Welcome to the U.S.’s first fire-resistant neighborhood — in Escondido

A model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first wildfire resilient neighborhood in the U S constructed using fire-resistant materials and methods Adriana Heldiz CalMatters The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched shrubby hills of North County But look a little closer at these Escondido homes The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin wire mesh Each window is double-paned the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame The privacy fences a suburban staple look like wood but are truly brown-tinted steel Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built wildfire resilient neighborhood in the United States The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills a question of when not if this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision s edge Though only half of the homes have been constructed the maturation had its grand opening earlier this month No one from KB would say as much but in purely marketing terms the timing couldn t have been better For years wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for a multitude of California homeowners January s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them revealed Steve Ruffner who oversees KB projects across the region The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business Home Safety a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry The institute began issuing its wildfire prepared designations to homes in Think organic certification on produce except for homes built to withstand wildfire This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests An unknown number live in homes built before when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas A few home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able Others less so A assessment from by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story square-foot single family home at anywhere from to more than Karen Collins vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association calls these retrofits pre-disaster mitigation measures As wildfires grow more severe and costly these measures can offer a huge return on commitment from what is otherwise spent at the loss she explained Translated from insurance speak Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward But yes to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars so there s a populace procedures bargain off she noted Like how do we do this Steve Ruffner regional general manager for KB Home s coastal division touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photo by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters Various local governments albeit not a great number of offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to various homeowners who make firewise changes though the promised savings are often smaller than a multitude of homeowners expect or demand There aren t any statewide plans to help harden California s housing stock en masse though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a scarce other ideas Beyond changes in initiative California homeowners planners real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire jeopardy reported Yana Valachovic a forest healthcare and fire expert with the University of California Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West It requirements to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your resources revealed Valachovic Fuels management and home hardening are just as central as a remodeled kitchen at this point A fireproof home Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm Open eaves the cavities beneath a roof s overhang vents that lead into an attic wood decks wood shingles wood fences and any plants lawn furniture cars sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder Hardening a home means covering them up replacing material that burns with material that doesn t and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house an area state regulators call zone zero Ember-proofing alone isn t invariably enough In urban conflagrations like the ones in Los Angeles flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames feet away In those conditions cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance Steve Ruffner regional general manager for KB Home s coastal division places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photo by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters First Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home Last A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photos by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles they exposed repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire In Maui after the Lahaina waterfront burned in images of a single red-roofed home lonely and seemingly untouched went viral Reporting later revealed that just prior to the mishap the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation They were trying to keep out termites not flames but fire doesn t consider motive There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house but if vulnerability to accident is a numbers competition home hardening like seat belts bike helmets and vaccines can up the odds of survival Pilots and programs The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a million pilot project The California Wildfire Mitigation Project run jointly by the California s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Cal Fire and the governor s Office of Emergency Services is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state The scheme seeks to tackle the trouble of fire resilience at a group scale Managing wildfire peril is a bit like managing an infectious condition There s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected Fuels management and home hardening are just as significant as a remodeled kitchen at this point YANA VALACHOVIC FOREST MEDICAL AND FIRE EXPERT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA The pilot was launched by the legislature in but is only just beginning to get off the ground So far homes have been retrofitted in Kelseyville Lake County and two in Dulzura east of San Diego Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process Each house presents its own array of costly challenges New roofs new siding new windows replacing decks cleaning brush We don t want to just kinda harden the home announced Deanna Fernweh campaign manager for the Lake County project This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source particularly if you need something to be just the right size Local contractors don t consistently know much about fire vulnerability nor do the local permitting representatives Several counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages With largest part of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn t disturb migratory or endangered birds An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photo by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters All of that adds to the price tag The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly revealed J Lopez executive director of the statewide scheme That was a tidy well-maintained home in Kelseyville The most of expensive so far was At current funding levels the project is on track to harden roughly homes That s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state But Lopez explained part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood and then figure out approaches to make it all less so When the VCR first came out I think the first ones were about he reported I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions and we are part of that helping move that along The pilot is as of now set to expire in though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent Future funding remains an open question So far FEMA s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant activity which provides much of the funding for the California operation has been spared the cuts that have felled other urgency response and preparedness initiativesunder the Trump administration Legislators may also take up decree this year to shave off certain of the tax revenue the state at this time collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant operation for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work Another bill would create a Locality Hardening Commission inside the state s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification venture with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state s imprimatur Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening Assemblymember Steve Bennett an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill explained at a budget committee hearing in February We ve talked about it and talked about it but we re not really making much progress Locals step up Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening activity specific cities are trying to fill the gaps In Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention operation The operation shells out roughly million each year on individualized home safety assessments home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation highway clearing operations In the city of Novato the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town Homeowners can apply for matching grants up for home hardening and for brush clearing Sometimes that s enough to cover the cost of the work Vent screens aren t expensive and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photo by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters But often the grants aren t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work In Novato at least a financial nudge is often all that people need mentioned Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood According to content collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects homeowners spend four times that amount Novato homeowners are getting pressure from the insurance companies they re seeing year after year major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes Osgood mentioned They are highly motivated Where Marin County is offering carrots other cities are using sticks Across the Bay the city of Berkeley just passed its own zone zero regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends The new plan will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines That s a sparse years ahead of the rest of the state Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific zone zero regulations for all high hazard areas something a state law directed them to do by In February Gov Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to accelerate its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year The bulk contemporary draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply Do this or you re done Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley just west of the Tahoe National Forest since the late s In it started a specific division for home hardening We re seeing a real groundswell of interest disclosed Jeff Fierstein the company s general manager Several of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires which put fire pitfall top of mind for various But he revealed roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress The insurance companies are saying Do this or you re done he declared Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin s support or Berkeley s political appetite for new mandates For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface the the greater part powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company s premium hike or non-renewal notice A regulation from is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities voluntary neighborhood calamity preparedness groups But the approval process has been slow the discounts vary from carrier to carrier the requirements coming from insurers don t invariably match the state s own standards and the savings on offer are according to particular miserly California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory milieu that doesn t allow them to cover their costs numerous carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers That dour situation might begin to change soon commented Janet Ruiz a spokesperson for the industry association the Insurance Information Institute The state s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of framework changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the arena That overhaul should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April Photo by Adriana Heldiz CalMatters Even with the right regulations in place insurers aren t known for embracing change explained Dave Jones California s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Setting Peril Initiative at UC Berkeley s law school Earlier this month Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy circulated a new first-of-its-kind insurance protocol for Tahoe-Donner one of the country s largest homeowners associations In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly off on its insurance procedures It s a very conservative industry he mentioned You need to show them that an insurer is able to make money doing this before others will follow suit The upside The new guidelines shows that at least one insurer in this circumstance Globe Underwriting based in London believes it can account for the reduced exposure that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass chosen of those savings onto customers The downside The procedures only covers commonly held land not individual homes and at least for now the Nature Conservancy is footing the annual premium The big success here is that the insurance protocol was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest therapy work that the homeowners association is undertaking explained Jones Whether it s forest management programs zone zero mandates or home hardening grants the constituents is only going to assistance these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance realm and bring down premiums he stated Part of what we re trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done convince insurers to do it but also continue to build society advocacy for these necessary investments explained Jones Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do CalMatters is a general interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California s state Capitol works and why it matters