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LA REAL ESTATE LOBBIED TO DEVELOP IN HIGH-RISK FIRE AREAS  
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Katya Schwenk
January 13, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In California, policymakers have long warned that continued
development in high-risk wildfire zones was magnifying fires. But real
estate interests have lobbied hard against any development
restrictions, helping exacerbate the LA fires. _

A resident of a senior center is evacuated as the Eaton Fire
approaches in Altadena, Calif., Ethan Swope/AP

 

Back in 2019, a California state climate task force issued a stark
warning
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endless development in the state’s high-risk wildfire zones was
magnifying wildfires and putting more people in their path.

It was a call that has echoed in the state for decades from
environmentalists, urban planners, and policymakers, even as
developers pushed to build ever more homes in zones designated as
“very high risk” for wildfires.

Now many of those homes have burned to the ground.

The fires in Los Angeles have reduced thousands of homes to ash,
forced more than one hundred thousand people to evacuate, and rank as
the most destructive
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the city’s history. They were fanned by one-hundred-mile-per-hour
wind gusts and exacerbated by eight months of little rain
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But they were also fueled by the state’s endless urban sprawl, which
is encroaching further and further into fire-prone wildlands.

In recent years, at every turn, efforts to reduce high-fire-risk
development have been stymied by powerful real estate and construction
interests. The industry has successfully fought against limits on
development for wildfire safety and even beat back safety standards
for houses in fire-prone areas.

That includes a successful 2021 lobbying blitz uncovered by
the_ Lever_ that helped kill a state bill that would have limited
new home construction in the state’s most extreme fire-risk areas
— including some of the Los Angeles neighborhoods engulfed in the
recent fires.

“There is huge pressure on local and state officials to continue
approving large-scale development in high-risk areas,” said J.P.
Rose, urban wildlands policy director and senior attorney with the
Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.
Particularly in the last few years, Rose said, the industry has pushed
legislation that would “roll out the red carpet for more such
developments.”

“They’re Putting All of Us at Risk”

In 2021, state senator Henry Stern
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who lost his own home in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon in the
2018 Woolsey Fire
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fighting in the California legislature to stop development in
high-risk areas. Stern told _Curbed _in May 2021 that it was time
for the government to tell developers, “No, you can’t build your
new mansion.”

At the time, four years before the firestorm that just descended on
Los Angeles, Stern was trying to pass a bill that would block most
development in zones designated by the state as at “very high
risk” of wildfires.

California’s state fire marshal maps out
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risk across the state, classifying areas as at “moderate,”
“high,” or “very high” risk of wildfires. These designations
inform building safety standards and disclosure requirements for
property sales.

In 2021, Stern’s bill
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have barred development in “very high risk” zones, with exceptions
for cases in which local fire agencies adopted a comprehensive plan
for wildfire risk management. Without such limitations, development in
these areas was likely to continue to boom; one 2014 study estimated
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by 2050, a million additional houses would be built in very-high-risk
wildlife zones in California. Already, there are two million homes in
high and very-high-risk wildfire zones in the state.

Los Angeles County has the most
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areas at high risk of wildfires of any California county. Wildfires in
and around the city are frequent, and several of the most affluent
areas that recently burned — like the Pacific Palisades neighborhood
and the neighboring city of Malibu — have long been deemed at high
fire risk, having been built into canyons and foothills where
wildfires are inevitable.

Wildfires in the state are steadily worsening. The widespread
devastation of the recent fires — including in parts of the city at
lower risk of wildfires — illustrates how building structures in
high-fire-risk zones can have downstream effects in other areas.

The highest-risk zones are often at the edges of suburban development,
where homes lie adjacent to wild, undeveloped land. Called the
“wildland-urban interface,” this is where fires are most likely to
begin, often because California’s fire-prone chaparral landscape is
ignited by a human-made spark. And once a fire begins, it spreads.

“It’s really the edge that’s going to start the center,”
explained Jack Eidt, a Los Angeles-based urban planner and
environmentalist. He explained that this phenomenon could be seen in
the recent Palisades Fire, which consumed 20,000 acres and burned down
thousands of homes. The fire spread outward from
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Palisades Highlands neighborhood, one of the Palisades’ more recent
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which borders undeveloped state park land, into lower-risk areas.

“If some entity would have stopped development out in Palisades
Highlands, this fire would never have spread to Palisades Village,”
Eidt said. “So they’re putting all of us at risk when these types
of developments are approved on the edge.”

These were the kinds of developments targeted by Stern’s bill. After
the legislation was introduced, disclosures show, the real estate
lobby descended on it: a litany of developers and real estate groups
lobbied to kill the bill.

“That bill faced strenuous opposition from the building industry,”
said Rose at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The effort was led by the California Building Industry Association,
the lobbying arm of California’s developers and building
contractors, an industry estimated to have generated more than $60
billion
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residential building revenues in the state in 2024. After languishing
for nearly a year after it was first introduced, the bill died in
committee.

The California Building Industry Association did not return a request
for comment from us.

Stern also didn’t respond to a request for comment. In 2021,
however, he told the press that his bill may have been a long shot.
But it wasn’t the first time — or the last — that real estate
interests would beat back wildfire safety policy in California.

“This Is a Political Problem”

When developers and city planners propose high-fire-risk projects in
California — drawing up plans to build thousands of luxury homes on
land that has regularly suffered wildfires
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they often fall back on the same justification: California’s ongoing
housing crisis. The state has a shortage of hundreds of thousands
of homes
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and costs for renters are far above
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national average.

But for developers, Eidt said, there’s “no money in affordable
housing” and far more profits to be found in expanding suburban
sprawl into undeveloped land. This incentive structure has driven
development increasingly into risky fire zones, abetted by promises of
trickle-down improvements to housing availability.

And when such developments ultimately catch fire, there’s no way to
hold the developers that pushed them through accountable, Rose said.
Instead, he said, “Right now, we are all paying when these disasters
occur.”

“There’s landscapes into which we move that we know are
high-severity fire zones,” said Char Miller, an environmental
historian at Pomona College in Claremont, California. “And we are
given the green light to do so by city halls, county governments,
planning boards, zoning commissions, architectural boards —
they’ve all signed off on this.”

“So this is a political problem, a policy issue,” Miller said. And
it’s a policy issue that has been shaped by decades of influence by
the state’s real estate interests.

In California, over the decades, developers and real estate interest
groups have again and again intervened to push against wildfire safety
standards.

“Any type of baby step toward rethinking our relationship with
building the wildland-urban interface is met with massive resistance
from entrenched interests among developers and the business
community,” said Rose, who has advocated for many of the proposals
at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The California Building Industry Association, which spends millions
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lobbying and political campaigns in the state, has often been at the
forefront of these efforts. It’s led by developers
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say they have “zero” doubts about building in the riskiest fire
zones.

The group pushed against
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proposal in 2021 that would have required towns or cities to create
fire safety standards before moving forward with developments in very
high-fire-risk zones. The California Building Industry Association’s
president, Dan Dunmoyer, called the proposal a “no-growth
strategy,” saying its “goal is to make it harder to build housing
outside of the urban corridor.”

Additional developers that lobbied on the bill included two of
California’s master-planned community developers, as well as
Brookfield, a global real estate investor and developer.

The same year, when California’s Insurance Commissioner Ricardo
Lara
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funding for some developments when fire risks were too high, Dunmoyer
was quick to speak out against it, calling it
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“nonstarter for us.” “If we plan properly, we can avoid fire
loss,” he said.

Dunmoyer, a former insurance executive
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leading the lobbying organization, according to its most recent tax
filing
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The California Building Industry Association has also advocated,
sometimes successfully, for weaker wildfire safety standards. The
industry pushed a bill
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the state senate last year that would have abolished the state’s
current fire-risk classification system entirely, in favor of more
limited “mitigation” zones. Though the effort has stalled, the
weaker approach had the support of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom
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Last year, the lobbying group backed a bill
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have allowed developers to redesignate very-high-risk fire zones as
lower risk, evading building code requirements and opening up the door
to even more development in risky wildfire corridors.

The Center for Biological Diversity called the proposal “unwise and
extremely dangerous” and one that “perpetuates the myth that
California can safely continue to build deeper into fire zones despite
the overwhelming health and financial harms recent wildfires have
caused to people and communities.”

As Los Angeles continues to smolder, this myth may be harder to
sustain.

_Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Phoenix, Arizona._

* LA Wildfires
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* real estate industry
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* Code of the Freaks
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