They seem to have already started down that road.
If you’re both the insurance agent and the preventative care person, preventative care looks pretty good. I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea.
You can already get fire insurance thru CA Fair Plan. So, there will be insurance.
Also
Mandatory one-year moratorium prevents homeowners insurance cancellations and non-renewals in affected areas of Southern California
and this
Which of course is not really a solution. You may be able to legally coax insurances into contracts, but users will be served the cost + risk, so premiums will skyrocket.
Consider that thousands of people had their fire insurance cancelled over the past year because, apparently, the insurance industry saw this coming.
My admittedly limited understanding is that this was done years ago, but that there was a large amount of housing stock grandfathered in at the time these things changed.
Not sure about San Francisco but that sort of thing definitely happened after the big Chicago fire in 1871. Again, though, older buildings were grandfathered in. If you know what to look for on the South Side you can still see the limits of the burn by the difference in construction although the older buildings are gradually being replaced. Even so, brick and stone buildings can still burn if they have flammable interior fittings and possessions.
Depends… but yes, there are advantages to using wood in earthquake zones as far as surviving the shaking goes. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for earthquakes to be followed by fire…
It is possible to build earthquake resistant brick, concrete, metal, etc. structures but I don’t know the details on that.
There are already reports of people priced out of rental housing, and that’s where it’s even available. I expect if every vacant unit hasn’t been snatched up by now they will be by the end of the week.
My (again) limited understanding is that LA landlords can’t increase rent by more than 10% when renewing existing leases, but a new lease can be for whatever the market will bear. So once you get a new lease going forward the rent control ordinances apply. It’s not that rent control is on old vs. new built apartments but rather whether or not you already have a lease. If anyone in LA knows better (and has the time/isn’t fleeing a wildfire) people correct any errors I may have made.
But yes, there will be people priced out of their old neighborhoods.
More admittedly limited understanding: the lack of enforcement was due in part to lack of funding. Nobody works for free, after all.
Also, given the complete lack of rainfall in the area controlled burns may not have been possible in a safe manner. In my own area the authorities skipped quite a few controlled burns due to weather conditions and where I live, even in our driest years, is a LOT wetter than Southern California.
Possible. Especially when you have literally thousands of people who need housing. Then again, the US seems to have a high tolerance for people sleeping in makeshift tents on sidewalks… so maybe not. Of course, tent cities are in no way fireproof.
In sum: the situation is messy.
That is not the state taking it over.
https://www.cfpnet.com/about-fair-plan/
What the pool can’t cover goes back to the companies to pay in proportion of their share of the market.
The longer term motivation to get out of the California market remains unless premiums can increase enough to make it a reasonable bet for them. There is no public funded insurance option alternative for insurance (other than FEMA to whatever degree it applies).
So medium to longer term either premiums raise enough to price out all other than the 0.1% or companies abandon the market as an existential risk going forward.
Longer term housing prices drop as there are no buyers at those costs. Even for the 0.1% as there is no appeal of living in a beautiful house if there is no one available to do your maintenance.
The area fairly rapidly becomes a not very desirable place to live.
Double posting as there are really at least two questions: what should happen; and what more likely will happen.
The “should” is changes in zoning. Current zoning prevents denser cheaper housing in areas farther from the most extreme risk areas. This forces the working class into cheaper homes farther into the WUI.
Individual homes made fire resistant won’t help make any individual home much cheaper to insure. The entire community needs to be more fire resistant to make the community a reasonable place to insure. That means denser fire and earthquake resistant housing built less in and immediately adjacent to the WUI.
But NIMBY for denser housing is likely to prevail. And while some will buy and build replacement homes thinking that this fire was an exceptional event like a lightening strike, swallowing insurance costs or managing to pay cash and go without protection, the conditions that led to this will not get better over the several decades.
In the medium term - even if there are lots of jobs created with rebuilding (and doubtful those outpace the loss of jobs due to no one needing house cleaners, yard service, so on, while the wealthier home owners are out of area waiting for recovery), the housing stock for them is now vastly diminished, and what is available is going to cost lots more. They’ll move away.
I think we will get another wave of that currently “unspecific” we-are-leaving-CA-for-another-state movement.
What percentage will leave? hard to say … probably not too many (%-wise)… but I thing the net-outflow of CA will pick up speed.
CA has an annual Population growth of .017%. More people are coming in than going out.
Yes, there is an exodus of retired people looking to save on taxes and also selling their home to get a smaller cheaper one in another state. but not for disasters since they are often moving to Texas or Florida. Many are republicans.
But then a lot of people come to CA as we have the jobs.
That is population growth due to births. Net migration is negative and has been so for a quarter of a century:
Public Policy Institute of California:
Much has been made of the California exodus to other states, and rightly so. This migration, over the decades, has the power to reshape the state. From 2010 through 2022 about 8.5 million people moved from California to other states, while only 6.3 million people moved to California from other parts of the country, according to the American Community Survey. The state has lost residents to other states every year since 2000, according to Department of Finance estimates.
As for an expert opinion on climate-challenged real estate, here is a take from Daryl Fairweather, behavioral economist and the chief economist of Redfin (also a big boardgame nerd if the pile of Eurogames behind her in every interview is an indicator):
Stranger
Population growth in California was zero or negative in three of the last six years.
More people are going out than coming in. The lack of overal population loss is that there are still more being born than dying off. An article that provides details from last year.
California lost a net of 407,000 residents to other states between July 2021 and July 2022, including a greater share of those with a college degree and residents at all income levels than in the past.2
And they appear to be ignorant, as in 2024 CA TX and AZ have about the same crime rate- CA is slightly lower- but 62% thought CA has a higher rate- most of those were Republicans of course.
Empirically, California and Texas have virtually the same violent crime rates (ranking 17th and 16th among all states) and Arizona had a higher rate in 2020 (ranking 6th).4 Nonetheless, Table 4 reveals 77 percent of Republicans believe that crime is more common in California, including 64 percent of Arizonans and 59 percent of Texans.
Still despite those numbers- CA is not losing a significant number of residents- your study shows CA had a net loss of 409K out of a population of 39million, aka 39,000,000 aka 39,000K. Do the math.
The math is that once upon a time California was the place to move to. Now it is increasingly a place to move from.
Is it suddenly going to become depopulated? No. But is in particular losing its college educated population to other states. That is only going exacerbate the huge wealth inequality within the state as the middle leaves more than stays.
To keep it to the subject of this thread: the fires have decreased available housing supply in a state which already has very little affordable housing. Much built in the WUI. Huge numbers use more than half their income on housing. Homelessness is on the rise.
Less housing which will have more cost, to make more fire resistant, to pay for the premiums required to cover the risks which are not going anywhere but up, to pay for rebuilding infrastructure… no doubt domestic emigration will further increase over the medium and long term.
1%? Bah, that is nothing.
Republican retirees.
12,000 homes burned- out of 14,763,237. And a lot of those are second home in the Malibu area.
I know some people like to think CA is going to hell in a handbasket. But it is not. Crime is rather low, the weather is great, and this current batch of two big fires is an outlier. The biggest other fires this century here in CA burned only a couple hundred homes.
Hurricane Andrew: Destroyed 25,524 homes and damaged 101,241 others.
Well that is the crux of it. Is the past century a good guide to what the next decades will be? Or, given that the fraction of residents living within the WUI has gone up dramatically, that inadequate forest management has a huge amount of fuel available, that climate change will be making droughts more common and more severe and strong winds are not uncommon, is this not an outlier going forward, no more than “once a century” storms hitting shore communities are actually going be that going forward?
This is not your parents’ California.
And no it is not just retirees leaving California. It’s Millennial’s and Zs. All the more the shame because California has a great state college system that has invested in educating these people, only to have another state reap the benefits.
Again no not near term sudden collapse. We are discussing medium to long term. And the direction is toward a point where fewer are asked to shoulder more cost and inflection points are very likely going to get hit.
Keep moving those goalposts; eventually they’ll be in position to score.
Stranger
Do you have something useful to contribute?
Yes:
Stranger
I asked for useful. Just repeating yourself is not useful. And no goalposts were moved.
The LA Chargers may get land for their own stadium. Not unserious. That’s a major investment in jobs initially combined with infrastructure building. It would also be a morale boost.
I see a lot fewer single homes. Lack of adequate insurance will hinder rebuilding along with inflation and tariffs boosting prices.
At 80mph, a fire front is near impossible stop but I’d like to see area rezoning to break up areas - parking lots and open areas as a firebreak of sorts.
Parking lots? I’ll take my chances with the fires, thank you.