btfod

Pure tragedy to consider every dollar, every hour of labor, every second of time spent on this instead of providing healthcare to people who don't have it. Least serious country.

Someone also mentioned this tactic on the recent Rev Left Radio ep on the fires. Great point.

From the beginning fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze along the coast of José Tapia’s Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely because of—the Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century.

But the pressure during the 1920s boom to open the coastal range to speculative subdivision was unrelenting. In the hyperbole of the era, occupation of the mountains became Los Angeles’s manifest destiny. “The day for the white invasion of the Santa Monicas has come,” declared real estate clairvoyant John Russell McCarthy in a booklet published by the Los Angeles Times in 1925. In anticipation of this land rush, the county sheriff had been arresting every vagrant in sight and putting them to work on chain gangs building roads through the rugged canyons just south of Rancho Malibu. (Radical critics at the time denounced this system as “deliberate real-estate graft” meant only to enhance land values in mountain districts “which the population of this city does not even know exists.”)

This essay gave me a lot to chew on, and I wanted to highlight these two excerpts in particular (bolded emphasis mine). Thanks for sharing. I don't think a "fuck settlers" captures the magnitude of what I'm feeling but it'll have to do for now.

Thank you. Please forgive, I didn't intend to imply aesthetics fix everything despite my comment appearing so.

Where can I read more about this topic

Submitting the "President Trump has formally extended a PERSONAL invitation to YOU!" mass donation email as evidence he and I are true best friends

Yes... severe storms and tornadoes are unfortunately a factor where I live. I've seen neighborhoods here that look just as ruined as the one in the photo, sans ashes... and of course most of the new construction is lumber frame. I even saw a 4 story apartment building go up last year, all lumber. Seemed wild to me. One of the many ill effects of housing being considered a commodity instead of essential to human life, I guess.

Makes sense to me, thanks. That last one though... Not sure if crawlspace foundations are common there but if so I bet their vents were open. That's horrifying to imagine embers blowing in and turning your crawlspace into a bellows

Dude was horning in on their turf, no way they could handle getting beaten to market by some rando

Minus the power lines, give it all a fresh coat of paint/stucco and that would look pretty dope I think.

Spread some public art and plant life around and I'm nearly there

Thanks for the reply. The older I get the more I wanna live in a dope concrete apartment building, and I don't even live in an earthquake or fire risk area... (yet, who knows what's in store)

I'm sure that would help on the margins but I wonder if a fire of this scale could easily ignite or carbonize the timber frame behind it anyway...