Los Angeles Times

In fire-scarred Santa Rosa, many struggling to rebuild

Class, location and fate weigh heavily on resident recovery

- By Laura Newberry

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — It was just one year ago when Tricia Woods lost her home in a single, impossible instant.

The Tubbs fire, the most destructiv­e wildfire in California history, had ripped through Sonoma County and incinerate­d more than 5,500 homes, including the middle school teacher’s own four-bedroom house in the Coffey Park neighborho­od of Santa Rosa.

That night, from an evacuation center at her daughter’s school, she called her insurance company and property manager. Right away, she knew she would rebuild.

“It was just such an achievemen­t to be a woman on my own, to have bought a home in California on a teacher’s salary,” said Woods, a 47year-old mother of three. “I wasn’t ready to let that go.”

But as Woods and thousands of

others struggle to rebuild a year after the fire, they are encounteri­ng very different challenges based on class, location and fate.

Residents who face enormous insurance gaps are dipping into savings to construct houses similar to the ones they lost or building smaller ones. Others are buying elsewhere in a county that suffered a serious shortage of affordable housing even before the fires. In this increasing­ly ruthless housing market, displaced renters have been left to compete with more moneyed families who also lost their homes.

Some, reeling from the emotional trauma, left the area completely.

“For every person we find who’s doing great, there are a couple of people who aren’t,” Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane said.

This is especially true in hard-hit Santa Rosa, where the economics of reconstruc­tion vary wildly from neighborho­od to neighborho­od.

More than 1,200 of the 2,700 homes lost in Santa Rosa are in the process of being rebuilt, according to numbers from the city. As of early October, 26 were complete. Most of those finished homes are in Coffey Park, a predominan­tly middle-income neighborho­od that is now a bustling constructi­on zone.

The ease with which residents can rebuild depends on resources such as time and money, of course, but also location. In Coffey Park, the land is flat and the lots are smaller, making them easier to prepare for constructi­on. Woods’ home is expected to be built by Christmas.

But just over Highway 101, in the affluent hillside enclave of Fountaingr­ove, things have been more difficult. City numbers show that 188 homes were being rebuilt in Fountaingr­ove as of Oct. 9. That figure was almost triple in Coffey Park.

In Fountaingr­ove, most homes sat on large lots with uneven topography, making them tricky to clear and more expensive to rebuild. On top of that, the neighborho­od was plagued with water contaminat­ion issues after the fire.

Some Fountaingr­ove residents grappling with massive insurance shortfalls are still deciding whether it’s worth the stress and expense to rebuild. Others, like Ian and Lisa Alexander, have chosen to move on.

The Alexanders, both 54, had lived in their Fountaingr­ove home for 14 years when it burned to the ground. As Ian Alexander put it, the couple “lived like refugees” for months, moving from hotels to friends’ places to short-term rentals, while at the same time moving through their grief.

“We’d never wanted to build a house to begin with, and to think about doing it under these circumstan­ces — it was never appealing,” said Lisa Alexander, who is a communicat­ions director for a nonprofit.

The couple decided to buy a mid-century modern home about two miles from their old place. It’s smaller than their Tudor-style in Fountaingr­ove, but it has a pool and is close to downtown.

“We’re sitting here on the anniversar­y of the fire, traveling the same streets we’ve always traveled, in a house that has a solid foundation for us to be happy and comfortabl­e in,” said Ian Alexander, the co-founder of a software company. “We feel a tremendous amount of pain and loss, but also tremendous gratitude for being in a position to buy a new home.”

Also motivating the Alexanders’ decision was the fact that they were woefully underinsur­ed. They would have paid around $700,000 out-of-pocket to build a comparably sized home on their property, which they still own.

The Alexanders are far from alone. In April, twothirds of North Bay residents who lost their homes reported being underinsur­ed by an average of $317,000, according to a survey by United Policyhold­ers, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps people navigate insurance policies.

The cause of this problem is manifold. Insurance companies use software to calculate the cost of rebuilding, but those estimates do not take into account the inflated cost of labor and materials that follow a disaster like this, said Keith Woods, chief executive of North Coast Builders Exchange.

And if your home was built before the early 2000s, changes in building codes can increase the cost of constructi­on by as much as 20%, according to Woods, who is not related to Tricia Woods of Coffey Park.

When Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin has talked with contractor­s about rebuilding her own home in Santa Rosa, she’s been quoted $500 to $600 per square foot, whereas building a custom home before the fires would have cost around half that.

“It’s clear that insurance is really designed for losing a home in a house fire,” said Gorin, who is facing an insurance shortfall of more than $1 million. “It is not intended to cover replacemen­t costs and code upgrades for 5,300 homes all at once.”

To complicate matters, contractor­s will not start a job unless they are sure there is enough money to complete a project, and time is of the essence. Most insurance policies will cover two years of rent, said United Policyhold­ers Executive Director Amy Bach, leaving some residents a year to build homes before they’re forced to pay both a mortgage and rent.

Steve Morrow’s situation is unique: He didn’t lose his home, but could still end up paying double. His trailer in Journey’s End, a mobile home park that sits below the hilly crests of Fountaingr­ove, was one of 44 that survived. The fire destroyed the park’s electrical and gas systems and contaminat­ed the community’s well water, rendering the homes uninhabita­ble.

The owner of Journey’s End shut down the park, leaving Morrow, a 70-yearold Vietnam veteran, paying a mortgage on a mobile home he can’t live in. He’s renting a camper on an artist’s compound for more than $1,000 a month — an expense that is covered by insurance, at least for now.

Morrow said he’s “working like hell” to find an affordable lot where he can move his mobile home, but their cost has skyrockete­d since the fire.

“Sooner or later I’ll find a place. I have no choice,” he said. “It might just be a ways from here.”

The owner of Journey’s End is working with a nonprofit, Burbank Housing, to explore redevelopi­ng the property into a mixture of affordable and market-rate apartments. By law, the park’s residents — most of whom were seniors with limited incomes — would be first in line for the affordable units, said Laurie Lynn Hogan, Burbank Housing’s director of funding and communicat­ions.

But the proposed project is moving at an excruciati­ngly slow pace, Hogan said, partly because the nonprofit must work with state and federal agencies to relocate the surviving trailers.

Sonoma County, like much of the Bay Area, was already facing a dire shortage of affordable housing before the firestorm. The median home price there nearly doubled since 2009, said Rick Laws, regional vice president of Pacific Union Internatio­nal, a real estate firm.

Recognizin­g that the fires would exacerbate this crisis, the county scrambled to streamline its permitting and review process. Officials have also made it easier for residents to build larger accessory dwelling units, otherwise known as granny flats, on their properties while they rebuild their homes.

Still, as many as 7,000 residents may have left Santa Rosa in 2017, according to an analysis by the Press Democrat, Santa Rosa’s daily newspaper.

“I’m not sure that those numbers really reflect what’s happening here,” said Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Coursey, a former Press Democrat reporter who believes that fewer people have left. Many residents are still living with family members, he said, and the city’s homeless population has grown 6% since last year.

For those left in Coffey Park, the neighborho­od is irreparabl­y changed. Most of the subdivisio­n was erected in the ’80s, and its builders used fewer than 10 f loorplans for the tract homes. Now, more than 50 different builders are on-site, leading to a mosaic of modern architectu­re rising from the raw dirt.

Residents say that before the fire, Coffey Park was the kind of place where you’d wave to neighbors on the street, but you probably didn’t know them. Now, they describe the neighborho­od as a big, unconventi­onal family united by misfortune.

On the fire’s anniversar­y, a dozen or so displaced residents set up their camping chairs and folding tables in a quiet cul de sac. As they chatted over glasses of wine in the fading golden light, neighbors threw their arms around others and shared inside jokes as if they’d been friends for a lifetime.

In truth, it had only been for one very long, hard year.

 ?? Photograph­s by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times ?? HOUSES ARE being rebuilt in Santa Rosa, where last year’s Tubbs fire razed more than 5,500 homes.
Photograph­s by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times HOUSES ARE being rebuilt in Santa Rosa, where last year’s Tubbs fire razed more than 5,500 homes.
 ??  ?? TRICIA WOODS, a middle school teacher and mother of three, is rebuilding her home in the Coffey Park neighborho­od of Santa Rosa.
TRICIA WOODS, a middle school teacher and mother of three, is rebuilding her home in the Coffey Park neighborho­od of Santa Rosa.
 ?? Photograph­s by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times ?? SANTA ROSA residents, united by the misfortune of last year’s Tubbs fire, gather for their weekly “Whine Wednesday” event.
Photograph­s by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times SANTA ROSA residents, united by the misfortune of last year’s Tubbs fire, gather for their weekly “Whine Wednesday” event.
 ??  ?? MORE THAN 1,200 of the 2,700 homes lost in Santa Rosa are being rebuilt. Some residents, reeling from the emotional trauma of the blaze, left the area entirely.
MORE THAN 1,200 of the 2,700 homes lost in Santa Rosa are being rebuilt. Some residents, reeling from the emotional trauma of the blaze, left the area entirely.

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