The death of 19 firefighters in Arizona this week highlights what has become a fact of life in the West: Every summer, smoke fills the big skies yet people continue to build in the places that burn most. More people live in these areas, and many balk at controls on how and where to build.

“There’s a self-selection factor in there — people who don’t want the government to do things tend to move to places where the government isn’t around to do things,” said Don Elliott, a senior consultant at Clarion Associates, a land-use consulting firm.

Just as many Easterners resist stepping back from their increasingly flooded coast, Westerners build where they want to build.

In a report last September, CoreLogic, a business analytics company, estimated that 740,000 homes in 13 Western states, with a total value of $136 billion, were at high or very high risk of burning up. Nationwide, Oregon and Wisconsin researchers found, 98.5 million people lived in 43.7 million homes in what is known as the wildland-urban interface or WUI (pronounced woo-ee) in 2010.