A year after the LA fires, some people who lost their homes are trying to bring down the price of rebuilding by buying services and goods together.
DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
It’s been a year since the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes and other buildings in Los Angeles, and many survivors have not even started to rebuild yet. One big obstacle is the price tag attached to returning home. Libby Rainey with LAist News reports on a group of survivors who are buying in bulk to try to bring prices down.
LIBBY RAINEY, BYLINE: One year after the fire, this is what some of Altadena sounds like.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAMMERING)
RAINEY: The wooden structures of new homes are slowly starting to pop up block by block, little signs of progress in a landscape still wildly transformed by the fires that burned here last January. Where a whole community once stood, now vacant lots sprout flowers and weeds, and it’s quiet when the hammers aren’t going.
MICHAEL TUCCILLO: It is weird. You know that this is not what it’s supposed to look like and not what it normally looks like. It’s extra quiet at night, and it’s extra dark.
RAINEY: That’s Michael Tuccillo, a fire survivor in this neighborhood. We took a walk around his block in December, passing dirt-filled plots of land and one neighbor living in an RV next to his property. Tuccillo has one of the few standing homes on his street.
TUCCILLO: Do we feel incredibly grateful to be back home. And now, I feel like I have to, like, double my efforts to help my community get back home.
RAINEY: One big impediment to that – a lot of people face a critical gap between what insurance is paying and what it’ll actually cost to rebuild. So some fire survivors are turning to bulk purchasing as a solution, going in on the many costs of rebuilding together to score better deals and save money. It’s a tactic that Tuccillo and fellow Altadena fire survivor Morgan Whirledge used for land surveying, assessing the land before you build.
MORGAN WHIRLEDGE: If you’re bringing out survey equipment to an area, you – that equipment is expensive. You have multiple people doing it. So why not knock out a few properties at the same time?
RAINEY: And it worked. Whirledge went in with four other households and said the initial cost was $5,000 each. But by hiring the service together, they saved around $1,500 per person. Whirledge and Tuccillo say their neighbors haven’t gotten far enough in the rebuilding process to use bulk purchasing for other needs. But it’s a strategy that’s worked for all kinds of things in previous fires around California. When Brad Sherwood lost his house in Santa Rosa to the Tubbs fire in 2017, he and his wife, along with around 20 neighbors, hired the same builder.
BRAD SHERWOOD: And that really benefited us in terms of construction costs, time line, labor costs.
RAINEY: Sherwood said that initial estimates for just his household were something like $700 a square foot. By purchasing his home alongside his neighbors, he said he brought that cost down to around $400 a square foot.
SHERWOOD: The group buy was kind of like therapy in a way ’cause we all were doing this together, and you didn’t feel alone or scared.
RAINEY: The savings from bulk purchasing can be huge, but it’s tough to pull off. Making big financial decisions with neighbors and friends is complicated. For one, it’s hard to get organized. Here’s Morgan Whirledge in Altadena again.
WHIRLEDGE: Everyone sort of going out and trying to negotiate these things on their own or trying to, like, get their neighbors together through email or text chains or WhatsApp. And it’s just – it’s all very cumbersome.
RAINEY: In Los Angeles, a software developer has launched a website to try to streamline this coordination, but that’s just one of the issues they’ll confront as they move forward with bulk purchasing. When Tuccillo hired a land surveyor for around two dozen neighbors, someone had to go first, and someone had to go last.
TUCCILLO: It took, like, two months, maybe three months, you know, for some of these people to get service, which is a big deal, and people were upset at me.
RAINEY: Jennifer Gray Thompson leads the national fire survivor support organization After The Fire. She says that despite the difficulties of group purchasing, she has seen so many people benefit from working together.
JENNIFER GRAY THOMPSON: Nobody can walk through this alone. It’s an inefficient way to do it. It’s not healthy emotionally or financially or politically or socially.
RAINEY: And it’s not just in California. She says communities in Colorado have used this same technique, and survivors of the fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, are discussing it now. How well it works depends on a number of factors, she says, including the affluence of the region and the proximity of the homes. In Altadena, fire survivors say if it means more people can come home, they’re determined to keep working together to bring costs down.
For NPR News, I’m Libby Rainey in Los Angeles.
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