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California
COLUMN: STATE FARM IS RIGHT. CALIFORNIA CAN’T KEEP BUILDING HOUSING IN HIGH-RISK
PLACES
Brenda Ortega salvages items from her flooded home in Merced during California’s
catastrophic winter storms. Only about 230,000 homes and buildings in the state
are covered by flood insurance.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
By Erika D. Smith,
Anita Chabria
June 18, 2023 5 AM PT
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Back in January, on a dark night of pelting rain, Erica Lopez Bedolla had only
minutes to evacuate her family from the impoverished Central Valley town of
Planada after a levee broke.
“It was so quick,” she told our Times colleague Jessica Garrison, recalling the
speed with which the water rushed into her town and then her home, destroying
almost everything and displacing hundreds. But after a few months, Bedolla
already felt as if the rest of California had “forgotten this happened.”
In a community of mostly undocumented farmworkers, no one is sure whether
Planada will recover. But if it does, and if families like the Bedollas do
rebuild, we can be certain that the town and its beleaguered residents will
remain vulnerable to future floods.
From Planada to Paradise, the urgent fallout of climate change on California’s
already terrible housing crisis is undeniable — except perhaps to our state
politicians who pay it lip service but have dodged the big questions about where
we should build and rebuild in the future.
Our most vulnerable communities often lie in our most vulnerable regions:
mountains marred by years of unprecedented wildfires, or Central Valley farm
fields drowned in record rains and now epic snowmelt. It’s a big part of the
reason several insurance companies are refusing to issue new policies and
otherwise limiting their financial exposure in the Golden State.
State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, announced in May that it would no
longer take on new residential and commercial properties, a devastating blow
that will be felt most keenly in fire-prone areas where coverage is costly and
hard to find. Flood insurance typically has to be purchased separately.
Advertisement
Allstate, another major insurer, also has pulled back in California and, last
week, declined to reverse course even as state insurance officials agreed to let
the company raise premiums by 4%.
Business
STATE FARM’S CALIFORNIA FREEZE: LOOMING INSURANCE APOCALYPSE OR POLITICAL PLOY?
California’s biggest seller of homeowners insurance says regulations and
wildfires make new policies a financial loser. But there are reasons to question
that explanation.
June 15, 2023
Such business decisions should prompt California’s leaders to rethink land-use
policies. After all, losing access to insurance creates another barrier to
homeownership by making it impossible for most people to get a mortgage,
compounding our housing crisis.
But once again, like Florida — a red state our political leaders love to
denigrate — California is ignoring the obvious, knowing the consequences of
doing so will be catastrophic.
“The reality is most people across the West live in zones that are on some risk
map,” said Lisa Dale, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Climate School.
Indeed, there are few places left to live in California that are safe from
climate disasters. And yet, in an attempt to help the tens of thousands of
people sleeping on our streets and the millions more at risk of getting priced
out of their apartments and ending up in a tent, Gov. Gavin Newsom has started
cracking down on cities and counties that refuse to build more affordable
housing.
His administration has famously made an example of intransigent Huntington
Beach, suing the Orange County city for violating state housing laws.
The urgency is refreshing after years of state officials letting cities and
counties promise to build but then failing to deliver housing at the rate needed
to address a crucial shortage that is driving sky-high rents, homelessness and
an exodus of residents to more affordable states.
California
REBUILD | REBURN: SHOULD WE BE REBUILDING TINY, VULNERABLE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
TOWNS?
California needs a plan for how and where we will live in the future.
Sept. 27, 2022
The problem is Newsom and his administration have required little oversight of
where all this housing is being built. Nor have they communicated a cohesive
philosophy about mitigating the current and future development risks linked to
climate change.
Instead, the decisions underpinning this nexus of climate and housing have
largely been left to local governments, with county supervisors and city
councils navigating the complicated and emotional terrain of determining where
people can and cannot safely live — a topic we wrote about last year after the
Dixie fire leveled the Northern California community of Greenville.
Near Tulare County, for example, record precipitation has brought back Tulare
Lake, a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Selecting sites for new housing,
as the state has ordered the county to do, means balancing the risk of flooding
with the need to have agricultural workers near farms — even if those farms are
in a floodplain.
“We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got housing that’s available, affordable and
close to the workplace,” Supervisor Pete Vander Poel III told us, explaining
that a commute from the county’s largest city to “a dairy or a ranch in
Allensworth, that round trip is over 100 miles.”
In Monterey County, where a long-neglected levee failed in March, inundating the
farmworker town of Pajaro, Supervisor Luis Alejo said he has been focused on
approving housing projects that can better withstand flooding. That’s a crucial
issue throughout California, given that only about 2% of homeowners have flood
insurance — and through a federal program stretched to its limits.
Under state law and the governor’s more aggressive goals, the county must build
35,000 units in the next eight years, meaning supervisors are trying to be
clear-eyed about both future risks and the current emergency.
A vehicle braves a flooded highway in the Tulare Lake Basin, an historic lakebed
drained for agricultural use that has refilled following record winter storms.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“To tell a disadvantaged community that because there’s a floodplain they cannot
build at all,” Alejo said, pausing to find the right words, “I think that is
putting limitations on a community. They love living in Pajaro. They want to see
investment. They want to see more housing and businesses come here. But I think
in moving forward, housing and businesses have to be designed smarter.”
What’s “smarter”? In many ways, officials in Monterey County, as in Tulare
County, are making it up as they go along. Meanwhile, climate change is
accelerating.
After a winter of record precipitation, this summer’s “big melt” may leave more
people knee-deep in the misery of waterlogged homes. And, experts warn, one good
rainy season might reduce the risk of wildfire this summer, but it won’t keep us
safe from future conflagrations. Climate experts say weather whiplash,
ricocheting between extremes, should be our expectation for life in the West in
coming decades.
In a 2022 report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, lawmakers were told they
will need to acknowledge the significance of climate change on housing policy
and take a greater role in crafting that policy.
“In recent years, much of the new housing construction in the state has occurred
in areas that are at significant risk of the effects of climate change,” the
report warned, noting that in the last decade, 6 in 10 of the fastest growing
counties are in areas of the Central Valley and Inland Empire that are at rising
risk for excessive heat — and now for flooding.
In 2022, California had nearly 1.3 million homes in high-risk fire areas,
according to the Insurance Information Institute. More than 1.5 million
California properties have a greater than 26% chance of being severely hit by
flooding during the next 30 years, according to Risk Factor, a site that tracks
climate-related risk across the U.S.
And a 2020 study found that the number of affordable housing units vulnerable to
coastal flooding in the state will increase by 40% by 2050. Risk Factor also
found that more than 340,000 properties sit in areas threatened by extreme heat
days, another climate-change emergency.
That’s a lot of potential misery and ruin. Although State Farm, Allstate and
other insurers have complex reasons for cutting back, they aren’t ignoring those
future losses the way California is. Rather than leading, the state seems to be
following the Florida model by ignoring reality until disaster forces us to pay
for our mistakes.
Allowing our new affordable housing stock to be built or rebuilt in high-risk
areas is an abdication of governmental responsibility and a cheat on
Californians who mistakenly believe they are buying a home as a generational
investment.
As the insurance companies know, a house is not affordable, for renters or
owners, if it is destroyed by fire or flood.
Firefighters battle the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire along Highway 89 near Lake
Tahoe
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
It is time for California to create a comprehensive land-use policy at the state
level — or at least engage in an honest and robust conversation — that ensures
our affordable housing isn’t just affordable but as safe as we can make it from
the known dangers of climate change. And, dare we say, this must include a
discussion of managed retreat, not just from areas of our forests that will grow
hotter, dryer and more dangerous in coming decades, but from coastal communities
where sea level rise is already toppling homes.
We aren’t saying that the state has done nothing, and we acknowledge there are
no easy answers. The governor and lawmakers are walking a tightrope between the
desperate need for more housing and the realities of climate risk.
There are programs and grants that encourage infill development in urban areas;
a new generation of fire-risk maps that come with regulations about how we build
in those areas; and more technical guidance from the state for local officials
to use when deciding whether to approve new developments.
State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta is emerging as a leader in this area, bringing at
least two lawsuits — one in Lake County and one in San Diego — against
developments where risks may not have been properly evaluated.
California
COLUMN: CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES TO FLORIDA HURRICANES, HOW THE RICH GAME CLIMATE
CHANGE
After Hurricane Ian, readers rightly asked: Why is rebuilding in coastal Florida
any different than rebuilding for poor Californians after wildfires?
Oct. 9, 2022
And Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara championed a law in effect this year
that requires the disclosure of a home’s risk score — the measure insurance
companies use in evaluating how vulnerable a property is — in an attempt to help
consumers grasp exactly how much of a chance they have of losing their home to
disaster, whether in the wilds of Humboldt County or the combustible hillsides
of Malibu.
But we are also sending mixed messages, providing state-backed fire insurance
for high-risk properties through the FAIR plan when other options are gone, and
emphasizing an urgency to #rebuild at all costs when disaster does strike. As
our colleague Sam Dean reported, the FAIR plan has doubled in size since 2018,
leaving more consumers with coverage that is limited and expensive.
Although existing homeowners may need that safety net, new communities and homes
that fail to properly mitigate for dangers should be excluded. Because as
Columbia’s Dale said, while such policies benefit vulnerable homeowners, they
also “obscure real risk.”
And, really, there you have it. It’s hard and unpleasant, but Newsom should take
leadership on building not just affordable housing but a California ready for
our changing climate.
If we don’t, we are investing in failure. Because Californians don’t just need
homes, they need homes that will last.
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HomelessnessCalifornia Politics
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Erika D. Smith
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Erika D. Smith is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times writing about the
people, politics and quest for a more equitable California. She joined The Times
in 2018 as an assistant editor, expanding coverage of the state’s homelessness
and affordable housing crises. She previously worked at the Sacramento Bee as a
columnist and editorial board member. Before the Bee, Smith wrote for the
Indianapolis Star and Akron Beacon Journal. She is a graduate of Ohio University
and a native of Cleveland.
Anita Chabria
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Anita Chabria is a California columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in
Sacramento. Before joining The Times, she worked for the Sacramento Bee as a
member of its statewide investigative team and previously covered criminal
justice and City Hall.
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