Wildfire threat becomes tool to fight home builders

Preston Brown knows the risk of wildfire that comes with living in the rural, chaparral-lined hills of San Diego County. He’s lived there for 21 years and evacuated twice.

That’s why he fiercely opposed a plan to build more than 1,100 homes in a fire-prone area he said would be difficult to evacuate safely. Brown sits on the local planning commission, and he said the additional people would clog the road out.

“It’s a very rough area,” Brown said. “We have fires all the time now.”

Opponents like Brown, a member of the Sierra Club and California Native Plant Society, scored a win last year. A California court sided with a coalition of environmental groups and blocked a developer’s plan called Otay Village 14 that included single-family homes and commercial space. The groups argued the county didn’t adequately consider fire escape routes, and the judge agreed.

That's not the only time California's escalating cycle of fire has been used as a basis to refuse development.

Environmental groups are seeing increased success in California courts arguing that wildfire risk wasn't fully considered in proposals to build homes in fire-prone areas that sit at the edge of forests and brush, called the wildland-urban interface. Experts say such litigation could become more common.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has backed a handful of the lawsuits, putting developers on notice.

“You can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing when the world is changing around us,” Bonta said in an interview, adding that he supports more housing. His office has, for example, questioned the increased fire risk of a 16,000-acre (6,475-hectare) project that includes a luxury resort and 385 residential lots in Lake County, roughly 130 miles (209 kilometers) north of San Francisco in an area...