Malibu continues to rebuild one year after Palisades Fire

By Chris Woodward
The Center Square

Malibu is open for business, but officials say more time is needed to get the famous beach city back in the shape it was in before the devastating Palisades Fire.

With a population of around 10,500 people, Malibu has businesses that did not burn during the January 2025 blaze. But access to them has become more difficult with the Pacific Coast Highway essentially serving as a construction road with a 25 mph speed limit.

“This would be a huge challenge if it were New York or Los Angeles,” said Maryam Zar, CEO of the Malibu Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce. Zar noted it’s an even bigger challenge for a city of Malibu’s size.

“Given the fact that it’s Malibu, I think the city needs all the support that it can get to be able to manage,” Zar told The Center Square.

The Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres along coastal Los Angeles County and resulted in 12 deaths and the destruction of 6,833 buildings.

The disaster is referred to as the Palisades Fire after the coastal Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, which is near Malibu. The small city is known for its mix of movie stars and everyday residents, living side by side with beachfront homes in a community that stretches for more than 30 miles south along the Pacific Ocean toward Santa Monica. Malibu is well-known as a city that has been featured in countless movies and TV shows.

Because of the fire’s name, “people forget or maybe underestimate the impact of the fire on Malibu,” Zar said.

The chamber CEO called the impact devastating and said full recovery will take time.

“It’s going to be years in the making, and it’ll be complicated,” said Zar. “Add to that the fact that Malibu has always been and it has purposefully been a slow-growth city. And that’s not because city government is inept.

“It’s because that’s how Malibu wanted it to be, so you’re talking about a recovery that requires Malibu to almost bifurcate its policies and say, ‘We have one set of policies that are directed at swift rebuilding for those places that were impacted by the fire,’ ” she said. “And then we have our underlying slow growth ethos, which means that we’re not going to allow this to be a reason or a pretext under which we have to endure great development.”

That, said Zar, is hard to do for a small city.

Malibu Mayor Marianne Riggins said recovery has been slow, but nearly two dozen new businesses have opened since the fire.

“Obviously, we did lose quite a few businesses, but some new ones have come in and taken their place,” Riggins told The Center Square. “So we are really excited about what we have seen as far as people investing and wanting to open their small, local business in our community.”

Longtime business owners include Helene Henderson, who opened Malibu Farm in 2013 at the start of the Malibu pier.

These days, Henderson said business is pretty good on a nice, sunny weekend. Weekdays, however, can be more challenging.

“A lot of locals were displaced, so there are fewer people here,” Henderson told The Center Square. “Tourism to Malibu seems to be down, but I think that’s for all of Los Angeles.”

Henderson said things won’t get back to normal anytime soon. She pointed to the number of people who were displaced, both in Malibu and Palisades, along with the challenges nearby in the Topanga Canyon.

“The No. 1 thing we always need is people to come out on weekdays,” said Henderson. “Weekends are very busy and then the weekdays are very slow, and that makes it very hard from an operational standpoint. It makes it very difficult from a staffing standpoint.”

Henderson said most staff want full-time jobs working five days a week, not just Saturdays and Sundays.

Melissa Smith, owner of SweetBu candy shop, can relate.

The store opened in 2017, and Smith said business in 2025 was extremely slow from January to June.

“Business has not come back to its fullest since,” said Smith. “Even the holidays were not where it should be.”

Smith encourages consumers to come visit, tell others and shop at small businesses.

“Order online,” added Smith.

While business owners face their share of challenges, residents are rebuilding homes.

As of Jan. 15, Malibu had owners of 22 homes getting permits for reconstruction and close to 500 permits overall for repairs and other things for homes that did not burn down but were still impacted by the fire.

Riggins described permits to a “team sport” between the property owner and the city.

The city’s role is to confirm each project complies with local zoning and building codes, the Malibu mayor said.

The property owners and their teams show what they want to build and provide proof they’ve complied with codes and completed structural engineering, Riggins said. She said the work can include civil engineering if there’s grading.

The mayor said the city’s role is to review those plans and make sure they comply with minimum code standards.

Malibu has opened a center to assist property owners with their needs. For example, the center houses Malibu’s planners, building plan checkers and environmental health specialists to review details with property owners.

“So they have a one-stop shop that property owners and their team can come in and get answers to all their questions,” said Riggins. “They will schedule a meeting, and they will have every group represented in that meeting and available to them.”

Zar said Riggins is the perfect woman for this moment.

“Marianne’s background is actually city planning,” the chamber CEO said. “She’s absolutely right.”

Pointing to Los Angeles, Zar said the city has suspended some paperwork to move things along, but “government cannot slash every rule for this recovery.”

“In L.A. they’ve suspended the California Environmental Quality Act [CEQA], and they’ve suspended Coastal Commission review, which is aimed at streamlining. And that’s great. But if the trade-off is that we’re going to end up having homes that negatively impact our environment, we might not be happy about it 20 years from now,” said Zar.

Just as someone in Los Angeles has to go through many hoops to get something done, Zar said people in Malibu have to go through “half a dozen loops.” The beach city still requires property owners to submit the things needed to get a project approved, she noted.

Riggins added that more state and federal assistance would be welcomed.

“FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] does offer reimbursement for a lot of things and repairs, so we are definitely looking to have those reimbursements processed as quickly as possible through FEMA,” the mayor said. “The state, through their Office of Emergency Services, offer assistance for repairs and rebuilding, and so we’ve been diligently filling out our paperwork. But we’re eager to see some of those reimbursements because we have had both a lot of damage to our public infrastructure, but also the things that we need to stand up to make sure that the residents are supported so that we are able to focus on their rebuilding.”

While Riggins and others are waiting, they invite people from out of town or out of state to visit and shop in Malibu.

“We welcome everybody, whether you are coming to visit the beaches or you are coming to hike on one of the public trails that are here, see the parks that are here,” said Riggins. “Please stop in on our stores, on our restaurants, and grab something, whether it is one of our seafood restaurants or picking up a sandwich or a burrito from one of our places. We kind of have something for everybody here.”

Zar is also doing her part.

“One of the things that we’re trying to stand up is a PaliBu marketplace,” said Zar. “It’s a digital marketplace for all the businesses, and once we stand this thing up, if anybody wants to help Malibu, go on and shop.”

Travel on the PCH can be difficult, but the Chamber of Commerce has asked the California Department of Transportation to suspend the 25 mile-an-hour speed limit in the afternoons and on Sundays to make it easy for people to be able to go to dinner or brunch in Malibu.

“Right now with the 25 mile-an-hour speed limit, nobody wants to get on that road,” Zar said. “But we’re saying, ‘We understand that there’s construction and there’s stuff that needs to happen on that road, but when the workers are gone, pick up the pace so that we can get people out there.’ “