The Brief

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The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido, north San Diego County.

But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.

National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.

Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.

“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.

The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.

This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.

Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.

Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”

Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.

“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there's a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Adriana Heldiz

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Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.

The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.

There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.

Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.

“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”

A fireproof home?

Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.

Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”

Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.

In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Adriana Heldiz

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CalMatters

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Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home.

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Adriana Heldiz

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CalMatters

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A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Adriana Heldiz

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When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.

Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.

There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.

Pilots and programs

The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.

The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.

The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.

The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.

Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.

This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.

An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.

That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.

“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”

The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.

Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.

“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”

Locals step up

Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening program, some cities are trying to fill the gaps.

In 2020, Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention program. The program shells out roughly $20 million each year on individualized home safety assessments, home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation route clearing operations.

In the city of Novato, the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town. Homeowners can apply for matching grants — up $1,500 for home hardening and $1,000 for brush clearing.

Sometimes that’s enough to cover the cost of the work. Vent screens aren’t expensive, and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves.

Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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But often the grants aren’t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work. In Novato at least, a financial nudge is often all that people need, said Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood. According to data collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year, the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects; homeowners spend four times that amount.

“(Novato homeowners) are getting pressure from the insurance companies, they’re seeing, year after year, major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes,” Osgood said. “They are highly motivated.”

Where Marin County is offering carrots, other cities are using sticks. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley just passed its own “zone zero” regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants, wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends. The new policy will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines.

That’s a few years ahead of the rest of the state. Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific “zone zero” regulations for all high hazard areas, something a state law directed them to do by 2023. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to “accelerate” its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year. The most recent draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply.

'Do this or you’re done'

Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.

“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.

But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.

Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.

A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.

California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.

That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.

An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.

“It's a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”

The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.

The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.

“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.

Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.

“Part of what we're trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such battery energy storage systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

In an attempt to resolve evictions before they go to trial, the Los Angeles County Superior Court has launched new programs that seek to facilitate settlements by providing free attorneys to tenants and financial relief to landlords who are owed back rent.

Presiding Judge Sergio Tapia said these pilot programs are designed to stem the tide of evictions, which have risen sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We're trying to show litigants across the board, whether it’s tenants or landlords, that the court is the opportunity to try to find resolution faster,” Tapia told LAist.

Both tenant and landlord attorneys agree that settlements can often be the best path for both parties.

One program launched last month in downtown L.A.’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse gives tenants the right to request a mandatory settlement conference overseen by a court-appointed settlement officer.

These tenants, who rarely come to court with legal representation, will be given a free attorney to guide them though the settlement conferences, as long as they earn less than 125% of the federal poverty level.

But lawyers who represent landlords say their clients often feel local government is increasingly putting money toward helping renters, while leaving property owners struggling.

Where does funding come from?

Facing eviction without a lawyer “puts people at such an enormous disadvantage, when landlords normally have lawyers,” said Conway Collis, president of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, a nonprofit that is helping to fund the Mosk program’s free attorneys.

Other funding comes from Stay Housed L.A., a legal aid partnership funded by the county of L.A. and the city of L.A. through its “mansion tax.”

Landlords will be required to notify tenants about the program in the eviction paperwork they serve to tenants.

Settlement officers come from the court’s pool of temporary judges, who handle lower-level cases, such as traffic infractions. Other officers are retired judges or trained lawyers.

The settlement conferences are being held on the same day as regularly scheduled court hearings, one floor down from the Mosk courthouse’s eviction department.

How are the conferences working so far?

Elena Popp, the executive director of the Eviction Defense Network, which is providing lawyers for the program, said that on one recent day, landlords and tenants were able to reach mutually agreeable settlements in about half the conferences.

“We settled one,” Popp said. “We are very close to settling a second one. The other two are way further apart because the tenant really wants to stay on, but the landlord really wants them to go.”

Settlement deals look different in each case, Popp said. Sometimes they involve landlords letting tenants stay if they pay overdue rent. In other cases, tenants are given additional time to find new housing before they must leave. When settlements are reached, cases are sealed so that evictions won’t be visible on a tenant’s record, a black mark that makes it very difficult to find new housing.

When settlements can’t be reached, landlords and tenants go back upstairs to resume their normal proceedings, Popp said.

No matter how cases are resolved, she said, tenants can’t be expected to navigate legally complex processes on their own.

“One of the things that we stressed when we were setting this up is that you absolutely have to have a lawyer,” Popp said.

Compton program pairs settlements with money to landlords

Another pilot program launched last month at the Compton courthouse offers up to $10,000 to cover rent owed to landlords in cases that settle. Landlords will be required to inform tenants about the settlement conferences. To qualify, either the tenant or the landlord must earn no more than 120% of the area’s median income.

The settlement conferences at the Compton courthouse are overseen by Community Legal Aid of Southern California, and rent relief funding is administered by L.A. County’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs.

Attorney Aaron Kohanim, who represents landlords, said he advises his clients to settle whenever possible, because going to trial is “a casino — you don't know if you're going to win.”

But he also said landlords generally view taxpayer-funded attorneys for tenants as unfair.

“Only one side gets a piece of that pot,” Kohanim said. “Landlords have to pay out of pocket for their attorneys. And on top of that, they are not allowed to collect rent in the middle of the case, so they're getting beaten by two different angles, versus a tenant who is just living there rent-free and they get a free lawyer.”

Tapia said the programs are currently limited to the Mosk and Compton courthouses because of funding constraints and limited resources. But the judge said if they prove successful, they could be expanded county-wide.

“If we're able to show success, that will allow us to recruit a more robust set of settlement officers to perhaps expand,” Tapia said. “We need to see how this pilot plays out first.”