California's rising home prices mean there's more to lose in a wildfire. U.C. Berkeley planners looked at three recently burned communities and found that if homeowners rebuild where they were, people and property are not any safer.
With last summer’s wildfires hanging over their heads, the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation recently discovered that rebuilding in the same area would not make those residents or homes any safer than before.
UC Berkeley, in collaboration with nonpartisan nonprofit Next 10, chose the communities affected by wildfires recently: Santa Rosa, affected by the Tubbs Fire in 2017, Ventura, affected by the Thomas Fire in 2017, and Paradise, affected by the Camp Fire in 2018, for their research.
The results showed that while Santa Rosa has rebuilt quickly after their wildfire, many Ventura residents have opted not to live so close to the wildland urban interface (WUI), which refers to the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development. As for Paradise, a lower income community, many have struggled.
Santa Rosa fast-tracked the construction process while Ventura added restrictions on rebuilding in the wildland areas, pushing instead for multi-family construction closer to the city center.
“Let’s retreat from the WUI, or the wildland urban interface, and build in more, dense walkable areas,” said UC Berkley Department of City and Regional Planning professor, Karen Chapple.
Or, added Chapple, another strategy is to build “resilience nodes” a term she credits her students at Berkeley for coming up with, which would be dense walkable communities placed at the periphery of cities, essentially surrounding them by a green buffer so they’re more protected from fire.
The results of the report provide a cautionary note – if Californians continue to rebuild as usual, there's a massive insurance crisis ahead. And according to the report, one in 12 California homes are in a high-risk wildfire zone, although with the caveat that this estimate is likely low.
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