Hot Trend: A Home in the Woods

Cliff Fuhst says he’s got wildfires figured out. He doesn’t see the point of clearing a 30-foot fire buffer around his home, which sits half a mile from a national forest.

His view: Why bother cutting trees and underbrush? Should a fire rage near, there’s nothing that would save his cedar-sided, shake-roofed mountain cabin. So his two-story home remains surrounded by towering pines.

Fuhst, a builder of custom homes in this heavily wooded part of north central Arizona, is living in a dangerous neighborhood and he knows it. Thousands of his neighbors were evacuated last week during a wildfire that destroyed five homes here.

Americans such as Fuhst are increasingly flocking to the brink of the wilderness to make their homes. There are now an estimated 12.2 million people living on the edge of Western forests, in harm’s way for wildfires. Whether from arrogance or ignorance, optimism or denial, the rate of building at the forest fringe is growing 25% faster than for construction elsewhere in the landscape.

Fire managers in mountain regions of the West agree that vast tracts of combustible forests are not the place for subdivisions, especially now that a prolonged drought has heightened fire danger throughout the region. But there are few restrictions that discourage or prevent homes from going up in the midst of trees--such as zoning regulations, building codes or prohibitive insurance premiums.

In a market-driven industry, developers are going to build where the demand is highest. Contractors are going to build the home customers ask for.

Most people moving to the mountains, they say, have their hearts set on a home built of wood. Builders fear they could lose business if they push too hard to sell homebuyers higher-priced fire-resistant building materials, such as clay roofing tiles and composite siding.

“If the builder insists on it, he may end up losing the job because the client can just go to another builder who won’t insist on it,” said local builder Tom Haley.

Throughout the country, Americans live in regions at risk for hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. But it is homeowners in areas prone to wildfires who seem to ignore their peril.

“It seems like 100% of our customers don’t mind taking the risk of living in the middle of trees,” said Dick Miller, a marketer for Sun Pine Homes in Prescott, which is on the western edge of the world’s largest stand of ponderosa pines. “We’ve never had anyone say, ‘I want to live in the pines; build me a fireproof house.’”

According to Bill Travis, a geography professor who studies land use at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Americans have never shied from settling in dangerous areas.

“I’m impressed by the discounting of risk that pervades the system. Individuals in society look for guides. People say, ‘It can’t be dangerous here or there wouldn’t be a house for me to buy,’” Travis said. “They expect that some government entity would have prevented the building.”

The conservation group Greater Yellowstone Coalition began examining the issue of homes built in wooded areas after last summer’s devastating fires in Jackson, Wyo., that cost taxpayers $14 million to fight. The group found that there were almost no restrictions on home building in forested areas, nor any prohibition against shake roofs, which were the culprit in spreading that fire.

“We are trying to make a case that people shouldn’t move to those areas,” said Mark Haggerty, who studied the fire for the group. “If you can identify private lands that are at high risk for catastrophic fires, we would recommend that there not be any homes at all.”

The group advocates more local and county restrictions--either limiting growth or requiring stricter building codes and use of fireproof materials. Yet even as the Prescott fire was causing the evacuation of 2,400 people from four subdivisions, city and county officials had still not agreed on the adoption of fire safety guidelines in what firefighters call the urban-wildland interface.

Across the West, cities and counties are attempting to address the problems. The issue is especially acute in Colorado, where 44 of 64 counties are heavily forested. Often the results of regulation are mixed.

The city of Boulder banned shake roofs in 1994 and was sued for trade violations by the Canadian wood industry, which manufactures cedar shingles. Pitkin County, home to Aspen and other mountain skiing areas, likewise banned shake roofs and was also sued, this time by the Washington State timber industry. Both lawsuits failed in court.

“We want to try these tough regulations, but it’s not an easy sell when you go up against money,” said Justin Dombrowski, the wildfire management officer for the Boulder Fire Department. “We need to educate planners and developers. We have many, many safety measures for buildings in the city, but not up in the hills.”

Sometimes fire rules conflict with other regulations. Boulder County mandates that mountain homes maintain a cleared space to keep fire at bay, which usually requires cutting trees. But the county also has a rule that says trees must screen homes from each other.

“When you get in a battle between aesthetics and fire safety, who do you think wins?” asked Dombrowski.

Even when fire restrictions are in place, Dombrowski said, they only apply to new construction.

So far this year, nearly 2,000 fires have burned more than 200,000 acres in the West. David Theobald, a research scientist at Colorado State University, maps housing density at the forest fringe for the Colorado Forest Service. He says his research focuses on the forest edge, so his estimated 12.2 million does not come close to including all Westerners at risk of wildfires.

“It excludes all of Southern California and most of Arizona, for example, where there is low shrub and chaparral,” said Theobald. “Those areas burn all the time.”

The insurance industry neither penalizes these homeowners with high premiums nor offers discounts for fireproofing. The reason, they say, is statistics.

Insurers, in Colorado, for example, say that by far the biggest loss is from hail, so they offer a discount for a hail-resistant roof but not a fire-retardant one.

“I hate to say this, but there aren’t enough wildfires to generate statistical data to justify rate changes,” said Charlie Howard, the Western fire underwriting superintendent for State Farm Insurance. “We have good data about how car alarms reduce theft and how air bags reduce injury, but wildfires are so unpredictable. Even though intuitively we know fire-retardant roofs save homes, we can’t prove it statistically.”

But even economic disincentives are unlikely to stop the growth of homes in the mountains, where people come for the tranquillity and the beauty. And for the trees.

“I hadn’t thought too much about fire, and I know it’s an issue,” said Beverly Brown, who moved into a wood-sided home in the Prescott mountains last year. “But life is too short to worry about it. A disaster could happen to anybody at any time. Whatever life brings is what we get.”