“In 1666 London burnt down. Sir Christopher Wren, a very highly esteemed architect, came to the king with a plan with arterial roads and said, this is our chance. And the king said, look, this fire was traumatic for these people. If now I start expropriating land, there's going to be a revolution. … People started to clean the debris and rebuilt London exactly along the same property lines two weeks later.”
What Happens Next in 6 Minutes · September 2026
Larry Bernstein had asked Angel, who studies how cities expand, whether the Pacific Palisades fire produced the wider roads and higher density that economists hoped for. Angel's answer is that planners consistently misread catastrophe as a blank slate: under the rubble are property rights, and acquiring them is no easier than before the disaster. What he says does work is land pooling, organized bottom-up by the owners themselves, as in postwar Tokyo and Seoul.
Transcript
The grid is normally contrasted with the radials and circumferentials. The grid expands infinitely. Radials start out, they're very close to each other, you move out, they get further and further away from each other. The idea of an arterial grid is that it puts you within walking distance of public transport. Walking distance is the walking distance of a woman carrying bags or having a kid with her. We can do a mile grid, which is what you have in Chicago, but you can't walk half a mile to get to a public transportation. So a kilometer grid puts public transportation within walking distance of regular people. So that's why we're recommending the one kilometer grid.
Sometimes you get a second chance. A catastrophe destroys everything. I asked Ed Glazer after the Pacific Palisades fire what he changed. He said, wider roads, increased density, and that will increase everyone's property values. Everybody wins. Did any of this happen?
The planners or the people like you who think that when things are leveled, you get a second chance, get it wrong. In 1666, London burnt down. Sir Christopher Wren, a very highly esteemed architect, came to the king with a plan with arterial roads and said to the king, this is our chance. Let's do that. And the king said, look, this fire was traumatic for these people. If now I start expropriating land, there's going to be a revolution. And so the king refused to expropriate the land. People started to clean the debris and rebuilt London exactly along the same property lines two weeks later. What people don't understand when they see rubble, they don't understand it in Gaza, they don't understand it in Katrina, they don't understand it in Ukraine. They don't understand that under the rubble there are property rights and that people are not going to give up these property rights. Acquiring those property rights is just as difficult as it would be when the thing is constructed. That is why I worked with Ed on the article that he published on Gaza. And I said, the first thing to do in Gaza is register these property rights. That's why all of these things are never a second chance.
What about Tokyo? The Americans firebombed it flat and it came right back.
So what happened in Tokyo is exactly what we're recommending in many other places that are being developed or redeveloped, which is land pooling and readjustment. So what happened in Tokyo and in Seoul is people getting together, 30 people, but not thousands of people, pooling their land and creating a plan for that land and redividing the plots among them and leaving more land for public use, widening the roads and so on. Tokyo was rebuilt with land pooling and readjustment.
That's what Ed Glaser wanted for Pacific Palisades as well, but he didn't get it.
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