After the fire, should some parts of Los Angeles never rebuild?

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(Bloomberg) --The fires in and around Los Angeles are coming under control. The city's mayor has already issued an executive order to speed up rebuilding. But equally catastrophic blazes are likely to strike again on a hotter planet, raising the question of whether some parts of the region should still be considered livable. 

It's not an unthinkable notion. There have been a handful of attempts at systematically moving populations away from regions severely affected by climate change. This kind of "managed retreat" has typically been applied to risks from rising sea levels, with recent programs in the US involving relocating tribal populations in Alaska and Washington.

But people affected by wildfires are only just starting to see efforts from governments to help them to move away from high-risk areas, including in LA county. A California program launched last year that offered up to $350,000 in loans to those affected by fires in 2018 and 2020 to shift to safer places fully allocated its funds within weeks. 

Researchers warn that wildfires pose very different risks from more predictable events like sea-level rise and riverbank flooding. "Managed retreat is not necessarily an appropriate response to fire risk, nor is it the only alternative to wildfire-induced displacement," Kathryn McConnell of Brown University and Liz Koslov of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in a study published last March.

Miriam Greenberg, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says a lot more research is needed before designing managed-retreat programs for wildfire-prone areas. But in some cases it's much better for people to stay and rely on the knowledge of indigenous people who have kept fires away for centuries. "We need people who know how to steward those lands," she said.

Rising sea levels are a more clear-cut threat because the bodies of water consume land as they swell, making them uninhabitable. Areas left empty after fires, however, can actually end up becoming more flammable and dangerous as a result of increased vegetation. Some parts of the Mediterranean that depopulated have led to more severe wildfires in later years. 

It's also extremely challenging to successfully execute any managed retreat program. Take the case of an initiative that kicked off after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012.

The US government and New York state offered residents of Oakwood Beach in Staten Island an escape route: The state would buy homes at their pre-storm value, give a bonus to those relocating in the same borough and promised residents that the land would be returned to nature, serving as a barrier for future storms.

The approach was a much bigger success than a similar attempt being run in Queen's borough around the same time, said Rebecca Elliott, an associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics who studied both programs. The Queen's buyout program was available on a more selective basis, which meant it picked off the economically most vulnerable. It also didn't promise not to redevelop that land, which Elliott said would have given more residents a "sense of moral purpose."

Even so, the State Island program wasn't a complete success. If climate change itself is a collective-action problem requiring everyone to produce fewer greenhouse gases, then managed retreat is an even tougher example of that challenge because people have deep connections to the places they live and some find it much harder to leave.

While most residents of Oakwood Beach accepted the buyout offer, not everyone did. Rewilding of the land couldn't take place as planned. Nearly a decade into the program, a youth soccer league bought some of the land to build a multi-field facility. Predictably it has made many former residents angry.

When there aren't programs of this kind available at large scale, what can happen after climate catastrophes is simply unmanaged retreat. New Orleans' population after Hurricane Katrina never recovered. A long-term study found that, five years after landfall, "post-disaster housing instability is one of the most important obstacles to recovery in other life dimensions, like employment, children's education, social support, and mental health."

Jake Bittle, author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next Great American Migration, says that given the desirability of LA county most homes after the 2025 fires will be rebuilt. For those who can't afford to reconstruct their homes, because they don't have insurance or don't get adequate payouts, their land will likely be bought out.

But Bittle also warns against buying the over-simplified narrative that rich residents will be able to rebuild while poorer ones won't. 

"Rebuilding after disasters is really complicated," he said on Bloomberg Green's Zero podcast. Bittle's work examining rebuilding in Santa Rosa, California after fires in 2017 showed that many people in poorer neighborhoods received sufficient insurance payouts to rebuild. Many residents with million-dollar homes in more complex terrain were forced to conclude that the compensation they received would go further if they moved elsewhere.

Overall migration trends in the US also make managed retreat harder. Instead of moving away from areas most vulnerable to increasingly severe weather, Bittle's analysis showed that Americans are shifting toward those places instead. Florida, Texas and Arizona, which have experienced some of the most expensive climate catastrophes in recent years, are seeing their populations increase.

"This was the most bedeviling question that still remains with me," Bittle said. But perhaps the rising cost of insurance might finally force their hands. "It's possible that in the next couple decades, in a geographically specific way, you might start to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further expansion into these areas."

To contact the author of this story:
Akshat Rathi in London at arathi39@bloomberg.net