Nearly a third of new homes are a fire risk

The Guardian -  A rapidly increasing share of US homes are built in areas that are at risk of fire. In 1990, about 13% of new homes were built in places at high risk of fire. By 2020, that number had more than doubled to 31%. The numbers come from ClimateCheck, a for-profit research company that compiles risk by studying trends including rainfall, wind and temperature. But the climate crisis is just one of the reasons that more homes are unsafe.

The Covid pandemic changed the way people work and live. Some workers who were able to continue their jobs remotely wanted out of dense cities. New York alone has lost half a million residents since 2020. Many of these domestic migrants relocated to smaller cities and rural areas, often choosing homes that were at greater risk of wildfire.

Maximilian Stiefel, a risk expert at ClimateCheck, explains: “In California, especially, there’s a difficulty in building dense housing, so a lot of people are forced into single unit housing, and that just accelerates this spread into the wildland urban interface, because you can’t build up another unit on your property if you have a single family house. And then there’s a lot of nimbyism in California, where people don’t want denser developments being built.” Over 80% of properties built in California between 2020 and 2022 were in high fire risk areas, compared with just 28% of the properties built between 1920 and 1929.