California’s Policies Laid the Groundwork for Wildfire Danger
The risks are growing, but instead of protecting citizens, state leaders focused on climate change.
Fires have been ripping through the forests and scrublands of California for millennia. Indeed, with its combination of long dry seasons and intense Santa Ana winds, the state is uniquely prone to fire. “It’s a place that nature built to burn, often explosively,” writes the noted historian of wildfires, Stephen J. Pyne. In sparsely populated or empty areas, fires cost little in terms of treasure or lives (in fact, they can be beneficial to some ecosystems). But when a wildfire encroaches upon neighborhoods abutting wild terrain—a zone known as the
wildland-urban interface (WUI)—the destruction can be swift and catastrophic. The Camp Fire, which raced through the Sierra foothill community of Paradise in 2018, killed 85 people and wiped out some 18,000 structures.
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While the media stresses climate change, conservative critics point to DEI policies in L.A. government, budget cuts to the fire department, the failure to improve water infrastructure, poor forest-management practices, and other lapses in political leadership.
Those issues all demand investigation. But the biggest question facing California is why so many of its residents live in such hazardous terrain. As I reported in a 2023 City Journal special issue on California, more than a quarter of the state’s residents—roughly 11.2 million people—live in
fire-prone WUI regions. Some are drawn there by the state’s natural beauty, but many homebuyers are pushed out of urban areas by regulations that restrict housing construction and thus drive up costs. In recent decades, half of California’s new homes have been built in non-urban regions. That includes more remote communities such as Paradise, where—unlike in elite L.A. suburbs—many homes are relatively affordable. Either way, the
explosion in WUI construction has dramatically expanded the scale of economic losses—the disaster “bullseye”—when wildfires ravage those areas.
Nonetheless, California continues to nudge its citizens out of dense regions (which are relatively safe from fire) and into more vulnerable terrain. In fact, while urban dwellers face sky-high costs and declining services, residents of the
WUI often benefit from hidden subsidies. For example, while living in fire country entails higher risks, California funds a massive firefighting program focused mostly on protecting residents and their homes. These efforts are not always successful, of course, but the state’s firefighters usually succeed in keeping fires from reaching developed areas.
Knowledge that homes in the WUI are likely to be protected (at no cost to the homeowner) constitutes a huge, if hidden, subsidy. Two economists who studied this phenomenon concluded that the state’s firefighting investment boosts WUI home values and effectively bankrolls “development in harm’s way.”L.A.’s damaged and threatened neighborhoods are an outlier in this dynamic. Some were developed as much as a century ago, long before economic factors lured other Californians into WUI regions. Residents of these peaceful, long-settled communities might easily forget they live next to wild land. Nonetheless, the city’s development patterns subtly amplify fire risks for those on the city margins. Decades of lush landscaping have put more fuel in the paths of fires. (The non-native palm trees beloved by Angelenos light up like roman candles when ignited, showering burning embers on everything downwind.) And the existence of so much wooden infrastructure creates another hazard, note fire researchers Faith Kearns and Max Moritz: when wildfires reach settled areas, they write, “wind driven home-to-home fire spread then occurs, causing risky ‘urban conflagrations’ that can be almost impossible to stop.”
Most wildland fires are started, one way or another, by humans. Potential sources of the L.A. blazes include fires started in homeless encampments, arson, and the smoldering remnants of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Since a bigger human population raises the risk of fires, WUI areas can be more vulnerable than pure back country. That means built-up WUI communities face both more frequent fires and more intense fires, due to their concentrations of flammable infrastructure. Both factors multiply the bullseye effect. L.A.’s massive runup in home prices in recent years has inflated the bullseye even more. Early estimates for the total cost of the disaster run as high as $275 billion.
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