Fire-Prone Suburban Southwest Built At 'Catastrophic' Densities
Burgeoning migration to the American southwest has resulted in suburban expansion into wilderness areas prone to fires, which are now more severe due to the impacts of climate change.
"While this may all look like business as usual for legions of jaded, CNN-watching fire buffs, the enormity of this year's out-of-control blazes sets them apart.
So why on this scale?
Even by its own arid standards, the Golden State and much of the Southwest has just experienced an unprecedented summer heat wave, shrivelling crops and lawns and turning always-dry terrain into a blast furnace. Drought this year and last sucked the land dry. Rainfall across the region this past six months was just one-fifth of average levels.
Compounding the threat is the fact that despite soaring temperatures, Americans continue to head south and west.
Since 1990, an estimated eight million new homes have been built in the western U.S. states, chiefly in areas described as 'the urban-wild land interface,' code for uprooted city dwellers, many retired, who live in big houses or near pristine forests and deserts.
Those eight million buildings house at least 20 million new western residents.
And in Southern California, whose deserts are dotted with combustible scrub, brush and trees, that translates into ever-growing population density, meaning more houses, built ever-more closely together, and more people for the local fire department to protect.
That density can be catastrophic."
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Is density really the problem?
Is high-density housing really the problem? Or is low-density suburban sprawl and dense irrigated vegetation combined with dry, hot weather?
Scales of density
This is yet another post that illustrates how thinking about density gets out of whack when scales are dramatically shifted. The New Urbanist or True Urbanist generally thinks of density at the scale of the street, block, or neighborhood. Libertarians often gleefully point out that Los Angeles is the densest metropolitan area in the United States, as if this somehow proves that everything that New/True Urbanists and Smart Growthers advocate for is wrong. However the scale of density referred to here is thousands of square miles and has very little to do with the street, block and neighborhood.
An Urbanist would most likely advocate for a lower metropolitan-scale density in Los Angeles but a higher density at the street, block and neighborhood levels. Such an approach would increase natural open space in which fires could run their course; plus it would increase the effectiveness of firefighting by decreasing the total number of streets to be protected and increasing their connectivity.