Wildland–urban interface

I'd say there's a few peculiar things about that.

I think anybody who is a reasonable person and, and a reasonable organization like we are could say, "Okay, let's take a look around infrastructure or perhaps in the WUI," as we call it, the wildland-urban interface, you know, where there's houses right up-

Yeah

... against these forests.

And this wildfire-urban interface areas are particularly widespread in the eastern United States, reaching a maximum of 72% of land area in Connecticut, for example.

Now, here in California, we have the highest number of housing units in what's called the WUI area, 5.1 million homes.

And that translates to more than 11 million Californians who are living in a wild urban interface, a wildfire urban interface.

That means more than a quarter of the state's population is living in a high fire hazard zone.

You know, he's the CEO for Child Unlimited.

But, like, I think, you know, some of that flexibility around the WUI, which is the Wildland Urban Interface, I, the WUI, I remember being in meetings for a long time, like, what the hell is the WUI? And then finally, somebody's like, oh, it's the wildland urban interface.

But you know, these places where you have infrastructure, whether, you know, these are power lines, or these are houses or whatever, then the edge of these roadless areas, I think that flexibility to do some more mechanical treatment in there, I think that's, that's, that's what I think that I think Chris would say you can already do that.

But I think really having that conversation about what that looks like.

This is also a story about aggressive residential development into this wildland interface.

Today, more than a third of American homes are in the WUI, as are half of the Canadian ones.

It's a beautiful place to live until it goes feral.

When a WUI burns, it does not burn like a forest fire or a house fire.

It burns like hell.

If a fire reaches a home, what lies inside matters too.

Those are, I think, important macro drivers.

And then when you think about the insurance landscape, about what does insurability look like in California, in the WUI across the board, increasing rates, commercial insurance, you more state plans, those things all rolled together, I think is a really important wake-up call for individuals, communities, but also state and local governments about the importance of not just having a plan for how to handle fire, but putting sustainable vehicles and programs and policy together that will make sure that this work is funded.

And Los Angeles is that place where I think a lot of the innovation is starting to happen to demonstrate this is what it looks like when a community takes this into their own hands to make sure that resilience is infused into how we build.

The marker of success for us is that we We believe about a third of the homes are going to be built to this IBHS standard.

That is actually what happened.

We have reports that go all the way back that show us that proper vegetative management areas, what we refer to as WUI land, wild urban interface, needed to be heavily managed, didn't have 40...

They- it had 40 years of vegetation and brush, and what used to be nature's management was fire.

So you will either have fire or you can mechanically thin and process or even use goats.

Right.

I was reading about the new 2026 California Wildland Urban Interface Code, which is consolidated under Title 24, Part 7.

Yep.

Title 24.

now has banned any type of vegetation material underneath the roofline of a home in any high-risk, high-fire areas.

You know, instead of the state focusing on its own forest management and creating protection lands around high-dense, what we refer to as WUI land, wildland-urban interface, the state is now saying well we must go after the individual because they're not doing what we want when it comes to general protection and really where this is that it it it comes with your ideology of what government can and can't do and the original foundations and principles of the constitution were actually constraints what could we constrain the government because the government cannot solve everything and what we have here in california is an unconstrained view the government can do everything the government should do everything they should be the ones who dictate whether you have flowers next year home or not they should be able to dictate what tires you put on your car not and the issue again that we have it in California is that if they can go and govern your tires and govern your flowers, there is nothing that they won't go after to govern.

And Zoran Mamdani and other political members have this same mindset.

When Zoran Mamdani says that we will reject the cold frigidity of individualism and we will embrace the warmth of collectivism, That is anti-original foundations of our Constitution.