POLITICO: Wildfires Threaten All of the West — and One Group More Than Others
That threat to Latinos has grown in the past decade, and they are twice as likely to live in areas most threatened by wildfires relative to the overall U.S. population.
And so-called “natural amenity” communities built around winter sports, resorts and second homes began attracting Latino residents in the early 2000s to work service industry jobs that supported those burgeoning towns, said Richelle Winkler, a sociology and demography professor at Michigan Technological University who has studied migration, residential segregation and the environment. But Latino residents tended to settle in less expensive, wildfire-prone rural areas far from those towns — and from firefighters.
“Affordable housing programs are the No. 1 thing we need to work on,” she said. “It’s the root of all environmental justice issues, really, but very specifically in this case.”
People working in landscaping, housekeeping and other industries serving the Western Colorado resort towns of the Roaring Fork, Colorado River and Eagle valleys often live in high-risk areas between two and three hours from their jobs due to lack of affordable housing, said Beatriz Soto, director of public lands advocacy group Defiende Nuestra Tierra at the Carbondale, Colo.-based group Wilderness Workshop. Many reside in mobile home parks without access to clean water and rely on electric heaters, which pose significant fire hazards.
“It’s extremely dangerous,” she said.
Soto said local officials and voters in wealthy towns like Aspen and Snowmass have resisted pressure to build affordable housing. “They don’t want the person who cleans their home to be their neighbor.”
Overall, more houses are being built in unoccupied land abutting forests and woodlands, known as the wildland-urban interface, to accommodate the growing population. About 46 million homes are located in these areas, which is growing at a pace of 2 million acres per year, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That housing boom represents a 49.4 percent increase from 30.8 million in 1990. That has put people and property at greater risk while boosting wildfire probability: Humans start 87 percent of them, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
But the threat posed by wildfires has not deterred construction: risQ found U.S. single family home permits in the top quartile of wildfire-prone counties accounted for 37 percent of all permits in 2019, up from 30 percent in 2010.
“People know the risk, and that’s been a little bit of a wake-up call to ecologists like myself,” said Volker Radeloff, a fire ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
risQ’s analysis showed economic costs of wildfires are already significant. Losses for single family homes hit $13 billion annually under current climate conditions and are likely to climb to $14 billion a year by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked. But losses held constant in a scenario with half as much warming as the worst-case forecast, which risQ CEO Evan Kodra said showed “a clear trade-off” for reducing emissions.
By: Zack Colman
Source: POLITICO