A Century of Bad Forest Management

It turns out homeowners insurance is really expensive in areas prone to burning down. California insurance crisis is changing how people buy and sell homes

And it isn't just the areas impacted by wildfire. Insurers are abandoning the entire state, because that is how insurance is regulated.

When Cindi Koehn listed her Lake County home for sale last year, she didn’t expect any trouble selling the beautiful 1.7-acre property overlooking the lake. But three interested buyers walked away. The cost to insure it, they told her, would be too expensive.

As a lot of journalists do, this author "gives a human face" to the problem by following one person. They do get around to the overall situation eventually.

In Lake County, the availability and affordability of insurance has been an issue for several years, according to Marie Wotherspoon, a real estate agent in the area. But the effects of the crisis have begun manifesting elsewhere. In San Diego, where Wotherspoon was based until last year, Foremost Insurance’s decision to stop offering condo insurance caused a number of condo owners to lose coverage, she said. Even in some coastal cities, buyers have struggled to find insurance, she said.

A century of "fighting every fire," followed by 30 or 40 years of environmentalists opposing every form of forest management has lead to an environment where fires like The Camp Fire are not a once in a lifetime occurrence, but a regular feature of life in California. Diseased trees that can't be removed, together with lots of undergrowth to provide kindling, means that fires are fairly well guaranteed to get out of control.

A list of posts on Forest Management:

• California’s Forest Management and The New York Times Selective Memory
• How Environmentalists Killed Forest Management
• “An epidemic of dead and dying trees”