Months after wildfires ripped through Southern California, a new San Diego housing development offers hope for communities threatened by mega-fires. Now, the 64-lot subdivision, the first wildfire-prepared neighbourhood certified by the Institute for Business and Home Safety, could provide a model for housing estates nationwide.
And whilst the houses built in the Dixon Trail neighbourhood look like any other sprawling SoCal subdivision, Steve Ruffner, from KB Home projects, said if you look a little closer, they are being built to withstand wildfire. Each house, he said, features choices like double-paned glass windows tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, flame-resistant stucco and shutters, and a protective moat of gravel.
“A 5-foot area where we have gravel around the house — that’s the ‘no plant zone,’ where you don’t want any ignition source up against the house,” Ruffner told local media yesterday. “Having been in California most of my life, wildfires are just a terrible thing here and the tragedy that happened in LA was so bad; but we did this before that, because we were just concerned. How can we do something that our customers will feel safer about?”
Professor Daniel López-Pérez, program director for the University of San Diego’s architectural programme, said Dixon Trail, located in the at-risk Escondido community, shows the need for updating building standards, especially in extreme weather areas: “We live very close to nature. In fact, there’s that cliché of ‘indoor-outdoor living,’ we are blessed with our climate, and we don’t want to give up,” López-Pérez said. “But we just want to responsibly mitigate these events by building smarter and bringing advanced technology down to the single residential house.”
López-Pérez is behind Polyhaus, a 64-part metal-clad cross-laminated timber system that could be a game changer in low-cost housing: “Leaving no air gaps, they don’t give the fire oxygen to grow. I think what is exciting about the period that we live in now is that there is a collective consciousness that technology has to inform our way of building.”
Ruffner said even the privacy fences, a suburban staple, are a safety feature in Dixon Trail. “Instead of wood fencing up against the home that could catch fire in a wind-blown fire, this fencing is made of steel. So this fencing will not burn,” he said. And with every house that goes up, he is confident a wildfire will never bring it back down again: “This makes you feel like you’re doing everything you can to help people.”
- To learn more about LA’s worst-ever wildfires and why clear design was the key in ensuring a timber-clad house survived the mega-fires, click here for Wood Central’s special coverage from January.
