The Architects Of L.A.’s Wildfire Devastation

Back in 2019, a California state climate task force issued a stark warning: 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” of 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 100,000 people to evacuate, and rank as the most destructive in the city’s history. They were fanned by 100-mile-per-hour wind gusts and exacerbated by eight months of little rain. 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 Sen. Henry Stern (D), who lost his own home in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, was 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 “very high risk” of wildfires.

California’s State Fire Marshal maps out fire 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 would 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 that 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 homes in 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 the Palisades Highlands neighborhood, one of the Palisades’ more recent developments, 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 in 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 The Lever. 

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 — they often fall back on the same justification: California’s ongoing housing crisis. The state has a shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes, and costs for renters are far above the 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 on lobbying and political campaigns in the state, has often been at the forefront of these efforts. It’s led by developers who say they have “zero” doubts about building in the riskiest fire zones.

The group pushed against a 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 proposed withholding state funding for some developments when fire risks were too high, Dunmoyer was quick to speak out against it, calling it a “nonstarter for us.” “If we plan properly, we can avoid fire loss,” he said.

Dunmoyer, a former insurance executive, makes $500,000 a year leading the lobbying organization, according to its most recent tax filing.

The California Building Industry Association has also advocated, sometimes successfully, for weaker wildfire safety standards. The industry pushed a bill through 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 Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Last year, the lobbying group backed a bill that environmentalists warned would 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.