Yves here. Perhaps readers will beg to differ, but there seems to be some flawed assumptions in this piece. First is that the decision on how much and how to rebuild Los Angeles should be left to the community, whatever that means (as in which legal jurisdiction?). Mind you, from a practical standpoint, it largely will be, but “should” is another matter.
The destruction has been on a scale that the state FIRE funds, which insured many of the houses, is sure to be fully used and then some. That means costs will be imposed state-wide, with the preferred course of action “socializing” the costs, as in making all home insurers in the state eat some of the costs. That will mean increases in premiums, again across the state (although presumably some properties will be dinged with higher increase than other). The state is already in such budget stress that an explicit bailout (from taxpayer funds) is theoretically possible, but seems politically untenable.
The second assumption is such a dry and getting drier area can make changes in practices so as to drastically reduce fire/fire spread risk. However, this article IMHO is a complete fail here. Nowhere does it discuss building materials, and our new friend, concrete. All the ideas are curb-appeal friendly ones like less shrubbery, more parks and footpaths to create more soft fire breaks between houses, and the long-overdue measure of having miscreant PG&E bury power lines. Nevertheless, with high speed Santa Ana winds, hot embers fly considerable distances and wooden homes, as we have seen, combust nicely.
By Matt Reynolds, a senior writer at WIRED, where he covers climate, food, and biodiversity. Originally published at Wired; cross posted from Undark
As houses continued to burn in Los Angeles, officials had already started talking about rebuilding the city. “We’re going to rebuild this remarkable community and we’re going to come back,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a call with President Biden on Jan. 10. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass added her own call for action. “We’re going to recover, and we’re going to rebuild and we’re going to rebuild better.”
The challenge facing the city is huge. An estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed in the Palisades and Eaton fires, neither of which has been contained as of last week. At least 25 people have been killed by the blazes, which are on track to be the costliest wildfires in U.S. history. But as the risk of devastating wildfires increases with climate change, the calls to rebuild Los Angeles raise a series of tricky questions: How and where to rebuild — and whether to rebuild at all.
In November 2018, the Camp Fire razed most of the northern Californian town of Paradise to the ground and killed 85 people. The population of Paradise is now just a third of its pre-fire levels, but the town is rebuilding in a way that residents hope will make future wildfires less devastating. “We’ve gone from fire suppression to that not even being possible once there’s an ignition,” says Dan Efseaff, who started working for Paradise Recreation and Park District about a year before the Camp Fire.
One way to lessen the spread and intensity of fires is to reduce the amount of flammable vegetation — often called “fuel” — through prescribed burns, cutting back shrubs, and allowing animals to graze. Forest trails can also give authorities access for fuel management, provide a break in vegetation that slows fires down and, as was the case in the Camp Fire, provide evacuation routes in an emergency.
As well as reducing fuel and introducing more forest trails, residents are also thinking about where new homes will be built and what surrounds them, says Efseaff. Rather than building homes that back directly onto wildland, the town is exploring the use of buffer zones — areas of managed land that distance homes from the highest-risk areas. The idea is that homes can be clustered closer inside these defensible areas, making them easier for fire-fighters to access and defend.
Parks can also be an important part of fire defense: Open spaces like managed parks contain much less fuel, slowing down fires and halting their spread. As the Camp Fire raged, some 80 to 120 Paradise residents sheltered under the pavilion at nearby Bille Park. Since the fire, Esfeaff’s crews have worked in the park removing shrubs and small trees that could spread fire into its taller trees. “We wanted to get rid of those not only from a fire-protection standpoint, but because it also makes the park feel safer,” he says.
There are all kinds of buffer zones, says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at UC Santa Barbara. Vineyards, golf courses, baseball fields, and public parks can all be used to provide an open, less flammable space between homes and more flammable vegetation, to attempt to stop and slow fires before they enter neighborhoods. Once fires spread into denser urban areas they become urban conflagrations with whole blocks in danger of going up in flames, as has been the case in northern and eastern Los Angeles.
The planners and residents working to rebuild Los Angeles won’t be starting from a blank slate, however. Existing roads, infrastructure, and plots of lands will all shape how the city is rebuilt. Some residents may want to immediately rebuild on the same plot of land, while some may be willing to sell their land to create a buffer zone.
On Jan. 13, Mayor Bass issued an executive order that will expedite permits for rebuilding “like for like” and exempts these from reviews that would slow down the rebuilding process. Gov. Newsom has also relaxed permitting rules under the California Environmental Quality Act in order to speed up rebuilding.
Exactly how LA then chooses to rebuild is a “social values question,” says Moritz. “It’s not so much of a science question any more. Shouldn’t we as a society be able to weigh in on where and how people are building or rebuilding, so it’s safer and has less of an impact from a public funding perspective down the road? Because a lot of these events will recur.”
Wildfires in California have grown larger and more damaging in recent years. Some 7.08 million acres burned in California between 2009 and 2018 — more than double the area burned between 1979 and 1988. The number of fires encroaching into urban areas has gone up too. In the 10 years between 1979 and 1988, around 22,000 acres of burned land was within so-called wildland/urban interfaces — areas where housing is close to wildfire-prone nature. By 2009–2018 that increased to 32,000 acres.
One result of all this is that Californian authorities have good maps of high-risk areas. Many of the areas hit by the Palisades and Eaton fires were classified as very high fire hazard zones, which means new developments in these areas have to take steps to minimize the risk of fires spreading from wild vegetation into homes, including planting fire-resistant vegetation and keeping any other trees and shrubs trimmed and away from houses.
But housing demand is so high in cities like Los Angeles that developers often end up building in these very high fire-hazard zones anyway. After a wildfire, developers tend to slow down building in high-risk areas for a while, but after a couple of years they return to previous rates of development, says Nicholas Irwin, who studies real estate economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Cities and local authorities need to think about ways to discourage development in high-risk areas, says Irwin. One way would be to increase development taxes in areas prone to fires, but another would be to incentivize developers to infill — building more houses and apartments in underused urban areas.
“We do need denser development, especially in places like Los Angeles. The property market there is out of control, and it’s going to be getting even worse,” he says. “We need to think about ways to rebuild that allow more units to be built to help affordability but also ways that are more resilient to future wildfire risks.”
Burying power lines might also go a long way to defending houses against wildfire risks. The fire that destroyed Paradise was sparked by a power line fault, as were at least seven other of California’s most destructive wildfires. Burying power lines isn’t cheap, and those costs get passed on to utility customers, many of whom don’t live in areas at risk of wildfires.
“It’s these little things that would make a difference in the long run,” says Irwin. Burying power lines, encouraging denser development, and building more defensible communities. But these long-term investments require changing how people think about living in wildfire risk zones and accepting that more resilient communities come at a cost. “I just don’t know if we’re going to learn anything,” says Irwin.
The best way to manage the land is to mimic nature. This means, allowing goats & chickens to graze the forest (urban agriculture). Using materials that don’t burn. (rock, concrete & steel) and removing unnatural sources of fire (powerlines). It also means making land owners responsible to manage the land, not burdening them with regulations that prevent them from taking measures to protect themselves.
Another thing, when you remove risk (or at least take away the natural consequences of action) you increase the probability of extreme events. (Think Nassim Talib & Black Swans) When you have extremely wealthy communities, who are protected from nature, bad things will happen.
Goatidote in my area.
My town, San Clemente is bringing in goats to clear hillsides.
From Firewise:
Firewise Communities
Join collective efforts to improve wildfire preparedness in California.
https://readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/firewise-communities/
What will US housing look like in 2050?
Houses are burning down, blowing down or flooding on a regular basis all over the country, though of course in some areas (flood plain, forest edge, California+Florida, etc.) more than others.
What will be the resale value of single-family wooden houses?
So now, back in 2025, shouldn’t a smart home-buyer get a condo in a concrete apartment block NOW? Or am I missing something?
The pretense that the state parks and national forests around LA are “wilderness” needs to be dropped. In reality, they’re parks—-no different than Central Park. That land needs to be managed like a park (eg, brush clearing, fire breaks, etc). The real wilderness is upstate.
Not holding my breath on this hot potato obviously. Now on to the next wildfire hot potato: zoning!
Most of North America was managed (directly or indirectly) by indigenous peoples for millennia. Some version of prescribed burning was present all over the continent, including forests in the east and midwest, to encourage species such as oak and chestnuts or to keep open pasture/grasslands.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-shape-our-land.htm
Californian indigenous peoples in particular depended on regular fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems#California Wish I had a better source, but I’m largely going off memory from a California land environmental history course I took in college decades ago.
Due to land use and air quality concerns, a modern process would have to be different, from using goats to something on the scale of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
I actually agree with you on doing a better job of management, but these areas aren’t like Central Park.
I personally have seen coyotes, deer, and bobcats behind my house which is about 5 miles from the Angeles National Forest. I saw a mountain lion just a few months ago.
https://nationalforest.travel/how-many-mountain-lions-in-angeles-national-forest/
Kind of hard for me to see Sespe wilderness, for example, as Central Park, but OK.
Sespe is not Topanga State Park, which is surrounded by human development, just like Central Park. Angeles National Forest lucks as not many people want to live in Palmdale.
“Cities and local authorities need to think about ways to discourage development in high-risk areas, says Irwin.”
Think about? Don’t zoning authorities there have the power to just say no?
Of course the real problem is that as in almost all cities the real estate interests are a major political force that money dependent politicians are reluctant to confront. However the social calculus here isn’t very difficult. If your house burns it not only is a matter of your property and that of your neighbors but of the toxic smoke blanketing a city of millions. Taibbi says that David Lynch had emphysema and had to be moved out of his house and may have been another fire victim.
Sprawl eats the land and has become a prominent American phenomenon–perhaps inspired by LA’s early example. I lived many years in Atlanta which eventually seemed to take up most of north Georgia.
The issue here is that the interests of different parties involved are not aligned. While (future) owners have an interest in minimizing fire (and other) risks, the developer and the builder do not. Fire breaks, parks, etc. all require building fewer houses, lower profits and less shareholder value.
My family built two concrete family homes in Europe and I’ve built a wooden house in the US, and the experience has been very different. Concrete homes took a full year to build and required significant periods of inactivity while the concrete for each floor was setting. One of the houses was built on a slope, so the hill was dug up on the back side of the house and a retaining wall was built that keeps the water away from running down the hill from the house. In the US this would be built as a walkout basement and have perpetual foundation and water intrusion issues.
The house in the US went up in 4 months with about half the labour the concrete houses took. It’s on a slab because I insisted on no basement, but otherwise it would have a walkout. If I was a developer, I know which method I’d prefer. My family’s European homes will be just as good in a 100 years as the day they were built and my US home will start having issues in 10-15 years and will have to be rebuilt 30-40 years down the line.
Concrete home? You mean a reinforced concrete support structure and ceilings / floors but the rest is either bricks of all kinds, especially the hollowed ones to insure greater insulation or the AAC type, which is even easier to put together. I have seen a house like that put together in a matter of weeks, during a summer I spent in a german town years ago.
The only problems I have with these homes is that the walls are plastered with some fine concrete and then it is a hell to hang anything on them. But if one could put drywall therethen would be a perfect, multigenerational home, impervoious to hurricanes, fire and fixable after flooding. Could likely whitstand earthquakes.
It’s concrete for floors and load-bearing pillars, then hollowed bricks for the the walls, much more solid than just using hollowed bricks. These were 3-level homes and concrete for each level was allowed to slowly set over 3 weeks with daily wetting of the concrete to slow down the setting process.
The basic shell took about 4 months to put up and then insulation was applied on the outside as insulation sheets held in place by a metal mesh and covered with plaster or thin ceramic tile to form a facade. About 6 months total for the outside of the house.
Interior took another 4 months or so, plaster on the walls and ceilings and additional insulation between each floor. Very energy efficient even thought the homes are 3000 and 5000 sqft.
yeah, real house.
after moving in North America, I have the feeling that any stray dog can ultimately chew through any house, including app buildings up to 4-5 levels…
A potential solution is in the title but I don’t think the author speaks to it. I see words like “property market”, “planning”, “zoning”, “parks”, “buffer zones”, “regulation”, “planners”, “residents”. As if any of this has to do with community. Maybe in the abstract sense of people being merely physically assembled alongside and in proximity to each other, like in an elevator, but not in any sense beyond that.
I know this is generalizing a bit, but I don’t think the wealthy tend to view homes or houses as permanent structures. The permanence or impermanence of a built structure is of little concern, a house is just a temporary closet to hang ones coat or park ones car, or a set for an entertainment venue, populated with carefully placed and curated items intended to convey ones “personality”. From the article, I sense this may be the same lens with which this latest rebuilding project is being viewed. Buffer zones and forest trails, regulations, planners, are features and abstractions to add to the description of this general demarcated area.
So long as it is a commodity, upon becoming acquisition it ceases to be art, love or beauty. So it is with homes. A wealthy person residing in a home empties it. If you want permanence, give the area over the the poor who’ll turn it into community, a place of warmth and love, something lasting.
Living in So. California, I am concerned that new homes built in high risk areas (crazy) will cause all of our insurance premiums to rise. Let the premiums be assessed based on the risk. If you choose to build in a canyon full of oily, flammable chapparal, so be it, but I really don’t want to subsidize this recklessness, and I suspect a lot of others share this sentiment.
And a side note to Yves’ comment about concrete building material: Notice in photos of burned out homes, the concrete and brick chimneys, retaining walls, etc., are still standing.
Whereas in earthquakes its pretty common in SoCal to have the chimney fall down.
What would the 3 little pigs do?
I believe the discussion is about fires, not earthquakes. Nonetheless, many commercial buildings are made of pre-fab walls, and they seem to hold up pretty well.
Chimneys are about the only bricks you’ll see in single family homes in SoCal, masonry doesn’t work in earthquake country.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1994 quake I was in Santa Monica, and a brick church on Arizona Ave had utterly collapsed on itself, if it had happened on a Sunday during services, every last person would be quite dead.
Concrete isn’t earthquake resilient although perhaps there are ways of making it so through reinforcement. Perhaps also adobe or rammed earth could be adapted to be both fire and earthquake resilient. Wrath of Gnon on X is all about rammed earth.
Rammed earth is so beautiful, like a building carved from the geology of the earth itself. I was wondering why it’s not standard in California, precisely the place you’d expect it to be.
because rammed earth is very hard to get any kind of consistent strength due to inconsistent materials.
Terrible for an earthquake. Hard to permit in earthquake country.
Here are just some of the many types of building that works for fire. And design has a huge impact on how well these work. No eves, metal roofs, no gutters, tempered glass windows, no screened vents etc.
Hardy board class A fire rating. Basically concrete in plywood shape. Comes in ship lap and 3×6 or 4×8 sheets, used with standard stick framed house.
ICF blocks. These are hollow foam that you put concrete in for strength and then cover outside usually with stucco, inside can be plaster or sheet rock. Super fast to put up.
full concrete with foam added in and or outside for insulation. But full concrete is terrible to heat and cool, its thermal mass, no insulation.
Strawbale. Don’t laugh, it actually take a huge amount to get it to burn. Also covered in plaster or stucco.
Building for fires doesn’t have to be a huge expense.
How would steel framed houses perform in an earthquake?
Nova did a show about how those heavy timber Chinese buildings–think Forbidden City–were made earthquake resistant by having flexible timber joints that could move a bit without coming apart.
Interestingly while scads of oak and shallow rooted tulip poplars came down here during Helene the tall pine trees seemed the least affected. The rigid oaks pulled up their roots whereas the softwood pine would bend with the wind.
After the Camp Fire and so many people lost-burnt up on the roads of Paradise, many mountain communities and US Forest Service land got religion and cleared out all dead burnables about 100 feet from the road on both sides as a preventive measure.
They rarely went any further than that though…