I disagree…
(Owner of A brick house that survived an earthquake stronger than any registered in CA ever without problems.
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Brick is fine.
Right, even concrete home have wood furniture.
It is not the houses- it is the brush.
Right.
Possible in theory, but I suspect it will take so long to get anything done (and require such tax increases) that it might be quicker and easier to just move to another State.
It’s easy to say that, but how easy is it for someone to disengage from the property? I mean, with a mortgage, insurance, property taxes, etc. Can one just say “f!ck it!” and toss the keys into the ash and just walk away, no strings attached?
The usual answer to walking away from your debts is to declare bankruptcy.
Or fake your death and move to Australia under an assumed identity.
Assuming that the homeowner’s insurance doesn’t pay out for whatever reason, presumably you still own a building lot in an expensive area of the country. Selling that should make it easier to build or buy somewhere, even if it’s not in the Los Angeles area.
Here is a gift link to a New York Times article about a house in the Santa Monica Mountains in Malibu designed to withstand wildfires. The article described how the husband stayed in the house through the 2018 Woolsey Fire, though he suffered some injuries and had to be rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. But the trauma of that experience has them thinking of selling the house and moving on.
Their house had heat-resistant windows, a fireproof clay roof, walls made of concrete instead of wood, and vents stuffed with steel wool to keep embers from flying into the house. The property ran entirely on off-the-grid power in case of an outage, and it was surrounded by about half a dozen private fire hydrants, high-power water pumps and tanks that stored more than 50,000 gallons of water.
Point taken, but isn’t insurance going to go through the roof if still obtainable at all? Which course represents the lesser evil?
Will it stay an expensive area if this sort of thing goes on happening?
It is likely to become more expensive. Depending on where you are talking about. If a fire burns down a poorer flatland neighborhood you could have situations where insurance payments stall a long time on payouts, to the point where some people eventually don’t bother rebuilding and just take the cash and move somewhere cheaper. Or you could have a larger number of underinsured or uninsured who can’t realistically afford to rebuild. In that case the area may linger in a blighted state for some time and local home values, already low(er) by CA standards, may crater.
But a lot of the areas that burned in these events were somewhat to very expensive to begin with, even by CA standards (which are very high). Great views, generally nice weather (a very, very relative assessment to be sure). The locations retain that attraction and many residents were/are loaded. Some of them can pay cash for those very pricey homes and the burnt down homes will get rebuilt, because location and money (insurance and otherwise). No insurance in the future and then the only people who can afford to buy there are those who can pay cash. Super-expensive will stay super-expensive, moderately expensive will become super-expensive, somewhat pricey will become…probably super-expensive.
Thing is the super wealthy who can afford to own without insurance and just rebuild out of pocket? They don’t do their own yard work, pool maintenance, housecleaning, or likely even cook much. They have people for that. If there is no where that those people can afford to live then there is no appeal to living there. So unless they are building compounds with staff quarters, which maybe some will, IMHO living there does not appeal.
I was watching the news and they showed two very, very expensive homes that had been fireproofed- and survived- but then another where over $75000 had been spent, and it was gone.
IIRC the two fireproofed had cost many millions of $.
So- in other word- yes, they can be, but the cost is astronomical, and it doesn’t always work.
Tangential, but it’s interesting to read that private equity (gasp) is possibly one of the reasons that the LAFD struggled with the fires.
Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?