Why Did Berkeley Resist Fire-resistant Homes?

Michael Lewis says wooden fences running through a community are the way fire moves from house to house. Protecting a community against fire requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease and very similar to a pandemic. A community is only as strong as the weakest link.

In Berkeley, California, up at the top of the hill where the town meets the forest, the law already makes people make their homes fire resistant, because if one goes up, they all go up. Even in Berkeley, the rule caused blowback. Sam Fragoso calls the place liberal, woke Berkeley, and Lewis repeats the label. Lewis says Americans do not, as a society, do collective stuff. The country is highly individualistic, and the line that a home is a castle is not going to cut it. The community is the castle. Fragoso reads from the book that Americans living in or beside wild space are being asked to change the story from my home is my castle to my neighborhood is my castle. Lewis agrees.

Fragoso says the mantra could be applied to many pockets of society. Lewis says that is completely right.