<story><title>The regenerating power of Big Basin’s redwoods</title><url>https://worldsensorium.com/the-regenerating-power-of-big-basins-redwoods/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>That would be extremely unpopular.&lt;p&gt;Say you bought a house in the suburbs.  Everything&amp;#x27;s fine.  Then someone comes in and says &amp;quot;Hey.  We didn&amp;#x27;t know there was a problem with the soil under your home, so we&amp;#x27;re just going to come in one night and destroy it.  And you don&amp;#x27;t get to sell it or file an insurance claim.  And we&amp;#x27;re not going to compensate you for it.  You just need to pay off your mortgage, even though we destroyed the house.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Changing zoning is a great idea, but alienating property owners from the value of their purchase is not.&lt;p&gt;The only solution I can think of is eminent domain, but it&amp;#x27;s structurally a little more difficult in California than authoritarian states like Texas that just come in and grab your house to give it to the local baseball team.  So you would have to pass the legislation in Sacramento to authorize the creation of a special district to manage the confiscation of property.  Then you would have to approve the funds, cause this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an improvement district and you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be funding the district from the tax on the property.  Then you have do the confiscation, and sheesh, the San Lorenzo Valley is sort of the definition of &amp;quot;weird deed restrictions.&amp;quot;  And once the state (or maybe the open space trust???) has the land, it has to pay for remediation so the soil doesn&amp;#x27;t wash away and cause landslides that cover the road in three feet of mud.  And you have to do all this before the next big rain event so the roads don&amp;#x27;t completely wash away.&lt;p&gt;So... eminent domain isn&amp;#x27;t a bad idea, per se.  But it&amp;#x27;s HARD.&lt;p&gt;(queue Jethro Tull&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Farm on the Freeway&amp;quot;)</text></item><item><author>billiam</author><text>&amp;gt;And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed? Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t let them rebuild in place. Your points are spot on (a new survey shows 1&amp;#x2F;3 of Californians live in the urban&amp;#x2F;wildland interface where wildfires will destroy most dwellings) and it requires new zoning, new fire legislation on fire insurance, and of course the ability of people to live in higher density through infill and careful planning. The cost of housing in the Bay Area is a closely related problem, but the bottom line is that we have to let fire move through the coastal redwoods every few decades, and that means we cannot build tinderbox houses right next to those groves.</text></item><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>I think this page plays down the importance of fire to a healthy redwood ecosystem.  The trees seem to depend on a fire running through every so often and burning out the scrub under the canopy.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this isn&amp;#x27;t how old-world forests work so when European-Americans started building cabins en masse up in SLV in the 1920&amp;#x27;s, they put them right next to large trees and we did everything we could to limit fire.  While there are a limited number of structures in the park itself, almost 1500 structures were destroyed during the CZU fire in the adjacent communities.   My old house was 10 miles away from the park and was across Big Basin Way and Boulder Creek from neighborhoods that were decimated.  (TEN MILES from the park and they were still decimated.)&lt;p&gt;We can&amp;#x27;t have the same type of design, with houses right next to trees.  Once you have people living up there, the likelihood you can convince people to do a &amp;quot;controlled&amp;quot; burn gets pretty low.  Then the fuel builds up for another 100 years and it destroys EVERYTHING in its path.&lt;p&gt;And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed?  Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.&lt;p&gt;This is a great article about how the forest survives fire, but the policy and politics behind how we got to the CZU fire are complex and sometimes pretty subtle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>opportune</author><text>This problem solves itself, just stop bailing those homeowners out with firefighting that’s actually a net bad for the forest and any government funding to rebuild infrastructure or burnt homes.&lt;p&gt;The properties will become uninsurable and you can still live there as long as you can pay without insurance (and likely without a mortgage either).&lt;p&gt;We should not eminent domain this property, that’s a terrible incentive and precedent. I don’t want my tax money spent on bailing out a clearly unviable living arrangement.</text></comment>
<story><title>The regenerating power of Big Basin’s redwoods</title><url>https://worldsensorium.com/the-regenerating-power-of-big-basins-redwoods/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>That would be extremely unpopular.&lt;p&gt;Say you bought a house in the suburbs.  Everything&amp;#x27;s fine.  Then someone comes in and says &amp;quot;Hey.  We didn&amp;#x27;t know there was a problem with the soil under your home, so we&amp;#x27;re just going to come in one night and destroy it.  And you don&amp;#x27;t get to sell it or file an insurance claim.  And we&amp;#x27;re not going to compensate you for it.  You just need to pay off your mortgage, even though we destroyed the house.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Changing zoning is a great idea, but alienating property owners from the value of their purchase is not.&lt;p&gt;The only solution I can think of is eminent domain, but it&amp;#x27;s structurally a little more difficult in California than authoritarian states like Texas that just come in and grab your house to give it to the local baseball team.  So you would have to pass the legislation in Sacramento to authorize the creation of a special district to manage the confiscation of property.  Then you would have to approve the funds, cause this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an improvement district and you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be funding the district from the tax on the property.  Then you have do the confiscation, and sheesh, the San Lorenzo Valley is sort of the definition of &amp;quot;weird deed restrictions.&amp;quot;  And once the state (or maybe the open space trust???) has the land, it has to pay for remediation so the soil doesn&amp;#x27;t wash away and cause landslides that cover the road in three feet of mud.  And you have to do all this before the next big rain event so the roads don&amp;#x27;t completely wash away.&lt;p&gt;So... eminent domain isn&amp;#x27;t a bad idea, per se.  But it&amp;#x27;s HARD.&lt;p&gt;(queue Jethro Tull&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Farm on the Freeway&amp;quot;)</text></item><item><author>billiam</author><text>&amp;gt;And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed? Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t let them rebuild in place. Your points are spot on (a new survey shows 1&amp;#x2F;3 of Californians live in the urban&amp;#x2F;wildland interface where wildfires will destroy most dwellings) and it requires new zoning, new fire legislation on fire insurance, and of course the ability of people to live in higher density through infill and careful planning. The cost of housing in the Bay Area is a closely related problem, but the bottom line is that we have to let fire move through the coastal redwoods every few decades, and that means we cannot build tinderbox houses right next to those groves.</text></item><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>I think this page plays down the importance of fire to a healthy redwood ecosystem.  The trees seem to depend on a fire running through every so often and burning out the scrub under the canopy.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this isn&amp;#x27;t how old-world forests work so when European-Americans started building cabins en masse up in SLV in the 1920&amp;#x27;s, they put them right next to large trees and we did everything we could to limit fire.  While there are a limited number of structures in the park itself, almost 1500 structures were destroyed during the CZU fire in the adjacent communities.   My old house was 10 miles away from the park and was across Big Basin Way and Boulder Creek from neighborhoods that were decimated.  (TEN MILES from the park and they were still decimated.)&lt;p&gt;We can&amp;#x27;t have the same type of design, with houses right next to trees.  Once you have people living up there, the likelihood you can convince people to do a &amp;quot;controlled&amp;quot; burn gets pretty low.  Then the fuel builds up for another 100 years and it destroys EVERYTHING in its path.&lt;p&gt;And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed?  Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.&lt;p&gt;This is a great article about how the forest survives fire, but the policy and politics behind how we got to the CZU fire are complex and sometimes pretty subtle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lazide</author><text>Eh, the counties where this happened in likely couldn’t afford to eminent domain this problem away. It’s their tax base they’d be nuking!&lt;p&gt;If it was a legitimate problem, you’ve described what happens sometimes to folks buying homes. It’s a risk of ownership.&lt;p&gt;Could be sinkholes. Could be subsidence. Could be a toxic waste dump.&lt;p&gt;Lawsuits fly, etc.&lt;p&gt;However, long term it usually boils down to aligned incentives. If the people at risk had to pay for the risk (either by taxes or directly), they’d either move - or cover the costs and reap the good or bad consequences (including bankruptcy&amp;#x2F;loss of assets).</text></comment>