On a quiet street in Pacific Palisades, recovery does not announce itself. There are no banners or ribbon cuttings, no grand markers signaling resolution. Instead, there are empty lots where homes once stood, flanked by houses already under construction. Temporary fencing hums in the coastal wind. Contractors’ trucks idle beside families still weighing whether they can afford to rebuild.
One year after the January wildfire fractured the Palisades, recovery no longer looks like emergency response. It looks like planning fatigue. Insurance spreadsheets. Community meetings that stretch late into the night. It looks like people who did not set out to lead, but did anyway - building systems where none existed, simply so the work could continue.
The story of the Palisades’ first year of recovery is not a story of a single hero or a single plan. It is the story of neighbors who realized, often uncomfortably early, that recovery would not arrive fully formed. It would have to be built collectively, imperfectly, and in real time.
In the days immediately following the fire, as residents grappled with shock and displacement, Maryam Zar began doing what she does instinctively: convening people. Before she ever carried the title of CEO of the Malibu Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce, Zar helped organize one of the first community-level recovery conversations at the Riviera Country Club. Residents, civic leaders, and agency representatives gathered not because there was a clear plan, but because there wasn’t one.
“There was so much uncertainty,” Zar said. “People didn’t just need information. They needed a place to be heard—and a way to participate in rebuilding, not just be told what was happening to them.”
That early convening helped catalyze what would become the Palisades Recovery Coalition, setting a tone that recovery would be participatory rather than prescriptive. By November, when Zar stepped into her Chamber role, her responsibilities expanded overnight. Business advocacy quickly gave way to something larger: recovery architecture. Neighborhood visioning sessions followed. Recovery labs. Partnerships with architects, engineers, and researchers translating urgency into action. At the same time, Zar focused on stabilizing local businesses still standing but economically strained, pursuing recovery grants and new platforms to keep the local economy alive.
For many residents, the realization that recovery would be self-directed arrived abruptly. In the early days after the fire, people waited for formal emergency systems to mobilize. Instead, there was silence—unclear permitting guidance, stretched insurance timelines, fragmented communication. Into that vacuum stepped neighbors themselves.
Tony Hocking never intended to be the face of recovery. In fact, he designed Team Palisades so no one ever would be. What began as WhatsApp threads and block-level check-ins evolved into a flat, distributed network built on one principle: the rejection of the hero model.
“When you see the emergency up close and realize help isn’t coming right away, people step in,” Hocking said. “The opposite of the hero model was the point. Everyone becomes their own rescuer.”
With a background spanning aerospace engineering, manufacturing, and mountain rescue, Hocking approached chaos as a systems problem—how to organize without burnout, how to allow leadership to rotate as energy shifts, how to build something that does not depend on any one person remaining upright forever. As frustration mounted over delayed planning and insurance uncertainty, his focus remained on clarity, transparency, and the infrastructure beneath leadership itself.
While much of the community focused on debris removal and immediate housing needs, others were already thinking about what could not be undone later. Justin Skaggs was one of them. In the weeks following the fire, Skaggs—founder of Decision Construction—began advocating for converting overhead power and communications lines into underground infrastructure as rebuilding commenced.
“If you don’t organize early, the opportunity disappears,” Skaggs said. “Once rebuilding starts, it’s almost impossible to go back and fix what should have been done together.”
Drawing on deep experience in utility design, permitting, and construction management, Skaggs mobilized early—working with Dry Utility Experts, serving as a technical consultant with AIA Los Angeles, and coordinating with Team Palisades, the Palisades Recovery Coalition, Altadena Village, and neighborhood block captains. His work focused on navigating unglamorous hurdles—cost concerns, construction disruption, LADWP capacity limits, evolving technical standards—before momentum stalled. The aim was not perfection, but alignment.
For decades, PaliSkates was more than a skate shop. Founded 26 years ago by Erica Simpson, PaliSkates functioned as a first job, a second home, and a proving ground for confidence and responsibility. When the fire destroyed the store and everything inside it, Simpson lost the physical space—but not the mission.
She kept PaliSkates alive online, then reopened through a pop-up in Santa Monica, where support poured in from across the Westside. “PaliSkates has always been about hope,” Simpson said. “Giving kids a place to belong, especially when everything around them feels uncertain.”
Unexpected lifelines followed, including a nationally aired commercial produced by the Grammy Awards and a collaboration backed by Avril Lavigne. Looking ahead, Simpson plans to deepen partnerships with Palisades Charter High School, expanding internships and pathways as PaliSkates works toward an eventual return home.
As debris cleared and rebuilding decisions dragged on, a quieter phase of recovery took hold—the long middle. Jessica Rogers, president of the Pacific Palisades Residents Association, has long served as a steady civic presence. After the fire, that work became more urgent. PPRA became a vital channel for collective action, organizing letter-writing campaigns pressing officials on permit fee waivers, rebuilding timelines, traffic safety, and development decisions.
“Our role is to stay on the pulse of what the community wants,” Rogers said, “and to make sure decision-makers hear it directly from the people who live here.”
Rogers also helped lead the Pacific Palisades Long Term Recovery Group, a coalition grounded in national VOAD models that brings together dozens of committees and service organizations to bridge gaps between assets and unmet needs. As insurance runs out and savings stretch thin, Rogers believes the most urgent need now is mental health support. In a recent NORC survey asking residents to name the word that best captured where they are now, the answer was unanimous: hope.
Opacity has fueled much of the frustration around rebuilding, and Frank Renfro set out to change that. As co-founder of Pali Builds, Renfro helped make the invisible visible—tracking permits, construction activity, property purchases, and developer intent so residents could understand what was happening, where, and by whom.
That transparency soon expanded into insurance advocacy. Using industry-standard Xactimate software, Pali Builds began generating locally grounded rebuild estimates, often revealing multimillion-dollar gaps between insurance payouts and real rebuilding costs. From there, the platform evolved into a two-sided marketplace, helping homeowners solicit bids while enabling contractors to find and organize work more efficiently. With a background in software, Renfro sees disaster recovery as a proving ground for better systems—tools that could one day prevent communities from facing the same failures again.
Back on that quiet Palisades street, the work remains unfinished. Some homes are rising. Others exist only as plans. Some families have returned. Others are still deciding whether they can. What has changed, however, is capacity. The first year of recovery taught this community how to convene, how to advocate, how to build systems that outlast individuals.
Recovery here is not a moment. It is a network. And one year later, Pacific Palisades is still here—not because the process has been easy, but because its people learned how to carry it forward together.