Steven Seagle and his family pulled up to a warehouse stocked with everything they’d need to start over. They’re roughly 12 miles from where their home in Altadena burned last month in the Eaton Fire. As they pulled in, the warehouse volunteers with the newly-created Home Bank LA welcomed them with a cheer.

They got a couch, a dining table, toiletries, everything except, of course, a house.

“We are planning to rebuild, just mostly the deal we made with the kids was we’ll give them this house, and so we want that house,” said Seagle.

Seagle has a couple of incentives to build something new that’s “substantially equivalent” to the 1912 home that he lived in for 20 years. One is money.

“You have to build the same house, or else your property tax goes way up. And our house was really perfect,” he said.

The other incentive is time. If fire victims build their new houses in roughly the same footprints as the old one, the state lets them bypass the months-long environmental permitting process.

“That all sounds all fine and dandy, and you feel like, ‘Oh my god, everybody is going to be able to build really quickly.’ However, there’s a big caveat there. A few of them,” said local architect Dan Brunn.

One person asked him to rebuild a decades-old Cape Cod-style house, but with more flame-resistant materials.

“You can get a version of that today, and I have some clients that we are doing things like that. It is costly. So, so, so, so costly,” he said.

Plus some of the houses that were there had wooden shingles, wooden shutters, even some wrap-around wooden porches. Those are all really flammable.

“We shouldn’t have built those to begin with. Those shouldn’t have been built there. You’re in Los Angeles, and Southern California, not the Northeast. So that worries me, big time,” Brunn said.

So rebuild faster, you have to build the same house, but you might not be able to afford it, and it might burn just like the old one did.

That is why some building professionals are thinking bigger picture about how to design neighborhoods that are cheap and quick to build, and are more resilient for the next wildfire.

“One of the things I’m trying to work on right now is, can I get some folks together to do some pooled purchasing, group buying for things like clean concrete or steel or wood,” said Ben Stapleton, executive director of the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council California.

The idea is: Get a bunch of fire victims together to buy sustainable materials, and their homes are cheaper and more resilient. That’s good for the planet, and for the victims waiting to move back home.

“What we shouldn’t be talking about is, ‘Hey, these are going to be more sustainable resilient homes.’ What we should be saying is, ‘These are going to be built cheaper, faster and safer,'” Stapleton said.

All of this talk of rebuilding is still up against a labor shortage. Los Angeles contractors mostly renovate homes. The county doesn’t have nearly enough who know how to build new ones from the ground up.

Brunn proposes designing a few model home templates for victims to pick from that can be built quickly, cheaply, and sustainably. Then builders could mass produce them, like Ford did with the Model T. 

“That’s what we need to be doing,” Brunn said. “We have this amazing opportunity. Why should we be going back?”