California’s housing crisis could be raising risk of climate disasters, researchers fear

The lack of affordable housing in California’s urban centers may be fueling increased development in adjacent wildlands — exacerbating the impacts of climate change, researchers fear.

For the past several decades, the Golden State has made the biggest mark nationwide on the so-called “wildland-urban interface,” according to a new perspective paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So large is that footprint, the authors observed, that more than one in three California households are now located either within or right next to natural environments.

That proximity to wildlands, they explained, puts residents at greater risk of climate-related natural disasters, such as fires, floods and landslides.

Surging development is also resulting in longer commutes — and a related rise in greenhouse gas emissions — while causing harm to area flora and fauna, the researchers noted.

“Our research aims to demonstrate that you can’t extricate these environmental and ecological dynamics from urban and housing dynamics — it’s all interconnected,” said lead author Miriam Greenberg, a sociology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a statement.

Greenberg and her colleagues are currently conducting a first-of-its kind study as to how, precisely, California’s housing crisis is contributing to the expansion of the wildland-urban interface.

To understand these dynamics, the team is relying on a mix of resources, such as surveys and ethnographic interviews, as well as census, mapping and ecological data along California’s Central Coast. They will also be exploring indigenous land stewardship, habitat restoration and the influence of prescribed burns on the wildland-urban interface.

As the researchers delve deeper into this $1.6 million, grant-funded endeavor, they shared several predictions in their new perspective paper.

They hypothesized that the motivations driving people to wildland-urban interface areas has undergone a major shift: Rather than feeling close ties to nature, they are making such moves due to housing affordability. A growing number of Californians, the authors explained, have simply been priced out of cities and suburbia. 

The researchers predicted the interface development that sprawls out of urban zones will largely be filled with middle-income commuters.

More remote development in wildland areas will feature “an eclectic housing mix” of everything from “large gated mountaintop estates for the affluent” to “off-the-grid” trailers and vehicles, according to the paper.

The authors also said they expected to find that the rise in affordability-driven migration has resulted in a general increase in inequality within the wildland-urban interface. That growth, they explained, may have worsened the effects of climate-fueled environmental disasters.

“We really need to expand the frontiers of how we think about urban sustainability, because it doesn’t just end at city boundaries,” co-author Hillary Angelo, an associate professor of sociology, said in a statement.

“Without enough affordable urban housing, people are being pushed to riskier areas outside of cities, and that makes cities unjust while also having terrible social and environmental impacts elsewhere,” Angelo added.