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FIRE HAZARD - Los Angeles is selling City-owned parcels once deemed too dangerous for homes in wildfire corridors—and calling it equity
Last week, the Los Angeles City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee advanced legislation branded Small Lots, Big Impacts, introduced by Councilmember Nithya Raman, in a moment of what can only be described as fire-blindness, to put it kindly. As the sponsor of this legislation, a leading proponent of housing density policy, and now a declared candidate for mayor, Raman is asking Los Angeles to adopt wildfire risk as an acceptable cost of speed and density.
Small Lots, Big Impacts targets City-owned parcels that were previously acquired precisely because they were deemed unsafe to build on—often after disasters. Two parcels on the City’s current sell-off list sit within Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.
One is a difficult-to-access hillside lot above the Hollywood Bowl, located off a narrow, winding dead-end road, where a prior structure was demolished after a major landslide decades ago. The City retained this parcel for slope stabilization and infrastructure protection—not housing. Another parcel lies off chronically congested Laurel Canyon, a known evacuation choke point with a documented fire history.
These parcels remained vacant not due to neglect, but because risk was acknowledged and deliberately removed from the system. Yet under this policy, thousands of City-owned parcels once deemed too dangerous to build may now be sold for private housing development.
Warnings Were Given—and Ignored
Prior to the vote, the Housing and Homelessness Committee received a formal letter from the Hillside Federation, founded in 1952 and representing approximately 250,000 residents across Los Angeles’ most fire-prone communities—neighborhoods that evacuate first, lose insurance first, and absorb the consequences of City Hall’s land-use decisions.
The Federation urged the City to exclude hillside parcels located in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, citing fundamental access, evacuation, and life-safety constraints that cannot be mitigated through building design, landscaping, or home hardening.
It did not ask the City to kill the program. It made a narrow, responsible request:
Remove parcels located in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones from the City’s land-sales portfolio.
The Committee advanced the legislation anyway.
This decision is especially troubling after the one year anniversary of the LA Fires. Yet despite City staff claims that parcels were “carefully vetted,” Small Lots, Big Impacts contains no wildfire evacuation analysis, no assessment of wind-driven fire behavior, no discussion of insurance availability, and no consideration of cumulative risk.
Fire is treated as a future problem—something to be managed later through vegetation clearance, defensible-space mandates, and individual home hardening.
You Cannot Home-Harden or Landscape Your Way Out of Bad Siting
The fallback argument is always the same: plant removal, ember-resistant construction, and defensible-space compliance will manage the risk. But California’s most destructive fires are driven by extreme winds, ember storms, and house-to-house ignition—forces that overwhelm graveled yards and Class A roofs.
Clearing yards does not slow 70-mph winds. Gravel does not stop flying embers.
Screened vents do not prevent structure-to-structure ignition when homes are built five feet or less apart. And none of these so-called safety measures widen roads, relieve congestion, or create a second way out of a burning canyon.
Which is why this policy does not merely gamble with the safety of future residents.
It raises the fire risk for existing neighbors.
Houses Are the Fire’s Fuel in Dense Cities
This reality is not controversial among fire scientists. In a recent NBC News investigation, wildfire researcher Dr. Jack Cohen—whose Home Ignition Zone work for the Insurance Institute of Business and Home Safety is frequently cited to justify a five foot defensible space zone around homes—put it plainly:
“When fires enter dense communities under extreme wind conditions, the homes themselves become the ignition source, turning what began as a wildfire into an urban conflagration that no number of firefighters can control.”
NBC’s reporting reinforced this visually: burned-out homes surrounded by singed but standing trees—evidence that buildings, not vegetation, were the primary fuel. Every additional structure increases radiant heat, ember production, and the likelihood of house to house fire spread.
Yet City Hall continues to advance policies that add the most dangerous fuel—houses—and reduced spacing between them in precisely the places where wind-driven urban firestorms are most likely.
When policymakers treat home hardening as a universal solution, they quietly convert design limitations into compliance failures. Homes that cannot be practically retrofitted are not made safer by mandate. They are made noncompliant—placing owners at risk of fines, insurance cancellation, property liens, and pressure to rebuild or sell.
Equity Language Used to Transfer Risk
Los Angeles presents itself as a city committed to equity and compassion. But this policy crosses a dangerous line. It sells City-owned land in known wildfire hazard zones, approves housing where the City itself once deemed construction unsafe, and transfers that risk onto working- and middle-class residents—while calling the result “equity.”
The program explicitly targets first-time homebuyers earning 80–150% of Area Median Income: teachers, nurses, city workers, skilled trades, and families without generational wealth. These are not people with the resources to self-insure against wildfire loss, absorb sudden insurance cancellations, or walk away from an uninhabitable home.
For a substantial portion of Los Angeles’ older hillside homes, “home hardening” is not a marginal upgrade — it would require demolition-level reconstruction that is economically or structurally infeasible. These are not abstract concerns. They are lived realities for existing middle-income, fixed-income, and legacy homeowners who are being placed in greater danger through no action of their own as the City approves new dense construction that effectively adds fuel to an already volatile system.
That is not equity. It is transferring foreseeable risk to those with the least margin for error.
This Is How Tragedies Are Manufactured
Once sold, the land leaves public control permanently. The wildfire, evacuation, and insurance risks do not. They are transferred to future residents, existing neighboring homeowners, and first responders—while the City walks away from both ownership and responsibility.
Introducing housing on land the City once deemed too dangerous to build on is not innovation. Adding density to dangerous locations does not solve a housing problem.It adds fuel.
When the next fire races through a dense canyon or hillside neighborhood, officials will express shock. They will cite codes. They will point fingers. They will say no one could have known.
Housing people on dangerous land in known fire corridors and calling it equity is not compassion. It is negligence. And it deserves to be called exactly that.
(Diana Nicole is an ecological horticulturist and wildfire policy analyst in Los Angeles. She writes about fire policy and landscapes that actually work for fire safety at dianaznicole.com. Previous columns are available at the citywatchla archives.)
