Jan. 19, 2025 9:00 pm ET
A battle for disaster recovery resources is poised to erupt across the U.S.
The vast scale of Los Angeles’s wildfire damage is coming into view, while devastated cities on the other coast are just starting to rebuild after back-to-back hurricanes ravaged the Southeast last fall.
Rarely have so many cities ruined by natural disasters attempted to rebuild around the same time. Hurricane reconstruction efforts are under way in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Soon, Los Angeles County will be starting to rebuild.
“We’ve had disasters like these,” said Jay Lybik, national director of multifamily analytics at CoStar. “But never anything like this where we’ve had so many.”
Cities in rebuilding mode are now all vying for specialized construction labor, scarce building materials and custom home appliances. Competition for resources would likely slow the pace of recovery for all the cities, some home builders and developers said.
Builders may not experience all these shortages immediately. Insurance negotiations, permitting approvals and other parts of the recovery process are likely to be a long slog. That can prevent rebuilding projects from breaking ground all at once, allowing local supply chains and labor forces to keep up.
The fires in Southern California have destroyed more than 12,000 structures. They are on track to be the country’s costliest wildfire disaster ever, with early estimates of the total economic loss put at nearly $50 billion.
Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, which killed more than 250 people in the fall, also led to a combined loss estimated at another $50 billion between affected areas like Florida and North Carolina.
Some construction crews helping to repair Florida’s Gulf Coast are considering driving to Los Angeles for the wildfire recovery because they think more opportunities exist there, said Saket Soni, executive director of Resilience Force, an organization that helps train, deploy and protect disaster recovery workers.
Recovery crews are often spread thin and have to bounce from one wreckage site to another. One disaster recovery worker drove a crew of nine from Louisiana’s Hurricane Francine destruction to Florida after Hurricane Helene, Soni said. He had already worked 19 hurricanes before that.
“You’re going to have a Hunger Games-style competition for materials and labor,” said Sean Burton, chief executive at the Los Angeles-based multifamily development firm Cityview.
Builders will compete for engineering resources, architectural resources and debris removal, he added.
Burton thinks that the government, homeowners and contractors should buy appliances and building materials in bulk to reduce costs and expedite the redevelopment effort in Southern California, even if that means storing some of that supply in vacant warehouse space.
…
