Fire-prone areas across the country are deploying cutting-edge technologies to reduce the risk of the next deadly fire. But as community leaders have implemented wildfire models and mobile robots, they have found that one of the biggest challenges in fire prevention is galvanizing collective action by property owners who disagree about what changes should be made.
“Every city has a city council and a planning commission where people have really engaged, motivated and emotional discussions about whether or not something gets approved or built,” said Roy Wright, executive director of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. “This topic of fire resistance just joined this forum.”
Mr. Wright compares firefighting to vaccinations and herd immunity. Putting your house on stilts will protect it from flooding, regardless of your neighbor's actions. But if you “harden” your home by replacing the roof, gutters, and siding, and your neighbor leaves their home filled with flammable materials and unprotected structures, your home remains at increased risk.
In Lake Tahoe, a new initiative from local environmental organization Tahoe Fund hopes to reduce wildfire risk and associated insurance costs and make neighborhoods on the lake's north shore models of community fire resilience.
The project, which began in earnest last May in Tyrolian Village, a community of 228 single-family homes and condominiums on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, involves three main steps. First, nearby forests are logged using BurnBots, remote-controlled combustion chambers on wheels that work much faster than human teams to control brush and overgrowth.
Second, provide each property owner with a certificate containing individual assessments and recommendations from the local fire authority for improvements to protect homes and prevent them from catching fire in a fire, such as: B. replacing old roofs and removing flammable trees too close to houses.
Finally, the group has funded modeling exercises for future wildfires designed to show which homes remain most at risk of acting as superspreaders and threatening other structures, with individual reports to be delivered to each homeowner.
“It's really like an experiment in social science and psychology,” said Amy Berry, executive director of the Tahoe Fund. “I think what's changing things is that homeowners can't get insurance or their premiums are so outrageously high that they think, 'I really have to do something'.”
Ms. Berry hopes her organization's efforts will reduce insurance costs and ultimately provide a model that inspires homeowners to take action.
Attempts to apply new regulations to enforce better fire resilience are met with resistance, particularly in California. A long-in-the-works effort by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to implement Zone Zero — a requirement that property owners secure their homes against fire risks and build an ember-resistant, noncombustible five-foot-tall barrier around homes — gained momentum in early 2025 when Gov. Gavin Newsom called for the initiative to be completed by December in response to damage from last January's wildfires in Los Angeles.
Many Los Angeles-area city council members, neighborhood associations and homeowners fought back, including during a tense public meeting in September. Opponents cited the cost of mitigation measures, damage to tree canopy and the aesthetics of the neighborhood. Work to finalize these rules has now been postponed until March.
Getting the vast majority of owners of already-built homes in high-risk areas to renovate and rebuild will be a challenge, said Kimiko Barrett, senior wildfire research and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group focused on land management.
“There are a lot of different opinions at the moment,” Ms Barrett said. “It's the age-old argument between applied science and theoretical science. The theory will say it should be completely non-flammable because that's what we know. But applied science says, 'Yes, but in the real world those are not realistic expectations.'”
A new report from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety on the Los Angeles wildfires highlights the difference that defensible space around homes makes, as required in Zone Zero. If more than a quarter of the area around a house had flammable plants before the fire, the risk of destruction increased to around 90 percent.
On Kauai, Hawaii's fourth-largest island, strict zone zero rules were passed in September for so-called plantation camps, densely populated rental communities on former agricultural land.
After the Kaumakani Fire nearly burned a camp in 2024, local planners set out to enact new rules for cleanup. They used previous fire analysis and technology from a company called Esri to determine exactly where resiliency regulations would be applied. Planners used modified photos of all buildings in the camp to visualize what new requirements might look like, showing that they would not significantly alter the historic character of these homes. Now, any new building in these neighborhoods must follow strict rules, including installing a five-foot-tall concrete border around each home and implementing vegetation management.
These efforts join growing movements to create homeowner certification programs, such as: B. Wildfire Partners in Boulder County, Colorado, which gives homeowners the opportunity to self-certify their property for a reasonable fee from insurance companies.
The insurers are reacting. By using mitigation data and modeling for their condominium community, owners of the McCloud Condominium Homeowners Association were able to reduce their annual premium from $1.3 million to about $913,000, said Andrew Engler, founder of RockRose Risk, a local insurance broker.
But it currently remains an incomplete solution.
“The carrot worked well,” said Greg Erfani, president of the Tyrolean Village Homeowners Association. But without building code compliance or new HOA requirements, not everyone has joined the effort. Mr. Erfani said about a third of households had completed the work and only 60 percent of residents had even opened the report's recommendations.
His own home had 23 violations, including pine needles on the roof and improper wood storage; So far he has crossed about 15 of them off the list. Starting next year, the initiative will begin offering neighbors $50,000 in grants from local utility Nevada Energy to help finance some of the more expensive upgrades, such as replacing a patio.
“It’s a community issue,” said Ms. Berry, the Tahoe Fund’s executive director. “If one house in the neighborhood doesn’t clean up its act, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the community does.”