Rick Caruso on California’s Collapse: Broken Leadership, LA Wildfire Failures & the Fix

When Competence Becomes a Civic Priority: The Palisades, Fires, and the Calculus of Recovery

The charred edges of a neighborhood are rarely just about burned wood and melted metal. They are the visible ledger of decisions made — and not made — when the heat rose and the wind began. In a conversation that moved between the granular and the systemic, a developer who built some of Los Angeles’s most beloved public places described how presence, preparation, and an almost corporate attention to detail altered the fate of a community that otherwise would have been reduced to ruins.

Private resources, public consequences

There is an almost counterintuitive scene at the center of the story: trucks full of water and private firefighters arriving before the flames, pre-deployed two days in advance because the storm warnings were unmistakable. This wasn’t improvisation; it was deliberate contingency planning born of prior experience on other wildfire-prone properties. The choice to station water tanks, firefighter teams, and retardant equipment was an operational decision informed by past fires on another project, and it transformed that preparation into lives and homes saved. The image of a property owner loaning equipment to municipal crews when hydrants failed reframes private infrastructure as a critical fall-back when public assets falter.

Red tape as the silent accelerant

Rescue saved structures; bureaucracy delayed recovery. The lament that plan checkers were working remotely months after an emergency crystallizes a broader dysfunction: in the hours and months after disaster, the machinery of government must move from policy to construction management. When essential government personnel continue to work from home rather than stand on-site in temporary trailers, rebuilding stalls. The result is an entire block, or dozens of families, suspended between tragedy and restitution by permits, reviews, and layers of procedural inertia.

This isn’t a complaint about process for its own sake. The consequences are concrete: slower rebuilding timelines; higher interim housing costs; the psychological toll of prolonged displacement. The recurring image is of an official checklist applied where urgent judgment calls are required.

Infrastructure reimagined: underground power and modern water systems

Beyond permits, the disaster illuminates a systemic imperative: rebuild to withstand the next catastrophe. Conversations shifted quickly from individual claims and rebuilding timelines to broader questions about power lines, water reservoirs, and hardened infrastructure. The call is for undergrounding critical transmission lines and designing neighborhood water systems that don’t rely on a single source. Infrastructural resilience here is practical policy — tunnels and conduits as civic insurance against the known behavior of wind-driven blazes.

Design thinking in public service

Heavier than the rhetoric was a recurring ethos: the private-sector insistence on delighting customers translated into a public conversation about what city life should feel like. Stadiums and shopping malls were contrasted with parks, trees, and water features designed to make people want to linger. That philosophy — the idea of enriching lives as a primary metric of success — informs a larger argument about political leadership. When municipal decisions are made with an eye toward how people experience place, the outcomes extend beyond economic returns to civic pride and safer neighborhoods.

Homelessness, drugs, and the price of inaction

One striking line in the discussion pierced the abstractions: a reported public expenditure of nearly a million dollars per person for street removals. Whether precisely accurate or an exclamation meant to jolt, the point landed — money is being spent without proportional, durable outcomes. The suggested alternative is straightforward: redirect funds toward organizations with a proven track record of housing placements and wraparound services for mental health and addiction.

At the same time, the presence of criminal activity — open drug sales and even reported booby traps in encampments — reframes public-health arguments as public-safety imperatives. The juxtaposition is stark: humane services must coexist with law enforcement capable of shutting down drug markets and protecting first responders. The conversation insists that tolerance for visible drug economies undermines any attempt to build productive lives for people living outdoors.

Politics of accountability and the incentives of office

Behind every municipal failure is a political economy: who benefits from stasis, who is rewarded for inaction, and how electoral systems shape incentives. The critique moves beyond personalities to structures — one-party dominance, ballot-harvesting controversies, and the way long-tenured officeholders can become untethered from day-to-day accountability. If governance becomes a career rather than a term of service, timeliness and urgency become casualty lines.

Federal intervention and local authority

The possibility of federal intervention — even the specter of the National Guard — rides awkwardly into the debate. There is a clear distinction drawn between federal territories and local municipal management: the remedy suggested is not to import military authority into cities but to demand and enable competent local leadership that will back its law enforcement and operate effectively in partnership with state and federal resources when appropriate.

Design, decisions, and a civic conclusion

The final chord is not partisan flourish but a call for an ethic: presence, preparedness, and the refusal to let procedure eclipse purpose. The details of a train bell at a resort or a trolley through a shopping district are not mere flourishes; they illustrate a practice of thinking through the user’s experience and applying that same attention to civic systems. If cities want to be livable, safe, and prosperous, leaders — whether elected executives or those shaping policy from the private sector — must prioritize decisions that protect life, expedite recovery, and invest in resiliency.

key_points

Recovery will require both rapid operational decisions and durable infrastructure investment, not rhetorical “reimagining.”

The most urgent reforms are procedural: get plan checkers on-site, streamline permits, and eliminate needless delays to rebuilding.

Private pre-deployment of firefighters and water resources can meaningfully supplement municipal response in wildfire zones.

Homelessness policy must combine prohibition of open-drug markets with funding for proven housing and services providers.

Undergrounding power lines and redesigning local water systems are essential investments for wildfire resilience.

Political accountability depends on civic engagement: elected officials need pressure to prioritize service over permanence.

The civic experiment ahead is not about ideology alone; it is about whether leaders will make the sometimes-unpopular, technically demanding decisions to keep communities safe and whole.