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moment and explores what it means for the future of housing after disasters and in communities facing disinvestment, outdated zoning, or housing supply constraints.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.
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.
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Rising disaster costs drive up insurance premiums, and rising premiums then make housing less affordable. But the feedback loop actually runs in both directions. Unaffordable housing is amplifying the conditions that exacerbate disasters—sending more families into fire-prone areas, adding ignition sources, and raising the stakes of every fire season.
A recent Bloomberg editorial pointed out that homeowners insurance premiums rose nearly 25% on average from 2019 to 2024, contributing to rising rents nationwide. The piece points to more extreme disasters, rising construction costs, and chronic underinvestment in resilience as the driving forces behind spiking insurance premiums.
There is another dynamic at play here as well: As housing costs rise, disaster-vulnerable areas often become the last remaining affordable option. This accelerates the feedback loop between affordability and risk. More people move into harm’s way, which makes disasters more expensive, which drives up insurance costs, which makes housing less affordable. And the cycle perpetuates.
Growth Is Concentrating Where Risk Is Highest
When urban housing becomes unaffordable, families move outward to chase lower prices. That migration increasingly pushes them into the wildland-urban interface (WUI): zones where homes meet flammable landscapes. The WUI has been expanding rapidly across the American West for years, with housing growth in these fire-prone areas outpacing growth in safer locations. In California, where median single-family home prices exceed $900,000, people who are priced out of fire-safe areas are building in fire country.
This expansion changes the risk equation. More homes in the WUI means more ignition sources, more structures to defend, and higher suppression costs. When wildfires inevitably occur, the damage is even more catastrophic. The 2025 Los Angeles fires caused somewhere between $76-131 billion in total property and capital losses, much of it in WUI developments that expanded over the last two decades.
Each megafire event reverberates through insurance markets as carriers reassess their exposure. Premium increases spread out across entire regions, not just the immediate burn zones. A homeowner in suburban Sacramento can see their insurance costs spike because of fires in Shasta County. A renter in San Diego might face higher costs because their landlord's policy doubled.
Then, higher insurance premiums compound the original affordability problem, pushing the next wave of households further into the WUI. The cycle reinforces itself: As households are pushed into higher-risk areas, risk grows, premiums rise, and higher costs push even more families out.
Resilience Is Affordable Housing Policy
Many of the solutions the Bloomberg editorial proposes point in the right direction: prioritizing resilience and creating tax breaks and grants for hardening homes against fire. As they write, these are "short-term expenses with long-term benefits.” A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study found that communities lose as much as $33 in future economic activity for every $1 not invested in disaster resilience. This is especially true in WUI communities, where the return on resilience investment is highest, and where the alternative is another catastrophic fire season absorbed by insurance markets.
And resilience within the WUI is achievable. Research shows that home spacing and building standards are decisive factors in whether structures survive a wildfire. A 2022 study found that California homes built after 2008 and subject to wildfire building codes were 40% less likely to be destroyed in a wildfire compared to those built before 1990, a difference attributed largely to stricter building codes. With resilient building certifications like IBHS Wildlife Prepared Home Plus that go beyond minimum building codes, those survival numbers can be pushed even higher. Smarter design and stronger standards can reduce losses and slow the cycle of rising exposure and rising costs.
The housing affordability crisis and the wildfire insurance crisis are two sides of the same coin. The solution requires resilience: building smarter in the places people are already moving to, and making it more realistic to stay in the places they can't afford to leave.
California Bill Would Guarantee Insurance for Fire-Safe Homes | Propmodo | A proposed California bill would require insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who harden their properties against wildfire. The measure aims to reward guaranteed access to insurance in high-risk zones for implementing defensible space, fire-resistant materials, and other upgrades.
Climate-Resistant Home Upgrades Agents Should Be Recommending | InsuranceNewsNet | This piece outlines practical upgrades insurance agents can suggest to clients facing escalating climate risk, including fortified roofs and smarter drainage. It also emphasizes how to frame conversations: positioning improvements not just as loss prevention, but as value preservation, insurability, and long-term affordability.
What’s Behind Your Eye-Popping Power Bill? We Broke It Down, Region by Region. | Grist | Electricity prices are climbing unevenly across the U.S., driven in part by vulnerability to heat waves and cold snaps. As utilities modernize aging systems and adapt to climate extremes, consumers are absorbing the costs. This breakdown highlights what’s going on in each state.
LA Fire Victims Suing City Utility for Billions Win Major Ruling | Claims Journal | A judge ruled that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power must face hundreds of lawsuits alleging it failed to supply adequate water during the 2025 wildfire that devastated the Pacific Palisades. The case could shape how liability is assigned when public infrastructure falters during climate-fueled disasters.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.
Real Estate & Construction
How Oregon is Building Back Smarter After Wildfire | Canary Media | After the 2020 Almeda Fire destroyed thousands of homes in Oregon's Rogue Valley, a combination of state incentives and progressive builders drove residents to rebuild to higher energy-efficiency and wildfire-resilience standards, offering a model for post-disaster recovery nationwide.
How Climate Risk Is Shaping Real Estate Strategy | Munich Re | A new report from Munich Re, co-authored with JLL, makes the case that physical climate risk is now central to valuation, financing, and insurance. The takeaway: Assets that integrate resilience across their lifecycle are more likely to preserve value.
Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.
ERM and Jupiter Intelligence Partner to Turn Physical Climate Risk Into Strategy | ESG News | A new partnership between consulting firm ERM and Jupiter Intelligence aims to translate physical climate data into actionable investment and resilience planning. As risk modeling becomes more sophisticated, firms are looking for tools that connect hazard projections directly to capital decisions.
Read more about private investment on The Epicenter here.
The Evolution of Home Rebuilding Catalogs: Lessons from Katrina, Santa Rosa, and Lahaina | Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan | In a three-part series, Pelosi and Keegan trace the evolution of pre-approved home catalogs from post-Katrina recovery efforts to Los Angeles’s AI-powered rebuilding model and make the case that the same principles driving faster, more resilient disaster recovery can address housing affordability and supply constraints in any market.
Extreme Heat: Opportunities for Investors | The Epicenter Editors | Investors can reduce the costs and dangers of extreme heat by fortifying the electrical grid and built environment, advancing alternative cooling innovations, developing public-private partnerships in cooling infrastructure, investing in blended finance tools, and scaling insurance innovations.
The predictive climate risk analytics market is anticipated to grow 181% by 2034, to $987.7 million (up from $351 million in 2024). That’s a compound annual growth rate of approximately 10.9%.
Have thoughts to share or want to add your voice to the conversation? Reach out!
The Epicenter helps decision makers understand climate risks and discover viable resilience solutions. The Epicenter is an affiliated publication of The Resiliency Company, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and empowering humanity to adapt to the accelerating challenges of the next 100+ years.
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 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.
