In the wake of last year’s Pacific Palisades wildfires, Village Rebuild is testing a different approach to rebuilding climate-impacted neighborhoods. Rather than buying out displaced homeowners, the firm adapts private equity joint-venture mechanics to individual homes: owners contribute their land as equity, while Village Rebuild raises capital, secures debt and oversees design and construction. The goal is a vertically integrated platform where residents emerge not as sellers, but as equity partners in the rebuilt community.  

Founder Dylan Hart is betting that this model can help close widening insurance and financing gaps in disaster-prone markets while turning “community preservation” into an investable real assets strategy. 

CM: How do you explain, in simple terms, the idea of “adapting private equity joint venture mechanics to individual residential properties”? 

DH: We are borrowing the land contribution concept from private equity to residential properties. In commercial real estate, large projects built through joint ventures where one party contributes land, another brings capital and development expertise, and they share in the upside. 

We’ve taken that same structure and applied it to a single-family home. Instead of Palisadians selling their burned lot outright, a homeowner contributes their land to a partnership. That land becomes their equity in the deal. We bring additional capital, secure debt, and manage the entire rebuild process from design through construction. When the home is complete, the homeowner and Village rebuild share in the upside or have the option to buy our equity out. 

CM: Why did you choose to focus first on Pacific Palisades, and how replicable do you believe this model is in other climate-impacted markets? 

DH: We started in Pacific Palisades because this is our community. My family lost three homes in the fires. We watched neighbors struggle with underinsurance, delayed payouts, and limited access to construction financing. The need was immediate and personal. Many families didn’t want to sell, but they also couldn’t take on the financial and logistical burden of rebuilding alone. 

As climate events become more frequent, we believe this model is highly replicable in post-disaster communities where there is meaningful land value, insurance gaps, and homeowners who want to remain but lack capital or development expertise. Anywhere those three conditions exist, there’s an opportunity for a partnership-based solution. 

CM: Walk us through a typical deal: how does a homeowner’s land contribution become an equity stake in the redevelopment? 

DH: The homeowner contributes their land to a newly formed joint venture entity. That land is valued and treated as their equity investment in the project. Village Rebuild then invests additional capital, secures debt where appropriate, and manages the design, permitting, and construction through our integrated team.  

Once the home is complete, there are typically two paths: 1) the property is sold, and the homeowner participates in the financial upside based on their ownership share, or 2) the homeowner buys out our interest and returns to the rebuilt home. The key difference here is that they are not a seller — they are a partner. 

CM: How do you determine the value of the land, especially when it’s fire-damaged and comparable sales may be distorted? 

DH: We analyze pre-fire pricing, recent lot sales, replacement cost, and broader neighborhood trends to understand where values are stabilizing. 

Disasters can temporarily distort pricing through panic sales or speculative buying, so we underwrite to long-term fundamentals rather than short-term noise. The valuation must be grounded in what the rebuilt market can realistically support. 

CM: Post-disaster, insurance and traditional lending can be scarce. How are you raising and structuring capital to underwrite this kind of risk? 

DH: We approach this the same way as a small-scale development platform. We combine equity capital with project-level debt where available, structuring each home with disciplined underwriting. Because we manage development, construction, and design in an integrated structure, we can control costs, timelines, and execution in a way that reduces uncertainty. 

That integration is critical. In a post-disaster environment, fragmented teams increase risk. A unified capital-and-construction model allows us to better manage it. We have not seen insurance and lending scarce in this situation. 

CM: How do insurers, lenders and equity partners view this model—are they treating it as higher risk, or to better manage existing risk?  

DH: In many ways, they see it to better manage existing risk. Insurers typically require proof of reconstruction to release full proceeds. Without capital and a clear plan, that money can remain out of reach for homeowners. By bringing structure, capital, and execution under one roof, we create a credible path to completion and allow homeowners to collect those withheld insurance proceeds. That clarity reduces uncertainty relative to an individual homeowner trying to navigate the rebuild alone. 

CM: From the homeowner’s perspective, how does this feel different than a traditional buyout or selling a burned lot to a developer? 

DH: The biggest difference is dignity and participation. In a traditional buyout, you sell your lot and walk away, and your relationship to the property ends there. Additionally, in many cases they don’t collect the entirety of their insurance proceeds if they do an outright sale. In our structure, the homeowner is an equity partner. They retain ownership in the finished product and share the value created. And in some cases, they have a path to return to the rebuilt home. It transforms a moment of forced displacement into an opportunity for financial recovery and, potentially, return. 

CM: You’ve described this to preserve long-term community stability. What does “community preservation” mean in an investment committee memo? 

DH: Community preservation, to us, means keeping long-time residents in place, maintaining the architectural diversity and human scale of the Palisades, and rebuilding family homes rather than flipping lots into purely speculative products. In practical terms, that means disciplined design, compatibility with the block, and structuring deals that allow original homeowners to participate in the upside rather than be permanently displaced. It also means optimizing homes to the community members that live in a small town like this. 

CM: Looking ahead, where do you see the greatest need—and opportunity—for this approach over the next decade as climate events become more frequent? 

DH: The greatest need will be in communities where climate events create a gap between insurance coverage and true replacement cost. As wildfires, floods, and storms become more frequent, we will see more families who are land-rich but cash-poor in the aftermath of disaster. Traditional financing will not always solve that. The opportunity lies in creating scalable, partnership-driven recovery models that align land, capital, and execution, so that recovery doesn’t default to displacement.