Rebuilding in Pacific Palisades: What Our Construction Team Is Hearing on the Ground
Notes from ten months of Palisades rebuild conversations — permitting, insurance, materials, and how families are thinking about coming back.
Since early 2025, New Horizon Development has met with dozens of Pacific Palisades families weighing whether and how to rebuild. These are notes from those conversations — anonymized, but reflective of what our construction team is hearing on the ground across the Palisades, the Alphabet Streets, the Riviera, and the Highlands.
Permitting is faster than expected — for the right team
The City of Los Angeles has stood up dedicated rebuild permitting resources, and turnaround times on complete, well-documented submittals are running significantly faster than pre-fire norms. The catch: incomplete submittals still bounce, and the difference between a two-week correction cycle and a four-month one is entirely upstream of the plan checker.
Insurance settlements are the bottleneck
For most families, the insurance conversation is the pacing item. We recommend engaging a public adjuster early and using an independent estimator to build a rebuild scope in parallel with the insurance negotiation — not sequentially.
Materials and labor
Contrary to what the news cycle has suggested, lead times on most materials have normalized. Framing lumber is available; window packages are running 14–20 weeks (roughly normal); high-end stone is still on 6–8 month lead times, as it has been for years. Where we are seeing pressure is skilled framing crews — we've expanded our in-house crew twice this year and continue to hire.
How families are thinking about coming back
The families we're working with fall into three camps: rebuild what they had, rebuild something meaningfully different, or sell the lot and move on. None of the three is wrong. The families in the strongest position are the ones who make the decision early and stop revisiting it.
If you are weighing a Palisades rebuild, our construction team is happy to walk your lot at no cost and talk through what a realistic scope, schedule, and budget look like. New Horizon Development has been building in the Palisades for more than two decades.
