The new sound in Pacific Palisades: Hammers on nails

There’s a new sound in Pacific Palisades lately.

The streets were quiet for so long, save for the rumble of excavators and dump trucks, hauling away the debris.

But now, if you visit Palisades in the daylight hours, you’ll hear the thumping rhythm of hammers against nails.

The wooden frames of new homes are finally going up. 

For weeks after the January 2025 fire, Palisades was a graveyard of chimneys, obelisks mournfully marking the ruins where homes had once stood.

Then the Army Corps of Engineers swept through. 

LA Mayor Karen Bass had said it would take 18 months to clear the lots. With President Donald Trump in office, it took less than eight.

Still, there was an eerie silence in town.

The city bureaucracy was slow to approve permits for rebuilding. And some of the insurance companies dragged their feet for months, leaving homeowners desperate for cash.

But then, this past January, President Trump decided to get involved.

I personally watched him sign the executive order in the Oval Office in which he took over the permitting processes for the Palisades and Eaton Fire burn zones. (I kept the pen.)

Residents were stunned at the news. Some pointed out that permits were no longer the limiting factor, and that the city had finally begun to get its act together. 

But what mattered most was that the president had taken responsibility for the rebuilding effort in a way that no state or local official had done.

Finally, someone was accountable. And there was nothing in it for Trump — no votes, not even a congressional seat to pick up. 

He did it because he has friends in the Palisades who — wealthy and successful though they might be — were at their wits’ end.

And he did it, I believe, because he cares.

Love him or hate him — and Palisades is heavily Democratic — Trump gave the rebuilding effort a boost.

He sent EPA administrator Lee Zeldin — one of the most effective members of the administration — to oversee the process.

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Zeldin’s team met quietly with local residents to find out where the bottlenecks were.

Crucially, he also met with Mayor Bass.

Bass had once told Trump to stay out of the rebuilding effort — to “handle his business, because we are handling ours.”

But one of my fellow Palisadians, a man named Spencer Pratt, started running for mayor.

And then Nithya Raman, a socialist on the City Council, jumped into the race, unexpectedly. 

The mayor suddenly had every incentive to work with the Trump administration — to blunt Spencer’s criticism, and to cast Raman as a risk to the rebuilding effort.

Bass is a poor administrator, but she is good at building relationships. And as luck would have it, she and Zeldin got along when they were in Congress together.

It was democracy at work: With the 2026 elections looming, everyone started pulling in the same direction.

(Everyone except Gavin Newsom, who seems to think fighting with Trump is good for his presidential prospects.)

The homes started going up first in the “Alphabet Streets” near the center of Palisades, where smaller lots made construction cheaper.

Then they started going up in Marquez Knolls, my neighborhood, where neighbors have banded together to help each other.

There is still so much more to do. And it is hard to drive past the lots that are still empty, overgrown with tall weeds. 

There are burglars who steal building materials, and even copycat arsonists looking for trouble. 

The streets are dark and frightening at night. 

My own house, which survived the fire, is half a house at the moment. We had to strip off the entire back wall.

We also had to remove the soil, which was contaminated with lead. California’s too good for hazardous waste, so we had to truck it to Arizona, which cost a fortune. And insurance doesn’t cover soil.

My wife used to joke that I should have let the place burn instead of fighting the flames with buckets of water. It would have been simpler.

But when I saw those redwood stud beams in back, exposed for the first time in 76 years, they were as good as new.

No one builds with redwood anymore. We still have it. 

Half a house feels like progress. It feels like hope.

In December, I visited Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, which burned down in 2017. 

It was almost entirely rebuilt. Standing in the park, I heard dogs barking and children playing. It was a community again.

I realized that we could do it, too. 

There’s a long way to go. But during the pandemic, stuck in that house, my son and I read Homer’s Odyssey together.

It’s about a guy trying to get home.

That’s the core of every epic story.

And this one is ours.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of the California Post.