From CityJournal, Special Issue 2023, Can California Be Golden Again:
Misguided policies draw people into California’s fire-prone regions.
Californians caught a break in the 2022 wildfire season. Only about 362,000 acres burned last year, compared with 2.5 million the previous year and 4.3 million in 2020, the most in roughly a century. California has always been prone to wildfires, but the state’s peak fire years are becoming more intense and more deadly. Thirty-three people lost their lives to wildfires in 2020. The Camp Fire of 2018, which destroyed the Sierra foothills town of Paradise, killed 85, making it the deadliest blaze in the state’s history. Fires are also becoming costlier. The Camp Fire damaged or destroyed nearly 20,000 structures and caused $8.4 billion in insured losses. Losses from fires in 2020 exceeded $19 billion. Yet, despite these risks, residents keep leaving California’s relatively safe coastal cities and moving into fire country. Today, more than one-quarter of the state’s population—some 11.2 million people—live in areas of heightened fire danger.
Some are drawn to naturally beautiful regions like Santa Barbara County or the California wine country. But many are pushed into harm’s way by extreme housing costs in urban centers. “California is the epicenter of the nationwide housing shortage,” Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, told me. Strict regulations make it hard to build housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities. “So builders look for areas where it is easier to buy land and there are fewer restrictions,” she said. One report finds that, between 1990 and 2010, half of all new homes in California were built in fire-prone, nonurban settings. The rise of remote work seems to have accelerated this trend. Over the past five years, Redfin’s data show, housing prices have soared 40 percent to 60 percent in some of the state’s booming semirural markets, including Napa and Sonoma Counties and the Tahoe region. (Rising interest rates have cooled sales in recent months.)
Not all of California’s at-risk housing is in remote areas. Restrictions on high-density development in their urban cores put pressure on California municipalities to grow horizontally. Many cities try to limit sprawl by enforcing “urban growth boundaries.” But the boundaries aren’t airtight. Over recent decades, clusters of housing have crept into the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, the grasslands of the Bay Area, and the rugged hills east of San Diego. In the East and the Midwest, urban sprawl usually claims former farmland. But in California, as in much of the West, new neighborhoods often extend into virgin terrain. A 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture study defines areas “where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland” as the Wildland–Urban Interface, or WUI. Homes in the WUI are far more exposed to wildfires, though homebuyers rarely focus on these risks, and they have few tools to assess their level of vulnerability.
Defending California’s WUI homes from wildfires adds hundreds of millions of dollars to state and federal firefighting budgets. Many far-flung clusters of housing require new roads and power lines, raising infrastructure costs. Compared with denser urban housing, homes in the WUI impose greater environmental costs, as well: they fragment fragile habitats, generate more greenhouse-gas emissions, and require their owners to drive longer distances. Given these financial and environmental burdens (not to mention risks to human life), one might assume that California would discourage wholesale migration into fire country. In fact, aside from a few token gestures, the opposite is true. Through an array of mostly subtle policies, California nudges its citizens to leave well-protected cities and to move to high-risk, semiwild regions.
In this issue, Judge Glock describes the layers of regulations that limit housing construction in California cities, thereby driving costs up and homebuyers out. (See “The Regulatory Labyrinth.”) Another set of policies tends to pull residents into WUI regions. These perverse incentives include insurance regulations that shield homeowners from the true costs of their fire risks, as well as disaster-relief programs that encourage rebuilding in fire-ravaged areas. State and federal firefighting programs add another hidden but substantial subsidy. By prioritizing the protection of homes in low-density, high-risk areas, wildfire suppression operations effectively transfer wealth from safe urban areas to residents of fire country.
Migration into the WUI isn’t just a California problem. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and other western states are all grappling with the intersection of population sprawl and fire risk. In December 2021, a fire tore through grasslands and housing developments on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado. In just a few hours, the blaze destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and caused more than $2 billion in damage. The Boulder County fire was a vivid demonstration of the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.” Forty years ago, that region was thinly populated; a fire sweeping through it would have mostly burned dry grass and a few scattered houses. But a building boom since the early 1990s put thousands of expensive houses in the fire’s path.
This phenomenon can be seen across the country: growing development in vulnerable areas ensures that fires (or, in coastal regions, hurricanes) cause more financial damage with each passing year, even if the size and frequency of these disasters don’t change. The media and environmental advocates often attribute increased fire hazards to climate change. And it is true that warmer, drier conditions appear to be increasing California’s incidence of “extreme fire weather,” especially during autumn months. But explosive housing growth in WUI regions is a risk multiplier above and beyond any gradual trends in the rate of fires. When policymakers stress climate as the overarching reason for growing fire costs, they draw focus away from more pragmatic policies that could reduce risks today, not just in a distant, theoretical future.
The map of California is studded with expanding bull’s-eyes: burgeoning communities surrounded by scrub, forest, or grasslands. The risks facing those enclaves are amplified by the state’s unmatched propensity for wildfires. “California’s fires are as monumental as its mountains and winds,” writes Stephen J. Pyne, the noted fire historian. “It’s a place that nature built to burn, often explosively.” The state’s Mediterranean climate plays a role. Wet winters promote the growth of lush grasses and brush. Then, long, dry summers desiccate vegetation until the entire state is a tinderbox. In the late summer and fall come the Santa Ana winds—hot, dry air flowing from high inland plateaus toward the Pacific—often at speeds of more than 50 miles per hour. In such conditions, a single spark can ignite a conflagration within seconds....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also the intro to and outro from ""State Farm Halts Home-Insurance Sales in California""
