Wildfires are a concern here in California. It is still unclear to what extent Los Angeles' devastating fires were caused by gross mismanagement by the city and state governments, and what actions the city and state governments should and have not taken. Many new details are still emerging.
It is clear that the city and state have failed. State insurance price regulations force homeowners to forego good private insurance and enroll in state insurance programs of last resort, shifting the responsibility to all homeowners in the state and devastating them. is on the verge of bankruptcy. The reservoir, which was supposed to be full, was empty. The city government had every reason to believe the danger had escalated catastrophically this week, but the fire department appears to have been blundered as the mayor went on an overseas trip.
But what's really frustrating, at least in the California policy community where I work, is not the mistakes leading up to the disaster, but the response that followed. Governors and mayors have not responded by reconsidering California's poor forest management policies. There is no plan to secure fire insurance for homeowners in other risk areas, and there is clearly no plan to deal with the cascading problems caused by the failure of the state insurance program.
Instead, the problems caused by price controls essentially include prohibiting insurance companies from renewing policies and buying demolished homes for pennies less than they were previously selling for. The company has mainly responded by tightening price controls, such as banning all offers. they burned out. Newsom passed an executive order waiving some environmental review and permitting requirements for rebuilding homes to their original condition.
Then some questions arose, like, “Wait, can he even do that?” and “If he have If he has that authority, why doesn't he use it to rebuild areas at risk of wildfires and to expedite construction in safe areas of a state experiencing a housing shortage crisis? Is it? ”
And given all this, there's a deeper question that seems to have a raison d'être for California. Is there any leadership at all? Is anyone thinking about the bigger picture in America's largest state, and is there a plan to avoid turning tragedies like this into an annual ritual?
What disasters often reveal is that there is no one to step in behind the scenes when things get really bad. Just the people who have been there all along and have always had their flaws.
The new coronavirus was a clear illustration of this. I think many people had a romantic view of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC is the heroic pandemic scientist who swoops in with sophisticated tools and implements a carefully planned pandemic roadmap as soon as things start to get tough. After all, America ranks among the highest in the world for pandemic preparedness.
And the CDC missed the mark. That test didn't work. It has erected useless barriers to the use of real-world tests. The message was confusing. Masks are bad, but we also needed to save them for healthcare workers. No, wait, masks were required.
There were many individuals who saw what was coming and took heroic actions to do something about it, but there was no institution waiting behind the scenes to save the day. When we got the vaccine, well-intentioned private groups organized on Discord did a lot of preparatory work to make it accessible to the public. In many cases, it involved systematically calling every pharmacy and filling out a spreadsheet to see if the vaccine was available.
A lot of the disillusionment I've seen from Californians over the past few days has this particular air of disillusionment — no, no matter how bad things get, you can call in real adults to save you. My understanding is that it is not possible. Because they don't exist.
Newsom's commitment to forest management, forcing private insurance companies to offer insurance at prices that won't break the bank, making communities fireproof, and encouraging people to build in safe parts of the state instead. No crisis is serious enough to seriously address the entire organizational effort. Urban peripheries, where wildfire risk is often the worst.
And there's no one to step in when Newsom fails to deliver, although I've seen plenty of people who are eager for the federal government to do so. will do Add conditions to the state government's increased support.
CALIFORNIA'S REAL EMERGENCY
The reason Newsom has executive order authority to waive environmental reviews and permits to help people rebuild burned-out homes quickly is because he has declared a state of emergency over the fires. This is because the governor's powers have been expanded. (How expanded? It's largely a question of whether anyone wants to challenge this executive order in court.)
Of course, there is no question that the devastating fires in Los Angeles are an emergency. But it was foreseeable that we would be faced with just such an emergency. Throughout California, it is often illegal to build homes in the safest areas of the state from disaster risk. This pushes homes to the fringes, where they are more likely to burn. This is no secret. The issue was widely debated after the devastating fires that destroyed Paradise City and other California suburban communities in 2019.
It is our choice as a society to govern, reactively rather than proactively, with terrible policies that encourage building in fire-prone areas. do not have Don't treat the state's massive homelessness crisis as an emergency, just the emergency and the associated fires.
But if you don't want to live in a permanent state of emergency, it's the wrong choice.
California is in a state of emergency, but not because of the Los Angeles fires. Mismanagement and bad governance have left one of the world's most prosperous, populous and beautiful regions in a state of extreme vulnerability, undermining the hopes and aspirations of its people and burning out trillions of dollars in potential. It's never too late to fix it. Many of the fixes are very simple. But I think it's clear by now that there are no responsible adults waiting behind the scenes to make it happen.
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