California made one change: In 2008, it strengthened building codes for the design and materials used in new construction in high-risk areas.
“The challenge is that most of the homes haven’t been built in the last 20 years,” said Crowfoot, who co-chairs an interagency wildfire task force created by Newsom. “These are old houses that need to be reinforced. »
California has spent at least $50 million on home improvement projects since 2020 and launched a small pilot program offering grants and financial incentives to homeowners for renovations.
But that program “is obviously not at the scale to address what happened in Los Angeles County or elsewhere,” said Kimiko Barrett, a research and policy analyst at Headwater Economics, a group of non-profit research.
Even meeting the highest fire safety standards does not eliminate fire risks, said JP Rose, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. During California’s deadliest fire on record — the Camp Paradise Fire that killed 85 people in 2018 — some homes built under the new codes “still burned to the ground,” Rose said.
Indeed, only about 43 percent of Paradise-area homes built after 2008 survived the fire, although that was a better result than among older homes. About 86% of homes destroyed in Paradise were built before 1990, according to a study published in Fire Ecology.
“Building codes alone will not protect us if we continue to build deeper into fire zones,” Rose said. “Today’s problems were created many years ago when authorities approved large-scale development in high-risk areas without adequate safeguards. »
At the federal level, no agency has invested significant funds to make structures more resilient to wildfires. By 2023, a Federal Wildfire Commission report said it would likely take “tens to hundreds” of billions of dollars each year to fully resolve the wildfire crisis, including much larger investments in resilience projects.
Such work, Cohen said, should include detailed and time-consuming assessments of the “ignition potential” of each home in fire-prone communities. Simply replacing wood roofs in wildfire-prone areas across the country would cost at least $6 billion, according to an economic study from Headwaters.
If governments don’t act, it’s likely insurance companies will be the ones pushing people to make expensive renovations, under threat of losing their coverage.
“Homes that are more resilient to wildfires will have an easier time getting long-term insurance,” Wiener said. “The insurance industry has, in some ways, more power than the government here. »
In the short term, the loss of housing stock due to recent fires will only worsen Southern California’s housing crisis.
Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have both issued orders aimed at cutting red tape and allowing homeowners to rebuild up to 110% of their home’s previous footprint.
