By One change California has made: In 2008, it strengthened building codes for the design and materials used in new construction in high-hazard zones.
“The challenge is, most homes have not been built in the last 20 years,” said Crowfoot, who co-chairs an interagency wildfire task force created by Newsom. “These are legacy homes that have to be hardened.”
California has devoted at least $50 million to home hardening projects since 2020 and launched a small pilot program offering subsidies and financial incentives for homeowners to retrofit.
But that program “is not at scale, obviously, to address what occurred in L.A. County or elsewhere,” said Kimiko Barrett, a research and policy analyst at Headwater Economics, a nonprofit research group.
Even meeting the highest fire safety standards doesn’t eliminate fire risks, said J.P. Rose, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. During California’s deadliest fire on record — the Camp Fire in Paradise that killed 85 people in 2018 — some homes built to the new codes “still burned to the ground,” Rose said.
Indeed, only around 43% of homes in the Paradise area built after 2008 survived the fire, though that was a better outcome than among older houses. About 86% of homes destroyed in Paradise were built before 1990, according to a study in Fire Ecology.
“Building codes alone are not going to protect us if we continue building deeper into the fire zones,” Rose said. “The problems of today were created many years ago when officials approved large-scale development in high-risk areas without adequate safeguards.”
On the federal level, no agency has invested significant funding in making structures more resilient to wildfire. In 2023, a federal wildfire commission report said it would likely take “tens to hundreds” of billions of dollars each year to fully address the wildfire crisis, including much larger investments in resilience projects.
Such work, Cohen said, would need to include detailed, time-consuming assessments of the “ignition potential” of each house in fire-prone communities. Just replacing wooden roofs in wildfire-prone areas across the country would cost at least $6 billion, according to a Headwaters economics study.
If governments do not take action, insurance companies will likely be the ones primarily pushing people to make pricey retrofits, under the threat of losing coverage.
“Homes that are more wildfire-resistant are going to have an easier time getting insurance over the long run,” Wiener said. “The insurance industry in some ways has more power than the government here.”
In the short term, the loss of housing stock due to the recent fires will only worsen Southern California’s housing crisis.
Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both have issued orders to cut red tape and allow homeowners to rebuild up to 110% of their homes’ previous footprint.
