Los Angeles Zoning Laws Pushed People and Homes Toward Fire-Prone Areas
The disastrous fires in the Los Angeles area have now claimed at least 10 lives and damaged or destroyed 9,000 structures, according to local officials. With insured losses expected to exceed $20 billion, the wildfires are on track to be the most expensive on record.
Though many factors contributed to the devastation (such as fire hydrants without water, too few controlled burns, and insurance price controls), it was also exacerbated by land-use policies that pushed homes and residents away from the city center and closer to the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The U.S. Fire Administration defines the WUI as “the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development…where structures…intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.”
The U.S. Forest Service’s 2020 national assessment includes the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and most of L.A. County abutting the surrounding hills in the WUI. In 2005, the Forest Service reported that California had 5.1 million housing units in the WUI—the most in the nation. The number of housing units in the WUI has only increased since, including 140,000 subsidized by the state.
State policymakers have been aware of the risk to these homes for decades. The University of California system received a grant from the Office of the State Fire Marshal in 1997 to “develop standard test protocols to evaluate the relative performance of exterior construction materials and assemblies” in the hopes of making homes fire-resistant. These standards have not prevented the incineration of buildings in the Palisades, Altadena, and other neighborhoods impacted by the inferno—with better land-use planning, they might not have been built in the first place.
The American Planning Association identifies these neighborhoods—the origin points of the present firestorm—as “Very High Fire Hazard” zones. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s active fire map includes a five-year fire history, which identifies the 2020 B
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