Six years ago, Liz Babb and her husband, Angelo Aloisio, retired financial services executives and new empty nesters, sold their place in San Francisco and moved to the woods. They bought a 1970s house on a steep slope in Portola Valley, an enclave of forested canyons minutes from Silicon Valley’s center that boasts a bohemian history, a reputation for moneyed discretion, and jaw-dropping views. It was an iconic—if, by local standards, modest—northern California dream home: wood construction, picture windows, multiple decks, and, everywhere, trees.

Lush vegetation blanketed the property: oaks, redwoods, and all manner of shrubs and bushes. They enveloped the house, but not only that. Soaring through the center of the structure—rising from the dirt, through the first-level floor, up three stories, and out the roof—stood a massive oak, its trunk encased by interior glass and its branches and leaves canopied over the house. “We were ready for our rural adventure,” said Babb, an avid hiker. When she first saw the shelter-magazine-worthy aerie, she recalled, “I fell in love with it.”

In August 2020, love turned to fear. A lightning storm struck hills stretching between Portola Valley and the Pacific Ocean—hills, that, like much of California and the West, are parched from years of drought. The bolts set the hills aflame. By the time five weeks later that firefighters extinguished what had come to be called the CZU Lightning Complex fires, the inferno had scorched some 86,500 acres and destroyed about 1,500 buildings. The blaze came within about eight miles of Portola Valley. The smoke plume turned the skies above the town a putrid, pallid orange. More permanently, the fire altered Babb’s view of her world. The ecology “has changed,” she said. “We’re a tinderbox here.”

Last November, fear turned to fatalism. Babb got a letter from Safeco, the company that had insured her homes for more than 15 years. Safeco informed her it was going to drop her homeowners policy in January; it had concluded her house in the trees was too severe a fire risk. For the next several weeks, Babb searched for another insurer, but other carriers, too, saw her house as a firetrap. Finally, days before their policy was to expire, she signed up for the California FAIR Plan, a last-resort fire-insurance pool that California established following urban riots in Los Angeles in the 1960s for people unable to get coverage through the regular market. Still, she will pay $8,000 annually for her full complement of homeowners insurance, about $7,000 of it for fire. That’s four times what she paid a year ago.

Babb and Aloisio, like many of their neighbors, can afford the expense. But even their rarefied ZIP code offers a window into the economic fallout from wildfires—recurring disasters that are intensifying in part owing to climate change. Here as elsewhere in California and across the American West, a surge of decisions by insurers not to renew the fire policies of property owners in combustible locations is spurring political fights and stoking fears of sinking property values. More consequentially, it is exacerbating societal inequities in ways that foreshadow dilemmas that will become more common in a warming world.

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