Why Your Rebuild Is Taking Longer Than It Should

And why the answer probably isn’t the city.

More than a year after the Palisades fire, the question homeowners keep asking is the same: Why is this taking so long?

The assumption, shared by many residents, repeated in the press, amplified on social media, is that the City of Los Angeles is the bottleneck. Permitting, red tape, bureaucratic backlog. It’s a reasonable thing to believe. It’s also increasingly not the story.

Builders and advisors working directly in the Palisades are saying something different. Kambiz Kamdar, a 25-year development veteran tracking rebuild data through Pali Builds, put it plainly: “I was very skeptical of the city initially. Now, I’m putting the onus on residents and architects.” 

His data shows permits averaging 90 to 100 days across the market. But in cases where architects are slow to resubmit corrections, that timeline extends dramatically. The city does its part. Weeks pass. Nothing moves.

The constraint, more often than not, is upstream.

The real bottleneck is coordination

Architecture and engineering firms have been flooded since January 2025. Capacity is stretched. Timelines are extended. When those teams also operate in fragmented relationships, architect here, structural engineer there, permit expeditor somewhere else, there’s no single point of accountability. Every handoff is a potential delay. Every correction cycle restarts the clock.

This is the part of the process that homeowners rarely see coming. They sign with an architect, get a timeline, and then discover that timeline was optimistic in normal conditions and aspirational in these ones.

The result is a pipeline that looks like this: insurance finally resolves, the homeowner engages a design team, design development takes longer than expected, plan check reveals corrections, corrections take weeks to address, resubmittal happens, the cycle repeats. Months pass before a shovel hits the ground.

What integration actually changes

Thomas James Homes was built around a different model. Architecture, engineering, and permit processing aren’t separate engagements coordinated by the homeowner. They’re fully integrated under one fixed-cost program, aligned from day one.

That alignment isn’t a marketing position. It’s a mechanical difference. When the architect, the engineer, and the permit team are working from the same playbook under the same accountability structure, the lag between phases disappears. Corrections get addressed in days, not weeks. Resubmittals happen on a schedule, not whenever capacity allows.

The result: Thomas James Homes is currently averaging approximately 50 days to permit, roughly half the market average tracked by independent rebuild monitors. That gap represents real time: time off your construction schedule, time in temporary housing, time carrying costs on a lot that isn’t moving.

Certainty doesn’t stop at permit

Getting to permit faster matters. So does what comes after.

Construction timelines in the current rebuild environment carry significant uncertainty for homeowners working with general contractors piecing together trades in a compressed labor market. Thomas James Homes guarantees construction completion in one year or less, a commitment that’s only possible because the same integrated discipline that drives permit efficiency carries through the entire build.

In an environment where time is money and money is already complicated by insurance payouts, financing, and temporary living expenses, a guaranteed timeline isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a plan you can build your life around and one you can’t.

If your project is stalled, it’s worth understanding why.

Not every delay has the same cause. Some homeowners are still waiting on insurance. Others are in design development with teams that are overextended. Some are in plan check with corrections that have been sitting on an architect’s desk for a month.

Before accepting that stall as inevitable, it’s worth asking whether the team structure you’re working with was built for this volume and this moment, or whether it was simply the team that was available when you needed one.

Thomas James Homes has completed more than 1,400 homes across the country, more than 700 of them in Los Angeles. More than 65 of those are in the Palisades. We were building here before the fires. We’re building here now.

If you’re navigating the rebuild process and want to understand your options, we’re here to help.