[altairprime]

Sonoma-area rent (this college is in Rohnert Park, south of Santa Rosa and east of Sebastopol) spiked by a thousand dollars a month or more after the 2017 fires destroyed several square miles of homes, and the city planners chose to let the single-family home district rebuild as low density rather than rezoning the now-bulldozed land as medium or high density. That campus used to be packed before it became impossible to live in the area, but afaik rents never came back down through when I left a couple years ago, and I think? enrollment dropped off a cliff as the graduating classes discovered they couldn’t afford to get jobs in the area. Presumably losing a state college that specialized in medical professionals in the city next door was worth it to Santa Rosa to preserve those atomic family homes, but locals were livid and it was the beginning of the end for me there (or else I would have been one of those students enrolled these past two years).

[vondur]

I don't think you can just appropriate the property that burned down and then build high density housing. I'd imagine the people probably want to rebuild their homes and move back. There's probably other land that can be used for more high density housing.

[skybrian]

I’m usually pretty YIMBY, but I would make an exception for a place that just had a catastrophic wildfire. (That is, unless something’s been done to lower the wildfire risk.)

[altairprime]

Sadly, they were not then YIMBY in any other ways after that missed opportunity, either.

[skybrian]

What I mean is, it seems like people should moving away from places with high wildfire risk? If so, building more housing as YIMBY encourages is counterproductive. Instead, they should disallow building there.

There are similar arguments about building housing in a flood zone.

Instead, we should be building more housing in safer places.

[altairprime]

As it turns out, insurers agree on the risk under today’s management practices and are simply ending service to the entire state rather than be compelled to insure the people living in unmanaged forest zones (i.e. all of western and northern California).

In that specific area of Santa Rosa, now that it’s burned it won’t burn like that again for a few decades — it’s not like SoCal LA where it goes up every ten years like clockwork due to chaparral — and it turned out that no one had been enforcing “safe distance around home clear of brush and trees” and so it’s probably now the lowest wildfire risk city in the entire state to build homes in as a result: proper code enforcement, safety protocols, and a case study of how fire spreads through blown embers, dry roofs, wall-adjacent bushes, and open vents.

The fires reached all the way to the highway and very nearly jumped it to burn towards the ocean and they were prepared to sacrifice the entire eastern half of the city to prevent that, because Marin and Sevastopol refuse to thin their trees and it would have spread in a single day to all of North Bay if they let it cross. (And, yes, even Marin deserves not to be razed by fire, however much ire they’ve earned!) So it turns out that building homes near any forest is a bad idea if you’re not also thinning out the forest with selective logging, and as a result the entirety of Northern California and Western Oregon are more or less ‘places with high wildfire risk’. It doesn’t have to be that way, but certainly it will be until leaders grow a spine and stop capitulating to the existing homeowners.

I wrote a rather detailed paper about this with a dozen references spanning the past century for school last year; no AI required, just a handful of luxurious 2500-word days and then an couple more for editing. Best week of the year. Each wildfire costs $100-150M of California GDP in direct and indirect impacts; at $15k/yr fulltime minimum wage, hiring a thousand laborers to carry hand axes into the forest and thin them for a full year — machines can’t traverse and even if they could, machine logging and controlled burns can only happen during 4 months out of 12 — would prevent at least one wildfire (breakeven point) and every one prevented after that would be pure profit for the state economy. You’d think greed would drive them to do it, but apparently it’s anathema to suggest manual labor can solve problems anymore. Maybe someday Santa Rosa or Sonoma County will work up the courage to do it :)

[nradov]

Where are the safer places? Pretty much everywhere habitable in California is at high risk of wildfires and/or earthquakes (plus floods in the Delta region). Instead of placing certain areas off limits a better solution is defensible space and stricter building codes. For example, build metal roofs.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/home-hardening

[skybrian]

If they're all the same, why are there fire risk maps for California showing some places to be riskier than others?

[altairprime]

Anywhere that’s burned recently or doesn’t have dense trees near housing is lower risk. Not all of California is woodland, etc.