Tough housing market awaits wildfire victims
As firefighters gain on wildfires burning in Northern California’s wine country, the many thousands who lost their houses, condos and apartments in those fires will have to find a new place to live in one of the toughest housing markets in the nation.
In San Francisco, an average one-bedroom apartment rents for more than $3,000 a month and the median home price is about $1.5 million. The climbing cost of living has reached the greater San Francisco Bay Area, which includes parts of the fire areas.
T he fires that swept through parts of seven counties were the deadliest and most destructive series of blazes in California history. At least 42 people were killed and 6,000 homes destroyed.
Crews made excellent progress Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, set- ting off controlled burns to deprive wildfires of added fuel, said Daniel Berlant, spokesman for California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire. He said cooler weather and the lack of wind helped.
“We’re hoping that Mother Nature will continue to coop- erate with us,” he said. “Increased moisture in the air and potential rainfall, all of those are welcome signs.”
Also on We d nesday, Sonoma County increased its death count from 22 to 23 when officials reported they had found another body in Santa Rosa. Officials released no details.
Keeping positive is hard when facing the reality of starting from scratch, said John De Groot, whose home in Santa Rosa burned down along with a lifetime of mem- ories.
“We’ve worked our whole lives,” De Groot said. “We’ve had this house for 23 years. So there are a lot of memo- ries there. Grandkids have been there. They love it. And it’s not there. So now what?”
California, which was grap- pling with a housing shortage before the wildfires broke out, is faced with a massive logistical issue with entire neighborhoods destroyed and so many seeking to rebuild.
“This is a tremendous event for an urban area,” Brock Long, an administrator with the Federal Emer- gency Management Agency, said Tuesday. “We’ve got a lot of thinking to do about how you mitigate this from happening in communities down the road and becoming more resilient.”
An estimated 100,000 people were evacuated at the height of the fires, and about 34,000 remain under evacuation. Many have yet to find out if their homes are still standing.
“The good thing is we have each other,” said Ramona Lancu, whose family home in Larkfield was destroyed. “We were able to escape. Now we just start a new life. It’s hard.”
Lancu was among tens of thousands who have drifted home to find their lives and their communities dramatically altered.
At a Red Cross shelter in Petaluma, 69-year-old Sue Wortman recalled the words that raced through her mind when she fled the flames near her home in Sonoma.
“We’re all go i ng up in smoke,” she thought at the time. Since then, she’s been walking around in a daze.
Firefighters gained more control Tuesday of the massive wine country wildfires, even as other blazes erupted in mountains near Los Angeles and Santa Cruz.
Meanwhile, officials and trauma experts worried about the emotional toll taken by the grueling week of blazes.
Wortman has been living in her RV outside the Petaluma shelter, while hundreds of other evacuees sought refuge in tents and trailers and on cots inside the fairground facility. She has sought comfort among friends and with her dogs but knows that feeling won’t last.
“I think it’s really going to hit when we go home and see the destruction,” she said.