What Cascaded

The Oakland Hills firestorm produced, among other things, an organization. Before the fire, Amy Bach was a consumer advocate and attorney. After it, she co-founded United Policyholders with Ina Delong, a 22-year insurance professional, because the survivors who had lost more than 3,000 homes discovered that the insurance they'd been paying into for years was riddled with gaps no one had explained to them.

Allstate and State Farm were fined for mishandling claims. A tax attorney named Bob Castle pushed the IRS to extend the deadline for taxing insurance proceeds from two years to four, because the scale of destruction meant there weren't enough materials to rebuild in time. Insurance companies were eventually required to send customers annual disclosure reports detailing what their policies actually covered.

Real changes, hard-won. And the underlying problem persisted anyway.

United Policyholders began surveying wildfire survivors in 2007. Since then, an average of two-thirds of respondents reported being underinsured by $200,000 or more. The legal standard that homeowners, not insurers, bear responsibility for determining adequate coverage persists thirty-five years after the firestorm. Bach calls it a "fiction." The fiction has outlasted every reform it generated.

The building codes cascaded more successfully, at least on paper. Oakland's immediate post-fire ordinances mandated Class A fire-rated roofing for new construction in the hills. Assemblyman Tom Bates pushed for a statewide ban on wood roofs, settled for a ban on untreated wood roofs in fire-prone areas. These local and state-level changes fed into what became Chapter 7A of the California Building Code in 2008, mandating fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, ember-resistant vents, and vegetation management for new structures in fire hazard zones. Economists Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower traced the lineage directly, finding that codes initially prompted by the 1991 firestorm reduced structure loss risk during a wildfire by roughly 40 percent. The codes also benefit neighboring structures, a spillover effect that makes the case for regulation unusually clean.

The limit is the word "new." California still has between 700,000 and 1.3 million pre-code homes in high-risk areas. In the Oakland Hills, the vast majority of structures predate even the 1992 codes. As Boomhower told Heatmap: "The challenge from the perspective of wildfire vulnerability is that those codes are relatively recent, and the housing stock turns over really slowly, so we have this enormous stock of already built homes in dangerous places that are going to be out there for decades."

And the homes that were rebuilt after 1991, the ones that do meet modern codes, are now worth $1 to $4 million. Hiller Highlands townhomes currently sell at a median of $1,175,000.

Catherine Johnson, who lives in a house rebuilt after the firestorm, told CBS San Francisco that her premium had jumped from $5,000 to $7,000 a year.

The Parkwoods condo complex, 400 units in the Oakland Hills surrounded by evergreens with breathtaking views, was dropped by insurers entirely in 2023. Blacklisted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Average unit premium tripled from $400 to nearly $1,500. Sales volume fell from 30 a year to roughly 10. The hills remain classified as a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. In October 2024, the Keller Avenue fire prompted evacuations of hundreds and briefly closed Interstate 580. The terrain hasn't changed even if the buildings have.

Grand Forks got its test twelve years after the flood. In 2009, the Red River crested at 49.33 feet, five feet below the 1997 catastrophe but still 21 feet above flood stage. The greenway and the new levee system, completed in 2007, held. The city sustained no significant structural damage. City engineer Al Grasser later reflected that the mitigation measures had lessened flood impacts and made the whole process of preparation easier. Before the levees and greenway, flood preparation consumed enormous resources and had to start much earlier. Now there was a level of "psychological comfort."

The Red River has flooded repeatedly since 1997: in 1998, 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2019, 2020. The greenway absorbs what the old neighborhoods could not. Grand Forks improved from a CRS Class 7 to Class 5 under FEMA's Community Rating System, a classification that earns residents a 25 percent discount on flood insurance premiums. The city's population recovered to pre-flood levels by 2007. East Grand Forks mayor Lynn Stauss called the twin cities "the poster child of flood recovery."

The buyout's equity record resists clean celebration. The families who accepted $52,000 or $66,000 for their homes couldn't replace them in Grand Forks at those prices. The buyout was voluntary, but voluntariness has a different texture when your house sits on the wet side of a proposed dike and you're living in a trailer in Emerado. A few holdouts remained, and levees were built around those properties. In some cases, homes ended up on the river side of the new levees. The Environmental Law Institute, documenting the East Grand Forks experience, acknowledged it could not obtain complete data on the total cost of the buyout or the current value of homes that remained in the flood hazard area. When the record is incomplete, the people who fell through stay invisible.

The national research tells its own version of this. Katharine Mach and colleagues found in 2019 that FEMA-funded buyouts have taken place mostly in high-income, densely populated areas, while projections suggest poor and rural communities would benefit most. Separate research found that although predominantly white counties have more access to federal buyout assistance, nonwhite neighborhoods within those counties see the highest rate of home demolition. Grand Forks is a predominantly white city, and the national racial equity patterns may apply differently there. The local record does show that the buyout affected working-class and middle-class homeowners whose modest home values left them with limited options. Speed, which was essential for getting people housed before winter, also meant less time to negotiate, less time to organize, less time to push back on appraisals that didn't reflect what a home had meant.

The bought-out land became the Greater Grand Forks Greenway, nearly 2,200 acres of parks and open space along the river. Lincoln Drive became Lincoln Drive Park, 120 acres, the city's biggest and busiest park, with a 20-mile biking and walking trail. Some of the people who walk it are former Lincoln Drive residents. They head for a tree or other landmark that identifies where their yard used to be.

This past Monday was Memorial Day. Lincoln Drive Park was full of families. Someone, maybe, paused near one of those trees. In the Oakland Hills, Catherine Johnson was waiting to find out whether her insurer would renew. The two communities built something real inside the window that disaster opened. Oakland is safer per-structure and more financially precarious per-household. Grand Forks is protected from the river. The greenway holds. The record of what it cost the people who couldn't participate on equal terms remains, by the ELI's own admission, incomplete.