Back in 2019, a California state climate task force issued a stark warning: endless development in the state’s high-risk wildfire zones was magnifying wildfires and putting more people in their path.
It was a call that has echoed in the state for decades from environmentalists, urban planners, and policymakers, even as developers pushed to build ever more homes in zones designated as “very high risk” for wildfires.
Now many of those homes have burned to the ground.
The fires in Los Angeles have reduced thousands of homes to ash, forced more than one hundred thousand people to evacuate, and rank as the most destructive in the city’s history. They were fanned by one-hundred-mile-per-hour wind gusts and exacerbated by eight months of little rain. But they were also fueled by the state’s endless urban sprawl, which is encroaching further and further into fire-prone wildlands.
In recent years, at every turn, efforts to reduce high-fire-risk development have been stymied by powerful real estate and construction interests. The industry has successfully fought against limits on development for wildfire safety and even beat back safety standards for houses in fire-prone areas.
That includes a successful 2021 lobbying blitz uncovered by the Lever that helped kill a state bill that would have limited new home construction in the state’s most extreme fire-risk areas — including some of the Los Angeles neighborhoods engulfed in the recent fires.
“There is huge pressure on local and state officials to continue approving large-scale development in high-risk areas,” said J.P. Rose, urban wildlands policy director and senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group. Particularly in the last few…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
