Hudson Idov grabbed what he could when the Palisades Fire tore through his neighborhood last January. Some clothes. A bowling pin from a birthday party he’d kept since he was a kid. Then he drove away and watched everything else burn.
He was a high school senior.
Less than a week after graduation, Idov enrolled in the carpentry program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a community college just south of downtown LA. A classmate joined him. Their goal isn’t just to get a job. They want to start a construction company and help rebuild the Palisades neighborhood they lost. “We have big, big 10-year plans,” Idov said during a break in his morning class.
He’s still living in an Airbnb.
The personal loss pushed him toward the trade, but the math makes sense too. Before the Palisades and Eaton fires, Los Angeles was already short roughly 70,000 qualified construction workers. The fires burned through thousands of homes and businesses, and that shortage got a lot worse fast. One state analysis now puts the city’s need at over 100,000 new construction and construction-related workers, with median pay estimated at just under $30 an hour depending on experience and position.
That’s a serious gap. And there’s no quick fix.
“We can’t put out enough people,” said Jaime Alvarez, one of Idov’s carpentry instructors, speaking over the sound of students hammering, sawing and drilling around him. Alvarez has about 30 students this semester. The four-semester carpentry program at Trade-Tech is likely the largest of its kind in California, enrolling over 1,800 people a year, but even that scale isn’t enough given what the region faces.
The construction workforce shortage in California isn’t new, and wildfire recovery timelines have historically been brutal. Some communities hit by the 2017 and 2018 fires still have only a fraction of their homes rebuilt. Eight years later. The Palisades and Eaton fires were larger and closer to one of the most densely populated urban areas in the country, which means the pressure to rebuild faster is intense, even if the workforce to do it isn’t there yet.
The state is trying to close that gap with money. Last year, California awarded five Los Angeles community colleges a combined $5 million to train workers for fire recovery construction. The funds only recently reached Trade-Tech, where they’ll go toward supplies and new curricula for students entering the industry. Pasadena City College, a few miles northeast of Trade-Tech, is using its portion to build a 55,000-square-foot construction training center.
Not a bad use of $5 million. Though whether it’s enough is a separate question.
Los Angeles Trade-Technical College has been running skilled trades programs for decades, but the post-fire enrollment interest has given the carpentry department a new urgency. Students aren’t just learning a skill. Some of them, like Idov, are learning to rebuild the specific streets and houses they grew up on.
Most days, Idov starts class at 7 a.m. and wraps around noon. He spends afternoons working part-time. His schedule is full, his living situation is temporary, and the neighborhood he’s training to rebuild is still largely rubble. That’s a lot to carry as a recent high school graduate.
CalMatters first reported on Idov’s story and the broader workforce challenge facing LA’s rebuilding effort.
The California Community Colleges system has long positioned career technical education as a faster, cheaper path to a stable income than a four-year degree, and the fire recovery context makes that argument more concrete than ever. A carpenter with two years of training can step into work that pays nearly $30 an hour and is desperately needed. The pipeline just can’t fill fast enough right now.
Alvarez knows that. His students know that. Idov definitely knows that.
He still has the bowling pin. It’s one of the few things that made it out of the house. Most mornings he drives past the kind of construction sites he hopes to be running someday, learning the craft that might eventually let him, and people like him, put the Palisades back together. It won’t be fast. California’s fire recovery history makes that clear enough.
But he’s not waiting around.