For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.
Before reading: let me guess, they’re going back to older building techniques, larger house spacing, etc. and not building things on top of each other.
Edit: After reading, pretty much. Wider spacing between homes, metal fences instead of wooden, even less vegetation, closing up holes. Now if only they could actually build homes to the standard. AZ contractors are absolute dog shit at building homes to the minimum code as it is, are they honestly going to do extra work reliably? Hell no. They’ll just charge more for it, say it was all done, and homeowners that don’t know any better will get shafted yet again.
Edit: After reading, pretty much. Wider spacing between homes
Oh boy, even more sprawl! Awesome. \s
I guess it would be too much to ask to – oh, I don’t know – maybe build appropriate density so that they wouldn’t have to expand into the hills to begin with?
Dont worry. Most of those will burn down, leaving plenty of room for houses to be built to the new requirements.
Best case is enough houses get built to this standard and intermixed into those neighborhoods to give a type of “herd immunity” from fires moving house to house. Hell, even a good bulwark of these in a line facing the forest might do it.
Before reading: let me guess, they’re going back to older building techniques, larger house spacing, etc. and not building things on top of each other.
Edit: After reading, pretty much. Wider spacing between homes, metal fences instead of wooden, even less vegetation, closing up holes. Now if only they could actually build homes to the standard. AZ contractors are absolute dog shit at building homes to the minimum code as it is, are they honestly going to do extra work reliably? Hell no. They’ll just charge more for it, say it was all done, and homeowners that don’t know any better will get shafted yet again.
Oh boy, even more sprawl! Awesome. \s
I guess it would be too much to ask to – oh, I don’t know – maybe build appropriate density so that they wouldn’t have to expand into the hills to begin with?
Now all they have to do is re-construct the last 250 years worth of construction to the new standards. Easy!
Dont worry. Most of those will burn down, leaving plenty of room for houses to be built to the new requirements.
Best case is enough houses get built to this standard and intermixed into those neighborhoods to give a type of “herd immunity” from fires moving house to house. Hell, even a good bulwark of these in a line facing the forest might do it.
That sounds suspiciously like vaccine herd immunity; be careful or the Department of Health & Human Services will come for you…