We try and manage the bushland with hazard reduction burns in the cooler months when weather patterns allow. These reduce the available fuel loads so that an uncontrolled fire in the area will be less intense.
There will always be fire in our landscape. Our job is to manage it as best we can to protect the trees, the wildlife and the homes that have been built near them.
Still I don't see public responsibility for people who buy homes in fire-prone areas; that should be a private cost (insurance).
If someone wants to build on a volcano let them, and let them pay for it.
At what point can the "if someone wants to build on California, just let them" be squared away against the inevitable humanitarian disaster of thousands of displaced families in our hypothetical location?
At what point does the government step in and say: we'll the first guy was dumb, but we let him do it, then other followed and now we have thousands and thousands and can't ignore it anymore.
An interesting related example is Federal Deposit Insurance. The Great Depression made clear to the Federal government that deposits had to be insured against bank failure or nobody would ever trust banks to hold savings again and the banking system would never recover. So it introduced a mandatory insurance system that all banks would pay into to insure the deposits of any bank that failed.
If your home is not insured (with a private insurer) the government says they will not help you financially after an earthquake.
California could do the same, but I suspect there would be protests from people living in low fire zones, while here in NZ pretty much everywhere is at risk of earthquakes.
FEMA bails out people who built in risky storm and flood zones like New Orleans. At the very least, I feel FEMA should be a one-time thing, if you insist on rebuilding in the same place, the government shouldn't be there for you again next flood.
Given that most buildings are built for 30-40 year spans, forcibly rebuilding once per century can be done economically.
The problems arise when hundred year floods become 10-30 year floods.
Given how calfire abuses the tools they do have (e.g. aggressively stopping wildfires that pose minimal threat to human settlements), I wouldn't trust them not to abuse this one as well.
But how much does it even really matter? Far more fires are started by humans than lightning.
Modern forest management regulation has backfired by making it too hard for land owners to log and thin forests, and at the same time, neither the federal or state governments are doing the job themselves. And so we have dense forests. This has other side effects like increased pestilence, which spreads in dense stands, results in dead trees, which then dry up and turn into fuel. The resulting big fires then keep trees from growing into maturity (“old growth”) and the cycle continues.
Like you, I’m not in favor of unabated giant fires - we need to break that pattern - but once we do, we also need to return the forests to how they were 1-200 years back, when they managed themselves.
See https://youtu.be/O6Vayv9FCLM for a talk by a US Forest Service researcher on this topic.