Differences in housing density show that the impact of the 1906 San Francisco Fire is still evident today.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire remains one of the worst natural disasters in US history. In new research, James Siodla finds that the devastation wrought by the disaster led to drastic changes in the city’s land use that can still be seen today. He writes that more than a century after the disaster, a significant difference in housing density exists between those areas which were burned and those which were not.