Palisades Village, the high-end outdoor mall in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades, is a rare chunk of the neighborhood that wasn’t destroyed in the wildfires that struck the region in January 2025. More than 6,800 structures perished in the Palisades fire, but aside from a few singed awnings and roasted patio cushions, the mall was relatively unscathed. After a year-and-a-half smoke cleanup and refresh, the shopping destination recently reopened, even as the neighborhood around it remains a mix of homes under reconstruction, charred land, and general uncertainty.

Controversially, the mall remained standing through the fires partly because it had what many of those lost homes didn’t. Caruso, the developer of the mall and other L.A. shopping centers including The Grove, had a private firefighting service on call ahead of the fires, and its firefighters were on site protecting the property within hours of the wildfire’s first spark.

Caruso and its billionaire founder Rick Caruso, who ran for L.A. mayor in 2022 as a Republican, aren’t hiding the fact that hired firefighters helped keep the mall intact while much of the Palisades burned. Rather, the company sees the approach of prioritizing wildfire mitigation in its building practices and operations as part of the new way real estate developers have to do business in vulnerable areas.

“We learned very early on that building systems and materials were very important, as well as fire prevention protocols and having an emergency response team on hand,” says Corinne Verdery, CEO of Caruso.

In December 2017, the company was less than a year away from the opening of the $200 million Palisades Village project when another of its major developments nearly burned to the ground.

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