Welcome to the lost debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta, and today we're

going to continue to talk about the wildfires in California and the larger national debate that we

are having about it. In order to do that, I'm going to talk to somebody who's actually in California,

in Los Angeles, Nolan Gray, who is the senior director of legislation and research at California

YIMB and a professional city planner. He has written for the Atlantic, Bloomberg City Lab,

The Guardian, and he wrote a fascinating piece this past week for the Atlantic about what really

led to the extreme catastrophes that we're seeing in Los Angeles right now and perhaps what we

could do about it. Nolan, welcome to the podcast. Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.

Nolan, are you still in Los Angeles right now or did you evacuate? I'm in West L.A.

So, distrously close to the fire, but probably pretty safe right now.

What's the scene on the ground right now? When you go outside, is there still kind of smoke billowing out into neighborhoods that aren't sort of directly affected by the path of the fire?

Things are pretty normal now. Over the weekend, the air quality increased a lot, but certainly Friday and even as late as Saturday, you would go out and there would be almost snow flurries of ashes.

So that was pretty surprising.

But air quality is back to normal now.

But as I understand, we're not totally out of the woods yet.

There might still be Santa Ana winds blowing through this week.

Is the fire under control at this point, or is there worry that this thing could still

spread? My understanding is that the Palisades Fire and the Eaton fire are both partly

under control, and they're under control with respect to moving toward settled areas, but they're still,

you know, on the margins, they're still moving through the hills. Well, you're in California. You're somebody who's been commenting on California policy

through the YIMB movement for quite some time. I have to imagine it's got to be strange

to have this much attention on the state from all the national players and all of our media,

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