In most parts of the United States the holiday season brings snow, mistletoe, and mulled wine at office parties. But out here in California it’s often the season of wildfires, flash floods, and mudslides.
Last month, Northern California’s Camp Fire (wildfires are named after the area or location where they start) destroyed 14,000 homes in Butte County and left almost all of the 26,000 residents of Paradise homeless. In Southern California, the Woolsey Fire burned 1,200 structures in L.A. and Ventura Counties before raging through the coastal canyons into Malibu, where it torched an additional 443 homes collectively worth more than $1.6 billion.
Despite the best efforts of FEMA, state relief organizations, and local neighbors, many victims forced from their homes in more modest areas are fearful they soon may join the 134,000 or so Californians who go to bed homeless every night. California has 12 percent of the nation’s population but 25 percent of its homeless, and their numbers have been increasing at a yearly rate of 14 percent.
Insurance policies in California normally pay for 12 months of temporary housing if a homeowner loses his primary residence in a natural disaster. The allowance doubles if Washington declares the event a major disaster. But based on the aftermath of recent disasters, even two years may not be enough time to complete the paperwork necessary for rebuilding here.
A year ago, the Tubbs Fire roared through Sonoma County, destroying more than 5,100 houses in the city of Santa Rosa. Fourteen months later, only 61 have been rebuilt. An additional 1,700 have construction permits, but many of the remaining 3,339 lots probably will end up in the hands of speculators. The situation is somewhat similar in the city of Ventura (pop. 111,000), where only 136 of the 524 single family homes burned in the December 2017 Thomas Fire have reconstruction permits. “Another 130 families are in plan check,” says Jeffrey Lambert, Ventura’s community development director, “but it’s true that some people are selling their lots and moving away.”
One reason for California’s slow recovery is a lack of adequate insurance. Many of the people burned out in Santa Rosa and Ventura were escapees from San Francisco and Los Angeles looking for a simpler life. They were quite happy to see the value of their houses appreciate, but because many lived off pensions or income from small-town jobs, they were unable to pay higher insurance premiums that would have provided full replacement cost.
But the real impediments to swift rebuilding after natural disasters are the state’s famously progressive policies designed to protect the environment. The California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, for example, requires detailed inspections of every new housing project. Because of time lost waiting for environmental impact studies and signoffs from building and safety officials, California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates it now takes an average of two and a half years to complete a housing project.
Residential landscaping should require nothing more than deciding between grass and drought-tolerant succulents, but the Model Water Official Landscape Ordinance of 2010 mandates that a registered landscape architect come up with a planting and irrigation plan that calculates “evapotranspiration” before a permit to rebuild can be issued. In Ventura the city charges $2,500 for a landscape permit; landscape architects demand $4,000.
Most of the state’s environmental safeguards are well intentioned. Dual-pane energy-efficient windows are worth installing despite California’s temperate Mediterranean climate. It’s just common sense to require fire-resistant roofs and fire-suppression sprinklers in new structures. The California Building Standards Commission recently recommended that larger water pipes and curbside meters be installed in every residence in the state, since larger pipes would increase the volume of water on tap and make fire sprinklers more efficient. In a city like Ventura, the upgrade can approach $30,000 once the permit fee, engineering documents, materials cost, and labor expense are totaled. Should people living in cars or cheap motels be forced to pay for a system that will be ineffective in the type of wildfires California has been experiencing? Perhaps. But for families who have lost everything in a firestorm, cost is paramount.
Some design professionals believe the enhanced regulations, repeated plan checks, and costly schematics imposed by bureaucrats seeking environmental perfection are unduly burdensome. “It was good intentions run amok,” confides one Ventura architect, speaking off the record out of fear of retribution from city officials.
“You can’t do anything without a permit, and there have been huge fee increases for every permit,” says RE/MAX realtor Fred Evans. “Rebuilding the two houses I lost in the fire will take $400,000 more than I have.” Evans says 80 families already have taken lowball offers from house-flippers and walked away. “Ventura was the last cheap beach town in Southern California,” he sighs, “but now the retirees and kids are both leaving and nobody’s ever coming back because the new housing will be too expensive.”
California has been losing residents for years. Since 2007, the state has lost half a million net migrants to less regulated, lower-tax states like Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the out-migration has almost tripled to 140,000 annually.
Those leaving California are relatively young, middle-class wage earners seeking affordable housing. Currently, the median home price in California is $535,000. The national median is just over $300,000. California’s moderately priced “starter homes” cost 161 percent more than comparable structures in other states.
The regulations on building all but guarantee those trends will continue. The first step back to a normal life from a house destroyed by wildfire is the removal of charred rubble and toxic material, which in California is defined to include flecks of lead paint, traces of insecticide, and even nail polish remover. Those rebuilding from a fire do not have to pay if the job is done by CalRecycle, a department in the California Environmental Protection Agency. CalRecycle is paid by FEMA and private insurers based on the amount of debris removed. After the Ventura fire a year ago, more than 263,000 tons of contaminated soil were carted away.
But Maggie Bird, a former travel agent in Ventura who now sells real estate, thinks CalRecycle destroyed any chance she might have had to rebuild. “Before the fire I had a three-story, 4,000-square-foot house worth $1.9 million that was made of redwood and glass,” she sighs wistfully. “The whole top floor was a master suite with an incredible view.
“Now all I have is a 22-foot hole in the ground.”
Removed along with ash and contaminated soil were two retaining walls and nine concrete caissons she installed at a cost of $700,000 10 years ago to stabilize her sloping hillside lot. Bird says the concrete pillars now look like toothpicks. “Can any fire be hot enough to affect the structural integrity of concrete 60 feet deep in the ground?” she asks. “I thought heat from a fire went up.”
Bird would like to rebuild but can’t get a permit to do so until she stabilizes her lot—a task that will cost a minimum of $200,000. She briefly considered a class-action lawsuit but quickly realized a legal settlement would take years. Says Bird: “I guess I’m one of those who’s ready to give up and let Ventura build a new city.”
Wendell Cox, an expert on housing affordability and municipal policy who sits on the advisory board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University, thinks California should make it as easy as possible for traumatized homeowners to replace what they lost at a reasonable cost. “Instead,” he says, “the government is quite happy to force people into poverty if it helps create its desired urban form.”
Some residents wiped out by the fires darkly mutter that the regulations that make rebuilding more expensive are designed to force them to walk away from properties that have a low tax assessment because of Proposition 13, which severely limits annual tax increases. The accusations are rooted in despair and are not supported by any objective proof, but the belief persists. “You’ll never get an official to go on the record about limiting Prop 13,” says Wendell Cox, “but there are incentives that make such a policy attractive.”
The tax revolt of 1978 that produced Prop 13 was prompted by years of double-digit property tax increases that forced some elderly and working poor from their homes. The constitutional amendment was approved in the third year of Jerry Brown’s first term as governor. It limited future property tax increases to 2 percent a year and said the value of private residences could not be reassessed until they were sold. Today similar homes in the same neighborhood can have vastly different tax rates.
Prop 13 protection remains in place if parents pass their house on to their children. Residents who lose their homes in a natural disaster can rebuild a comparable one without an increase in assessed value. They can even move to a new community and apply their Prop 13 assessment to a similar home they buy. But when they sell their charred property to a new buyer, the resulting house will be taxed on the market value—or sales price. A city will enjoy expanded property tax revenues if dozens of lots are simultaneously redeveloped by new owners and assessed at the higher market value.
Even if every home recently destroyed in fires and floods is rebuilt, California will still have an affordable housing crisis. There are no medium-priced houses for people with a medium income. In Los Angeles and the Bay Area, a home mortgage typically consumes about 40 percent of a person’s monthly income, compared with 15 percent nationally.
The solution to California’s housing crisis is to build affordable homes, but the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, the California Coastal Act of 1976, the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act, and other environmental restrictions limit the amount of land that can be rezoned for housing. Environmental groups, public agencies, and nonprofits control 47 percent of California’s total land area. This means almost 50 million acres are off-limits to development. Still, new housing developments should be considered on the edge of urban areas, despite the fear of creating urban sprawl.
California’s wildfires are a grievous natural disaster. They destroy lives and property in the blink of an eye. The inability to rebuild afterwards is a slow-motion disaster that is very much man-made.
