California state and local officials are encouraging rebuilding in areas destroyed by wildfires at a time when people should be redirected away from those areas if the state wants to reduce the economic and human impact of increasingly destructive wildfires, according to a report published Thursday.
quare miles (717,231 square kilometers); killed 33 people; and destroyed more than 10,000 homes and other structures.
Nick Cammarota, the California Building Industry Association’s senior vice president and general counsel, said the researchers failed to get input from builders who know of all the hurdles to producing housing in California.
“There’s no perfect place to build in California,” Cammarota said. “There are seismic constraints, there are flooding constraints, sea-level rise constraints. There’s habitat. There is toxics. There’s displacement and gentrification.”
The study takes a myopic focus on wildfires and the safety risks the blazes pose but fails to take into account a slew of other safety risks, including how dense urban areas could be affected during an earthquake, Cammarota said.
The report estimates that 1.4 million California homes are in areas identified as having a high risk of burning in a wildfire event. But researchers said that number is likely much higher because the state has not updated its fire risk maps since 2007.
Researchers suggest levying a 0.25% fee on all new properties in fire-prone areas, which could generate more than $1.8 billion that could be spent on wildfire risk reduction planning and projects, including fuel breaks and prescribed burns.
Continuing to allow housing development near wildlands will increase the cost of insurance and place significant burdens on local economies, the researchers said. From 1964 to 1990, the insurance industry paid out an average of $100 million per year in fire insurance claims in California, according to the report. Following the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, insurers paid out approximately $26 billion.
“We discovered the very many negative impacts of fires on housing, on housing displacement, on people’s finances, on insurance costs, on the fiscal health of municipalities, of the state as a whole,” said F. Noel Perry, founder of Next 10.
“A whole lot of positive things can happen by pulling back from having developments in the wildland: environmental, financial, fiscal, human — you name it,” he added.
Last week, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara released a draft of recommendations that aim to limit building in high wildfire risk areas, including having the state determine the areas where the risk is too high for state dollars to be used to support new development and infrastructure.
The recommendations also call for an expansion of tough building standards. If local officials still insist on building in places exposed to wildfires, the recommendations call for preventing those homes from getting insurance through the state’s FAIR Plan, the last resort for insurance for homeowners who have been denied traditional coverage.