In the recently built Dixon Trail neighborhood in Escondido, just 30 miles north of San Diego, a cluster of 64 homes line new streets and cul de sacs.
The colored stucco structures sit behind wide driveways and minimally planted front yards. Exterior features like shutters, windows and fencing look indistinguishable from most any suburban neighborhood in California. It’s just another example of little boxes made of ticky-tacky that all look just the same.
The new community borders more than 800 acres of preserved open space, a once coveted amenity guaranteeing distance from neighboring houses and reduced noise. While the steep slopes cloaked in heavy brush might make for nice views, after a decade defined by wildfire in California, the panorama could be a harbinger for disaster.
But this is no ordinary California neighborhood — if you know what to look for.
Each home has a 5-foot noncombustible perimeter, and its windows are dual-paned tempered glass. The roof tiles are concrete and the fencing is metal, even where it might masquerade as wood. Plenty of other specialized elements of these houses are impossible for nonexperts to notice, like enclosed eaves, flame-resistant vents and noncombustible gutters. For new and renovated homes in high-risk fire areas of the state — more than half of the area managed by Cal Fire — these kinds of desired features may come at a premium, but they’re increasingly seen as the difference between disaster and a chance for survival.
More and more Californians are willing to shell out the additional funds needed to fireproof a home. And that premium comes with its own advantage: It might be the one path forward to relatively affordable home insurance.
Watching a shed burn changed everything
In 2024, at a conference in Anaheim, Steve Ruffner watched a shed catch fire from floating embers and burn down. Just feet away, another shed resisted those same embers, blown at it by demonstrators with fans, urging the structure to ignite.
The first shed had been constructed with a vinyl roof, combustible wood siding and non-tempered glass windows; the second one was built to the wildfire resilience standard of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, or IBHS. It never caught fire, despite the exhibitors’ best efforts. Ruffner, the regional general manager of KB Home’s coastal division, could barely believe his eyes.
“To me, that was amazing,” he said.
KB Homes was already planning the Dixon Trail site, but this demonstration made Ruffner go back to the city of Escondido and redo the designs. Building in a high fire zone already required features like fire resistant roofs and noncombustible eaves, among other restrictions, but in order to meet the standards of IBHS, a nonprofit offering research-backed home-strengthening solutions to owners who face natural disasters, they added the 5-foot safety zone around the houses, along with steel gutters and downspouts, and changed the materials of the fences from treated lumber to steel.
They also decided they wouldn’t allow any detached structures such as accessory dwelling units on properties. The homeowners association would enforce codes that would keep the neighborhood in compliance with these rules long-term. That meant even funding the HOA to do home checkups for three years to ensure compliance.
“They wanted to make sure this community was fire resilient permanently,” Ruffner said.
Dixon Trail was also a bit of a test case.
Building fire-resistant neighborhoods was the right thing to do, Ruffner said, but the company also wanted to prove they could do it at a cost that was only marginally higher than a typical build. For Dixon Trail, that ended up being around an extra $3,000 to $5,000 more per home, Ruffner estimates.
Three-bedroom homes start around $1 million at Dixon Trail, climbing up to around $1.3 million for more premium features. It’s not a huge jump from the area’s average single family home price of nearly $900,000, according to Zillow, and the added cost is worth it when you take into account how much these homeowners may save on insurance, Ruffner argued.
His theory was right, and buyers “were shocked,” he said, by how much they saved on monthly insurance premiums, sometimes seeing rates that were five times less than what they were paying on their current home in a high fire zone.
Sales at Dixon Trail have been brisk — there are only a few homes left for sale. Ruffner said the unique neighborhood amenities helped them “in a pretty soft real estate market” to sell almost all the homes in under a year and a half. Now, the company is almost a year into building its second “wildfire prepared neighborhood” in Cameron Park, a suburb of Sacramento.
The Sierra foothills development dubbed “Stone Canyon” consists of 24 four- to six-bedroom homes that start around $700,000, and several have already sold, even though the neighborhood isn’t expected to be complete until 2027. The average list price for a single-family home in the area is $664,667, according to Zillow.
The insurance cost savings are a nice surprise, but Ruffner said people are more amazed by the neighborhood’s aesthetics. “I think people’s vision of wildfire protection would be some kind of a concrete bunker with no windows … but the landscaping looks great. It really looks good. You’d be hard pressed to notice a major difference in our community and one down the street,” Ruffner said.
Ruffner said people from all across California have contacted him to see and learn more about the communities, as well as insurance commissioners from across the country. “It’s not just California that’s worried about this stuff, so they all want to know how to do it,” he said.
‘Pays for itself’
Californians that can make the connection between wildfire safety features and lower insurance costs see the value in paying more, said Compass agent Matt Sevenau. He sells homes primarily in Bay Area Wine Country, an area that has had bigger and more destructive fires in the past decade than ever before. Even just three years ago, insuring homes in high-fire risk areas was different, and now, “insurance companies are starting to think outside the box,” he said.
More fire-resistant construction materials and strong defensive measures, for example, can make the difference in a sale. “It’s a huge value add. It’s an investment well spent up front and it pays for itself on the back end,” Sevenau said.
California is the least insurable state on the West Coast, according to a recent Insurify report, which predicts insurance premiums will rise 16% by the end of 2026. That’s the biggest jump for any state, as severe weather and natural disasters push prices higher.
In 2022, the California Department of Insurance crafted its own regulation requiring insurers who take wildfire risk into account to give credits to homeowners and communities who take steps to mitigate their risks, including features like Class A fire-rated roof, enclosed eaves and fire-resistant vents.
Individual builders are building to these specifications too, hoping that even at a higher price point, potential buyers will see the savings in both insurance and survivability. Builder Jon Landers Curry recently finished a home that’s as fire resistant as it can be, he said. It has a Class-A roof, tempered windows, fire-proof exterior siding, an unventilated attic (which means embers won’t slip into the roof) and a 5-foot gravel band around the house.
“It will not burn, period,” Landers Curry said.
Sevenau, who represents Landers Curry’s property currently listed for $10.9 million, said while they want to advertise the fire resistance of certain properties in a listing, “we have to thread the needle” because they don’t want people to read about these amenities and assume the property is at a high risk for fire. He doesn’t want people to get scared off before they understand the full picture.
‘A concern for everyone’
When wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena tore through entire neighborhoods in January 2025, it was a turning point in how San Diego Redfin agent Ashley Van Leuven sold real estate.
The concept of fire risk had been coming up more and more in her conversations with buyers over the past six years, especially when insurers started pulling out of California, but after the LA fires, “it’s not a question some people are asking. It’s a question every single buyer comes to me with now,” she said.
Fire is now “a concern for everyone,” Van Leuven said. One homebuyer she’s currently working with, whose family is relocating from the Bay Area down to San Diego, recently fell in love with a beautiful home that abutted a canyon. Ultimately, though, he passed on it, attributing his decision to the fire risk posed by all that open space.
She said he’s also making decisions about whether or not to even look at homes based on their climate and fire risk scores, the somewhat controversial features of many of the big listing sites.
Michael Dreyfus, a Sotheby’s agent who sells homes in the Peninsula and Wine Country, said he’s sold at least two properties recently that had their own fire trucks onsite. In Woodside and the Portola Valley, he’s seeing more homes installing pricey sprinkler systems on home exteriors that owners can control from an app, ready to turn on whenever a fire strikes. But Dreyfus said it’s more than just insurance and individual survivability.
“It’s getting to be a community issue,” Dreyfus said, explaining that neighbors realize that if the house next door catches on fire, theirs is likely to burn too, and everyone has to take as many measures as they can for the collective good.
His listing in Sonoma that just came to market for $40 million lists several fire mitigation features, from sprinkler systems to fire-rated windows to steel roofs. He’s not worried that buyers would balk at the high price tag on a home like this, though, he said, he’s worried about the insurance costs.