This is more a matter of market rules than an inherent property of insurance; currently we do not let insurers get sufficiently granular due to some assumptions about wider social benefits of a less individualised system.

This might be reworked to allow for fire resistant designs to be a factor.

[delayed]

Try and extend this logic to other highly correlative, immutable individual factors.

> Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone else.

but this means the insurance company is mispricing (or is being forced to misprice) the risk of resistant homes.

In theory, when correct pricing happens, these resistant homes should face less claims, and thus the premiums paid on them is high profit margin; ala, the customer is a good one, and the insurer should persue this customer more than another. This ought to results in a discount for said customer's premium, as more insurers vie for this customer over another.

This does happen, it's just done at neighborhood level. That makes some sense, the biggest fire risk factor for your house is probably your neighbor's house burning down.

I kinda figured it was self-destructive arson (detected or undetected) or gross negligence, and I'm mostly paying for those.

Similar to when I look at causes of death for my age group and can pretty much eliminate the top 2 of 3 causes for myself.

I would actually guess that biggest risk is internal. Either faulty wiring, appliance or simple user error in kitchen or with live fire. Entire neighbourhoods burning in general is rare event.

Don't know about the us but here we have fire breaks everywhere in the form of low depth waterways (non navigable). They also act as backup water reserves when the mains runs dry. So by design only parts of the neighborhood will burn down.

Yep, those exist across the western US too. I think many people are underestimating the scale and intensity of the winds California experienced. A single house on fire with relatively regular weather conditions isn't likely to spread to others - despite the "ha American houses dumb and wood" sentiment on this topic, there are building codes and fire safety is absolutely considered. But the Santa Ana winds are extremely dry and extremely powerful.

It's a hard engineering problem to solve, but an increasingly urgent one now that these major events are becoming more intense and frequent.