Millions of homes in California are in fire-prone areas. Researchers say it’s time to reimagine where people live
“We have a housing crisis that is pushing housing to the outskirts of our urban areas. We are building on outlying land, on exurban land, ”she said,“ And that puts a lot more housing at risk than ever before. “
Chapple adds that when a wildfire strikes, the state loses some of that building stock, putting more strain on the system.
Alternatives to “Rebuild as usual”
In one new report, Chapple and a group of Berkeley graduate students examined reconstruction alternatives for three California communities hit hard by catastrophic fires in the past five years: Santa Rosa, Ventura, and Paradise.
After the Tubbs fire in 2017, Chapple said, the Santa Rosa planning division stepped up to help homeowners rebuild homes they lost. But, she said, “They helped them rebuild themselves there, at the interface between wilderness and urban areas. What if they had considered building in an alternative way instead? “
In one scenario, survivors of the fires would be encouraged to move to cities and other low-risk areas (the researchers call this ‘managed retirement’) and found that this was the most effective way to remove people from the area. path of destructive forest fires, potentially reducing the number of homes in fire zones by more than 50% in Santa Rosa and Ventura, and to a lesser extent, Paradise.
A second scenario pushes the survivors towards pockets of development in rural areas with strong forest fire mitigation characteristics, neighborhoods surrounded by defensible spaces to serve as fire breaks. Chapple describes these communities – what she calls “resilience nodes” – as mini-villages or self-sufficient neighborhoods.
“It’s a scenario where you would partially rebuild in peri-urban areas or in suburban areas, at the forest-urban interface. But you will build with more density, ”she said. “You would create dense, passable nodes with small protective green buffer zones around them so that people don’t have to move totally out of their areas and downtown, which a lot of people don’t want to do. . “
The researchers compared these scenarios to what he called the typical “rebuild as usual” strategy, noting that encouraging people to move to cities added climate benefits. City dwellers generally drive less and use less energy (not to mention lower transportation, electricity and water costs).
The conservation of wooded areas is also beneficial. Trees sequester carbon dioxide, a gas that warms the planet and contributes to climate change, which is a extreme forest fire driver.
A costly problem
Building in areas prone to fire involves financial risk. An analysis of Urban footprint , a sustainability-focused city planning site, estimates the cost of rebuilding all of the 1.4 million homes in California’s most at-risk fire zones at around $ 600 billion.
These costs threaten to skyrocket insurance rates.
“Ultimately, the rates that adequately insure property threatened by wildfires will simply be too high for customers to pay, meaning that insurers can choose to opt out of the market altogether, leaving homes in the dark. WUI uninsurable, ”Robert Olshansky, a city dweller and regional planning researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wrote in a statement. “If we continue to rebuild as usual, it is almost inevitable that a major insurance crisis awaits us.”
the New York Times reported earlier this month that California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara approved a list of policy recommendations, launched by a state working group,
aimed at limiting development in areas at risk of forest fires. Some insurers have already pulled out of wildfire prone areas, making it more difficult for Californians to obtain financial protection against potential damage or loss to the home.
Reconstruct safely with “carrots and sticks”
Imagining what alternative reconstruction strategies might look like is one thing, finding feasible ways to implement them is another. Authorities must also ask people who have just suffered the trauma of losing their homes and belongings to move away from their communities, potentially disrupting their jobs, schools and families – and it is all the more difficult if a no one loses their childhood home or their dream. to house.
Chapple says a few solutions that might work could be a combination of new local zoning policies that would allow denser housing and statewide financial incentives to encourage residents to relocate. The state could also set aside funds to support subsidized housing in the event of a disaster.
She notes that tenants, disadvantaged communities, communities of color and immigrants are more vulnerable to displacement caused by forest fires; another set of policies may be needed to support these people.
“How do you rethink your risk mitigation and fire recovery policies to help people not be doubly vulnerable? ” she said.
The report recommends that California policymakers discourage risky developments, while encouraging the development of more affordable housing in low-risk areas. Prohibitive fire insurance rates can also lead to an exodus of people from wooded and fire-prone areas.
Jim Thorne, a UC Davis landscape ecologist unrelated to the new report, says the idea of a managed withdrawal is gaining ground for another climate-related crisis the state is facing: the rise of the sea level.
“A lot of California cities are considering this,” he said. “But this report speaks of a managed withdrawal from the UIE areas.”
He says the study could capture the attention of people who live in those areas and “grapple with this insecurity of,” Wow, it’s really hard to be sure we’re going to be able to keep things here.. ‘”
Getting residents to move away from areas prone to wildfires could help, Thorne adds, but the lack of affordable housing in urban areas remains a concern.
“If you’ve moved 500,000 units out of the WUI, where are you going to move them? ” he said. Some research suggests that the most effective strategy would be to create more filling housing units in urban areas around existing housing estates.
Thorne calls resilience knots a ‘good idea’, although that may not be entirely practical.. A more realistic idea might be closer to how the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection began to prioritize communities prone to forest fires for vegetation removal and fire breaks.
“Even if these [areas] might not be planned as urban pods, ”he said,“ There is already recognition of, ‘hey, we have to do this.’ “
Thorne says there is no one magic bullet. Solving this problem will be a process, a political combination of “some carrots and sticks” with “some ways of moving people.” “