Guest Post by The Antiplanner
Fed by high winds, a wildfire about 50 miles from Antiplanner headquarters in Camp Sherman blew up on Sunday, burning 34,000 acres in a few hours. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Land Conservation & Development Commission (LCDC) is seeking comments on a report it has prepared on “wildfire adapted communities.”
The report says little about density other than to suggest that structures be clustered “in areas of lowest risk.” Since the only places in Oregon that are naturally at low risk of wildfire are underwater, this suggests that no “clustering” of development makes sense.
But it is possible to protect existing cities and urban areas by putting a defensible buffer around them. Because high winds can blow fire brands for several miles, such a buffer should be at least five miles wide. It should have minimal flammable vegetation: ordinary forests or grasslands need not apply.
Development can be allowed in this buffer strip so long as it follows an important rule: structures should be at least 100 to 140 feet apart. As residents of Boulder County, Colorado discovered last December, when structures are built more closely together, if one catches fire, the radiant heat it emits will ignite nearby structures.
Currently, about 1.3 percent of the state is urban with small lots that are at high risk from fire, and about 1 percent is “rural residential” with 5- to 10-acre lot sizes. Such lot sizes are too big to provide a buffer since residents will have an incentive to make only the land around their home, probably around a half acre, defensible.
Thus, the most efficient way to construct a wildfire buffer will be to zone a five-mile strip around all cities and urban areas for half-acre to one-acre lots and require that any housing built on such lots be built and maintained in a defensible condition. This will, incidentally, allow construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, thus alleviating Oregon’s housing shortage.
Comments on the report are due on Friday. I’ve prepared a draft of my comments that I’ll submit then. If you have any suggestions for improving them, let me know.
Originally published by The Antiplanner. Republished with permission.
The Antiplanner is an economist with forty-five years of experience critiquing public land, urban, transportation, and other government plans.
For more on wildfires, click here.
For more on forest management policy, click here.
