• The top scientist at real-estate firm CoreLogic lives in an LA area affected by the Palisades fire.
• Howard Botts said he chose his home's location carefully and added extra protections against fire.
• He said his home is safe but that big challenges lie ahead for his neighbors and other homeowners.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Howard Botts, chief scientist and executive leader of CoreLogic's science and analytics team, which studies the climate crisis and risks from natural disasters. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I live in the Rustic Canyon area of Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles — 20 miles west of downtown.

We've had fires in the community before, but usually, they get suppressed pretty quickly. The recent fires are an anomaly.

On the day it all started, I could see smoke and fire on the top of the Santa Monica Mountains in the city. The wind was blowing at 30 to 50 miles per hour. which I knew wasn't good because winds flow from the mountains to the ocean.

My wife and I began packing up essential things, getting ready to evacuate. We had no idea how fast that fire was going to spread. Within a couple of hours, much of our city was engulfed in flames.

We evacuated from our house, along with tens of thousands of residents from Pacific Palisades and surrounding areas.

Last Thursday, I was able to walk into Rustic Canyon. Miraculously, our house had no damage, but there's a lot of ash, debris, and smoke damage that will need extensive clean-up. We may have to remove the drywall and insulation if deep cleaning doesn't remove the campfire smell.

I live on the south side of Sunset Boulevard, just below Will Rogers State Park. Virtually all the homes on the north side of Sunset and above burned — including Billy Crystal's house and Will Rogers' historic home.

As you go up the hill from where I live, into the main part of the Palisades, it looks like the pictures you see of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. Literally everything is gone, except for some fireplaces and metal staircases.

Palisades residents didn't anticipate the fires even though the area is high-risk

The Pacific Palisades is uniquely located between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains, which rise about 1,000 feet above the city — just a few miles from the coast. The mountains offer beautiful views but are also heavily covered with chaparral, making the area at high risk for wildfires.

I was very aware of this and avoided living in the hillside area.

A question I get a a lot is, "Why do people live in the Palisades, up in the hillside?"

I think it's a calculated risk. For some, the area's amenities outweigh the perceived risk.

The homes in the neighborhood range from $3 million to $64 million, so people living here have some level of assets and probably feel secure. The area is also unique in that, even though it's part of the city of LA, it has a small-town feel.

I think all of those things caused people to maybe downplay the wildfire risk. They thought nothing like this would ever happen.

The Palisades fire ignited for several reasons

You would never envision an entire community burning, but the wildfires were born from a perfect storm of events.

Increasing average temperatures put stress on vegetation in the mountains that hadn't burned in 30 years.

Extremely high wind speeds also played a major role. The winds carried embers a mile from the wildfire, blowtorching flames out of the mountains and into flat, more urban areas. In those areas, houses, fences, and vegetation were already burning well ahead of the fire's front.

There were also human-caused factors. Fire departments and responders ran out of water, so fire suppression that would normally occur on the ground ceased for a period.

Fires in this area are also typically attacked from the air with airplanes and helicopters. However, those aircraft were grounded due to the high winds, preventing the use of fire retardants and other aerial suppression methods.

I don't plan to leave the Palisades, but I've taken steps to protect my house and family

I absolutely plan to continue living in the Palisades.

As a scientist and a fourth-generation Californian, wildfire risk is always at the forefront of my mind. I've mitigated everything I could around my property, from installing double-paned windows and a fire-resistant roof.

My house is anchored in bedrock, so my earthquake risk is relatively low. Plus, I live high enough above the Pacific Ocean that I don't have to worry about sea level rise.

Conversely, it will take a decade for my community to return.

Many older homes likely had asbestos or lead, requiring major remediation efforts, including removing soil and other materials. This will prevent people from moving back in immediately.

Also, the stores, banks, post offices, and schools are all gone, so any sense of community closeness is lost.

It will be a long time before this area bounces back — that will be the real challenge.

Insurance costs could impact whether people who lost homes rebuild or move

The Palisades is relatively affluent. However, the areas affected by the Eaton fire have many more middle-class residents.

I think the fires will change the character of those neighborhoods, because the key question is, "Can residents afford to rebuild at the cost it will take?"

Building codes have changed, so homes being rebuilt will need to meet the latest standards, including indoor sprinklers for fire suppression and fireproof Class A roofs, which will increase both materials and costs.

Another question is, "Do residents have enough insurance coverage to make rebuilding possible?"

California definitely has an insurability problem at the moment.

In September, a major insurer did not renew my policy. The only fire insurance I could get was through the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort. My overall homeowners premium increased from $2,800 a year to $12,800 a year for less coverage than I had previously.

With higher insurability costs, some of my neighbors are considering moving to lower-cost areas in other parts of California. I think we'll see this play out nationally as well.

Over the next 30 years, we'll likely see people moving to regions they've historically left, such as cities around the Great Lakes — Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit — where climate change impacts are expected to be more moderate.

Californians will also need to adjust how they build homes

A key question is how places like California can stay safe with rising temperatures.

We'll see more happening at the community level, where neighbors band together to clear vegetation around homes to reduce wildfire risk.

Additionally, there will be more pressure on individual homeowners to mitigate wildfire risk on their properties — such as avoiding wood fences, decks, and pergolas attached to the house.

We'll also see insurers incentivizing homeowners to make changes that reduce risk. For example, some neighbors were told they could lower their rates by removing pine or eucalyptus trees from their property.

Going forward, I think there will also be much greater investments in California's public safety, including making sure there is adequate water supply, fire suppression equipment, and other resources.

• Trump's mass deportation plans could hinder LA wildfire rebuilding efforts.
• Immigrants form a large part of California's construction workforce, already facing shortages.
• Deportations could worsen housing shortages and increase costs in the construction industry.

Housing policy and immigration researchers say President-elect Donald Trump's plans for mass deportations could hamper efforts to rebuild the thousands of homes destroyed by the wildfires in Los Angeles and intensify the region's housing shortage.

Data from the National Association of Home Builders shows immigrants, including those living in the US illegally, make up a significant portion of California's construction workforce, which is already suffering from a shortage of workers.

The extent and scope of possible deportations after Trump takes office on January 20 is still unclear. However, researchers expect even the threat of immigration crackdowns to shrink the available construction workforce.

"When Trump is sworn in, there will be a chilling effect," Ben Metcalf, a housing policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told Business Insider. "We don't know how big it will be, but it is 100% certain that there will be fewer undocumented folks showing up at the job lines to try and get on construction jobs."

As of January 15, at least 25 people had been killed by the wildfires in LA County, and the Palisades and Eaton fires — the two largest — were still only partly contained. Over 12,000 structures have been destroyed, while over 40,000 acres have been burned. Nearly 90,000 people are still under evacuation orders.

Housing policy researchers and economists warned that the wildfire destruction will deepen California's already acute housing shortage. LA County was short about 337,000 homes as of 2022, per a report published last year from Zillow.

Any immigration restrictions will hurt labor availability for developers, contractors, and others involved in LA's future rebuilding effort, Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research and Consulting, told Business Insider.

"Everyone in and around Southern California that's in the housing market is going to feel this in some way or another," he said.

An industry built on immigrant labor

The exact number of immigrants who work in the country's construction industry varies among researchers, but foreign-born workers — particularly those living in the country illegally — make up a disproportionate share of the workforce. An estimated 15 to 23% of that overall construction workforce live in the country illegally.

In California, immigrants made up 41% of the construction workforce in 2023, the National Association of Home Builders found. It's unclear what share of LA's construction workforce is in the country illegally.

The construction industry is already facing a significant nationwide labor shortage — estimated at about 500,000 workers last year — that has also increased building costs. The shortage has slowed the pace of new home construction, repairs, and renovations and driven up labor costs.

Some economists and homebuilders have previously told BI that Trump's plans to curtail legal and illegal immigration could further restrict the construction workforce, slow the rate of building, and inflate prices. Many immigrants working in the industry are protected under certain special legal programs, like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status, which were bolstered under President Joe Biden but may be cut by Trump.

Deportations would mean "fewer workers to build the housing that we need, and to some extent, some homes would become vacant because members in their home got deported," said Shane Phillips, housing initiative project manager at UCLA's Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

Sixty-one percent of home builders surveyed by John Burns Research and Consulting in December said they expect potential deportations under Trump to hurt their operations. At the same time, 87% of home builders said they're concerned about Trump's plans to raise tariffs, which economists expect would inflate the costs of building materials imported abroad.

Immigrants who live in the US illegally are also more likely to work in single-family home construction than in larger apartment buildings, multiple experts told BI. This is in part because small, custom home construction projects tend to employ smaller contractors better able to skirt regulations, Metcalf said. Most of the homes that have been destroyed or damaged by the fires are single-family.

"Particularly in the renovation and rebuilding kind of space, where you're just doing a one-off home, that is exactly where the construction industry is particularly reliant on those undocumented workers," Metcalf said.

Chloe East, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies topics like immigration, said slowing the pace of construction by shrinking the immigrant workforce would also hurt the US-born construction workforce.

"When companies cannot find laborers for a building contract, they will also not hire architects and managers for the contract either," she said.

There is precedent for deportations negatively impacting the construction industry. During President Barack Obama's first term, about 400,000 people were deported through the Secure Communities program, a Department of Homeland Security program that identified deportable immigrants in US jails. Research on its impacts found deportations had negative impacts on new home builds. East added the threat of mass deportations causes people who are living in the country illegally to work less to avoid deportation risks.

"Three years after the start of mass deportations, the average county has about 2,000 fewer new housing units built than it would have if mass deportations had not occurred," East told BI, citing an October 2024 paper. "Because there are fewer new homes built, the price of the average new home also goes up."

An unpredictable future with immigration

While Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have pledged to deport millions of immigrants as part of a broader crackdown, it's not clear that their ambitious plans are feasible. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, told The Wall Street Journal he doesn't know how many people may be deported in the first 100 days and said the administration will likely first go after immigrants who are living in the country illegally and with criminal records rather than broad sweeps of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.

During his first term, Trump oversaw an initial uptick in removals. Still, his administration deported about 1.5 million people — significantly fewer than the 2.9 million people Obama deported during his first term.

On the campaign trail, Vance argued that deportations would lower housing costs, and American-born workers not in the workforce could take on construction jobs.

However, some economists and homebuilders told BI that these conclusions may not hold up. During the pandemic, many older, experienced workers retired, and the pipeline of younger US-born workers isn't sufficient, homebuilders have told BI.

"The only way that we as a country are going to get through our issues with homelessness, the housing price bubble, and the housing crunch issue is to construct more housing," Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the immigrant advocacy nonprofit group National Immigration Forum, told BI. "If we're actually thinking about removing so many of those workers and decimating that industry, it would have a domino effect on our housing shortage issues."

Chad Blocker, a Los Angeles-based immigration attorney, said his firm's clients in the construction industry are attempting to reassure their immigrant workers even as they anticipate a major federal immigration crackdown.

"The immigration enforcement environment is going to change dramatically," Blocker told Business Insider. "There's just a lot of general anxiety among the immigrant communities, including those who are here with lawful status."

Are you a home builder or immigrant construction worker concerned about the impacts of shifting immigration policy? Share your story with these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected].