KB Home opens new wildfire-resilient community in NorCal hills

In the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, KB Home has unveiled a fire-resilient new-home subdivision designed and engineered to protect homeowners, buffer neighboring communities and potentially lower property insurance rates. 

The homebuilder opened its model home and began selling homes in its 24-lot Stone Canyon community, 30 miles east of Sacramento in the fire-prone town of Cameron Park. Stone Canyon, KB Home announced yesterday, is the first community in Northern California to meet the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) home- and neighborhood-level wildfire resilience standards. 

California ranks as having the most stringent wildfire building standards in the nation, a necessity in a state that is highly prone to wildfires, but IBHS standards go above and beyond what California law requires.

On the individual home level, IBHS’s wildfire resilience standards require Class A fire-rated roofs, higher-quality windows and doors, noncombustible gutters, 5-foot noncombustible buffer around structures and ember- and flame-resistant vents. 

The standards also incorporate neighborhood-level design, including separating most of the community’s structures by at least 10 feet, using fire-resistant materials like all-metal fencing and reducing combustible fuels throughout the community. 

“The building code in California only addresses the home itself. It does not address the surrounding area. There’s a separate regulation that addresses the defensible space. Our program incorporates both together as a systems-based approach to wildfire mitigation. Under these extreme wildfires, when you have very strong winds, you have to address both the home and its surrounding area to give the home the best chance of survival,” Steve Hawks, Senior Director of Wildfire for IBHS, told The Builder’s Daily. 

IBHS, a nonprofit scientific research and communications organization backed by property insurers, reinsurers, and other affiliated companies, developed the home and neighborhood wildfire standards in consultation with the California Building Industry Association and other wildfire partners. The organization rolled out its neighborhood-level standards early last year, coinciding with an update to its home standards. 

The goal, of course, is to improve safety and resiliency, but IBHS also wants to make homes easier to insure, benefiting both homeowners and insurance companies.

As we reported in The Builder’s Daily, KB Home delivered another community, Dixon Trail, with the IBHS standards in Escondido, a suburb of San Diego. According to Hawks, all 64 homes within that community have insurance in the admitted market.

“Insurers want to write insurance, but they want to write insurance where the homeowner, the community, has done the right measures to significantly reduce the risk, giving the insurers the confidence that their home has a much better chance of surviving,” he said.        

Cameron Park is located in a fire-prone area, so preparation is critical. The King Fire in 2014, and the Caldor Fire in 2021 both affected nearby communities in El Dorado County. 

Nam Joe, Division President, Sacramento, said in an interview with The Builder’s Daily that his team was able to implement the more stringent standards at no additional cost by partnering early with IBHS. 

For KB Home, neighborhood-level fire-resilient design was a non-negotiable. As Joe put it, the resilient community design lowers risk for adjacent neighborhoods, too, since it can act as a buffer for wildfires. 

“Stone Canyon generally consists of larger lots, so we’re able to separate structures a good distance from each other. Beyond that, we’re able to plan the community landscaping in a manner that was fire-resistant, with large defensible zones,” Joe said. 

“[With] the materials that we used, we were able to preserve an overall aesthetic for the community. There’s a lot of rock material used throughout, and plantings are spaced pretty far apart from each other, so they don’t provide a fuel line to the houses and cause fire damage,” he added. 

Both Joe and Hawks emphasized the power of the partnership between IBHS and KB Home. IBHS brought the science and mitigation expertise to the table, and KB Home began implementing it in its communities. 

‘It’s a clear example of what other developers across California and the country should be looking to do as well,” Hawks said.