California is in a home-insurance crisis. The Pacific Palisades fire will only make it worse
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‘We need to make it incredibly expensive to build in these kinds of environments,’ one expert told The Independent. ‘If the insurance industry refuses to sell policies, maybe people won’t risk it’. There’s little question why homeowners choose to build in Southern California.
![[The destruction in Pacific Palisades has been virtually incomprehensible, residents say]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/21/GettyImages-2192342829.jpg)
“People want to live in beautiful places,” retired fire chief Glenn Corbett told The Independent. At the same time, Corbett, a professor of fire science at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, can’t understand why anyone would actually do so.
![[A Pacific Palisades church that went up in flames amid a wildfire expected to cost $10 billion in losses]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/21/GettyImages-2192446460.jpg)
As enormous swaths of the Los Angeles area continue to be ravaged by a series of wildfires burning out of control for the third day in a row, many Californians find themselves without adequate insurance coverage to rebuild their ruined homes. “There’s a lot of vested interest in building, with wood, in areas that shouldn’t be built in,” Corbett said. “We need to make it incredibly expensive to build in these kinds of environments. That’s all you can do… If the insurance industry refuses to sell policies, maybe people won’t risk it.”.
![[The smoke plume from the Pacific Palisades fire extended hundreds of miles out into the Pacific Ocean]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/21/GettyImages-2192428870.jpg)
Appearing Wednesday evening on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, actress Jamie Lee Curtis called the unimaginable wildfire damage “a catastrophe.” Comedian Billy Crystal reportedly lost his home, as did other prominent Angelenos including socialite Paris Hilton, two-time Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, and funnyman Eugene Levy, whose house was reduced to rubble.
Earlier in the day, actor and right-wing conspiracy theorist James Woods posted a video clip on social media of a neighbor’s house, engulfed in flames, in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, a wealthy enclave between Santa Monica and Malibu that boasts a median home price of $3.3 million.
