Thirty years ago, the historian and critic Mike Davis published “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” a classic essay that questioned the vast resources spent fighting fires and rebuilding mansions in a setting that was certain to burn again.
Mr. Davis’s ideas were shocking when the essay appeared, but the events of recent years have won a lot of people over to his way of thinking. After the 2021 Dixie fire in rural Northern California, a Los Angeles Times op-ed series raised the possibility of abandoning small fire-prone towns in favor of supposedly more defensible cities. Now, while wildfires burn across greater Los Angeles, some commentators are questioning the wisdom of rebuilding. Has the time come, they ask, for a “managed retreat” from wildfire?
We need a serious discussion of how to live with fire in this new era. Today’s wildfires make clear that “let it burn” is not a realistic or humane response to the destruction of homes and communities — in either urban or rural places. These wildfires also make clear that the prospect of large-scale retreat from fire risk is a fantasy. Instead, we need greater investment in preparing our buildings, and community-led experiments in new ways to protect neighborhoods.
As scholars, we have spent the past two years studying how managed retreat from wildfire might work. Known primarily as a response to floods, managed retreat typically involves government buyouts of individual properties and, sometimes, collective relocation from high-risk areas. While managed retreat is the focus of substantial research and government programs when it comes to flooding, there is scarce precedent for applying it in response to wildfires. We have found that doing so could run into many potential obstacles. In some places, retreating could make fire danger worse.
Nationwide, an estimated 44 million houses occupy what has come to be known as the wildland-urban interface, the places where housing and open spaces meet in an extremely flammable mix. This number is growing, driven partly by the dearth of affordable housing in cities. Wildfire has often been thought of as a rural or small-town problem, but changing environmental conditions are also putting cities in harm’s way, as the rise of fast fires and the recent prevalence of urban conflagrations, even in New York City and New Jersey, show.
Most retreat efforts in the United States require residents’ consent (although renters typically have less say in the process than homeowners). It’s too soon to know the wishes of people whose homes have burned in the latest fires: Will they want to return and rebuild, as has been the preference after previous wildfires, or might they want government support to re-establish themselves elsewhere?
When retreat strategies have been undertaken to try to mitigate the risk from flooding, uneven participation and a lack of long-term planning have produced patchworks of remaining houses and vacant, neglected lots. In areas already at high risk for fire, such a checkerboard landscape of inhabited property and overgrown vegetation would be a nightmare, adding fuel the way abandoned agricultural lands did on Maui in the 2023 Lahaina fire.
Any serious plan for a more cohesive retreat — for instance, buying out whole blocks to establish a protective buffer — would require investment in land homeowners leave behind, to make sure vacant lots don’t become huge piles of kindling. Even a well-managed buffer may not offer enough protection from the fierce firestorms we have seen recently, when flying embers have ignited homes miles downwind.
Then there is the question of where people would go. Managed retreat that is not accompanied by substantial investment in creating safe, sustainable and affordable sources of housing could worsen an already monumental housing crisis. In the competitive and expensive Los Angeles housing market, the rush is already on for those who lost their homes to find someplace to live. Not everyone will succeed. After the 2017 wildfires in Northern California, the unhoused population rose. Many of those most affected will be renters, a “forgotten population” in most discussions of managed retreat. To support communitywide recovery and planning, policies that lessen the risk of displacement are imperative: eviction moratoriums and rent freezes, for instance, as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as more sustained tenant protections.
These fires will have major reverberations in California’s teetering property insurance industry, further worsening housing affordability by increasing the annual expenses of homeownership. We can expect these costs to push more people out of the market and into more precarious and vulnerable living situations.
So, what are the alternatives to managed retreat for communities facing fire risk? What we’re seeing now is unmanaged retreat — chaotic, household-level displacement. There is a third, more sustainable option: Rather than dream we can retreat our way out of the crisis, we must relearn, and learn anew, how to live with fire.
Many strategies are already known to help: hardening homes, growing fire-resistant residential landscapes, creating defensible space, prescribed burning, running power lines underground, investing in community organizations that can help disseminate information — and listening to and learning from the experiences of residents, workers and firefighters. Other strategies, like shelter-in-place building design, require additional research. All of these strategies require investments — many of which, as a recent federal report highlights, are not being made at nearly the necessary level.
The losses from the wildfires burning across greater Los Angeles will be hard to bear. So will the cost of adapting to climate change — from adjustments to individual homes to the construction of multibillion-dollar sea walls. Who should bear these costs is an important debate. But no one should mistake managed retreat for a no- or low-cost alternative. Done right, it is a significant investment, not one that can be readily scaled up to the tens of millions of people who live in fire-prone places.
Mike Davis’s essay presented wildfire destruction as an affliction of the rich. After the 2018 Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise, he added a postscript. “Two kinds of Californians,” he wrote, “will continue to live with fire: those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
This future is not inevitable. With mansions, apartments, mobile homes and middle-class houses from Malibu to Altadena now reduced to cinders, we all must learn to live with fire. It is our shared responsibility to fight for policies and aid that will meaningfully support devastated communities, rather than imagining that we can retreat our way out to safety.
The post There Is No Way to Retreat From the Risk of Wildfires appeared first on New York Times.
