The rebuilding process in Los Angeles after this year’s devastating fires is highlighting how ideology and bureaucracy have helped destroy the city, as both are now bogging down the city’s recovery.

The fires that burned through Los Angeles took place in January, with the two largest fires being fully contained by Jan. 31. Mayor Karen Bass has repeatedly promised a speedy rebuilding process, including her March declaration that the city would be rebuilt at “lightning speed.” As recently as April 30, Bass said, “LA’s recovery effort is on track to be the fastest in modern California history.”

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It has now been three months since the fires were contained, and four since they started, and yet Bass’s proclamations are ringing hollow, just like her vow that she wouldn’t travel out of the country as mayor. As of March 27, the city had approved four building permits for rebuilding. It took until late April for the city to create a publicly viewable dashboard detailing its “progress.” As of May 4, the city is up to a total of six building permits issued, with just 95 building plan reviews in process. According to the dashboard, there are 12,048 damaged or destroyed properties.

To give you an idea of the pace, the first permit was issued on March 5. The blueprints for that rebuild were submitted to city inspectors on Feb. 17. The supposedly fast-tracked process took 16 days to issue its first permit. In the 38 days after it was reported that the city issued four total permits, it has issued just two more. It was Jan. 13 when Bass issued a “sweeping Executive Order to clear the way for Los Angeles residents to rapidly rebuild the homes they lost.” That was 111 days from May 4, meaning the city is averaging one newly approved building permit every 18.5 days.

Not everyone is focused primarily on the rebuilding process. NPR reports with glowing approval that “Climate activists hope to convince homeowners” whose homes burned to the ground that now is the time to transition from gas appliances to all-electric homes. The climate activists being promoted by NPR are not demanding electric-only rebuilds (for now), but Bass has heard the complaints. After first issuing an executive order to speed up the permitting process for homeowners rebuilding their homes similar to what they were, Bass also decided to speed up permits for people who rebuild their homes without gas appliances.

Los Angeles has also given no indication that it will be changing its homelessness policies, which have put a strain on the city’s fire department for years. The interim Los Angeles Fire Department chief estimated that a third of the fires his department responded to over the last six years were homeless fires. Homeless fires have doubled since 2020, and trash fires have increased by 475% since 2015. The department estimates that 80% of downtown fires are homeless fires.

This eats up LAFD funds, even though Los Angeles spends even more on homelessness than it does on LAFD’s budget, leaving the department with less money (and less time) to spend on wildfire planning and prevention. To give an example of how these failed policies consume so much of the city’s fire budget, you only need to go back a few days to May 1. On that day, a vacant home in Hollywood burned to the ground, with members of the community claiming it was a squatter fire. Those community members have repeatedly complained about the squatters in the area, and this marked the fourth time that LAFD responded to a fire at that one location in the last two weeks alone.

The city hasn’t learned much from the fires when it comes to water infrastructure, either. When the fires hit, the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty, which led to firefighters running out of water to fight the flames as they spread across the city. This was because state and city officials drained the reservoir while attempting to repair a tear in the cover. This unnecessary action was amplified by the city not awarding a contract to fix the cover for eight months after it was drained.

The city had a plan to reopen an old reservoir as a temporary solution, but the city ultimately scrapped that idea, meaning that both reservoirs were empty when the fires hit. The city was in the process of refilling the Santa Ynez Reservoir when leaks were discovered, meaning that the reservoir has been drained again and will remain empty for at least another two months.

The through-line in all of these is the utter lack of urgency by the city to respond to easily identifiable problems. The problems with homelessness and water storage were clear for months and even years, and yet the city dragged its feet to solve those problems. Los Angeles was in no hurry to solve its homelessness problems and ease the financial strain on LAFD responding to these fires, nor was it in any hurry to ensure that there was enough water available for the city. It matches the attitude of its Democratic leadership, as Bass was in no hurry to return from Africa with all the fire condition warnings.

The layers of bureaucracy in both the city and state have contributed to this lackadaisical approach to fire safety. Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) spent the immediate aftermath boasting about the red tape they would be cutting to allow Los Angeles to rebuild, with little time spent on why there was so much red tape in the first place. Earlier this year, a new ordinance went into effect in Los Angeles that would require low-income housing to replace apartment buildings that ended up being destroyed by the fires.

This particular example was notable for both its inconvenient timing and for the fact that the regulation was almost an exact copy of an existing California state regulation. Both Newsom and Bass waived the regulation, but nothing more perfectly illustrates Los Angeles’s obsession with burdensome and indeed redundant regulations.

The immense sea of regulations in Los Angeles and California is no doubt a contributor to the fact that the city has approved a grand total of six building permits four months after the fires started. But the nanny-state nature of state and city Democrats cannot alone be blamed for the city’s slow rebuilding pace. After all, it took the city until late April to create a public dashboard to track the city’s “progress.” The lack of urgency is embedded in the character of California and Los Angeles Democrats.

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This laziness has been entrenched as the Democrats who run the city have been consistently rewarded by voters. That is true for Bass, who chose the Los Angeles mayor’s office as her backup option after state voters didn’t send her to the U.S. Senate. That includes the Democrats who sit on the Los Angeles City Council, without a Republican member in sight. It also includes the bureaucrats who make up the bloated city (and state) bureaucracies, who know they don’t need to fear losing their jobs in an Elon Musk/DOGE-style examination of city departments.

Los Angeles’s response reflects the years of mismanagement in the city: no accountability and no urgency. The city is going to continue to drag its feet in the rebuilding process up to the moment that it becomes a political liability for the people in charge. Given Los Angeles’s history, it isn’t clear that moment will ever come.