R.J. Lehmann on Los Angeles Fires and Public Policy
ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by Reason in a story about the Los Angeles wildfires and public policy in the region. Read the full piece here.
Did these same insurance regulations result in more building in Los Angeles’ wildfire-prone area and thus more homes being devoured by wildfire?
The answer is “maybe,” says Ray Lehman, a senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics. He says fire risk doesn’t increase linearly with the amount of development that’s built in fire-prone areas.
Building a little bit of housing in a wildfire-prone area increases risk because that small amount of housing is next to a lot of combustible nature. But building a lot of housing reduces fire risk because that combustible nature is consumed by less flammable development.
There’s a point where the marginal additional home goes from increasing an area’s fire risk to reducing it.
Conceivably, California’s artificially reduced premiums increased development in wildfire-prone areas, says Lehman. Whether that increased development increased or decreased wildfire risk is harder to say.
That calculation is also complicated by the fact that “there will always be very wealthy people who like to live on very large properties on cliffsides in the woods,” says Lehman.