Homes Built on the Fringes of Forests
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06.27.07
In the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana, a house under construction in a setting that is increasingly desired by homeowners and frustrating to firefighters.
So many things are changing yet so many stay the same. We noted earlier that the Southwest is the fastest growing part of the US even though there is no water; the same drought and heat is causing massive increases in the number and size of forest fires, yet more and more people are building as close to the woods as possible. According to the New York Times: “It’s like ocean frontage,” said Larry Swanson, an economist at the University of Montana in Missoula who studies public lands. “You would not have these high private property values without the public lands nearby, and the public lands are a huge part of the package that is driving the growth trends.”
A new generation of Americans is moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West and living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.
Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.
“It’s like a tsunami, this big wave of development that’s rolling toward the public lands,” said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. “And the number of fires keeps going up.”
Read together with our post on development in drought areas and you wonder if it is time that we realized that land use planning is too important to our future to be left to the local level, it is time for national policies . ::New York Times
I'm not an enemy of regulation at the national level, by any means. But, in this case I think there is a far more effective solution. People will not build in areas that they cannot obtain insurance for their homes.
Very soon, insurance companies will begin to realize that this trend of developing near fire-prone forests is an expensive one on their part. They could then create rate maps, similar to ones for floods, that are dependent on proximity to large forests and distance from fire stations. Those is the highest risk areas would simply not be able to obtain insurance, just as they cannot with floods (except through national flood insurance programs, which is a whole problem on its own).
If we do want regulation on this, national legislation requiring insurance companies to develop and implement rates based on fire risk maps would be the appropriate regulation. People respond to nothing more quickly than threats to their property or income, and instead of creating a land-use restriction that people can rail against, make the price of their development be paid by them in the form of insurance expense.
I do not understand how this idiot gets insurance.When i upgraded my cabin home.The insurance company came out to the property.I had to create space between my cabin home and the woods.Basically a firebreak of 200 feet.It provided about 8-9 cords of firewood.