Comment by altairprime

I like the author’s viewpoints in some respects, but their belief in the power of the market to solve all problems is excessive. The market is captive to private landowners, coastal wealth, and lobby-tainted politics at every level now, and deferring housing policies to the forces of supply and demand is blatantly broken in California and will not be restored by simple deregulation alone. He states clear requirements for rebuilding after fires that ought to be enforced by the government — densification, fire control plans for neighboring regions, and even earthworks to impede fire — but these things will require the exact regulations decried, that may constrain supply but are also critical to increasing it.

The section about the patchwork of fiefdoms should be critical reading for college-level US politics courses. Let a hundred thousand students study and learn about their local fiefs, write about them and interview them and shine a naive spotlight into that nest of dark corners. They would leave school with a clear understanding of how local power can be used and misused, and how to investigate it and document it. We may not have journalism much these days but there is a master’s thesis opportunity here to document the specific offices of every branch of government and lobbying responsible for fire management (and its failure) for a single coordinate on the map.