The Weekly: Unaffordable Housing—A Hidden Driver of Wildfire Risk?
The housing affordability crisis and the wildfire crisis aren't distinct challenges. They're a self-reinforcing cycle that requires investing in resilience to break.
The housing affordability crisis and the wildfire crisis aren't distinct challenges. They're a self-reinforcing cycle that requires investing in resilience to break.
The Epicenter’s three-part home catalogs series from Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan describes how we arrived at the current moment and explores what it means for the future of housing after disasters and in communities facing disinvestment, outdated zoning, or housing supply constraints.
The same principles that accelerate disaster recovery can address housing supply constraints, urban disinvestment, and affordability challenges in any market.
Los Angeles is pioneering a new disaster recovery model that combines cross-sector collaboration, AI-powered coordination technology, and pre-approved wildfire-resilient home catalogs.
The absence of references to climate change in utilities' bond disclosures suggests we have not systematically assessed how climate hazards could disrupt operations or revenues and, just as concerning, that they aren’t incorporating climate risk into capital planning and investment decisions.
The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented rebuilding efforts over the past few decades. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.
Winter Storm Fern swept across a huge swath of the United States in January 2026, revealing both vulnerabilities and progress on the climate resilience and adaptation front.
Twenty-three billion-dollar disasters, $115 billion in damage, and not one hurricane: 2025 was a masterclass in how climate risk in the U.S. has changed.
Twenty-three billion-dollar weather and climate disasters struck the United States in 2025, revealing important takeaways for decision-makers in the real estate, public infrastructure, and insurance sectors.
Property insurance markets across the U.S. are under strain as premiums rise and insurers pull back from high-risk regions. In response, a growing number of states are leaning on public and quasi-public reinsurance backstops.
States are making a mistake by using public reinsurance mechanisms to address rising insurance costs. Legislators should invest in climate resilience and risk reduction rather than transfer risk to taxpayers and ignore the underlying drivers of catastrophic insurance losses.
Climate resilience is most visible in physical defenses and materials, but it relies on information infrastructure.