There are no grown-ups in California

Wildfires are on the mind here in California. It’s still not clear exactly to what degree the devastating Los Angeles fires were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments, with lots of new details still emerging about the steps they could have taken and didn’t.

It’s abundantly clear that the city and state screwed up. State insurance price controls forced homeowners off good private insurance and onto the last-resort state insurance program, which is about to go catastrophically bankrupt, passing on its liabilities to every homeowner in the state. Reservoirs that should have been full were empty. The city government had plenty of reason to believe that risk was catastrophically elevated this week, but the mayor took an international trip and the fire department seems to have been caught flat-footed.

But what has truly been infuriating, at least in the California policy circles I run in, has been not the mistakes in the lead-up to the disaster, but the response in the aftermath. The governor and mayor have not responded by reconsidering any of California’s bad forest management policy. They don’t have a plan to secure fire insurance for homeowners in other at-risk areas, and they definitely don’t have a plan to manage the cascading problems that will be caused by the bankruptcy of the state insurance program.

Instead, they’ve mostly responded to a problem that was substantially caused by price controls with more price controls — banning insurance companies from not renewing policies and banning all offers to buy the destroyed homes for 1 cent less than they’d have sold for before they burned down. Gov. Gavin Newsom passed an executive order waiving some environmental review and permit requirements for the homes to be rebuilt exactly as they were.

That prompted a few questions, such as, “Wait, he can do that?” and “If he has that power, why is he using it to rebuild in wildfire-prone, at-risk areas and not to expedite building in safe parts of a state buckling under a housing scarcity crisis?”

And with all of those, there’s a deeper question that feels existential for the state of California: Is there any leadership at all? Is anyone thinking about the big picture in America’s biggest state, and do they have a plan to avoid making tragedies like this one an annual ritual?

One thing that catastrophe often makes clear is that there isn’t anyone behind the scenes who steps in once things get really bad. It’s just the people who were there all along, with the foibles they had all along.

Covid was a stark illustration of this. I think many people had — I certainly did — a romantic view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the hero pandemic scientists who would swoop in with advanced tools and pull out their meticulously planned pandemic roadmaps as soon as things looked tough. America was rated the highest readiness in the world for pandemic preparedness, after all.

And then the CDC whiffed. Its tests didn’t work; it put in place unhelpful barriers to using the tests that did. Its messaging was confusing — masks were bad, but also we needed to save them for healthcare workers. No, wait, never mind, masks were mandatory.

There were plenty of individuals who did plenty of heroics to try to see what was coming and do something about it, but there weren’t any institutions waiting behind the scenes to save the day. When we got vaccines, it was a bunch of well-meaning private actors organized on Discord who did much of the legwork to make them accessible to the public, often by systematically calling every pharmacy to put in a spreadsheet whether they had availability.

A lot of the disillusionment I’ve been seeing from Californians in the last few days has this specific flavor — the realization that no, no matter how bad things get, the real grown-ups can’t be called in to save the day because they don’t exist.

There is no crisis severe enough to make Newsom serious about systematic statewide efforts to get caught up on forest management, let private insurers offer insurance at prices that won’t bankrupt them, fireproof our communities, or encourage building in safe parts of the state instead of the urban fringes where wildfire risk is often at its worst.

And there is no one to step in when Newsom fails to do that, though I’ve seen a lot of people wistfully wishing that the federal government would condition aid on the state government stepping up.

The reason Newsom has the authority for an executive order waiving environmental review and permits so that people can quickly rebuild homes that burned down is that he declared a state of emergency surrounding the fires, and in a state of emergency the governor has expanded powers. (How expanded? It’s mostly a question of whether anyone wants to challenge this executive order in court.)

There’s no question, of course, that the catastrophic LA fires are an emergency. But it was predictable that we’d face exactly such an emergency. Across California, it’s often all but illegal to build housing in the parts of the state that are safest from disaster risk. That pushes housing to the fringes, where it’s likelier to burn. This isn’t a secret. It was widely discussed after the catastrophic fires that destroyed the city of Paradise and other exurban California communities in 2019.

It is our choice, as a society, that we govern reactively rather than proactively, that we treat the awful policies that encourage building in fire-prone areas as not an emergency and only the resultant fires as one, that we do not treat the state’s huge homelessness crisis as an emergency.

But if we don’t like living in a perpetual state of emergency, it’s the wrong choice.

California is in a state of emergency, and not from the Los Angeles fires. One of the most prosperous, populous, beautiful corners of the world has been mismanaged and misgoverned into a state of extreme fragility that is damaging the hopes and aspirations of its people and burning trillions of dollars of its potential. It’s not too late to fix it, and many of the fixes are maddeningly straightforward. But I hope it’s clear by now that there are no responsible adults waiting behind the scenes to get them done.

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