocate.
A photo taken after the incident shows another view of the damage to Kohl’s home. | FOXBusiness
“When someone goes back to meet with their adjuster or if they have to meet with a contractor, that meeting takes them two to three hours a day,” he continued. “So they say, ‘Look, I can’t do this. This is affecting my life in such a way that we’re going to have to make another decision. We’re going to move to another part of Los Angeles, we’re going to leave Los Angeles because the commitment and the cost and the time of it is unlike anyone else’s, even in the first two months after the fires.'”
Kohl estimates that about 75 percent of his Palisades neighbors face insurance issues, and even motivated homeowners face a slow grind: utilities, roads, water and sewer, traffic, access to contractors and life disruptions.
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“We didn’t decide not to rebuild,” Kohl said of his now-defunct home of 23 years. “But the problem isn’t just insurance. The infrastructure isn’t there… There are no roads in our neighborhood.”
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“I have two clients [whose] the houses were heavily damaged… The only customer with the three year old house hasn’t even started yet [clean-up efforts] and his house is full of soot because he’s negotiating and fighting with his insurance company,” Weiss said. “Other friends and returning clients, restoring the house, clearing the smoke, dealing and negotiating with the insurance company has become a full-time job for them.”
Both sources describe a growing gap: Wealthier residents can absorb delays and costs, while others cannot.
“People who could afford it, right after the fire, ran away and bought another house,” Kohl described. “The people I mentioned next to us, the older couple, moved outside of Los Angeles, to Santa Barbara… They don’t have five to ten years to go through the process of rebuilding and living in a rental. They want to move on with their lives, so I don’t blame them at all.”
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“Another misconception, perhaps slight, is that everyone in Palisades is rich. You know, that’s not necessarily always the case,” Weiss argued. “I have a single mother of four who lived in a house that she grew up in and lost everything and won’t be able to go back…A client with an 86-year-old mother who lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a nurse had to move to the desert because it just wasn’t possible.
Weiss said about 50 homes are currently under construction in Palisades, with two nearing completion, but added that only real estate developers are actively seeking the market.
The two differ on responsibility – Kohl says the “fake news” narrative around bureaucracy doesn’t match his experience – but both describe a frustration with governance and politics.
“Many unrealistic deadlines have been given… ‘We’ll come back in a year or two.’ This is not the case. When you drive through the Palisades, it still feels like a war zone.
“No one comes forward and says, ‘We failed you. We’re sorry.’ Everyone is pointing the finger at someone else,” Kohl criticized. “I think in Palisades, if someone came forward and took responsibility and said, ‘I’m sorry, we really ruined your lives,’ that would go a long way…Maybe make Palisades its own municipality where we have our own resources.”
“I don’t think our local mayor has done a great job…I think there’s so much bureaucracy. And I know that from people of all price ranges and income levels who are struggling,” Weiss said. “I also think there’s been a lot of unrealistic deadlines that have been given to the community, to the world, saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to come back, we’ll be back in a year or two.’ This is not the case.”
Kohl, her husband and their cat now live primarily in their second home in Idaho, and she said neighbors have moved to states like Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Colorado.
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Los Angeles is slowly rebuilding, six months after the deadly wildfires that ravaged Southern California. But so far, only a thousand applications for reconstruction permits have been submitted.
“I think [of] their resilience then their strength to lose everything they had… It’s their first vacation away from home. All their photos are gone, their family heirlooms, they’re just trying to be strong,” Weiss said.
“We saw in our market…that they care more about their families. We don’t really need everything that we had…It’s very remarkable to see, and the community [is] I always try to bring us together and support each other.”
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