Three years have passed since the devastating Camp Fire and many of those who lost homes are still in the process of rebuilding.
The Rebuild Paradise Foundation is a movement of Camp Fire survivors and community leaders dedicated to helping those in need of guidance in the redeveloping and recovering effort.
Founder Charles Brooks and Executive Director Jen Goodlin spoke with NSPR's Angel Huracha on the rebuilding progress, the struggles, and obstacles that continue to face residents three years down the line.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
On the progress made in rebuilding homes the last three years
BROOKS: The last three years have been incredible. From where we've come from as the most destructive wildfire in California history, to over 1000 single-family homes rebuilt, almost 200 multi-family homes rebuilt, 2000 building permits and applications, and steady progress of 10 to 15 building permits issued a week by the town of Paradise.
It's a testament to the resiliency of the community. And we're the largest construction site, I would say, in California at this time. The entire town is under construction right now, that there's not a road you can drive down that doesn't have a piece of equipment operating on it or something going on. And it's just really neat to see. Every day you see a new wall going up, you see a new roof on a home.
On expectations for the community now vs. where they were three years ago
BROOKS: It's so hard to look back and go, ‘was I thinking that we would be this far along?’ And especially if you compared yourself to other well-resourced communities with high land values and high-income levels, like Santa Rosa and Sonoma County, where they didn't lose 92% of their community.
They had a lot more support around them as far as infrastructure and things like that. And so I keep going back to the amount of building permits. It's steady progress in our community. And we've got some things coming down the road that hopefully are going to help a lot more people come back that want to come back, Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery money that is finally going to start landing, the state is administering that in grants. And then you've also got the Cal Home loan program now running through the town of Paradise. So, those two things will help. And then hopefully, the PG&E bankruptcy claims process is going to expedite, and a lot of people will be able to use that money to help them come back home. We talk to people every single day (who say), ‘We're just trying to figure out the financial picture of how to get home.
On their personal reason for becoming involved
BROOKS: My wife and I moved to Paradise in 2004, fell in love with the community immediately, and just started participating in any way we could. And when we lost our home in the Camp Fire...It wasn't a couple of days afterward that we said, ‘we're coming back.’ We want our kids playing soccer on a Saturday morning, want to be there at Gold Nugget Days, we want to be hiking the flumes, we want to be in our community. We missed our community, the people, the sights, the sounds of Paradise at night, the lack of sound. It's really quiet. There are lots of stars.
We wanted that life back so badly. We were going through all these challenges, when we started talking to friends and sharing with them what we were going to be doing to rebuild and how we're going about it... and people are like, ‘so you are going to rebuild?’ And we started to see that spark of hope, that when you surround yourself with people who want to rebuild or move forward, it really helps. But that was the motivation, seeing the community back and helping other people navigate the same challenges we were, and that all the projects and the resources that we've developed are really mirrored around things that are coming up in the community or we've experienced personally in our own rebuild journey.
GOODLIN: My experience is different as I was not living here during the fire. I was in Colorado with my family. I grew up in Paradise, though. So after the fire, just a deep sense of loss and losing what I felt like I lost, my hometown, and wanted to come back and help. And how did that really look for our family and really, to help, you have to live their best way to help shop, be a good neighbor, do whatever you can start volunteering start just in any capacity. So we took a big risk, quit our jobs, sold our home, and moved here in April 2020. And right away, we encountered a lot of the obstacles that come with rebuilding. So almost instantly, I was using the Rebuild Paradise Foundation as a resource to help through that. Because they knew exactly what we were going through. And our experiences are a little bit different and not losing a home in the fire. But the resources were still on the same page of helpfulness. So Charles and I started getting connected in that way. He was rebuilding, and he lives close to our family. So our families just started to connect, and I recognized that my love and desire for Paradise were on the same page as his. So he lured me into the foundation, which I am honored and so excited to be a part of.
On the barriers residents face when rebuilding
BROOKS: That's an ever-changing landscape. There are general barriers that people will face, and some of them individually are not insurmountable.
But when you stack them all up, they can seem like a really daunting task. It can be everything from you've got to clear your land, you have to get the water turned on on your land, you have to have your land surveyed. You have to draw up a set of plans and decide what kind of house you want. And then you have to go through all the nuances of whether the property I own supports the type of house that I want? Because everybody's on septic. Is my septic still fine? Or do I have to replace my septic system? And where can my house go based on where my septic is? Do I have a creek running through my backyard? Do I have to change where my septic goes? Or where my house goes because of where that creek runs. And then from there, you get into what's my budget? Did I have insurance proceeds or not? Am I qualified for a grant program? I qualified for a low-interest loan or deferred loan program. And then what are contractors building out right now? What did COVID do to material prices, contractor availability, and do I have the time to wait to build?
A lot of people needed to restart their lives, they needed to get their kids in schools right away. They needed to move somewhere where they could have a home and have schools and couldn't do it transient living of moving to this rental or living in this trailer for three months and then moving to a rental or a year or two in a trailer, a lot of people just needed to move and they needed to settle. But we're seeing people coming back now that have moved away that are saying, hey, Paradise was really good. Let's see if we can do this. And then, they have to evaluate the budget. They have to look at their property. Most of us, I'm going to paint with a broad brush, I think many people would prefer to buy a house, paint the walls, plants, some flowers and that's home. I don't know too many people who said, ‘I want to design my dream home and recover from a natural disaster,’ Not even a natural disaster, but a disaster.
On why people are returning to rebuild in Paradise
GOODLIN: There is a really deep sense of place in Paradise. I would say there's nowhere quite like it. We moved here to help, and immediately, people were helping us. So that you will do anything to get back. Whatever obstacle. We just had a few trees fall in our yard, and it was storming, and neighbors' friends came over in the storm to help with the debris removal to not cause more problems in our yard. So those kinds of things. It's always worth it. What is your desire for your family for your life? What do you want out of your life? Many people in this town want this amazing quality of life with great neighbors, a great community, and a great sense of resilience. What do you want your children to grow up around? That's what I want my kids to grow up around.
BROOKS: It's that sense of place, it's the identity, it's knowing your neighbors, it's having a little bit of room to breathe. It's being really closely tied to nature. It's awesome sunsets, no matter where you are in town. It's six minutes from my favorite hike in the Feather River Canyon. And I can do that in the morning before work. It's just like in Chico, you can go to Bidwell Park, and you can be in the park, you can hike, and you can turn around and go to work. Paradise has that deep sense of place. There's a belonging. And there's also that pioneering spirit of let's make this happen. Let's make this the type of community that when our kids graduate high school, and they go off and see the world that they would want to come back to like, what how can we? How can we help be a part of that and bring that back?
There is a really deep sense of place in Paradise. I would say there's nowhere quite like it.- Rebuild Paradise Executive Director Jen Goodlin
GOODLIN: It's also really exciting to get to be a part of the town as it's changing. Because we get to be part of those decisions, we get to decide what we want the park to look like. The town lets everybody be included. There are surveys, meetings, there are things so my kids can say, oh my gosh, Mom, I would love that this style of park and their input matters. That's a cool thing to grow and be like I helped develop that town. You know, we got to choose. And you know, there's just an incredible amount of opportunity here if people just look at it the right way.
BROOKS: Insurance is huge. Unfortunately, in a disaster, especially at the scale of what we have with the campfire, you have surge pricing, or what I call disaster economics. You have way more demand than you're ever going to have a supply of labor and availability and materials in the beginning. And that's immediately going to push pricing up.. I'd say most of our community was underinsured, just based on the scale of the disaster. If you were just an isolated home, and you lost your home and a house fire, but the whole town is still standing, you're probably going to do okay, if you've been reviewing your policy every year, but it's when you have the entire community gone, that volume that needs to be filled with insurance, it's just it's, it's too much. And so most people are underinsured, but insurance is the critical piece to being able to recover and recover quicker. Because then you do not have to go out and find the grant programs and find the loan programs and cobble together the finances you need to build.
Insurance is one of the things that when I talk to people outside of our area in other communities that are in the wildland-urban interface that look like Paradise. It's what are you doing for insurance? And have you met with your insurance agent this year? Are you looking at extended replacement costs? Do you have code upgrades? Y What are you looking at price per square foot? I will talk to anybody willing to listen about the value of insurance. We see it firsthand. We have people go through our programs that are underinsured, non-insured, and we're referring them to any program we can. Because of just how much that can affect your ability to recover.
On what attributes to only 1000 homes being rebuilt in three years
GOODLIN: Good things take time. So a lot of it, you know, things start off slow because they want to do them the right way. And so it's just, it takes longer. And then you know, I think over time, you'll see kind of like a mountain like all of a sudden it'll climb a lot higher. So I think 1000 homes in three years after what happened to that this town is incredible.
On PG&E's lawsuit money and how those waiting has affected the rebuilding process
BROOKS: It's huge. There are five to 10 conversations we have a week, people that are saying, we're excited to use one of your floor plans. We're just waiting on our PGE settlement. It's insane that three years after the fire, I don't know anybody, personally, that has been given an award letter, or has even been made an offer from the bankruptcy claim. That money needs to get out quicker. It needs to help people rebuild. I understand there's a lot of claims to get through. But it really, really is challenging that that money is not in the hands of people who suffered this loss and are in need to rebuild, and they need that money as part of their financing to be able to rebuild.
