Donna Howell survived the Bear Fire — also known as the North Complex — which killed sixteen people and displaced hundreds in rural Butte County in September of 2020.
After Howell’s home burned down in the remote community of Berry Creek, she struggled with homelessness. She lived at a friend’s house in the city of Live Oak and then lived out of her car.
In March of 2023, she came back to the tight-knit mountain town nestled in the Plumas National Forest so she could be close to her newest baby granddaughter. Today, she lives in an RV on a dirt lot that she rents. A local Catholic charity donated the trailer last winter.
Despite the difficulties of RV living, Howell is content.
“It’s the perfect size for me,” she said. “It’s roomy. I like it. It’s home.”
But there’s an expiration date on how long Howell can stay here, and earlier this fall she was terrified the county would remove her RV.
“I have nowhere to go,” she said this past September.
At the time, an emergency ordinance that allowed her to live full-time in her RV on the property was about to expire.
It used to be illegal to live permanently in an RV outside of a mobile home park. But following the Bear Fire, Butte County supervisors passed the emergency ordinance to help people get back on their feet. After the ordinance expires, the law says RVs on land where survivors aren’t rebuilding should be removed.
County supervisors first passed a similar ordinance following the 2018 Camp Fire that displaced more than 50,000 people in and around the town of Paradise. Other counties and cities in the North State have done the same, including Shasta County.
How long people can live in their RVs depends on each ordinance. Quite often, ordinances get extended – multiple times – after pushback from wildfire survivors. Survivors of the 2018 Carr Fire in Shasta County were allowed to stay in their RVs for about six years.
In Butte County, people have faced shorter deadlines despite extensions. Survivors of the Camp Fire were allowed to stay in RVs for about four years, until the end of 2022.
This October, Howell and other survivors of the Bear Fire successfully fought for an extension. The original ordinance gave them until the end of this year. Now, they have an extra year and a half to live in their RVs. But RVs without utility hookups will be removed next summer.
Howell said county officials aren’t acknowledging how few people can afford to rebuild or relocate.
“They have to realize that we don't have money,” she said.
Many people who lost homes in the Bear Fire were uninsured. A third of Howell’s community lived below the poverty line before the fire. Now, Howell says, after losing everything, she and her neighbors are struggling to make ends meet. It’s estimated that dozens to hundreds of people live out of RVs in Berry Creek, but there’s no official number.
“We barely get enough to survive,” she said. “We can't afford not being able to live in our trailers because we can’t afford to buy anything.”
While RVs are a lifeline for Howell and others, some community members have a problem with them. They say the ones without sewer hookups are unsanitary.
Bill Connelly, a Butte County supervisor who represents survivors of the Bear Fire, argued that allowing people to stay longer in their RVs creates a conflict with people who have rebuilt their homes.
“They don't want to live in a neighborhood of a bunch of campers.” Connelly said.
But some housing experts say there should be less punishment and more support for RV living. Zachary Lamb, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, said governments could improve RV living conditions, rather than legislate people out of their homes.
“If this is a way that a lot of people want to live and we decide that it's an acceptable way to live in our communities, then we need to provide the infrastructure to live safely and in a sanitary way,” Lamb said.
Lamb said that could mean making waste disposal and clean water more accessible. He added that mobile homes and RVs are already a major source of affordable housing.
“In a lot of parts of the state, this is what affordable housing looks like,” Lamb said.
The demand for affordable housing far outweighs the supply in Butte County. And traditional affordable housing options – like apartments – are usually located far away from the communities that were affected by wildfire.
Over the last five years, Butte County has received disaster recovery grants to build about 3,000 new affordable housing units. According to the Housing Authority of Butte County, there’s never been more new affordable housing projects. But only a single apartment complex is planned for one unincorporated area — about 60 units in the community of Magalia, where the Camp Fire burned.
Many displaced fire survivors don’t want to live in a city.
Until August, Donna Howell’s daughter Misty Mcdivitt had been living out of an RV in Berry Creek with her family and her farm animals. This fall, she moved to an affordable apartment thirty minutes away in the city of Oroville. The birth of her third child meant her family needed more space.
When she spoke with NSPR, she was hauling belongings out of her RV. Halloween decorations, an empty lizard tank that once held her sons’ pets, and flower pots were sitting outside the trailer’s front door.
Mcdivitt said she's been heartbroken ever since she moved. She still calls Berry Creek home. It’s where she’s lived her whole life. Her RV was parked right next to her mom’s.
“I literally cry a lot, like I want to say almost every day,” Mcdivitt said.
Getting the apartment wasn’t easy, either. Mcdivitt sat on a waiting list for over a year, the average wait time for low-income housing in the county.
“I think housing in general is just really hard to find right now,” Mcdivitt said.
Meanwhile, her mom, Donna Howell, hopes she can spend the rest of her days in her RV in Berry Creek.
Howell has several serious chronic health problems and has already outlived her doctor’s prognosis. She says she doesn’t want to spend what could be her last days worrying about where she’s allowed to live.
“Why can't they just leave us alone? Let us live our lives. So what if we're in trailers,” she said, adding that living in trailers doesn’t make them bad people.
She said she’d rather God take her before she has to move again.
