David Brancaccio

But given all this, they've now sold their burned property at a price depressed by current conditions.

Insurance money helped pay off the mortgage, but the investment in the house they purchased in 2022 is no more.

The property to Louie's left has also sold, and a house mid-block that survived intact with the fire-bubbled stucco repainted sold just before Christmas for what Zillow calculates as 29 percent less than its pre-fire value.

At the same time, some happy fresh plywood is visible from my burned patch, but with an address one street over.

Erica is an executive producer in the television streaming world.

Right after the fire, she got producing with a contractor who previously built a den for her that became her favorite room in her old house.

Then just after Labor Day, her crew poured the foundation.

When I first visited just before Thanksgiving, her frame was up, including the subfloor and roof joists.

It was to the point her neighbors threw her a party to use magic markers to write hope and love tidings onto the bare wood.

Erica's strategy was to get moving, even with the all-out push for insurance money in progress.

The contractor she had, she also paid a project manager to get those plans through the often confused county permitting process before the expected onslaught of new building applications.

Actually, one year later here, the onslaught of building has yet to come.

Across Los Angeles County, encompassing most of the two biggest fires, 1,200 building permits have been approved so far, with rebuilding actually in progress on less than half of those, or 527 properties.

On my street, among those 15 grounders, as he called them, there are also 10 homes left standing, but in the path of all that toxic smoke and soot.

That's a particular insurance nightmare I'll explore later this week.

And you can watch my video series with Teachable Moments from my burned street.

Instagram is one place to see it.

Our handle is Marketplace APM.

And later today, my colleague Kai Risdahl talks to the owner of Two Dragons Martial Arts, where the owner is done with renting after the fire and is working to buy the lot from her landlord.

That's on many public radio stations or from Marketplace.org.