How can we possibly hope to rebuild after losing more than one half of a percent of our housing?

 Two months later and the Wall Street Journal is still pushing the drama (not to mention a couple of its favorite narratives).

Rebuilding Los Angeles Is California’s Economic Moment of Truth

As I've said before, I don't want to minimize the loss and personal tragedy experienced by the residents of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, but this has just gotten silly.

This is not San Francisco after the earthquake. The combined population of the unincorporated L.A. County community of Altadena and the L.A. City neighborhood of Pacific Palisades was somewhere around 65,000, with about two-thirds of them living in the Altadena. That's a lot of people experiencing a great deal of human suffering, but we have to keep some sense of proportion. Los Angeles County has around 10 million people. 

Other than four or so days of bad air and some admittedly scary reporting around the possibility of things spreading into much more densely populated areas, the fires had no direct impact on the vast majority of Angelenos. Other than some burn scars on some of the mountains, most of us haven't even seen any signs of the fires. To say that life goes on would be a massive understatement.

It would take some work to check, but it certainly seems like the press forgot about Hurricane Elaine faster than they forgot about the L.A. fires, despite that storm killing hundreds and leaving hundreds of thousands displaced, though, in defense of the editors and reporters covering that other story, almost none of those houses belonged to movie stars.