Toward a Just, Environmentally Resilient Future

Los Angeles County is a region of resourceful, hardworking communities. During the covid pandemic and once again in the wake of the LA wildfires, mutual aid networks emerged to connect disaster-impacted community members to the essentials of food, medicine, clothing, and even shelter. As we plan for recovery and reconstruction, we need to pursue policy solutions that draw on the same principles to resist exploitation, remediate ecosystems, and rezone for resilience.

The right kind of government action can peel back layers of inequality and redirect our region towards a more just, environmentally resilient future.

Recommendation 1 - Counter land speculation

Land speculation is already skyrocketing in the fire zones and corporate owners are taking control. According to a new SAJE report, almost half of the 94 post-fire sales from February 11 to April 30, 2025, were to corporate entities. As the fires burned, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to try stopping this practice but still it persists, being deeply rooted in historical patterns.

There’s a long record of land being treated primarily as capital in the U.S, which has led to deep racial and economic inequality In what’s now California, Spanish colonists established ranchos by violently dispossessing Indigenous people from the land beginning in the 15th century and taking place for over 400 years since. European-American settlers developed massive agriculture operations starting in the 19th century and sprawling home building enterprises in the 20th century. Disaster-fueled land speculation is a continuation of this centuries-long history.

To go beyond stopgap executive orders, our region needs a true decommodified land use option to counter land exploitation and speculation. We need a toolkit of policies and practices of land stewardship which are rooted in the same communal ethos that powers mutual aid networks and which can help stop permanent displacement of communities from disaster areas. Two decommodified land use policies are particularly important – Community/Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Acts (COPA/TOPA) and land banking.

COPA/TOPA is a policy that would require land owners to notify nonprofit community groups and/or organized tenants about their intent to sell and honor their right of first offer ahead of commercial offers. Land owners retain discretion over whom to sell. However, COPA/TOPA offers land owners that are interested in considering noncommercial factors, such as community preservation and anti-displacement.

Land banks confer government or nonprofit agencies that run them an obligation to advance public purposes with the land, like providing affordable housing. Land banks offer those agencies a way to buy land at prices before market speculation drives up land value, which would drive up development costs. Land banks and COPA/TOPA policies when implemented transfers land ownership into public stewardship and relieves private land owners of their financial and other land owning obligations.

Recommendation 2 - Promote land remediation

Hazardous fire debris is the latest threat to California’s natural ecology, following sources like oil drilling, transportation, and electronic waste disposal. Pollutants from all these sources trigger adverse public health impacts on communities, especially in lower income communities and communities of color. Debates about where to process toxic debris from LA’s recent wildfires highlight an additional layer of environmental hazards with serious public health and ecological impacts.

Public policy that holds industry polluters accountable to the widespread harm they profit from is the level of intervention necessary to protect public and ecological health. San Fernando Valley Area 1 Superfund site is one such example. Since 1989, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has led clean up efforts of the groundwater beneath Burbank and North Hollywood that corporations Lockheed Martin and Honeywell polluted with their aerospace manufacturing operations for decades. Groundwater at this site supplies 12 percent of the City of Los Angeles’s drinking water supply. Governments have held Lockheed Martin accountable for more than $265-million and counting for long term groundwater clean up.

As toxic waste from industrial pollution and climate disasters happen at once, governments should enact legislation and accounts funded by fees and fines on polluting industrial corporations to resource ecological remediation and measures.

Recommendation 3 - Rezone for resilient communities

Climate change created the drought conditions in which the fires burned more widely and intensely than ever before in January. Overnight, tens of thousands of people fled and relocated indefinitely, if not permanently. These newly displaced persons were forced into an already overheated local rental market, exacerbating competition for housing where fire hazard risk was relatively low. Large populations are experiencing the adverse effects of climate change beyond those directly displaced by the 2025 fires.

The sum total of people in all of LA’s climate hazard zones, including high fire, high sea level rise and high flood zones, now comprise a population at risk of mass displacement, which city officials need to account for as they plan for a warming planet. California cities should prospectively accommodate a shift of population away from high climate risk areas with a two-step policy solution.

Cities should incentivize the development of a large number of affordable and social housing units in relatively lower climate risk areas through their zoning codes. Current land use policies, like the recently adopted City of Los Angeles Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) incentivize affordable multifamily development, but only in existing multifamily zones. The City of LA’s CHIP excludes sites in single family land use zones from development incentives, despite single family zones comprising 72% of the city’s land area. Single family land use zone exclusion plus climate hazard induced displacement increases development pressure in multifamily zones in lower climate risk areas. This presents a dilemma of whether and how tenants of existing apartments can remain in their neighborhoods.

Along with policies to encourage production, cities should enact strong tenant protections, on the model of LA City’s recent Renter Protection Ordinances, to reduce displacement pressures against people who already live in lower climate risk areas.

Governments have the unique power to cultivate collective action in this new post-wildfire context for a just recovery and equitable reconstruction. In the wake of the wildfires that burned rapidly through Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and other Los Angeles neighborhoods this year, we have seen how our regions thirst for community and how naturally we fall into communal support. Mutual aid networks represent the absolute best of Los Angeles. We need plans that reward mutual networks of support, not individuals with the deepest pockets. We need policies that help communities resist exploitation, remediate ecosystems, and rezone for resilience. We need leaders that connect everyone in our communities not just when disaster strikes but for the long run, prioritizing people vulnerable by physical disability and systemic socioeconomic disadvantage, so no one is left behind.

Alfonso Directo Jr. is Advocacy Director at ACT-LA, a countywide coalition of 49 community-based organizations advocating for housing, land use, and transit justice.