One change California made: In 2008, it strengthened building codes governing the design and material use of new construction in high-risk areas.

“The challenge is that most homes haven’t been built in the last 20 years,” said Crawford, co-chair of the interagency wildfire task force created by Newsom. “These are heritage homes that must be strengthened.”

Since 2020, California has invested at least $50 million in home-strengthening projects and launched a small pilot program to provide subsidies and financial incentives for homeowners to make improvements.

But Kimiko Barrett, a research and policy analyst at Headwater Economics, a nonprofit research organization, said the plan "clearly does not go far enough to address the problems happening in Los Angeles County or elsewhere."

Center for Biological Diversity lawyer JP Rose said even the highest fire safety standards could not eliminate the risk of fire. During California’s worst fire on record — the 2018 Camp Paradise fire that killed 85 people — some homes built to the new code “still burned,” Ross said.

In fact, only about 43 percent of homes built after 2008 in the Paradise area survived the fire, although that was a better outcome than older homes. About 86 percent of the homes destroyed in Paradise were built before 1990, according to a study in Fire Ecology.

"Building codes alone will not protect us if we continue to build deeper into fire zones," Ross said. "Today's problems were created years ago when officials approved large-scale development in high-risk areas but did not Adequate safeguards.”

At the federal level, no agency has invested significantly in making buildings more resilient to wildfires. A 2023 report from the Federal Wildfire Commission said "hundreds to hundreds of billions" of dollars per year may be needed to fully address the wildfire crisis, including larger investments in resilience projects.

Such work requires a detailed and time-consuming assessment of the "fire potential" of each home in a fire-prone neighborhood, Cohen said. According to an economic study by Headwaters, it would cost at least $6 billion just to replace wood roofs in wildfire-prone areas across the country.

If the government doesn't take action, insurance companies may largely push people to make expensive retrofits under the threat of losing coverage.

"Homes that are more resilient to wildfires will be easier to obtain insurance in the long run," Weiner said. "In some ways, the insurance industry has more power than the government."

In the short term, the loss of housing inventory from recent fires will only exacerbate Southern California’s housing crisis.

Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have both issued orders cutting red tape and allowing homeowners to rebuild up to 110% of their homes' previous footprint.