L.A.’s Sprawl Into Fire-Prone Areas

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Michael Manville, chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Reason about land-use policies that have led to the outward spread of housing in Los Angeles, including into fire-prone areas. For decades, state policymakers have been aware of the risk to homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development, where man-made structures intermingle with vegetation that can fuel fires. Manville says the sprawl arises from “the desire to have … the most in-demand kind of housing, which is a nice little family home with a backyard, [and] you can’t do that without expanding outward.” Nearly 78% of residential land in Greater Los Angeles is reserved for single-family housing, the article notes, impeding any effort to relocate homes from the flammable outskirts toward urban centers. Manville called for zoning reforms to “take these areas that are zoned for very low density and allow them to build four or five units.”

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A Test of Los Angeles’ Fire Preparedness

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Edith de Guzman of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation spoke to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”  about the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles. The program, part of a special series on California wildfires, focused on L.A.’s preparedness for the fires — made worse by Santa Ana wind conditions — which have led to loss of life, burned thousands of structures and displaced thousands of Angelenos. De Guzman said that the past week has tested L.A.’s otherwise high level of fire preparedness. With “embers flying miles apart, fire ignition is extremely difficult to predict or control and it’s happening simultaneously in so many places,” said De Guzman, a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist on water equity and adaptation policy. She added that climate change and the fact that much of L.A.’s housing stock is built with wooden construction for seismic safety have made things worse.