By Ben Christopher | CalMatters
In 1955, the Ventu Park wildfire tore through the canyons above Malibu, burning nearly 14,000 acres and eight homes. The same area saw two large fires burn hillsides and homes over the next three years. There were two in the 1970s, one in the ‘80s and three in the ‘90s. This century those hills saw the Woolsey fire, one of the most destructive burns in California history. The Franklin fire, which scorched the hills just last month, has now been overshadowed by the firestorm that followed.
With the Palisades Fire still ripping through that same fire corridor last weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to rebuild — and quickly. He signed an executive order suspending environmental laws that might delay reconstruction and ordered the state’s housing agency to identify building codes that could stand in the way of recovery. His administration, he told NBC News, was in the midst of putting together a “Marshall Plan” for post-fire reconstruction.
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The impulse to restore all that the fires have stripped away may be a basic human one and for Newsom, it’s certainly good politics.
But to many ecologists, economists and other experts on California wildfire risk, the vow to rebuild is part of a familiar California cycle as predictable as the Santa Anas: We keep putting homes in the path of the flames.
“The biggest thing to note about these fires in LA is that none of this is surprising,” said Erica Fischer, an Oregon State University professor who studies wildfire impacts on buildings and public infrastructure.
Between 1990 and 2020, nearly 45% of the homes built in California has broken ground in what researchers and firefighters call the wildland-urban interface: the hillsides, ravines and canyons where the furthest frontier of residential development meets and merge with the state’s forests, scrublands and grasses. That’s despite the fact that this area makes up less than 7% of all the land in the state.
It’s a particularly risky place to reside. Of all the structures destroyed by wildfire between 1985 and 2013, more than 80% were in that fire-prone zone.
No matter the other precautions a homeowner or local government might take, “you’re still taking a gamble when you place a new development out in an extraordinarily fire-prone environment,” said Alexandra Syphard, an ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute who studies how land-use decisions affect wildfire risk.
“Simply by the law of numbers, the more people you have in an area like that, the higher your likelihood that one of those people will start a fire and the higher the likelihood that that fire is going to reach a house,” she said.
Once the smoke clears, rebuilding in the same place, often in the same way, is the historic norm. A study of 28 catastrophic blazes across California between 1970 and 2009 found that nearly 60% of all the destroyed buildings were replaced within six years. The study also found “no consistent trend” suggesting that the homes or communities were rebuilt in a way more likely to resist future fire.
Some argue that California doesn’t have the luxury not to build (and rebuild) in fire country. Though the state has a chronic and worsening wildfire crisis, something that rears into public consciousness a few weeks out of every year, it also has a chronic housing crisis caused by a severe shortage of homes. For many Californians and lawmakers, that’s a 365-day concern.
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“You really hate to take areas off the table for building homes,” said Judson Boomhower, a UC San Diego environmental economist. “We know that we don’t build enough homes. At the same time, you want to make sure that you’re building those homes in a way that’s responsible and safe.”
At the urban fringes, the trade-off between housing and fire risk can be a profoundly difficult one to navigate.
Miriam Greenberg, an urban sociologist at UC Santa Cruz who studies housing and population growth in California’s wildland-urban interface, said she’s watched the debate play out in her own backyard. “You see at the city council meetings, young people going to these meetings and saying, ‘you know what, I would rather that it weren’t so dangerous. But housing is housing.’ And we need housing,” she said.
Greenberg has argued that academics and policymakers need to see residential expansion into the state’s most fire-prone areas as yet another reflection of California’s affordability crisis.
“People are looking to the (wildland-urban interface) as one of the only places that has capacity for housing,” she said. Though the wildland-urban interface includes toney enclaves of wealth like Pacific Palisades, it also features some of the more affordable real estate left in the state.
Over the last few years a handful of state lawmakers have proposed sharp limits on whether and how homes can be built in high risk areas. None have become law.
Fire-hardened homes
In 2020, then-state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson introduced a bill that would have required local governments to impose building code, brush management and road design standards on new homes and subdivisions built in areas deemed by CalFire to be at high risk. The bill passed both the Assembly and Senate only to be vetoed by Newsom.
“Wildfire resilience must become a more consistent part of land use and development decisions,” the governor wrote at the time. “However, it must be done while meeting our housing needs.”
Two years later, Sen. Henry Stern, a Democrat from Calabasas whose district includes Malibu, authored a bill that would have imposed severe restrictions on construction in fire country in exchange for allowing higher, denser development in low-risk areas. Assemblymember Chris Ward, a San Diego Democrat, introduced a bill in 2023 with a similar trade-off: Fewer restrictions on dense urban development coupled with fresh limits on growth in the wildland-urban interface.
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Both bills died without a vote. Both faced stiff opposition from the state building industry.
Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, a trade group representing the state’s home builders, said blocking development in these areas is not only counterproductive from an affordability perspective, it’s unnecessary.
New homes built to current California code “are completely different from the homes in Altadena that were built in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” he said. “We know that we can build master planned communities with hardened homes and hardened neighborhoods that don’t burn.”
Buildings can in fact be fire-hardened, if not entirely fire-proofed. That’s often the reason that every California inferno has its share of miracle houses: the rare single structure seemingly untouched by flame and surrounded by the ashes and smoldering foundations of neighboring homes.
Since 2008, any new homes built in a high risk zone are saddled with a wide array of state-set construction requirements that specify the shape and composition of a building’s roof to the siding material that can be used to the vent covers needed to keep wind-surfing embers from wafting into a house.
“No other state has as many wildfire requirements in place or direction on what communities have to include in their general plans,” said Molly Mowery, executive director of the Community Wildfire Planning Center, a nonprofit that works with jurisdiction across the West to plan for fires.
The Board of Supervisors of Los Angeles County is considering a new Community Wildfire Protection ordinance that would codify and enhance some of these same statewide requirements. It would apply in many of the areas that are currently burning or under evacuation order. But the rules would only apply to future development, not the homes already there.
That underscores a statewide problem: “We have all these homes that were built in places with pretty high fire risk during a period in which we weren’t thinking as much about the risk and during which the risk may actually have been less than it is now, because we know scientifically that the climate is making this worse,” said Boomhower from UC San Diego.
Fire-hardening entire communities at once is prohibitively expensive for most localities, even if it’s the only way to effectively protect a neighborhood.
“The mitigation for wildfires is very similar to how we think about mitigation for infectious disease,” said Fischer from Oregon State University. “If one person gets vaccinated out of the whole town it’s not really going to make much of a difference.”
Lawsuits and insurance
While lawmakers have been loath to out-and-out limit development in the most flammable corners of the state, the courts have occasionally stepped in.
Environmental preservationists, anti-development activists and even the state’s attorney general have turned to the California Environmental Quality Act to block construction projects.
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The act requires governments to study and publicly report the environmental consequences of a development before approving it. In October, a California appellate court held that wildfire risk is one of those consequences that may deserve special consideration.
Phillip Babich, a real estate attorney, said he expects to see community groups opposed to nature-adjacent developments demanding “more disclosure, more effort in dealing with wildfire risks” as a result of the ruling.
Newsom’s executive order has foreclosed that option in Los Angeles.
That leaves a final check on whether homes are constructed in fire-prone areas: Insurance.
For years, private insurers have been in a slow motion withdrawal from California, citing, in part, the state’s increasingly severe wildfire threat and state regulations that prevent them from charging premiums high enough to profitably cover it.
A recent raft of state regulatory changes is aimed at enticing insurers back. That may mean that homeowners who have been shuttered from the market will now have the option to buy insurance — but at a price they can’t afford.
That, ultimately, is how insurance markets are supposed to work, said Victoria Xie, a Santa Clara University economist. When insurance companies refuse to cover an area or will only do so at skyhigh rates, that’s a strobing, red light that the risk of residing in such a location is very real and very high.
“Maybe households need financial incentives or some sort of help that allows them to make that move,” she said. Because the best long-term outcome is “obviously for us all to instead of frequently fighting these fires and having unaffordable rates to just stay out of these areas.”
That would be a painful transition. But it isn’t likely to happen just yet: Last week, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara banned insurance companies from cancelling policies or dropping customers in any of the zip codes that have been burned by the Los Angeles fire for the next year.
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Levi Sumagaysay contributed to this story.