How much do you California haters want to bet right here and now that every square inch that was burned in the Palisades gets rebuilt? As always, you seem to have a basic misunderstanding of this place and think that it's just Phoenix or Cincinnati near the ocean.
Where would some super-successful people who lived in the Palisades move to, in your imagination? People live here BY CHOICE, not because it's where they were hatched and they never had the wherewithal to move anywhere else. It's a special place. Yes, it's more expensive in every way than most other places in the U.S. but the benefits in terms of recreation, natural beauty, the local economy, jobs, institutes of higher learning, restaurants, etc., make the possible replacement locations close to non-existent.
Also, people have lived in the area for generations and have deep community and professional ties, not to mention extended family. One good friend who grew up in Santa Monica Canyon, (between Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica), owns a house now in the canyon and his 85 year old father and stepmother live close by. Both houses were spared or missed by the fire, thank god. The father is one of 10 children, all very accomplished and most relocated to the Santa Monica or Palisades area decades ago from New York and raised families here.
They are just one example of a very large family full of high achievers in the area. There are thousands of others. Do people like this exist in other parts of the country and the world? Of course they do but I'm talking about people who choose to live in Southern California in places so beautiful that I could not have closed my eyes and imagined them as a child before I saw them. The thought of people like this relocating to somewhere in the middle of the country because of a fire is absurd. Maybe there is some young tech-scrote or influencer living off of credit cards who lived in the area and will now get spit-out back to Kansas but I view that as a positive for L.A. I hope that lots of weaklings leave, we'll be better for it.
