Down the street from the Los Angeles Angels’ stadium in Anaheim, a crowd gathers to watch two homes burn.
In less than 30 minutes, one structure is reduced to its smoldering, blackened wood frame, while the other, thanks to simple changes to its design, is remarkably unscathed. Of course, this was the point of the demonstration, which was held last June by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) at a firefighting training center.
The heat from the burning demo home is fierce as we stand outside under a bright, cloudless sky. The plume of thick, black smoke is what eventually pushes me back from the front of the audience. But it’s still nothing like the worst blazes I remember growing up with in Southern California, when the sky glows a hazy orange and ash falls like snow.
Firefighters, housing developers, and insurance professionals gathered for the annual Pacific Coast Builders Conference who I talk to know what that kind of inferno feels like — or at least have to navigate the unthinkable loss left in its aftermath. It’s what brings us all here today — the hope that there are steps to take that can help a home survive. The same demonstration the previous year was enough to convince one builder to change course. “It was shocking,” says Steve Ruffner, a regional general manager and division president at KB Home. “That was when I was like, Okay, we’re in a high fire zone in Escondido. We got to see if we can do this.” KB Home, one of the most prolific homebuilders in the US, had already broken ground on Dixon Trail, a new community in Escondido, California. It was about to get a makeover to be more like the demo house built to withstand a blaze.
It’s the kind of neighborhood-scale action that’s becoming more crucial as wildfire risk rises with climate change. Wildfires are becoming too big a threat for any single homeowner, neighborhood, or even firefighting squad to just play defense. The fight is now collective and starts from the ground up, when homes are built. It continues with everyday actions that hold property owners accountable for their neighbors’ safety, too.
In many ways, Southern California is ground zero for this crusade. Here, builders, fire districts, and homeowner associations are figuring out how to keep living in an already fire-prone landscape that’s increasingly becoming a tinderbox. Preparing for disaster — as the state has done with earthquakes — is part of the ethos. When it comes to wildfires, the “big one” for greater Los Angeles arrived a year ago, when blazes destroyed more than 16,250 structures. Each time the winds pick up on a hot, dry day, that preparation is tested.
“If you just stand right here, which way is the wind blowing?” asks Dave McQuead, fire chief of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire District.
It’s a hot August day, and fortunately, the breeze is cool against our faces. We’re standing on a hill in a posh gated community of Rancho Santa Fe fittingly named Cielo, the Spanish word for sky or heaven.
But what some might otherwise appreciate as an ocean view with a breeze, McQuead sees through a more scrutinizing lens.
We’re looking down at a valley where the hills dip and slope into flatlands just before the ocean. The topography becomes a natural tunnel for coastal gales. If there happened to be a vehicle on fire below that transferred to vegetation, for example, the wind could easily blow heat and flames from that blaze straight to us. As one side of the valley burns, it would transfer heat to the other side of the slope — drying out the vegetation and priming it to also burn. It creates a convection column of gas, smoke, and ash. We’re standing on top of a natural chimney in the landscape.
“Dangerous spot,” McQuead says.
Megafires start small, often with an ember. Homes that face the most risk often sit where forest or brush meets suburbia, along what’s technically called the wildland-urban interface (WUI — pronounced “woo-ee” in much more innocuous-sounding jargon). Here, a gale might easily fling embers from a forest fire into a neighborhood. An ember might land on a rosebush in a planter or drift into a home through a vent.
Once that first home starts to burn, it can make the situation more explosive for the rest of the community. There are more embers, and now direct flames threatening neighbors. Sheer radiant heat can cause nearby fire-prone materials to combust.
Those three elements combined — embers, direct flame contact, and radiant heat — are what burn communities to the ground, says Kimiko Barrett, lead research and policy analyst at the nonprofit Headwaters Economics.
Conversely, the best way to protect any single home is to harden the entire community against those threats. The goal is to limit weak points where embers might gain a foothold from which to spread into an inferno.
“What we do know about wildfire risk reduction to homes is that it has to occur at that neighborhood scale because of the nature of how homes burn down,” Barrett says. “It’s not a wildfire problem, it’s a structural ignition problem, and that requires a big shift in our paradigm and expectations of what it means to live with wildfires.”
Fire has always been a part of the ecology in some parts of the world, including much of California. Wildfires naturally clear debris, fertilize the soil, and help some seeds germinate. But in the future, living in harmony with those fires is going to take a more concerted effort.
European settlers threw the natural balance out of whack in California. They outlawed Indigenous practices of controlled burns to manage the land, wisdom that policymakers more recently started to heed by reintroducing prescribed burns. The timber industry also stomped out fires that would have been healthy for the forest and nearby communities. Years of all-out fire suppression have allowed dead vegetation to build up into loads of tinder that then fuel much larger conflagrations. Hotter, drier conditions with climate change also supercharge blazes. Human-caused climate change has extended California’s fire season and increased the number of acres burned.
At the same time, unaffordable housing in urban centers has pushed many residents farther into the wildland-urban interface, where they’re more vulnerable to fire. Nearly a third of housing across the US, more than 44 million homes, was located in WUI in 2020, according to federal data. Much of that development has taken place since the 1990s.
Avoiding high-risk areas might be one way to adapt to a warming, more fire-prone world. There’s also talk of “managed retreat,” coordinated efforts to abandon areas that are just too difficult to defend against escalating climate disasters like fires and floods. But that’s often not a feasible or fair option for people, especially when skyrocketing housing prices and rising temperatures that suck the landscape dry mean there’s nowhere safer to go.
McQuead brought me to that Cielo hilltop because the neighborhood is actually known for having survived an inferno, the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, thanks in large part to the proactive measures taken by its former fire chief, Erwin Willis. A decade earlier, the fire district became one of the first to establish new building codes to protect against fire, including residential fire sprinklers and defensible space surrounding homes.
The Witch Creek Fire forced some 21,000 residents within the fire district to evacuate. After the firestorm, the damage was one-sided. No structures were lost in Cielo or other newly-constructed communities in Rancho Santa Fe. More than 60 homes and outbuildings were destroyed by the blaze, but only in areas built before the new building code applied. It was stunning evidence that helped California adopt statewide building codes for fire-resistant construction the following year.
Back at the IBHS burn demonstration in Anaheim, I meet State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant, who tells me about a pilot program that aims to provide financial assistance to Californians who can’t afford, or can’t physically do the tasks required, to harden a home against fire. After all, he says 90 percent of homes at risk of wildfire in California were built before the building code was updated in 2008.
“A home is significantly more likely to survive a wildfire when it has home-hardening retrofits built to today’s code paired with defensible space. But we continue to see those homes still burn as well,” Berlant says. “Hardening” is the technical term for making a home more resistant to embers, flames, and radiant heat. “And so what we continue to really gain out of our research is that it has to be done at neighborhood scale. If I do everything right, but based on density, my neighbor next to me doesn’t, we’re still both at risk.”
How to harden a home against fire
About 11 miles from Rancho Santa Fe, Escondido, California, has a higher risk of wildfire than 98 percent of communities in the US, according to the USDA Forest Service. Nevertheless, it’s still one of the most populous cities in San Diego County, with nearly 150,000 residents and more moving into newly built communities like Dixon Trail.
Dixon Trail is on the edge of town in Escondido, nestled at the foot of shrubby hills. When I ask Steve Ruffner why KB Home would build here despite the risk, he’s unfazed.
“You’re not going to be able to put a community like this in the middle of a city,” he says. Construction in an urban center would avoid the ‘wildland-urban interface’ — but there isn’t enough space to build rows of detached, single-family homes like we see here, and that’s what a lot of buyers want.
What he says next surprises me. By becoming the first neighborhood built in the US to meet IBHS’ home- and neighborhood-level wildfire resilience standards, what I thought would be a vulnerability in the location is now expected to be another firefighting tool. “We will be a backstop to prevent fire going to all those older homes surrounding us,” Ruffner says.
There are no real boundaries between Dixon Trail and the community next door, Eureka (which was not built by KB Home). But it’s easy to see where one ends and the next begins. The older neighborhood is noticeably greener, with manicured lawns, roses, hibiscus, and other bushes climbing up against the walls of homes.
Dixon Trail is purposefully more austere because these homes have been “hardened.” One of the clearest differences is the 5-foot moat of gravel and concrete surrounding the perimeter of each home, a buffer free of any potentially flammable plants or materials that’s called “defensible space.”
Other details are less obvious. Vents in many homes are meant to let outside air in under the floor or roof of a home; good airflow can prevent the moisture that leads to mold or rot. But that flow of air into the home can also let embers inside, potentially igniting a structure fire. With home hardening, vents are designed to block embers, covered with metal mesh to keep embers from sneaking into the house. The garage doors are all metal, with no plastic windows that might melt and let embers inside. Windows are often weak points, so those are all double-pane (instead of single-pane) with tempered glass that’s stronger and more heat-resistant.
Many of the measures are already required in newly built homes by California law, including covered vents and double-pane windows. KB Home followed even more extensive standards set by IBHS. It has since broken ground on another community in the Sacramento area similarly being built to meet IBHS standards at the home and neighborhood level. Here at Dixon Trail, what appears to be wood fencing is actually made of steel, and so are retaining walls. All the upgrades were cost neutral, according to Ruffner. Using recycled metal for fencing, for example, didn’t wind up costing more than heavy timber would have.
Nevertheless, these homes aren’t cheap. Houses in Dixon Trail start at around $1 million, which is close to the median price for the county. But in an already unaffordable housing market, the fire resilience measures are also meant to cut down on soaring insurance costs. I met Kifah Samara and his wife as they were moving into their new home in Dixon Trail in June. Samara coached a soccer team that occasionally played inside of the neighboring community of Eureka, and after spotting the construction, stopped into the Dixon Trail visitor center on a Saturday.
He’d been looking to buy a new home for four or five years already, but got an extra push this year. He says home insurance for his previous condo had jumped from roughly $750 a year to nearly $4,000 after the devastating fires nearby in the greater Los Angeles area in January 2025. Before then, his rate had typically only risen about 20 percent per year. “This year it was crazy,” he says. After moving into Dixon Trail, built to meet insurance industry-developed standards, he says he’s paying closer to $1,400 a year. “I think it was a good decision,” he tells me of the move.
The megafires that laid waste to the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades outside of LA weigh heavily on the minds of many of the people I met while reporting this story. “Now that we’ve seen entire cities burn down, if you’re going to start fresh, do it right,” Samara’s next-door neighbor Kevin Walton tells me. He and his wife moved in a couple weeks before we met to be closer to their daughter, who was about to give birth to their grandson. The fire-resilient measures, particularly the indoor sprinkler system, he says, were a plus. “It just gives some peace of mind.”
When I ask Len Gregory, who moved to Rancho Santa Fe about 10 years ago, what brought him here, he tells me emphatically, “The trees! The trees!”
The community’s eucalyptus trees are iconic; they’re even depicted on the Rancho Santa Fe Fire District’s emblem and a patch on Chief McQuead’s uniform. They’re not native to the region. Local lore says that a railroad company planted the trees in the early 1900s as a source of timber for the rail lines, and they’ve taken a foothold ever since. Their fragrant oil also happens to make these trees extremely flammable.
We’re surrounded by them at the Ewing Preserve, a nearly 25-acre parcel of protected land managed by Gregory’s HOA, also called Rancho Santa Fe. Before retiring, Gregory was a distributor of landscape equipment and irrigation products, which gives him a little expertise in leading the HOA’s forest health and preservation work. As much as he loves the trees, part of that work is to remove some of them — replacing the most fire-prone vegetation with less combustible, native species and thinning undergrowth.
It sounds like a hard sell, particularly when the trees are beloved to residents, including Gregory himself. But when it comes to fire mitigation, Gregory says, they’ll do whatever it takes.
“Quite frankly, we live in terror,” Gregory tells me before rattling off a history of infernos from the Witch Fire to the devastating January 2025 blazes surrounding Los Angeles. “I mean, you can’t live in Southern California — actually, anywhere in the West — without being terrified.”
A year after the fires that devastated Altadena and Pacific Palisades, many residents are still coping with the aftermath. After the public outpouring of support and solidarity from politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and philanthropists both near and far, survivors are still left reeling. Reality TV veteran Spencer Pratt, who was among those who lost their homes, announced a mayoral campaign for Los Angeles this month that’s largely fueled by his fury at officials for failing to stop the blazes.
Other people are navigating construction and insurance nightmares with far fewer resources and clout. Few homes have been rebuilt, while others are still standing but uninhabitable from the damage. And each time the region’s Santa Ana winds — which fanned the flames in January 2025 — kick up, it’s a reminder that another terrible fire could break out. It’s all the more reason for many Southern Californians to want to take action.
Here in the Ewing Preserve, much of the work is focused on removing any dead trees, and preventing beetle infestations from killing more. They want to remove any debris that can become “ladder fuel,” which could help flames climb to the tree canopy — a point at which blazes move faster and become harder to control. An even more ambitious project is underway nearby at another preserve called Arroyo along the San Dieguito River.
“Without this work, [firefighters] would be racing a speeding train,” says Jonathan Appelbaum, a biologist working with the nonprofit San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy.
With the blessing of the Rancho Santa Fe HOA that owns the land, the conservancy got a $1.5 million grant in 2024 from the California Wildlife Conservation Board to remove invasive trees — restoring the river corridor habitat into a natural firebreak. Firefighters use these breaks to try to stop an inferno from advancing; the idea is to create or rely on an existing barrier that flames can’t cross. A river and damp vegetation surrounding it is a great option, but less so if it’s choked off and overrun with more fire-prone trees that can fling embers across.
When I visit Arroyo with Applebaum, the river is little more than a trickle. It’s the dry season, but invasive trees aren’t helping. “Eucalyptus is like sticking a straw into the ground and sucking as hard as possible to drink all the water up,” he says.
Eucalyptus and palm trees are Applebaum’s biggest targets. It’s grueling work, particularly in the most dense and remote parts of the preserve, where they’ve had to resort to airlifting trees out by helicopter. Native willows, sycamores, and cottonwood trees are taking their place. Species that evolved to take advantage of the river’s hydrology here are more efficient with how they use water and manage to stay perennially hydrated, Appelbaum tells me. Their higher moisture content makes them less flammable than oil-filled eucalyptus and palms with dead fronds that light up like Roman candles. A year into the grant program, they had removed close to 80 percent of eucalyptus within the target 12-acre area.
Taking a community-wide approach to wildfire prevention is especially crucial for managing shared spaces like this preserve, which can help or hurt neighboring properties when fires approach. But the Rancho Santa Fe HOA is also being proactive when it comes to helping its residents maintain their individual properties. It has also partnered with the startup FireWatch to provide residents with aerial maps of their property that can show risks they might otherwise miss on the ground. By plane, FireWatch can actually use a multispectral camera system to map the health of trees and plants below. The cameras can read near-infrared wavelengths invisible to the naked eye. What looks like a green canopy in a regular image appears in shades of red and pink — with stressed or dying plants, perhaps infested by those pesky beetles, appearing more brown or gray.
“This is a tree in decline. I can tell that this is going to need treatment or it’s going to need to be removed,” Caitlin Kreutz, a biologist at SWCA Environmental Consultants who has worked with FireWatch and the Rancho Santa Fe HOA, says as we flip between looking at the green and pink images of a property from FireWatch’s home base at a small airport in Carlsbad. To the naked eye, she says, it’s just a green tree. But in infrared, it’s much duller in color than its neighbors. Besides, as a homeowner, you’re not going to be able to look down on your tree’s foliage to spot any subtle changes because you’re underneath it. “This just gives a whole other perspective,” Kreutz says.
In 2025, the Rancho Santa Fe HOA was officially designated as a Firewise community, which recognizes adherence to another set of nationally recognized guidance for reducing wildfire risk that was developed by the National Fire Protection Association. The designation saves residents up to 5 percent on their insurance premiums, according to the HOA.
“Communities tend to stand or fall together,” says John Bailey, a professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University who studies fire management. “I see a key solution being taking the information that we have [on home-hardening and] expanding it to a critical number if not all neighbors.”
If each home is also relying on their neighbors to do their part, that also means that every convert reached can have an outsize impact with the actions they take. That’s ultimately what the burn demo I attended in Anaheim was all about. After KB Home’s Steve Ruffner attended a similar IBHS demo in 2024 on a whim, his company became a sponsor of the event in 2025.
“I was here just like you last year getting sunburned and wondering what the heck this was about,” Ruffner says to the crowd gathered at the opening of the event. “I can tell you I’ve lived through a lot of red flag days just like you … and I just want to thank you for coming to watch this because it changed my life.”