Like for like: the Malibu rebuild path explained
Nobody tells you the permit is the easy part. It is, if you stay inside the like for like envelope. Here is what that envelope actually is.
The state rule: Executive Order N-4-25
After the January 2025 fires the Governor signed Executive Order N-4-25. For a home destroyed by the fire, it suspends Coastal Act review for a rebuild that is:
- in the same location,
- for the same use,
- and within 110 percent of the previous footprint and height.
That last line is the one people call “plus ten percent.” Stay inside it and you skip the longest review a Malibu project can face. Go past it and the project is treated as new construction, with everything that implies.
The city rule: Ordinance 524
Malibu adopted Ordinance 524 and its urgency version 524U as the disaster rebuild ordinance. It is the city’s side of the same path: an expedited process for like for like rebuilds, run through the Rebuild Center. The Coastal Commission approved Malibu’s Local Coastal Program amendment for disaster rebuilds on April 10, 2025, which is what lets the city process these without a Coastal Development Permit.
Bluff, beachfront, and environmentally sensitive lots still carry conditions. The exemption removes the review; it does not remove the geology.
Where the line bites
Most owners want something back that is a little better than what burned. A bigger primary suite, a second story, a garage where there was a carport. Each of those is fine right up to the 110 percent line, and the height limit applies as well as the floor area. We draw the envelope first and fit the wish list inside it, because the alternative is months of review for a few hundred square feet.
The numbers, cited
The City of Malibu reports 720 structures destroyed inside city limits in the Palisades Fire, 322 of them coastal homes. As of January 26, 2026 the Rebuild Center had logged 2,018 appointments and issued 532 permits in the fire area, with at least 20 homes under construction. By August 2026, Spectrum News reported fewer than 2 percent of Palisades Fire homes in Malibu had rebuild permits, against 42 percent in the City of Los Angeles.
The Woolsey benchmark: 60.8 percent of 375 tracked rebuilds were complete seven and a half years after the 2018 fire. That is the pace to beat.
Fee waivers
Goldenline Construction’s rebuild guide quotes fee waiver deadlines of June 30, 2028 for applications and December 30, 2030 for building permits. We have not confirmed those with the city ourselves, so we do not plan a client’s schedule around them until we have. Call the Rebuild Center and get it in writing.
What we do with this
On a site walk we take your scope of loss, your survey, and your wish list and tell you which side of the 110 percent line you are on before you spend money on drawings. That, and the fire hardening the code now requires, is most of what a Malibu fire rebuild comes down to. If you are running the rebuild yourself, our owner-builder consultant service is built for exactly this question.
Sources
Forge & Cove builds fire hardened homes in Malibu and everything around them to the same specification. Book a site walk.