As wildfires grow more extensive and severe, new data shows that more Americans are moving into areas more likely to burn, raising the odds of catastrophe.
In 2020, more than 16 million homes in the West were located in fire-prone areas near forests, grasslands, and shrublands, where the risks of wildfires are highest. That’s an increase from about 10 million homes in 1990, according to a research paper published Friday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the United States Forest Service.
“That’s the perfect storm,” said Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped lead the research. “Millions of houses have been built in places that will sooner or later burn,” he said, even as climate change increases the risks of major wildfires across the West with extreme heat and dryness.
To make things even worse, According to an analysis by Seattle, Washington-based Redfin a full-service real estate brokerage firm, America is increasingly building homes in places endangered by natural disasters.
According to the Redkin analysis, published on September 9, more than half (55%) of homes built so far this decade face fire risk, while 45% face drought risk.
Obviously, we are seeing the worst dynamics of wildfires and the loss of homes to conflagrations in California and other western states. In California, according to the New York Times, there are roughly 5.1 million homes in what’s known as the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI), areas usually on the outskirts of cities, where houses and other development are built near or among flammable wild vegetation.
One of the areas seeing the biggest growth in new homes is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where construction is right up against forests or even in areas previously burned.
Similar trends can be seen throughout the West. In Colorado, the number of homes built in the wildland-urban interface has nearly doubled to more than 1 million since 1990. Some of the fastest growth has unfolded along the Front Range, where the number of large, high-severity fires has increased in recent decades.
Texas now has 3.2 million homes in the WUI and saw the fastest growth of any state over the past decade.
When wildfires erupt, they tend to inflict most of their damage in these transitional zones where homes and businesses encroach on otherwise undeveloped wilderness.
The more homes we have in the wildlands, the more people we have to protect, more people that need to be evacuated,” said Miranda H. Mockrin, a research scientist at the United States Forest Service, who worked on the new study. “It becomes more of a challenge.”
Moving into disaster-prone areas
Let’s head to Phoenix, Arizona, shall we? The Colorado River supplies the state with a certain percentage of drinking water. Under new guidelines that go into effect in January 2023, Arizona will be facing a cut of 592,000 acre-feet of water, which is approximately 21 percent of its annual apportionment.
So, in Casa Grande, a city just south of Phoenix, builders are selling homes despite warnings that there may not be enough water to go around.
From an environmental standpoint, America is building, rebuilding, and subsidizing homes in the wrong places, according to economist Jenny Schuetz, who recently published a book on the topic.
“The areas that are already built are at lower risk of wildfire because they’re not surrounded by forest and trees—they’re surrounded by other buildings,” Schuetz said by phone. But “increasingly, we have to build new housing farther and farther out from downtown areas because the easy-to-use land has been built out and it’s often difficult to add more housing in the urban core. … In the West, the wildfire-prone areas are in the undeveloped lands, and so the farther we push toward the undeveloped lands, the more houses are going to be at risk.”
Suburbia got a housing boost during the coronavirus pandemic as builders responded to shifting homebuyer preferences. Remote work and surging housing prices prompted homebuyers to leave high-cost cities for far-flung suburbs and Sun Belt states that often have larger, less expensive houses and more land on which to build.
So far this year, the states with the most building permits are Texas, Florida, California, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Colorado—all of which face significant risk from fire, drought, heat, and/or flooding. Nationwide,
This leads me to ask why Realtors are pushing for people to buy homes in high-risk states. Do they not tell people what environmentalists have been saying for years about what is happening with our climate?
