Skip Navigation

News @lemmy.world

RegularJoe @lemmy.world

3mo ago

Welcome to the first fire-resistant neighborhood. Now what about the rest of California?

This ‘wildfire resilient neighborhood’ shows how much CA housing has to change

California @lemmy.world

HootinNHollerin @lemmy.dbzer0.com

3mo ago

Welcome to the first fire-resistant neighborhood. Now what about the rest of California?

calmatters.org /housing/2025/04/california-fire-home-hardening/

13 comments

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?
- 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.
If California just built Japanese homes using their methods and their materials, homes that are already multiple generations into being built from the ground up to withstand earthquakes, fires, and floods, it would severely curtail suburban destruction without doing anything else.
“But Japanese homes are designed to be torn down.”
The ramshackle construction during the bubble in the 1970s and 1980s were not built with longevity in mind, yes. Modern Japanese homes are very different and can easily last for generations.
In 30 years Japan is going to be nothing but a patchwork of pre-war and post-2000 construction.
- Aren’t most current houses in Japan built for like 20/30 yrs? They even have a weird lease system for land or something along those lines where you don’t own the land where you build. I don’t think they are much into generational housing; that would be more of a thing in Europe where houses 100+ aren’t uncommon.
After next wild fire:
Home for Sale! Next Open House w/ barbecue!
What a silly article. California building code already requires the design features mentioned in the article; i.e. the hardscape, window design, etc -- so just about any house is getting built this way. The only thing somewhat unique is the metal fence.
I haven’t read the article but I’ll take an educated guess that this home isn’t necessarily earthquake proof, right?
- Anything built in California today has to meet certain standards for earthquake resistance, if it didn’t meet those it wouldn’t get built.
  
  Also, a not-insignificant amount of earthquake resistance, in the sense of resisting the effects of an earthquake, is actually fire resistance.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake
  At 05:12 AM Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). High-intensity shaking was felt from Eureka on the North Coast to the Salinas Valley, an agricultural region to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Devastating fires soon broke out in San Francisco and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city was destroyed. The event is remembered as the deadliest earthquake in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high on the list of worst American disasters.
  As damaging as the earthquake and its aftershocks were, the fires that burned out of control afterward were far more destructive.[28] It has been estimated that at least 80%, and at most over 95%, of the total destruction was the result of the subsequent fires.
Eww it's made by KB? But how will the home owners be able to burn it down for insurance money when they realize everything about it is total garbage?

13 comments