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Arjun Singh 0:01
Arjun from the levers readers reported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh. Los Angeles has been on fire for nearly two weeks now, and everyone's keen to point a finger at who's responsible, but the truth is that LA's fires were a crisis years in the making, maybe even centuries. For as long as it's been a state, California has had a tense relationship with fire, but today, things are different. Today, more Californians than ever are living in hazardous regions, and the inability of the state to build more housing in its urban centers is pushing more and more people further out. But why was California built like this? Who allowed the urban sprawl the state's famous for to push right into wildfires, and why does this keep happening today? On lever time, we're going to look at the history of California's famous urban sprawl and hear the long history of how the state's real estate and gas industries suppress science and push the public into danger. You

Arjun Singh 1:06
How are you? Man, how are you? Yeah, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I mean, I'm on the East Coast, so you know, I I'm doing well. Climate catastrophes feel a lot different when they happen close to home. That's a weird sentence to say out loud, but it was how I was feeling last week when I called up Josh Olson, the other voice you just heard Josh and I connected last week when the Los Angeles fires were really picking up, and like a lot of Angelinos, Josh was trying to remain optimistic, but he was confronting the reality that he might literally lose everything.

Josh Olson 1:41
The sky's a little bit red. It was redder yesterday, but there's little tiny bits of ash, kind of floating down, which is terrifying. You don't want to go out, you don't want to breathe. We have been kind of ready to go for, you know, a day and a half now. We basically packed our go bags the other day and kind of everything standing by. And that is a surreal experience, because you're kind of going through the house and going like, you know, we need some clothes. We you know, we've got a dog, a cat and a two and a half year old, so we need to bring everything that's attendant with all that along. And then you're kind of going through going, you know, what are the your you know, obviously, there's important papers you need to bring jewelry, whatever. But then they're sort of like, what are the things that matter the most? You know, it's like, I've got a ton of these, like, photo albums I used to make of digital photos. Used to do them off of Apple. I'm leaving all those, but I'm taking all that because I have the photos backed up. But I'm taking all my like, old photo albums of like, actual, irreplaceable photographs and things that, you know, I can't and, you know, you're just sort of going through and just kind of giving a weight to

Arjun Singh 2:43
everything. Josh is a screenwriter by profession, an Academy Award, nominated one at that, and that's what usually comes to mind when you say the words Los Angeles to someone, the home of Hollywood, glistening beaches and a creative culture that rivals few. But it's also got a dark side. California's climate is the envy of the world. But it's also long been known that the natural beauty can easily become dangerous. You know, there's

Josh Olson 3:06
always that concern. It's like, there have always been fires. There's always the fear that, you know, they seem to be getting a little bit closer off and on every year, but this is the first time we've, we've had to, like, actually pack up and wait for, you know, the word, I mean, this is going to seem trite, and I just understand, man, we're all living here. We're all going through this. We're all trying to, like, deal with as best we can. And I'm certainly not making light of any of this. The one thing that kind of makes me feel better, but kind of keeps me going. It's like, at least with fires, you have a little bit of a warning here on

Arjun Singh 3:37
this podcast, I always want to be honest with you. So in that spirit, I should say that I grew up in California, in the Bay Area, but a lot of my friends live in Los Angeles, several of whom either evacuated or are trapped in their homes because of how toxic the air quality is. Like any horrific event, most of us experience it as a media phenomenon, but as you could just hear, it's a hell of a lot different. When you're hearing what's happening from someone on the phone.

Josh Olson 4:05
It's just surreal, man. You just go from kind of living a normal life to all of a sudden dealing with this. I've, I've, you know, if you really put a gun to my head right now and ask me to come up with an exact number, I might be able to, but off top my head, I can't tell you how many friends I know who have already lost their homes entirely, especially since, you know, having our son, it's a concern. I mean, it's a concern. I think anywhere in the country right now and in the world is like, Where can we live that's safer from the sort of climate catastrophe that we're already in and is getting worse? I mean, there are no guarantees, but you know, where do you go to avoid some version of this?

Arjun Singh 4:43
Naturally, questions have abounded of whether this could have been prevented, or if California's leaders mismanaged the crisis. But these questions sidestep a grim truth, despite the known risk of fire, California's business and political leaders insisted on pushing single family. Family homes closer and closer to fire zones. Last week on lever time, David Sirota asked you whether we need to fundamentally rethink living in a world with a changing climate. But today, I want to examine the forces that led things in Los Angeles to be as bad as they did, and also how the city rebuilds from here.

Arjun Singh 5:22
Like I said earlier, it's hard to talk about Los Angeles without talking about the movies. As the fires began to rage, one movie came to mind, et The Extra Terrestrial. ET is a movie from the 1980s directed by Steven Spielberg, and it's basically about the friendship between a little kid and an alien. But the reason it came to mind is because there's a scene in the movie where the main character of Elliot is biking through a series of new housing developments in a part of Los Angeles called Granada Hills.

Arjun Singh 5:56
Why am I telling you all of this? Because Elliot wasn't just riding through new construction. He was riding into what's now a fire zone. Well,

News 6:04
a new fire earlier today in Granada Hills briefly prompted an evacuation order as it advanced towards homes. It started just before 10:30am on West Cessna and Boulevard. It grew to 31 acres.

Arjun Singh 6:15
These neighborhoods and towns close to where fires can erupt actually have a name too. They're called Wild and urban interfaces, or W UIs. And since the time et was released, more and more Californians are living in them, the

Char Miller 6:27
Greek word to go back to Prometheus as Hubers. We think we can control fire or floods or hurricanes or whatever. So we have Hubers like crazy. And you know, since the 1920s when Angelenos realized that the foothills were great and you start to watch the march of let's call it civilization, up to these spaces everywhere, fire has erupted, in part because we are Prometheus. We bring fire with us.

Arjun Singh 6:59
Char Miller is a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College in Southern California, and the author of the book burn scars. Char is one of the most widely respected historians when it comes to fire and fire management, and living in Southern California, he's watched firsthand the consequences of Americans encroachment into drier and more flammable terrain. You know,

Char Miller 7:19
in the 1950s it was Bel Air that had just recently plowed where Richard Nixon built a house, and there's a famous photograph of him in 1960 on the roof of his house with a hose as the Bel Air fire is roaring. He's also wearing a coat and tie, and you're looking at that going well, of course, it's burning. You just put bulldozers up there. You just cleared the space. You have a patio, you have charcoal briquettes flying, and you're bringing electric wires that will spark. So everywhere we move, we bring fire with us, and that's true in Napa. It's true in the Sierras. It's not just a Southern California thing, it's true. In Denver, all of these places have been burning because that's what we do. But there's also landscapes into which we move that we know are high severity fire zones, and we are given the green light to do so by city halls, county governments, planning boards, zoning commissions, architectural boards, they've all signed off on this. Why?

Arjun Singh 8:23
To understand that, we need to look at how the American dream changed in the early 20th century. Around the 1950s this idea became popular that you could have a big house, white picket fence and a yard the happiest

Old Commercial 8:35
investment they have ever made. At last, the Bryants have all the space they need big floor to ceiling closets for each member of the family, large, comfortable bedrooms,

Arjun Singh 8:45
and that became synonymous with success. And that was especially true in Los Angeles. By the 1950s LA's population was ballooning and the wealthy began moving further and further into the hills. But even back then, they knew they were taking a risk in 1956 for example, Malibu was set ablaze by a fire that would go on to destroy 60 homes and to char Miller's point earlier, the perspective of the federal government and local governments was simply to let people keep building

Arjun Singh 9:19
in what was likely a well intentioned policy. The Eisenhower administration in the 1950s subsidized continuous construction in flammable areas by offering tax relief and low interest loans to rebuild. One thing you need to know, though, is that California was settled in a blaze of violence and fire

Arjun Singh 9:42
when European settlers first arrived, they saw how indigenous Californians made ample use of controlled burning, in some cases, burning up to 10% of the state's land mass annually. For the settlers, this posed a problem. The fires made the terrain inhospitable to commerce and industry, so their response. Was murder in waves of brutal attacks, settlers killed the indigenous Californians. Then they sought to tame the land, whereas the indigenous Californians made ample use of fire, the settlers thought they could suppress and control it, and in the name of industry, they created the bedrocks of a political economy dedicated to pushing the boundaries of how far humans could manipulate the environment around them.

Arjun Singh 10:42
Give me a years since the turn of the century, Los Angeles has grown from a sleepy Pueblo to a vast, seething metropolitan city, fine buildings, huge stores, busy citizens, a city which has grown faster than any other in America in the past decade and which sees a constant day to day influx of people from every part of the world. Los Angeles is a beautiful city, vibrant, filled with brilliant people. But by the mid 1950s the same time period when President Eisenhower was encouraging Angelenos to keep building in fire zones, Los Angeles was covered in smog during

Rebecca John 11:20
the smog season, thick blankets of smog would cover the city. And one of the earliest major smog episodes in 1943 was so sudden and so intense, it was believed to be a world war two gas attack by the enemy. And over the next decade, the problem got worse. And you know, the fall of 1952 saw five straight weeks of smog that pushed public anger to boiling point. Rebecca

Arjun Singh 11:47
John is an investigative reporter and a research fellow at the climate investigation center, and her reporting has been published in outlets like de smog in The Guardian. Recently, Rebecca was investigating the 1950s smog crisis in LA a situation that made the city uninhabitable for some people. If

Rebecca John 12:04
you went out in the smog, it would burn your eyes, causing them to stream and hurt. Would hurt your throat. On bad smog days, emergency rooms were filled with people suffering from aggravated respiratory conditions like asthma as well as heart problems and the fatality rate increased, which was particularly because many patients suffering from TB tuberculosis had moved to LA on the advice of their doctors, specifically seeking out a healthier climate. So they were very badly affected by these smog episodes

Arjun Singh 12:35
like the current wildfire crisis. The smog crisis back then had a direct link to industrialization in California. In the case of the smog, it was attributed to California's oil and gas industry. Recent research out of Caltech had conclusively proved that the smog in LA was caused by a mixture of oil and gas emissions along with sunlight. This really riled up the gas industry, particularly because they had been trying to control the narrative through a research group they sponsored, called the Stanford Research Institute, whose studies tended to downplay the influence of the industry on the smog, but armed with the research out of Caltech journalists, especially at the city's local paper, the LA Times, they began to question the motives behind the group.

Rebecca John 13:15
There was one smog conference actually held early on, sponsored by the oil and gas industry at a hotel in LA and on the day of the conference, the smog was so bad it completely encircled the hotel, which is just a pretty incredible image in itself. And the chief reporter at the LA Times told his colleagues, you know, don't believe anything that Stanford Research Institute is saying about smog, because they're sponsored by the oil industry and are not to be trusted. And

Arjun Singh 13:42
this all prompted the industry to change, no, not a change of heart, just a change of organizations. Seeing the lack of confidence in the Stanford Research Institute, a trade association called the Western States Petroleum Association decided to bankroll a new group this time. They called it the air pollution foundation. Ironically, the research produced by this group ended up revealing an even more uncomfortable truth, that the emissions from oil and gas might be altering the climate in a dramatic way. Yep, back in 1954 it was the industry's own research that told them they may have had a hand in climate change, and what did they do with that information? Absolutely buried it,

Rebecca John 14:29
instead of referring to the climate significance of carbon dioxide further air pollution, foundation reports describe carbon dioxide as innocuous. And in addition to that in 1958 at one of the very earliest national air pollution conferences held by the Public Health Service in Washington, the California oil and gas industry had a representative speak who described carbon dioxide as harmless. So you see very clearly the industry using that front group to quickly take control of the conversation and. Forward a message that was favorable to its own interests. So

Arjun Singh 15:03
it turns out that the California Dream, the one where you can live in your own bungalow, enjoy the amenities of the city and be right next to nature, was always a fraught promise. In the 1980s la experienced another population, one that was supported by more urban sprawl. In that decade, Californians would pass two important ballot measures. One was called prop 13, and that limited the amount property taxes could increase. Another prop 103 forced home insurance rates to go down by 20% and subjected insurance rate changes to approval from the state for homeowners, it was a good time, but to accommodate the population, the sprawl went further and further into fire zones, and the lowered insurance rates may have ended up encouraging more construction and flight into these fire zones. Tie that to the affordable housing crisis taking place in the state cities, and it's resulted in a place where more residents are living in hazardous fire zones than ever. So after the break, we'll hear an example of how the real estate industry recently fought legislation meant to build safer communities, and hear how places like Los Angeles can rebuild in a new era of extreme weather. We'll be right back. You.

Katya Schwenk 16:36
So back in 2019, California's Governor Gavin Newsom, his office, put together a task force to start to look at the issue of wildfires and climate change in California. Because it's been increasingly clear over the last few years and last decade that, you know, climate change has sort of really dramatically changed wildfires in California. And so, California was looking at ways to mitigate this and sort of look at the reasons why

Arjun Singh 17:06
Katya Schwenk is a reporter at the lever. Last week, she put out a huge story that documented the lobbying Blitz the real estate industry deployed to continue building in these fire zones, the wild and urban interfaces, despite the evidence from the state's own report that it would be dangerous. As we know, that's nothing new, but what's changed is the severity of the danger today, California has almost 40 million residents, half of whom live in the Los Angeles area, and not including the current fires in LA the worst five fires in the state's history have all occurred within the last seven years, one of those fires took place in Los Angeles County in 2018 the Woolsey fire, as it's known, forced hundreds of 1000s to evacuate and destroyed 1643 structures. One of the victims of it was a California state senator named Henry Stern. I'm saying

Sen. Henry Stern 17:58
I got caught flat footed, and like my whole community burned down overnight. I lost my own apartment in the Woolsey fire, and I lost a lot less than other people did because we literally weren't paying attention to the risk.

Arjun Singh 18:10
That experience prompted stern to file a bill in 2021 that would ban development in high risk areas of the state. But the bill was basically dead on arrival because of the real estate lobby's influence over state politicians.

Katya Schwenk 18:23
When I started looking into why this bill died so quickly in the legislature, you know, I quickly found lobbying records that showed the involvement of all sorts of real estate interests in California, including some of its biggest developers, and sort of the key group that comes up whenever you look at real estate lobbying, especially around wildfire safety issues in California, is something called the California Building Industry Association. This is an organization that represents Building and Construction interests and developers across California. It's an extremely powerful group. In fact, they've tried to kill many other similar bills to Senator Stearns, and they've pushed policy that would weaken wildfire safety standards for new developments. The

Arjun Singh 19:12
Real Estate lobby may have won in their fight with Henry Stern, but whether they want to accept it or not, it's clear California's current system of coping with these fires is not working. More people are being pushed into the w, u eyes, and the climate is only getting drier and the planet hotter. One odd voice of truth in this debate has actually been the insurance industry, though, for all of the wrong reasons, insurance agencies in California have been denying claims left and right for years due to fires, a recognition that the risk of living in a w, u, i is simply too high now in California, statewide Insurance Fund is dwindling. It's a grim situation, but it left me wondering, What does rebuilding look like after this?

Jonah Susskind 19:54
It's a question or a challenge that touches so many aspects of sort of, how. Communities and cities come together, and I think it's it's almost impossible to disentangle the design side of that from, for instance, the policy side. Or like we know that certainly here in California, where the housing crisis, the housing affordability crisis, is so exaggerated that you know exclusionary zoning practices and just land value being so inflated has pushed more and more of the population further and further from the urban cores out to the urban peripheries, where risk of wildfire exposure is already the highest. But you know, essentially is kind of the only places left for for finding affordable housing. Jonas

Arjun Singh 20:41
Susskind is an urban planning professional whose career has focused on the intersection of urban development and environmental risk. One of

Jonah Susskind 20:48
the things that we've seen historically in this country, and certainly in the last several decades in California, is a kind of an acquiescence to private developers, and again, I don't know if that's entirely fair, but one of the things that California has really struggled with, and really I think this is an American problem as much as it is, or an American challenge or struggle as much as it is a California one, and a Southern California one in particular is just the incredible, overwhelming significance that home ownership, single family home ownership, has had. It's sort of this untouchable part of the American dream. And I think in in places like Los Angeles, where you know, private home ownership is so important and is given so much room, it really a lot of the buck does stop with the private developer, and the private developer with a capital T hasn't had a whole lot of sticks,

Arjun Singh 21:53
yet, an optimist at heart, Jonah also told me that he does see a path forward for Californians and Americans in a New Era of fire as cities begin to rebuild, Jonah told me, one important thing planners can do is to be more thoughtful about creating a buffer between the people and the flammable area, a concept known as defensible spaces. So defensible

Jonah Susskind 22:12
spaces we understand it is this idea that you take a structure and you you sort of think about distances from that structure so very, very close to a home. Let's say there are design guidelines and maintenance guidelines around what kinds of vegetation may or may not be appropriate within five feet of a home, what kinds of surfaces or materials might be more or less appropriate. And then, you know, moving out to the sort of 50 foot mark, the 100 foot mark, the two foot mark, from a from a particular building or structure. This idea of defensible space is really important, and when done well, it really can substantially decrease the likelihood of structure loss in a fire. One

Arjun Singh 22:55
town that's already employed some of these concepts is paradise, California, a place that was almost completely destroyed in 2018 during the camp fire, the deadliest fire in California's history. But today, Paradise is California's fastest growing city, and Jonah says that they've implemented better practices to protect the community.

Jonah Susskind 23:14
So what they're working on doing is developing what they're calling wildfire risk reduction buffers that you can think of essentially, as kind of a green necklace that sort of encircles the town of paradise. And the idea is that these buffers would be fuel reduction programs, right? So they would be things like shaded shaded fuel breaks, or, you know, areas where thicker parts of the forest would be thinned, areas where more intensive vegetation management would be happening, but at the same time, those are very expensive things to do, especially in rural communities without really significant tax bases, and so this has been a real opportunity for a rural community like paradise to think about, how do we scale up the idea of defensible space to protect our entire community, and then How do we also think about those zones as being instrumental boosting our tourism economy. Moving forward,

Arjun Singh 24:11
if paradise sets the standard, California may finally be able to make peace with fire, but only if it can break with its traditional commerce. As of recording this episode, there are still fires raging in the city. People are evacuating, and it's become a political football during a heated presidential transition. Recently, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson said that he wanted aid to California to have conditions attached to it, and there's a crisis of confidence in Los Angeles's Mayor Karen Bass. LA's fires are going to sear a scar in the state psyche, and it's forcing a lot of us to confront the possibility that an extreme weather event will come to our home next but as we've heard today, accepting that possibility doesn't have to be an admission of defeat, nor is it a justification to do more of the same with the right foresight. Planning and thoughtfulness. It's very possible humanity can endure a different era. You.