Wildfire Rebuilds Are an Opportunity to Build More Resilient and Sustainable Homes. But That Comes With Controversy

After Colorado’s most costly wildfire, hundreds of residents in Louisville—one of the communities that burned—protested in front of city hall over building codes meant to make new homes more green and sustainable, arguing they would make the rebuilding process longer and more expensive.

To rebuild, new homes would have to be built to updated energy standards that had been passed by the city months before the fire. But in the chaos and confusion after the fire, a local home builders association estimated the new codes would increase the cost of rebuilding $100,000 per home. Many of the residents who lost their homes were underinsured or uninsured—the average homeowner received $250,000 less than what it would cost to rebuild—making the cost to build back more sustainably difficult to bear. 

“You might think, ‘People who’ve just gone through a disaster, they must be really open to doing things differently so that they don’t suffer that same thing again in the future,’” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has spent his career studying the aftermath of natural disasters. “But the reality is that actually post-disasters are one of the most difficult times to do resiliency and to make those hard decisions because people have just gone through a traumatic loss. They’ve already had a lot taken from them, and oftentimes decisions about rebuilding that are perceived—whether or not it’s true or not—to add cost, add time, add difficulty, add uncertainty, can feel to them like the government or others trying to stop them from coming home.”

Louisville, along with neighboring Superior, relented on imposing more stringent energy codes and allowed the residents who had lost their homes to rebuild to older standards.

Still, three years later, about 70 percent of those who have rebuilt have met the higher standard, as local government staff across municipalities worked to educate homeowners on what the standards actually cost (closer to $13,000), explained the long-term benefits of the improvements and worked to bring in rebates and funding to offset the extra costs.

It’s been barely a week since a series of deadly and destructive wildfires devastated Los Angeles, with multiple fires still burning and swaths of the region still facing extreme red flag warnings, but already the beginning steps of rebuilding have begun. Los Angeles’ recovery will be long and expensive, but recoveries from other wildfires and natural disasters, like the one after the Marshall Fire, provide insight into how to navigate rebuilding equitably and sustainably.

In the aftermath of a disaster, when people just want to return home and misinformation is swirling, efforts to rebuild more resilient and sustainable homes are often mired in controversy. Experts and local leaders involved in disaster recovery efforts said the key to building back better and more equitably is community outreach and engagement, frequent communication with the public about the process and the flexibility to eliminate hurdles and change processes to make recovering easier. Though challenging, there’s real opportunity to create communities better prepared for the types of extreme natural disasters climate change is making more frequent.

“When your infrastructure is blown to bits, unfortunately, the very, very small silver lining is that you could do better next time” by rebuilding with fewer vulnerabilities, said Deserai Anderson Crow, a professor University of Colorado Denver and co-director of the university’s Center for Community Safety and Resilience.

Rumbach said recovery efforts are always defined by the tension between speed and deliberation. Communities want to rebuild as quickly as possible and attempt to return to “normal,” he said, but at the same time, make good decisions that protect the community from future disasters. But the deliberations required to make forward-looking decisions are often seen as slowing down the recovery process and increasing its costs, although research from Rumbach, Anderson Crow and others found those drawbacks occur at much lower rates than people sometimes fear. Their research, however, showed that recovery often becomes less equitable over time, highlighting the argument for speedy rebuilds that prioritize all members of the community.

It’s something local leaders learned after the Marshall Fire. “No matter how fast you are, nothing is fast enough,” said Allison James, Superior’s disaster preparedness and recovery manager.

“It’s really hard to tell people that have to rebuild, that already have these huge insurance gaps, that they’re going to have to spend X amount more to rebuild,” she said. Xcel Energy, the local utility, offered rebates between $7,500 to $37,500 for rebuilding homeowners depending on the green home certification standard their new home earned, but those took time to roll out, James said. There are also federal programs that can help, like the Small Business Administration‘s low-interest disaster loans. And it’s vital for those working on recovery efforts to take care of themselves as well, so they don’t burn out, James and others said.

Local leaders quickly lost the narrative after the Marshall Fire over the cost the energy codes would bring and had to pivot to address those concerns, said Zac Swank, the deputy director of Boulder County’s Office of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience. So the affected towns allowed those rebuilding to use older codes but then worked to find new ways to incentivize the energy codes and explain their benefits. They built a website to explain the benefits and provide links to assistance, hired a housing consultant to meet with any residents who had questions, created a hotline for residents to call and held a series of webinars and meetings with community members, all to help correct the narrative over how much it would cost to rebuild more resilient and sustainable houses and how that could help them.

“It’s really hard to tell people that have to rebuild, that already have these huge insurance gaps, that they’re going to have to spend X amount more to rebuild.”

— Allison James, Superior’s disaster preparedness and recovery manager

Not only were they vital for the big picture of reducing the carbon emissions heating the climate so that it drives bigger and hotter wildfires, he said, but saved money on energy bills and made homes more fire resistant thanks to their simpler designs that left fewer nooks and crannies where embers can lodge on the house and better insulation and more tightly sealed venting that make it less likely that an ember can ignite the interior. 

“Robust early community engagement and education about not why it’s good for the climate, but why it’s good for homeowners and how achievable it is is key,” Swank said. “I expect that LA homeowners will also be facing insurance challenges and tight budgets, and there will be similar pressures in that rebuilding effort to maybe go for the lowest-cost solution, but it’s important to get out ahead of that narrative.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Marshall Fire, those who had lost homes were facing big gaps in insurance coverage, and there was a perception the new codes would add big costs on top and that they weren’t beneficial to actually building fire-resilient homes, said Jeri Curry, the executive director of the Marshall Restoring Our Community advocacy group.

But rolling back the energy code brought unintended consequences, she said. Some had ordinance and law coverage from their insurance provider, which covers the cost of rebuilding homes to new, updated standards the original house may not have been built to. But rolling back those standards means insurance companies don’t have to cover building to those standards. That means someone who wants to build to that higher code has less money from their insurance claim to do so.

“Insurance no longer has to support them,” Curry said.

Though initially controversial, the incentives and education efforts eventually paved the way for many to rebuild to higher standards. Of the 890 homes rebuilt or permitted to begin doing so after the Marshall Fire, 630 meet or exceed the net-zero energy code. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called a special session for the state legislature, proposing at least $2.5 billion in additional funding to aid emergency efforts and kickstart recovery efforts, while also issuing executive orders to cut red tape while rebuilding and streamlining the debris removal process. Los Angeles City Council Tuesday passed new measures to aid the recovery as well, including one to help residents quickly gain access to federal disaster relief funding.

Rumbach said those are signs the state and city plan to move fast. “It’s remarkable that we’re having this conversation while the fires are still burning,” he said. Finding a balance between quickly rebuilding and careful planning is key, he said. Move too fast, and actions can have unintended consequences and not prepare the community for the next wildfire. Move too slowly, and misinformation on how long it will take to rebuild and how much it will cost begin to impede actions meant to help the community—and the environment.