• The Foothill Catalog Foundation, Los Angeles County, and Archistar joined forces to help 12,000 displaced fire survivors rebuild.
• Pre-approved home designs paired with AI permitting tools are cutting review times in half for Altadena and Palisades homeowners.
• The three-way collaboration is proving that rebuilding Los Angeles could become a blueprint for disaster recovery around the world.

But that’s what 12,000 homeowners faced after the fires ignited on January 7, 2025. And it continues to be a long road to recovery for many fire survivors. Between LA City and LA County, more than 5,000 permits have been issued to date (not all for unique addresses), but two out of three people who were living in Altadena and Pacific Palisades areas are still displaced.

Fortunately, there are many people across the public and private sectors working to get people back in their homes faster. In this video, you’ll see how The Foothill Catalog Foundation, County of Los Angeles, and Archistar are working together to rebuild LA and create a model for disaster recovery around the world.

First fire survivor/homeowner: We could see the fire just coming down the mountain, and we told the kids to just fill what they could in a backpack.

Second fire survivor/homeowners: We packed up both cars, the cats, and we just drove.

First fire survivor/homeowner: Everyone was just in shock.

Second fire survivor/homeowners: It was like a war zone. It’s like, you gotta be kidding.

Cynthia Sigler, Co-Founder, Project Architect | The Foothill Catalog Foundation: So, The Foothill Catalog Foundation is a nonprofit organization with a mission

to develop a catalog of pre-approved home designs specifically for Altadena and some of the other communities we’re serving.

Alex Athenson, Co-Founder, Executive Director | The Foothill Catalog Foundation: So, The Foothill Catalog Foundation came out of both myself and my wife Cynthia’s knowledge as architects, but more importantly as community members as well.

Cynthia Sigler, Co-Founder, Project Architect | The Foothill Catalog Foundation: Just knowing kind of the design and permitting process and how difficult it is in a normal situation, realized that there was going to be a great need for alternate solutions in this rebuilding effort.

And so, the first hurdle was, you know, defining a clear path forward for people. The catalog model, I think one of its strengths is that the concept itself is quite simple and easy to understand. The second hurdle is, you know, the actual design. So being able to provide the catalog of pre-designed homes really takes that burden off of people’s shoulders. And then the third and maybe, you know, biggest hurdle is the permitting process. And so the pre-approval comes in as this kind of new innovative permitting process that didn’t exist prior to the fires.

Dr. Benjamin Coorey, Founder & CEO | Archistar: When people talk about

permitting, it sounds simple. Design your building, get your permit, proceed. In reality, it’s not that simple. And there is a back and forth process where you’re iterating and trying to get it right to get that permit approved. And that’s what takes a long time.

And the reason why we branched out to LA is we were asked to assist with the recovery after the LA wildfires. There are 12,000 homes that were affected from the wildfires. You now have 12,000 people trying to get back into their home, going through a very lengthy process, and it is not a process that they intended to do. What Archistar is doing is getting those permits out the door so that we can build faster. It is saving applicants 50% of the time that they would take to normally get a permit through.

Alex Athenson, Co-Founder, Executive Director | The Foothill Catalog Foundation: The Archistar platform, I mean, what its goal is, is to allow us to

take our product, this freestanding, pre-approved home design. How do we connect that with a wide variety of different site conditions, different

lot conditions, different families who are looking to rebuild? And so with Archistar’s technology and utilizing cutting-edge AI, allowing us to very quickly do feasibility studies to assess code compliance, zoning compliance within seconds. When we learned that LA County was working with Archistar as well, we were really excited to explore the efficiencies of what a pre-check system could look like.

Glenn Kam, Principal Planner | County of Los Angeles: When the fire happened, it was a very deep sense of urgency for me to do my job quickly, but to do it really well. So, Archistar was very crucial in that it can handle very complex hierarchical

review sets. Let’s just take the Altadena area for example, there is Title 22, the

general zoning code. On top of that, you have the Residential Design Standards Ordinance. On top of that, you have the West San Gabriel Valley Planning Area

Standards District. And on top of that, you have the Altadena Community Standards District. The software will do that check for the case planner. It’ll run through all those hierarchical layers.

What Archistar AI PreCheck can mean potentially is that me as a case planner, I can review that plan more quickly. It would take me five days or six days to clear a plan as opposed to ten or eleven or twelve. In the larger scheme of things, a case planner can review more plans using Archistar AI PreCheck. From an Archistar and artificial intelligence perspective, it’s clear that speed and accuracy is the name of the game.

The most fulfilling outcome is not just to see one house that I worked on being rebuilt. It’s to see all the plans that I’ve cleared rebuilt and those families, back in their homes. And as a government planner, to be able to see that come to fruition, that was awesome.

Alex Athenson, Co-Founder, Executive Director | The Foothill Catalog Foundation: As we are desperately searching as a country to find more means and methods of just producing more quality affordable housing, we’re really excited to prove this concept here in our hometown and to help our friends, our neighbors recover through this efficiency and innovation, but really build upon this

initial success as a model for the rest of the country to learn of what we can do and how we can help people get back home.