If it was a legitimate problem, you’ve described what happens sometimes to folks buying homes. It’s a risk of ownership.
Could be sinkholes. Could be subsidence. Could be a toxic waste dump.
Lawsuits fly, etc.
However, long term it usually boils down to aligned incentives. If the people at risk had to pay for the risk (either by taxes or directly), they’d either move - or cover the costs and reap the good or bad consequences (including bankruptcy/loss of assets).
The number of completed homes is low.
The number of issued build permits is not.
The problem isn't just that people build houses in places they probably shouldn't have, it's that those houses represent the primary wealth of a number of a number of not-entirely-upper-class families. I mean sure... if you're banking a couple mil per quarter working in the venture mines, you can afford to give up your house in the woods. But for the majority of people who live there, that would be financially ruinous, and thus... unpopular.
> unpopular
No matter if it's Bonny Doon or Felton it will be unpopular with the people living in the woods.
The alternative is that the rest of us pay for their chosen lifestyle. The vast majority of people don't live in up in the mountains and don't rely on little towns existing up there. I don't see why defunding would be overall unpopular.
The damage from the CZU fires was certainly intensified by man-made decisions, and most of these a result of the anti-development turn Santa Cruz County took after the late 1970s.
Two very simple and straightforward solutions to mitigate destructive wildfires in the SC Mountains are to 1) allow logging, and 2) stop favoring existing homes over new homes when it comes to fire resistant requirements.
One of the reasons Santa Cruz County (or California) is in the state it's in is people don't want to hear this.
Logging: There are tens of thousands of acres of TP (Timber Production) zoned land in the Santa Cruz Mountains -- very much in areas that burned -- that have been blocked from logging due to years and years of environmental reviews and neighbor complaints. These lands could have just simply been logged. There would have been healthy trees left (clear-cutting is illegal) and overall the forest would have been in a much better state to resist fires. Also, Santa Cruz County unfortunately allows single family homes on TP-zoned parcels. So there are lots of TP-zoned parcels that will never be logged as they are really now residential lots in disguise. This does not help forest management at all.
Fire resistant requirements: I'm one of the few people I know that has actually built a new house on raw land in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the last 10 years. It took me nearly 3 years for permits alone for an 1100 sq ft single story SFH built on flat ground near a public highway. This type of timeframe dissuades most people from new construction here. This is on purpose: it's what the county and people in the county want.
The actual Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) building codes are very straightforward and increase the cost of construction by only about 10 percent. Class A shingles, Type X gypsum underlayment everywhere, approved fire resistant siding, fire+ember/resistant vents, tempered fire resistant windows/shutters, indoor sprinkler system, vegetation clearance everywhere. It was all required (and inspected) for me to legally move in.
None of my neighbors in their 1930s/1940s homes are remotely as fire ready. Remotely. Lots of the homes that burned in the CZU fires were pretty distant from the fire line. All it took was floating embers setting shrubs on fire, and those shrubs burning and getting embers sucked into a vent, and many a house became a tinderbox.
Yet my neighbors can sell their homes -- and there is a decent amount of home sales up here still -- and not have to upgrade a single thing.
Since wildfires don't care about whether a house has been standing 1 year or 100 years, this is obviously driven by politics and not fire safety.
There was a state law passed in 2021 that mandated that any home located in a State Responsibility Area Fire Severity Zone of High or Very High get a fire safety inspection and approval (for vegetation clearance) before an existing home sale. Updated 2022 CalFire maps have classified a good amount of homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains as High or Very High, so the updated maps becoming legally binding will be a good first start.
But it's a small start.
How much did this set you back? I assume you're still living there? How have the fire seasons affected your insurance and sense of the area's longer-term viability? (I'm not in CA, but the redwoods have been stuck in my head for a while now. I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about moving to a few places including SLV.)
Some of the homes in my neighborhood (much older but roughly the same size) have gone for $700K-$800K recently, so new construction isn't much different in cost either way.
It just takes years to build.
I'm a software developer, and many familiar with Silicon Valley home prices will look at the SC Mountains and see immediate 50% or more reductions in house prices and just think they have discovered a real life cheat code to home ownership in coastal California.
It helps to like rain, yard work and chain sawing up large trees that fall after strong windstorms, doing one's own home/car repairs, and have a generator for the weeks long power outages. This isn't the type of area where contractors are thick on the ground and ready to work at a moment's notice. All of my neighbors do their own repairs. Public road closures after winter storms are common.
So the price differences between Silicon Valley and the SC Mountains reflect a lot more than just distance from one's favorite amenities.
I'm not being snarky, btw: I love it here.
Everything is a calculated risk and some people are just going to stay no matter what. Including me. And 3 of my neighbors who do their own work -- one remodeled his own house personally, where I used subcontractors to build mine -- work in the tech industry themselves. So the area does attract new residents.
It just takes more work than an average urban/suburban homeowner may expect or be used to.
With that said, in lots of the San Lorenzo Valley (like Felton) or adjacent areas like Scotts Valley one can have a pretty comfy small town living and still feel like one is in the redwoods.
The properties will become uninsurable and you can still live there as long as you can pay without insurance (and likely without a mortgage either).
We should not eminent domain this property, that’s a terrible incentive and precedent. I don’t want my tax money spent on bailing out a clearly unviable living arrangement.
Say you bought a house in the suburbs. Everything's fine. Then someone comes in and says "Hey. We didn't know there was a problem with the soil under your home, so we're just going to come in one night and destroy it. And you don't get to sell it or file an insurance claim. And we're not going to compensate you for it. You just need to pay off your mortgage, even though we destroyed the house."
Changing zoning is a great idea, but alienating property owners from the value of their purchase is not.
The only solution I can think of is eminent domain, but it's structurally a little more difficult in California than authoritarian states like Texas that just come in and grab your house to give it to the local baseball team. So you would have to pass the legislation in Sacramento to authorize the creation of a special district to manage the confiscation of property. Then you would have to approve the funds, cause this wouldn't be an improvement district and you wouldn't be funding the district from the tax on the property. Then you have do the confiscation, and sheesh, the San Lorenzo Valley is sort of the definition of "weird deed restrictions." And once the state (or maybe the open space trust???) has the land, it has to pay for remediation so the soil doesn't wash away and cause landslides that cover the road in three feet of mud. And you have to do all this before the next big rain event so the roads don't completely wash away.
So... eminent domain isn't a bad idea, per se. But it's HARD.
(queue Jethro Tull's "Farm on the Freeway")