On March 20, 2025, Steven Soboroff and Dr. Mark Gold sat down in front of a small audience at the Westside Urban Forum gathering at the Helms Design Center to talk about the unique disaster of the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.
“There’s only one thing you can’t ask, there’s one question I can’t answer,” Soboroff, who is now the Chief Recovery Officer for the City of Los Angeles. “Don’t ask how I am, because I really don’t know yet.”
Gold, famous for his work on water quality through the state, noted that the wildfires that wiped out both Pacific Palisades and Altadena were unprecedented. “This is an unheard of level of disaster in the history of the United States”
Soboroff got into logistics; the number of homes that would be rebuilt, how long it would take and how expensive it would be. With his history of building Playa Vista and the Staples Center, he was candid about the need for express clearance on building permits, and how much people would need to be prepared to invest. “If you can come back in two or three years for three million dollars – that’s one thing. But if it takes seven or eight years, and you are over ten million, will you still want to rebuild?”
Gold also dug into logistics, with the difficulty of transporting materials and labor to the Palisades with its notably limited access, and how the community of Altadena was already strategizing. Noting “The renters who were burned out, the apartment buildings that are gone…” were all under the same risk from toxic debris with far fewer resources.
The question and answer period that followed saw more than a dozen people stay to ask about the specifics of their own situation, and there was a calm in commiserating.
What now, what next? Soboroff reiterated “We don’t know yet.”
Judith Martin-Straw
Photo – Stephanie Shaw of Westside Urban Forum with Soboroff, Gold