This week’s episode of Burning Issues is all about housing. First, we explore fire mitigations behaviors anyone can adopt with Dan Lang, a lifelong firefighter who currently works for the California Fire Safe Council (https://cafiresafecouncil.org/). With him, we not only discuss the dangers of the fires and the challenges of living in the WUI but also how someone can reduce the risk of losing everything with just a few easy and cost-effective steps.

Then, we move on from the individual to the community level to discuss how housing policies can lower the risk for entire neighborhoods with prof. Robert Olshansky. Unfortunately, fires will continue to be devastating, therefore, Robert also researched recovery strategies in a recent paper (https://www.next10.org/publications/rebuilding-resilient) which has some key insights we get to explore with him.

Somewhat surprisingly, there are quite a few reasons to be optimistic as Dan and Robert essentially lay out a plan to greatly reduce the burden wildfires cause every year in the context of housing. Yet, there are key and time-sensitive policy challenges that remain, which should have been address yesterday -- after all, they are burning issues!