The lessons for every homeowner from the LA wildfires

Most single-family houses are built around a few main ingredients: wooden framing, a sloping roof that hangs over the sides, vents that keep air circulating through the attic. These features are key to churning out new builds quickly and relatively cheaply, and they've remained more or less the same for decades. They also make it easier for homes to burn.

The fires that swept through the Los Angeles area were the result of an extreme scenario: The confluence of hurricane-force winds, dry brush after months of drought, and the construction of old homes near combustible wildlands set the stage for the blazes to spread rapidly. The devastation in Altadena, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, where the Eaton and Palisades fires have destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed at least 28 people, is especially stark given that California's building standards are some of the strictest in the world. In much of the rest of the country, the housing stock is even less equipped to face the rising threat of fire.

The ongoing fires bear a warning for other cities that have pushed residents farther and farther from the urban core in search of space to build. The risk of fire damage is greatest in areas known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI — pronounced, charmingly, as "woo-ey" — where human-made sprawl meets undeveloped land. Data from the US Forest Service indicates the number of homes in WUIs grew by almost 50% from 1990 to 2020; about 48 million homes, or almost a third of residential units nationwide, are in counties that face a high risk of fire. Homeowners in California and beyond, architects and researchers tell me, must begin wrestling with how to fortify their own houses.

"As we've seen with LA and some of the other fires in California and Maui, it's not just a WUI issue anymore," Michael Eliason, the founder and principal of the Seattle architecture firm Larch Lab, tells me. "These are quickly becoming urban fires."

Perhaps the most confounding images from the LA fires show the outliers: homes miraculously left standing in the middle of flattened neighborhoods. Architects I've talked to generally agree that chance played a big role in deciding which structures survived. But as Sean Jursnick, a Denver-area architect, puts it, the owners of the spared houses may have "created some of their own luck."

Measures to reduce the risk of fire damage include straightforward design tweaks such as streamlining exteriors to eliminate the nooks and crannies where stray embers can settle, or getting rid of vegetation that could shuttle flames to the main structure. Then there are the cutting-edge materials — wrapped in jargon like "cementitious fiber-reinforced composite building system" — that offer alternatives to the flammable lumber that dominates home construction.

Interventions by both homeowners and builders are growing more necessary as the risk of fires increases — and as insurers get pickier about which properties they'll cover. Soon, many people across the US may have no choice but to build smarter.

Scott Long has spent decades in pursuit of a material capable of unseating lumber as the go-to option for home frames. The basics of home construction haven't substantially evolved since the 1800s, when building the skeletal structure out of dimensional lumber — your classic two-by-fours, etc. — came into fashion. Wood components, Long says, are "literally the worst possible product you could use" in the event of high winds, flooding, or fire since they burn (unlike concrete) and aren't as sturdy as, say, steel. Masking wood with something like magnesium oxide board or stucco siding, both of which are more resistant to fire, is fine, Long says, but "not a solution."

"It's time for change here," Long tells me. "We can't keep building the way we've been building up against these types of historic events."

Given these problems, Long founded NileBuilt in 2019, building homes primarily out of fiber-reinforced concrete panels with foam insulation in the middle. The company's model homes look simple and modern, all flat roofs and sharp edges, and it says the materials can withstand temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — the panels, unlike the walls of traditional homes, won't combust from the extreme heat of a neighboring fire. Long says the cost of building his homes roughly matches that of wood-frame houses. A quiet start to 2025 for his company has turned into a frenzy; he says that even before the fires, the waitlist for one of the homes was just under 3,000 people.

Eliason isn't calling for the kind of paradigm shift in building materials that Long suggests. He pointed to a widely seen X post showing a Pacific Palisades home that survived with little apparent damage, saying it was "not a concrete house or brick house or anything" — other measures its owner took may have mattered a lot more. And wood has its own advantages: It's cheap, and lumber production doesn't release nearly as much carbon as concrete or steel. In the event of an earthquake, its pliability is a huge plus. For all these reasons, Eliason says, "going away from wood-frame construction seems really shortsighted."

Instead, he advocates more-modest tweaks that can add up to real risk mitigation. A streamlined, boxy structure offers fewer places for stray embers to linger. These embers are often good fuel for a wildfire's spread — they can travel several miles by air, then enter through vents or settle on a combustible part of the home, igniting another conflagration. By getting rid of nooks and crannies like roof overhangs (also known as eaves) or little windows that jut out of the roof, builders can reduce fire risk. Materials also matter: Builders can wrap a home in noncombustible mineral wool and install drywall capable of withstanding an hour of direct contact with flames. Metal roofs are preferable to classic shingles.

The house Eliason referred to has many of these features: stucco finishes, a metal roof, tempered windows, no roof vents or eaves on its sides. But there's an even smaller adjustment that may have helped keep the flames away: a buffer around the house devoid of vegetation. Jursnick recalls a conversation with another architect who likened nearby plants and bushes to the tinder you'd use to light a campfire. Removing those is an example of a little thing even weekend-warrior home-improvement types can do to better protect their homes. Another is replacing old vents with newer models designed to deny entry to embers. Costlier measures include swapping in a metal fence for the wooden version or opting for a new metal roof.

Decades-old homes, like many in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, are much more susceptible to fires than newer builds. But retrofitting them to meet modern codes is more expensive than adding fire-resistant features to new construction from the get-go. Research from the environmental economists Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower suggests that California homes built after the state tightened its building codes in 2008 are about 40% less likely to be destroyed in a fire than a 1990 home exposed to an identical blaze. Another study of the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed most of the town of Paradise in northern California, found that only 11.5% of single-family homes built within city limits before 1997 survived, compared with a 38.5% survival rate for those built that year or later.

Boomhower walked away from his study convinced that more local governments should mandate fire-resistant building codes rather than wait for builders and homeowners to wise up to their benefits. Normally, an economist like him might be skeptical of government rules for something that is so obviously a good investment — buyers of new homes should be motivated to protect what is likely their biggest asset, codes be damned. But Boomhower's study found limited adoption of these best practices in areas that didn't require them.

"Homebuilders and home buyers are just not always aware of the risks and aware of the low-hanging-fruit options for mitigation," Boomhower tells me. The data also suggests there are spillover effects that could protect non-improved homes: Investments made by just one homeowner can help stunt the spread of a blaze, making it less likely that their neighbors' homes burn down. And insurers may be more willing to extend policies to homeowners in areas where they know many builds meet these criteria.

This is far from just a California issue. A handful of states, including Montana, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and 200 local jurisdictions have adopted the International Code Council's standards for building fire-resistant homes in WUIs. Austin, for example, adopted the code in 2015 and is considering an update that would expand the WUI's borders in hopes of protecting more homes. Homeowners that go beyond even the strictest codes, either during the initial construction or as part of a retrofit, may score discounts from insurers or state-level tax breaks.

But even with city-level and homeowner-level interventions, Eliason tells me, "there's no guarantee of protection." The logical thing, he says, would be to build more densely in areas far from the WUI to limit the number of homes at risk in the first place. In the absence of that kind of fix — which would involve sweeping changes to the zoning laws that say what you can build and where — better materials and design can make a difference.

Jursnick, the Denver-area architect, has been thinking about this stuff a lot recently. He's working on plans for an apartment building in an area just outside Boulder that was burned in 2021 by the Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes. Much of the community input, he says, has revolved around how to prevent that kind of tragedy from happening again.

"If we're going to keep building more homes in those areas," Jursnick tells me, "I think we need to be more thoughtful of how we build, and adapt our building strategies in those areas to acknowledge that risk."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.