‘A different kind of homelessness’
A Camp Fire survivor’s long road to finding a home for her family — ‘my advice would be to just keep going’
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series on people who have experienced homelessness in Chico.
CHICO >> After the Camp Fire, Kimberly Sullivan found herself without a home for the second time in her life, in a way she never imagined. It took over two years until she found a permanent home for herself and her two sons.
Sullivan, 53, has moved nine times since the Camp Fire destroyed her home in Paradise. Her two sons joined her after several months as she went from a FEMA trailer, to multiple apartments with other local residents who offered her temporary shelter.
She said she always paid rent, but had no way to find a permanent home for her family.
Until the fire, her sons Gage and Riley Sullivan lived with their father. Her most recent home in Paradise, the town she lived in for 20 years, was rented with a roommate — who had fire insurance, while Sullivan had none.
Sullivan said she felt the type of homelessness she was facing after the fire was so different from what she saw around the city, as
she never found herself on the streets, yet was always displaced from house to house.
Having lived five years clean after drug addiction and surviving sexual assault, she said she has been homeless several times before, but it had looked different.
At that time, “A lot of programs have helped me learn how to be a functioning person again,” Sullivan said, crediting the local Salvation Army for helping her to “start to sober up” as well as Johnson’s House of Sobriety in Chico.
After the fire, she found herself displaced in a new way, as she “bounced around on couches” at people’s home for several months. Her sons stayed with their father at first but then chose to stay with her in a trailer in a stranger’s yard for a time.
“Those things are still considered homeless since it isn’t yours,” she said. “I didn’t know they considered that homeless. I didn’t want to take help from somebody else because we weren’t on the streets freezing.”
She spoke with deep gratitude for strangers who offered their homes to her family seemingly out of nowhere — “I didn’t have a network, and didn’t have any family here.”
“A co-worker’s ex-husband took us in twice … that was really heartwarming. He didn’t know me at all and he really changed my life by doing that.”
Yet she was always uncomfortable, as she and her sons would stay in different homes, but could never qualify to get their own place, with a deposit down and lease signed.
“It really takes a toll on your soul,” she said. “If you’re in other people’s homes … nothing is where it should be. Nothing is where it goes and nothing makes sense. It just chips away at your soul. It’s very disheartening.
“Adults really need their own space. To not have that sort of chips away at your psyche.”
She also said she “felt like a failure” wanting to provide a stable home for her sons.
“I felt like I’m not providing a good life for these kids. I was doing everything I could do and it still wasn’t enough.”
Fighting trauma
Sullivan knows she was heavily impacted by the trauma of the fire and being displaced. Having worked at Butte County Behavioral Health, she said she heard the term “trauma brain” from other survivors and her therapist, and knew it applied to her, suffering “a lot of depression.”
“It’s so hard to get on your feet afterwards,” she said.
“I sort of lost the ability to maintain more than one thing in my head at one time. The stress of it all made it so difficult.”
To make matters worse, she then lost her job with the county due to the pandemic, in September 2020, after three years in her position. This caused her to spiral into a major depression, she said, a period when she “didn’t really eat, get dressed or sleep.”
She also worried for her sons, one of whom now attends high school in Chico at 16, whose friends are all from Paradise, whom she worries felt isolated. The other is 19, a full time student at Butte College.
“I was surprised how long the depression lasted after the fire,” Sullivan said. “How deeply it affected me in so many ways.”
A new beginning
Sullivan started at Chico State in the fall of 2020, working to get a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She is determined to then earn a master’s degree in social work.
“I pretty much had given up on us getting a home,” she said, until she called Butte 211.
“I was so tired of not having a home. They immediately hooked me up with the (Chico State) Basic Needs program, and we had this apartment within a month.”
Sullivan said Chico State Basic Needs “helps you see we deserve security.”
She also hopes soon Butte County Behavioral Health will have openings for part time employment in the summer —“I loved working there so much.” However, she said right now she could not handle working full time while taking classes.
“School takes me about 50 hours a week,” she said. “I made the dean’s list my first semester. But it has been really hard — my brain doesn’t want to retain information.”
To get by, the family is still using some money left over from fire aid from FEMA, Butte 211 and the state’s Fire Victim Trust, “trying to be super careful with it.”
“I put it in the bank and tried not to touch it unless we had an emergency,” Sullivan said.
Harmful stigmas remain
Having experienced several ways of being unsheltered, Sullivan said she worries about people’s stigmas against the unhoused she witnessed.
“It worries me, because I think a lot of people who are fully homeless on the street have mental health problems that are not treated. It’s a different kind of homelessness than I’ve ever expected.” She said she wished those stigmas would be better addressed with more awareness of mental health problems among the unsheltered population.
As of March 19, Sullivan and her sons have been in their apartment in Chico for over one month.
“My advice would be to just keep going,” she said.
“In the last six months I’ve really begun to heal, and us getting this apartment caused the healing to speed up. I began to feel really hopeless it (her depression) wasn’t ever going away.”
Sullivan added she also sees a therapist regularly, who is also a fire survivor.
“She’s still in my life and changed my way of thinking … she is invaluable to me.”