Up First from NPR - Time to Leave

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

The recent wildfires around Los Angeles are just the most recent example of how extreme weather driven by climate change is affecting housing across the country. Millions of homes are at risk of flooding, fire or drought. Increasingly, local municipalities are facing hard decisions about whether to tear homes down or ban new construction altogether. Today on The Sunday Story, we share an episode that originally aired last year in which reporters Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Sommer visit three communities in the US trying to balance the need for housing with the threat of climate-driven disaster.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story from Up First where we go beyond the headlines to bring you one big story. First came the Santa Ana winds, then the massive wildfires. Next, the rain arrived to parts of Southern California, causing mudslides in some of the burned areas. It's hard to comprehend the aftermath. More than two dozen people died, and thousands of people have lost their homes,

including Jennifer Bar-Guiarana of Altadena, California. Recently, she spoke to my colleague Elsa Chang. Us, like tens of thousands of Angelenos at this moment, are scrambling to find temporary housing, but are we looking for short-term temporary, long-term temporary? How do we settle our family in a way that stops making this an emergency

for weeks and months moving ahead? Bargy Arena needs answers fast, but her questions also go to the heart of even bigger questions. Are there places that are simply too dangerous, too risk-prone for people to live? And who decides where those places are? Today, we bring you a story we first aired last year. In it, my colleagues Lauren Summer and Rebecca Hersher of NPR's Climate Desk traveled to communities at risk of natural disasters and considered the hard choices they must make.

Rebecca, Lauren, welcome to The Sunday Story. Hey, it's great to be here. Yeah, thanks. Climate change is driving more extreme weather on all ends of the spectrum. It just seems like, you know, every other day there's some sort of weather record being broken and you're just hearing about it more and more. Yeah, and you know, there are millions of homes at risk from climate change. But then there's the question of where to build new homes.

Right, so on that sort of new home building front, in-city council meetings and planning board meetings and other frankly kind of boring public forums where these decisions actually get made about where to build homes, we are hearing people on opposite sides of the country expressing really similar concerns and fears and hopes. Yeah, it's happening in California with wildfires.

I don't care what you build, it'll burn. It's happening with droughts and lack of water in Arizona. We need to get the water. And it's happening with flooding. So please, you have to think ahead. What is the increase in rainfall that we can anticipate will happen? And in some places, you know, these debates are just beginning. In others, residents have started to figure out some solutions and policies that can guide these building decisions. I mean, so this is one of those things where you can see where people are coming from on all sides of it.

Like, there is a massive housing shortage in this country, and it is very difficult for many people to buy a home. But then, on the other hand, you have all of these homes that have been lost and people that have died in these disasters. Right, yeah. And because building decisions are mostly local decision, it really means that local governments are making some of the most important climate change decisions out there. But you went to three communities that are in the middle of this. So where are we going to go first in this conversation? What community are we going to hear from? Yeah, it's a place with some of the most expensive housing in the country. You can see how close these homes are sited together. So this is Van Collinsworth. He lives here in

Santee, California, which is kind of east of San Diego. And it's, you know, the suburbs. It's kind of at the edge of the whole metropolitan region. And we were walking through rows of homes on the outskirts of town. There's not enough space between them. So if one home ignites, it's likely to ignite the next home and the next one ignite the next and pretty soon you have a cluster burn like you've seen in some of the other larger fires

around the state. Yeah, so Collinsworth, he's the kind of guy who sees fire danger everywhere. His day job is doing wildfire inspections at homes around San Diego. He actually makes sure they've cleared flammable brush. Yeah, I see things. He also runs a local environmental group

called Preserve Wild Santee. And for years now, he's been focused on this huge piece of land on the edge of town. Right now it's open space. It's rolling hills and they're kind of covered in dry grass. And it's where a new development for about 3000 homes is being proposed. When you say a whole bunch of dry grass, I would think that he may see some fire danger in this area. Yeah, exactly.

And this area has burned before. About 20 years ago, the Cedar Fire came right through here and destroyed more than 2,000 homes around the area. That really hit me because we know that a disaster in the past is a good indication that another one could happen in the same place in the future, right? So that's true for wildfires. It's also true for floods.

So that's pretty scary. Yeah, exactly. And this new development, which would be called Fonita Ranch, it concerns Collinsworth because it would be difficult to evacuate. So if a wildfire hits, people wouldn't be able to get out in time. Yeah, yeah. And that's how people have died in other wildfires. And there would only be two roads into this development.

Essentially, they're betting the farm, so to speak, that those homes are not gonna burn. He pointed out, you know, wildfires are getting more extreme. And he thinks that should change the way people think about where to live. I don't think developers and decision makers are willing to acknowledge that we are living

in a new era of extreme weather, and really grapple with what that means for the desire to just build and build and build. So he actually joined with some other environmental groups and they sued to stop the development in 2020 and a judge actually agreed Saying the developer needed to analyze how long a wildfire evacuation would take What does the developer have to say about that and the and in the fire risk? Yeah. Yeah, that's a question I put to them. We're not building, you know wood shingled homes

We're basically doing the opposite. We're developing what's known as a defensible community. So this is Ken Aiden. He's a senior vice president at Home Fed Corporation, and that's the developer of Fnita Ranch. He says this community would be built with wildfire in mind. So the homes will be built out of fire resistant materials. And the more buildings that are built like that, the safer a community is. And then there's a bunch of other stuff Aidan says they're planning to do. There would be a dedicated fire station built. Residents would get inspections twice per year to make sure their flammable vegetation

is cleared out. The vegetation would also be cleared on the outskirts of the development that kind of protects it, makes a buffer. None of this to be clear would be a guarantee that the community wouldn't burn, but Aiden says, you know, they've worked with fire experts to reduce the risk. We've learned through those tough lessons from the other fires, the things we need to do, and believe that we can create a great community and help solve the California's housing shortage. But that doesn't address evacuation, right? Like, wasn't that one of the biggest concerns? Yeah, right. That's what the judge said. Aidan says they've developed a phased approach. So

everyone just doesn't leave all at once and clog up the streets with traffic. So they will identify certain streets and then use the reverse 911 and other tools to evacuate those streets, you know, one at a time on an orderly basis. Yeah, and if you haven't heard of reverse 911, which I hadn't before I started reporting about this, it's used in a lot of disasters. It's how authorities can send an alert to your phone based on where you are saying like, there's a wildfire, you need to get out. And that's what Aiden and his company

worked on after the lawsuit. They changed the project a little, they did more analysis, and then they brought it back to the community and the city council to vote on it again. So, whether they're gonna build or not build, that's what we'll find out next. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. That's what we'll find out next. TNCs apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Bowlin Branch. Change your sleep with the softness of Bowlin Branch's 100% organic cotton sheets. Feel the difference with 15% off your first set of sheets at bowlinbranch.com with code

NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with the Sunday story talking about home building in the age of climate change with NPR's Rebecca Herscher and Lauren Summer. So a city near San Diego is weighing a big choice. They need more housing for residents, but the area is at risk of being hit with a wildfire. So Lauren, what did they decide? Yeah, so... Item number eight is a public hearing for the development of the ranch.

So the Santee City Council members, they heard a lot from both sides and then they had a chance to speak to kind of say how they were going to vote, like council member Laura Koval. Frankly, I'm tired of Santi's greatest export being our young talent and our families. Rent in San Diego is the fifth most expensive in the country. And when it came to the vote, Motion carries with four ayes, Council Member McNeil. It passed. So the need for housing won out in this case.

Yeah, and most of the city council members said they were satisfied with all the fire prep that was proposed. You know, this is something we've seen across the country, like the need for housing winning out. It's really, really hard for city councils to even consider limiting growth under these conditions. That makes sense. Like if you're an elected official, you may not win an election saying that you want to

stop building, especially when people are like, we need houses and you also need those taxes. And you know, when you look around, there really aren't easy choices about where to build because like in California, for example, about a quarter of the land is at high risk of burning. And, you know, that's a lot of land. And that question, you know, how do we build? I mean, California is really an example of where these conversations are just getting started. I mean, there's still not a lot of guidance and support about how to do this for each city. But there are other states that are more involved in that planning process about where people

can live. Okay, so where are we going to head next? Okay, next to the desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona. And that's where there's one topic that always comes up in government meetings. Is there water for it? There's a long running drought. It's still going more than 20 years now. And it's really affecting Arizona's water supply.

It's being tested like never before. And that's why it's on the mind of one person I met there, Craig McFarland. He's the mayor of Casa Grande. It's hard, yeah. Water is hard. So Casa Grande, or a lot of people say Casa Grande. It's kind of like one or the other there.

It's about 45 minutes south of Phoenix. And you drive through some serious desert to get there with these big saguaro cactuses everywhere. The town is in Pinal County, which is the fastest growing county in Arizona. And McFarland, when you talk to him, he's really quick to list all the companies that have moved in.

We have Frito-Lay, we have Abbott, we have Hexel. We also have Lucid, which is the newest electric car manufacturing plant here. That means there's a lot of jobs opening up. As the industry is really rushing into the community, we have a huge need for housing. But where to put the housing? That's the issue. So he unrolls this big map of the city and it actually kind of looks like a patchwork quilt. Some of the land is white and some of the land is blue and those blue parcels, that means there's water.

So these are all areas that single-family homes can be built in. So these are all areas that single family homes can be built in. So how does some land have water and some land doesn't? The blue squares are really about a promise of water. So to build a subdivision here, builders have to show the project has a water supply for a hundred years. So on that map, all the blue squares have that. It's part of a consumer protection law that says that in Arizona, if you're a consumer, we're going to guarantee you have 100 years worth of water. The water mostly comes from these really big aquifers under the ground.

And what regulators do is they have to add up all the demands over the next 100 years, and they have to see if the supply can keep up with that. And they found the demand had grown so much, water is going to run short over the next century. So they stopped issuing those water guarantees for new subdivisions. It's those promises that make you go from a white square to a blue square, which is what you need to build something.

But McFarland, he actually isn't very discouraged about that. Casa Grande will continue to grow. It's just we have to manage it. We have to be frugal with the water we have. And because building hasn't actually stopped in town. So I went by a new development going up in town, construction workers they were putting on the siding for these single-story homes before it got too hot later that day, it'll be more than 300 units.

And even with the water situation, this project didn't have to worry about a water supply. Why not? Yeah, so I asked the developer, Greg Hancock, who is the president of Hancock Builders. This is a great product to rent. So the requirement to have 100 years of water kicks in when a developer takes a big piece of land,

subdivides it into smaller lots, you know, to build homes, and then sells those homes. But Hancock didn't do that here because these will be rented, not sold. We don't need to ensure water supply because it's one lot. Although it is 331 units, it is one lot. So it sounds like then if you build rental units instead of selling the homes, you get out of the requirement for the water. So it's like a loophole. Yeah, exactly. And these are called build to rent projects.

They've been booming in Arizona lately. We have finished 3000. We have 3000 more under construction and000 more in pre-development. I mean the drought and the water challenges, they really don't phase Hancock. People will not stop moving here. There's 12,000 employees at the chip plant in North Phoenix that is one sixth built. People are going to keep coming here. They want to live here. So the question is, if there's still a lot of building going on,

does that defeat the purpose of the rules that are supposed to limit the building with respect to the water supply issues? Yeah, exactly. That's the question. This is growth that's unaccounted for, and that could strain the water supply even more. So really, Arizona seems like an example of somewhere

where there's a law that requires cities to think long-term about the risk of climate change when they're thinking about building, but then there are these loopholes and these ways to get around the rules that they have in place. Yeah, exactly. It's just that cities have to think about that long-term future and how it affects their

growth. I mean, that's kind of the power behind Arizona's law. And as a result, a lot of cities are planning ahead. They're looking seriously at water conservation, at water recycling projects, things that will help boost their supply. seriously at water conservation, at water recycling projects, things that will help boost their supply. So you know, it's incomplete, but it really is forcing that conversation. We'll be right back.

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Submit a video of you playing an original song to the Tiny Desk Contest by February 10th. Find out more and see the official rules at npr.org slash tinydeskcontest. The indicator from Planet Money is diving into the world of batteries. Not the kind you buy at the grocery store. We're talking really big batteries.

The kind that can power thousands of homes. This technology came seemingly out of nowhere. We're digging deep into the battery industry in three back to back episodes. Listen to the indicator from Planet Money podcast on NPR. We're back with a Sunday story and an episode that first aired last year talking about home building in the age of climate change with NPR's Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Summer. So, um, it is what I'm hearing from all of this is that it sounds like it is really hard for local

and state governments to keep people from living in places that aren't going to be safe or that may not have the supplies that they need because of the changing climate. But is there anywhere that is just knocking it out the park? They got it. You know, they got that climate change under control. I don't know about having climate change under control. I wish I could just be like, yeah, mm-hmm. But sort of, sort of, there's a place that experts kept telling us is an outlier in a

good way. So that is the third place that we visited, and it's New Jersey. People are going to die. People are going to die. They will be me and my neighbors, and I don't want that to happen, okay? So that's Catherine Riss, and I know that doesn't sound like success,

but bear with me. She is testifying at a public hearing about a state regulation that would make it a lot harder to build homes in places that are prone to flooding. New Jersey is one of the most flood-prone states in the country. And Riss said her apartment building is at risk. prone to flooding. New Jersey is one of the most flood prone states in the country. And Riss said her apartment building is at risk. She's scared about what will happen as extreme

rainstorms get more common in her state. And you can hear the emotion in her voice. Riss So please, you have to think ahead. What is the increase in rainfall that we can anticipate will happen. We need to plan for that now. So the proposal that the state came up with in the face of these feelings coming from their residents was to basically make it really hard to build new homes in places that are prone to flooding. You know, coastal areas, also inland areas near rivers, and also to require that homes that are renovated in those areas be protected. That was the proposal.

So based on what happened in Arizona and California, I guess my guess would be that this proposal to limit building, that it either failed or there was this big loophole that people were able to like drive a truck through and do whatever they wanted. Yeah, that would fit the pattern. Yep. Yeah, you're right, actually, that it faced a ton of opposition, especially from developers. But in the end, there was no loophole and it was enacted. I mean, how did how did they do that?

Was it money on the side or like, because usually it's some money involved. I mean, this is what I wanted to know, right? Because it's what sets New Jersey apart from other parts of the country. And New Jersey is arguably the national leader in reducing flood risk as the climate warms, which is a big deal because a lot of states in the country have a lot of flood risks.

So it says something that this state is way out front. So what is working in New Jersey? Yeah, I also was intrigued actually and kind of surprised. But yeah, I drove up and I spent some time there and I visited this one town. Woodbridge, New Jersey. One of the first things that happened when I arrived in Woodbridge is that the town's mayor, John McCormick, started bragging to me about how great the highway access is, which not to stereotype, but that is pretty Jersey. We're right where the two major highways in the state cross,

the Parkway and the Turnpike, one, nine, 27, 35, 287, 440, all in Woodbridge. Yeah, it's very Jersey, it's Jersey. It's very Jersey. But all joking aside, Woodbridge is definitely a crossroads kind of place. It's right outside New York City. It's got train lines and highways. There's a lot of water. The ocean is on one side of the town. And then on the other side, there are rivers and creeks. It's very marshy.

And in recent years, they've had a huge flooding problem. It's not just, you know, rain events. It could be a minimal rain event with the high tide and you're in trouble. So a decade ago, Hurricane Sandy devastated this town. Hundreds of homes were underwater. And this is why I visited, because after Sandy, McCormick did something that was kind of controversial.

He actually advocated for hundreds of flooded homes to be permanently removed. That's something we wanted to do, but we had to do it. So how did that work? Yeah, so basically the government bought the houses and knocked them down. But you know, it's controversial for all the reasons you can imagine.

You're actually purposefully eliminating tax base and elected officials do not love that. But, you know, McCormick is an elected official, been elected many times over. And he said when he really sat down and thought about it, he realized that it was actually more expensive and dangerous to keep the houses because these houses were going to flood again. And the town would have to pay for emergency workers to rescue people. They'd have to pay for extra trash removal to get rid of all destroyed belongings and construction debris, and that's all before you consider the mental and physical toll that it would take on the people who are actually living in these homes.

So to him, it made more sense to try to move people out of harm's way. But a home buyout, it is voluntary, And people were not immediately sold on the idea. McCormick told me he still remembers this excruciating town meeting that he presided over in the high school auditorium right after Sandy. I mean, standing up there on the auditorium stage, looking out at 400 people whose lives were just upended is not easy. People were angry. People think we can do something about everything.

So people expect the mayor to be able to solve their problems. And in this case, we did, but it wasn't an easy process. So how did the government convince people to leave? You know, there were a few things that I found in my reporting that seemed to have helped this difficult conversation. So the first is that McCormick thinks it really helped that the city government vocally supported these home buyouts in flood zones. I think that psychologically meant something

to them. Say wait a minute there must be something to this. If the mayor's telling me it's okay to go. The other thing that probably helped is that New Jersey assigns case managers to families that are considering selling their homes to the government. So you have somebody to call, right? Or somebody who follows up with you throughout the process.

Because the process can take years. And in other states, there's been research that shows that a lot of people who might be interested in this kind of thing don't end up actually taking it all the way to the finish line and selling their house because the process is so convoluted, there's so much paperwork, it gets confusing, and so you give up.

So, I mean, what ended up happening in Woodbridge? Like, how many houses did they remove? They ended up removing about 180, which is not a small number for a single town. And statewide New Jersey has removed about a thousand homes in the last decade. And they're trying to make sure that the ones that remain are safer. Obviously, safer is better, but it's still kind of sad when people have to leave their homes that they've lived in all their lives. Absolutely, and I think like one lesson that I saw in New Jersey is that doing this well

means making room for it to be a personal decision and not sort of pushing people to do things that they don't want to do. I talked to the Chief Resilience Officer for New Jersey about this. His name is Nick Angaron. And he said, this work, it's really, really hard. Right. You're talking about, you know, some of the basic principles of, right, of the country is kind of, you know, where and what you can do with your property.

And he said New Jersey still has a really long way to go, even if they're a national leader, because flooding is only getting more severe as the planet keeps getting hotter. Yeah, and I think that's the thing that really struck us in all three places is that the intensity, the urgency of these decisions is just getting worse, right? The population is growing, housing prices are going up, but the disasters are getting

worse too. And it's really hard to have these conversations in a community. It's hard to plan thoughtfully and to respect everyone's decisions when the choices are so hard. But that's what climate change does. It forces us to really think long term and and locally This is where it's really playing out in a big way Well, it seems like you either think long term or the then the long term comes and smacks you in the face

Like you either you either deal with it or it's gonna deal with you, right? Yeah, totally. Well, thank you both so much for bringing your reporting to us and going all over the country with us. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for having us. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Neela Banerjee and Jenny Schmidt. Special thanks to Ryan Kelman. The mix engineer for this episode was James Willits.

Our team includes Liana Simstrom, Justine Yan, and our executive producer Irene Noguchi. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystoryatmpr.org. I'm Ayesha Rosco, up first is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend. Here's some news that really stinks. Garbage is responsible for 20% of planet warming methane emissions. That's why all week, here and now, is looking at ways people are cutting back on waste. Robot dogs hiking landfills, textile recyclers melting down old clothes, dumpster divers scoring big, and builders deconstructing homes instead of demolishing them.

You can hear all that by following our podcast. It's called Here and Now, Anytime. Matt Wilson spent years doing rounds at children's hospitals in New York City. I had a clip-on tie. I wore heelies, size 11. Matt was a medical clown. The whole of a medical clown is to reintroduce the sense of play and joy and hope and light into a space that doesn't normally inhabit. Ideas about navigating uncertainty. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR.

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