TL;DW: as fucking always, it’s single-family zoning:

I think instead of making it impossible to build more affordable housing in safer places, and incentivizing people to rebuild in fire-prone areas, maybe the government could do the fucking opposite for once and make it easier to build in places that don’t burn down once a decade! The state’s response to these neighborhoods going up like kindling cannot only be to replace the kindling just as it was, just where it was, as quickly as possible, and at a taxpayer-funded discount. That is not bravery; that is not resilience; that is denial.

Climate change is only going to make these fires more frequent, and we have a glaringly obvious solution to make California safer in the face of them: we could rezone the city to allow more housing in areas that don’t border the fire zone. But that is a solution that our cowardly politicians refuse to try, for fear of pissing off the homeowners who don’t like apartment buildings!